u/Ok-Mix1345

I spent the last 3 months building Meridian, an open-source developer tool, mostly without knowing if anyone would actually care about it.

When we finally had something I was happy with, I decided to launch it on Product Hunt.

We had zero paid ads and spent ₹0 on promotion.

Instead, we focused on getting the launch in front of people who were actually interested in developer tools, reaching out to people who had followed the project, sharing the launch with our existing network, and being around throughout the day to reply to everyone and keep the conversation going.

After a pretty intense launch day, Meridian ended up #1 Product of the Day.

What surprised me most was that the launch wasn't really about having a huge audience. It was about getting the right people to care enough to show up and support it.

I wanted to share what we did because I know a lot of people here are interested in organic growth and launching without throwing money at ads.

A normal day might start with a plan, but then reality happens, a bug needs fixing, someone asks for help, a PR needs reviewing, something breaks in production, there's a quick investigation, a support request comes in, or you spend an hour figuring something out.

By the end of the day, you've done a ton of work that was never on the plan.

And the problem isn't just that the work was unplanned, we forget a lot of it. When you look back at your Jira/GitHub/Linear activity, the record often doesn't reflect everything you actually spent your time on.

I built Meridian to make that invisible work visible.

It captures the work happening throughout the day and helps connect it back to the systems you already use, so your record of what you actually did isn't limited to what you remembered to put on the plan.

It's open source, and we recently launched on Product Hunt and reached #1 Product of the Day.

I'd love feedback from the community: how much of your actual work is unplanned, and how do you currently keep track of it?

https://preview.redd.it/upcvcepogdkh1.png?width=919&format=png&auto=webp&s=b1aa1c536e5e94cf710850a2d18969df72cac3fa

Repo: https://github.com/Meridiona/meridian

We just launched Meridian on Product Hunt 🚀
It's an automatic worklog that makes sure your work never goes unnoticed. An everyday tool that remembers what you did, so you don't have to.

I would love for you to check it out and share your honest feedback. It would mean a lot 🙏

Link:https://www.producthunt.com/products/meridian-16

I’ve been building Meridian, a productivity tool designed to make sure the work you do doesn’t go unnoticed.

I’m launching it on Product Hunt this Friday, and I’m honestly excited and nervous. If the idea resonates with you.

More than anything, I’d appreciate your honest feedback. Every comment will help make Meridian better.

Thank you for being part of the launch.

I’m looking for honest feedback on the website’s design and UX:

- Is it immediately clear what Meridian does and who it is for?

- Does the site feel trustworthy?

- Is the visual hierarchy easy to follow?

- Does anything feel confusing, overly technical, or AI-generated?

- How does the site work on mobile?

This is a genuine feedback request, not a promotional post. Direct, actionable criticism is welcome.

This is the first screen users see after installing my desktop productivity app. The app name is blurred in the image. I wanted the experience to begin with a genuine welcome rather than immediately presenting a wall of permissions and setup steps.

https://preview.redd.it/c33j6cv6bdgh1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=07137708cd6268b5eb4ce7af52c0b59fddcd68e8

The app does not collect user names, so the numbered “founding user” badge is meant to acknowledge each early user without pretending the experience is personally tailored.

Does the screen feel warm and welcoming, or does it come across as trying too hard? Honest critique is welcome.
I’d also appreciate ideas for making early users feel more valued and connected

Almost everyday starts with a rough idea of what we're going to get done.
Then reality happens.

• Standup changes priorities.
• Someone Slacks you for help.
• A production issue pops up.
• A PR review takes longer than expected.
• You discover the ticket is twice as complicated as you thought.

By the end of the day, you realize you spent hours on things you never planned to do.
I'm starting to think developer productivity isn't about executing the perfect plan.
It's about understanding why the plan changed.

• Was it legitimate interruptions?
• Poor estimation?
• Context switching?
• Helping teammates?
• Urgent work?

I'm curious how this looks for everyone else.
When you finish your day, which feels most accurate?

• "I got through most of what I planned."
• "Half my day disappeared into unexpected work."
• "I honestly couldn't tell you where the time went."

And if you've found a good way to understand where your day actually went (without manually tracking everything), I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Almost everyday starts with a rough idea of what we're going to get done.
Then reality happens.

