As of August 2, 2026, the EU AI Act's high risk provisions are enforceable, meaning agentic AI systems now legally require human oversight and conformity assessments. Fines for non compliance can hit 15 million euros or 3% of global revenue.
What's interesting is that "human oversight" isn't clearly defined in most implementations I've seen. Does it mean a human reviews every action before it happens? Only high risk actions? A log someone can audit after the fact?
I've seen a few teams building agent products wrestle with this exact call for every action type, not as a compliance checkbox, but because it genuinely changes how much you can trust the thing day to day.
I've spent exactly all of last year building a total of 6 products, 4 of which are paid. But I haven't gotten a single paying customer yet. Channels I've tried.
Posting on Hacker News and Product Hunt
Paid ads (Google, Instagram, Reddit)
Listing on tool directories ("ThereIsAnAIForThat.com" etc)
Creating Free tools and sending some related traffic back
Asking a couple of people I know to try my products
Each have given me various degrees of success. Rest assured, I have lots of users using the free parts. Recently I'm trying push marketing; for example recently my girlfriend and I went to a pet-friendly cafe in Bangalore and we got talking with the proprietors. One of them was interested in what I was building and I found myself pitching my product them. I felt icky and weird since all my life I've been a software engineer and hardly ever someone who sold anything. What's your experience getting customers, especially the first ones for your product?
I've been in social media marketing for nearly five years, but with AI advancing, I suspect my role in ad setup may soon become unnecessary.
I used to set up promo campaigns manually using native platform tools (which already applied some AI, like automated texts or ad placement, viz. Facebook Business Manager).
I've been building Android apps since 2016, and for most of my apps, I never relied heavily on paid user acquisition.
ASO was enough.
Over the years, I learned how to find search intent, optimize metadata, target the right keywords, and iterate based on what users were actually searching for.
At one point, I was able to get hundreds of thousands of organic downloads in a relatively short period of time without spending much on ads.
had one this week. a framework update changed how apps launch, and one function kept working exactly as before except the data it hands you is now empty. no crash, no warning, nothing deprecated. deep links just silently stopped opening.
took me a while to find because nothing failed. it all looked like success.
I'm experimenting with SEO for a new product site and recently crossed the first 500 Google Search impressions.
One thing surprised me: Search Console is already showing a few long-tail queries where existing pages are getting much better positions than the rest of the site.
I ve been thinking about a problem that seems to become more difficult as products grow: adding features can make a product more capable while also making the experience harder to understand.
A product might start with one clear workflow, then gradually add dashboards, integrations, settings, automation, notifications, and other features. Eventually, the challenge isn't necessarily what should we build next? but how do we keep the main experience simple?
My instinct is to separate the core workflow from everything else and make secondary features progressively discoverable rather than putting everything in front of the user at once. But I m not sure that works equally well for every type of product.
For people who have built or redesigned products as they grew:
I ve been thinking about a problem that I m sure many technical founders and Makers here can relate to.
I m a Senior Software Engineer with 5+ years of experience, and I ve built 300+ Android, iOS, and web applications across areas like education, healthcare, productivity, AI tools, and business software.
Over time, I ve realized that building the product is often easier than getting it in front of the right customers.
As a technical person, I m comfortable with product development, architecture, UI/UX, backend systems, AI integrations, deployment, and turning ideas into working products.
