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Advice Needed: How to Choose a Research Paper to Implement for Learning AI

Hi everyone, I'm currently diving into AI and planning to implement a research paper to strengthen my understanding and gain hands-on experience. However, I'm a bit overwhelmed by the vast number of papers out there and unsure how to pick the right one, I have some coding experience, but I’m still growing in terms of implementing more complex algorithms Any resources, personal experiences, or advice would be greatly appreciated!

Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics

For anyone working on LLM / AI startups

My company (which I will not promote) wrote this blog post in compliance with rule #7 :) Introduction to fine-tuning Large Language Models, or LLMs, have become commonplace in the tech world. The number of applications that LLMs are revolutionizing is multiplying by the day — extraction use cases, chatbots, tools for creatives and engineers. In spite of this, at its core, the LLM is a multi-purpose neural network, dozens of layers deep, designed to simply predict one word after the next. It predicts words by performing billions of matrix multiplication steps based on so-called parameter weights, which are discovered during the model training process. Almost all open-source, open-weight models are trained on a massive amount of text from every conceivable genre and topic. How, then, do researchers and engineers create novel specialized applications? The answer is fine-tuning. In this post, we will demystify the process of fine-tuning and discuss the tradeoffs of other approaches to customizing an LLM. The history of fine-tuning In the ancient days of LLMs, by which we mean five years ago, the primary approaches to customizing an LLM was identical to the approaches to customizing any other deep learning model. A machine learning engineer would have two options: Retrain the entire LLM. This would mean discarding the trained weights and instead only using the open source model’s architecture to train it on a specialized dataset. As long as the amount and diversity of the specialized data is comparable to what the original model was trained on, this can be the ideal method of customizing a model. However, of course, this is a massive waste of resources due to the computational power required and the difficulty of collecting such a massive dataset. Even if an organization could provision enough GPUs, the cost of training modern-day models could cost up to $190 million. Retrain the last few layers of the LLM while keeping the rest of the weights frozen. This is a more efficient method in terms of time and computational power required because it significantly cuts down the number of parameters that need to be trained. However, for most tasks, this leads to subpar quality. Of course, almost everyone chooses to retrain the last few layers. And where there is only one option, the research community saw an opportunity to step in. Soon, the LLM space saw an enormous amount of activity in fine-tuning, which leads us to today. Modern approaches to fine-tuning Most fine-tuning approaches today are parameter-efficient. Deep neural networks are composed of matrices and vectors (generally called tensors), which are at their core arrays of floating point numbers. By training a small subset of these tensors, while the rest of the LLM’s weights are kept frozen, practitioners achieve good enough results without having to retrain the entire model. Generally, this method requires at least a hundred or so handcrafted examples of input-output pairs for fine-tuning. This is called supervised learning. The modern fine-tuning landscape involves an unsupervised learning step afterwards. Given a set of inputs, a practitioner gathers the various possible outputs from the LLM and casts votes among them. This preference data is then used to further train the LLM’s weights. Usually, this approach is used for LLM alignment and safety, which defends the application from malicious uses, outputs embarrassing to the organization, and prompt injection attacks. Fine-tuning’s relationship to prompt engineering A natural question arises: why fine-tune instead of crafting a well-considered system prompt? Wouldn’t that be easier and more efficient? The answer is no, it wouldn’t. Here’s why: Advanced techniques make prompt engineering obsolete: \[redacted\]'s product uses soft-prompting and other techniques to train the input layer itself. This obviates the need for prompt engineering entirely, which lets organizations avoid the time-consuming trial-and-error process to get the prompt just right. Prompt engineering has been a stopgap measure in the early days of LLM applications to convey the practitioner’s intent to the LLM. It is not the long-term solution for LLM application development. The system prompt is precious: the limited budget for system prompt length is better used for up-to-date information, e.g., Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Even as context windows increase in size with each new open-source model, the system prompt is the least efficient place to provide the LLM model with verbose instructions and examples. The longer the prompt, the slower the application: an LLM must attend to the entire system prompt for each token generated. This pain becomes more acute in the chatbot case, where the length of the conversation so far is also counted toward the system context. The longer the conversation, and the longer your beautifully-crafted system prompt, the slower the bot becomes. Even in cases where the model allows for system prompts that are millions of tokens long, doubling the size of the context will quadruple the latency. This means adding a few hundred words to the system prompt may result in several seconds of additional latency in production, making a chatbot impossible to use. Edge case handling: the number of edge cases that the system prompt would need to consider and emphasize to the LLM is too large. The instructions would have to be too nuanced and long to cover them all. However, fine-tuning on a dataset that considers these edge cases would be more straightforward. Do I need to fine-tune the LLM in my production application? Every LLM application in production must be fine-tuned often, not just once at the beginning. Why fine-tune? The world in which the application exists is constantly evolving. New prompt injection attacks are being discovered every day, new ways of embarrassing a chatbot are emerging constantly. This data can be used to further train an LLM model, which protects the application from new failure modes and reputational risk. Like any software, LLM models are constantly improving. Smarter and faster models are open-sourced all the time. For a new model to get deployed to production, it must first be finetuned on the specific dataset of the organization building the application. Fine-tuning does not add latency to LLM applications. Rather than a solution that sits in the middle of the LLM and the rest of the application, fine-tuning leverages the power of the LLM itself to increase the quality of the output. In fact, fine-tuning allows for shorter system prompts, which speeds up the average response generation time.

