We re in the thick of redesigning onboarding for a new consumer app trying to make that first minute actually count. Not just informative, but compelling enough that people actually stick around and use it again.
Too many products treat onboarding like a tutorial. And it becomes easy for the user to view it as just another hurdle to get through instead of a moment to get set up for a positive experience. Swipe, swipe swipe, go...
My first instinct was to show one simple count. Then I ran into a problem: writers usually care about visible characters, while browser form limits can use UTF-16 code units. A draft can look fine in one counter and still fail a form field.
I m considering two approaches:
Show only a simple count until someone selects a target like web form .
Show both counts from the start, with a short explanation.
I lean toward the first option because most people should not need Unicode terminology while writing.
I created /services/ai-copilot-development on 5 July. Google crawled it for the first time on 31 August. Fifty seven days.
Nothing was wrong with it. It returns 200 with a title tag. It sits in sitemap-0.xml. robots.txt allows everything except /studio, /api and /preview-mode. It is linked from the site navbar, the footer and eight sibling service pages, so ten files point at it.
I'm doing my first solo Product Hunt launch in a few weeks. No team, no hunter with a big audience, no launch day command center. Just me and a very long to-do list.
So if you've done a launch day on your own:
What's the 1 thing you'd do differently?
What did you spend time on that turned out not to matter?
How do you get through the dead hours in the middle of the day?
Hey Sometimes I can come up with an idea that perfectly fits the Producthunt vibe. Usually, it is a SaaS but really small, so it can be someone's pet project. If you have the same ideas, let's share them here! It might help the new members to start with something small but cool & useful! My attempt:
Simple & Sexy monitoring of your product key metrics. (inspired by YC Startup School dashboard). 1. You code secret endpoint that returns the key metrics (DAU, Retention, $$$)
2. SaaS calls this endpoint each day and saves result
3. You receive a sexy & simple dashboard for all your pet projects. It can be viewed on a large TV or in iOS app widget. Let's start our day with growing metrics motivation!
I ve been running into this issue where an agent tries to fix a minor bug, fails, and then decides the best solution is to completely rewrite three surrounding utility functions. By the third iteration, it has introduced two new breaking changes and lost track of the original error entirely.
I'm currently working on the affiliate strategy for a new SaaS product and considering offering a 40% lifetime recurring commission.
My thinking is that, as an early-stage product without a large distribution channel yet, I'd rather give affiliates a much stronger incentive and reach customers I probably wouldn't be able to reach on my own.
For founders who have already run affiliate programs with recurring commissions:
Hit a wall with my daily task setup recently it reached a few thousand completed rows and now opening the app on my phone takes forever. Trying to find a clean way to clear out finished stuff that's older than a month. I'd love to avoid setting up paid external tools just for basic maintenance. What native setups or free built-in rules are you using to auto-hide archived entries automatically?
