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We put soo much work into BuildHop this week, hope you guys love the new features and refinements we’ve made. Next week I need to put a little work into https://www.freescan.app, which if you haven’t tried yet is an absolute life / time saver. 🤝🎉
I appreciate all y'all are doing! making Buildhop more awesome every week, keep up the hard work.
Thank you for doing that! Is there a chance to add a public release and possible roadmap? That would be cool to add. "suggest a feature" button somewhere
Question 1 of 7
I’m a product designer and design engineer with about 15 years of experience building everything from native consumer apps to complex enterprise automation platforms. I like problems where the technology is powerful but the product still makes people work too hard. I’m happiest talking to users, untangling the system, designing the details, and then working in code with engineering until it ships.
Question 2 of 7
Most of my time is going into three products I'm designing and building with my wife Claire. LaunchChair (https://www.launchchair.io/) helps founders research an idea, define the right product, and give coding agents enough context to build it properly. FreeScan (https://www.freescan.app/) gives anyone a free, practical audit of their website, while BuildHop helps independent products get discovered without requiring founders to already have an audience.
Question 3 of 7
Mostly frustration. AI made it much easier for me to ship software, but research, product decisions, QA, and distribution were still fragmented across a pile of tools. LaunchChair came from needing a better way to manage the build itself, FreeScan came from repeatedly auditing my own sites, and BuildHop came from seeing useful products disappear because their founders had no reliable way to reach people.
Question 4 of 7
I used to think faster development would be the biggest advantage. Now I think code is becoming the cheapest part of building a product. Knowing what to build, keeping the product coherent, earning trust, and getting it in front of the right people matter much more than generating another feature quickly.
Question 5 of 7
LaunchChair passed that test when users started using it to drive entire builds instead of treating it as a prompt generator. More than 100 early users have tried it, roughly ten products have been completed through the workflow, and several are now earning MRR. That showed me the living context, build cards, agent loop, and QA process were solving a real problem.
Question 6 of 7
Distribution, honestly. I can build and improve products very quickly now, but earning sustained attention without turning into a full-time content machine is still difficult. BuildHop is partly my attempt to solve that problem for myself and other independent builders while keeping discovery useful rather than turning it into another spam-filled directory.
Question 7 of 7
Build something useful for one specific person before worrying about turning it into a large SaaS business. Put it in front of people early, watch what they actually do, and instrument enough of the product to tell whether it helped. Shipping quickly is valuable, but only when each release teaches you something.
Find your position. Unlock your next breakthrough.
Get funded for your startup
AI Model Benchmarker based on evidence
Build Landing Pages, Websites & Admin dashboards at zero cost with Shadcn Space
Social posts in your own voice, on 16 networks.
Shop your favorite creators’ recommendations—or start your own Fanclip shop and earn from your picks
Deploy anything on your server
Shared Planner And Robot Companion
Point. Prompt. Ship
Find local spots by the tags locals vote up
Compose your game art. Keep it consistent.
Save any link, Sted reads it, organizes it and resurfaces the most important in The Recap.
The notch that Windows never gave you. Made for your developer and personal work.
Form your US company in a 5-minute AI chat
Better workouts. Better together.
Exchange ads with other products.
Beautiful web analytics you'll actually want to use
Personal aggregator and assistant with a workspace
Connect any AI agent to 1,000+ apps via one MCP server.
Free video and audio tools. Nothing gets uploaded.
Just a little reminder, with a Founder Spotlight you can share your launches directly to the feed from your profile with a custom post now.
Free website audit for SEO, security, accessibility, and design
Jacob Counsell has responded to some feedback for FreeScan.app
great site, ive used it, does exactly what it says on the tin, nice layout, nice design
FreeScan.appDoes everything you want and nothing you don’t. The provided MD file and prompts are very helpful for fixing whatever page you scanned. We have a promo for Pro here on BuildHop. 🤝
Do me a huge favor and vote for me on this goofy list, takes two seconds no account required 😂😂😂 https://tech50x.snytch.ai/
Jacob Counsell has responded to some feedback for FreeScan.app
I just can't describe my love enough for this product haha
FreeScan.appI appreciate this! Share it with someone you think might need it. 🤝
Jacob Counsell has responded to some feedback for LaunchChair
Website needs a lot of work. Information overload.
LaunchChairChanged positioning after expanding the MCP tools, also reduced copy greatly.
Jacob Counsell has responded to some feedback for LaunchChair
The organization of all of the roadmapping and build documents seems like the biggest win here
LaunchChairWell that and then your agent builds the product without you writing a single prompt. 😂
Jacob Counsell has responded to some feedback for FreeScan.app
the best free website audit in the game !
FreeScan.appI super appreciate you saying this! Thanks you 🙌🙌🙌🙌
We have some awesome promo codes for some super high quality products on the deals page right now. These offers are very generous and exclusive to BuildHop users. Take advantage of these promos while you can. 🔥🔥
We put soo much work into BuildHop this week, hope you guys love the new features and refinements we’ve made. Next week I need to put a little work into https://www.freescan.app, which if you haven’t tried yet is an absolute life / time saver. 🤝🎉
I appreciate all y'all are doing! making Buildhop more awesome every week, keep up the hard work.
