In 1972, five people left IBM to start SAP and the word "ERP" didn't exist for another 18 years. I think AI work tools are at the same stage: lots of products, no shared abstraction yet.
My bet on the missing piece: "conservation of responsibility" every agent action should trace back to a human who authorized it, with an auditable record. Until that exists, AI at work stays stuck in pilots.
In our first six months, whenever a paid user churned, our immediate reaction was: Ah, they needed Feature X. Let s build it."
Our backlog became a graveyard of quick fixes requested by churned users. Yet, retention stayed flat.
It took us a painful realization to see that the issue wasn t a feature gap; it was a friction gap. The product required too many context switches from our users' daily routines.
For founders who survived this phase: How did you shift your team's mindset from "ship more features" to "reduce workflow friction"? What metrics actually helped you spot this early?
I'm a solo developer. In August I launched a small side project here, and it was never featured, so it couldn't rank at all. It finished with 0 upvotes and 1 comment. My earlier launch, a job-search tool, got only a few upvotes back in July.
Looking back, I think I made two mistakes. I launched without checking whether it would be featured, and I didn't spend any time in the community beforehand. Since then I've been active here daily for about three months.
For makers whose launches were featured: what did you change in your listing (tagline, gallery, first comment, topics) that you think made the difference? I'm especially curious whether anything specific helps a niche or experimental product get featured.
Hey all, we just released a few updates to product hubs with a focus on converting visitors to your website/apps/social, and providing the right information to community members who are researching new products. As an example, here's Notion's product hub: https://www.producthunt.com/prod... (you can access your product hubs in the new sidebar on the homepage) The header was re-focused on driving conversions, followers, and saves. We ve removed upvote counts and focused on reviews + followers on the hub pages; while upvotes are important for launch day, we ve found that they re not necessarily a highly correlated signal for overall product quality, especially for community members researching products months (or years) after a launch. The updated sidebar displays links, product info, and makers more prominently, and the rest of the page has been simplified with an additional focus on reviews (currently sorted by recent, so make sure you re encouraging your community to leave reviews). As always, Product Hunt is in a constant state of change, so let us know what you think about these changes and if you have any suggestions or recommendations moving forward!
