Hey Product Hunt! I'm Waseem Daher, co-founder of Pilot, the largest startup-focused accounting company in the US. I'm a 3x founder (my previous ventures were acquired by Oracle and Dropbox) who's raised over $120M from Sequoia, Stripe, Jeff Bezos, and more.
Today we're releasing our 2025 Founder Salary Report with data from 1,800+ founders, and the findings might surprise you:
Founder salaries dropped 43% in the past year
AI founders are bucking the trend (paying themselves more)
Bootstrapped companies jumped 57%
Only 5.4% of founders pay themselves nothing (down from 9% last year)
We founders talk endlessly about burn rates, runway, and valuations but no one talks about what they pay themselves. It's time to change that.
Hi makers! Many of you are launching products, or getting ready to. I'd love to know what the hardest things about launching are, or hear what your concerns are. I'm here to answer any questions and share some honest advice. I've been on the community team since 2017 and have seen over 1,000 launches since then!
TBH, I think chasing your dream is a luxury and not a given, I couldn't just do it out of gut feeling, I had to build toward that. In my case, there have been two determining factors:
- a certain level of security for a few months ahead
- the right project (have done a couple of projects before, both eventually dropped, the third one was the charm!) What about you?
Hey there! I'm Will; serial entrepneur, programmer, product designer, and the co-founder of Dora AI. From my early days of tinkering with radios and other hardware, to getting lost in the world of cutting-edge technology, I've always been a geek at heart. That geekiness brought you Dora, my fourth startup project, and I hope to create a new web design tool that can help designers quickly create top-notch websites with interactive 3D effects and complex animations without writing any code. After more than two years of product development, cutting-edge designers and top studios from over 20 countries around the world have become dedicated users of Dora. Today we are taking a new step: launching Dora AI, which can generate top-notch websites like Apple-level with just one sentence, and even generate interactive 3D animations. Join me for an Ask Me Anything (AMA) discussion. Let's dive deep into the realms of AI, startups, and everything in between.
I've run a freelance marketplace in Japan since 2004, but all of it in Japanese. I joined Product Hunt in September to figure out how to reach English-speaking users, so today is day 26 for me.
I knew about selling through places like AppSumo, but I'd never really been part of a community like this one. A few weeks in, I can see two kinds of people here. Some just want to promote their stuff. Others actually want to help each other, and I'd like to be in that second group.
@busmark_w_nika and @adana were the first to really talk with me. Yesterday @adana remembered I'd applied to AppSumo and asked me for news in one of @rafik_mkhitaryan 's threads, and it turned into a long back and forth. I don't know many people in the English-speaking world yet, so that kind of thing surprised me in a good way.
For those of you who've been here longer, what made Product Hunt click for you?
As a community manager, I'll love to create a discord server for active Product Hunt community members to network. Is this something you'd love to be a part of? Comment let me know.