How a founder built a B2B AI startup to serve with 65+ global brands (including Fortune500 companies) (I will not promote)

AI Palette is an AI-driven platform that helps food and beverage companies predict emerging product trends. I had the opportunity recently to sit down with the founder to get his advice on building an AI-first startup, which he'll be going through in this post. (I will not promote) About AI Palette: Co-founders: >!2 (Somsubhra GanChoudhuri, Himanshu Upreti)!!100+!!$12.7M USD!!AI-powered predictive analytics for the CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) industry!!Signed first paying customer in the first year!!65+ global brands, including Cargill, Diageo, Ajinomoto, Symrise, Mondelez, and L’Oréal, use AI Palette!!Every new product launched has secured a paying client within months!!Expanded into Beauty & Personal Care (BPC), onboarding one of India’s largest BPC companies within weeks!!Launched multiple new product lines in the last two years, creating a unified suite for brand innovation!Identify the pain points in your industry for ideas* When I was working in the flavour and fragrance industry, I noticed a major issue CPG companies faced: launching a product took at least one to two years. For instance, if a company decided today to launch a new juice, it wouldn’t hit the market until 2027. This long timeline made it difficult to stay relevant and on top of trends. Another big problem I noticed was that companies relied heavily on market research to determine what products to launch. While this might work for current consumer preferences, it was highly inefficient since the product wouldn’t actually reach the market for several years. By the time the product launched, the consumer trends had already shifted, making that research outdated. That’s where AI can play a crucial role. Instead of looking at what consumers like today, we realised that companies should use AI to predict what they will want next. This allows businesses to create products that are ahead of the curve. Right now, the failure rate for new product launches is alarmingly high, with 8 out of 10 products failing. By leveraging AI, companies can avoid wasting resources on products that won’t succeed, leading to better, more successful launches. Start by talking to as many industry experts as possible to identify the real problems When we first had the idea for AI Palette, it was just a hunch, a gut feeling—we had no idea whether people would actually pay for it. To validate the idea, we reached out to as many people as we could within the industry. Since our focus area was all about consumer insights, we spoke to professionals in the CPG sector, particularly those in the insights departments of CPG companies. Through these early conversations, we began to see a common pattern emerge and identified the exact problem we wanted to solve. Don’t tell people what you’re building—listen to their frustrations and challenges first. Going into these early customer conversations, our goal was to listen and understand their challenges without telling them what we were trying to build. This is crucial as it ensures that you can gather as much data about the problem to truly understand it and that you aren't biasing their answers by showing your solution. This process helped us in two key ways: First, it validated that there was a real problem in the industry through the number of people who spoke about experiencing the same problem. Second, it allowed us to understand the exact scale and depth of the problem—e.g., how much money companies were spending on consumer research, what kind of tools they were currently using, etc. Narrow down your focus to a small, actionable area to solve initially. Once we were certain that there was a clear problem worth solving, we didn’t try to tackle everything at once. As a small team of two people, we started by focusing on a specific area of the problem—something big enough to matter but small enough for us to handle. Then, we approached customers with a potential solution and asked them for feedback. We learnt that our solution seemed promising, but we wanted to validate it further. If customers are willing to pay you for the solution, it’s a strong validation signal for market demand. One of our early customer interviewees even asked us to deliver the solution, which we did manually at first. We used machine learning models to analyse the data and presented the results in a slide deck. They paid us for the work, which was a critical moment. It meant we had something with real potential, and we had customers willing to pay us before we had even built the full product. This was the key validation that we needed. By the time we were ready to build the product, we had already gathered crucial insights from our early customers. We understood the specific information they wanted and how they wanted the results to be presented. This input was invaluable in shaping the development of our final product. Building & Product Development Start with a simple concept/design to validate with customers before building When we realised the problem and solution, we began by designing the product, but not by jumping straight into coding. Instead, we created wireframes and user interfaces using tools like InVision and Figma. This allowed us to visually represent the product without the need for backend or frontend development at first. The goal was to showcase how the product would look and feel, helping potential customers understand its value before we even started building. We showed these designs to potential customers and asked for feedback. Would they want to buy this product? Would they pay for it? We didn’t dive into actual development until we found a customer willing to pay a significant amount for the solution. This approach helped us ensure we were on the right track and didn’t waste time or resources building something customers didn’t actually want. Deliver your solution using a manual consulting approach before developing an automated product Initially, we solved problems for customers in a more "consulting" manner, delivering insights manually. Recall how I mentioned that when one of our early customer interviewees asked us to deliver the solution, we initially did it manually by using machine learning models to analyse the data and presenting the results to them in a slide deck. This works for the initial stages of validating your solution, as you don't want to invest too much time into building a full-blown MVP before understanding the exact features and functionalities that your users want. However, after confirming that customers were willing to pay for what we provided, we moved forward with actual product development. This shift from a manual service to product development was key to scaling in a sustainable manner, as our building was guided by real-world feedback and insights rather than intuition. Let ongoing customer feedback drive iteration and the product roadmap Once we built the first version of the product, it was basic, solving only one problem. But as we