There is a massive trap when you first start vibe coding where you end up overbuilding features just because the AI makes it ridiculously fast to spin them up.

You spend days adding things nobody asked for only to realize the real bottleneck is maintenance API costs and actually getting people to care.

Shipping the app to the App Store turned out to be the easy part compared to distribution. If you ve built something using AI tools recently what is one thing you wish someone had warned you about before you started?

We shipped our product a few weeks ago, and while my co-founders have their maker tags visible next to their profile names my account still looks completely standard.

I've double-checked my team settings and maker status, but nothing updates on the public profile.

Is there a hidden setting or a specific admin approval step I missed to get the badge to appear?

Yesterday I checked a month worth of conversation with one of my AI (yes it was claude).
This month alone i shared with Anthropic my blood test results to figure em out and some legal contracts (back and forth) that I wanted to revise both manually and thru mr claude to double check. Those were the most sensitive ones among other information i sent within conversations. Search engines already knew a lot about me, i see that from ADs tailored to my preferences. Companies like this go beyond knowing your liking, with context, including private things.
I don t necessarily think that makes anyone a villain, as this is roughly the same trade we made with email and maps and photos, and most of us took it (I did at least) without much hesitation. What I notice is that I never actually decided how I feel about it, as it is me who decides what to share with them (more or less). So my question to you is where s your line? Do you think about what goes in, or is this a trade you ve already made? If none of it left your machine, what would you ask that you don t ask now? (you don t have to be specific haha)

We hit a weird breaking point last month when I looked at our support logs and realized a single free tier user had opened over 30 tickets asking for custom API work and endless Zoom calls.

At the end of it all they flat out said they d never upgrade because the free plan already gave them everything they wanted. It felt like running an unpaid consulting agency for someone who had zero intention of paying.

How do you draw a hard line on support for free accounts without looking like a terrible company?

There is a massive difference between a developer who can write clean algorithms in an interview and one who actually knows how to build something from absolute zero with no product manager or QA team around. Our biggest hiring mistake was optimizing for resume prestige instead of looking for someone comfortable with ambiguity and broken infrastructure.

If you're building a tiny early stage team right now what kind of practical test do you give candidates to see if they can handle startup chaos?

Some of the most inspiring startup journeys of the last few years happened in plain sight.

@levelsio built Nomad List and Remote OK live on Twitter sharing revenue numbers, failures, and pivots in real time. @marclou does the same, shipping products publicly and turning his audience into his distribution. Both have built massive followings and real businesses partly because of how openly they build.

In most parts of the world, Easter is being celebrated right now, honestly, not really.

Today, I was invited to a weekly meeting despite the holiday.
I had forgotten one fact: Orthodox countries celebrate Easter a week later.
(and countries in the Far East simply don t have this holiday at all.)

This is actually a broader topic, because every country celebrates holidays differently, and with many teams being international, some kind of synchronisation is necessary the question is: how?

Relying on the model itself to break out of a broken loop never works out well. Putting hard programmatic limits outside the LLM layer is the only real way to protect your cloud bill.

A 40% drop in infra costs just from stopping bad loops is a massive win.

For our customer facing apps the tricky part was deciding what to display on the user's screen when an agent gets cut off mid task.

Do you return a friendly error message immediately or tell the user a human is taking over?

Customer feedback is essential for us building a B2B SaaS product, but not every requested feature belongs on the roadmap.

We currently evaluate requests based on:

• Whether several customers have the same problem

• Whether the request supports the product s core use case

• How much value it would create

• The ongoing cost of maintaining it

The difficult case is when an important customer requests something valuable that only applies to their particular workflow.

When we launched our software year we set the price at nine dollars a month because we were afraid that nobody would pay more for an early stage tool. Signups came in fast. Our support costs soon grew faster, than our revenue and working late nights became unsustainable.

Of raising the price on the entire public landing page we ran a quiet experiment with new visitors. We added a forty nine dollar tier that included priority setup support. We expected the conversion rate to fall to zero. Surprisingly twenty percent of new users chose the higher tier.

The higher price attracted serious users who needed less hand holding and who valued the software s core utility. Our monthly recurring revenue tripled, even though the customer volume was cut in half proving that underpricing was our bottleneck.

How did you find the courage to raise your price. How did your early users react?