Ask HN: How did you find PMF?
The article discusses the challenges of finding product-market fit (PMF) for startups. It emphasizes the importance of building what customers want and minimizing costs in the solution-building process. The author expresses frustration over a lack of traction despite efforts to engage potential customers and launch minimum viable products (MVPs).
- ▪Successful businesses focus on building what people want and minimizing costs.
- ▪The author has struggled to gain traction with MVPs and customer outreach.
- ▪There is a sense of frustration and disappointment in the search for effective strategies.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 19 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
Hacker News (Newest) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 5,306 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Ycombinator |
| Canonical URL | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48259551 |
| Publication time | Sun, 24 May 2026 17:59:47 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-24T18:07:33.784Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-24T18:07:37.634Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | iN6WAPAf9K-G · 5 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Nearly all successful business stories boil down to two aspects1. Build what people want. So much so they are willing to pay. Talking to potential customers matters here. 2. Minimize the cost for solution building, both time and money.I get it.My problem is in the details. I would ask questions on sub-reddit, hacker news, x, etc if someone has specific problems, with some solution in mine. I get very little traction.I would launch MVPs, reach out to the people who I think may find it interesting, both online and offline. Very little traction, and both growth and retention converge to zero.Is there the right playbook? How do you execute? Things are quite daunting and disappointing. Never felt so useless.
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ycombinator.