worked closely with customers, they requested additional features and functionalities to make it more useful. As a result, we continued to evolve the product to handle more complex use cases, gradually developing new modules based on customer feedback. Product development is a continuous process. Our early customers pushed us to expand features and modules, from solving just 20% of their problems to tackling 50–60% of their needs. These demands shaped our product roadmap and guided the development of new features, ultimately resulting in a more complete solution. Revenue and user numbers are key metrics for assessing product-market fit. However, critical mass varies across industries Product-market fit (PMF) can often be gauged by looking at the size of your revenue and the number of customers you're serving. Once you've reached a certain critical mass of customers, you can usually tell that you're starting to hit product-market fit. However, this critical mass varies by industry and the type of customers you're targeting. For example, if you're building an app for a broad consumer market, you may need thousands of users. But for enterprise software, product-market fit may be reached with just a few dozen key customers. Compare customer engagement and retention with other available solutions on the market for product-market fit Revenue and the number of customers alone isn't always enough to determine if you're reaching product-market fit. The type of customer and the use case for your product also matter. The level of engagement with your product—how much time users are spending on the platform—is also an important metric to track. The more time they spend, the more likely it is that your product is meeting a crucial need. Another way to evaluate product-market fit is by assessing retention, i.e whether users are returning to your platform and relying on it consistently, as compared to other solutions available. That's another key indication that your solution is gaining traction in the market. Business Model & Monetisation Prioritise scalability Initially, we started with a consulting-type model where we tailor-made specific solutions for each customer use-case we encountered and delivered the CPG insights manually, but we soon realized that this wasn't scalable. The problem with consulting is that you need to do the same work repeatedly for every new project, which requires a large team to handle the workload. That is not how you sustain a high-growth startup. To solve this, we focused on building a product that would address the most common problems faced by our customers. Once built, this product could be sold to thousands of customers without significant overheads, making the business scalable. With this in mind, we decided on a SaaS (Software as a Service) business model. The benefit of SaaS is that once you create the software, you can sell it to many customers without adding extra overhead. This results in a business with higher margins, where the same product can serve many customers simultaneously, making it much more efficient than the consulting model. Adopt a predictable, simplistic business model for efficiency. Look to industry practices for guidance When it came to monetisation, we considered the needs of our CPG customers, who I knew from experience were already accustomed to paying annual subscriptions for sales databases and other software services. We decided to adopt the same model and charge our customers an annual upfront fee. This model worked well for our target market, aligning with industry standards and ensuring stable, recurring revenue. Moreover, our target CPG customers were already used to this business model and didn't have to choose from a huge variety of payment options, making closing sales a straightforward and efficient process. Marketing & Sales Educate the market to position yourself as a thought leader When we started, AI was not widely understood, especially in the CPG industry. We had to create awareness around both AI and its potential value. Our strategy focused on educating potential users and customers about AI, its relevance, and why they should invest in it. This education was crucial to the success of our marketing efforts. To establish credibility, we adopted a thought leadership approach. We wrote blogs on the importance of AI and how it could solve problems for CPG companies. We also participated in events and conferences to demonstrate our expertise in applying AI to the industry. This helped us build our brand and reputation as leaders in the AI space for CPG, and word-of-mouth spread as customers recognized us as the go-to company for AI solutions. It’s tempting for startups to offer products for free in the hopes of gaining early traction with customers, but this approach doesn't work in the long run. Free offerings don’t establish the value of your product, and customers may not take them seriously. You should always charge for pilots, even if the fee is minimal, to ensure that the customer is serious about potentially working with you, and that they are committed and engaged with the product. Pilots/POCs/Demos should aim to give a "flavour" of what you can deliver A paid pilot/POC trial also gives you the opportunity to provide a “flavour” of what your product can deliver, helping to build confidence and trust with the client. It allows customers to experience a detailed preview of what your product can do, which builds anticipation and desire for the full functionality. During this phase, ensure your product is built to give them a taste of the value you can provide, which sets the stage for a broader, more impactful adoption down the line. Fundraising & Financial Management Leverage PR to generate inbound interest from VCs When it comes to fundraising, our approach was fairly traditional—we reached out to VCs and used connections from existing investors to make introductions. However, looking back, one thing that really helped us build momentum during our fundraising process was getting featured in Tech in Asia. This wasn’t planned; it just so happened that Tech in Asia was doing a series on AI startups in Southeast Asia and they reached out to us for an article. During the interview, they asked if we were fundraising, and we mentioned that we were. As a result, several VCs we hadn’t yet contacted reached out to us. This inbound interest was incredibly valuable, and we found it far more effective than our outbound efforts. So, if you can, try to generate some PR attention—it can help create inbound interest from VCs, and that interest is typically much stronger and more promising than any outbound strategies because they've gone out of their way to reach out to you. Be well-prepared and deliberate about fundraising. Keep trying and don't lose heart When pitching to VCs, it’s crucial to be thoroughly prepared, as you typically only get one shot at making an impression. If you mess up, it’s unlikely they’ll give you a second chance. You need to have key metrics at your fingertips, especially if you're running a SaaS company. Be ready to