Me? Oh, for me it was definitely never a number. When I got my first job, I made my own lunch and used to eat it all by myself on the office rooftop. Partly because I didn't much like all the baseball talk at lunch, but mainly, of course, to save money. Then, about a year and a half later, I opened my own company. It has already been 22 years since then, and I still run the company myself.
So my conclusion is: it was about having enough money set aside to get me through the low seasons, rather than reaching a certain level of profit.
As I work toward getting more people to use my product I've been building.
We spend so much time testing whether our software works. We check functionality, fix bugs, improve the interface, and make sure everything behaves as expected.
But I've started questioning whether we're always testing with the right people.
Last month we checked our internal collection of prompt examples and found instructions going past two thousand words. We thought more details meant results but our tests showed the opposite effect.
When directions get long models start missing important formatting rules hidden in the middle sections. Our output became more consistent only after we made those big sections shorter and used bullet points instead.
We learned to see prompts as code functions not as assignments. Keep the focus small explain input values clearly. Take out all the friendly conversation words.
A short instruction set makes the model use its knowledge instead of getting lost in different style rules. Fewer words often mean thinking.
How do you split time between building and growth when you're solo?
I've been building NAAD (an Indian classical wellness app ragas, pranayama, mantra meditation) mostly alone, and I've noticed something: the skills that make you good at shipping product are almost the opposite of the skills that make you good at growth/distribution. One is heads-down and technical, the other is outward-facing and relational.
For those of you who've been solo makers did you force yourself to learn marketing, or did you eventually bring someone in to own that side? And if you brought someone in, how did you structure that (equity, profit-share, contract) in a way that felt fair to both sides?
Genuinely curious how others have navigated this, especially early on when there's no revenue yet to pay someone a normal salary.
Everywhere you look on Product Hunt, browser extensions and web apps are absolutely exploding. But if you look at real-world screen time stats, mobile apps still capture the lion s share of daily attention. Is the market splitting in two?
If you built a web-first product, did sticking strictly to desktop actually help your retention, or did it hurt you?
If we exclude Silicon Valley, the one every entrepreneur has already watched, there is a certain kind of comfort I derive from movies and shows about people who actually built something. These days the struggle and the passion pull me in more than almost any other genre.
The last one to get me was Made in India: A Titan Story (2026) the story of a small team building India s first world-class watch. What stayed with me was the number of times they were on the cusp of shutting down before they made the slimmest watch in the world in 1990, not the eventual success.
I don't know if it's inspiration or just a way to feel less alone in the uncertainty of building something myself but I keep coming back to these stories. Some of the best ones I ve found were never big releases.
