We launched a SaaS recently and noticed a cluster of accounts created within minutes of each other that never confirmed email or returned after signup. We want to keep our user table healthy without accidentally deleting real users.

Curious what other founders do in practice, more specifically:

• Do you auto-delete accounts after X days without email confirmation? If so, what timeframe worked for you?

• Do you keep soft-deleted rows for analytics or GDPR reasons? Any retention windows you recommend?

• If you have automated detection, what signals did you use (IP clusters; identical metadata; signup rate spikes)?

Hey all, first time founder here. I'm having trouble knowing when good enough is good enough.
It's SOO easy to let feature creep take over with AI now days. I've posted on Reddit a few times and I've gotten a few 100 signups and a few of them (~10%) even seem to be sticking. But I don't know whether this means "great, keep improving the product" or "that's good enough, start distributing more aggressively".

Some advice would be appreciated.

Cheers,

When you build many products based only on a feeling, you eventually realise that the majority of them won t work.

Sometimes it s because the distribution wasn t good enough. Other times, the product itself wasn t good, or people simply didn t need it.

I think finding good design references is the easy part. Figuring out what to take from them is much harder.

For example, you find a dashboard with a really clean layout. But is it good because of the spacing, the information hierarchy, or simply because it has less data than your product?

I've been thinking about a few things worth checking before borrowing a design pattern:

• Context: What problem is this design solving, and is it similar to ours?

• Structure: Does the layout still work when the content gets longer or more complex?

• Interaction: What happens in empty states, errors, or when users need to go back?

• Tradeoffs: What did this product simplify or leave out to make the experience feel clean?

From experience, I see that product makers most often rely primarily on just 2 things:
1. Social media (and ads on them)
2. Influencers and UGC

As if nothing else existed.

We re getting ready for our second Product Hunt launch on Jan 31, and a post by @busmark_w_nika got me thinking.

What to do (that we didn't do the first time):

• Plan your launch. What does it mean?

  • Write down everything you need to do before you launch.

  • Cleaning your copy

  • Your product images

  • Your product video (demo under 60 seconds if you can)

  • For our first launch, we didn't do anything. Even though we got 2nd Product of the Day, I would not recommend others to leave it to their luck. Plan and maximize your chances of success.

• Keep it simple, stupid.

  • Don't overcomplicate your page with lots of marketing language.

  • Simplicity, clean product screenshots, and clear language.

  • I think this is the single most important thing to take into account when launching, and why we probably did so well on our first launch.

    • Ask yourself: Does the tagline make sense? Will others understand what the product does and what it is in under 10 seconds?

    • For us at @Pretty Prompt: Grammarly for prompting. (Grammarly = it is an extension.) Improve prompts in one click. (super clear what it does).

    • You can straight away visualise how you might use the product and what it will do for you.

• Focus on your strengths.

  • Don't give everything you got in one go.

  • Earn the right for people to read and scroll down. Read and scroll down.

  • Save some stuff for your pinned post.

  • People have a short attention span.

  • Hook people on your most important feature, showcase it front and centre, don't give me everything together cos I'll forget, and also I'll get lost.

  • For us at @Pretty Prompt: Improve your prompts in one click. Works inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Lovable, and more.

  • Even though you have about 10 other features on Pretty Prompt, we don't talk about them right in the beginning; we just feature that one "killer feature" and let users dive deeper afterwards.

• Product assets = show, don't tell.

  • Your images and video should be about your product.

  • Don't make it marketing-heavy. Make it product-heavy.

  • Show me what the product does, don't tell me about it.

  • For us: 60-second demo video actually using the tool. Screenshots of the top features (Improve - Refine - Save - History). Not fancy Figma designs, I mean screenshots of the actual product.

  • If you get big like Notion, Cursor, Claude, etc. you may also be able to add a more human video of you talking about the product, or new functionality, your story, etc. But for the majority, just show your product, and let the product win.

• Learn from others.

  • Though no two products or launches are the same, you can learn from others and pick the best things that fit your own product.

  • Checkout this post by @fmerian on "The Cursor Way to Launch". Great tips.

• Warm up the Audience.

  • Don't just rely on your followers.

  • Use as many channels as possible to maximise the reach and get people excited about your launch, even before you launch.

  • If you do this step well, the launch is just 50% of the job, and you're already a step ahead of most.

  • For us: I did a community post, Substack one, LinkedIn one, Slack one. We'll be recording a founder video too. I want it to be as human as possible; people buy into people.

I don t code.
I build with ai tools and a friend handles the tech side, so i m asking from the outside.

For people who do code: was there a moment you realised you were leaning on claude too much? like a bug you couldn t debug without it, a code review that went badly, or just a gut feeling one day?