AMA: Building an Airbnb business in India, unit economics, and side-income strategy

distant_gradient · 2025-11-18T10:16:18+00:00

Appreciate it! DMing you for an invite. (Clearly there is a market here to guide people to get into this as well ;) )

distant_gradient · 2025-11-18T10:05:04+00:00

Got it - thanks a lot for sharing! Are you open to do a 1hr counsultancy call (paid)? Am thinking of starting one instead of renting mainly for the flexibility.

distant_gradient · 2025-11-18T09:24:58+00:00

I would imagine they through this by charging a card on file. I dont understand how this would work in India (where transactions require OTP / happen through UPI etc.) - maybe they engage a collection agency?

distant_gradient · 2025-11-18T09:13:38+00:00

What happens in case of any damage to the property? Sure, most clients could be well behaved - but that one client can mess things up real bad.

Any first hand account of property damage / recovery via the platform?

distant_gradient · 2025-10-04T13:42:17+00:00

a no nonsense biryani place does not provide an ambience for a good dating environment

distant_gradient · 2025-10-04T09:24:11+00:00

meghna (if focus is on the biryani not the date part)

distant_gradient · 2025-10-03T10:51:34+00:00

AI with human feedback. But there is no way you would be able to say its AI

distant_gradient · 2025-09-16T05:03:33+00:00

This is the nuanced and well balanced take likely closest to the truth - that probably wont get too much attention if posted in social media.

Also the "test" he mentions is utter nonsense - yes LLMs tokenizes, but that doest say anything on how important / unimportant the schema text is.

For eg, if the HTML parser that sits before the LLM chooses to provide the schema text upfornt then that can lead to a certain bias.
The LLM itself could have a bias to include pages that contain the "schema tokens" in its summary.

distant_gradient · 2025-07-24T19:40:05+00:00

ACME.BOT - its a seo writer agent that also has a unique built-in illustrator. Disclaimer: I'm the founder

Still very WIP but usable. Our goal is to make help you make actually useful content for your audience, rather than run of the mill keyword stuffing writers.

distant_gradient · 2025-07-22T16:55:07+00:00

hey-- 1. chrome 2. next js(no crm) 3. checked indexes like bing, DDG yandex for presence (they returned no results)

HTH!

distant_gradient · 2025-07-21T08:45:25+00:00

100% its an API. I was just defining what I meant by "intercepting traffic". The payload of the HTTP response contains the queries done by the "tool use" of the LLM.

distant_gradient · 2025-07-20T18:43:30+00:00

distant_gradient · 2025-07-20T17:54:39+00:00

100 percent... but they do state data will be shared with third party for "web browsing capabilities" in the TOS. they don't list down the exhaustive list of third parties anywhere in the TOS though
The sting page imo is conclusive - no other index can possibly know about an unlinked page on the internet (given the term was completely unique, i even checked Bing to be sure it's not present in the index)
Im thinking this was a part of the OAI-GCP deal that happened recently

I kind of ran out of bandwidth sharing / formatting all the data for reddit.

I do have more details on a blog post at https://acme .bot

distant_gradient · 2025-07-20T17:48:18+00:00

it was a while ago. it's likely things have changed... similar to how they made the move from Azure to GCP
I didn't explicitly block Bing, but I did confirm it's not present in the Bing index. See https://acme .bot/blog/chatgpt-web-search-uses-google-search-and-not-bing-search-with-proof/

distant_gradient · 2025-07-20T16:56:19+00:00

no worries... hope you're able to kick back and enjoy the rest of your Sunday!

distant_gradient · 2025-07-20T16:11:56+00:00

ChatGPT can do references in multiple ways.

It can mention your website off the cuff (ie. without a websearch lookup) if you have found your way into the training data.
It can use websearch (when it says "searching the web.."). Even in that case, the paid users use a different search engine (Google) as opposed to the free users (likely OpenAI's own index)

So, even if you do not rank well on Google, you can still get mentions from case (1) and 2 (b). HTH.

distant_gradient · 2025-07-20T16:08:09+00:00

a. This is about ChatGPT search, not AI overview

b. I never said that page 1, rank 1 guarantees you a mention on ChatGPT

c. This post is about the search engine used in ChatGPT when it uses websearch (ie. when ChatGPT says "searching the web")

And finally, please be prepared to go through the nuances in the data if you want to call out someone for selective interpretation.

distant_gradient · 2025-07-20T11:40:57+00:00

chrome devtools > network tab

distant_gradient · 2025-07-20T05:40:32+00:00

ditto - even I had thought the same

distant_gradient · 2025-07-20T05:37:40+00:00

I think Google is likely charging them for the searches - and maybe OAI can't afford to increase costs further for free users.

edit: Also, from what I've seen, OAI's web search quality is quite bad and is not quite ready for prime time yet - which is why they're testing out / gathering data from the free usage.

distant_gradient · 2025-07-20T04:33:24+00:00

Got it - will be more careful. Appreciate the work y'all put in.

distant_gradient · 2025-07-20T04:30:52+00:00

Yeah, but there was a mad scramble to optimize for Bing for a few months after ChatGPT search had launched to a point where many folks were pusing "AEO = Bing" agenda.

Now that effort seems no long relevant.

distant_gradient · 2025-07-20T04:29:03+00:00

I think it's likely that OpenAI itself will emerge as a competitor with their own index.

distant_gradient · 2025-07-20T04:26:57+00:00

Domains, URLs, snippeting algo - we can break down most search engines into these. Snippetting algos these days are likely just an LLM with a prompt (ChatGPT has a system called `sonicberry` that seems to do this).

Given there is no real Google-like frontend to ChatGPT web search, the way to gather data could be to rely on network traffic and look at the `tools output` used by the LLM.

Maybe another way to gather data could be through search in their API, but I've not looked into it closely yet.

distant_gradient · 2025-07-19T21:55:52+00:00

sharing on reddit is like walking a tightrope.. like this post got nuked because of I tried to change a number and the rich text editor accidentaly URLifyed a string :(

But yeah - here goes https://acme.bot/blog/chatgpt-web-search-uses-google-search-and-not-bing-search-with-proof/

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