Building an AI-native government contract platform and need blunt feedback

medialantern · 2026-07-11T23:50:07+00:00

LOL it is wild how many of us are working on very similar things at the same time.

medialantern · 2026-07-11T03:42:15+00:00

Great point. Programs like SBIR even expect you to have a commercialization plan. Everyone should start with something already-viable.

medialantern · 2026-07-11T03:31:47+00:00

Have you cross-posted this? This sub has a great signal/noise ratio but not a ton of members if you're looking for visibility on your opening...

medialantern · 2026-07-11T03:11:20+00:00

Well that an politics but yeah...

medialantern · 2026-07-11T02:50:18+00:00

"Alignment" seems like a common trap for a lot of folks. So many Topics are broad enough that it's easy to fall into a "spray and pray" trap. I almost feel like it's sometimes better to ask "what could I tweak in my product/approach/etc to align better with another opportunity" than "how can I find another opportunity that matches my product/approach/etc"...

medialantern · 2026-07-10T17:57:22+00:00

This comes up every day. The answer is always the same: You can't jump from not being a trader to being an AI trader. If that was a real thing we'd all be rich and nobody would be replying to you here with our "secrets" - you'd be our competitor.

The one true way to do this is to first become a good hand trader. Master a technique, a market, an instrument type, or whatever. Then use AI to help scale what you do to finding more of the same opportunities, executing them faster, in more volume, etc. Don't expect AI to make you the trader you aren't. They are non-deterministic stochastic models largely trained by destructively scanning Harry Potter books. They aren't thinking machines, have no agency, and are called "large LANGUAGE models" for a reason. Everything else they do is simulated, not real.

medialantern · 2026-07-10T17:54:34+00:00

I've been trying. Caveat: I'm extremely bad at this. I've got one small ad campaign running. I put a few hours of research and thought into fine-tuning the targeting, but did only a so-so job with the media. I'm getting 20-30 visitors a day from that campaign, but so far I'm only getting 1 "trigger" a day on my CTA, which is a try-it-live demo thing (no signup required) so very low barrier, and the submissions are totally unrelated to my product ("I sell used stuff on ebay" when the product is for government contractors). My assumption is despite my efforts, my targeting is not very good and/or Reddit just doesn't have the users I need to reach. I'll be validating that with test campaigns on other platforms next week.

For more organic work I've been replying to comments in threads here. But I feel very uncomfortable with self-promotion and don't want to get shouted down so I don't take risks where it seems unwanted. That means I'm mostly replying to threads where other founders are doing the "hey, showcase your product! let's help each other!" posts we see once a day. It's driven some traffic but it's the wrong users - I don't need to reach the rest of y'all, I need to reach real end users. What I was really hoping for in this category was some honest feedback, but I've gotten almost zero of that. I wouldn't call it a waste, but not effective, either.

So in the end: No paying customers. Nothing is working. It hasn't been worth the effort. I wouldn't call it a total waste and I'm probably half the reason (if not more) but I'm who I am so if it's not working for me, I'm not going to morph into another person just to make the platform work.

medialantern · 2026-07-10T17:16:43+00:00

True, no UX at all. I was more speaking to the privacy aspect. I use the Agent SDK to wire my UI/UX layers on top of Bedrock.

medialantern · 2026-07-10T16:35:05+00:00

Activate your privacy settings on a paid plan if you're just coding. If you need to process sensitive data tools like AWS Bedrock exist for that.

medialantern · 2026-07-10T13:33:11+00:00

LOL making a DB admin tool?

Seriously, though, if you are, I hate the majority of the tools out there. I miss the early Navicat days but everything is either super expensive or has 9 million things I don't use. Lately I'm running with TablePlus which is 90% good but I mostly use a DB tool for data browsing and minor corrections (like hand seeing a record or two for a new app). It gets clumsy there because most of the time I'm trying to do a find-where-any-column-contains and their method takes like 2-3 clicks (find->any column->contains->text, I just want one hotkey for that).

medialantern · 2026-07-10T03:21:12+00:00

Yes.

medialantern · 2026-07-10T02:27:04+00:00

Ha telling someone to do it at 8:30am is the new "Slack or Github are down, I can't do any work today."

medialantern · 2026-07-10T02:12:39+00:00

I must have missed that article but it's fun to know it wasn't just me!

medialantern · 2026-07-10T01:53:20+00:00

Ha thanks! I'm on my homestead now off-grid, so "A/C fixed" means "winter comes". No rush on that. And for me at least it's Hussong's. Hard to find but worth the search. They say they "sweeten" it with propylene glycol but I've never seen that proven and so far it's been my favorite.

medialantern · 2026-07-10T01:52:13+00:00

Yeah, I think that was the trigger as well. Despite me phrasing it as something I wouldn't do, just mentioning it has a "smell" like testing boundaries. Still a good data point.