Thank you for doing that! Is there a chance to add a public release and possible roadmap? That would be cool to add. "suggest a feature" button somewhere
Jacob Counsell has responded to some feedback for LaunchChair
I was trying it for a bit, but yes, too much text and too much to fill out. I will try to finish it out later, as I want to see it actually create something cool as there are new AI releases as of today I'd like to try this with.
LaunchChairDefinitely not intended to be used manually! Use the MCP, your agent can use the entire workspace and you can run LaunchChair directly from your agent.
More on the MCP and CLI for LaunchChair. https://www.launchchair.io/docs/agent-api
Jacob Counsell has responded to some feedback for FreeScan.app
i may have never scored very high with my sites but that doesn't stop me from running it through them. Nice work as always!
FreeScan.appFreeScan will help you get those scores up, just feed your audit link to your agent!
Jacob Counsell has responded to some feedback for LaunchChair
Wow this is epic. This is exactly what i need for my builds. structured in such a great way.
LaunchChairLet me know if you end up giving it a try! The MCP is the real magic here, with the MCP it essentially gives whatever build agent you're using a product brain, saves tokens, and keeps you from writing prompts.
If you have a Founder Spotlight, you can always share your product directly to the feed!
Free website audit for SEO, security, accessibility, and design
Tons of new features on your Founder Spotlight pages if you have a Founder Spotlight.
Most of my time is going into three products I'm designing and building with my wife Claire. LaunchChair (https://www.launchchair.io/) helps founders research an idea, define the right product, and give coding agents enough context to build it properly. FreeScan (https://www.freescan.app/) gives anyone a free, practical audit of their website, while BuildHop helps independent products get discovered without requiring founders to already have an audience.
Pushing a ton of visual design enhancements to BuildHop all week and we have some new features coming to the feed as well as some big algorithm enhancements. What's everyone working on this week?
BuildHop just got a little sharper! Our new launch badges are smaller, cleaner, and show your total upvote count. Pick a light or dark badge in your dashboard, copy the short embed code, and add it to your site. We also improved dark mode across BuildHop with softer mint accents, clearer text, and more readable buttons, tags, and tabs. You can now switch themes directly from the navigation. Give the updates a try and let us know what you think. Your feedback helps us keep making BuildHop better!
Jacob Counsell has responded to some feedback for LaunchChair
its cool but why cant I just use claude or codex?
LaunchChairYou can’t use it WITHOUT Claude, Codex, or Grok. It’s intended to use with a build agent but forces them to build scalable software that isn’t slop. It keeps you from ever writing prompts and gives your agent a product brain, automatically does product research and competitive research, automatically generates a living spec, acceptance criteria, has automated remediation prompts for when your agent doesn’t build something. Allows you to create software rapidly without writing prompts.
What’s everyone working on this weekend? What’s one thing you want to accomplish before Monday?
Still deep in polish, but shipped a big feature: public links can now have a password. if you want to try: https://s-fheas9rav4jvbvchoy.preview.artor.app/ Pass: testing-artor - type a wrong pass first haha
Jacob Counsell has responded to some feedback for FreeScan.app
ohh this is cool, but I got a bit confused I got a grade C with 74% performance. I like the copy prompt to fix tho!
FreeScan.appThanks for giving FreeScan a try! The letter grade is for the “Speed insights” sections and for performance, it’s separate from your overall score that’s comprised of SEO / AEO, security baseline, accessibility, and design standards. I’ll make some visual changes to further support the distinction between speed insights and website health scores.
Little reminder here. All feedback goes through a review process, it’s very obvious when you give yourself feedback and try to glaze your own product. 😂
I had no idea that was possible haha one idea if I'm leaving feedback on my own product you should make the profile not anonymous, problem solved haha
You can’t, but because we have truly anonymous feedback and voting for users who don’t have an account you can just leave feedback in incog, it’s always obvious and super lame though haha.
Jacob Counsell has responded to some feedback for FreeScan.app
Amazing SEO/AEO tool with quick feedback to fix anything that's hamstringing your presence.
FreeScan.appLove to hear this! We appreciate you giving it a try. ❤️
Pushed a ton of changes to feeds, user profiles, and various new ways to earn points. More on this tomorrow!
Jacob Counsell has responded to some feedback for FreeScan.app
Does it work on other languages or only English?
FreeScan.appWe did some large refactoring to our scanning heuristics recently to better accommodate multilingual websites, we will continue to make enhancements so our audits work well for foreign websites.
Big week here! FreeScan.app is going live on ProductHunt this Thursday with some new pro features I'm about to release. BuildHop is getting some big changes to Founder Spotlights as well as some design housekeeping.
I just updated my Founders Spotlight. Pretty stoked on the new features we've added to these spotlights.
Most of my time is going into three products I'm designing and building with my wife Claire. LaunchChair (https://www.launchchair.io/) helps founders research an idea, define the right product, and give coding agents enough context to build it properly. FreeScan (https://www.freescan.app/) gives anyone a free, practical audit of their website, while BuildHop helps independent products get discovered without requiring founders to already have an audience.
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