Being brutally frank - It's way too early to determine PMF, but in our last 5 projects we've:

• built things that were useful to us and to nobody else

• got in front of tens of thousands of people and converted almost none of them

• ran customer interviews every way we could think of and still couldn't tell signal from politeness

• built things nobody wanted, including us

Each time, shutting down because getting customers felt like a game of convincing.

I think it was Robert Kiyosaki who said that straight-A students end up working for C students, and B students work for the government.

On the other hand, we often see stories of college dropouts building billion-dollar companies. But these next big thing cases are maybe 2% at most. I believe top students usually find their place in more formal paths: becoming doctors, lawyers, and similar professions.

Okay, this will be very honest, so hopefully, if they read it, they will not kick me out.

With a client from a fintech, we are trying to come up with ideas on how to present a company (tone of voice, type of posts) in the industry, that is "serious".

Tonight, we are hosting a small hackathon in Phoenix in partnership with @bolt.new! All the hackers get free credits to build whatever they can imagine during the hackathon. Thanks Bolt for the hookup! In this forum thread, all the hackers will submit their projects and vote on their favorite one (they can't vote on their own).

The top project will get hunted on @Product Hunt by me! If you want to follow along, come back to this thread in an hour or so and the submissions will start rolling in.

During our Product Hunt launch, we received offers for:

Paid upvotes
Engagement pods
"500k+ audience promotion"

We declined every one of them.

Not because they don't work.

Everyone talks about building the next unicorn. But what if that's the wrong goal entirely?

Here's a different mental model worth considering. Instead of spending 5 years chasing one product to $10M ARR, what if you built 10 20 smaller products (each generating $10k $50k MRR) managed entirely by AI agents?

A few years ago, getting a VC check was the ultimate shortcut. The fastest way to scale. The signal that you'd "made it." But with AI is a little bit different.

Global VC funding declined 30% in Q1 2024. One of the lowest quarters since 2018. And bootstrapped startups are quietly catching up. Recent data shows bootstrapped businesses are growing as fast as VC-backed startups, while spending only about one-quarter as much on customer acquisition.

I think AdSense rejection emails are one of the least helpful feedback in the tech field. They simply state, "Insufficient content." "Policy violation." They don't even specify the exact page, section, or rule.

When I spoke with bloggers who had this experience, I found the pattern was almost always the same. They guessed the reason, finished writing the post, waited two weeks, and still got rejected again. Some people even gave up after trying three or four times.

Has anyone here had a similar experience?

Did you actually figure out the reason for the rejection?