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:
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.
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.
For the first year of Murror, we ran surveys, interviews, feature request boards -- the whole playbook. We collected thousands of data points about what people said they wanted.
Every investor deck we've ever seen says the same thing: grow DAU. Daily active users is the north star. If people aren't coming back every day, something's broken.
We believed this too when we started Murror. We built push notifications, streak counters, and gentle nudges. "You haven't journaled today." "Your streak is at risk." The standard playbook.
Since the AI era started booming, everything has been changing incredibly fast and it requires us to adapt just as quickly. AI is now part of both our work and daily lives. It slowly seeps into everything, and over time, it can even reduce how much we think and decide for ourselves. Of course, I won t deny the huge benefits AI brings.
But the more I saw how easily we can get carried away by it, the more I felt the need to slow down to step back and look at the bigger picture.
After spending time working with AI, I realized a few important things:
One of the hardest conversations we had at Murror was about a pattern we kept seeing in the data.
Some users were journaling every single day. Multiple entries. Long, thoughtful, beautifully written reflections about the same thing over and over a breakup, a falling out with a friend, a decision they couldn't make.
