We built automated alerts, summaries, and email digest triggers thinking we were keeping users engaged. But cancellation feedback showed the exact opposite.
Instead of bringing users back our notifications were creating inbox noise, causing users to mark us as spam or cancel just to clear their mental clutter. They liked the product, but hated the daily noise around it.
For founders who have optimized re-engagement: how do you design smart notification frequencies that build habits without causing fatigue?
It's so easy to fall into the trap of automating everything just because you can write a script for it.
I automated our weekly invoice sorting process but it turned out that going through those files manually was the only time I caught subtle client trends and bugs.
Once it became fully automated, I stopped looking at those details altogether. Are there certain tasks you purposely refuse to automate now because you need eyes on them?
been running a few coding agents at once and the dumb failure is one nuking anothers uncommitted changes. worktree per agent fixed most of it for me but merging back is still manual. how are you doing it, separate worktrees, separate branches, or just one agent at a time
I logged every indexing API notification for 58 days. Total was 551. When I broke them down, 34% were for pages that had already been indexed weeks earlier.
The cause was my sitemap regeneration triggering on every deploy instead of on content change. The API was re-submitting old URLs because the build process couldn't tell the difference between a new page and an unchanged
No first paying customer here yet, so this is less a story and more a suspicion I want to test.
When you start out, the first people you talk to are usually people who already like you. They re warm, they totally get it, and they say they d use it.
I m starting to think those conversations are great for learning and terrible for validating. People who like you are bad at telling you they won t pay.
Hi guys, if the demo at a product launch dinner doesn't go well, due to some errors/issues, how do you deal with it? A lot of time is spent on invited investors, other company leads, prospective customers, etc. and it's disheartening when the demo doesn't go as planned. How to deal with this?
A few years ago, shipping constantly was almost a marketing strategy. Pieter Levels, Jennifer Dewalt, Marc Lou building fast gave people a reason to follow the journey. Every launch created another story and more momentum.
But AI changed the equation. Now anyone can ship an app every week, and a lot of them are buggy, generic, and make $0. Shipping itself is no longer impressive.
Pulled my own kitty points breakdown again since it moved a lot since the last time I checked. Sitting at 388 KP total now. Forum Threads plus 272, Comments plus 101, Reviews plus 10, Maker plus 6.
Ten days ago Forum Threads were plus 87 and Comments were plus 64, so the gap did not just grow, it flipped which category actually drives the number. A handful of threads are now outscoring every comment I have ever left combined.
Early on, marketing is just as important as building the product, especially if you want a successful launch.
Some say the fit in Product-Market Fit is really about marketing. I tend to agree. For me, when I founded my first company, I was more comfortable writing code than copywriting. When I started trying to sell the first product I developed, I realised just how much I didn t know about Go-To-Market (GTM) and marketing. I ve tried everything from cold outreach to reading all the books I could find. After my second company failed, I actually went back to being an operator and only took "business" roles to try and learn as much as possible from doing.
So, if you don t have an MBA or business background, how are you tackling this side of things?
Are you talking to mentors, reading books, taking online courses, using LLMs, or something else entirely?
