My main focus is BuildHop, a discovery and distribution platform that helps early-stage products keep getting seen after launch day. Visitors can hop through real products, while founders gain traffic, feedback, and useful signals about what people are genuinely interested in. I’m also expanding BuildHop to highlight the builders behind the products. Founder Spotlights give them a permanent place to share their story, connect their launches, and create more paths back to their work. The larger goal is simple: make discovery more continuous, useful, and human.

BuildHop began as a way to help test my husband’s product, LaunchChair, during its earliest days. The tricky thing about testing a product brain designed to guide an MVP is that you eventually have to build an actual product. I was excited about my first few ideas, but my ego took a small hit when I saw the market-validation scores LaunchChair gave them. So I went back to the drawing board and thought about the products I had loved in the early 2010s, especially the features and interactions that made discovery feel fun. At first, BuildHop was simply an easy way to hop through what other people were creating. The distribution tools and founder community came later, as we learned more about what early-stage founders actually need after the singular moment of “launch day.”

I’ve learned that your ideas are not always what the market needs, no matter how clever or original they seem to you. I’m fortunate that my husband built a product brain I could use while building with AI. It helped guide decisions about which features belonged in BuildHop and which ones did not. My background is in community management and social media marketing, so I had never built a product from start to finish. Left entirely to my own devices, I’m not sure where I would have ended up. I can say with confidence that it would have taken much longer and been far more confusing if I had simply vibe coded my way through it.

The first time someone shared a screenshot of their analytics on X and wrote, “BuildHop is the only launch site that I am actually getting traffic from.” I believed the model could send meaningful traffic because BuildHop is designed around active discovery, not a static directory. People arrive because they are curious and want to look at what others are building. Still, I did not expect it to outperform other launch sites so decisively. That was the moment I realized the core idea was doing what we had hoped: sending founders real visitors, not simply giving them another place to leave a link.

When I started working in social media marketing and community building in 2014, there was far less noise. We generally knew which larger accounts were using bots, and it was still possible to build lasting relationships with people who would eventually become genuine advocates for a product. That kind of connection feels harder to create now. AI-generated replies and posts have made many interactions feel shallow and interchangeable. There are still wonderful people to meet, and I have made some meaningful connections, but the broader idea of online community has changed. I’m still trying to understand how to build something that feels genuinely human inside systems that increasingly reward volume, speed, and sameness. The algorithms are part of that battle, but the larger challenge is preserving real connection when so much of the internet now feels synthetic.

The pattern I see most often begins with the rush of a new idea and builds toward the proverbial “launch day.” A founder posts the product on a few sites, waits for traffic that never arrives, and then abandons it for the next exciting idea. The cycle repeats. A launch is not a verdict on whether your product deserves to exist. It is the moment you finally begin learning how people respond to it. Treat launch day as the starting line, not the finish line.