I'm trying to reach out to startup people or influencers to do interviews or surveys to find out the feasibility of my product, but I'm getting a very low response rate.
We're having some internal discussions about what users would prefer - a wide range of niche products (maybe in more of an app-like ecosystem) - or an all in one platform. Interested in learning what the community things - primarily folks who use creator tools and publish / sell / create content!
Reading bug reports or feedback forms is one thing, but watching someone actually open your app for the first time and struggle with things you thought were totally obvious is painful.
I sat behind a beta tester last week and watched them bypass our entire onboarding flow using some bizarre workaround I never could have imagined. It made me realize how trapped we get in our own design logic.
When was the last time a user session completely broke your assumptions about your own software?
I found an old notebook last week. From before I started any of this. Full of ideas about what I wanted to build and how I wanted to build it.
The person who wrote that notebook had principles. Strong ones. He believed in doing things a certain way. He had opinions about what was right and what was cheap.
Been offering a free plan for two years now, and i still can't decide if it's helping or just wasting time.
It brings in steady word of mouth traffic but free users generate most of our support tickets without ever converting. Paying for servers for people who will never upgrade is starting to feel like a bad trade.
I used to pride myself on clearing my inbox in record time, sometimes replying to detailed user questions in under two minutes. But I realized that when someone takes ten minutes to write a thoughtful bug report and you shoot back a one-liner instantly, it can feel like you just brushed them off without actually processing what they said. Speed feels great on our end, but on the receiving end, it sometimes looks like carelessness. Have you ever had to intentionally slow down your response times just to make people feel heard?
The build phase was actually the easy part. The real anxiety hit at exactly 8:14 AM yesterday when I hit "Publish" on my new side project.
I had spent three weeks prepping the landing page and doing all the "right" things. But as soon as it went live, I just sat there staring at my screen. Every time my phone buzzed with a notification, my stomach dropped. I kept thinking, "Did I mess up the onboarding flow? Is the pricing page broken?"
I ended up spending six straight hours just refreshing the analytics dashboard and the live feed. I didn't eat lunch. I didn't answer a single support email because I was too scared to look at the inbox. I literally burned out on day one because I was trying to control something I couldn't.
For the founders who have been through this: How do you physically stop yourself from refreshing the page? Do you have a specific rule or a ritual you use to force yourself to step away from the computer right after a launch goes live?
Running agents in production is getting expensive fast especially when something loops, retries, or a user abuses the system. Curious what others are actually doing:
Relying on provider-side billing alerts?
Hard limits set on the OpenAI/Anthropic dashboard?
Custom solution you built yourself?
Nothing yet and just hoping for the best?
I've been deep in this problem lately actually built something around it (launching tomorrow on PH). Would love to hear real approaches first though, especially from anyone running multi-tenant SaaS where you need per-user cost control.
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?
