In the early days, our product had a single, crystal-clear value proposition. Users logged in, knew exactly what to click, and achieved their goal in seconds. Because the core experience was focused, conversion rates were high and onboarding was practically effortless.
Then came the desire to expand. We started building every feature users requested, adding customizable settings, and creating multiple workflow options. Instead of delighting people, the experience deteriorated. More options split user attention, clutter ruined the clean interface, and new features introduced unexpected edge-case bugs. We added value on paper, but in reality, we just added friction.
How do you strategically say "no" to feature requests so your product stays lean, intuitive, and effective as it scales?
When I started there were only a few things to worry about so decisions were pretty quick. Talk to users fix the product ship the next thing. Then the business started growing and suddenly every decision affected something else. More customers meant more support more features meant more maintenance and more people meant more opinions. How do you keep things simple as the business gets bigger?
Correcting the headline number on my own post. I wrote sixteen months here and that was wrong, our blog has been running since June. I used a figure I had not checked, so I am fixing it rather than leaving it up.
Founder here, I run a done-for-you affiliate storefront service, so I am not neutral about this. I sell storefronts that depend on traffic, and the traffic on my own marketing blog is in single digits, which is why I went looking.
When we first started we had a really specific user in mind.
But once we went live the people actually buying and using the app were completely different. They had different problems but they were the ones actually paying us money.
Meta and Sierra just announced Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard for how personal agents talk to businesses. Shopify, Stripe and Walmart are listed as partners and the first spec is supposed to land later this month.
I build small web apps and my first reaction was mixed. Fewer abandoned checkouts sounds nice. But I'd want to know when it's an agent and not a person, and who sorts it out when it orders the wrong thing. Is anyone already seeing agent traffic on their product? Would you support something like this early or wait and see?
I m at the stage where building the product feels easier than getting the first real users.
Not traffic. Not friends signing up. I mean people who genuinely try the product, come back, and tell you what s useful or broken.
I keep hearing the usual answers - Product Hunt, Reddit, X, communities, cold outreach - but I m more interested in what actually worked when you had no audience yet.
Did your first users come from one channel, or was it mostly manual conversations one by one?
Wrote a script to validate blog drafts before publish. The check was all(validate(p) for p in sys.argv[1:]). Ran it against a 125 file backlog and got back exactly one line of output.
all() on a generator expression stops at the first False. Every file after the first failure never even ran through the checks, let alone printed anything. It looked like a clean pass because there was one failure and then silence, not because 124 files were fine.
The other day I saw a poll on LinkedIn which said one of the biggest ongoing struggles of startups and small businesses is reliable, scalable lead generation especially beyond the usual tools like Apollo, ZoomInfo, Clearbit, etc.
Product Hunt often features some fresh and creative approaches to data. I have seen some around company enrichment, contact intelligence, trigger signals or even outreach automation. But often PH launches get forgotten after their launch day.
What are some lesser-known or recent data tools you ve come across on Product Hunt that help with lead gen, enrichment, or prospecting?
