Who are you, and what kind of problems do you like working on?
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
What are you building or working on right now?
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
What got you started on this?
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
What's one thing that's changed your mind since you started building?
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
What's a moment that told you something was actually working?
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
What's something you're stuck on right now, in any of your projects?
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
What's one thing you'd want to share with first-time builders?
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.
We just released our MCP / agent skill for FreeScan single-page audits and pro accounts. We’ve also made the free single-page audits extremely readable for agents.
https://www.freescan.app/agents
Trying to fix my new one - no I'm not building a new one - but one I built yesterday, fun concept, but video creation stuff is always complex and now with my AI agent friends having issues, not getting too far - AlternatePast.com
love the ui/ux in the landing page and the scan looks very useful however the ui is cluttered and kind of confusing in the results page (mostly everything from 'Why this scored this way to the bottom).
Personally nope, not experiencing any issues at all; and now that I last checked there are huge improvements on the platform UI and UX experience is getting better and better! GJ :D
We added deeper website performance insights to FreeScan.app, individual LLM AI crawler access checks, and over a dozen quality of life enhancements. As always FreeScan.app is 100% free to use. Check it out https://www.freescan.app/
It’s interesting this person thought it was an agent, as said on the website this is meant as an MCP and companion to your agent, it’s a second brain for context, creates a spec, and PRD, then writes prompts for your agent from spec.
maybe they just glanced at the site? I just gave it another once over and I can see how on a quick read it could come off as an agent - some of the taglines mention "your agent" or "the agent".
I know what the product is so it doesn't read that way to me, but yeah. some minor wordsmithing or a section that explicitly says "NOT A FRIGGIN AGENT BUT A TOOL FOR YER FRIGGIN AGENT" perhaps? 😂.
You can collect anonymous feedback and get votes for your launch when people visit your actual website by using the new BuildHop feedback widget, click this link to find your widget in your dashboard https://buildhop.io/app#website-feedback
Been running this on both SublimeKeys and BackDrop_'s pages — genuinely the best feedback widget I've integrated. Real, actionable comments straight from actual visitors, not just launch-day noise 👌
We’re going to be updating the BuildHop homepage a little for SEO / AEO reasons, but wanted to ask everyone how they feel about this founders feed being on the BuildHop homepage?
This feature is live now for all users with approved launches! It’s in beta and we still have some enhancements to make but it’s working very well!
Give it a try 🤝🙌
https://x.com/JacobCounsell/status/2081450599229370468
Little reminder for everyone, if your site blocks BuildHop from framing it and your website doesn’t work within the Hop discovery our system automatically hides you from discovery. No views. No feedback.
Genuine question: how does BuildHop handle the security tradeoff here? Some products intentionally block third-party framing to reduce clickjacking risk, especially when login or payments are involved.
We're not suggesting not to have security headers, we're suggesting you set "frame-ancestors 'self' https://buildhop.io" on your homepage and for basic security have all auth and payment pages set to "frame-ancestors 'none'"
We listened to our users and uncapped project limits for all pricing tiers! Now the $19 a month tier has unlimited projects. The only difference in plans now is seats. https://www.launchchair.io/
Every LaunchChair build starts with an agent ready boilerplate worth $500! This boilerplate has auth, admin, blog, agents / design.md, hooks for Stripe / Resend / PostHog, security, and great SEO out the gate.
https://www.launchchair.io/
LaunchChair now has a full agent loop API / MCP so you can have Claude or Codex build a market informed SaaS that doesn’t suck without writing a single prompt.
https://www.launchchair.io/
Now, on top of Fixes, Opportunities, and Insights, FreeScan also gives you prompts you can use with your agent of choice to make immediate improvements to your site.
https://www.freescan.app/
LaunchChair has a full agent API and MCP with fully functional endpoints for your agent. Our CLI is also finished but not live yet as we’re still testing a few things.
https://www.launchchair.io/docs
We’re no longer offering dofollow to every launch… Next week we’re going to push our SEO and DR hard so a dofollow is going to require a badge on your website. More on this next week 🤝