Mona Truong (@monatruong_murror) builds Murror, an AI journaling app, and stopped calling it one. They pulled "AI" out of the marketing, led with what the app actually does for you, and downloads tripled, so she posted the numbers.
Gal Dayan (@galdayan) saw the same thing with his product: "AI-powered" in the headline pulled in tire-kickers who wanted to poke a chatbot and bounced when it wasn't one. Yudhish Khatri (@yudhish_khatri) pushed on the ethics of hiding the tech, and Mona's answer was clean: it's all disclosed in How It Works and the privacy policy, "there's a difference between being transparent about your tech stack and using AI as a positioning hook."
The sharpest point in the thread is Gal's: the AI label sets an expectation of a specific interaction pattern, chat, prompt, response, and if your product doesn't work that way you're fighting your own label the whole time. Murror's retention jumped 41% once it stopped.
Good thread if "AI-powered" is still the first line of your landing page and you've never tested whether it's helping.