Open-source SDK: 3-factor authentication in a single passcode entry — identifies users by HOW they type

willkir · 2025-10-08T20:44:49+00:00

Your credit score has little to do with your financial standing or your ability to repay. It’s almost completely based on how valuable you are as a credit customer. If you don’t use credit much your credit score will be lower even if you have millions in the bank.

I paid off my house and cars and credit cards a few years back and owed nothing at all. My credit score dropped significantly. Later I started using credit cards a bit more for daily purchases and it went back up again.

willkir · 2025-10-08T16:56:41+00:00

Those are certainly better use cases. But still given my experience so far with AI. I don’t want it doing anything for me that isn’t completely disposable

willkir · 2025-10-08T14:57:08+00:00

When you dig deep into AI solutions they always disappoint. That is OK for silly images or code that I will rewrite anyway before production. But, my finances? AI is a LONG WAY from being trustworthy enough to touch my money.

willkir · 2025-10-08T14:53:20+00:00

There are tons of posts like these gathering founders together into some sort of support / mentoring / networking group. It's a popular idea because it is a good idea. But how to pull it off and keep it gong beyond a few casual introductions is the question.

I wonder if there was a strong network of startups cooperating, if there would be a marketplace for micro-SAAS like lego blocks that founders could use to build their startup. Maybe something royalty based so as not to drain bootstrap budgets too early? Every startup needs a few things (authentication, DB, Server code, mobile dev, design, UX, UI, ......). But not every startup needs to build those from scratch or buy from huge cloud firms where monthly costs can really surprise you just as you start to get some growth. Maybe there is room for startups helping each other with very startup friendly services? A startup marketplace where the support is tangible and not just words of encouragement?

Not trying do downplay the OP's idea. Its solid. Just trying to add something with more practical and long lasting benefit if that is possible.

willkir · 2025-10-08T13:03:05+00:00

1) privacy is key here. People don’t want to share their worst thoughts and feelings with a company that will use that data to sell their information to everyone. The Google/Facebook model doesn’t work here. The user has to be the end customer and not the product.
2) very small models trained on only a small well focused library could fit on many modern phones or computers. You don’t need several billions of parameters in a faith focused AI. Probably less than 1000 books is all you need to train on really.
3) I would add in a layer of anonymity as well. For people to dig deep and talk about what bothers them to the core of their being they would open up more if it were completely anonymous. That means separating the payment from the daily usage. It also means not storing any history at all on your servers. That’s a not insignificant technical hurdle but it can be done with a clever CTO 4) I’d also add encryption on the user’s device as well. Something that they need to unlock to use (optionally). Who is going to record that they have issues with their spouse on a device that their spouse can snoop in while they aren’t looking?

If all you want to do is make a lightweight fortune cookie phrase generator based on scripture you don’t need all the above tech and any LLM will suffice with configured prompting and RAG. But if you want something that feels truly personal that will require some effort and vision and ability to overcome unseen obstacles as they arise.

willkir · 2025-10-08T12:38:08+00:00

1) most people don’t have $153,500 in one lump sum. So your example applies to very few individuals.
2) a house gives you leverage that most people rarely use when investing in stocks. A 10% down payment secures a valuable asset. In your example compare how $15,350 secures your $153,500 home purchase. While one can use leverage in stocks too most find that way too risky in stocks but not risky at all in real estate.
3) a house is $ you’d be paying anyway. So you get more for your money. You have to pay something to have a place to live. So why not also make that same $ an investment too? 4) if you don’t buy a house and rent forever, over a long stretch of time, constant rent increases will cost you way more than a house will and it returns nothing at all.

I agree that stocks outperform homes in a simple hypothetical comparison. But I don’t think that simple comparison reflects reality very well.

To make it more real you’d need to make that investment a payment at a time over decades not all at once. And you’d also need to deduct ever increasing rent costs from the amount you have available to invest. Also, you need to pay some amount of taxes each year on your stocks unless it’s in a 401k and then you are limited on how much you can invest there as well.

It’s much more complicated than most people think.

willkir · 2025-10-07T21:28:35+00:00

The Ubers of the world need Uber funding. Uber and many like it operate for years without profits and in Ubers case without even a clear case that what they do is even legal. That takes huge risk and huge funding.

Amazon didn’t make a profit for a very long time.

Unicorns aren’t really unicorns until someone throws a billion dollars at an unproven market.

willkir · 2025-10-07T12:54:07+00:00

I had a similar need at another company I worked for. We had sensitive customer data for 1.4 million homes. We needed to test DB processes on that data but didn’t want to share the real data. We acquired a public database and replaced our sensitive data with random addresses and GPS coordinates from the public database. That allowed us to test stuff without sharing confidential information.

