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.
It is a question of choosing between two evils for us now. Neither option is completely free of flaws.
Human: Recruiters with "gut feelings" who harbor unconscious bias. they reject excellent candidates who just didn't go to the "right" school or didn't just "click." Inconsistent, unfair, and un-auditable.
AI: Algorithms whose training datasets are themselves replete with historical biases. They increase the scale of discrimination at light speed, becoming so-called black boxes that end up rejecting qualified candidates for reasons that humans cannot even fathom.
We are truly deciding to exchange messy, subjective human prejudice for cold, ruthlessly efficient algorithmic prejudice. Is that really an upgrade?
Something I changed my mind about while building a finance app for freelancers.
Say someone made $2,000 last month and $0 this month. The math says -100%. A big red number.
It's correct and it's still misleading. For a freelancer, an empty month often just means a payment is late. So in my app, when a month is at zero, that comparison doesn't show at all. Same with small samples: if there isn't enough history to say something, the screen says that instead of guessing.