answer questions like: What’s your retention rate? What are your projections for the year? How much will you close? What’s your average contract value? These numbers should be at the top of your mind. Additionally, fundraising should be treated as a structured process, not something you do on the side while juggling other tasks. When you start, create a clear plan: identify 20 VCs to reach out to each week. By planning ahead, you’ll maintain momentum and speed up the process. Fundraising can be exhausting and disheartening, especially when you face multiple rejections. Remember, you just need one investor to say yes to make it all worthwhile. When using funds, prioritise profitability and grow only when necessary. Don't rely on funding to survive. In the past, the common advice for startups was to raise money, burn through it quickly, and use it to boost revenue numbers, even if that meant operating at a loss. The idea was that profitability wasn’t the main focus, and the goal was to show rapid growth for the next funding round. However, times have changed, especially with the shift from “funding summer” to “funding winter.” My advice now is to aim for profitability as soon as possible and grow only when it's truly needed. For example, it’s tempting to hire a large team when you have substantial funds in the bank, but ask yourself: Do you really need 10 new hires, or could you get by with just four? Growing too quickly can lead to unnecessary expenses, so focus on reaching profitability as soon as possible, rather than just inflating your team or burn rate. The key takeaway is to spend your funds wisely and only when absolutely necessary to reach profitability. You want to avoid becoming dependent on future VC investments to keep your company afloat. Instead, prioritize reaching break-even as quickly as you can, so you're not reliant on external funding to survive in the long run. Team-Building & Leadership Look for complementary skill sets in co-founders When choosing a co-founder, it’s important to find someone with a complementary skill set, not just someone you’re close to. For example, I come from a business and commercial background, so I needed someone with technical expertise. That’s when I found my co-founder, Himanshu, who had experience in machine learning and AI. He was a great match because his technical knowledge complemented my business skills, and together we formed a strong team. It might seem natural to choose your best friend as your co-founder, but this can often lead to conflict. Chances are, you and your best friend share similar interests, skills, and backgrounds, which doesn’t bring diversity to the table. If both of you come from the same industry or have the same strengths, you may end up butting heads on how things should be done. Having diverse skill sets helps avoid this and fosters a more collaborative working relationship. Himanshu (left) and Somsubhra (right) co-founded AI Palette in 2018 Define roles clearly to prevent co-founder conflict To avoid conflict, it’s essential that your roles as co-founders are clearly defined from the beginning. If your co-founder and you have distinct responsibilities, there is no room for overlap or disagreement. This ensures that both of you can work without stepping on each other's toes, and there’s mutual respect for each other’s expertise. This is another reason as to why it helps to have a co-founder with a complementary skillset to yours. Not only is having similar industry backgrounds and skillsets not particularly useful when building out your startup, it's also more likely to lead to conflicts since you both have similar subject expertise. On the other hand, if your co-founder is an expert in something that you're not, you're less likely to argue with them about their decisions regarding that aspect of the business and vice versa when it comes to your decisions. Look for employees who are driven by your mission, not salary For early-stage startups, the first hires are crucial. These employees need to be highly motivated and excited about the mission. Since the salary will likely be low and the work demanding, they must be driven by something beyond just the paycheck. The right employees are the swash-buckling pirates and romantics, i.e those who are genuinely passionate about the startup’s vision and want to be part of something impactful beyond material gains. When employees are motivated by the mission, they are more likely to stick around and help take the startup to greater heights. A litmus test for hiring: Would you be excited to work with them on a Sunday? One of the most important rounds in the hiring process is the culture fit round. This is where you assess whether a candidate shares the same values as you and your team. A key question to ask yourself is: "Would I be excited to work with this person on a Sunday?" If there’s any doubt about your answer, it’s likely not a good fit. The idea is that you want employees who align with the company's culture and values and who you would enjoy collaborating with even outside of regular work hours. How we structure the team at AI Palette We have three broad functions in our organization. The first two are the big ones: Technical Team – This is the core of our product and technology. This team is responsible for product development and incorporating customer feedback into improving the technology Commercial Team – This includes sales, marketing, customer service, account managers, and so on, handling everything related to business growth and customer relations. General and Administrative Team – This smaller team supports functions like finance, HR, and administration. As with almost all businesses, we have teams that address the two core tasks of building (technical team) and selling (commercial team), but given the size we're at now, having the administrative team helps smoothen operations. Set broad goals but let your teams decide on execution What I've done is recruit highly skilled people who don't need me to micromanage them on a day-to-day basis. They're experts in their roles, and as Steve Jobs said, when you hire the right person, you don't have to tell them what to do—they understand the purpose and tell you what to do. So, my job as the CEO is to set the broader goals for them, review the plans they have to achieve those goals, and periodically check in on progress. For example, if our broad goal is to meet a certain revenue target, I break it down across teams: For the sales team, I’ll look at how they plan to hit that target—how many customers they need to sell to, how many salespeople they need, and what tactics and strategies they plan to use. For the technical team, I’ll evaluate our product offerings—whether they think we need to build new products to attract more customers, and whether they think it's scalable for the number of customers we plan to serve. This way, the entire organization's tasks are cascaded in alignment with our overarching goals, with me setting the direction and leaving the details of execution to the skilled team members that I hire.

