General Forums on Product Hunt

Unpopular opinion: Leetcode interviews are filtering out the best startup engineers

Harjobandeep Singh · 2026-09-17T20:52:04.793-07:00

The engineers who built the most impressive things I've seen never practiced Leetcode.They learned by shipping.They debugged at midnight. They read someone else's broken code and fixed it. They reverse-engineered systems nobody documented. They optimized something 40% faster because it was slow and that bothered them.None of that shows up in a binary search question.Startups especially can't afford this mistake.You don't need someone who can invert a binary tree in 20 minutes.You need someone who will stay until the problem is solved, figure out what they don't know, and ship something real by Friday.Those two people are almost never the same person.I get why big companies use it. It scales screening.But for a 5-person startup copying the same playbook?You're optimizing for the wrong signal entirely.The best hire I've seen for an early stage company was someone with a portfolio of things they built, zero competitive programming experience, and a genuine inability to leave a problem unsolved.That's the filter that actually works.What do you think? Am I wrong?

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2mo ago

Solo founders, what is the one boring task you finally automated and wish you had done sooner?

Everyone talks about automating the FANCY stuff, but the thing that actually gave me hours back was automating my weekly metrics screenshot for investors. Ten minutes every Monday, gone forever, took me a year to bother setting it up.

Not looking for tool promos, more curious about the task itself. What was your "why did I do this manually for so long" moment?

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4mo ago

Is launching on Product Hunt still worth it in 2026? 👀

Feels like launching products today is harder than ever.

There s more competition, shorter attention spans, AI products dropping every hour, and getting real traction feels increasingly unpredictable even with a good product.

So I m curious:

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2yr ago

Who else is launching in August?

We are launching Capital King in August. Feel free to share your launch below so we can support each other! https://www.producthunt.com/prod...

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1mo ago

Ways to promote for free/ with low budget

Hey ProductHunters! Your advice is needed
As a small startup team (2 people) with no extra budget, we're doing our best to promote the product in all the possible free ways: content marketing/SMM on Linkedin, Instagram, TikTok, joining product listings and running some email campaigns. It has some outcome but all of these approaches are mainly for long-term results.
Young companies' owners and other professionals, what strategies do you use for low-cost promotion? Is it worth investing in Google ads/ Ig ads?
Thanks!

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1yr ago

What’s a product you loved… that completely failed?

You ever fall in love with a product, tell all your friends about it, and then disappeared?

I really liked Wunderlist (task management application). It had a super clean UX, funny tone and felt like it should ve blown up. Well, in the end it didn't survive (I think some internal political war ruined it), but at least now there like 20 new ones in the market to take their space.

Have you ever had a favorite product that totally flopped or shut down? Why do you think it didn t make it?

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2mo ago

How do you trust tests written by the same model that wrote the code?

Basically all our code gets written by agents now, and so do the tests. Usually same session, same model. And I keep hitting the same loop:

Agent builds the feature
Agent writes the tests, everything green
Ship it
A user hits an edge, I dig in, and the tests were checking what the code does, not what the ticket asked for. Suite was green the whole time.

The annoying part is that if the model misread the ticket, its tests misread it the same way. It's basically marking its own homework. The model is just agreeing with itself.

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2mo ago

We said "No" to every shortcut on Product Hunt. I'd do it again

During our Product Hunt launch, we received offers for:

Paid upvotes
Engagement pods
"500k+ audience promotion"

We declined every one of them.

Not because they don't work.

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3yr ago

Grow Your SaaS to up to $20k in 6 Months

I often see people struggling to reach this figure, or it takes two years. I have generated around $10m selling SaaS in the last 4 years and bootstrapped everything under my SaaS marketplace PitchGround & my own SaaS FirstSales.io Today, I will share simple strategies for hitting your first $10,000 to $20,000 in MRR in less than six months. This can be applied for most online niches but works best for SaaS. 1) Build in Public on Twitter, LinkedIn & Reddit. Refrain from building your startup in stealth mode; you are wasting so many marketing opportunities. 2) Create 5-type of content frameworks: - Do a weekly giveaway post for your product. - Create content behind the sign-up wall; you can only access the content if you share your email. - Create 1x Reel per day, 2x Tweet per day, 1x Twitter Thread per week, 1x LinkedIn post per day & 1x YouTube Long form video per week. You can repurpose the reel on YouTube. - Create Value content around product categories. For example, if you're selling a growth-hacking product, talk about different growth-hacking strategies, even if your product doesn't offer those features. Awareness is a critical part of reaching more audiences. - Do one collaboration post each week. 3) Create a community You can start building your community at least six months before you launch your product. As a benchmark, wait to launch your product until you hit 2k members in your community. This strategy alone can help you cross $10k in MRR within weeks of launching your product because you have already built the trust factor with your audience. 4) Narrow down your use cases & outreach. For the first 6-12 months, narrow your use case to focusing on just 1-2 ICPs at the most, and ensure all your copy revolves around that niche. Now you can start outreaching out. Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to narrow your ICP and scrape that data is easy. Put that data in your favorite email enrichment tool to get the email. Now is the fun part, use FirstSales.io to launch an outreach campaign. Please do not sell them your product; instead, invite them to your community; this will increase your reply rate & future conversion rate without burning leads. 5) Collaborate with a few Micro-Influencers This is a highly underrated strategy because everyone wants that GIANT big launch. Wait to launch big. Launch your product/services MULTIPLE times with multiple micro-influencers, even if it generates as low as 5-10 customers. This adds up in no time. If you do all the above-mentioned strategies, I can guarantee you will build a $10,000 MRR to $20,000 MRR business in no time. Remember, there is no shortcut in life to hard work and producing results if you wish to choose the path of entrepreneurship. If you have any questions, then please let me know in the comments below

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1yr ago

What’s one tool everyone swears by — but you still secretly don’t get?

No shame.

We ve all nodded along while someone drops tool names like gospel.

But deep down, you re thinking:

I ve opened it 5 times. Still don t know what I m looking at.

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2mo ago

How do you tell a quiet day that is actually fine from one that is quietly going wrong?

I keep running into the same confusion when I check in on any of my businesses after a day away. Nothing new in the inbox, no missed calls, the dashboard looks calm. Sometimes that calm means everything actually is fine. Other times it means nobody has noticed the thing that went wrong yet. From the outside those two look identical, quiet is quiet. The only way I have found to tell them apart is checking the activity underneath, not just the absence of alerts on top of it. Curious how the rest of you tell the difference, and whether you ever got burned trusting a quiet day that was not actually quiet.

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