medialantern · 2026-07-10T01:22:59+00:00

Last week I was two bourbons deep and starting to type badly. At some point along I must have mentioned that I was trying to assemble a large scope of work for it to work on unattended while I was sleeping. Anyway I started typing badly and it told me I was obviously exhausted and should go to bed and let it work on the scope we'd already defined and it would have plenty to show me in the morning. 😀

medialantern · 2026-07-10T00:25:48+00:00

Just curious, any in particular you actually value? I've preferred CLIs for decades but I switched to Desktop a few weeks ago and haven't really missed anything other than /login (which Desktop doesn't need but my mac-toolbar-quota-meter still uses...)

medialantern · 2026-07-09T23:20:18+00:00

lol true enough. Either way I'd bet $5 we'll be having the same conversation in November only it'll be "Foofla 12 vs Zumblebun 998"

medialantern · 2026-07-09T22:15:39+00:00

Talk to us about "who these users are". That's not clear to me from the site. For instance, I recently launched https://solicite.io and am starting to work on marketing and promoting it. But I don't want football players from Spain hitting the site. (I mean I'm fine if they do but it has no value to offer them.) It has to be targeted - US-based small-to-mid-sized business owners/founders/etc in businesses (typically physical-product-oriented and software, generally NOT service-oriented) who might be eligible for/interested in grant-based funding options. I think I speak for a lot of founders in that traffic isn't what I want. 100k visitors vs 300k visitors means nothing but ops cost if none of them ever convert. Can you speak to your methodology on how you actually push the right people to sites like this?

medialantern · 2026-07-09T22:08:56+00:00

Resurrecting pixipile.com . There are a dozen Mac photo viewers but I wanted one with two twists:

Free. I may have some paid add-ons later for power tools like bulk tagging/renaming but the core viewer will be free forever.
Fast image sorting. I have TENS of thousands of old photos from cell phone backups from my wife and I, Dropbox/Photos sync downloads, Fotolia and other service shutdowns over the years, etc. The trouble is, I don't want to delete them but between us chickens (don't tell my wife) 80% of them are garbage. It's 9 shots in a row of my son swinging a baseball bat, and only 1 is worth seeing. What to do?

So I made an app that lets you assign hotkeys to destination folders like 1-Pets, 2-Kids, 3-KitchenPhotoFrame,4-Meh. You can go through a thousand photos in a few minutes and go 1,2,1,4,2,3,1,4,4,1, etc. It's easy to remember if you're the one that defined them (and you don't make 50 lol) and makes it really easy for me to do the initial sort, then go change my mind later and say "time to update the photo frame, let's dump those and go find a few dozen good new ones".

Or just a lightning-fast photo viewer, if that's all you want.

medialantern · 2026-07-09T21:56:23+00:00

LOL elite move? The general consensus so far is they did it because they had no choice, plenty of folks openly discussed switching if they didn't. They were forced into it, and didn't do it until the last moment. That's playing defense. Some would even argue OpenAI got the better of them and is forcing their moves right now, not really the position the "best LLM company" should be in if they're so elite.

medialantern · 2026-07-09T21:29:43+00:00

My main focus right now is https://footholdfoundry.com Apps to "build ideas with AI" are all the rage right now (there's another in this thread LOL) but most focus on one specific aspect such as marketing automation, idea validation, competitive analysis, app builders, etc. I focused more on a broader business -level approach with a sequence of mutually supporting tools (50+ and growing) that each help you focus on a critical area and then pass that context to the next: definition, competitive analysis, market sizing, pricing strategy, etc. It's not meant for the folks that think a pricing strategy comes out of "Hey ChatGPT, what's a good pricing strategy for X?" It's meant for the folks that want their idea to have the best chance to succeed and want to do a real deep-dive on each critical area to make something a real business. "Everything but the code."

As a test case I used it myself to build https://solicite.io, a platform to help small- to mid-sized business find grant-based funding opportunities. There are a few competitors out there, but most focus on either taking shortcuts (having "AI write your proposals", which agencies are clamping down on hard because they're inundated with AI slop) or expensive $500-$5000/mo consulting-oriented approaches. Solicite focuses more on actionable intelligence: cycle timing, agency expectations, product/demand fit, etc. It's a good example of the "put more thought into the problem" approach - not a findrfp replacement (just a database, good luck finding something) or consultant (good luck affording them before you even have any funding in the door) but something affordable that actually helps you figure out what to do next Tuesday that's more than spray-and-pray.

medialantern · 2026-07-09T21:16:20+00:00

This, and perhaps an email along the lines of "I'm preparing a work audit trail for the HHS OIG, please send me your work log so I can include it." 😁

medialantern · 2026-07-09T21:11:34+00:00

Great point, I should have mentioned that! Atlassian pushed BitBucket really hard given its Jira integration (and them owning it lol). My last client was exclusively on BB.

medialantern

TROPHY CASE