Every morning, I scroll through the new launches to see what people are building, as many others do, and some recurring patterns are simply impossible to ignore.
When your product hits the front page, you have exactly three seconds to convince someone to click.
Just three gatekeepers stand between you and a new user:
When you're bootstrapping, cash is handled very carefully. You don't have thousands to drop on an agency just to see if your idea has legs. But you still need words to write social posts, a simple landing page to gauge interest, maybe a full email sequence, and much more.
From what I ve seen as a professional writer, most new founders tend to rely on three main alternatives:
DIY route: Firing up ChatGPT and hoping for the best, maybe thinking, "That's how everybody's doing it now, so that must be the best way."
Gig roulette: Hiring a freelancer on Fiverr or Upwork who does everything, from branding to graphic design and copywriting. Feels like saving a lot of money until you see the results.
Internal favor: Tapping the co-founder or team member who "knows how to write" to draft the copy. Kind of like the -My cousin does it better- version for start-ups.
I m increasingly noticing a trend: people use AI for (almost everything), especially for writing texts. it is nothing new, but it started to be annoying (?)
The problem is that AI often: fully or largely replicates existing text without adding anything new adds completely pointless things, like a two-line comment followed by writes extremely long comments that no one will actually read
Now more than ever, when you look at new products launching on Product Hunt or anywhere else online, the conversation is dominated by one topic: virality.
There is an endless stream of tools and hacks promising to make your content "explode." It often feels like "going viral" has become the default KPI for every modern business. If you aren't trending, are you even growing?
But is going viral a real, effective marketing strategy?
When my wife Noa and I heard that MTV was officially shutting down, it felt like the end of an era. As 90s kids, we missed that specific "linear" experience the joy of just turning on the TV and being surprised by a music video without an algorithm getting in the way.
I've been contributing to discussions every single day for over 3 years now, and sometimes it's really hard.
One day, I have a great time coming up with topics, and then there are those days when I just stare at the screen and can't type. But I always manage to find a way.
With the new year around the corner, we re doing what many others are doing: looking back.
I started using PH this summer, slowly trying to understand how the platform works (I still have doubts about some features, but I'm making progress at least.)
At first, my goal was simple: engage authentically. I didn t want to comment just for visibility or talk about things I didn t care about. So I stayed low-profile, joined conversations that genuinely interested me, and tried posting a few threads before launching NiceJourney (this last part didn t go that great, actually, as the majority of my threads were rejected).
A while ago, I commented on a product launch here on PH. I was genuinely interested, so I asked a question about the product and wished the team good luck. I just wanted to be supportive and know more about what they were doing.
The day after the launch, one of the team members added me on LinkedIn, and I accepted. They thanked me for my interest and asked if I d be open to a partnership. Sounded great to me, so we booked a call.
During the call, though, it became clear that partnership meant different things to us:
Building the product is the fun part: you sketch, you code, you design, you tweak, and suddenly you re proud of this shiny thing that (hopefully) works. Then comes the harder question: Who is this actually for?
You might be tempted to say: Everyone! Anyone! People who breathe oxygen! But if your audience is everyone, your message doesn't reach anyone. The more you try to appeal to as many people as possible, the more you lose touch with your real target, who would gladly pay for what you sell.
All founders feel the same way:
You re too close to your product, and while you're convinced you're seeing the bigger picture, you're actually not.
Narrowing your audience feels like losing potential customers instead of gaining clarity.
For you, every user matters. In reality, users are NOT buyers: not everyone who likes your product will pay for it.
Your product solves 10 problems, but you know you can only market 1 at a time.
Somewhere along the way, startup culture decided that the only acceptable speed is faster than yesterday. Ship fast. Fix later. Break things. Move fast. Break more things.
Obviously, nobody wants to spend three months debating the color of a button.
But when it comes to creative work (branding, design, copy, storytelling), sprinting nonstop comes with side effects:
ideas get flatter
decisions get safer
and suddenly your unique identity feels suspiciously template-ish
Even back in university, I noticed how much younger people (17 or 18 years old) were always jumping into some kind of trendy business model or income stream that happened to be booming at the time.
First, it was dropshipping and flipping items.
Then came NFTs and everything happening in the crypto space.
Now everyone seems obsessed with quick vibecoded AI solutions and investment apartments.
If you ve never heard the term enshittification, you re in for a treat. It was coined by author Cory Doctorow, and it perfectly describes what happens when platforms get so big that they slowly turn to...crap.
Instagram turning into a shopping mall
Amazon burying real products under a mountain of ads and sponsored maybe-it s-real-maybe-it s-not listings
TikTok pushing whatever keeps you scrolling, not whatever you actually care about
Twitter/X well, everybody knows
Doctorow explains enshittification in three phases:
The platform showers users with value: Everything is free, fun, simple, and frictionless. You think, Wow, capitalism isn t so bad after all.
The platform squeezes users to please business partners: More ads. More promotions. More recommended for you content that you did NOT ask for.
The platform squeezes partners to please shareholders: Everyone gets annoyed. The user experience collapses. And the magic disappears. Products that once felt cool now only make you more stressed and dissatisfied.
If you scroll through the SaaS category here on PH, you might notice the same patterns almost everywhere:
Blue + purple gradients: It s the unofficial uniform. If your logo doesn't have a neon-ish gradient, then you're not a SaaS.
Rounded geometric logos: Circles, dots, abstract blobs...lovely, but indistinguishable.
Overused tech fonts: A variant of Inter or a slightly modified SF Pro. Clean? Yes. Memorable? Not really.
Taglines that all say the same thing: The AI platform that boosts productivity. Your all-in-one workspace. Do more with less. Okay, but which product is this again?
Sameness is comforting because you know others have succeeded using those patterns, so you feel safe doing the same thing. After all, you're already risking a lot launching a new product.
But this mindset is counterproductive, especially when new products are launched every week, and competition is fierce.
