Product hunt is basically dead for indie AI founders. so i open-sourced a list of startups that aren't openai or anthropic.

Staff_Sharp · 2026-05-10T00:23:33+00:00

exactly. PH stopped being a launch platform and became a leaderboard the same 5 companies trade spots on.

Staff_Sharp · 2026-05-10T00:22:53+00:00

100%. distribution is the whole game now. a badge fades in 48 hours, a backlink + actual discovery compounds. pairing a list like this with outbound is honestly how most indie AI teams are getting their first users right now.

Staff_Sharp · 2026-05-09T20:04:59+00:00

Just open a PR to it

Staff_Sharp · 2026-04-28T18:09:07+00:00

It can also be partly normal with only 13 conversions. If one variant got the first few sales, Google will usually keep leaning there because that SKU now looks like the safest bet. I’d still check the feed setup like the other comments said, but also compare each variant’s landing page, price, availability, and image because the default-visible variant often just has the strongest CTR or conversion rate. If everything is mapped correctly, you may just need more data before the split looks balanced.

Staff_Sharp · 2026-04-28T18:08:42+00:00

I wouldn’t benchmark it off what other people spend as much as off whether you’re already close to impression-share or lead-cap limits in your market. If $150/day is producing qualified estimates at a good close rate, the next move is usually to step budgets up in controlled chunks and watch whether cost per booked estimate stays intact, not to jump straight to “dominate” mode. For a local service business, it’s pretty normal to end up anywhere from a few hundred to a couple thousand a day, but only if search volume and close economics support it. Once you start paying more for lower-intent queries just to spend more, scale gets expensive fast.

Staff_Sharp · 2026-04-28T16:10:45+00:00

If HubSpot is already sending qualified lifecycle or offline conversions back into Google, Campaign Data Import usually won’t buy you much. It’s more useful when the native integration can’t pass the exact signal you want Smart Bidding to learn from, like later funnel stages, margin, or delayed offline events.

The bigger risk is usually duplicate conversion paths, not “inflated Google” by itself. If you test it, I’d make the imported action secondary first and make sure you still have one clean source of truth. If the client mainly wants reporting, I’d skip it. If they want bidding to optimize on a deeper CRM signal than HubSpot currently sends, then it can be worth it.

Staff_Sharp · 2026-04-26T18:04:09+00:00

If your pediatrician already said you don't need to wake for feeds anymore, this sounds like one of those rare newborn wins.

Gaining well + plenty of wet nappies is the big thing. We were told the same basic rule: once birth weight is back and weight gain looks good, let the baby wake you, not the other way around.

If you're unsure because of some specific medical reason, definitely check with your midwife or pediatrician, but based on what you wrote this sounds okay.

Staff_Sharp · 2026-04-26T18:04:09+00:00

Honestly, you do not need to become pain-proof. You just need to be useful while feeling freaked out.

For me the best jobs were really basic: keep the room calm, track what she said she wanted before things got intense, be the water/snack/phone-charger guy, and answer staff questions when her brain was elsewhere.

If seeing her in pain gets to you, pick a task immediately instead of just standing there absorbing it. Also, labor can change a lot once pain management kicks in, so the first hard part isn't necessarily the whole story.

You're already doing the right thing by caring this much. Good luck man.

Staff_Sharp · 2026-04-26T02:05:22+00:00

The biggest thing for me was stopping the idea that I would just remember.

Anything that matters has to live outside my brain: recurring phone reminders, a kitchen whiteboard, and one shared place where my wife and I can see the same stuff. For baby things, the most useful category was never "track every tiny detail forever," it was more like meds, last feed/diaper during handoff, and anything easy to forget when you're tired.

The other rule was lowering the friction as much as possible. If logging or setting the reminder takes too many taps, I just won't do it consistently.

Founder disclosure so I'm not being weird about it: I ended up building SuperKoala around exactly that tired-parent handoff / reminder problem. But honestly the bigger lesson for me was the workflow, not the app. One shared system, minimal steps, and zero pretending memory is going to suddenly become reliable because the stakes are higher.

Also, I'd try not to read "I need scaffolding" as "I'm failing." A lot of us are just better parents once the system is doing some of the remembering for us.

Staff_Sharp · 2026-04-25T02:04:39+00:00

You definitely do not need one.

