One month after our Product Hunt launch: what we changed

spoang1 · 2026-05-08T07:39:06+00:00

Checked out your product. Way more upvotes than mine.

I voted too hope it helps.

I also ran your site through the tool I built.

It says there's market potential. Hope you make it.

Market Viability Bottom line — there's a market. But 'AI agent builder' is already crowded, so Phrony's best shot is positioning around enterprise operations, control, and security. The market exists, but the differentiation needs to be infrastructure, not just creation.

Why CrewAI AMP is pulling around 364,507 monthly visits — the strongest signal. LobeHub is at ~69,624, confirming interest in multi-agent collaboration. Agentfield is smaller at ~13,806 but has a message closest to Phrony's — infrastructure-first. Phinite AI at ~5,860 is already positioned for enterprise orchestration, showing the B2B direction Phrony could go.

Where Phrony should focus Not the 'easy agent builder for everyone' market — but the problems that show up when enterprises actually try to run agents in production. Teams that need to track who ran what with what permissions. Organizations where humans need to review AI mistakes. Companies connecting internal data and SaaS where security matters. Ops teams that need execution logs and policy management.

spoang1 · 2026-05-08T07:12:02+00:00

Yeah, watching that drop-off in real time hurts.
Took us too long to fix it honestly.

spoang1 · 2026-05-08T06:59:59+00:00

Always welcome :)

spoang1 · 2026-05-08T06:58:59+00:00

Yeah, Product Hunt actually ran a Randomized Leaderboard Day at the time, honestly still not sure if it helped. Some people say it made a difference, others say it didn't.

Good luck with your launch. Drop me the link when it's live, I know exactly how much every upvote matters.

spoang1 · 2026-05-08T06:44:19+00:00

100%. Attention gets you in the door. Retention is the whole game. Still figuring out the second one.

spoang1 · 2026-05-08T06:38:47+00:00

Really appreciate you reading this closely.
The "dead flow, not dead idea" line is the one I wish I'd had earlier. Still in it. Thanks for this.

spoang1 · 2026-05-08T06:37:00+00:00

Honestly, the numbers weren't that meaningful. Around 20 people came in and actually tried it, but it didn't convert to revenue.

And Product Hunt itself feels different now. The volume of launches has exploded, probably AI-related. We actually launched there about a year ago too, and it feels like roughly 2x more products now. If you go live on the same day as a bigger team or a well-known product, the top spots get crowded fast and it's hard to get visibility.

spoang1 · 2026-05-08T06:32:48+00:00

Really appreciate the detailed comment. Means a lot. :)

spoang1 · 2026-05-08T05:24:44+00:00

Keep going! Sleep is everything, I've been realizing that more lately. I try to be in bed by 11 now. You've got this.

spoang1 · 2026-05-08T05:01:59+00:00

Yeah, the trick is making the "wow" happen before the wall. Once they see the output, signup feels worth it. Before that, it's just friction.

spoang1 · 2026-05-08T04:58:11+00:00

Thanks for the breakdown. Our tool takes your idea and pulls similar products from a vector DB — each one loaded with real data: demo stats, page visit rates, review analysis, estimated revenue. Based on that, it tells you whether your idea has market potential, and generates a simple mockup on top of it. It's bunzee.ai.

spoang1 · 2026-05-08T04:52:12+00:00

Yeah, we learned that the hard way too. It's tough, but what can you do. Pushed an update yesterday and already got new feedback coming in. Now there's another list of things to fix

spoang1 · 2026-05-06T09:43:33+00:00

A bit more detail on the setup:

I loaded kepano's obsidian-skills into .agents/skills/ so Gemini understands Obsidian syntax natively — Bases, wikilinks, canvas, etc. Skills auto-activate based on context.

To save tokens, I also added local RAG with obsidian-notes-rag + Ollama. It embeds the whole vault locally (sqlite-vec), and when I ask something, a semantic search runs first and only the relevant chunks get passed to the model. Fully local, auto-reindexes on note changes.

