This evening we have our Demo Night in San Francisco, and our team is stoked to see some amazing products in action later on! If you're in SF - come out and say hi!
Here's the event: https://lu.ma/demos

The first security question from a buyer usually lands at the worst possible moment: the deal is nearly closed, and someone on their side asks for a pentest report, a filled-in security questionnaire, or proof that customer data is actually protected. Most small teams have none of that ready, so everything stalls while you work out what a credible answer even looks like. I'd like to hear how other founders handled it. Did you pay for a pentest just to unblock one deal? Fill in the questionnaire yourself and hope nobody read it closely? Start SOC 2 earlier than you wanted to? Or walk away from the deal? And for those further along: what actually satisfied the buyer in the end, a document, a call between engineers, or just a founder who clearly understood the question? Disclosure: I co-found Xseth, where we do external security testing, so I have an obvious bias here. I'm asking because the stories I hear are all over the place, and I'd genuinely like to know what unblocks these deals in practice.

I'm looking for tools to help me brief clients and get their answers in voice format. Recently, I found @Yapz It really impressed me. Simple to use, the delightful format of briefing people, only a positive experience. The only downside is that I cannot see the whole call transcript, which is crucial for me. Are there any free/cheap AI alternatives that makes summaries of answers and saves transcripts at the same time?

I m always on the lookout for those aha moments where a product nails the timing, design, or simplicity so well it just clicks.

What s the last product that made you pause and think:

Damn this is clever ?

Bonus points if it s something small but brilliant. Curious to see what s been impressing you lately

Hey ProductHunters! Your advice is needed
As a small startup team (2 people) with no extra budget, we're doing our best to promote the product in all the possible free ways: content marketing/SMM on Linkedin, Instagram, TikTok, joining product listings and running some email campaigns. It has some outcome but all of these approaches are mainly for long-term results.
Young companies' owners and other professionals, what strategies do you use for low-cost promotion? Is it worth investing in Google ads/ Ig ads?
Thanks!

I've noticed a shift in how I work over the past year, and I'm not 100% sure it's a good one.

A year ago, I'd use AI to speed up execution like writing boilerplate code, drafting an email or summarizing a doc. The thinking was still mine. Now, more and more often, I catch myself asking AI to decide things too: which architecture to pick, how to frame a pricing page, even how to respond to a tricky customer email. The line between "helping me think" and "thinking for me" has gotten blurry.

Here's what worries me a bit: the moments where I learn the most are usually the moments where I struggle first. If AI removes the struggle, does it also remove the learning? Or is that just an old-fashioned way of looking at it - the same way people worried calculators would ruin math skills, and mostly they didn't?

Do you think AI has made you better at thinking, or just faster at producing? And any moment where relying on AI backfired because you skipped the "struggle" step?

The Perplexity CTO announced at their developer conference this week that they're moving away from MCP internally. Garry Tan tweeted "MCP sucks honestly." Pieter Levels called it useless. The "MCP is dead, long live the CLI" post hit the top of Hacker News. OpenClaw, the hottest open-source agent project in the world, deliberately chose not to support it.

The argument: MCP tool definitions eat your context window. Auth is clunky. The whole thing is an unnecessary abstraction over APIs that already exist. LLMs are smart enough to call APIs directly, or use CLIs, or write their own integration code. Why add a protocol layer?

There is a strange irony I have been sitting with lately.

I am building an app specifically to help young people feel less alone. And yet, some of the loneliest moments I have experienced have been in the past year, building it.

Most ecommerce analytics give you a pretty good picture of what happens before and during a purchase - acquisition, conversion, etc.

But once the order is delivered, there seems to be a big blind spot.

I recently finished building my first product and realized that building was only half the challenge.

Now I m trying to figure out distribution from zero, no existing audience, no customer base, and no big launch community.

For founders who have been through this stage, what actually helped you get your first 10 paying customers?

Was it: