From TechCrunch:

"Windsurf, the maker of a popular AI coding assistant, is in talks to be acquired by OpenAI for about $3 billion, Bloomberg reported."

This is pretty crazy especially since the OpenAI Startup Fund is one of @Cursor 's biggest investors (source).

What do you all make of this? Good news? Bad news?

According to the Verge, Open AI is trying to create a new social network where people can share their creations produced by artificial intelligence.

Meta is also considering creating AI avatars for social media to drive engagement.

At first, I thought people would resist, but AI in social media is quickly becoming the norm.

Most content – images, texts, comments, even videos and DMs – is already AI-generated. On IG, YT, FB, TikTok, X and LI too.

• Are you already fed up with the AI trend?

• Or will the AI-social media concept prevail in the coming decades and be perceived as a normal part of our lives?

• Last question: How do you see the whole thing around the OpenAI social media network?

[I think the next generations will be as familiar with this development as we are with the internet now. Completely normal thing.]

Hi everyone! Please welcome this week's Maker's Corner feature, @catt_marroll , Founder of @https://www.producthunt.com/products/purposeful-poop

Feel free to chime in below in the comments with questions on his product or journey or anything else that comes to mind!

If you're interested in being featured in our Maker's Corner, please let us know here on this forum thread.

What inspired you to build your product? What problem were you trying to solve when you built it? Has that evolved?

I originally bought the domain in 2023 for this exact idea, but I planned to make it a mobile app. It would be a button you press when using the bathroom, then keep track of the time and give you a report at the end of the year. I wanted to launch something on PH, and it seemed tractable.

It resurfaced in 2025 when Aaron posted a thread about useless domains you had. In the interim I had started working on a personal finance tool, and trying hard to get some beta users. I realized I could try to make that app (as simple as possible), and use it with a CTA to drive traffic to my personal finance project.

What’s a feature or detail you obsessed over that most users will never notice—but you're really proud of?

Almost all of the time on the app was actually spent just trying to update the main app I wanted to drive traffic too -- my financé. I ended up thinking that OG images would be important for shareability, so I set up a server to be able to render a nice OG image when you share your results.

Honestly, I wouldn't say I'm proud of any technical feature of the app, it all was thrown together very quickly. I am pretty adamant about my hate for marketing and ads, but I hoping that this was tasteful enough to pass my own personal lever of "annoyingness".

TL;DR if i obsessed over anything it was bigger picture of how to market in general.

What’s something that didn’t make it into your product for this launch, but you'd like to build?

I have a few more ideas for tools that have a similar arc: Either funny or moderately useful, with some CTA to the finance tool I am hoping to gain traction with. It would be cool if this tool continued to gain traction post launch. If so maybe I'll make some T-shirts or something available for purchase.

Is this your first product? If not, what else have you built, or are currently working on?

It's my second launch on PH. the first was tab-slayer -- a chrome extension that kills your tabs at some interval (unless they are "spared"). It's both helpful and super annoying when you're using a tab and it gets slain.

My main side project continues to be My Financé. I would love for that to grow into a small sustainable project and have been putting most of my free time into that. I'm trying to take the "modern maker approach" where I talk about it in public a lot, ship fast, etc. It's hard when I know things in the site are buggy or suboptimal, but I think it's been good to be willing to talk about it and get eyes on it.

What’s your secret weapon or go-to when you get stuck while building?

I really like working early in the morning before my partner wakes up. I have been on a huge bonobo kick for the past year, I probably have listened to both this and this >100 times in the past year.

When did you decide to launch on Product Hunt, and how did you prep for it? Do you have any advice for someone thinking about launching?

I spend a lot of time on PH and am more or less always scheming to launch something. Most things wind up in the graveyard before I actually launch. For this specific app the whole loop was ~5 days from start building to launch.

In terms of advice, I really have no idea. I think a lot of projects are super interesting when you are deep in the domain, but many of the taglines I read I just don't really know if I care or should care. i.e. I would be really impressive if I knew what the builder knew and cared about the space, but that isn't always the case for me, personally.

Community building is hard and takes time, so preemptively trying to build up an identity by being active is probably the best thing you can do.

Also PH isn't necessarily the 'best' venue for every app. If you are building a tool for a really small set of nuclear physicists, having a low ranking PH launch probably doesn't tell you too much.

If the launch of my finance tool is half as good as this launch, I would be both really psyched and honestly surprised. getting people to click on something funny feels way easier than something "real".

What's the most surprising or unexpected learning and/or feedback you've received?

