Hey HN - Ivan here, founding engineer at Diffmode.
We built Diffmode for bootstrapped founders who are tired of hearing the same growth advice: write content, run paid ads, build a community, post on LinkedIn.
That advice is not wrong. It is just crowded. If every competitor is running the same playbook, a smaller team usually loses.
Anton, our founder, was previously growth lead at JetBrains Academy. He kept seeing the same pattern: useful products would get early traction, then stall. Not because the product was bad. Because the next growth channel was not obvious.
So he started collecting mechanisms behind growth wins from real companies. Not "use TikTok" or "launch on Product Hunt." More like: counter-cyclical timing, pre-validation economics, audience borrowing, trust through curation.
That database is now 576 documented mechanisms: 347 demand-gen vectors and 229 CRO vectors.
Diffmode cross-references those mechanisms against your constraints: budget, team size, stage, skills, customer type, and channel saturation. Then it combines 2–3 mechanisms into tactics for your specific situation.
The important part: the output is not a list of ideas. It is a plan.
You get competitor landscape, buyer JTBD, channel gaps, prioritized tactics, day-by-day execution, templates, tools, and kill criteria. The goal is to tell a solo founder what to do Monday morning, and when to stop if the signal is not there.
Hey HN - Ivan here, founding engineer at Diffmode.
We built Diffmode for bootstrapped founders who are tired of hearing the same growth advice: write content, run paid ads, build a community, post on LinkedIn.
That advice is not wrong. It is just crowded. If every competitor is running the same playbook, a smaller team usually loses.
Anton, our founder, was previously growth lead at JetBrains Academy. He kept seeing the same pattern: useful products would get early traction, then stall. Not because the product was bad. Because the next growth channel was not obvious.
So he started collecting mechanisms behind growth wins from real companies. Not "use TikTok" or "launch on Product Hunt." More like: counter-cyclical timing, pre-validation economics, audience borrowing, trust through curation.
That database is now 576 documented mechanisms: 347 demand-gen vectors and 229 CRO vectors.
Diffmode cross-references those mechanisms against your constraints: budget, team size, stage, skills, customer type, and channel saturation. Then it combines 2–3 mechanisms into tactics for your specific situation.
The important part: the output is not a list of ideas. It is a plan.
You get competitor landscape, buyer JTBD, channel gaps, prioritized tactics, day-by-day execution, templates, tools, and kill criteria. The goal is to tell a solo founder what to do Monday morning, and when to stop if the signal is not there.
There is a public sample report here: https://diffmode.app/reports/sample
Two things I would love feedback on:
1. Run the free Audit on your own product and tell me where it gets things wrong, generic, or overconfident.
2. Is the day-by-day format useful for a bootstrapped operator, or would you rather get something shorter and more strategic?