Bastien Renard's profile on Product Hunt

About

Twenty-five years in luxury fashion and sportswear have taught me that brand is a business lever, not a marketing function. The difference between a brand people admire and one they belong to is how the brand, product, distribution and cultural connections are assembled into something coherent, authentic and inspiring. I've run global businesses and early-stage ventures, managed P&Ls from the ground up, and led large teams across Europe, the US and Asia through product reinvention, channel transformation and brand repositioning. The work I find most meaningful sits at the inflection point: where a brand has genuine equity but the organisation hasn't yet caught up with its potential.

Badges

Tastemaker

Gone streaking

Forums

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1d ago

How do you get people to trust your data when you have zero track record?

Been thinking about this a lot for anything where the core pitch depends on numbers - finance, health, fitness, anything with metrics attached.

You can publish real data, real logs, whatever proof exists - but a brand-new account with no history saying "trust me, the numbers are real" is exactly what a scam would also say. The data being genuinely real doesn't automatically solve that problem.

For anyone who's launched something like this - how did you actually get people to believe you early on? Public/verifiable data, third-party validation, just time and reputation compounding, something else entirely? Genuinely curious what's actually worked for people here versus what sounds good in theory.

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5d ago

The first ten users should have been easier to retain. Nobody warned me of that.

It took a weekend of direct messages to get ten people on board. Four months in, and I'm still at only six.

One thing that has been surprising is the level of personal loss when it comes to churn. Every churn is a 10% loss, but more importantly, a specific person who no longer replies to your emails. I spent an entire Tuesday crafting an email to a single user, then never hit send.

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8d ago

US founders vs rest of the founders

US founders have real structural advantages we do not talk about enough. Ivy League is not magic; it is a pre-built network, so a cold intro becomes a warm one. Flying to SF for a weekend and landing at the right dinner is a low-friction move for them and a logistics project for the rest of us. Stripe/PayPal restrictions are serious enough that Stripe Atlas exists just to route around them.

But that mostly buys fundraising and visibility. It does not buy product-market fit.