Everyone says an MVP doesn t need to look polished. Just build the core feature, get it in front of users, and see what happens.
I agree with most of that.
But there s something that bothers me about the design can wait approach.
Say you launch a simple tool with a genuinely useful feature. The UI is a little confusing, the layout feels unfinished, and users aren t quite sure what to do next.
I've been thinking about a problem that gets interesting once agent systems stop behaving like isolated runs.
Imagine a research agent spends $0.40 gathering information and produces an artifact. Five other agents reuse that artifact instead of doing the research themselves.
The accounting seems straightforward until you ask what you're trying to measure.
It's so tempting to keep the front door wide open so anyone can jump in and try your app in two clicks. The downside is that you end up with hundreds of random signups who churn instantly because your product doesn't fit their actual workflow.
We started adding a quick two question onboarding survey just to understand who they are and it surprisingly scared away a lot of the bad-fit traffic.
What specific qualification steps or friction points did you add to your signup process to protect your product roadmap from the wrong feedback?
I asked Cursor to add input validation to a form handler. It reported editing three files. I checked git diff: two files changed. The third was a no-op.
The agent had described what it planned to do, not what it did. I only caught it because I diff every change now.
Product Hunt has teamed up with OpenAI Developers to launch the GPT-6 Astra Challenge! @OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra is built for complex, multi-step work from software engineering and research to workflows that require judgment and follow-through. Build something useful with Astra, launch it on Product Hunt, and compete for API credits and ChatGPT Pro subscriptions. If you re already building with Astra, this is a chance to share what you ve made and put it in front of a wider audience. You can schedule your launch for Friday, September 18. Here's everything you need to get started:
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We fell into the trap of saying yes to every little dashboard customization request from early customers. Within six months, the interface looked like an overloaded airplane cockpit and new signups had no clue where to start. Cleaning it up felt risky because we were terrified of annoying those few vocal users but retention actually went up once the screens were quiet again.
How do you decide when a feature has overstayed its welcome and needs to be buried or cut completely?
For the two years I celebrated each increase in our email list. I refused to delete anyone because a large email subscriber count felt like an asset.
Eventually our email open rates fell from thirty percent to twelve percent. Our newsletters began landing in the promo and spam folders of people who wanted to read them.
Mail providers look at how many people ignore your emails to decide if you are sending spam. By keeping thousands of email readers we were telling Google and Apple that our email content was not worth opening.
We finally ran a re engagement campaign. Deleted six thousand email users who had not clicked a link in six months. It felt terrible to slash our email list size in half
Been on this platform a month now, and genuinely think the people here are sharper than what i've found anywhere else. Curious if that's actually held true for others when it comes to hiring. Have you hired someone you found on ph, or been hired yourself through here. Also curious what your actual go-to platform is for finding people, ph, linkedin, twitter or somewhere else entirely.
