Comment by minimaltom
10 hours ago
Some of what OP is saying generalizes to the concept of being "too early" - if you are early, your engineering / innovation spend is used to discover that at-the-time reasonable ideas don't work, or don't work with the current appetite, whereas later entrants can skip this exploration and start with a simple copycat.
My (business-school) partner reminds me that first movers are seldom winners.
That perfectly surmised my experience. I've been "too early" far too frequently.
Before ElevenLabs, I built an AI TTS website that got 6.5 million monthly users at peak [1]. PewDiePie and various musicians were using it. It didn't have zero shot or fine tuning, so it got wiped out pretty easily when ElevenLabs arrived.
Before Image-to-Video models got good and popular, I built a ridiculous 3D nonlinear video editor [2] for crazy people that might want to use mocap gear and timelines to control AI animation. You couldn't control the starting frame, which sucked, but you could control the precise animation minus hallucination artifacts. Luma Labs Dream Machine came out just a few weeks after our launch and utterly wiped the floor with our entire approach.
I was late to build an aggregator, but I'm a filmmaker and I'm stubborn and passionate. I'm now trying to undercut the website aggregators with a fair source desktop "bring your own keys" system [3]. Hopefully I'm "just in time" for these systems to become desktop, with spatially controllable blocking, and with "world model" integration (nobody else has that yet). It's also Rust and when I port the UX to Bevy, it's gonna sing.
[1] https://github.com/storytold/artcraft
Hey, if you are ever looking for a job at Krea, just let me know!