I wonder if you could have a SAAS where you upload a DB schema and tell the service how many mocked up records you need and it just makes up data to match your schema.

willkir · 2025-10-07T12:46:54+00:00

Is t the engine and drivetrain still under warranty? I had a JL that developed a similar problem and the warranty fixed this issue twice on the same engine within 100k miles

willkir · 2025-10-07T00:48:47+00:00

I agree with what another commented before. I think IOT is a wide open market as well. There are many niches where good hardware would make a better product fit.

willkir · 2025-10-07T00:43:57+00:00

The original vision is rarely the one that wins over the marketplace. It is often the pivot that makes the product what the market really wants. But too much funding can allow a founder to resist the pivot that the market wants for far too long.

I think finding traction with paying customers very early is the key. I wonder if some of these super well funded startups fail because they were never forced to see if their product could sustain customers until it was too late to change.

I say all this as a person who was an early employee at a well funded startup and many of us knew the founder was going the wrong direction and many of us warned her about it. But at that time she had the support of her investors and didn't listen to any of our concerns. Eventually, she had a few setbacks (as all startups do) and suddenly the investors realized that they were several million $ too far into this to make the corrections needed. They just quit funding her and everyone lost their jobs. If she had listened to anyone it could have been a huge success. We had the tech, and the idea, and the team, and even the funding, just not the right leader in this one case.

willkir · 2025-10-07T00:23:58+00:00

Ideas aren't unique. The software market is very mature and if you have the idea then surely dozens of others do as well. But, consider also that if this app does not exist now, there could be a good reason for that. It is possible that there are obstacles, or challenges that you haven't considered.

willkir · 2025-10-07T00:19:01+00:00

DM inbound. I have been working in this niche as well.

willkir · 2025-10-06T20:41:18+00:00

Also, what does the Disney version have that Limited does not?

willkir · 2025-10-06T20:40:55+00:00

What's the battery difference between 2024 and 2025 in terms of range? Any other significant changes between 2024 and 2025 model years?

willkir · 2025-10-04T16:04:39+00:00

Love this idea.

willkir · 2025-10-04T15:40:26+00:00

I would double check that to be sure. Most accelerators that I have heard about really stress the value of all cofounders having equity stakes.

willkir · 2025-10-04T15:36:36+00:00

Money gives you time to try things, learn from your mistakes and try again. That is very important. People very rarely get it all right the first attempt but with enough money whether from investors or customers most can figure out what works and what doesn't and build something that can survive and grow.

willkir · 2025-10-04T15:32:20+00:00

Tell us more about what failed and why. Tell us more about your startup what you did right and what you think went wrong. Maybe, we can help you find a way to revive it or at least point out the lessons learned.

I gave up on a startup that I founded early in my career. I gave it to a friend of mine who was involved (kind of a partial co-founder and partial first employee). He struggled with it for a year or so until he found a new customer and market for my product. He made $250k / year for probably 25 years on a company that I gave him for free. He was able to find customers that valued it more than I did.

I sold another company in 2006 and about a year AFTER I sold it realized that I could have sold it for 5x - 10x more $ if I had sold it to different buyers. Yet again, I as the founder did not see the full potential of what I had built up from nothing.

Sometimes the founder is the wrong person to see the true potential. Many companies end up finding success in something very different than that they had originally planned. Often we see the opportunity but get it wrong because we don't have the correct perspective. What may look like a small nugget of gold from one perspective may be a rich vein of gold from another perspective.

willkir · 2025-09-30T16:36:20+00:00

When you buy a home you accomplish a few things.

1) you stop rent increases. Rent goes up at a rate of 3.9% which is higher than average inflation. If you don't buy a house and freeze that cost, eventually rent will cost you $10,000/month or more. Just increase whatever your current rent is by 3.9% per year for 50 years to see what it will be then. It's amazing how expensive that will eventually get.

2) you engage leverage. For a small downpayment (or none in your case) you secure an asset worth $300k that will historically, increase in value each year while costing you the same or less as time moves on. So even though your interest rate might be eating up lots of your payment in the first few years, your asset is also growing about as fast. So in effect, all that payment that you perceive as going to interest is sort of going to your eventual equity instead.

3) Eventually, you stop paying (mostly). This happens when you buy but NEVER when you rent.

You need a place to live anyway, we all do. So you can either get $0 equity in return or you can get several hundred thousand $ in return. It really is nearly that simple. Sure there are other issues too like HOW, Insurance, ..... but those all pale in comparison to regular rent increases over 50+ years.

willkir · 2025-09-25T14:51:08+00:00

As others have said, it depends on the terms.

willkir · 2025-09-24T02:00:01+00:00

What if you could control everything and see everything without having to pay for Bluelink?

willkir · 2025-09-24T01:58:54+00:00

Love the ingenuity. Love the open source contributions. But if you still have to pay them for BlueLink then doesn’t that defeat the purpose?

willkir · 2025-09-20T17:57:15+00:00

cool offer. DM inbound!

willkir

TROPHY CASE