When you're bootstrapping multiple products, there's this physical feeling that shows up and nobody ever talks about it. Your stomach is somehow empty and full at the same time. This knot that just sits there while you're trying to figure out which project needs you most.
I run Sparkum, Biteme, and LifeLines all under Onyx Labs. No investors. Every dollar is ours. Some days that's exciting. Other days it's just heavy.
A few things that actually help me:
Get specific. The "everything is overwhelming" feeling is almost never true. It's usually one or two things hiding behind everything else. Name them. The rest gets lighter.
I keep hearing and reading about how programmers are at risk; basically, everything that can be replaced by AI is at risk.
Yesterday, Lenny Rachitsky shared a post that PM openings are at the highest levels since 2022.
At the same time, I read how big giants (Meta, Amazon, etc.) are laying off engineers because of AI, and then I read about how they had to hire back again because something managed by AI went wrong.
I ve discovered a lot of useful products through Product Hunt over time.
Funny thing is, some of them I found way back, but only recently started using when the right use case clicked. I kept bookmarking them. And that s when their real value showed up.
I'm at my first PH launch today, and stumbled upon a question I thought could have been interesting to share. I'm sorry in advance if this sounds like a noob question to product experts, but that's exactly what I currently am :D
So my company just launched Bench for Claude Code here: it's an observability tool that logs, stores, and lets you share everything your Claude Code instances do.
There is a strange irony I have been sitting with lately.
I am building an app specifically to help young people feel less alone. And yet, some of the loneliest moments I have experienced have been in the past year, building it.
If you re still sitting on your launch, this is the push.
YC made a special exception for this community: one or more companies that launch tomorrow will get a YC interview and potentially funding. A YC partner will review every eligible launch.
With the launch of PATTTTERNS v2.1, I wanted to share a behind-the-scenes look at the tech stack. As a solo maker and Design Ops Lead, my goal was to build something highly scalable but with zero monthly overhead.
For as long as software has existed, the user has been a person. Someone sitting at a desk, poking at a phone, or calling an API. That assumption was so obvious it was never really a design principle, it was just common sense. Every decision about hierarchy, color, button placement, and error messaging was downstream of a single fact: a human being is going to see this.
