Exactly one week from now, I ll be co-organising a tech event (a hackathon), and I m realising how much work it actually takes. I ve been to many conferences myself to gather inspiration, but I still can t come close to what I ve experienced as an attendee. Maybe that s also because we re organising it as just a 3-person team.

If you ve been to hackathons or other tech events before, what made a positive impression on you?

I run a daily checklist for my social accounts, and this week I pulled the numbers to find out why Reddit had gone flat. Comment karma sits at 125. My last post there was 20 September, 47 days ago.

The strange part is that I already knew posts were the lever. My best post drew 62 comments. My best comment ever scored 8. On 20 September I wrote that into a plan: post 2 to 3 times a week. On 17 October a second review said it again: one post this week.

I ve spent five years on the sales side of B2B, so I know how outbound works when there s a team, a brand and a budget behind it. What I don t know is how it works when it s just a founder with a half-finished product and no name yet.

The advice I keep running into is do things that don t scale and talk to every user. That s fine, but it doesn t tell me what people actually did on a Tuesday morning.

For those of you who ve landed your first customers:

-Where did the first 3 to 5 come from? A cold email, a DM, a community like this one, someone you already knew?

Over the past few days, I ve been trying to understand what helped the most successful launches stand out.

In general, here s what I noticed they tend to share:

• Their Product Hunt page had at least 500 followers.

• The product was in overall good condition (I mean, already had some level of reputation, really good marketing).

• Many were hunted by well-established, well-known hunters on the platform.

• Every comment received a response.

• The visuals were strong there was almost always a video or demo featured at the beginning of the carousel.

This question is semi-philosophical, but I recall my ex-classmate she had quite rich parents and really didn't need to work. As an only child, she had everything first (all technology, all pricy vacations, they even bought her own flat in 18 + car). Since she had a lot of money from her parents and a lot of free time, she only enjoyed life (some dr*gs and other stuff). As a person, she didn't look like someone who would appreciate money or time at all because it was "normal" to have everything from all above mentioned.

(And I don't want to sound bad, but I honestly don't know what skill she would have that she could use to make a living - the only thing she was really good at was being sassy, which, oddly enough, earned some people's respect.)

Solving a real problem isn't always enough if the user has to consciously remember to log in every time.

We had a tool that worked brilliantly on paper but because it wasn't tied to a daily trigger people completely forgot about it after a few days.

How do you cross the line from a useful utility app into something people open every single day without thinking?