Hi from a tech writer
Hi everyone :)
I'm Valentina, a technical writer who got into this field kind of by accident. I studied engineering and started with IoT devices and Arduino, then learned Python for automation and scraping. Somewhere along the way I ended up writing guides instead of just coding, and honestly I really enjoy it.
Why I'm here? I've been lurking on Product Hunt for a while and finally decided to join the conversation. As someone who writes about technical products, I'm always looking for new tools to explore and test. I also love seeing what other makers are building and learning from this community.
One thing I've noticed is that I prefer testing products myself rather than just trusting reviews. If anyone here is building dev tools, automation products, or anything in the AI space, I'd be happy to test them out and give honest feedback from a technical writer's perspective.
What I'm interested in. Simple, functional tools in the dev/automation/AI space. I'm also interested how other people here approach product evaluation. Do you trust reviews, or do you test everything yourself before committing?
Always happy to chat about products, scraping, automation, web scraping guides, or whatever you're working on. Would love to hear what everyone is building or exploring lately :)
Replies
Hi Valentina 👋
Firstly, love your hands on approach to product testing. As a builder, thoughtful testers are honestly underrated, they usually give the most meaningful and actionable feedback.
I've been thinking a lot about how people evaluate tools beyond surface level reviews. So it's really interesting to hear your perspective. I do pay attention to overall aggregated ratings as a signal, but I'm usually still hesitant until I've tried the product myself.
When you evaluate products, what actually builds trust for you? Depth of documentation, real world use cases or transparency from the builder?
Hey, thanks, @minhajulll!
Honestly, documentation is important. When you're trying out a new product, that's usually the first place you go to understand how it works. If there are working examples, even better.
But I can't say it's the main thing. Recently I was comparing captcha solving services, and there was one with a library that used outdated modules. To make it work, I had to either go into the library and fix things manually or use an older Python version. Their docs were pretty bad, and the examples didn't even work.
But weirdly enough, I remember that service as one of the most pleasant to work with. Because their support was amazing. They actually tried to help and even sent me an entire archive with working examples (though why they didn't just put it in their repo is still a mystery to me). And in practice, even though the service was inconvenient to set up, it turned out to be one of the fastest with high success rates. I ran tests for different types of captchas.
So I guess for me it's a combination. Good documentation helps, real examples are great, and responsive support that actually cares can make up for a lot. What builds trust is when you feel like the people behind the product really want it to work for you, not just sell it to you. And of course, how well the product actually works matters too. Is it reliable? What's the uptime? Does it deliver on what it promises?
What about you? What's been your experience?
@valentina_skakun Absolutely I agree, good support teams make a massive difference to trust. I find that when products offer alot of things for free out of the box, I'm more likely going to want to pay for their services because if the free services work really well I kind of build up a dependency and I want to say thank you to the team. Kinda like how you mentioned " When you feel like the people behind the product really want it to work for you." Having good documentation around this as well and being supportive by email/phone with quick responses is just a massive bonus as well!
@minhajulll Exactly! I totally get that. When a product has a good free tier or trial, it shows they're confident in what they built and actually want you to try it before committing.
I usually skip services that require a card upfront or don't offer any way to test things first. I just want to see if it actually works for my use case before making any decisions, you know?
The whole "try before you buy" approach really does build trust. If the free version works well, I'm way more likely to upgrade because I already know it's worth it.