After four long years of grinding, building, fundraising, and hiring, we decided to pivot. I wanted to write down my thought process and timeline because I wish I d seen more honest pivot stories when we were stuck. Not just we pivoted and everything was instantly great but the real version where we kept trying to make the original idea work for way too long because we already put so much into it.

I went through YC S20 (the first COVID batch) as a solo founder working on @Basedash. After YC, I did what you re supposed to do. I talked to users. I built product. I did founder-led sales. I hired a great team. It felt like progress because I was constantly busy and the product kept getting better.

Many people have told me that being part of Gen Z comes with advantages we have time, energy, and plenty of opportunities to shape our careers in the AI era. And I do feel lucky to have grown up with technology, to have had early exposure and opportunities to learn and explore it.

But the AI era feels different. The shift is not only new, it s happening at lightning speed. Before I ve even fully adapted to working with AI, we re already seeing waves of layoffs where human roles are being replaced or reshaped by AI systems. And honestly, that creates uncertainty and anxiety not just for me, but for many people around us.

Hey everyone!

I wanted to take a moment to thank each and every one of you for the incredible support during our launch week. Seeing VolumeHub climb the rankings and reading all your thoughtful comments has been absolutely amazing. The fact that 200+ people upvoted and believed in this project means the world to me!

I came to exactly the same conclusion that real startup ideas often come from simple and boring problems. From my own experience: I spent three years on a startup that was supposed to revolutionize online education, but in the end it had 0 users. Now I ve just started solving a simple problem for home appliance repair technicians and immediately got my first paying users on a very rough MVP.

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.

We ve worked in two other eco-systems (India & France), and each has clear strengths and trade-offs in terms of talent density, cost of building, access to capital, speed of decision-making, and openness to risk all vary a lot.

Curious to hear from founders and operators who ve built outside the US:

• Which ecosystem punches the most above its weight today?

• Where do you see the best balance between talent, capital, and customer access?

• Are there cities/countries that are especially strong for specific stages (0 1 vs scaling) or specific verticals (AI, fintech, climate, SaaS, deep tech)?

Hey PH community, I counted yesterday. 23 different apps before noon. Slack, Notion, ChatGPT, Figma, Google Sheets, email, Trello... and about 15 Chrome tabs I never closed from yesterday. By lunch I was exhausted and my actual work was still sitting there unfinished. The thing is, we all do this. We've normalized digital whack-a-mole. We have AI that can generate images and write code in seconds. But somehow we're still the ones doing all the clicking and switching. The AI just sits in a chat window waiting for us to feed it context. That felt backwards. So we built HappyCapy basically a computer where the AI can actually DO stuff, not just tell you what to do. Generate images, edit docs, crunch numbers, build sites. Whatever. You just describe what you need and it handles the tool-hopping. We're not replacing your main computer. But for a lot of tasks, it's way faster to just delegate to an agent that gets it done. It's live now. Still rough in places. But if you're tired of being an unpaid assistant to your own AI assistant, it might click. Curious: how many apps are you juggling right now? What's driving you most crazy about it?

The greatest invention of our time the smartphone has also become one of the biggest consumers of our energy and attention.

Being focused is now an art.

I spend most of my time on these two things:
1) observing products on the main page and upvoting/commenting on them

2) talking with people within comments under my forums

The second one is the one where I notice some things that I lack and see possible improvements, namely:

It s almost here for me. In three days, I ll be relaunching a major update for the app I have been collaborating with, and I ve set clear boundaries for myself about what I will and won t do before the launch. I guess these are some general, unwritten rules I try to follow

Definitely DON T:

• Accept offers from charlatans promising votes or engagement for money

• Send unsolicited messages begging for votes or support

• Spam other people s posts with launch announcements

Hey!

Wanted to share something I've been working on. Besides the MCP server stuff, we now have a CLI and a Claude Code plugin.

Many people were looking for an answer in one category, namely, Forums Streaks.

This metric by itself only tells you that people log in to the app.

To work more efficiently and productively, we usually create some familiar patterns (habits) that shorten our time doing tasks (saving time and energy). This is also indirectly related to tools that make the work process easier.

What does your workday look like + tech tools without which you would not be productive?

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.

Today, I read in the news that OpenAI is considering "expanding its data footprint" and possibly buying Pinterest, as there is a lot of data on it just for the sake of users finding inspiration (which can be key for purchase decision making and understanding personas Pinterest has 600M+ users).

I also take into account how Pinterest started to resent the proliferation of AI content there users do not like it so much (as far as I know, OpenAI also wants to have its own social network, and Sora curation is a bit reminiscent of that)

Our app was sh*t? Just temporarily.
A bug was reported through our in-app feedback channel where some users saw an error screen when they shouldn t have.
In a few cases, people couldn t even register. That truly sucks.
As a developer, you mostly use your app in perfect conditions. Real users don t.
I ve seen this screen once in almost a year and it made sense then. For others, it didn t.
This is exactly why:
real users matter
real feedback matters
and a direct feedback channel is essential
Without it, we d be losing users silently and that s the scariest failure of all.
Huge thanks to everyone who reported it (even the angry ones). Most genuinely wanted to help, and that means a lot.
More tomorrow.

your posts can now schedule themselves. use it to: pick the best time to post

I d like to share iPhotro v4.0.0, a free and open-source, local-first photo manager that recently gained a set of advanced color grading tools.

This release focuses on giving photographers precise control over color and tone, while keeping a clean, non-destructive workflow and a familiar, macOS-like interface.

Color Grading & Tone Control

"I just watched seven AI experts argue about my blog post for 3 minutes straight."

Marketing guy said it was too technical. Accessibility auditor flagged the contrast. Editor caught a logic hole I missed.

Hey crusty sun worshippers!

We now have introduced an overview of interesting and artsy pixel clusters on the beach:

News in the tech world gets old quickly. It's no longer relevant in 10 minutes.

What helps you quickly navigate the world of AI?

I caught the latest news about AI from:

1/ The problem: The "garbage" bottleneck

We all know that 90% of enterprise data is unstructured (PDFs, docs, emails). Traditional RAG pipelines "collapse" this structure into flat vectors, losing the narrative context. Current solutions are either too slow or prohibitively expensive.

2/ The solution: NeuroBlock's smart hybrid architecture

There are products I keep using when launching on Product Hunt -- products that help me craft beautiful assets, plan content distribution, and analyze results.

Here's my personal collection. How about you? What's your stack?

Yesterday went through this Tweet by Greg Isenberg.

There is an app called "rent a human."