Hi all! I m working on an idea that came out of my own frustration:
There are SO many AI tools right now for writing, meetings, code, design, finance but it s getting overwhelming.
Even though I m deep in the AI world, I still find myself Googling things like: Best AI tools for solo founders ; Free AI video editing apps ; Is this tool even legit?
Our churn analysis revealed a painful truth: 60% of paying users who canceled had only configured half of their workspace setup. They got stuck in administrative setup before every experiencing the core benefit.
The urge is always to ship the next shiny tool on the roadmap, but right now our biggest bottleneck is the multi-step configuration process.
How do you reprioritize your roadmap to strip down setup steps without hurting enterprise power user requirements?
Back around 2000 in Japan, you could stick "dot-com" on a company name and VCs would hand you money. I really looked up to some of those founders, and then I watched them on TV bowing their heads at shareholder meetings. One listed company I was doing business with got absorbed when its sales tanked, and the CEO got pushed out, right in front of me basically. Scary stuff. It's why I went with my own money and nobody else's.
When I hear "AI agent" now I get the same feeling. Some of these products are made by people who know the tech under them, and some just sort of happened, and honestly from the outside you can't tell which is which until a lot of users show up. I've run enterprise-size systems and that's when security falls over.
Building an AI agent is one challenge, but knowing it's ready for production is a completely different one.
Traditional software can often be verified with unit tests and integration tests, but AI agents introduce additional complexity. They rely on reasoning, external tools, changing context, and non-deterministic model outputs, which makes testing much less straightforward.
I'm curious how other teams approach this before deploying AI agents to real users.
After OpenAI's DevDay, ChatGPT can now suggest an app in the middle of a chat, run it right there, and let people sign in with their ChatGPT account. 1B+ people open it every week, and they don't have to search an app store to find any of these apps.
I work in growth for an AI startup, so I keep asking myself where the next million users will find software. Will it be in a store, through Google, or inside a chat?
The scariest part isn't actually the preparation or the build phase it's that weird silence right after you hit the launch button.
I used to keep all my anxieties bottled up inside which made me overthink every single click and notification. Just getting those raw, messy thoughts out of my head before things go live has saved me from burning out.
When things finally go public how do you keep yourself from constantly refreshing the analytics page?
Launching something new always brings a weird wave of doubt right before it goes live. I started a habit a while ago of just dumping every worst case thought onto a blank sheet of paper like what if the server crashes or what if nobody even notices.
Once it s written down it somehow stops feeling like this massive invisible monster in my head. Most of the time the things I'm stressing about never even happen.
Do you have any little mental tricks or habits to calm your nerves right before a public launch?
When you spend hours sketching out a product plan and convincing yourself it's brilliant asking for external feedback feels genuinely terrifying because you're scared someone will pop your bubble. I remember almost launching a complicated update until a casual chat with a friend made me realize people were already handling that task using a much simpler tool. We tend to fall in love with our own ideas instead of looking at how people actually live their workflow.
How do you separate your personal excitement from what the market actually needs?
