User feedback is crucial to the product development cycle - but it isn't always the first step to building a successful product. How early in your journey did you start integrating user feedback? "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses" - Henry Ford
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.
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".
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.
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?
I build HIPAA compliant AI for healthcare, and last month I deleted a feature I had just finished. It was a journey analytics module in our internal dashboard: stage by stage funnel, cohorts, drop off between every step. The module worked as designed. I removed it anyway.
The reason is that I could not name one decision it had changed. I opened it, read the stages, agreed with them, closed the tab. It described the past accurately and left me where I started, because a funnel tells you where people stopped and never tells you which of the eleven things on that screen to cut.
Most of the time, when I'm working on my own, I miss the feeling I'm not alone in the difficult moments, especially when I'm stagnating or the results tend to decline.
When you have a co-founder, it's a little better.
Maybe there are support groups for solo-founders (like build in public)
Or there are meetups, online networking/calls, where you get advice.
Or do you solve it with a partial "step back"
Where do you look for support and redirection? (Personally, I wouldn't want to slip into talking to ChatGPT.) :D
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?
I can see that many people use especially: LinkedIn (group) posts, DMs Twitter posts, DMs, Streams Product Hunt in p/self-promotion Newsletter in sequences campaign YT for streaming Have you ever used other channels too? (E.g. Reddit, HN) or any other form that would make your upcoming launch stand out?
