😸 Pivot like there's no tomorrow

gm legends. It’s Sunday funday.

In this edition: pivoting instead of panicking in a pandemic (with a peck of pickled peppers), Elon’s new AI friends, using AI to write the great American novel, and the most popular products that launched this week. 

We’ve got a lot to share, so fill the Yeti and let’s get going.

P.S. Launching soon? We’d love to hear about it → editorial@producthunt.co 🫶

Kraftful co-founder Yana Welinder was a recovering lawyer and head of product at IFTTT when she decided to apply to Y Combinator in 2019. It seemed like a great time to build a product to help companies in the burgeoning IoT sphere. A year later, with hardware supply chains collapsing and IoT startups folding, the company she built needed to pivot. 

And pivot it did. Yana, who had taught about AI and law nearly a decade earlier, now tapped large language models for the path forward, and Kraftful took off by helping product teams sort through and analyze the reams of feedback they received. Earlier this month, the startup was acquired by publicly traded data analytics platform Amplitude.

Product Hunt sat down with Yana to talk about pivoting during a pandemic, moving on from sales-led growth, and saying goodbye to the brand she built.

 This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

How did Kraftful start? What were the early days like?

So we got our start essentially applying to YC, and getting in almost on a whim—

You mean by accident?

It was the last day of being able to submit an application. I got it in super last minute, hit submit right before the deadline. In fact, I still had a job. I was head of product at IFTTT at the time and rushed home to record the video. I just submitted the first video where my 2-year-old wasn’t screaming in the background. To my great surprise, my co-founder and I got in and had to quit our jobs. YC was actually where I first met [Product Hunt CEO] Rajiv. We were in the same batch.

When you went into that YC batch, what was your idea for the product?

The vision was always to help product teams build better products. But it started in a very different place. The first version for Kraftful was essentially Webflow for IoT, and we later pivoted to Amplitude for IoT, which is kind of funny now that we've been acquired by Amplitude.

We eventually dropped IoT entirely and started focusing on product teams more broadly—and leveraging large language models to serve product teams, which is essentially when Kraftful really started taking off and getting broader adoption. That’s when we hit product-market fit.

2015: It was the best of times…it was the worst of times? C’mon, dude. We’re not actually Charles Dickens, but a whole slew of writing assistants have made us feel like we could be big-name authors. One of them came out with its version 2.0 on this date 10 years ago, promising to “[make] your writing bold and clear.” It’s still around, and, as an editing tool, it’s still valuable—with 2024’s edition layering in more AI insights. We still use it occasionally to strangle stray adverbs and smother unneeded adjectives. (How are we doing on that front?) 

Can you name the product? 

The shift: Elon Musk’s chatbot, Grok, now has a goth anime waifu mode. It’s a new visual toggle that transforms the AI into a sulky, stylized character with heavy eyeliner, dramatic expressions, and a distinctly Tumblr-era vibe. (Too sexy? Maybe try Bad Rudy, a cocaine-fueled, anarchic red panda.)

The move: This isn’t just a skin—it’s a play for cultural relevance. By leaning into hyper-specific internet aesthetics, xAI is trying to carve out a niche in a market dominated by more polished, utilitarian competitors. It’s meme-as-strategy, designed to make Grok feel less like a tool and more like a personality you’d actually want to talk to.

Why it’s interesting: As AI assistants become interchangeable in capabilities, companies are turning to branding theater. A chatbot’s tone, look, and lore are becoming as important as its IQ. Grok’s anime avatar isn’t about intelligence—it’s about internet clout.

The catch: None of this solves Grok’s bigger issue: it's still catching up to GPT-4 and Claude in performance. A new aesthetic might buy attention, but it won’t hold it if the experience underneath stays mid.

Did you know Product Hunt has an ambassador program? Elly is here to tell you all about it and see if, maybe, just maybe, you want to be one of us. (One of us…one of us…)