Every founder update reads the same now. "excited to share," emoji bullets, fake vulnerability about the rollercoaster. doesn't matter if it's real or not, it all sounds identical.
Noticed this hard while hiring. read every dm myself for a growth role. most were obviously ai-generated, same tone, zero thought put in. the ones that stood out were rough, specific, clearly written by someone who actually looked at the problem first.
Think the same thing's eating founder credibility. people used to trust a post because it sounded like someone actually figured something out.
We wanted to build an AI-powered productivity assistant. Prior to development, we launched a simple email newsletter and landing page to collect leads. We promised daily emails with habit suggestions, which we coded in 5 days. (Check out Insumo 1.0 launch at my Profile) We obtained ~1000 organic leads with launching on Product Hunt, BetaList, and Reddit to generate interest. With the traction gained, we secured a pre-seed funding round from investors. With the funding we launched our iOS app, as our target audience and 80% of paying users are on iOS. We did Performance marketing on Facebook, Snapchat etc and brought in 25K+ more users. With paid traffic also resulting in organic traffic which bumped us to 35K users. We later started playing the SEO game, wrote content in various platforms and mostly on our website www.insumo.io. Kept creating content on social media, created podcasts called "Habit Talks" and kept talking with our active users which helped us to gain 10K users. Our focus was to acquire mostly free users, learn from their behavior and needs, and launch our AI-powered web app. Now We're preparing for the public beta launch of our web app.
I control every 1 hr of my day to maximize productivity. Wake up at 5:30, meditate, work, learn programming, work some more, write a novel, and run a family with 1 kid coming. You could say I'm hyper productive, but I know many of you have a lot more on your plate. As founders and makers, what do you do to make sure your sanity is kept in check?
I'm referring to the recent situation where Dataroom Corgi copied code from the @Papermark project.
The topic feels even more personal to me because I know one of Papermark's founders, and I've seen how many years she's dedicated to building the project.
I ran a similar experiment on Twitter a while ago and realized I should have asked the Product Hunt community. First, some context: I started Weekend Fund in 2017 while I was still the CEO at Product Hunt. Today, @vedika_jain and I write $100K to $300K checks into early-stage startups (most of which launched on Product Hunt at some point). Our background is in product and community building, but we have a network of over 400 LPs across every domain from data science to enterprise sales. More details at weekend.fund. If you're primary KPI (revenue, MAU, etc.) is growing 20%+ for 6+ months, drop me a note with details ryan@weekend.fund. If you have a deck, please share but we'd also love to chat with founders that aren't actively raising but could use our capital and help. :)
Whenever I m about to buy something (especially something more expensive), I can be easily influenced by recommendations from people I trust and know. That might be well-known accounts on X or suggestions from friends.
