My app is Flutter, and this week I shipped Siri support for it: a user says "Hey Siri, make a birthday song in <app name>" and the request runs while the phone stays in the pocket, plus playing the result by voice, asking if it is ready, Spotlight, a Control Center button and Shortcuts actions. All of it is a Swift layer talking to Dart over a method channel. The docs cover the happy path; these are the five things I only found out by testing on a phone.

1. Apple caps you at 10 App Shortcuts, and every phrase must contain the app name. Only enums and entities can be parameters inside a phrase, one per phrase. So "make a lo fi song in <app>" works because the style is an enum, while free text has to be collected in a follow up question.

2. Siri speaks 20 languages, your app may speak more. Mine has 43 locales, so the phrases are translated for the 20 Siri understands and the in app guide shows English phrases for the rest. Otherwise people in those languages read a phrase Siri can never hear.

3. Spotlight shows your app icon instead of your artwork if the thumbnail is a remote URL. The indexed entity needs the image bytes, so I keep a small local cache of thumbnails and hand Spotlight the data.

4. You cannot start a Live Activity from the background, at all. A request made through Siri with the app closed never got its lock screen card, from Swift or from Dart. The fix is push to start: the app saves the push to start token, and the backend raises the card itself. Two traps inside that one: a Date in the activity attributes never decoded from the push payload (send plain seconds), and the app is suspended the moment the intent returns, so the intent has to wait for the started card's own push token before answering, or the "ready" push has nowhere to go.

5. A Control Center button that only sets openAppWhenRun does nothing when tapped. It has to be an OpenIntent with an enum target, compiled into both the app and the widget extension. Apple's own sample is this shape, the docs just do not say why.

Also: Siri gives you about 8 seconds to answer, and a Flutter engine that is still cold can eat most of it. I added a "ready" handshake so an intent waits for Dart instead of failing, and the play command answers as soon as the player accepted the item, not when audio actually started.

One of the biggest questions every early-stage founder faces today is: How do I launch my startup in this new era of AI-driven product development? It s so easy to build quickly now. Do I build first or validate first?

Personally, I ve seen hundreds of startups born in the past year. I m a grad student at MIT, and I created an AI accelerator for MIT and Harvard, so a lot of those startups have had amazing founding teams. I want to share some of the best practices I m seeing for getting products into market in an era where a lot of the old best practices seem to be shifting.

One of the most interesting things to me is how culture shapes our weekends.

Some people unplug completely. Others treat Saturday like Monday.

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I ve been that person at every event for the last 3 months.

Samsung Xcelerate, IMC, GFF, GTM Builders Bangalore, two random roundtables in Gurgaon where the AC was too loud. I go, I collect 30 business cards, I have 20 conversations that feel important in the moment, and I come back with nothing.

Hi hunters!

In the past few months I've been given the reins to the GTM horses of a young budding organisation. Mind you I'm no more than 22 years of age and I graduated in May. All my life I was all about research and never, never marketing. Everyone told me GTM is about charisma, cold calls, flashy decks. I thought I'd be terrible at it. I'm the guy who spent undergrad in Stata and EViews running logit regressions on 200+ investors, modeling power sector data for 50 years to figure out where to put 40Cr of battery storage.

When I had to plan our first roundtable, I didn't start with venue and snacks. I started like a thesis. What's the hypothesis? Who's the ICP? What do we want to learn vs. sell?

When outreach wasn't working, I didn't write punchier copy. I treated it like fieldwork.

During August I found that emails with my own email domain got into the spam folder in Gmail no matter how I made a delivery. SPF, DKIM and DMARC verification passed smoothly and the domain was not on any blocklist.

I tested four kinds of sending a message with 'test' only and no links: first from my Workspace, then SocketLabs, an old hosting email server, and finally via Gmail API. All four resulted in spam. Consequently, I believed the issue was related to Gmail being against my domain rather than it being the email route that caused the problem.

The situation was dramatically changed when people started replying. I launched a birthday gift sign-up where readers were required to reply to the confirmation mail, and they literally fetched the mail out from their spam folder and replied. Every day I sent a test message to myself, and since September 1st it has landed without problems in the inbox every day.

I keep seeing posts about some secret growth hack that supposedly saved a product, but when you look at what they actually did, it's usually pretty basic stuff.

Answering support messages talking to early users writing useful posts instead of pushing generic promos.

sometimes it feels like calling it a "hack" just makes people look for shortcuts instead of doing the boring work consistently.

has anyone actually found a real growth shortcut, or does it usually just come down to doing the basics really well?

I'm months away from my product launch and this is a question that constantly bugs me. There are innumerous new products every day on ProductHunt itself, let alone all over social media, are people not worried about someone stealing all their work and using it for their own product? Yes I know the source code is mostly hidden but what about the ideas behind it? Or forget other humans, what about AI getting trained on reddit threads and stealing it from there?
I want to understand how to properly go about marketing my product the right way: Where I can generate interest, get funding, yet copyright and own the ideas I come up with. Startup founders of ProductHunt, how did you tackle this?

The first week felt like validation. 340 customers, $50K in the bank, near the top of the charts. I thought I'd solved the cold start problem.

What I hadn't worked through: I'd acquired 340 customers who paid once and had no incentive to churn. Which meant I had no recurring signal on what actually needed fixing. The feedback was noisy because everyone bought at different price points with different expectations. Support was immediate and permanent. When I raised prices six months later to attract monthly subscribers, existing LTD holders treated it as a personal betrayal.

I do go-to-market for a product where the customer is a founder, and I keep running into the same wall.

Founders can smell marketing from a mile away. They've written the same emails, run the same ads, built the same funnels. So the usual playbook lands flat. Anything that sounds like copy gets skipped. Anything that sounds too clever gets skipped faster.

What seems to work better is being specific and slightly boring. Less "transform your fundraise," more "here is the exact thing this does and here is what it doesn't do."

But I'm not sure if that's a real insight or just the one thing that happened to work for us.