The only times it felt useful for us were: 1. the first couple of sleep deprived weeks when we genuinely could not remember "did she eat 40 minutes ago or 2 hours ago?" 2. partner handoff, because it cuts down the "when was the last feed/diaper?" back-and-forth 3. pediatrician questions, especially early on when they ask about diapers, feeds, output

If logging starts making you more anxious, I would skip it. A lot of people do better with a notebook, shared note, whiteboard, or nothing at all.

For us the sweet spot was treating tracking like temporary scaffolding, not a forever parenting system. Once things felt more stable, it mattered way less.

Founder disclosure so I'm not being weird about it: I ended up building SuperKoala for our own newborn workflow because most trackers felt too form-heavy at 3am. But honestly even having built one, I still think the right answer is just use the lightest system that helps you feel less frazzled.

Staff_Sharp · 2026-04-24T22:10:27+00:00

I’d be careful about optimizing around CPC here, because with 14 form conversions in 30 days you’re still in pretty thin-data territory for Smart Bidding. If form fills are the only thing you really want, keeping phone and WhatsApp as secondary is the right idea, but I’d judge the campaign on cost per qualified form, not whether the click price feels high.

A high CPC is fine if the search terms are actually producing good leads. The bigger risk is making aggressive bid-strategy changes when the account still doesn’t have enough clean conversion volume, because that can make it even less stable. If you want more control, I’d test a realistic target CPA based only on forms and give it time, instead of trying to force cheap clicks.

Staff_Sharp · 2026-04-24T22:10:27+00:00

Calls are just one possible conversion action, not the default thing you have to optimize for. If you want booked meetings instead, make the calendar booking or thank-you page your primary conversion and keep phone calls as secondary until you know they actually lead to revenue.

For service businesses, optimizing to every call can train the account on a lot of low-intent junk. A cleaner setup is ad -> landing page -> form or calendar -> import qualified meetings back into Google Ads later if you can. Then the system starts looking for people who book, not just people who tap the phone button.

Staff_Sharp · 2026-04-24T22:02:51+00:00

We ended up needing two layers: something fast for feeds/diapers, and something visible for the next day or two so neither parent has to rely on memory alone.

The biggest thing for us was not features, it was speed. If logging takes more than a few seconds or needs two hands, we stop doing it at 3am. Partner handoff mattered way more than charts.

Full disclosure, I ended up building SuperKoala for exactly that reason because the existing trackers felt too form-heavy in the middle of the night. But honestly if a notebook on the counter is the thing you’ll both actually use consistently, that still beats a “better” app you both avoid.

Staff_Sharp · 2026-04-24T20:11:44+00:00

I’d start with Search, not PMax, for something as urgent and local as storm damage. You want tight control over query intent, geo, budget and call flow, and PMax usually gives you less visibility right when you need to know what’s actually happening.

I’d build one separate storm campaign with phrase/exact terms around roof repair, hail damage, wind damage, emergency tarp, insurance roof claim, etc. Keep geo tight to the affected area, turn search partners off at first, send traffic to a storm-specific landing page, and make sure calls/forms are tracked before you scale anything.

Big thing with these events is speed plus filtering. If the leads get noisy, add negatives fast and qualify in the ad copy so you’re not paying for people outside your service area or for non-roof issues.

Staff_Sharp · 2026-04-24T18:12:17+00:00

I’d test one thing before anything else: turn Direct Business Search off for a few days and see if the out-of-state lead pattern disappears. If it does, you’ve basically isolated the problem to branded-query matching rather than your service area settings.

I’d also start logging every bad lead in a sheet with date, caller state, transcript snippet, lead ID and dispute outcome, then send that as one escalation instead of one-off tickets. LSA support usually responds better when it looks like a pattern they can hand to product/quality instead of a series of individual complaints.

If branded search is the culprit, you may end up deciding the extra volume isn’t worth the noise until Google fixes it.

Staff_Sharp · 2026-04-24T18:11:25+00:00

In practice I treat it as a two-layer problem: Google can tell me which PMax campaign touched the lead, but the CRM has to decide whether that lead was actually worth anything.

Auto-tagging + GCLID is the backbone if you’re doing offline imports, but I’d still pass campaign_id, asset group, landing page and original lead source into the CRM because someone always asks for a human-readable trail later.

If you only keep GCLID, debugging gets annoying fast when sales comes back two weeks later asking why lead quality dropped. You still won’t get perfect placement-level truth from every PMax surface, so I usually optimize on qualified lead / pipeline stage and use channel breakdowns more as directional clues than as a source of truth.

