What's the PROBLEM your product solves?
In the month that I've been here, I've been noticing a pattern in a lot of launches - strong demos, polished UI, clear outputs of "what it does."
But when I ask myself "What problem does this solve?" I sometimes have to dig for the answer. (I come by that thinking honestly - I've spent 33 years building and fixing businesses, so this is the lens I can't turn off.)
The products where the problem is obvious are the ones people actually buy - you see it, you go "oh, that's exactly my issue," and you're sold on it.
It also makes pitching easier. If you're clear on the problem, explaining your product to anyone - buyers, other makers, whoever - gets a lot simpler.
And it's a small tweak with a big payoff - naming the problem clearly in your launch messaging can be the difference between people scrolling past and people stopping to actually look.
Curious what others think: when you're checking out a launch here, do you look for the problem first, or does the demo/output usually sell you on its own?
Replies
I think problem first. Demo/ouput second..
The product I built (RecurRoster launching today July 4th ) literally solved my own problems as a freelancer with multiple service jobs
@linh_chi_evelyn_phan Congratulations on your recent launch!
Recognizing you'd built this to solve your own multi-client freelance chaos is exactly the right starting point.
THIS: "your reputation with those clients is what brings new ones through the door" - that's a sharper and more specific pitch than the generic "all-in-one business planner,".
It's not about tools - it's about how service businesses actually grow. Have you thought about leading with that distinction more than the feature list of what your product does? You want copy that makes your reader sit and say, "that's me!".
Hello Inbox
I think it's subjective. I'm drawn to the launches/demos that are relevant to my industry or some personal problems I am experiencing. What might be obvious to you may not be obvious to me.
Totally agree with the problem-first framing. We went through the same thing with AI Hive, where early messaging was all about features: no-code builder, multi-LLM, on-premise deploy. But the moment we rewrote it around one concrete pain ("80% of enterprise AI projects die before they reach production"), everything clicked faster. People didn't need to figure out if they had the problem, they already knew they did. The demo became confirmation, not the pitch.
For SiftFirst: a small business owner with no HR team posts one role and gets 200+ applications, most AI-written and all polished, so the resume itself no longer tells them who can actually do the work. The interesting part is that the real problem is not ranking, plenty of tools rank. It is trust: nobody will act on a score they cannot see the reason for. So every score quotes the exact line from the resume behind it, and the human still makes the call. The problem I am really solving is not "too many resumes," it is "I cannot hand a hiring decision to a black box."
@virko_kask In my experience, it drifts constantly - usually not the problem itself, but how sharply you can say it. You started knowing brand-mismatched outputs were annoying; the fact that it took a full rebuild to land on "learns the brand DNA first" tells me the problem probably didn't change much, but your read on the mechanism that actually fixes it did.
I'm wondering what the v1 version of BrandGen thought the fix was, before the rebuild taught you otherwise?
@anna_ludwinowski I think the BrandGen part was meant for another maker in this thread, mine is SiftFirst (resume screening). But the underlying question lands anyway, so here is my answer for it: when I started, I thought the fix was better ranking, a sharper score at the top of the pile. Building it taught me that nobody acts on a score they cannot verify, so the evidence quote became the real product and the score is just its summary. Which matches your point exactly: the problem never drifted, my read on the mechanism that fixes it did.
@virko_kask My bad - clearly an error on my end!
"Nobody acts on a score they cannot verify" - that's the whole thing, isn't it? You didn't set out to build an evidence-quoting tool, you set out to build a better ranker, and the black-box problem is what forced the pivot. The score was never the product. It was just easier to think it was, at first.
What was the actual moment when that clicked for you?
@anna_ludwinowski No worries at all. The click came from watching myself distrust my own prototype: it ranked fine, and I still caught myself rereading the resumes to check it. If the builder cannot take the score at face value, no hiring manager ever will. Quoting the exact line I was rereading anyway was the obvious fix, and the moment it was there, I stopped rereading. That was the tell that the quote was the product and the score just its summary. Your thread has a talent for pulling these stories out of people, by the way.
