Comment by autoconfig
9 days ago
> When creation was hard, skill was the differentiator: you had to actually be good to make something worth showing. Now the barrier is near zero, so you need reach. Reach costs money or it costs years. Probably both.
Creation has progressively been getting easier since the invention of the computer, it is not a new phenomena. This naturally pushes the boundary on what needs to be delivered in order to find paying customers. In other words, creation still is "hard" if you want to succeed.
> I launched something last week. 14 people signed up — no ads, just a couple of posts. 14 real people who didn't have to. That number is tiny and it felt like something. Then I sat down to think about what it would take to grow it and I couldn't look at that math for very long.
This applies to 90+% of founders that have ever launched something. The hard part comes from continuing to push forward when you experience this (which you will over and over). It sounds like the author expects that what was hard suddenly should be easy.
sounds like the author is discovering business.
I didn't read the article, but yes, going from 0-1,1-10 is really hard and really rewarding. And it got easier with the Internet. Going from 10-1k and 1k-1M is a different ball-game. Always was.
The dream of running my own company got me to learn programming. 20 years later I'm an employee at a company still dreaming of running my own company. But now I can realize that reality and dreams are not the same and that's ok. As in, I probably really don't want to run my own company. We'll see =P
>> The dream of running my own company got me to learn programming. 20 years later I'm an employee at a company still dreaming of running my own company. But now I can realize that reality and dreams are not the same and that's ok. As in, I probably really don't want to run my own company. We'll see =P
To me having one own's company was just a means to the end: making enough money to live comfortably without the need to get a job ever again for the rest of my life. I too learned programming as a means to achieve that end but eventually realized that I don't need a company if I can short-circuit the path to money. By switching to the right domain - finance, where what I learn might be eventually put to use directly by investing capital into profitable trading strategies.
Back to OP's article, if there's a domain where money as a moat is not a problem, that's definitely finance: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-and...
I work in this domain since almost 20 years and can tell you, noone's gonna risk a billion dollars on crap vibe coded by AI. I wrote before, I don't know what crack these AI people are smoking but when there's real stakes at play, they don't play around with toys. And AI in programming is a toy. The unlikely triumph of "Can I haz teh codez?" CTRL+C / CTRL+V "prompt experts" (mocking it, lol) strategy on Stack Overflow, along with the people who employ it.
I'm not worried about MY particular future in this industry. I'm not worried that AI is gonna replace me, us, or write anything significant here at all in the foreseeable future until it fucking evolves into AGI which is somewhere 5000 years from now, optimistically.
The party's gotta come to an end really soon along with the figures on how much money AI makes versus it's real utility - which is, simply stated, "a toy".
Not necessary but here's my mood while writing this comment: - listening to this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EWqTym2cQU&list=RD6EWqTym2c...
It's absolutely wild to see how unevenly distributed the future we're living in is.
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In the game of business, quitting = losing.
Something I've noticed a lot with Twitch streamers and YouTubers is that many of them want the outcome and are prepared to do the work, but want some sort of guarantee of success. It's very difficult to really sell to people that you will work very hard for a while and there's absolutely no promise that you'll ever have more than 14 subscribers. That's simply the core risk of entrepreneurship.
Also, as someone who's main source of income is a YouTube channel: there is a type of threshold effect, where your videos are not good enough to watch until one day they suddenly are.
This means that until you reach that threshold, it feels like you're not making progress, cause every video just gets the same result (no views). Even if below the surface, you're slowly inching closer to that moment where your videos will actually be watched.
I have the impression it's more of a "bait and switch" thing. People get into streaming thinking they can just play games and make money, but then they realize nobody is going to watch someone play game X, they all want to watch game Y, because game Y is popular right now among the people who have the most time to play games and watch streams (kids). So they enter the industry thinking they can just do whatever they want, and quickly realize they have to do infinite things they don't want to actually reach the level of popularity they need.
The thing is, the barrier isn't near zero. The time to reach an MVP has just decreased. But you still very much need expertise, strategy, etc. to deliver something worthwhile. The bar has just increased.
You've basically chosen to ignore the whole AI argument as if it was just another tool and we had business as usual. Given how pervasive and fast developing it is, there should be an argument why it can be dismissed so easily.
> Creation has progressively been getting easier since the invention of the computer, it is not a new phenomena. This naturally pushes the boundary on what needs to be delivered in order to find paying customers. In other words, creation still is "hard" if you want to succeed.
Only for developers. Outside of software creation is still hard. Global markets giving access to excellent manufacturing sure does help, but software is a bubble.
Creating marketing material has certainly gotten easier as well, it used to require a lot of work to create these spam pamphlets and company documents but today its trivial. Of course those are worthless to society so didn't help GDP but it filled our society with advertisements and spam and filled companies with worthless documents since now nobody thinks before making one.
Seriously you can ship in a week things that FAANGs would have paid billions for 10 years ago.
LLMs are just glue between pieces of your code you still need to be able to plug them into a coherent architecture to do something impressive.
Apple Pay (launched around 12 years ago, and likely costing billions) is exactly the counter-example here. The 'code' was the easy part. The moat was the decade of hardware R&D and the leverage to force banks to adopt a new standard. An LLM might write the API wrapper in seconds, but it can't hallucinate a relationship with Visa and Mastercard. You literally cannot create a new Apple Pay in a week or even years, no matter how much you vibe code.
I'm sometimes baffled by what people think can pass as a product in a real sense.
To the extent that’s true it has much, much more to do with AWS, open source libraries, and collective knowledge, than it does LLMs.
But I honestly can’t think of anything you could do in a week that a company in 2015 would have paid billions for unless it’s something like tweaking an LLM. But in that case it’s the original model, not the 1 week or work you put in.
OK, say you build a Whatsapp clone in a week. How many Whatsapp users will switch to your app?
> things that FAANGs would have paid billions for 10 years ago
such as?
I can only assume the grandparent means Google+
I mean literally anything that leverages modern APIs.
WYSIWG Site Builders, text Chat bots, audio Transcription, voice synthesis.
Yeah building from scratch would take longer, but you can slap a UI, a DB/schema around modern APIs and output something that would be science fiction 10 years ago.
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i would argue that reach has already been the biggest limiting factor for the last 10 even 20 years.
It's just another way of saying "Ideas are worthless, execution is what matters" which has always been largely true.
Yes, you need the idea first of course. But that's truly the easy part. 99% of "ideas" rely on great execution to be worth even looking at - much less paying for - for anyone else.
That isn't what it's saying and I don't think the idea that "execution is what matters" is even true, other than to point out that ideas aren't valuable by themselves.
This is about marketing, about getting people to know and care that the thing you built exists. You can execute perfectly (in terms of making a great product) and not get a single eyeball.
> You can execute perfectly (in terms of making a great product) and not get a single eyeball.
that's a tautological statement - if not a single eyeball is on the product, then you obviously didnt make a great product. after all, who determines a product is great? It's those eyeballs, not the creator.