• Standup changes priorities.
• Someone Slacks you for help.
• A production issue pops up.
• A PR review takes longer than expected.
• You discover the ticket is twice as complicated as you thought.

By the end of the day, you realize you spent hours on things you never planned to do.
I'm starting to think developer productivity isn't about executing the perfect plan.
It's about understanding why the plan changed.

• Was it legitimate interruptions?
• Poor estimation?
• Context switching?
• Helping teammates?
• Urgent work?

I'm curious how this looks for everyone else.
When you finish your day, which feels most accurate?

• "I got through most of what I planned."
• "Half my day disappeared into unexpected work."
• "I honestly couldn't tell you where the time went."

And if you've found a good way to understand where your day actually went (without manually tracking everything), I'd love to hear your thoughts.

I've been thinking about something recently.

This habit actually goes back to my college days when I was preparing for entrance exams. Every morning I'd write down what I wanted to get done in a notebook, and throughout the day I'd cross things off as I finished them. There was something really satisfying about seeing the list shrink by the end of the day.

Years later, even as a developer, I still do the same thing.

With tools like ChatGPT, Cursor, Copilot, Claude, etc., I don't feel the need to remember every API, syntax, or implementation detail anymore. AI can usually help with those pretty quickly.

But I still find myself writing my tasks down—sometimes in a notebook, sometimes in Notes, and sometimes in a PM tool like Jira, Linear, or Trello. Even today, physically crossing something off (or checking it off digitally) gives me a sense of progress that AI hasn't replaced.

I'm curious how everyone else approaches this now.

• Do you still keep a handwritten to-do list?
• Do you rely entirely on project management tools?
• Do you use AI to organize your tasks?
• Or do you just work directly from Jira/GitHub issues without maintaining a personal list?

I'm wondering if this is just a habit I've carried over from my student days, or if many of you still do something similar despite AI changing so much about how we work.

Built something devs would love but managers would want to force on them , who do I actually sell to?

Not promotion: I built a product that tracks what a developer actually does across a day including AI-agent coding sessions like Claude Code/Cursor and auto-drafts their worklog/Jira updates from it instead of them writing it from memory at 6pm. Runs locally on their machine.

Here's the tension I can't get past: it's genuinely useful to the individual dev (nobody wants to reconstruct their day from memory for standup), but the same "watches what you do all day" mechanic is exactly what an engineering manager would want mandated across a whole team for visibility and reporting. My gut says sell to the dev, not the manager let individuals adopt it because it actually helps them, and let team-level/paid tiers come later once a few people on a team are already using it. The second this becomes "install this so your manager can see what you did," it stops being a productivity tool and becomes surveillance, and devs will either resist it or quietly sandbag it. But that also means a slower, harder path to real revenue than just selling managers a dashboard.

Has anyone here built something with this same shape genuinely useful to the individual, but structurally attractive as a top-down mandate? Did staying bottom-up-only actually pay off, or did you eventually have to go sell the manager version anyway?

We recorded everything a developer did for a week. The hours weren't in the wrong place, a third of them were nowhere at all.

I’m exploring a B2C workflow/tooling problem and trying to figure out whether it’s a real pain point or just something people complain about but tolerate.

The area I’m looking at is the manual overhead around software developers updating their Jira/Linear, worklogs, status updates, sprint hygiene, etc. My instinct is that a lot of teams find this tedious, but I’m not sure whether it’s painful enough that they’d actually adopt a product to fix it.

For founders who’ve built or validated internal tooling / B2C workflow products: how do you test whether something like this is worth building around?

What signals do you look for ? time wasted, frequency, teams already hacking together automations, willingness to trust automation, or whether the actual buyer is engineering leadership / ops / PM rather than the dev doing the work?

Would love to hear how people here think about validating this kind of problem before building too much.

I’m curious how this works in most software development teams.

Do you find updating Jira / Linear / worklogs / status stuff genuinely useful, or is it mostly just tedious process work? And what tools do your teams actually use for this?

Also, if there was a tool that auto-updated some of this from commits / PRs / calendar / Slack etc, would you actually use it or not trust it?