Author here. Built this solo with Replit Agent + Perplexity over 15 days—echoing those recent HN threads on agents in production. Happy to dive into RLS bypasses, OAuth double-encryption, or background-job tenant leaks if folks are building similar stacks.
I do think the narrative is propagating a false sense of easy to achieve story, considering the founder wrote a lengthy note of self-reflection. Very sad to see this narrative this removes the faith in the founder's earlier reflection. Creating a successful business is never easy, you could get lucky, but you rarely get that lucky. This kind of article makes it seems all rosy.
Startup school's valuable first lesson in customer communication and PR is right here. Well, software screwed up the experience and crushed the expectations of so many, including me. Moving on :)...
Yes the lessons learned here were translated. As of now the product hunt for marketing is a place for discovery and we realize that our new model will build a community and we have to build active monetization around value-based product around the same premise - yes product hunt for marketing won't make money by itself.
Well, the example is a very simplistic one for the purpose of this interview. The vision, if you could call it that, was to package other signals e.g. weather, geography, and demography into personalizing a message. Having come from a background of e-commerce I definitely know personalization has a positive impact on cart values, engagement, and conversions. Considering all of that our hope was that we would be that kind of a personalization software for mobile apps.
You bring up a good question. The $ amount while painful was spent over getting some design work,domain name etc... The value we thought the product would add was to make apps more engaging. Personalization is a big deal in e-commerce world and I naturally translated that as a consequence to mobile app - I do realize that was a mistake. So yeah, we definitely expected to get paid for such a service.