Hey PH.

Launched Briefance here last week. Solo founder, Istanbul, no team, no investors. Wanted to share what actually happened instead of the usual "thank you so much" post.

Quick context: Briefance turns chaotic client emails into structured briefs. Freelancer target. Paste the mess, get scope, timeline, budget, and follow up questions in ten seconds. Free tier has 3 briefs, no card needed.

Here's what the launch week taught me.

AI is everywhere right now - from copilots and chat assistants to analytics, research, and planning tools. But beyond the hype, I m curious about what s truly useful in day-to-day product work.

From a PM or founder perspective:

• Where has AI genuinely saved you time?

• What tasks do you trust AI with - and what do you never delegate?

• Has AI changed how you write specs, manage roadmaps, or talk to users?

• What AI use cases sounded great in theory but failed in practice?

Personally, I see a lot of potential, but also a lot of noise. I believe that in the future, AI should help us much more. Create good roadmaps, convert product specs into concrete tasks, prioritise them, assign people, push for realisation, and much more.

AI tools are becoming a standard part of the design workflow from generating UI ideas to writing copy and speeding up iterations.

In my experience, they re great for exploration and saving time, but they also tend to push outputs toward similar patterns and solutions. It feels like the more we rely on them, the more important our own taste and judgment become.

I wrote a long essay following a talk I gave at AI DevCon in Brooklyn last month.

It starts out with an anecdote about hunting ChatGPT in December 2022 and goes on to explore what I think will be necessary to thrive as code becomes a commodity:

In December 2022, I hunted ChatGPT on Product Hunt.

It ranked #1 product of the day, then the week, and went on to be named Product of the Year.

Having co-founded a YC-backed conversational AI startup in 2018 (long before LLMs) I recognized in ChatGPT the missing ingredient that would have made that venture viable.

The future we d anticipated had arrived. I could revisit my old problem, or I could expand my area of potency by raising and deploying my own venture capital fund.

I chose the latter.

Three years later, on December 9th, I watched a 24-hour window on Product Hunt cross 500 launches roughly double what I observed throughout the preceding 825 days. Only 13 were featured; most were unremarkable.

The LLM has fundamentally shifted the economics of software development.

As someone with a dual vantage point being the #1 Product Hunter while investing in AI startups I watch the floodwaters rise in real-time.

What s become clear: SaaS is dying; VC is withering . Building software is not uniquely compelling. Code has become a commodity.

What most people miss about commoditization is that when a product or resource becomes abundant, it doesn t just get cheaper. It unlocks new and previously uneconomic uses.

Everywhere I look, I see founders and operators investing heavily in their personal brand:

• LinkedIn posts every day

• X threads

• Podcasts, YouTube, newsletters and substacks too

Meanwhile, their CV or portfolio gets updated maybe once a year.

I m wondering if we re heading into a world where your online signal (what you say, who engages with you, what you ship publicly) will matter more than any formal CV or resume.

Okay, so I know everyone's feed has been taken over by the Studio Ghibli but I'm curious what else people have been able to create or seen that's really left an impression. Here are some that I've created! Also on X.

AI as you know it is disrupting industries, and the software industry is at the forefront of this disruption. So what will be the future of SaaS, a model that presents users value for use?

The first and most important impact as we are already seeing is that the barrier for non-technical people to build software they require will drastically drop. This is evident in tools like lovable, bolt, replit etc... where users with no coding experience can whip up apps in a couple of minutes or hours as the case maybe.

A/B testing is supposed to systematically isolate winning and losing acquisition funnel content.

My biggest struggle, by FAR, is understanding why people bounce from my landing page after clicking through my ad.

For me, it was a very simple, yet really insightful thing: enhance what's already working.

We're running a community forum, and our "Changelog" and "Ask the Community" categories performed really well. But after we featured them on the forum's homepage and applied some changes to improve usability, the engagement boosted significantly.