Happy #StarWarsDay! Below are my must-read resources on dark mode. What are yours?
A Complete Guide to Dark Mode on the Web
How to design delightful dark themes
The Ultimate Guide on Designing a Dark Theme for your Android app
Design for the Dark Theme
8 Tips for Dark Theme Design
How we created a dark UI for GitLab's Web IDE
The Complete Guide to the Dark Mode Toggle
Material dark theme, to design a dark theme version of your Material UI
Themer, a Figma plugin that helps you quickly swap themes from your styles
Manage Light and Dark themes from design to code
Over to you! What are the best resources you've read on dark mode? And if you enjoy this list, make sure to star this repo full of hand-picked resources, tools, and examples to build awesome products in dark mode. #MayThe4thBeWithYou
I was testing a new workflow tool last week, genuinely excited to try it out. I signed up, and before I could even see the dashboard, it hit me with a 6-step onboarding quiz. What s your role? How big is your team? What s your primary goal? Invite 3 teammates to continue... I don't even know if your product works yet, why am I inviting my coworkers? I closed the tab by step three.
The other instant-kill for me is the "free trial" that demands a credit card upfront. If I m just poking around for 10 minutes to see if it actually solves my problem, I m not pulling out my wallet just so I can stress about remembering to cancel a subscription in 14 days.
I don't want to rant here (but I probably will a bit)...
I've been doing product marketing and growth for a while now, and I feel like the whole industry has just defaulted to volume over quality. Almost every growth strategy I see lately is "send more cold emails," "post 5 times a day on LinkedIn," or "find a loop to spam people's inboxes." It's cheaper and more scalable, sure, but it's exhausting.
It feels like we've traded building actual relationships with users for building automated sequences that annoy them.
So, how do you actually drive meaningful growth right now without feeling like a spammer?
We've been building agent features into SaaS products, and the hardest decisions aren't the model. They're which actions need a user's explicit confirmation. For us that's bulk deletes, billing changes and data exports, plus anything that could cross tenants (which we make impossible by design).
Curious what makers here have landed on:
Which actions does your agent never take on its own?
How do you design the "waiting for your approval" UX so users don't just ignore it?
Do you start in a propose-only mode and loosen autonomy over time?
I saw an article on TechCrunch discussing Cluely (created by Chungin Roy Lee and Neel Shanmugam).
TL;DR: The AI tool, originally developed to cheat on software engineering interviews, now helps users cheat on exams, sales calls, and job interviews through a hidden in-browser window. And now has raised $5+ million.
When you live inside your own product every single day, you forget what it's like to see it with fresh eyes. Every button, label, and navigation menu feels completely obvious to you.
Then we watched session recordings of our first few real signups. It was painful. Users were getting completely stuck on things we assumed were intuitive, dropping off before they even touched our primary feature.
For builders and indie hackers: what methods or tools finally opened your eyes to your own onboarding blind spots?