MonoCloud for Startups
The pattern you are seeing usually means the team fell in love with the solution before validating the problem. My test is whether a stranger can repeat the problem back to me after one line. If they cannot, the demo does not matter. Strong output with a fuzzy problem is a product looking for a reason to exist.
@shivangit26 Well said! And I can see how that happens BUT we have to keep in mind the PROBLEM we're solving for. Otherwise, it becomes a fun project, and not a real product in the marketplace.
It would be interesting if Product Hunt encouraged every launch to answer one simple question at the top. What problem does this solve, and who experiences it most?
@tumblar_kevin Great suggestion - would definitely help those builders/developers looking to take their products to market.
I agree with the core point — naming the problem clearly makes it easier for the right people to recognize themselves and say "yes, that's me." That is what I want to see as well.
That said, I wonder if there's another layer to this. A launch isn't just for the people who already know they have the problem. Sometimes it also needs to catch the attention of those who aren't a perfect fit — or don't even realize they need the product yet. Polished demos and slick UI might not answer "what problem," but they do lower the barrier for discovery. They make people curious enough to stick around and ask the question in the first place.
So maybe it's not either/or. A clear problem statement helps converts; a strong demo helps reach. Both matter, just at different moments.
Problem first, always. Features explain the product; the problem explains the purchase. If I can't answer "Why would someone switch from what they're doing today?" within a few seconds, I usually lose interest even if the demo is impressive.
@tarqiya_forgah Appreciate your comment - we have to make it easy for our audience to know if we solve their problem or not :)
I have to use terminals from time to time, but almost all existing terminal apps (barely an exaggeration...) are obsessed with removing the entire user interface. You have to edit JSON files just to change a color, and they force you to memorize keyboard shortcuts for any settings change or to open a window or tab (most don't even have tabs). So I just made a custom one.
I wanted one where I could assign frequently typed commands to buttons. Nothing is forcibly hidden—no "minimal UI." I went over the top with themes and styling, and put AI in it(you can even "vibe code" a theme by typing something like "make the app look like it's Halloween" - feature nobody asked for).
The one tool that people bought right away and some use everyday just solves the repetitive copy-paste ritual you run into when trying to feed a folder or an entire project to an AI model on a web chat interface (like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini). For a long time, none of them allowed you to just drop a big folder in—it was one file, then the next file, then the next... and how do you get it onto the clipboard? Open editor/notepad, select, copy, paste, open next file.. Even when you can drop multiple files or a folder, it only gives the AI model the option to look at them rather than force-feeding the context in full, which gives you less control and subpar responses.
I still don't know how to properly describe why someone would want to do that, and it matters less today with agents but it is still another way to work with models (in the context of coding mostly but any type of work). Can pack up a whole coding project, Ctrl V it into 5 different web chat's to get 5 opinions. Or to get more use from ChatGPT subscriptions/Claude if you are rate limited (these companies are much "looser" with their web chat interfaces to the models.. often still free).
@tom_brothers Yup, the terminal one you nailed already - "edit JSON to change a color" is the problem statement. That's a clear one.
The other one's more interesting to me actually, because you said the quiet part - you don't know how to describe why someone wants it, but people paid for it anyway and use it daily. So, forget the mechanism for a second - what's the actual moment right before you reach for that tool? Is it the tedium of doing file 1, file 2, file 3 by hand, or is it more like watching the AI give you a worse answer because it only "looked at" the files instead of actually having them?
Eliminating an unlimited feed on a social media, and focusing social media around the topics you have selected as interested in, rather than what the algorithm has chosen due to it capturing you watching random stuff all the time, and continuously feeding you more. @Weavefeed pushes a more beneficial way to use social media, that encourages learning and further interest exploration!
@kevin_short3 Ok so the problem it solves is that your feed gets all messed up from the occasional random viewing and this keeps it "clean"? I can see that being a problem. Bigger question is WHO is this for? Just the casual feed scroller who gets annoyed OR the sales team wasting time looking through unrelated stuff instead of posts from prospects? Big difference in who's going to pay for your product.