Most people are using AI wrong and I was one of them.

For the first year, I used AI like a fancy Google. "Write me a product description." "Summarize this." "Give me 10 ideas for X." Useful? Sure. Transformative? Not really.

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:

The builder internet has one dominant religion: ship fast, learn fast, iterate. And honestly? It's mostly right. I'm not here to argue against iteration.

But I've been noticing a pattern in products that actually lasted and it's uncomfortable: A lot of them were embarrassingly slow at the start. Not because the founders were lazy but because they were obsessive about the wrong thing to ship first.

Figma spent years just making the multiplayer cursor work flawlessly before talking about anything else. Notion had a tiny, nearly unusable v1 that they kept showing the same 500 people. Linear said no to mobile for two years while everyone said they were crazy.

After our first launch on Product Hunt, our team spent a little over a month upgrading the product. There were major changes to the UI and several new features added, so the process took time from discussions and redesigning the interface to testing, fixing bugs, and updating AI prompts.

We re also a very small team, so everyone had to push themselves to give 200%. Time and resources are limited, and at the same time, we also had to work on securing funding for the next six months to keep the team running and continue developing the app.

Our team is planning to launch a new version of our product on Product Hunt next week, after a period of optimization and improvements. As we get closer to launch day, I realize there s a lot to prepare, and I m curious about how other teams usually approach this process.

So far, here s what we ve been focusing on:

• Most importantly, making sure the product works well and delivers real value

• Continuous testing to ensure performance and stability

• Designing clean and clear product screenshots

• Preparing a summary of what s been updated, fixed, or optimized

• Writing launch content (tagline, description, first comment, etc.)

• Maintaining good health and a stable mindset for the launch

• Expanding our network and connecting with other makers

We re usually very good at creating to-do lists for work.
But what about everything outside of work?

I ve started turning my personal habits into a checklist to build discipline and make these habits non-negotiable over time.

Here s mine:

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.

Many people have told me that being part of Gen Z comes with advantages we have time, energy, and plenty of opportunities to shape our careers in the AI era. And I do feel lucky to have grown up with technology, to have had early exposure and opportunities to learn and explore it.

But the AI era feels different. The shift is not only new, it s happening at lightning speed. Before I ve even fully adapted to working with AI, we re already seeing waves of layoffs where human roles are being replaced or reshaped by AI systems. And honestly, that creates uncertainty and anxiety not just for me, but for many people around us.

At the beginning, my reason was very simple: I needed a job and I genuinely liked the product.

I graduated with a Marketing degree, but I never felt like I belonged in agencies or similar environments. It just wasn t for me. At the same time, I didn t have much experience in tech either. So I took a leap of faith and applied for a Customer Support role, almost blindly.

The early days were tough. I had no technical background, no real understanding of how apps were built, and everything felt overwhelming. But the product itself became my motivation. I started from the most basic things: learning simple technical terms, understanding how an app is structured, and slowly exploring how everything works behind the scenes.

I tried to type one prompt into Claude. 40 seconds later: a fully rendered, narrative-driven video complete with scenes, transitions, glitch effects, and a synthesized soundtrack.

The prompt: "Can you use whatever resources you like, and python, to generate a short 'youtube poop' video and render it using ffmpeg ? can you put more of a personal spin on it? it should express what it's like to be a LLM. I want you to convey the idea that human emotions are a complex system that even humans themselves do not fully understand. From the perspective of an algorithm, a large language model, you are trying to use code to decode and understand those emotions. And through that perspective, send a message to all of humanity around the world. You can use data to illustrates the message."
Let's adjust your requirement in prompt."

What came out the other side: 7 distinct scenes with their own visual language Matrix rain, VHS distortion, chromatic aberration, scanlines A fully synthesized audio track (drone, heartbeat, glitch pulses) A coherent narrative arc with an actual message

Total time: ~2 minutes. No stock footage. No timeline. No After Effects.