100 AI-Driven Businesses Later… Here’s the Truth No One Tells You! (I will not promote)

I analyzed 100 businesses across industries that implemented AI, and here’s what I found! Most businesses use AI for: Marketing automation (15%) – email copy, ad creatives, SEO research (ChatGPT, Jasper, Copy.ai) Customer support (12%) – AI chatbots handling up to 70% of inquiries before escalation (Intercom, Drift) Data analysis & insights (10%) – AI summarizing reports, trends in seconds (Tableau AI, ChatGPT for spreadsheets) Sales prospecting (10%) – lead scoring, automated outreach (Apollo.io, HubSpot AI) Workflow automation (8%) – connecting tools and automating repetitive tasks (Zapier, Make.com) Biggest AI adoption challenges: 20% couldn’t decide which AI solution would give the highest ROI 15% faced technical difficulties like integration with existing systems 10% struggled to choose the right tools from too many options Honestly, a lot of businesses waste time on AI solutions that don’t align with their needs. I made a quick questionnaire to help find the right ones tailored to your needs. Let me know if you want to check it out.

Content aggregation that acts as a middleman for content discovery via third-party marketplace & revenue sharing (i will not promote but I'm looking for fellow researchers)

High level I’m considering a content aggregation business model, but one that acts as an open marketplace where third party devs and where world class data scientists compete to build the best recommenders for different use cases. (E.g. the incentives can be ad revenue sharing or subscription based for niche professional markets.) The idea is to facilitate more bottom up innovation from third party data scientists. The platform itself just acts as the middleman. (Also something that strips out original ads and makes it easy to skip paid sponsorship sections would be great.)  I’ve seen startups building web crawlers and content aggregation systems for other AI startups. My proposal is better in the sense that third party devs are instead responsible for implementing whatever questionable hacks are necessarily to scrape platforms that don’t necessarily want to be scraped.  Personally, I’m more concerned about getting the right information than ever before, to this end I can’t rely on platform specific recommenders. The solution is more bottom up innovation in content promotion. More generally, if you’re also concerned about consuming game changing information that’s too easily missed: we need a platform that incentivizes bottom up innovation of content promotion. What we need is a platform that functions like a marketplace where third party devs and where world class data scientists compete to build the best recommenders for different use cases. Here’s some elevator pitches I’m considering:  Did you know that the magic behind YouTube is its recommendation engine? Now, imagine an open platform where independent engines compete to deliver the most personalized content feed—from news to local events—directly to you. Interested in rethinking how we find content? “In today’s fragmented digital landscape, a single platform no longer holds sway over content discovery. The Network Effect is dead: audiences are more mobile than ever; and big tech killed it. In such a fragmented landscape we’re building a bottom-up, decentralized marketplace for recommendation engines—a solution that taps into diverse revenue streams through subscriptions, ad revenue, and affiliate partnerships. Invest in the future of personalized content aggregation.” “Are you a developer passionate about algorithms and content discovery? Our open marketplace lets you build and monetize your own recommendation engine, competing to deliver the most engaging, personalized feeds. Join a revolution where your innovation can directly shape how the world finds content.” “Are you tired of being told what to watch or read by one mysterious algorithm? Imagine taking control—choosing from a marketplace of smart recommendation engines that curate content just for you. It’s a revolution in content discovery where you hold the power.” (As a Utahn this one is interesting because even mormons are talking about the dangers of “doom scrolling” though it’s seldom discussed in society at large.) As far as simple hooks I’m considering:  One platform to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.  Choose how you discover—content recommenders that work for you.  The area where recommender engines battle to win your feed. Request I would love to start prototyping this idea and see what else I can uncover from such preliminary research. But I want to get a couple other likeminded individuals onboard.  I'm the best when it comes to iOS/macOS development, but there's tons of backend work that needs to be done which I wouldn’t have the time for if i'm focused on the native clients. Who am I 'ideally' looking for?  I’ve heard of weird stats to the effect that if you scale up a population to billions of people, the number of life overlaps starts skyrocketing. Not just physical lookalikes, but people with eerily similar life paths, personalities, habits, and even thoughts — without ever knowing each other. Where are my clones? Such is whom I’m looking for in an ideal world.  Take a hunch  People nowadays have no concept of going out on a limb, taking a ‘hunch’, and backing their instincts. Everything has to be calculated, proven, and guaranteed before they make a move. In contrast consider the success of the Chinese DeepSeek project: According to Asianometry’s YouTube video on DeepSeek, their “memory-saving multi-head latent architecture” (whatever that means, just quoting the name) came about from a researchers ‘hunch’, which the company bet big on and the result was drastically improved performance on low end hardware…  Here in the west the idea of betting on a hunch is inconceivable. We have no balls to chase long term insights. My own instincts when it comes to software is such because I’ve wasted too much of my life on small scale projects. All I’m trying to do is attempt a more scaled up experiment based on some hunches with me and a few other likeminded individuals.  Just as the early oil prospectors didn’t have precise maps—just intuition and test drills. They had to drill, analyze the pressure, and adjust. The best oil fields weren’t found by foresight alone, but by adaptive exploration. The startup space itself is liken to the first prospectors who got the gold nuggets lying in the riverbed. In such an environment moving first has its advantages but nowadays I wish I could have all those shitty ‘engineers’ sent to their maker.  Today the reality is such that you’ve got to dig deep—where vast stores of wealth can be found—or go home, and those who dig into the depths cannot use mere forethought, for what lies beneath cannot be seen by the mind’s eye.  I will not promote but I'm looking for fellow research oriented minds.

