Is ambition contagious or is burnout?
Spend enough time around driven builders, and your standards rise. You want to ship faster. Do more. Stay ahead. That part is powerful. But here’s what I’ve been noticing about myself: I treat growth as urgent. I treat health as optional. Deadlines feel fixed. Sleep feels flexible. Momentum feels critical. Recovery feels negotiable. You can build something exciting on the outside while quietly...
Are we confusing chaos with creativity?
Vibes are powerful. They spark ideas fast and give you momentum before overthinking takes over. But vibes without structure just create noise. That's where prompt engineering matters. It's the bridge between inspiration and execution. It turns abstract intent into concrete instruction. It's what turns "I want something cool" into: Here's the outcome Here's the user Here are the constraints Here...
YC cohort patterns from W25.
Most people saw “AI startups.” The real shift? AI as infrastructure. ~160 companies accepted. The signal was clear: Agentic AI (~30%+) Not wrappers. Systems executing multi-step workflows autonomously. Replacing humans, not assisting them. The vibe-coding edge (~25%) 1 in 4 companies had ~95% AI-generated codebases. AI wasn’t just a tool; it was the development process. Speed became the moat....
What if the outbound channel you're betting on is the wrong one for your market?
I've been talking to founders across different stages and ICPs, and here's what's surprising: there's no consensus anymore. 1. Cold email is crushing it for some teams and completely dead for others. 2. LinkedIn DMs are either goldmines or ghost towns. 3. And somehow, cold calls are quietly working for a subset of B2B companies. It feels like the best practice playbooks don't account for how...
When you launched on Product Hunt, how did you pick your category?
Most founders treat categories like labels. Product Hunt treats them like distribution. Categories weren’t added to classify products. They were added because one global feed stopped working. Too much noise. Too little intent. Your category decides: who sees you how you’re evaluated the quality of feedback you get Wrong category → “Nice demo.” Right category → “This breaks my workflow.” That...
How many AI tools do you know, but can’t actually use?
I realized I was stuck in AI FOMO. Bought multiple courses. Knew every tool by name. Hadn’t built a single working automation. So I stopped and asked one question: "What repetitive task can I hand off to AI today?" Not after another course. Not after “learning more.” Today. That shift mattered. Most of us can list Cursor, Claude, n8n, Make, ChatGPT, MidJourney. Very few can show one real...
YC RFS 2026: here’s the breakdown that actually matters
A lot of people read YC RFS Spring 2026 as a trend list. It’s not. It’s a signal of where work inside companies is quietly breaking. Here’s how this shows up in real teams: Product teams YC references @Cursor , but the opportunity isn’t coding faster. It’s helping PMs synthesize interviews, metrics, and feedback to decide what to build next. Finance and hedge funds Firms like Renaissance,...
Why is defining relevance still the hardest part of building AI features?
As more teams build AI agents, search, and personalized feeds, one problem keeps surfacing. Not generation. Not model quality. It’s retrieval and ranking. Deciding what information should show up and in what order. Most teams solve this by stitching together systems. Vector search for meaning. Keyword search for precision. Custom logic for business rules. Over time, relevance logic spreads...
Can Product Hunt actually bring in customers after launch day?
It did for us. 3 customers came to @Flexprice last week. No ads, no cold DMs. Just conversations. Most people treat Product Hunt as a one-day spike. I treat it like a community of builders. We launched Flexprice last year and learned (the hard way) what works here and what doesn’t. So now I keep it simple: – I support makers launching on Product Hunt for free – I give honest product feedback as...
