I launch in 5 days. I have 2 paying customers, gotten before I ve done any of the official launching. So now I ve got a new problem: is 2 a trend, or is 2 just 2?

Here s what I ve got so far, and I genuinely can t tell which of these mean something:

I keep getting pitched on lifetime deals pay once, get access forever as a way to raise fast cash, build a customer base, and create a wave of early evangelists who feel invested in my success.

The appeal is obvious. One big lump of money now, no churn on those customers ever, and a group of people who will defend the product because they own a piece of it forever. For a small product, that cash can be the difference between continuing and quitting.

Six months ago, we were desperate for cash flow to keep the lights on. We decided to run a Lifetime Deal (LTD) campaign. We thought it was a win-win: we get a quick cash injection, and we get hundreds of users to give us feedback.

It worked... at first. We made $5,000 in a single week. I felt like a genius.

But the reality check hit us hard over the next 90 days:

• Our support tickets exploded by 400%. LTD buyers were incredibly demanding, asking for custom features and 1-on-1 onboarding calls for a product they paid $49 for once.

• Our server costs tripled. Many of these users were uploading massive files and using our API heavily. We were now paying AWS $300/month to host users who would never give us another dime in recurring revenue.

• Our real MRR stalled. We got so bogged down supporting the LTD crowd that we completely stopped our outbound marketing and sales efforts.

Building and launching products, testing them in real markets and building a business are like mini-MBAs. It teaches you a lot of things about human behavior, finance, marketing, sales, entrepreneurship, management and more.

We become wiser; and wish someone had given us the right advice at the right time.

I learned this the hard way after spending weeks staring at dashboards trying to reverse-engineer why people dropped off.

Someone showed interest didn't convert. Someone signed up never came back. Someone was on a trial quietly disappeared.

For those who don't know:

• The EU has proposed a law intended to protect children from online abuse.

• But the draft includes a highly controversial measure: mandatory scanning (client-side scanning) of private communications, including encrypted ones, for child sexual abuse material.

• Experts and authorities (such as the EDPB and EDPS) warn that this kind of mandatory scanning could lead to mass surveillance through automated tools, posing a serious threat to fundamental rights like privacy and data protection.

• According to reports, 15 member states support the proposal, 6 are against it, and 6 remain undecided. The law would not apply to political officials, but it would affect the reading of communication of ordinary citizens.

Hey everyone! I ve seen some people mention using Reddit groups to help launching their products, but I m a bit new to the platform. From what I ve noticed, many groups don t allow self-promotion or talking about your own business. I m curious, which subreddits do you participate in, and what s your strategy for engaging and launching your products there?

I d love to hear about your experiences and any tips for successfully navigating Reddit for product launches!

I spend a lot more time on PH at the moment to see what indepedent makers are spending their time on. I've noticed some patterns and also want to share a little bit about my journey at South Park Commons. Most startup stories begin at zero when there s already a team, an idea, maybe even a prototype. But at South Park Commons (SPC), the philosophy is different: people gather in the -1 to 0 stage. That liminal space where you don t yet know what you re building or even if you should build at all. It s a place for exploration, experimentation, and being brutally honest about what s working and what s not.

A hallmark of SPC is how often industry leaders drop by to share what they ve learned in the wild. Recently, I was in a small chat with Tyler Payne former Google and LinkedIn AI lead, startup builder, who has spent the last decade helping teams actually ship real-world ML systems. We're always talking about what's being launched at SPC.

We put off refactoring for way too long last year because we were so focused on launching new features every single week.

Eventually the codebase got so fragile that fixing one simple bug broke three other things in the app. Taking a few uninterrupted days to clean the foundation completely changed our speed going forward.

It really is the best investment you can make even though it hurts to look at an empty changelog at the end of the week. How do you decide when the tech debt is finally too heavy to ignore?