I recently saw a marketer with 10k+ followers launch and finish 6th with 348 upvotes. They followed a proper pre-launch and post-launch plan, did everything right, and still the outcome felt unpredictable.

Now I m launching @Curatora next week.

I m not a marketer. I have a little over 1k followers. Of course, asking for support helps. But I also keep hearing that a large part of the Product Hunt community shows up mainly for their own launch, then goes quiet until the next one.

That makes me wonder: how much of success here is strategy, and how much is timing and network effect?

With the advent of clawdbots, it's as if we've all lost our inhibitions and "put our lives completely in their hands."

I'm all for delegating work, but not giving them too much personal/sensitive stuff to handle.

We re all builders here, which usually means at some point we looked at something clunky, slow, or frustrating and thought, there has to be a better way. Most products don t start with a grand vision; they start with irritation, curiosity, or firsthand pain.

I d love to learn more about how others here have navigated that journey:

How did you uncover the problem you decided to work on?
What signals told you this problem was worth solving?
How did you validate (if at all) whether people would actually pay for a solution?
Has your product stayed true to the original problem, or did it evolve into something different?
What surprised you the most along the way?

Hello everybody!

I'm Kristof from Belgium and only recently discovered this website thanks to Claude, so yeah, vibecoding my ass off : )
My story? A few years ago I was scraping the bottom of my bank account every month, financial anxiety through the roof!

So I went hardcore. Became obsessed with optimizing every euro, becoming debt free and you know, actually being able to breathe. Since I already was freelancing for a big Belgian newspaper me and a colleague managed to build out a podcast popularizing personal finance issues that reached millions of downloads. (which is a lot in Belgium :))

But here's what I noticed talking to hundreds of people along the way: people are struggling even way more than we think - and let's be honest, we already think they're struggling. And as of late it seems to me people are losing hope, feeling overwhelmed. Like it doesn't even matter to try anymore.