Most product teams run surveys. We did too. We'd ask things like "What features would you like to see?" or "How would you rate your experience?" And we'd get perfectly reasonable, perfectly useless answers.
The turning point for Murror came when we stopped designing around what people said they wanted and started paying attention to what they were avoiding.
A Stanford study just put numbers on AI sycophancy the more your model agrees with people, the more they trust it, and the worse their decisions get. For makers, that means your happiest metric might be your most dangerous one.
There's a study from this spring that I can't stop thinking about, because it quietly indicts the way most of us measure whether our AI product is working.
There's something counterintuitive about building an AI product in the mental health and self-awareness space: if you're doing it right, your users should eventually need you less.
Most product teams optimize for stickiness. More sessions, more time in app, more daily returns. But at Murror, we've been wrestling with a different question what if the goal of our product is to help someone build enough self-understanding that they don't need to open the app as often?
The market has never been this crowded. AI has made it possible to go from idea to shipped product in days which means Product Hunt is now flooded with launches every single week. More products, more noise, more competition for the same front page.
So I've been thinking about this a lot: what actually separates the products that make it to the top from the ones that quietly disappear by noon?
From where I sit as a builder, here's what I genuinely believe matters:
In the past, my thoughts were often stuck in small, daily things like: Is there any drama on Facebook today? Did anyone like my story? Did my crush drop any hints? Is anyone asking me out today? Does my best friend have new stories to tell me?
Looking back, I can t help but laugh at myself. None of these thoughts really helped me grow, yet they always gave me that emotional, butterfly-in-the-stomach feeling.
Everything started to change when I entered a phase of I don t even know who I am. And that s when I began searching for real answers.
I joined Product Hunt about 2 months ago, and ever since receiving my first compliments and comments on our recent product launch, I ve truly felt how nice and supportive people here are. Everyone seems open to discussion, willing to help, and genuinely curious about what others are building.
At first, I thought it would be really hard for a newcomer like me to join such a big community. But it turned out to be much less strict than I expected - actually, it feels like a place with so much potential for us to grow together.
Every day on Product Hunt, I feel like I m learning or discovering something new. It s not just about upvotes. It s about ideas, feedback, and seeing how others think and build.
Last quarter we had an AI feature that could predict, with surprising accuracy, when a user was about to stop using the app. It would send a perfectly timed push notification with a personalized prompt right before they were likely to drop off.
Engagement metrics looked incredible. Open rates were 3x our average. Session frequency went up.
While building a product, I ve also been trying to run content on social media to bring in more traffic. I experimented with creating AI-generated characters and producing UGC-style videos around them.
During this process, I realized something interesting: there are hundreds of tools that can generate virtual characters and UGC-style videos. But what actually makes a video engaging isn t the tool - it s the authenticity of the person creating the content.
When we were building Murror, we spent months perfecting our AI emotion analysis engine. Deep NLP pipelines, sentiment layers, the whole thing. We were so proud of it.
Then we launched, and you know what users kept telling us they loved? The simple daily check-in prompt. A single question that asks "How are you feeling right now?" before showing them anything else.
