There are founders you d love to NOT work for. And then there are founders whose company you wouldn t want to leave, no matter what.

A big part of that comes down to people, their values, and their character.

And often, that starts with the founder.

A lot of people try to raise funding before they even begin.

And then sometimes I read those zero to hero stories. (Maybe they re a bit "polished" by the media to have publicity.)

In any case, building products has become much easier from a technical perspective, which also makes it cheaper especially for software startups.

As someone who manages social media, I also have to manage what happens in the comments section.

Sometimes it's constructive criticism. Other times it's pure hate.

Credits look like a solution to variable cost. They're really a way of moving the variance onto the user without telling them.

In Arteza a quick edit and a full multi shot render are about 12x apart in what they cost us to run. Both are priced in the same unit. So someone learns an exchange rate from the cheap action, builds a mental model, then spends a third of their balance in one click and feels robbed. That isn't a pricing bug. We asked them to hold a cost model in their head that we never showed them.

What's worked is putting the credit cost on the button before the click instead of in a docs table. Boring fix, and it cut the where did my credits go messages more than any price change we made.

The part I haven't solved is failures. A bad output still burned the compute. Refund it and people retry until they like the result. Don't refund and credits feel like a slot machine. We refund and eat it, which won't scale.

Most people use Product Hunt primarily for launching their product, which is completely understandable and a basic thing. That's what the platform is best known for.

BUT I think Product Hunt offers far more opportunities than just launch day. If you approach it strategically, it can become an ongoing marketing channel rather than a one-day event.

The struggles you may face in terms of Product Hunt discussions are:

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I am a Computer Science student doing research into how solopreneurs and small startups create new apps and what their stack looks like. Particularly, I'm interested in how you handle things like authentication, billing, and permissions/authorization in your apps.

Let me know what you're working on below and how you're going about it -- I'd love to connect for some quick calls to learn about your product and talk about your process in building it!