Gen Z took lying in bed all day and gave it a name that doesn't sound lazy. "Bed rotting." Doing everything from binge-watching to doomscrolling to staring at the ceiling. And the framing shifted from "being lazy" to "slowing down" and "self-care" .
I've been thinking about how this applies to building. There's a version of rest that's genuinely restorative. And there's a version where you're calling it "rest" but it's actually fear. Fear of the thing you should be doing. Fear of putting yourself out there. Fear of finding out the thing you built isn't good.
The hard part is knowing which one you're doing. From the inside, they feel identical.
How do you tell the difference between "I need this rest" and "I'm using this to avoid something"? Is there a signal you trust?
There's a thing I built, shipped, and then felt nothing about. It worked. People used it. I got the messages I'd been waiting for. And about three days after launch I realized I had no interest in maintaining it.
I kept it alive for a while out of obligation. Answered the emails, fixed the small bugs, pretended I was still invested.
We're all seeing AI transform industries, but are we looking deep enough? I've been thinking about applying first-principle thinking to identify areas truly ripe for AI disruption going beyond automating existing tasks to fundamentally reimagining solutions.
Instead of asking 'How can AI make X better?', what if we ask:
What is the core human need X is trying to solve?
What are the fundamental limitations of current solutions, pre-AI?
If we were to solve this need from scratch today, with current AI capabilities (LLMs, generative models, etc.) as a core building block, what would it look like?
In the early days, it s tempting to keep driving top-of-funnel traffic to see sign-up numbers grow. But if only 10% of those sign ups actually activate and get value pouring more traffic into the funnel feels like pouring water into a leaky bucket.
On the flip side, pausing marketing to fix activation with a small user sample size makes it hard to gather enough statistical data.
How do you balance top of funnel growth with product activation during the first few months after launch?
Whenever I share something I m working on, the feedback comes in all directions. One person says it needs more features, another says it s already too complicated, and a third wants a completely different design.
Last month I changed a small feature because three people asked for it in the same week. After the update, nobody used it, and the people who had asked never came back to try it. I realized I had counted requests instead of asking who really needed it.
It made me wonder if I m too quick to act on feedback just because it s loud or repeated.
How do you decide which feedback is worth acting on? Have you ever built something because people asked, only to find they didn t use it?
During a recent round of feedback calls, our power users requested a workflow feature that would fundamentally change how our product operates. On paper, it solves a big problem for them but it moves our app away from the simple, focused solution we set out to build.
Balancing listening to your customers with sticking to your core vision is much harder in practice than in theory.
How do you handle conflicting user feedback? Do you adapt your roadmap to high value requests or stay firm on your original vision?
We started with a 14 day free trial, assuming urgency would push users to explore the tool deeply. Instead, most users signed up, got busy with work, and returned on day 13 asking for an extension because they never had time to test it properly.
Switching to a limited freemium model gave them breathing room but conversion to paid slowed significantly.
For founders who have tested both models: which one worked better for your product archetype, and how did you balance urgency with user activation?
