I went through YC as a solo founder and I'm 6 years in now. I sometimes wonder whether I'd go solo again if I started a new company.

The good parts are obvious. No cofounder conflict, fast decisions, all the equity.

Hey Product Hunt! I'm Waseem Daher, co-founder of Pilot, the largest startup-focused accounting company in the US. I'm a 3x founder (my previous ventures were acquired by Oracle and Dropbox) who's raised over $120M from Sequoia, Stripe, Jeff Bezos, and more.

Today we're releasing our 2025 Founder Salary Report with data from 1,800+ founders, and the findings might surprise you:

• Founder salaries dropped 43% in the past year

• AI founders are bucking the trend (paying themselves more)

• Bootstrapped companies jumped 57%

• Only 5.4% of founders pay themselves nothing (down from 9% last year)

We founders talk endlessly about burn rates, runway, and valuations but no one talks about what they pay themselves. It's time to change that.

Today, I came across an article on TechCrunch: The great computer science exodus (and where students are going instead).

It shows that UC campuses saw a drop in computer science enrollment for the first time since the dot-com crash (6% in 2025, 3% in 2024), but students are shifting to AI-focused programs.

There are countless products and services out there, and I ll admit I sign up for more than I probably should. But I usually stop using them for a few common reasons:

1. It doesn t actually fit my needs

2. The company feels unreliable or opaque

3. The value doesn t justify the cost

After spending my career in enterprise software, I ve noticed that many of these issues aren t just product problems, they re relationship problems.

When companies show a bit of intention, clarity, and care, trust goes up. When they don t, everything feels disposable, even good tools.

I think many tech product builders, including myself, can easily fall into tunnel vision, whereby I am overly convinced that the feature we re working on is clearly justified. With vibe-coding tools, the cost of building new features has also dropped dramatically. But lower development costs didn't seem to translate to product growth in my organization. Many newly launched features still receive little adoption, or have a hard time "syncing" with the rest of the product.

So I m curious: how do you decide when a feature is actually worth building? Do you wait for repeated user requests, test a lightweight version first, trust your product instinct, or rely on behavioral data before committing?

I've recently seen more cities that are growing teams and building offices that seem to be growing rapidly? 
SF seems like it's one of many hubs that have been growing in the recent years. I'm trying to see which cities people are looking into and where people think will be the next startup hub? 
I've seen mixed opinions on cities like New York and Toronto but would love to hear what other people think as well!

I remember there was a time when the Product Hunt team had a subcategory called AMA, which felt a bit more exclusive.

A special guest would show up with a post like I m X, founder of X, AMA, and those sessions were actually quite successful in my eyes.