For the first half of this year, we were starving for revenue. So when a mid-sized company reached out about our platform, I went full "enterprise mode." We hopped on 6 different Zoom calls, built a custom CSV importer for them, and even shifted our roadmap to prioritize a feature their team specifically asked for.

After three months of back-and-forth, they finally signed a $500/month contract. I was thrilled. I thought we had finally cracked the code for landing bigger accounts.

Fourteen days into the contract, they canceled.

When I asked for feedback, the answer stung: "It's too hard for our team to learn." We had spent so much time building the custom features and doing the manual data imports that we completely neglected the core user experience. The tool was clunky, the UI was confusing, and their team just refused to adopt it. I was so focused on winning the deal that I forgot to make sure the product was actually easy to use for the people who had to log in every day.

Honestly, it feels like if your product doesn t feature an LLM integration, investors and launch hunters look right through you. But let s be real not every micro-SaaS or developer tool needs a chatbot.

For those who launched or are building a "traditional" software product recently: How are you handling the marketing? Are you feeling pressure to pivot or force-feed AI features into your roadmap just to stay relevant, or are you doubling down on pure, rock-solid utility? Let's discuss.
By the way, I also wanted to ask for your thoughts on websites like this one. It has a lot of interesting offers and various bonuses. Although this isn t related to the topic, I ve found it very useful. I recommend checking it out and sharing your thoughts.

One mistake we made early was assuming that if someone clearly had the problem, they would be willing to change how they solved it.

Not necessarily.

A business can dislike its current process and still prefer it because it is familiar.

That changed how we think about product adoption.

We ran a massive discount campaign a few months back and got a crazy amount of signups. Felt great at the time, but three months later, half of those accounts vanished in one go.

Turns out when you heavily discount your product, you attract bargain hunters who were never looking for a long-term solution to begin with. It completely skewed our metrics.

If you ve run promos before did you notice a massive spike in churn right after, or did some of those users actually stick around?

I got a message from a user last week that started with the words "I know this is not a normal request." They wanted to use my product for something completely outside its intended purpose. Not a bug, not a feature request, just a different problem that my tool happened to solve.

I almost replied with the polite version of no. Instead I asked why. And their answer described a whole category of people I had never considered, with a need I had never designed for.

Been on this platform a month now, and genuinely think the people here are sharper than what i've found anywhere else.
Curious if that's actually held true for others when it comes to hiring.
Have you hired someone you found on ph, or been hired yourself through here.
Also curious what your actual go-to platform is for finding people, ph, linkedin, twitter or somewhere else entirely.

I set a rule for myself last month. No new features. No new projects. No starting anything.

Just finish what was already open. Close the loops I had been leaving open for months. Answer the emails I had been avoiding. Fix the small things that had become background noise.

For the first few months of building, everything felt like magic. I would make something and sit there genuinely amazed that I had made it.

That feeling is gone now. Not because the work got worse. Because I got used to it.