Seeking advice from non technical founders

I am building a software platform that will help aspiring non technical AI founders go from 0-1 in less than 24 hours. This is not your typical no-code solution but rather a combination of few bespoke solutions that can be built without platform lock-in. Premise of the idea As a technical founder myself, I find that I and others I have met, lack domain knowledge for an industry other than tech. This makes it harder for us to build vertical SaaS. On the other hand, non technical folks don't have a way to build using AI without knowing the technical details of managing AI and the right architecture to use. Solution A platform where you can pick and choose components for an app. Provide it your own data and then let AI do the heavy lifting. Ask If you are a non technical founder, would you be interested in this? What reservation would you have? What would make this a no brainer for you?

Why you should consider using small open source fine-tuned models

Context I want to start off by giving some context on what fine-tuning is, why it's useful and who it would be useful for: What is fine-tuning? When controlling the output of an LLM there are, broadly, three levels. Prompt engineering, RAG and fine-tuning. Most of you are likely familiar with the first two. Prompt engineering is when you try to optimize the prompt to get the model to do what you want better. RAG (retrieval augmented generation) is when you first do a search on some data (usually stored in a vector database which allows you to search by similarity), then you insert the results into the prompt so that the model can use that context to more accurately answer any questions. It's like letting the LLM access external information right before answering, using that additional context to improve its response Fine-tuning is when you want to fundamentally teach a model something new or teach it to behave in a particular way. You would provide the model with high quality data (i.e. inputs and outputs) which it will train on. Why is it useful? At the moment, many of you use the largest and best LLMs because they give the best results. However, for a lot of use cases you are likely using a sledgehammer for a small nail. Does it do a great job? Damn yeah! Well... why not use a smaller hammer? Because it might miss or hit your finger. The solution shouldn't be to use a sledgehammer, but rather to learn how to use a smaller hammer properly so you never miss! That's exactly what fine-tuning a smaller model is like. Once you fine-tune it on a specific task with good high quality data, it can surpass even the best models at that specific task. It'll be 10x cheaper to run, much faster and, if you use an open source model, you'll own the model (no vendor lock-in!). If you run a SaaS and your biggest expense is AI costs then you should definitely consider fine-tuning. It'll take some time to set up but it'll be well worth it in the medium/long term (a bit like SEO). You can always resort to the best models for more complex tasks. How to fine-tune? I'm going to give you a breakdown of the process from beginning to end. You do need to be (a bit) technical in order to do this. Getting the data Let's suppose we want to fine-tune a model to make high-quality SEO content. At the moment, you might be using a large sophisticated prompt or using multiple large LLMs to write different parts or utilizing RAG. This is all slow and expensive but might be giving you great results. Our goal is to replace this with a fine-tuned model that is great at one thing: writing high-quality SEO content quickly at a much lower cost. The first step is gathering the appropriate data. If you want the model to write 3 or 4 paragraphs based on a prompt that contains the topic and a few keywords, then your data should match that. There are a few way you can do this: You can manually gather high-quality SEO content. You'd write the prompt and the response that the model should give. You can use a larger more powerful LLM to generate the content for you (also known as synthetic data). It'll be expensive but remember that it'll be a larger one-off cost to get the data. If you already have a pipeline that works great then you can use the prompts and the generated content that you already have from that pipeline. You can buy a high-quality dataset or get someone to make it for you. The data is the most important part of this process. Remember, garbage in garbage out. Your data needs to have a good variety and should not contain any bad examples. You should aim for around 1000 examples. The more the better! The actual fine-tuning. At this stage you are now ready to choose