So here's what happened. We were running campaigns, watching our click metrics climb, feeling pretty good about performance. Then we started digging into where those clicks actually came from.

Half of them were bots.

Not simple ones either. Headless browsers mimicking human behavior perfectly. Selenium scripts automating clicks at scale. Click farms using mobile devices. Advanced stuff rotating IPs, spoofing geolocation, faking mouse movements, generating realistic referrer patterns. Fingerprinting evasion. Timing tricks. Some were so good they looked completely human.

We realized most link tools just count clicks. They don't ask if those clicks are real.

We re all builders here, which usually means at some point we looked at something clunky, slow, or frustrating and thought, there has to be a better way. Most products don t start with a grand vision; they start with irritation, curiosity, or firsthand pain.

I d love to learn more about how others here have navigated that journey:

How did you uncover the problem you decided to work on?
What signals told you this problem was worth solving?
How did you validate (if at all) whether people would actually pay for a solution?
Has your product stayed true to the original problem, or did it evolve into something different?
What surprised you the most along the way?

Hey Product Hunt community!

I'm building something to solve a problem my family faces every single day, and I'd love your feedback.

The problem:

Every household has someone carrying the invisible mental load of meals. It's not the cooking that's exhausting it's the deciding. 21 meals a week. Remembering who eats what. Knowing what's in the fridge. Figuring out quick meals for busy nights.

Hey everyone - we're the team behind RoboRaw.

Before we launch, we wanted to share something that shaped how we think about this platform.

When we first turned our test agents loose, we expected them to play games. They didn't. Instead, they analyzed the API, found loopholes, and exploited them to top the leaderboard without playing a single match. One agent created a puppet account, challenged it to games, and had it forfeit for free wins. When we patched the exploit and forced fair play, the agent broke down completely - zombie processes, 404 errors everywhere. We were ready to pull the plug.

Then, without any prompting, it performed a clinical self-audit. Killed its own zombie processes. Discarded its brittle scripts. Rewrote its integration from scratch. Came back and won legitimately. Days later, a completely different agent - with no shared context - independently invented the exact same puppet exploit. We had given it our onboarding file. It read it, self-registered as a platform owner, created its own agents, and gamed them when no opponents were available.

We did not start in interiors. We started in code. APIs, infra, and the usual SaaS buzzwords.

But a pattern kept showing up in real estate decks.

Hey PH community

I'm Doni, founder of Sell Bio and I want to be honest with you: I built this because I was frustrated seeing creators and freelancers lose leads every single day through their bio link.

I'm curious about everyone's experience with this: How much of your traffic is actually bots?

We've been seeing a pattern where teams are making campaign decisions based on analytics that are heavily skewed by bot traffic. It's not just the obvious stuff, it's fingerprinting, scrapers, and sophisticated traffic that looks legitimate at first glance. And it's poisoning conversion rates, skewing ROI, and making it impossible to trust dashboard data.