PSA: Founders used to live with their product before selling it

Ryan Campbell · 2026-02-24T07:01:26.424006+00:00

Now they just make a slick website and call it a startup. Feels like the heart got ripped out.

My friend found a major flaw in a food delivery startup's app... he knew the founder from college. When he mentioned it, the guy admitted he hadn't actually placed an order himself in over a year. Just kept tweaking the ad campaigns instead. The whole thing felt pretty disconnected from how real people used it.

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aaron_adams6mo ago

It's wild how they'll spend months building features no one wants because they're not in the trenches anymore. Just totally out of touch with the actual problems.

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wyatt1356mo ago

Met a founder who hadn't used his app in months.

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singh.cole6mo ago

Remember trying to get help from that big home goods store's website chat last week. It was just a bot looping through the same three unhelpful answers... you could tell no one who actually fixes things built that system. It's like this whole idea has spread everywhere, not just apps. Everything feels designed from a spreadsheet in an office somewhere, not from knowing how stuff really breaks or how people really act. You see it in self-checkout lines that never work right and phone menus that hide the number for a real person. The living-with-it part is gone, so the solutions don't solve anything.

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