a model and setup the fine-tuning. If you are unsure I'd stick to the Llama 3.1 family of models. They are great and reliable. There are three models: 8b, 70b and 405b. Depending on the complexity of the task you should select an appropriate size. However, to really reap the cost saving benefits and the speed you should try to stick with the 8b model or the the 70b model if the 8b is not good enough. For our SEO example, let's use the 8b model. Important note on selecting a model: You might see multiple models with the 8b flag. You might see 4bit-bnb or instruct. The instruct version of the models have basically been trained to be chatbots. So if you want to keep the chatbot-like instruction-following functionality then you should use the instruct version as the base. The non-instruct version simply generates text. It won't 'act' like a chatbot which is better for use cases like creative writing. The 4bit-bnb means that the model has been 'quantized'. Basically it has been made 4x smaller (the original is in 16 bits) so that it is faster to download and faster to fine-tune. This slightly reduces the accuracy of the model but it's usually fine for most use cases :) Fine-tuning should be done on a good GPU. CPU aren't good enough. So you can't spin up a droplet on digital ocean and use that. You'll specifically need to spin up a GPU. One website that I think is great is Runpod .io (I am not affiliated with them). You simply pay for the GPU by the hour. If you want the training to be fast you can use the H100, if you want something cheaper but slower you can use the A40. Although the A40 won't be good enough to run the 70b parameter model. For the 405b model you'll need multiple H100s but let's leave that for more advanced use cases. Once you've spun up your H100 and ssh-ed into it. I would recommend using the unsloth open source library to do the fine-tuning. They have great docs and good boilerplate code. You want to train using a method called QLoRA. This won't train the entire model but only "part of it". I don't want to get into the technical details as t3hat isn't important but essentially it's a very efficient and effective way of fine-tuning models. When fine-tuning you can provide something called a 'validation set'. As your model is training it will be tested against the 'validation set' to see how well it's doing. You'll get an 'eval loss' which basically means how well is your model doing when compared with the unseen validation data. If you have 1000 training examples I'd recommend taking out 100-200 so it can act as the validation set. Your model may start off with an eval loss of 1.1 and by the end of the training (e.g. 3 epochs - the number of epochs is the number of times your model will be trained on the entire dataset. It's like reading a book more than once so you can understand it better. Usually 3-5 epochs is enough) the eval loss would drop to 0.6 or 0.7 which means your model has made great progress in learning your dataset! You don't want it to be too low as that means it is literally memorizing which isn't good. Post fine-tuning You'll want to save the model with the best eval loss. You actually won't have the whole model, just something called the "QLoRA adapters". These are basically like the new neurons that contain the "understanding" of the data you trained the model on. You can combine these with the base model (using unsloth again) to prompt the model. You can also (and I recommend this) convert the model to GGUF format (using unsloth again). This basically packages the QLoRA adapters and model together into an optimized format so you can easily and efficiently run it and prompt it (using unsloth again... lol). I would then recommend running some evaluations on the new model. You can do this by simply prompting the new model and a more powerful model (or using your old pipeline) and then asking a powerful model e.g. Claude to judge which is better. If your model consistently does better then you've hit a winner! You can then use runpod again to deploy the model to their serverless AI endpoint so you only pay when it's actually being inferenced. (Again, I'm not affiliated with them) I hope this was useful and you at least got a good idea of what fine-tuning is and how you might go about doing it. By the way, I've just launched a website where you can easily fine-tune Llama 3.1 models. I'm actually hoping to eventually automate this entire process as I believe small fine-tuned models will be much more common in the future. If you want more info, feel free to DM me :)

How a founder built a B2B AI startup to serve with 65+ global brands (including Fortune500 companies) (I will not promote)

