Everyone has their favourite routine to perform at their best.

Some are advocates for the Pomodoro technique (25 minutes of intensive work, with a 5-minute short break), others love time-blocking, a few plan the entire week on Sunday, and there are even people who say ice-cold showers la Wim Hof help them focus.

Everywhere else I look podcasts, social media, even casual discussions  longevity is a hot topic. Bryan Johnson, for example, shows up in my feed constantly.

For me, health-tech feels like the most valuable thing we could be building. Not just extending life expectancy, but actually improving quality of life.

As a European citizen, I think we need to look at the current situation clearly.

I m from Hungary, a country where the previous administration became well known for strongly criticizing the EU. But this post is not about that political debate.

Hey Product Hunt!
This morning I launched my first solo product ever: Controol a minimalist finance app built around one idea:

Know how much you can spend, not just what you already did.

No team. No paid ads. No launch list. Just late nights and building something I personally needed.
I honestly didn t expect much but hours later, it made it to the Top 5 of the day

The feeling? Wild.
Strangers are connecting with the mindset behind it, and it's been amazing to read their comments.

I've been noticing an interesting pattern while talking with founders.

For very small teams, spreadsheets, chat, and memory seem to work surprisingly well.

Then something changes.

Not because people become less organized.

Building in public and doing some research on my own scar tissue. I've rage-quit more finance apps than I can count YNAB three separate times, two spreadsheets I lovingly built and abandoned by week three, one app whose notifications made me feel like a parent was scolding me.

Every time it was the same story: the tool slowly turned into a chore, and one day I just... stopped opening it.

So I want the war stories. What money app or system did you rage-quit? Was it the manual data entry, the guilt-trip notifications, the endless categories to maintain or something else?

What made you finally walk away?

We re getting ready for our second Product Hunt launch on Jan 31, and a post by @busmark_w_nika got me thinking.

What to do (that we didn't do the first time):

• Plan your launch. What does it mean?

  • Write down everything you need to do before you launch.

  • Cleaning your copy

  • Your product images

  • Your product video (demo under 60 seconds if you can)

  • For our first launch, we didn't do anything. Even though we got 2nd Product of the Day, I would not recommend others to leave it to their luck. Plan and maximize your chances of success.

• Keep it simple, stupid.

  • Don't overcomplicate your page with lots of marketing language.

  • Simplicity, clean product screenshots, and clear language.

  • I think this is the single most important thing to take into account when launching, and why we probably did so well on our first launch.

    • Ask yourself: Does the tagline make sense? Will others understand what the product does and what it is in under 10 seconds?

    • For us at @Pretty Prompt: Grammarly for prompting. (Grammarly = it is an extension.) Improve prompts in one click. (super clear what it does).

    • You can straight away visualise how you might use the product and what it will do for you.

• Focus on your strengths.

  • Don't give everything you got in one go.

  • Earn the right for people to read and scroll down. Read and scroll down.

  • Save some stuff for your pinned post.

  • People have a short attention span.

  • Hook people on your most important feature, showcase it front and centre, don't give me everything together cos I'll forget, and also I'll get lost.

  • For us at @Pretty Prompt: Improve your prompts in one click. Works inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Lovable, and more.

  • Even though you have about 10 other features on Pretty Prompt, we don't talk about them right in the beginning; we just feature that one "killer feature" and let users dive deeper afterwards.

• Product assets = show, don't tell.

  • Your images and video should be about your product.

  • Don't make it marketing-heavy. Make it product-heavy.

  • Show me what the product does, don't tell me about it.

  • For us: 60-second demo video actually using the tool. Screenshots of the top features (Improve - Refine - Save - History). Not fancy Figma designs, I mean screenshots of the actual product.

  • If you get big like Notion, Cursor, Claude, etc. you may also be able to add a more human video of you talking about the product, or new functionality, your story, etc. But for the majority, just show your product, and let the product win.

• Learn from others.

  • Though no two products or launches are the same, you can learn from others and pick the best things that fit your own product.

  • Checkout this post by @fmerian on "The Cursor Way to Launch". Great tips.

• Warm up the Audience.

  • Don't just rely on your followers.

  • Use as many channels as possible to maximise the reach and get people excited about your launch, even before you launch.

  • If you do this step well, the launch is just 50% of the job, and you're already a step ahead of most.

  • For us: I did a community post, Substack one, LinkedIn one, Slack one. We'll be recording a founder video too. I want it to be as human as possible; people buy into people.