MaeL

I help AI & SaaS startups fix where users drop off and turn more traffic into signups.

[MaeL @DesignByMaeL]

most founders think users abandon products because the feature set is weak. a lot of the time they abandon because the category label formed incorrectly in the first 10 seconds.
once a product gets mentally classified as:
“another dashboard”
“another AI wrapper”
“another analytics tool”
every later interaction gets filtered through that assumption. Thats why positioning failures are often visual before theyre verbal. People dont read their way into trust first, they feel their way into it.

#BuildInPublic #Startup #ProductHunt #AI #SEO #Devs #Infra #BuildingInPublic

[MaeL @DesignByMaeL]

makes sense. that’s usually interesting part for me. sometimes the emotional angle is already correct but users mentally categorize the product before they ever reach it. whether you’ve looked at where people emotionally classify JellyNet in the first 10-40 seconds vs where you actually want them to classify it.

[MaeL @DesignByMaeL]

@adam_kershner my guess is users usually struggle to answer that directly so they don’t think in workflows yet. they think in annoyances. i’d probably ask what repetitive task they catch themselves doing every week that feels stupid to still do manually.

[MaeL @DesignByMaeL]

@daleverett @daltonmeon @damienhe @evokoa_ai yeah that makes sense. what’s interesting is that teams often buy around economics but stay around mental relief. i actually have a few thoughts on where that relief is already visible vs where the positioning still sounds infrastructure first. happy to share if useful.

[MaeL @DesignByMaeL]

@dotnonecom Yea ,when people finally get it, what seems to create the click moment? is it understanding protected operations conceptually or seeing it work on their own traffic for the first time?

[MaeL @DesignByMaeL]

@sachinbapure @ProductHunt makes sense btw. at what point does email verification stop being perceived as a cost-saving tool and start being perceived as operational insurance? feels like those are very different buying mindsets.

[MaeL @DesignByMaeL]

awareness products often face a strange challenge, users intellectually agree with them faster than they emotionally adopt them. have you noticed whether people keep using it because they want better information or because they start learning something uncomfortable about themselves?

[MaeL @DesignByMaeL]

my guess is developers may say cost reduction initially because it’s easier to articulate but adoption often compounds around cognitive relief. so people remember not having to think about problem anymore more than they remember saving a few dollars. which story users naturally repeat when recommending it internally.

[MaeL @DesignByMaeL]

@itsirenechan interesting. have you noticed whether some categories perform poorly because they’re genuinely weaker products or because users mentally classify them as already seen before evaluating them at all?

[MaeL @DesignByMaeL]

@YourBodyClock yeah that makes sense. what i was actually curious about is what users become attached to after they learn their chronotype. do they keep returning mainly to optimize sleep schedules or does it become more of an identity/self-understanding tool over time?

[MaeL @DesignByMaeL]

@DefangLabs once teams stop using it only for debugging and start using it as the default way to understand the system, retention usually changes completely. have you seen any signs of that shift yet?

[MaeL @DesignByMaeL]

@abhibagaria @ProductHunt that’s interesting because it means the product may actually be reducing publishing anxiety more than writing effort itself. what users do immediately after editing. do they publish faster or do they keep editing anyway?

[MaeL @DesignByMaeL]

@CanopIQ yeah exactly. what’s interesting is that users buy the ability to stop carrying the responsibility mentally. the software just becomes the mechanism. i’m actually curious whether your best long-term customers describe CanopIQ as compliance software or as peace of mind.

[MaeL @DesignByMaeL]

actually pretty interesting. So thing that stands out to me is that navigation and onboarding being 43% suggests users are still spending a lot of cognitive effort understanding the environment itself. pricing interest is already showing up, which usually means curiosity isn’t the bottleneck. i’d be more curious where people move after onboarding. do they transition into repeatable workflows or mostly continue exploring features?

[MaeL @DesignByMaeL]

yea that pattern usually means users still emotionally classify the product as interesting AI capability instead of trusted daily environment yet. curiosity usage is there but workflow attachment hasn’t formed underneath. especially if commands stay exploratory/random instead of identity linked, so i actually think Oasis has a pretty interesting perception problem hidden underneath the privacy angle specifically. could probably map where the product currently feels experimental vs where trust/long-term utility starts forming during onboarding and first sessions. been doing focused async teardowns around this layer lately btw.

[MaeL @DesignByMaeL]

decision loss inside Slack is one of those problems teams normalize until operational trust starts quietly collapsing. feels like hard part here making captured decisions feel alive/contextual instead of archived. are teams mostly using it reactively rn or actually changing behavior around decision making already?

[MaeL @DesignByMaeL]

@aaru_kun @ProductHunt @Peerlist there’s something weirdly sticky about products that eliminate tribal knowledge dependency inside teams. do users treat this more like security tooling or operational memory?

[MaeL @DesignByMaeL]

@Pitch feels like the real value here is identity preservation more than presentation generation. are users reacting more to the speed or to finally getting outputs that still feel like their company?

[MaeL @DesignByMaeL]

@BlueberryBsmnt @ProductHunt calendar products get interesting once the emotional payoff becomes less dread before meetings instead of organization itself. what part people get addicted to first?

[MaeL @DesignByMaeL]

@amrith @ProductHunt habit of shipping changes founder psychology more than individual products sometimes. so once ideas stop living only in your head your tolerance for imperfect execution grows insanely fast. did launching publicly change how you evaluate your own ideas already?