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.
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.
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?
If you do outbound or B2B sales, you ve probably wasted hours scraping sites, cleaning CSVs, and fighting bounced emails only to get a tiny reply rate.
I built Leadmeta (https://leadmeta.me) to make that whole flow stupidly fast:
Describe your ideal customer in plain English (e.g. founders of SaaS tools doing $10k $50k MRR )
Leadmeta uses AI to generate Google Dork queries and runs them in real time
It extracts emails from public search results and runs a 4-layer DNS-based verification client-side
You export a clean CSV that plugs into any CRM or cold email tool in one click
I built CodeAtlas because I kept getting lost in unfamiliar codebases jumping between files, trying to understand how everything connects.
So I thought: what if you could see a codebase instead?
CodeAtlas turns a GitHub repo into an interactive graph of file dependencies. You can explore how files are connected, click into them, and get a visual sense of the structure instead of digging through folders.
Share the name of your product, a brief description of how it will help the community, and your launch date, and let's support each other and hunt together. Let's get connected on Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/boyuan_qian
X (Twitter): https://x.com/boyuan_qian
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.
