This is a good article and hopefully it served its purpose of generating awareness for the platform but I have to disagree with the core claim of the article.
Distribution was always the hardest part in building a business, sure today it’s easier to vibe code something in a day or two but there is a reason that for a long time now the standard advice to technical founders has been to not build before you have conviction on the product market fit.
And product market fit means that you have also figured out how to get to the market, aka distribution.
A related dynamic: even getting attention requires increasingly fantastical and absurd claims. You basically have to lie about what your product is capable of because your competitors are. If you're making an app to find and save recipes, you have to pitch it as an AI chef that will find delicious, customized recipes that will cure your diabetes while also making you last longer in bed. There's so much mania right now that your traction will outpace any public criticism or scrutiny, and you'll get acquired by Amazon for $50M within a couple years. Crazy times.
F500/large enterprise buyers are getting questionnaire-fatigue from endless internal AI security, compliance, and legal reviews that they actively avoid products who market "AI" as their primary feature.
The rules of product market fit and go-to-market fit remain the same. Customers will always buy the product, AI or not, that both solves their problem and is priced/marketed in a way that makes it possible to purchase.
> The fourth thing is that I am trying out marketing ads on social media and that includes posting ads on Facebook and Reddit. I'm doing a smaller ad spend at first to see if it is worth spending extra money on advertising on certain platforms.
Drill into this. Really optimize and test. The more I learn about marketing, the more I recognize that paid ads can and do work, but you must really persist with them.
Learned a lot from Alex Hormozi, Allan Dib, and Seth Godin. Start there.
It seems like if I were looking for software to do something specific, I might do a Google search, or ask an AI to do some searches for me. I wouldn't be interested in browsing this sort of website even if it had a lot more content.
Are there other people who find software this way? I've heard of Product Hunt, but never used it.
It’s inevitable the ads end up in code. How much would a third party ORM library creator pay Anthropic to get Claude to use their ORM wherever possible and then prompt the user to buy a license to continue? Think about that across different use cases and not just code. It would be bigger than Adsense.
> "Claude" is a (registered) trademark of Anthropic PBC.
The author is attempting to bait Anthropic by using their registered trademarked product name to send a cease and desist for attention. This is how it works:
1. Anthropic sends the cease and desist and tells him to change the (domain) name. The author does it quickly.
2. The author then in another blog post says he got so much attention, Anthropic tried to shut him down.
3. Everyone falls for it and the author relaunches with the new project / domain name + with more attention.
The domain similarity and layout looks like a setup for that purpose for manufactured drama and attention so that he can make another post crying wolf about Anthropic shutting him down.
Distribution was always the hardest part in building a business, sure today it’s easier to vibe code something in a day or two but there is a reason that for a long time now the standard advice to technical founders has been to not build before you have conviction on the product market fit.
And product market fit means that you have also figured out how to get to the market, aka distribution.
F500/large enterprise buyers are getting questionnaire-fatigue from endless internal AI security, compliance, and legal reviews that they actively avoid products who market "AI" as their primary feature.
The rules of product market fit and go-to-market fit remain the same. Customers will always buy the product, AI or not, that both solves their problem and is priced/marketed in a way that makes it possible to purchase.
Drill into this. Really optimize and test. The more I learn about marketing, the more I recognize that paid ads can and do work, but you must really persist with them.
Learned a lot from Alex Hormozi, Allan Dib, and Seth Godin. Start there.
Are there other people who find software this way? I've heard of Product Hunt, but never used it.
the big platforms are sort of tolerated because you can't really escape them, not because people like them
another small one? nah, thank you, I have plenty of my own useless projects to look after
Anyone else’s slop detector go off on this sentence? Or am I losing it?
If the author doesn’t have the time or care to write it, why should have the time or care to read it?
The author is attempting to bait Anthropic by using their registered trademarked product name to send a cease and desist for attention. This is how it works:
1. Anthropic sends the cease and desist and tells him to change the (domain) name. The author does it quickly.
2. The author then in another blog post says he got so much attention, Anthropic tried to shut him down.
3. Everyone falls for it and the author relaunches with the new project / domain name + with more attention.
The domain similarity and layout looks like a setup for that purpose for manufactured drama and attention so that he can make another post crying wolf about Anthropic shutting him down.