I don't want to rant here (but I probably will a bit)...
I've been working in product growth for a while, and I feel like every single product roadmap right now has just turned into a race to bolt on an "AI assistant" or a "generate with AI" button. It s like every investor and every competitor is screaming that you need it, so everyone just slaps a chat interface onto their app and calls it innovation.
But when everyone has the exact same AI feature, it stops being a differentiator and just becomes a checkbox. It feels like we're spending all our time building generic AI wrappers instead of actually solving the user's core problem.
So, how do you actually figure out where AI belongs in your product without just following the hype?
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 every single piece of advice right now is telling founders they need to become full-time influencers. "Post on LinkedIn every day," "start a YouTube channel," "build in public."
I get the logic people buy from people. But it's exhausting. It feels like we've shifted from "build a great product and tell people about it" to "build a great product and then spend 4 hours a day performing authenticity on social media." And the worst part is, most of it just looks like the same recycled motivational platitudes.
So, how do you actually build trust and drive growth without forcing the founder to become a content creator?
I've been thinking quite a bit about privacy while working on a software platform.
Most platforms make it easy to search for people and connect with them. But should that really be the default?
We're exploring an approach where users decide whether their profile can be found or stays private. Connections would also require an invitation rather than just clicking a button.
Have you heard of C2PA or Content Credentials? It s a standard designed to help people understand how digital content was created and changed, and personally I think it is awesome
Over the past few months, I've noticed that AI coding tools are excellent at generating code, but they still struggle to keep context across larger projects. That often means spending time re-explaining the codebase instead of moving faster.
I'm curious whether others have noticed the same thing, or if you've run into different limitations. What's the biggest issue you've experienced?
We run 10+ image models plus Veo 3.1 and Seedance 2.0 behind one studio. Until recently every generation record stored the prompt and the output file and nothing about which model produced it. When there was one model that was fine.
With a router it means every quality complaint ends in a shrug. Someone says the face drifted between the image and the video, and I can't tell them whether that was the model, the seed or the upscale step, and I can't reproduce it either because the router might pick differently next time. So the report goes in a doc and dies there.
Writing model, version and the reason the router picked it onto every output has done more for quality than any prompt work we did this year. Not because the models got better. Because complaints stopped being about the product in general and started being about one model in one situation, which is a thing you can actually fix.
The open question for me is whether users should see it. I want to show the model on every output. My cofounder thinks it just gives people something to argue about and moves the conversation off the work. If you route across models, do you expose that or keep it internal?
It's always the customers who never message support that end up doing the most interesting things with your product.
When everything runs smoothly on their end, you assume they are barely using it, but they might actually have built their whole daily workflow around it.
We found out a user was running our tool for something completely different than what we built it for, just by reading an random blog post they wrote.
How do you usually find out about these hidden use cases if nobody emails you?
I was one of those people who actually used the Touch Bar When I switched Macs, I missed having volume and brightness right under my fingers, so I tried a few trackpad shortcut apps.
That got me thinking about which gestures I d actually want to change from app to app. I d want volume to work the same way everywhere. But I could see myself using the same swipe to switch tabs in my browser and skip a song in Music. I m curious whether that would feel natural after a few days or whether I d keep mixing them up.
If you ve set up gestures or shortcuts that change depending on the app, which ones actually stuck? Anything you ended up changing back?
