It's a really weird feeling having a decent number of signups on paper but having zero clue what your actual ideal customer looks like. You look at your analytics and see one group living inside your app daily while another batch signed up months ago and never came back. When you're trying to design features for two completely different types of users at the same time you end up satisfying nobody.
Looking back do you wish you had niched down right from day one or is it better to cast a wide net early on just to see who sticks around?
I would like to warn you in advance that I do not want to offend any culture or country with this post. It only demonstrates observations from my own experience.
6 months ago, I had a conversation with a friend and we got to the topic of money.
Most of the time, when I'm working on my own, I miss the feeling I'm not alone in the difficult moments, especially when I'm stagnating or the results tend to decline.
When you have a co-founder, it's a little better.
Maybe there are support groups for solo-founders (like build in public)
Or there are meetups, online networking/calls, where you get advice.
Or do you solve it with a partial "step back"
Where do you look for support and redirection? (Personally, I wouldn't want to slip into talking to ChatGPT.) :D
When I launched my first paid tool, I set the price at $5 a month because anything higher felt like I d scare people away. It took me almost a year to realize the people paying $5 were the ones emailing support the most, and the few who would have happily paid $30 never thought it was a serious product.
I raised prices earlier this year and lost a couple of users, but revenue went up and, oddly, the complaints went down. I still feel a little guilty every time I look at the pricing page, though.
I ve noticed two patterns with makers I talk to:
People who start cheap to get traction and then struggle for months to raise prices without upsetting early users.
People who charge more from day one, get fewer signups, but end up with customers who actually stick around.
The initial spark of an idea usually starts with a grand purpose and a wave of high motivation. However, over time, this process can turn into a cycle of professional and psychological exhaustion. As the project progresses, the idea hits walls relative to its purpose and fails to align with the real world. Sometimes, you have to give up right in the middle of building it; other times, as time passes and the idea keeps coming back to you, you begin to think it was just a nonsense idea in your mind all along. Watching a concept you once cherished slowly disintegrate like this is a process that pushes you to your psychological limits. As a founder or product leader, how do you prevent your mind from manipulating you with these ideas? When and how do you realize that an idea will actually work and that it isn't just a mental trap?
Last night, two PHP security issues were revealed, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619. Both allowed remote code execution with no authentication needed, and they were very serious, with a vulnerability score of 9.2. Due to the extent of the impact, we found ourselves doing emergency work on client sites late that night.
What astonished people most: updating WordPress and its plugins doesn't fix it. The problem is in the PHP language itself, so the PHP on the server is what must be upgraded.
Also note that if a website is running a PHP version that's no longer supported by the PHP development team, there will be no official patch.
