What’s the most unexpected way someone used your product?
Curious—what’s the most unexpected way someone’s used your product? Looking for fun, weird, or totally unintended use cases.
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Curious—what’s the most unexpected way someone’s used your product? Looking for fun, weird, or totally unintended use cases.
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Product Hunt
For my last startup @Tandem , we had a user interview with a high-end hair salon that was using Tandem to run their internal operations. They had a remote receptionist on a laptop screen who would greet the guests and use Tandem to then teleport back to the room where the hairstylists were waiting and tell them to meet the guests. After the haircut, the receptionist would show up on an iPad to talk to the guests while they were paying.
Based on this, we built a way for remote teammates to teleport around the office called Hybrid Spaces. Unfortunately, installing this hardware was prohibitively expensive and cumbersome, but it did create a really good experience for the few companies that adopted it.
@rajiv_ayyangar So, what's the next step for your project: adjust the costs, making some improvements based on received feedback from a high-end hair salon?
Product Hunt
@rajiv_ayyangar oh now that is intuitive!
One guy used our chat widget to flirt with his own chatbot. We didn’t know whether to be concerned or impressed :)
Product Hunt
@tomina_veronika ahahaha i'd say a little bit of both if i'm being honest!
@tomina_veronika 😂😂😂
@tomina_veronika maybe he was preparing for a date 😅
@tomina_veronika But this is real, LOL. Often, I've noticed Indonesians playfully flirting with their chatbots just for fun. Some were singles who couldn't handle seeing their coupled friends being lovey-dovey. I think it's absolutely hilarious.
Product Hunt
@kevin_mcdonagh1 You know after reading this I immediately thought to myself "yeah i would do this" ahaha
Headliner
I work for Headliner. Our bread and butter is helping podcasters create social video.
Some out of the box use cases that are actually very popular on the platform are newlyweds creating audiograms. (Audiograms take audio files and turn them into video using a waveform and static image - traditionally.) They basically string together a bunch of 'call's' from loved ones that were left on a messaging system at the wedding and create branded videos with them.
They also create clips from the full length and share parts with specific people or sides of the family.
Always very touching when we see these come in! (I say as a newly engaged woman lol)
Product Hunt
@elissa_craig love the example of newlyweds creating audiograms!
We are an app designed for touch-based music haptic, but our users often import the sound of kittens purring into it. This way, they can feel the soft and delicate sensation of little kittens right on their phones, which has left a profound impression on us.
Tempo-Pulse
@ayuanyuan cute users
AutoProctor: A proctored test to screen and hire OnlyFans chatterers. The founder posted about it https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jayanthneelakanta_onlyfans-autoproctor-activity-7089164783630876672-w_u-/
Hey Aaron, that's a great thread! The most unexpected use? Someone used an AI avatar to help them practice difficult conversations... with their boss. 😬 It was surprisingly effective! It highlighted how much emotional connection is possible with AI.
I am actually delving into the psychology of that in a free webinar on April 2nd, including how AI avatars can build (or break) trust. If anyone wants to join me, check it out!
Product Hunt
@oleksandr_naumov oh this makes sense actually! I would do the same if I had a convo like that coming up!
One early user repurposed our email triage AI to track lease expiry risks.
Not the original intent..but it turned out that missing just one buried lease email could trigger $18K in penalties. We started digging and realized there was an entire ops use case buried inside Gmail.
Now it’s one of our core user personas. Never saw that coming.
Love this thread — seeing your product used “wrong” might be the best kind of validation.
someone use my AI Whiteboard to create a cooking book from youtube videos
Grimo
So basically @Grimo is a writing tool, focusing on general writing, which is way more customized and controllable than @ChatGPT by OpenAI .
What surprised us is that, as we build a pipeline offering extremely strong customization power, Grimo easily jailbreaked almost all 'content safety' rules, and we didnt know it until some marketer users wrote to us that they were using Grimo for adult advertising lollll
One user told us they used the app not just to track groceries… but to prove to their partner that they were the more “economical shopper” 😅
Turns out graphs of spending and category breakdowns are now part of their domestic debates. Unexpected? Totally. Effective? Very.
(The app just lets you snap a receipt, and it breaks down everything you spent — great for tracking habits, budgeting… or winning shopping arguments, apparently hahah😂)
Chikka.ai
We automatically collect hundreds of user interviews every month using our own product Chikka.ai and discovered many surprise user cases of our AI voice interviewer, including:
A documentary filmmaker asked all sorts of people on social media to tell a story about their day and curated a voice anthropology;
An adult merchandise company used it to collect anonymous data on people's sex habits;
An introvert used it to ask potential dates what their first impressions of him was and whether they would like to go out with him!