What seems very common when it comes to advice for founders is:

• Write regularly on X

• Be on Reddit

• Build in the open

We all hear the same advice: "build in public," "launch on Product Hunt," "find your niche," "talk to customers."

But what's one piece of this advice you think is actually overrated, misleading, or just doesn't apply to your experience?

For me, it's "ignore your competitors." I think watching them closely is how you find gaps. Curious to hear yours.

I m exploring an ambient desktop/terminal companion that grows as you complete deep work blocks (similar to Forest or Pengu, but tied directly to CLI events and terminal sessions).

The core tension is retention versus distraction:

If the companion relies on passive background triggers (git commits, compilation passes), users often forget it s running and the emotional attachment dies.

If it requires active care (clicks, feeding, manual status updates), it quickly becomes another chore that gets closed during high-focus work.

18 months ago, I barely scraped a C in introductory college coding and swore off development entirely. As an Economics grad, my plan was strictly research.

Then I landed a Revenue Operations role.

Suddenly, my job demanded working automations: Clay workflows, HubSpot APIs, and dashboards that actually had to function. Opening VS Code for the first time felt completely foreign.

Instead of quitting, I used Claude as an infinitely patient technical pair-programmer. Fast-forward to today: I have shipped 20+ automations managing 5,800+ live contacts.

When you realize that the vast majority of your new accounts are going dormant almost immediately, panic usually sets in. The knee-jerk reaction is to completely freeze feature development and overhaul everything, which usually just stalls the whole company. We had to figure out how to patch the onboarding leaks while still keeping things moving forward. For founders who managed to transition from top-of-funnel acquisition to real retention, what was the first actual change you made that worked?

Last week I was on a first call with a potential client. Three people joined: me, her, and AI Bot.

She didn't mention it. I didn't ask. But I noticed I started talking differently. More careful, more filtered, like everything was on the record. Because it was.

I asked a few founder friends and got completely opposite reactions:

Half of them said "who cares, notes are notes, I have one in every meeting"

In the past few months, I have come to learn that building products isn't all about adding features.

Every single idea seems necessary.

Every single feature seems to be essential to improving the product.

However, each new feature brings along complexity, new use cases, delays its release and makes development harder.

Everyone says build your personal brand first. For B2B I agree. With LifeLines (medical software) people want to know exactly who's behind it before they trust you with their practice.

But for a consumer app? Nobody downloaded their calorie tracker because they liked the founder. They downloaded it because a friend showed them or it looked fun. The product has to speak for itself.