Honestly, the whole thing went about as I expected. Also this project has the "No hugs, no learning" mantra to some extent. If there was a killer feature that made it 10x as shareable I would build it! but I didn't receive (or expect) that.

Share a few Products and/or Makers that inspire you and why

I enjoy a good piece of boring software. @Discharge - Battery Warning is something that I constantly tell people about and love.

I honestly am pretty "light" on tools in my normally workflow.

But anyone that has built and grown a piece of software and converted people to paying users has a ton of my respect. It's really not trivial (at least for me!), so getting a stripe payment represents a really impressive demonstration of skill and tenacity.

I'm a maker myself, like many others here, primarily focused on my own products. Hunting started as a fun way to share cool things I found – much like @chrismessina said – it also become "a side hustle run amok" to me. I genuinely want to help more people discover the great products being built in this era, especially in the AI space I follow closely.

So, maybe this small episode is just a lesson in the diversity of approaches out there and a reminder to keep a level head. Launching on Product Hunt, much like building a startup, involves embracing uncertainty!

Until now marketers have had to guess what's a normal CPC, CPM or CTR in their niche. There's no real public information available. So we decided to fix this. Here's our public free Facebook Ads benchmarking tool.

It's based on real data, not some marketer's best guess from 2017. It's built on an anonymized data set of $2B+ of Facebook Ads ad spend. All data is fully aggregated and anonymized You can currently select CPC, CPM or CTR. And slice the data by industry, campaign type and country.

Is your CPM spike an industry-wide trend?

Is your CTR truly exceptional or just average for your vertical?

These are questions you can now answer with data, not gut feelings.

We launched Bucket MCP last week and got featured in The Leaderboard.

@aaronoleary put it elegantly:

Whether you're using @Cursor, @Augment Code, or @Windsurf, you can just tell it what you want flagged, and the MCP server handles it. So instead of context-switching to write config files or CLI commands, you just prompt: “flag the download button.” That’s it.

I'd love to follow up here and hear from the community — Is it too much trust to hand over?

Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk would like to ‘delete all IP law’

(The original Tweet is here and you can read many opinions there.)

About a week ago people were arguing about the ownership rights of Ghibli and it seems that the discourse about what belongs to whom and who has/doesn’t have the right to what is still going on.

How do you see the protection of artwork and rights in the world of AI?

To cancel/not to cancel IP Law?

My personal take…

I don’t think IP laws are useles. I didn’t really care about these things until I took a two-semester course on copyright law in my third year of college and I started to understand that it gives value to works and the meaning of creating.

If everyone could steal what someone else had done, the original person would go hungry. (Business and art are simply two different things.) Without reward, there is often no motivation to create (and that is precisely where we trained our AI models).

While an artist creates an idea, all that is needed is a more skilled marketing person who will take it and make it visible – and what now for the original artist?

Whether someone wants to share open source code or create free licensed music is a choice. It is not a choice for someone to profit from someone else's work without permission. We have a term for it – it is called theft. (In politics, we would call it Illegal privatization)

And if we want to pretend that no one should have any rights to anything, then let’s agree that these AI companies should also give up the profit they make from the code they’ve created and through which they sell creative work. (I believe they would have strong objections to such a stance of ‘shared collective ownership’ and would start defending their own interests.)

Maybe it is time to stop asking whether copyright will survive in the AI ​​era, and start asking:

How to set it up in a way that protects those who create and, ideally, still has the motivation to create.

I’ve been building products for a long time (15+ years), and I recently tried using v0.dev for the first time. Honestly didn’t expect much, but I was surprised how quickly I got something real off the ground - not just a playground UI, but a fully working fitness app with protected routes, dashboards, flow logic, the works.

It’s called The HIIT PIT — and it’s live, but that’s not why I’m posting.

I’m more curious to hear from other devs and indie makers:

• Have you tried tools like v0.dev or similar AI-based builders?

• What were the gotchas or unexpected wins?

• Would you actually ship something production-ready this way?

I still did a lot of work to stitch everything together, but it saved me a ton of time. I’m super curious how others are approaching this - especially solo builders trying to move fast.

Would love to hear your experiences or trade notes.

We launched @Trickle and @FirstVersion a while ago and just started looking into the Product Hunt forum feature more seriously.

PH mentioned that every time you post a new thread, all your followers get notified — which sounds super useful for keeping the momentum going, boosting traffic, and even helping with SEO.

We’re definitely planning to start using it more, but I’d love to hear from folks who’ve already seen good results.

Some questions:

• What kind of posts worked best for you? Announcements? Behind-the-scenes? Questions?

• Have you seen any SEO boost from your forum threads?

• Any tips on how to keep your forum active (without it feeling forced)?

• Do you repurpose content or write stuff specifically for the forum?

Appreciate any advice or examples you’re willing to share — would love to learn from the people who’ve cracked it 💬🙏

I'm super curious how everyone starts to vibe code? In the beginning I would simply jump into @bolt.new or @Cursor and just do a prompt and continue refining with the AI. I quickly realized this created a lot of issues as I didn't think about the structure, tech stack, and how I wanted the features to interact with each other and how the way I was building things would impact the user experience. I now do the following:

• Write down a simple problem statement: "what am I trying to solve?"

• Write down a simple solution statement: "what does the thing I'm building do (to solve the problem)"

• Share the above with @ChatGPT by OpenAI and word vomit my thoughts, ideas, how I want the user to interact with my app, etc and ASK ChatGPT to turn everything I said and want into an easy to understand directive and instructions for an Engineer.

• I then take the Engineer instructions and give it to a new chat in ChatGPT and ask it to turn those instructions into a prompt for an AI engineer and to break up the project into sections so that each time we focus on a section the app is shippable and keeps things easy to work on.

• I take the output and paste it into my notes. I then give it to Cursor.

• Once in Curosr, I create a new project folder and got at it!

Curious what everyone else does and if you've experience any things to avoid or must do

👉 Post your upcoming launch preview link or draft below 💬 Then check out someone else’s and leave them a quick comment too To find your preview link: Go to My Products > Scheduled > click on the launch title > copy the URL

Let’s help each other launch better 🚀👇

Ok, on to the show! Here's the link to download our 2025 Founder Salary Report: https://pilot.com/report/founder-salary-2025 

Let's get into the real talk about founder finances. Ask me anything!

• Don't try to build something that gets featured. Build something that solves a problem.

• Don't stress about getting featured.

• If you don't get featured, it does not mean your product is not good enough. I have launched multiple times and did not get featured every time.

• As a solopreneur, I'm very time-efficient, so I tell you this: Don't waste weeks/months preparing for the launch. It is Pointless.

• You can check my product launch and copy the design of the Images/Media I used. I also copied the design from other successful products. I just added my touch, colours, product info, etc. The structure, though, you can copy. It is clean and straightforward.

• Don't buy scammers upvotes. I was watching my launch closely, and a couple of products got banned because they did just that.

• Make sure your first comment on your launch page is clear and explains the product's value and the problem it solves. Don't get creative. Just be straightforward. Again, check mine. I used others to structure mine.

• A few days before launch share your app with users who fit 100% your target user persona. Listen to their feedback and iterate. That will help you have a smooth product ready to be used. Shout out to @busmark_w_nika & @julia_zakharova2 for supporting me with this.

• Engage with the comments people leave on your page – every single one of them. They check your creation and deserve your attention.

All in all, a Product Hunt launch is a great thing to do if you are building apps. Gives you a lot of exposure in a short amount of time. At the end of the day is not PH's job to bring you customers or anything like that. If you get 1,000 visitors and nobody signs up, it does not mean PH is bad. This means you need to iterate. However, if you don't get featured, it does not mean your product is bad. That's why you should not stress about it. I know I didn't. Just a couple of days of effort, that's all.

I'm launching a new app soon ;)

Ask me anything in the comments regarding my launch, and I am happy to support :)

I remember reading an essay by @rrhoover about how he moved from his native Oregon to San Francisco after university studies, where doors full of networking opportunities opened up for him.

I saw the same thing in my country after graduation. About 80% of my classmates went to the capital, where there are the most opportunities in marketing and tech. (Or they went abroad.)

The differences in places and their opportunities are vast and it depends on where you move (as my friend would say: "It's better to do business in SF than in Ghana.").

Which places do you consider to be the "Mecca" of business opportunities in your country?

I am in a very small country so I can list only 2 for Slovakia:

• Bratislava and Košice

[Idea: In the future, we could create something like a map of these places. 😄]

Hi everyone, CEO of Bolt here! Super excited to open up about our journey and offer any learnings and stories I can to help other makers on their journey. Within a span of 2 months we've grown to $20M in revenue and were recently featured in NYT as paving the way for vibe coding.

Every decision can turn into a pivotal one for a start up, but you have to keep iterating and trust your gut. Feel free to AMA about bolt's journey, vibe coding, what we have in store, and how other makers can learn from bolt's past (and rapidly evolving future).