These last months have had ups and downs, with moments when my partner and I considered setting NiceJourney aside, and pleasant surprises when clients appeared without any outreach.
The truth is, we never stopped thinking about how to make our offer and services truly advantageous, flexible, and unique. We spent weeks discussing, analyzing, considering...and now it's time to make some real changes!
I was watching an interview with one of Airbnb s founders recently, and one specific detail really stuck with me.
In the beginning, they didn't try to conquer the travel industry; they barely even tried to conquer a city. They started with about 50 core users in the New York area. They catered to a hyper-specific, tiny niche and built their empire outward from that one small epicenter.
Right now, at NiceJourney, we are working with a client taking the exact opposite approach.
I ve been spending more time vibe coding recently, and I ve started to question something I initially took for granted. Most of the conversation around vibe coding is about speed. Like how quickly you can go from idea to prototype, or how fast you can iterate. And to be fair, that part is real. The barrier to building has clearly dropped.
But the more I use these tools, the more it feels like speed isn t the limiting factor anymore.
The real constraint seems to be taste.
what do you choose to build?
what do you keep vs discard?
what actually feels right vs just working ?
what is genuinely useful vs just impressive in a demo?
Every morning, I scroll through the new launches to see what people are building, as many others do, and some recurring patterns are simply impossible to ignore.
When your product hits the front page, you have exactly three seconds to convince someone to click.
Just three gatekeepers stand between you and a new user:
When you're bootstrapping, cash is handled very carefully. You don't have thousands to drop on an agency just to see if your idea has legs. But you still need words to write social posts, a simple landing page to gauge interest, maybe a full email sequence, and much more.
From what I ve seen as a professional writer, most new founders tend to rely on three main alternatives:
DIY route: Firing up ChatGPT and hoping for the best, maybe thinking, "That's how everybody's doing it now, so that must be the best way."
Gig roulette: Hiring a freelancer on Fiverr or Upwork who does everything, from branding to graphic design and copywriting. Feels like saving a lot of money until you see the results.
Internal favor: Tapping the co-founder or team member who "knows how to write" to draft the copy. Kind of like the -My cousin does it better- version for start-ups.
I m increasingly noticing a trend: people use AI for (almost everything), especially for writing texts. it is nothing new, but it started to be annoying (?)
The problem is that AI often: fully or largely replicates existing text without adding anything new adds completely pointless things, like a two-line comment followed by writes extremely long comments that no one will actually read
Now more than ever, when you look at new products launching on Product Hunt or anywhere else online, the conversation is dominated by one topic: virality.
There is an endless stream of tools and hacks promising to make your content "explode." It often feels like "going viral" has become the default KPI for every modern business. If you aren't trending, are you even growing?
But is going viral a real, effective marketing strategy?
When my wife Noa and I heard that MTV was officially shutting down, it felt like the end of an era. As 90s kids, we missed that specific "linear" experience the joy of just turning on the TV and being surprised by a music video without an algorithm getting in the way.
I've been contributing to discussions every single day for over 3 years now, and sometimes it's really hard.
One day, I have a great time coming up with topics, and then there are those days when I just stare at the screen and can't type. But I always manage to find a way.
With the new year around the corner, we re doing what many others are doing: looking back.
I started using PH this summer, slowly trying to understand how the platform works (I still have doubts about some features, but I'm making progress at least.)
At first, my goal was simple: engage authentically. I didn t want to comment just for visibility or talk about things I didn t care about. So I stayed low-profile, joined conversations that genuinely interested me, and tried posting a few threads before launching NiceJourney (this last part didn t go that great, actually, as the majority of my threads were rejected).
A while ago, I commented on a product launch here on PH. I was genuinely interested, so I asked a question about the product and wished the team good luck. I just wanted to be supportive and know more about what they were doing.
The day after the launch, one of the team members added me on LinkedIn, and I accepted. They thanked me for my interest and asked if I d be open to a partnership. Sounded great to me, so we booked a call.
During the call, though, it became clear that partnership meant different things to us:
