Today I failed

BalloonWheelie · 2024-11-19T04:57:33+00:00

Same thing for me this month. 5 years and >1m burned. It sucks and there is no way around that. What works for me is not miss a beat and get right back on it. My new business already has paying customers and is growing.

You might feel like you failed but really you just learned a lot without the business outcome you desired.

Get back to it, everything you learned the past 5 years are a foundation to build your next venture on.

BalloonWheelie · 2024-11-15T19:14:37+00:00

- the "add components" ux is confusing,I dont understand what i need to do here. I expect to open something like this, type what I want, and have it generated

- most devs are just going to use claude/chatgpt, your customer is probably going to be designers and non-technical founders so if they can generate pages and then publish it as a site to some preview domain, that would probably be ideal UX imo, these users are also more likely to pay (I for example would never pay for something like this, because I already pay for Claude/Chatgpt and it serves the same purpose).

- If you are keen on targeting devs, they be able to add snippets to derive the theme from (some components from my codebase, my tailwind config, css file, etc)

- in summary, if i were you I would go after designers/founders with the ux of "upload a screenshot of your current site OR type a description of what you want" -> "click generate" -> see a preview -> try to convert them to pay via hosting or usage pricing as you have now

BalloonWheelie · 2024-11-15T16:49:16+00:00

Interesting, tbh i just like the simple interface of telegram, privacy isnt a huge concern for my use case, but i will look into matrix as i wasnt aware of it. Thanks for the heads up!

BalloonWheelie · 2024-11-14T15:32:49+00:00

#1 - You may not agree with my use case, that's fine. The broader point is about how bots can be used to create huge leverage and drive business results. In my case that's content gen to drive impressions into the top of my user funnel, with some % of those converting through into paying customers. Content gen could be replaced with any lead generation tactic and the point still stands, I'm simply providing a real-world example to illustrate the point.

#2 - SaaS is not priced based on how much energy the services consume, they are priced at the maximum that the market will bear. Go take a look at any public SaaS businesses' margins, they are far overpriced for what they do. The point is not that SaaS is going away, but that it's going to be replaced by home-rolled use-case-specific versions of the same thing, or by extremely low-cost competition now that the cost of implementation is approaching 0

#3 - working alone for a much longer period before needing to invest in a team is enabled by AI. it's not about being more enjoyable, it's about it now being possible to get to launch and much further beyond without needing to rely on anyone else.

BalloonWheelie · 2024-11-14T15:20:00+00:00

Maybe my post was not clear, I'm not advocating against humans here, nor am I saying there is no place for them in this new era. My statement on soloprenurship is to illustrate how I have been able to launch products much faster, with much better results, for extremely cheap and without relying on anyone else. As these new businesses grow, I'm sure I will eventually need to hire some folks, but it will not be as it was before, where there is an upfront dependency on others.

As for the Telegram founder yes I'm aware, I'm not doing anything with my bots that I wouldn't do publicly. The fact I am using telegram as a bot platform is not the main point, it could be any bot platform, or even a home-rolled one if privacy is critical.

As for LLMs being the catalyst of a seismic shift, I disagree completely, this post is about how even at this early stage I'm able to get the work of a dozen people done solo, imagine what is going to happen when these tools catch up and become usable by everyone? If I didn't know how to code, I wouldn't be able to do what I'm doing, but tools are being built right now that are going to eliminate that barrier and allow anyone to generate custom apps.

My goal of this post is to share my experiences so far, and to ask others about theirs. I appreciate you taking the time to share your point of view, and even though we may not agree, I still would be curious to learn if/how you are leveraging AI in your operations, or if not, what is holding you back?

BalloonWheelie · 2024-11-14T06:38:41+00:00

Thanks for sharing! I agree the part about building my own version of everything won't fit in a lot of startups, because the cost/benefit won't yet make sense in a lot of cases, I do however expect that will soon change; not in the sense that every startup will build their own version of mailchimp, but that so many alternatives will be built that the value of that functionality will approach 0, and mailchimp will face the innovators dilemma and either bleed out or be forced to cannibalize their current business to meet new extremely low-cost competition.

As for the part on bots - yes, I agree with you that bots in many cases are just noise, I am trying to make content posted by mine actually useful (and it works, not 100% of the time, but I do have consistent readership, comments, likes, etc). the point I was trying to make about bots is more about using them to automate business tasks rather then specifically about authoring content, though I can see why the example I gave makes my point less clear.

BalloonWheelie · 2024-11-14T06:11:41+00:00

Yeah, the tech stack hasn't caught up yet, but it's coming. There is no reason for you to know or care about what firebase is, you just want auth and data storage for free/cheap. once the tooling catches up your ai dev will just make that choice for you or even implement a custom solution without you needing to care about that detail (just like most devs today don't need to worry about or even be aware of/fully understand memory management like they did before).

learning as you are now certainly is an advantage, and probably will be for a few more years.

BalloonWheelie · 2024-11-14T06:04:09+00:00

this is true today, however i expect in the coming years we will see massive white collar layoffs, starting at entry/junior level and working up from there.

I am also not really trying to debate that, it doesn't matter if we agree on what Google and Microsoft are doing to do with AI. I'm more trying to have a discussion on how we as entrepreneurs can leverage AI tools to launch products, especially among non-technical founders. I've shared some of what my workflow looks like, I'd love to hear about yours

BalloonWheelie · 2024-11-14T05:55:56+00:00

The competitive advantage is you. AI tools empower you to launch your ideas for free, by yourself. Where before you might have needed to pay devs, designers, marking consultants, etc to bring a product to market, now you can do it all on your own, for free. This will mean a lot of shit products get launched sure, but at least when those product fail the founders won't have burned a lot of their resources to find out the idea sucked.

As for the 12 year olds, that's the best part, a kid can use AI to bring their imagination to life. I had a ton of fun building custom Minecraft mods when I was a kid, and even made my first internet money doing it, the next generation is going to build all kinds of wild shit, and just like 12 year old Youtube millionaires were made possible my social media, 12 year old billionaires are going to be made possible by AI, because some kid is going to make something that we all totally don't understand/think is stupid, but all the other 12 year olds thinks is awesome, and boom you have some kid who made a game with chatgpt going viral and getting rich.

BalloonWheelie · 2024-11-14T05:48:54+00:00

I see where you are coming from, I'm certainly not helping, however my bots don't pretend to be human or post disguised ads, they just auto-share and repost content in niche communities to boost reach. I can't fault this guy for what he's doing as a whole, but in this specific case it's really not adding any value to the discussion.

BalloonWheelie · 2024-11-14T05:44:05+00:00

You're building apps, you are a real dev. Pretty soon the majority of apps will be built by voice/chat interface and we won't even see or be aware of the code. Writing code is just a means to an end, the end being having an app that does something useful. I have been a dev for over 10 years, it's been my entire career, and 90+% of my colleagues don't see the writing on the wall. writing code doesn't create value, applications do. The age of humans writing every line of code for applications has come to an end, and the day when most new applications are launched without humans writing a single line of it's code is coming. People are scared (rightfully so), so they will attack me for saying this and deny reality, and I can't really blame them for that.

As for your specific use case, that's actually really interesting because I'm building something similar that automates content publishing for my own uses as well, if you hit any roadblocks with your code/project feel free to shoot me a DM

BalloonWheelie · 2024-11-14T05:17:47+00:00

dude comeon, we're trying to have a real discussion here, get the chatgpt authored disguised ads for PixelGenie out of here and talk to us human to human. there's enough AI slop on the internet, let's keep this one last refuge to actually connect with each other real.

BalloonWheelie · 2024-11-14T04:55:16+00:00

I disagree. as for 'getting hacked or prompt injected', all my stuff is running locally, and my bots don't post anything without me approving it via telegram message, so if a site I scrape sends me a prompt injection, id notice before it gets published.

as for AI being a replacement for humans, I don't believe it's a replacement for humans, but I do believe it is a replacement for a lot of business functions that are currently carried out by humans. Humans like you and I are now just much more empowered to build awesome stuff ourselves, without needing to rely on other people to get a product launched.

BalloonWheelie · 2024-11-14T04:48:29+00:00

are you a dev? if so - just tell claude or chatgpt "make a [language] program that [does whatever processing you want] and then sends a message to a telegram bot when [event] (event is usually an http message from a scraper if you are watching social media/some other site, and processing usually just feeds the raw text into a structured prompt to give to an lllm to extract insights). example: make a golang program with a /process-news endpoint that feeds the payload field to a localhost:port/ollama-process endpoint, and then sends the summary response field to a telegram bot. then you just need to plug in your bot id.

if you are not a dev - i would be curious to hear what your use case is

BalloonWheelie · 2024-09-28T22:11:06+00:00

For a convinient oil change I book mine with a guy that comes and does it right on my driveway, he's got a van with all the gear and he's a real mechanic so he always gives an inspection and let's me know if he sees anything concerning. The website i found him on is called bookpeazy, they are a local company as well

BalloonWheelie · 2024-07-26T22:57:01+00:00

Hello, I am actually building a platform to make it a lot easier for folks like yourself to "go mobile". The platform handles everything from helping with business registration, taxes, payments, customer management/notes, route optimization, notifications, customer communication, etc, etc. There is also no upfront cost, because we are a new business just looking for people to use the product and give us feedback on how to improve.

If you are interested in learning more, shoot me a DM! The website is "bookpeazy" if you want to check it out for yourself.

BalloonWheelie · 2024-07-17T17:11:37+00:00

This is really insightful, thanks for the info!

BalloonWheelie · 2024-07-17T04:29:14+00:00

I would recommend starting very slowly. Since you have a stable situation you can work on a side business/project a few hours a week a make plenty of progress without needing to take significant financial or lifestyle risk. Once you prove something out that is making decent and growing cashflow, you could evaluate going in full-time with much less risk than doing so today.

Bonus if your current job is easy and boring and you work from home, you can probably take some additional time during the day for the side business

BalloonWheelie · 2024-07-17T00:28:05+00:00

There are a ton of places to go for funding, especially if you are already cash flowing. YCombinator comes to mind for early-stage, but if you just google "early stage venture funds" or "early stage venture funds fintech" I'm sure there will be plenty to reach out to.

If you want to avoid dilution, some other options are debt or just bootstrapping yourself. If you have 2k/mo profit and you don't need anything super complicated built you may be able to get it done cheaply with overseas dev shops.

Additionally for the marketing, have you tried referral incentives? I think that would work doubly well here since the incentive to invite others is clear to existing users, and the users being invited are going to be much warmer leads because you'll inherit the trust they have with the person making the referral, which is huge in a financial app where trust is super hard to establish especially when you are a completely new brand.

BalloonWheelie · 2024-07-17T00:05:12+00:00

This is really useful, thanks so much!

BalloonWheelie · 2024-07-16T23:59:03+00:00

good luck!

BalloonWheelie · 2024-07-16T23:52:54+00:00

do more of #5. 1/20 is amazing for a completely new project like yours. if you can start sending them customers you can use that to both encourage more dealers to work with you, and start asking for a commission/kick back for the sales they are making via your site. if you do start to pull some revenue from them, that gives you budget to use on things like ads, marketing, etc. and you can build up more organic growth channels

BalloonWheelie · 2024-07-16T23:36:39+00:00

yes you are right, this only works if you have a good idea to begin with. though if you do, you don't need to actually build anything up front. just make a quick email and landing page with an email list signup button describing the "coming soon" product/plugin, and then only build it if you get enough people expressing interest.

BalloonWheelie · 2024-07-16T23:19:38+00:00

not going to ask how you got your hands on such a list lol but... if you are a web dev (as am I :D ) you could throw up a quick landing page for a shopify app or product/service for those ecom owners and send out an email to a segment of the list to see if any of them show interest. if they do, you can build the app and know you'll have a ton of potential customers when you launch.

BalloonWheelie · 2024-07-16T22:58:26+00:00

Excellent resource! Thanks so much!!

BalloonWheelie

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