We relaunched on Product Hunt six months after our first launch. Here's what we rebuilt and why.
In March we launched Zyaku on Product Hunt as an all-in-one creator platform. It ranked #187 for the day. Not a disaster, not a win. The honest read was that "all-in-one creator platform" told nobody why they should care.
Today we're back on Product Hunt as Zyaku 2.0, and the product is different: offline-first social infrastructure. Creators and journalists publish, earn and communicate — and it keeps working when the internet doesn't.
Why we changed direction
The signal came from where our users actually are. We have people in 100+ countries, and a lot of them are on connections that drop for minutes or hours at a time. The complaint was never "I want another feature." It was "I wrote the post and it disappeared." That is a reliability problem, not a feature problem, and it pointed to one thing everyone else treats as an edge case: the network going away.
What we built since March
Offline publishing: posts and messages are composed and queued on the device with zero connectivity, then published exactly once when the network returns. No lost drafts, no duplicates. This was the hardest thing we have shipped — exactly-once on reconnect is where most of the engineering time went.
Offline Emergency Access: PIN/biometric-gated emergency tools (broadcast, safety check-in, cached contacts, crisis info) that work with no network at all.
Disaster Alert broadcast, live in production since 1 September.
Clips with an in-app editor, Motion Comics, AI video.
Creator payouts in 100+ countries — Stripe Connect where it exists, manual payouts where it doesn't. 80% revenue share, no follower minimum.
Where we are
Two people, fully bootstrapped, no outside money. Live revenue, still under $100K. Users in 100+ countries. Everything runs on a Node/Postgres backend on Railway that auto-deploys from main, because with two people the ops budget is zero.
What I'd tell March-me
Lead with the thing only you do. "All-in-one" is a list; "works when the internet doesn't" is a reason. Six months of building went into earning the right to say the second one.
The demo was recorded on a real phone in airplane mode, start to finish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL2SZ2bZbi4
Product Hunt launch, live today: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/zyaku-2-0
Happy to go deep on the offline queue, how exactly-once works on reconnect, or payouts in countries Stripe doesn't cover. Ask anything.
The “works when the internet doesn’t” positioning is much sharper. Have users in those unreliable-connectivity markets actually retained better or published more because of the offline workflow, or is that still the main hypothesis?
That’s still something we’re proving, the strongest signal so far is the reliability problem itself - users don’t want to lose work just because the network disappeared. We’re early on the behavioral data but that’s exactly what we’re building toward with the next layer of Zyaku’s offline architecture.
This hits close to home — I'm two weeks out from my first Product Hunt launch and the 'what did you rebuild and why' framing is exactly the situation I'm trying to avoid needing. The follower notification point is interesting: did relaunching meaningfully re-notify people who ignored the first one, or did the traction come mostly from fresh promotion? Also curious whether you changed the tagline or positioning between launches — that's the piece I keep second-guessing.
The biggest change was positioning, we went from “all-in-one creator platform” to leading with the actual reason Zyaku exists offline-first social infrastructure. That clarity mattered more than simply promoting the relaunch. The first launch taught us what the product was missing, the second was about earning the right to explain it differently.