We love celebrating products, but we realized that we could congratulate the community on their achievements. We launched badges last month with an initial set, but we can t get enough now. If you haven t seen those yet, go to your profile and add badges to your showcase so other users can see what you re most proud of earning. We want to launch another set of badges this quarter (we ve heard a lot of you request a badge for long streaks), so please submit your ideas here, and we ll try to make some of them happen!
I've used Product Hunt in the past to launch my company's AI/XR-related projects, with some success. I'm now building smart home stuff as a side project, and I wonder if people here are interested in that or not? My feeling is that everything here is about AI agent nowadays .
I'll probably get roasted for this, but hear me out.
The standard advice is "talk to 50 potential customers before you write a line of code." I did that for a project once. I talked to 40 people. I took meticulous notes. I built exactly what they said they wanted.
And you know what happened? They didn't buy it. Not a single one. The same people who said "I would definitely use this" looked at the finished product and said "oh, interesting" and went back to their lives.
I've since realized that people are terrible at predicting their own behavior. They'll tell you what sounds reasonable, what makes them feel smart for saying, or what they think you want to hear. But when it comes time to actually change their habits or pay money, a different person shows up.
I had a realization this morning that I can't shake.
Every single day, I apologize to someone. "Sorry, that feature isn't ready yet." "Sorry, the onboarding is confusing." "Sorry, I haven't replied to your email." "Sorry, the pricing page is broken on mobile."
I don't remember anyone telling me that 60% of building a product would be saying sorry to people who are kind enough to still care.
And here's the thing: I used to think "founder" meant vision, strategy, talking to users about the big picture. But most days, it's just managing a long list of small failures and trying to make sure the people who believed in you don't walk away before you fix them.
I m currently working on a product designed for users around the world, and as exciting as it sounds, building something truly global comes with a lot of unexpected challenges.
Ran the numbers on vendor/software spend at a few companies out of curiosity and honestly wasn't ready for it. Duplicate tools solving the same problem, licenses paid for months after nobody was using them, contracts that quietly auto-renewed because no one was watching!!. Has anyone else actually audited this at their own company? Curious if what I'm seeing is normal or if we just got unusually messy.
