I created a dataset of 3 years of Product Hunt activity and analyzed it.

The number of launches exploded at the end of 2025 and is still growing

One thing I've been learning while building a software company is that choosing a technology stack isn't just a technical decision. It's also a financial one.

There are tools for hosting, databases, authentication, analytics, testing, security, and AI development. Many have free tiers that make it possible to get started without significant upfront costs.

But as a product grows, those choices can introduce unexpected expenses, limitations, or migration challenges.

Been building in voice ai business for more than a year, sold to a few of the fortune 500s and also to agencies n startups, selling voice ai isnt that hard if you actually knoow what matters to the person in the buying end, happy to have this thread open for techies n business folks who want to make money in this space.

Gen Z took lying in bed all day and gave it a name that doesn't sound lazy. "Bed rotting." Doing everything from binge-watching to doomscrolling to staring at the ceiling. And the framing shifted from "being lazy" to "slowing down" and "self-care" .

I've been thinking about how this applies to building. There's a version of rest that's genuinely restorative. And there's a version where you're calling it "rest" but it's actually fear. Fear of the thing you should be doing. Fear of putting yourself out there. Fear of finding out the thing you built isn't good.

The hard part is knowing which one you're doing. From the inside, they feel identical.

How do you tell the difference between "I need this rest" and "I'm using this to avoid something"? Is there a signal you trust?

Thought getting people to reply to outreach emails was going to be the hardest part but site owners actually respond pretty fast.

The real bottleneck turned out to be managing hundreds of back-and-forth threads checking link placement and negotiating terms. Plus going direct ended up way cheaper than agency marketplace rates.

How do you guys manage high-volume email replies when a small team gets flooded?

The thread on when to launch got me thinking about what happens right after.

In the past, I launched product via Reddit and not PH. One that I did on PH was a dead one. We launched a fintech product a few years back and it went well (through Reddit though)! 100+ signups in about 72 hours. I have never felt more like a founder than I did that Tuesday.

Then Wednesday arrived. Two of us, both technical, trying to have 100 conversations while also fixing everything those 100 people were cheerfully breaking. We got to maybe 20-30 properly. The rest got a welcome email and then a long, dignified silence.

Hey PH,

After launching, I noticed a big increase in inbound messages - agencies, tools, consultants, AI assistants, and more. Some of it is genuinely useful, some of it is unexpected, but I'm curious how other Makers approach this!

Do you have a system for prioritizing what to respond to? Do you categorize outreach, set filters, or use any tools to manage it?

Beijing is investing billions into a national AI fund and its broader AI+ initiative to embed artificial intelligence across the entire economy. Backed by strong state support, domestic chip production, and lower manufacturing costs, China can scale AI solutions rapidly and analysts say it s on track to surpass the U.S. in the race for AI dominance. (IMO, it already happened.)

And one of the examples is these 2 news items I read today:
1) Alibaba unveils Qwen3.5 as China s chatbot race shifts to AI agents

2) and this one is even more important:
Alibaba has launched RynnBrain, an open-source AI model designed to power robots that can see, think, and act in real-world environments.