How did you get the seed capital to start your business?

I see mostly VC-funded companies on Product Hunt (mostly YC).
But are there people who fund their businesses in other ways?

My biggest mistake starting out was treating community feedback as actual market demand. I also wasted time embedding demo media inside text formats that completely ruined feed engagement and tried to sound bigger than I was until someone caught it.

Realizing that builder spaces are amazing for product advice but terrible for customer acquisition completely changed my distribution strategy. What was the most unexpected lesson you learned during your first week of trying to get eyeballs on your project?

We have been building since late 2024. In that time we were a gen AI agency, then a voice AI company, then a procurement tool, before landing on the thing that actually worked. Every one of those pivots was decided by the same wrong diagnosis. Something was not selling, we concluded the product was not good enough yet, and we went and built more. It is a very comfortable conclusion because building is the part you control and the part you enjoy. It also has a satisfying story attached: not there yet, nearly there, one more release. What was actually happening both times was that nobody knew we existed, and the people who did know had no reason to try it this week rather than some other week. That is not a capability problem and no amount of shipping fixes it. The way we eventually found the real thing was not analysis. We ran the catalogue on ourselves, and the one item we kept reaching for was the cheapest thing on the list, the one we had been treating as a feature to sell the expensive stuff around. Two things I would tell myself at the start. First, if a customer signs and then does not use it, that is not a customer, that is a very expensive compliment, and it should be counted as churn on the day it happens rather than revenue. Second, when something is not selling, force yourself to write down the distribution version of the explanation before you are allowed to write down the product version. The product version will still be there afterwards. It just should not get to go first. Curious how many people here have made the same call. When something stalled, did you build or did you go and find out why nobody came back?

Every day, hundreds of products launch on Product Hunt.

And let s be honest most of the time we upvote without really trying them.

Sometimes, though, you actually do try one and it sticks.

We wanted to "grow up" fast so we hired seasoned executives from large tech companies who brought impressive resumes and corporate playbooks.
But instead of accelerating our momentum, they introduced layers of bureaucracy, lengthy alignment meetings and hesitation around shipping fast and breaking things.
Our scrappy speed vanished replaced by a cautious corporate culture that couldn't survive in a fast-moving market.

For founders scaling their core team how do you balance the need for operational maturity with the agility required in the early days?