What made you build your product? Drop the real story below.
I'll go first.
Six months ago I was running growth for a small team. Seven tools open at once. I'd draft something in Notion, paste it into the CRM, copy the numbers from Analytics into a Sheets report nobody read, then schedule the post in a different tab. Every week the same loop. Nothing talked to each other, so I was the integration layer.
I kept thinking the problem was that I needed a better tool. It wasn't. The problem was the handoffs.
So we built Dolv. An AI operator that works across the tools you already have, not a replacement for them. It plans the work, does the work, and holds anything customer-facing in an approval queue until a human says go. Because unsupervised sending is the thing nobody actually wants, they just put up with the alternative.
Product Hunt page: https://www.producthunt.com/products/dolv
Your turn. Curious what the real origin story looks like for others:
What problem pushed you to build?
Who kept telling you it was painful before you finally listened?
What's the part you still haven't solved?
Will read every reply.
Replies
Great thread format, answering all three.
What pushed me to build: Twenty-five years running engineering organizations, and my own household still ran on the same duct tape as everyone else's: a budget spreadsheet, a calendar, a folder of insurance PDFs, bills in four apps, and all of it living in my head as the single point of failure. The moment that broke me was realizing my family couldn't answer "can we afford this trip?" without me personally assembling data from five places. I was the integration layer at home, same as you were at work.
Who kept telling me it was painful: My wife, for years, every time a question about our own life required "let me check three things and get back to you." And honestly, my own layoff told me loudest. When a private equity acquisition ended my VP role this spring, the first project I reached for was the one my household had been requesting forever. Built it solo in four months with AI agents as my engineering team.
What I still haven't solved: Onboarding. Every user who tries Kaevo wants what it does, and the first ten minutes of setup is where they stall, because a household OS is only useful once your real life is in it, and getting your real life into it is work. Universal pattern, no clean answer yet. If anyone here has cracked the cold-start problem for data-heavy personal tools, I'm listening.
Kaevo (kaevo.ai), the AI household operating system. Launching here on the 22nd. And Dolv's approval-queue insight is right, by the way: "unsupervised sending is the thing nobody actually wants" applies to household finance actions too. Good luck with the launch.
Progress AI Observability
@michael_shollenberger just passing by to say this sounds super cool and I really, really relate to the pain. I'll defintely check it out, good luck on your launch and beyond
@denitsapenchevavaltchanova Thank you! And 'I really relate to the pain' is basically our entire market research summarized in five words, ha. Would genuinely love to hear what you think after you poke around, especially anything that feels clunky in the first ten minutes. That's the part I'm obsessed with right now. Good luck with your own launches too! 🧭
The honest version: I kept running into the same question everywhere – "what colors actually suit me" – and the two available answers were a five-question quiz that never looks at you, or a $200–500 in-person session where two analysts can hand the same face different verdicts. That gap annoyed me enough to build the thing that just… looks: one selfie → your 12-season type, undertone, gold vs silver, plus a lab that grades the makeup you're actually wearing. Funny detail: the color half wasn't even in v1 – users kept sending screenshots of other tools' color results next to our makeup reads, and the effort of that workaround was the roadmap telling me what it wanted.
It's siOsi.me, free – launching here on the 22nd.
I started building Sentra because of something I kept seeing in healthcare, a lot of harm doesn’t come from a lack of effort. It happens because important things are missed at the wrong moment.
A drug interaction nobody notices. A deteriorating patient who doesn’t look critical yet. A diagnosis that comes too late. A referral that should have happened earlier.
In primary care, especially where doctors work with limited time, limited diagnostics, and a constant stream of patients, those small misses can become very serious.
That’s the problem behind Sentra, an AI system I’m building for healthcare.
The idea is not to replace doctors or make AI the decision-maker. I want to build something that works beside clinicians—a second layer of attention that can flag risks, help think through differential diagnoses, reduce administrative work, and hopefully catch things before they become preventable harm. That human-authority principle is also explicit in Sentra’s strategic mandate.
There’s still a lot I haven’t solved. Clinical validation is hard. Trust is hard. Building something that actually fits into a doctor’s workflow is much harder than building a good demo.
But the reason I keep working on it is simple:
Too many preventable outcomes begin with something small that was missed. I want to see if we can make those moments harder to miss.
I was coming up to the end of the financial year. Hadn't yet filed my taxes or done my accounts and the stress was getting to me, mountains of receipts and transactions across multiple bank accounts. I tried setting up with Xero but it was down at the time (wouldn't let me create an account). I tried using google sheets and got frustrated so I built @Wrightly for myself and now taking on feedback from real users to improve it for them too.
what pushed me to build: watching my own voice for a few weeks and noticing patterns i couldn't see any other way, stress and energy showing up before i'd have said anything was wrong. built a tool that reads that off voice, on-device.
who kept telling me it was painful: sales managers, once i started asking around. reps burn out and the good ones leave first, nobody sees it coming until the exit interview.
what i haven't solved: getting from N=1, my own voice, to something that generalizes across people without a mountain of labeled data. still the hard part.
Honestly, we got tired of seeing schools and companies either pay lakhs to build a quiz platform or settle for tools that all look the same 😅
So we thought… why not let them just have their own?
That’s basically how Aven Quiz AI started.
What pushed me to build it:
I started building Plantyd after 8+ years of trying to end up with nice looking DIY landscaping around my house and never quite getting there. I tried a lot of different approaches, but each one came up short in its own way. I hired a designer to plan everything at once. The design looked great, but I didn't have the money to install it all in one shot, and the plan quickly got outdated with no way for me to update it myself when plant selections changed. I tried software solutions too, but they were either built for professionals and painful to use, or they only really worked for designing one or two beds at a time. Some of them were good at one thing, but nothing could do everything, or even most things, well.
Who kept telling me it was painful:
My wife (seems like a common thread in this thread, lol). She walked in one day while I was trying to plan out the next "phase" and it looked like that conspiracy wall from Homeland. 10 different printed out copies of our property, a stack of randomly sized circular objects for tracing "plant size" circles, and zero coherent plan connecting any of it. She's the one who told me to stop working around the problem and just build something better.
What I still haven't solved:
Flexibility without complexity. The flexibility is there now, but with that comes a learning curve. It's not quite at the point where someone brand new can jump in and just get it without some onboarding pain. Getting closer though. It's honestly the thing I spend the most time thinking about.
As someone who considers them selves very disciplined I was always a little shocked at my screen time. Me? I am on reels for 3 hours a day?
I took extreme measures and took a video of my work day at my desk. 56. I picked up my phone 56 times in 3 hours. Absurd.
This one silly little thing I couldn’t beat so I started to think about the psychology behind it. You have work in front of you and endless free dopamine next to you. It’s a simple negotiation and free dopamine wins.
So I broke it down for myself like this. The phone needs to be in the room, but occupied itself. Because then my mind doesn’t wander almost like giving your phone a task so it stops asking you if you wanna hang out. (Visual White Noise)
Secondly it had to be something aesthetic and worth while. Not another focus timer, something that felt like progress in and of itself. Like not being on my phone was actually giving me something. (Climb Elevation Tracking)
Finally, I wanted to hack my competitive mind, the only thing stronger than my desire to scroll. If I leave the app before a session is over. I lose my lifetime ranking.