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?
Something clicked for me this week reading about what's happening in the advertising industry.
AEDEMO 2026 basically declared the end of GRPs those broad reach metrics the ad world has used for decades. A major Spanish broadcaster just launched an AI system that measures actual attention in TV ads: not impressions, not eyeballs-in-the-room, but genuine cognitive engagement. The industry finally admitted it had been measuring what was easy to count, not what actually mattered.
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.
~1s cold start for a 32B model. Most setups we ve seen fall into two buckets: multi-second to minute cold starts (model load + init) or keeping GPUs warm to avoid that We ve been experimenting with restoring initialized model state instead of reloading weights. This demo shows ~1s cold start for a 32B model. https://youtu.be/G8DsbS1mcwo