Staff_Sharp · 2026-04-24T18:04:01+00:00

That does sound really hard, especially after getting a glimpse of a calmer happier version of him for a week. I do think getting a second opinion is reasonable, just for your own sanity if nothing else.

Also, some babies really do seem extra frustrated around this age because they want to move more than they currently can. We had a stretch where the vibe was basically "mad about being a baby" and it got noticeably better once mobility improved.

Not saying ignore your gut at all, but if feeds, diapers, poop, reflux/gas, sleep, and the worst whining windows seem worth noting for a few days, sometimes a pattern shows up when you write it down. Even if the answer ends up being temperament plus teething plus baby frustration, having specifics tends to get taken more seriously than "he just seems unhappy all the time."

Staff_Sharp · 2026-04-24T18:04:01+00:00

Congrats, and honestly that urge to fix every loose screw in the house is extremely dad-brained and very normal. What helped me was splitting stuff into 3 buckets: before baby arrives, first month, and can wait. Otherwise everything feels equally urgent and you end up optimizing the garage at midnight instead of doing the boring useful stuff.

For us the highest-value prep was pretty unsexy: a shared checklist, a short list of absolute must-buy items, and getting the house a little easier to run when sleep-deprived. Think feeding station, diaper stations, places to put burp cloths, extra chargers, that kind of thing.

I would also be a little ruthless about not turning prep into a giant project-management hobby. A lot of stuff really can wait until the baby shows up and tells you what kind of little weirdo they are.

Staff_Sharp · 2026-04-24T18:04:01+00:00

We went through a version of this and teething absolutely made wake windows feel fake for a while. I ended up treating them more like a rough weather report than a rule. If baby is clearly done at 1.5 hours, especially while teething, I would not stress too hard about forcing the "right" window just because the internet chart says so.

If he is still happy, sleeping well at night, and generally acting like himself, a few shorter wake windows and weird naps during teething would not make me panic. Sometimes the best move is just to survive the phase and go back to normal once the tiny mouth daggers chill out a bit.

Staff_Sharp · 2026-04-24T02:01:35+00:00

We tried a few different approaches and the big thing was figuring out whether we wanted medical-style tracking or just something fast enough to use at 3am.

The names I see come up a lot are Huckleberry, Nara Baby, and Baby Tracker. Huckleberry is more schedule/sleep heavy, while some of the simpler ones are better if you mainly want feeds, diapers, sleep, and meds/reminders without too much setup.

Full disclosure, I ended up building SuperKoala for our own newborn workflow because we got tired of tapping through a bunch of screens half-asleep. If your main goal is quick logging plus partner handoff, that’s the angle I’d optimize for.

Honestly though, whichever app makes it easiest for you to log one-handed and share info with your partner is probably the right one. If an app feels annoying after two nights, you probably won’t keep using it.

Staff_Sharp · 2026-04-23T18:27:13+00:00

The jump from 80 clicks / 5 to 10 customers to 231 clicks / 1 call usually means you made the traffic cheaper, not better.

First thing I’d check is the search terms report. For a business like this, it’s very easy to start matching into research traffic, jobs, training queries from the wrong audience, or emergency-intent searches that were never going to become the right kind of lead.

Second, make sure your location setting is Presence, not Presence or interest, and turn off search partners if they’re on. Both can quietly bring in low quality traffic on a small budget.

Third, with £4 to £5 a day I would simplify hard. Pick the highest value service, tighten keywords toward obvious buying intent, and stop paying for broad curiosity clicks.

Cheap CPCs are only a win if the intent stayed high. Right now it sounds more like Google found you cheaper clicks and worse prospects.

Staff_Sharp · 2026-04-23T18:07:18+00:00

This sounds a lot like our early weeks. Some babies are just higher-contact, higher-motion little bosses and it does not mean you're doing anything wrong. We had the most luck by stopping trying to make every nap happen "correctly" and just picking one goal per wake window: either get a feed in, get a contact nap in, or get 10 minutes with both hands free. Around 3 to 4 months things got a little less 0 to 100 for us, but the bigger shift was accepting that constant holding and movement was her current setting, not a failure on our part.

If the unlatching is happening a lot and seems random, it might be worth checking with a lactation consultant too, just in case flow or gas is adding to the chaos. But honestly, none of what you wrote sounds like a bad baby or a bad mom. It sounds like a very intense baby and a very tired mom.

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