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Comment by jreynar

11 hours ago

It's nice to see an explanation of how they think you should use Claude for a host of different job functions / aspects of building a business, but the tone makes it seem like founding a startup is something you wake up one morning and just decide to do instead of, say, going to the park. Over coffee, you ask Claude about your idea and when it tells you "you're a genius" you're off. That's silly in so many ways. Statements like this "Validation cycles that used to take months now take afternoons" have an element of truth but ring with false promise.

And that relates to the lack of timelines and focus on how long things took around 2020 BC, that is Before Claude. Building a startup isn't like having a lemonade stand as a kid where you just don't bother to do it if you forget to buy lemons or it's rainy or something more fun comes along. There's a significant compound interest element to startups that's easy to overlook. Your codebase grows over time and so does your feature set and that collection of features attracts customers in a way one thing might not. You learn as go, of course, too.

This seems particularly relevant to the GTM section, which I was particularly amused by since that's what I'm focused on right now. It's a long game. Your blog post doesn't get found by anyone in Google until you've built up your SEO mojo, your LinkedIn post isn't read without the followers you need to accumulate and your content has to get engagement for people to see it even then, you don't start off line with a million followers on X, etc.

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jreynar

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doctoboggan  5 hours ago

> Your blog post doesn't get found by anyone in Google until you've built up your SEO mojo, your LinkedIn post isn't read without the followers you need to accumulate and your content has to get engagement for people to see it even then, you don't start off line with a million followers on X, etc.

I hate that this is true. It's the worst part about selling stuff online IMO and I found that you have to spend so much time doing it. In many cases, selling something online can be optimized to the extreme such that spend on marketing should be as high as possible and spend on the product R&D, manufacturing, support, etc should be minimized as much as possible. This equation gives you the most profit, but also gives the customer the absolute worst product that is possible to sell.

Capitalism doesn't really have a solution to this problem that I've seen yet.

  • pgraf  1 hour ago

    This problem really bothers me as well. I think that ultimately this problem boils down to reducing search cost[0], which the internet has already partially done. I think AI will reduce them further if it is not captured by the advertisement industry for the average user. However, we cannot assume a fully rational customer in the real world. Especially in software, the customer does not know what they are looking for most of the time. Further they cannot evaluate how good your offering is vs competitors without investing a significant amount of time, which in turn increases search cost.

    [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_cost

  • fragmede  3 hours ago

    Capitalism's solution to this "problem" is competition. If your widget sucks, but is cheaper, and mine is more. expensive, but better, then it's up to consumers to differentiate. eg Dyson makes expensive versions of gadgets. Some people see the value, others call them overpriced and then complain when the cheap knockoff sucks. It's -an imperfect system, but the free market is the solution to that problem.

empath75  9 hours ago

> the tone makes it seem like founding a startup is something you wake up one morning and just decide to do instead of, say, going to the park.

I'm not sure it's a crazy idea when you can run a whole revenue generating company with basically zero employees. You could have a successful 'startup' generating 200k in revenue a year, you just need to cover the cost of your anthropic subscription.