Most SaaS boilerplates today have a hidden flaw: They lock you into a stack of expensive managed services.

Between Vercel Pro ($20/mo), a managed database like Supabase ($25/mo), and an auth provider like Clerk, you are looking at a recurring burn rate of over $50/month before you have acquired a single paying customer.

For a bootstrapped founder, that kills your runway. It forces you to monetize immediately or shut down.

I decided to engineer a way out of this trap.

Yesterday, I had an unpleasant experience. For a few minutes, I lost my LinkedIn community of several thousand people (TL;DR: I was falsely accused of using suspicious software).

Fortunately, I got my account back but it was a strong reminder that we don t own platforms, nor our profiles on them.

Not really much, and it annoys me a bit. In exactly 14 days (28. 1.) we will launch the product, and the only thing I do is talk about it.

But yes, there are points that I still want to master by then, e.g.:

• Create an informational newsletter inviting people to follow our product page

• Create a list of people who could support us and ask them for help

• Announcements on social networks

• Inform Kickstarter backers who supported us with updates this is also an audience

• Publishing a Product Hunt badge on the landing page

• Continually grow and maintain a personal brand which should be a long-term goal, not just for launch purposes.

if i use claude or codex, i constantly am screen capping to show bad padding / alignment / whatever. is there a defacto way to let claude or codex tool call to see the browser or render a page for themselves?

Hey everyone!

Most of us have a link in our Twitter/X bio that goes to a personal site or a Linktree. But for founders, that "prime real estate" is actually a massive distribution channel.

I m working on makers.page a link-in-bio designed specifically for the startup ecosystem.

Whenever I browse product launches, I somehow subconsciously judge not only the product itself and its quality, but also the quality that is reflected in the effort the makers put into preparing it.

It may sound insignificant, but in my case, these things also make a significant difference:

• Icon GIF at the launch it enlivens the overall impression and is dynamic

• Quality graphics and video

• First, a properly filled-out comment

• Photos in the makers' profiles (it's less trustworthy for me when there's only the letter "J" or something similar)

• Whether any of my contacts or acquaintances on the platform reacted to the launch

So I've been a solo founder for almost 3 years, first two years was a b2b company and a lot of sales, meetings and "people to people work".

This year its been a lot more me and my computer when starting a tech/ai company. which have really tested me and my sanity...

Many products start as experiments built at night or on weekends.

At first, there s no pressure just curiosity and momentum.

But at some point, expectations creep in: users, revenue goals, support, roadmap decisions.

With today s tools, translation (UI, copy, even video) is no longer the hard part.

What slows us down instead are things like tax, legal compliance, hiring, support, payments sometimes even geopolitics. The moment users show up from a new country, a product problem turns into an operating one.

Hi folks,

I ve been spending a lot of time on Discord and Reddit helping people who are trying to add AI chat to their no/low-code apps.

What keeps coming up is that the setup is way more fragile than it looks.

It s usually not the model itself it s everything around it:
conversation state, memory, retries, edge cases.
Vibe-coding works for demos, but once people try to ship something real, things start breaking.

Hey Product Hunt
I m Dushyant founder & CEO of Genstellar.ai

I ve been building products for a while, but over the last
months I found myself increasingly frustrated with how we interact with AI. The models are insanely powerful yet the way we use them still feels oddly limiting. Linear chats, lost context, messy outputs, and very little room for real thinking or collaboration.

That frustration is what led me to start building Genstellar a visual, spatial AI workspace designed to match how humans actually think, explore ideas, and work together. Still very much in the building phase, learning constantly, and refining things based on real feedback.

Yesterday, I came across a job posting from a specific SF company that offered Yesterday I came across a job posting from a specific SF company that offered a salary of 250k 1M (including equity), but realistically, I don't think they have that money; they're just grinding to satisfy investors and succumb to too much hustle culture.

Requirement: be available on-site from 9 AM to 9 PM 6 days a week in the office (and I bet even Sunday would be dedicated to meeting some team members in "free time"). In addition, they were willing to hire those who would relocate to SF.

Hey makers!
I've been deep in prompt engineering lately while building an AI tool, and I'm genuinely curious about how others approach this.
A few questions:
1. Do you save your best prompts somewhere? Notion, text files, dedicated app, or just copy-paste from chat history?
2. How do you iterate? Do you have a systematic approach or just tweak until it works?
3. Different prompts for different models? Or do you use the same prompt for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini?
4. Text vs image prompts do you treat them completely differently?
I've noticed I was doing the same optimizations over and over (adding role, being more specific, structuring output format), which made me wonder if everyone has their own "prompt formula."
Would love to hear your workflows!