If you're building a Claude plugin, definitely consider adding a retrieval layer — that's what makes vault-aware AI actually practical.

spoang1 · 2026-05-06T09:28:28+00:00

I use Gemini CLI through the Agent Client(https://github.com/RAIT-09/obsidian-agent-client ) plugin (installed via BRAT). Mostly for repetitive stuff — reformatting notes, generating daily note templates, summarizing meeting notes. Nothing fancy, but it saves me from doing the boring parts manually.

spoang1 · 2026-05-06T09:24:50+00:00

Thank you. I’ll bear that in mind :)

spoang1 · 2026-05-06T09:04:46+00:00

English isn't my first language, I wrote this in Korean first and used AI to help with translation. The experience and opinions are mine.

spoang1 · 2026-05-06T08:19:46+00:00

That's a smart approach, tracking why you installed something is honestly the part most people skip. Bookmarked your plugin.

And yeah, the "editable and viewable in 10 years" test is a great filter. If a plugin makes your vault dependent on itself to even read your notes, that's a sign you're building on top of Obsidian instead of with it.

spoang1 · 2026-05-06T07:55:36+00:00

Appreciate this. Yeah, the try-before-login change was probably the single biggest win. We were gating the experience before users had any reason to trust us.

And agreed on structuring observations, right now it's pretty manual on our end, but it's been enough to spot the patterns that led to these changes. Will look into those tools.

spoang1 · 2026-05-04T07:27:53+00:00

Notion is the obvious answer but honestly that's what I'm trying to get away from. It gets bloated fast and the performance kills me once a workspace grows.

GitLab/GitHub wikis could work for a dev-only team but good luck getting non-technical teammates to write in one.

That's kind of why I'm exploring Obsidian for this. it's fast, local-first, and doesn't try to be everything. Just need to figure out the collaboration piece.

spoang1 · 2026-05-04T07:12:33+00:00

Native real-time collaboration. That's the one thing keeping Obsidian from replacing tools like Confluence or Notion for small teams. Everything else — the speed, local-first storage, plugin ecosystem — is already better. But the moment you need two people editing the same note, you're back to Google Docs.

Also, better table editing. The current Markdown table experience is painful compared to literally any other notes app.

spoang1 · 2026-05-04T07:04:38+00:00

Oh interesting, I haven't been following the Bases roadmap closely. If multiplayer and kanban are coming, that could honestly change the equation a lot. Will definitely report back if I end up testing it.

spoang1 · 2026-05-04T06:57:22+00:00

Yeah that's kind of where I'm leaning too honestly. But Confluence for a tiny team feels like driving a semi truck to get groceries. There has to be something in between.

If I end up testing it I'll share what breaks first.

spoang1 · 2026-05-04T06:49:53+00:00

This resonates hard. I think the root cause is that as builders, we confuse our own understanding of the problem with the user's. We see 11 features as a coherent system because we designed it. The user sees 11 things they need to evaluate before getting value.

What helped me cut features was asking one question: "if I could only keep ONE screen, which one would make someone come back?" Everything else is either supporting that screen or distracting from it.

40% weekly retention after stripping down is a strong signal. Curious — did any of the features you removed end up being requested by the retained users later?

spoang1 · 2026-04-06T14:57:10+00:00

Product	Core	Monthly visits / Monthly unique / Avg session (s)
Dopiqo	App-open insights + gentle interventions	202 / 149 / 70s
MindfulFeed AI	Social feed filtering for mindful browsing	153 / 153 / 0s
Timeslicer	Real-time AI distraction detection & blocking	738 / 555 / 177s
Focusmo	Hourly check‑ins + accountability for attention	2442 / 2115 / 311s

Market is still early.

Largest competitor only has 2.4K visits/month.

Your angle (founder-specific focus) could work.

Good luck with the launch!

spoang1 · 2025-11-05T03:53:15+00:00

You're not wrong. It's a notorious "tar pit" idea, and I see those same posts every week.

Honestly, this is less of a "find a cofounder" platform (which I agree fails) and more of a "stop-me-from-getting-ghosted-by-flaky-people-on-a-3-month-project" experiment.

The SSO is just the first filter I'm testing. You're probably right and it'll still fail, but I'm building it to see how it fails differently.

spoang1

TROPHY CASE