AI Palette is an AI-driven platform that helps food and beverage companies predict emerging product trends. I had the opportunity recently to sit down with the founder to get his advice on building an AI-first startup, which he'll be going through in this post. (I will not promote) About AI Palette: Co-founders: >!2 (Somsubhra GanChoudhuri, Himanshu Upreti)!!100+!!$12.7M USD!!AI-powered predictive analytics for the CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) industry!!Signed first paying customer in the first year!!65+ global brands, including Cargill, Diageo, Ajinomoto, Symrise, Mondelez, and L’Oréal, use AI Palette!!Every new product launched has secured a paying client within months!!Expanded into Beauty & Personal Care (BPC), onboarding one of India’s largest BPC companies within weeks!!Launched multiple new product lines in the last two years, creating a unified suite for brand innovation!Identify the pain points in your industry for ideas* When I was working in the flavour and fragrance industry, I noticed a major issue CPG companies faced: launching a product took at least one to two years. For instance, if a company decided today to launch a new juice, it wouldn’t hit the market until 2027. This long timeline made it difficult to stay relevant and on top of trends. Another big problem I noticed was that companies relied heavily on market research to determine what products to launch. While this might work for current consumer preferences, it was highly inefficient since the product wouldn’t actually reach the market for several years. By the time the product launched, the consumer trends had already shifted, making that research outdated. That’s where AI can play a crucial role. Instead of looking at what consumers like today, we realised that companies should use AI to predict what they will want next. This allows businesses to create products that are ahead of the curve. Right now, the failure rate for new product launches is alarmingly high, with 8 out of 10 products failing. By leveraging AI, companies can avoid wasting resources on products that won’t succeed, leading to better, more successful launches. Start by talking to as many industry experts as possible to identify the real problems When we first had the idea for AI Palette, it was just a hunch, a gut feeling—we had no idea whether people would actually pay for it. To validate the idea, we reached out to as many people as we could within the industry. Since our focus area was all about consumer insights, we spoke to professionals in the CPG sector, particularly those in the insights departments of CPG companies. Through these early conversations, we began to see a common pattern emerge and identified the exact problem we wanted to solve. Don’t tell people what you’re building—listen to their frustrations and challenges first. Going into these early customer conversations, our goal was to listen and understand their challenges without telling them what we were trying to build. This is crucial as it ensures that you can gather as much data about the problem to truly understand it and that you aren't biasing their answers by showing your solution. This process helped us in two key ways: First, it validated that there was a real problem in the industry through the number of people who spoke about experiencing the same problem. Second, it allowed us to understand the exact scale and depth of the problem—e.g., how much money companies were spending on consumer research, what kind of tools they were currently using, etc. Narrow down your focus to a small, actionable area to solve initially. Once we were certain that there was a clear problem worth solving, we didn’t try to tackle everything at once. As a small team of two people, we started by focusing on a specific area of the problem—something big enough to matter but small enough for us to handle. Then, we approached customers with a potential solution and asked them for feedback. We learnt that our solution seemed promising, but we wanted to validate it further. If customers are willing to pay you for the solution, it’s a strong validation signal for market demand. One of our early customer interviewees even asked us to deliver the solution, which we did manually at first. We used machine learning models to analyse the data and presented the results in a slide deck. They paid us for the work, which was a critical moment. It meant we had something with real potential, and we had customers willing to pay us before we had even built the full product. This was the key validation that we needed. By the time we were ready to build the product, we had already gathered crucial insights from our early customers. We understood the specific information they wanted and how they wanted the results to be presented. This input was invaluable in shaping the development of our final product. Building & Product Development Start with a simple concept/design to validate with customers before building When we realised the problem and solution, we began by designing the product, but not by jumping straight into coding. Instead, we created wireframes and user interfaces using tools like InVision and Figma. This allowed us to visually represent the product without the need for backend or frontend development at first. The goal was to showcase how the product would look and feel, helping potential customers understand its value before we even started building. We showed these designs to potential customers and asked for feedback. Would they want to buy this product? Would they pay for it? We didn’t dive into actual development until we found a customer willing to pay a significant amount for the solution. This approach helped us ensure we were on the right track and didn’t waste time or resources building something customers didn’t actually want. Deliver your solution using a manual consulting approach before developing an automated product Initially, we solved problems for customers in a more "consulting" manner, delivering insights manually. Recall how I mentioned that when one of our early customer interviewees asked us to deliver the solution, we initially did it manually by using machine learning models to analyse the data and presenting the results to them in a slide deck. This works for the initial stages of validating your solution, as you don't want to invest too much time into building a full-blown MVP before understanding the exact features and functionalities that your users want. However, after confirming that customers were willing to pay for what we provided, we moved forward with actual product development. This shift from a manual service to product development was key to scaling in a sustainable manner, as our building was guided by real-world feedback and insights rather than intuition. Let ongoing customer feedback drive iteration and the product roadmap Once we built the first version of the product, it was basic, solving only one problem. But as we worked closely with customers, they requested additional features and functionalities to make it more useful. As a result, we continued to evolve the product to handle more complex use cases, gradually developing new modules based on customer feedback. Product development is a continuous process. Our early customers pushed us to expand features and modules, from solving just 20% of their problems to tackling 50–60% of their needs. These demands shaped our product roadmap and guided the development of new features, ultimately resulting in a more complete solution. Revenue and user numbers are key metrics for assessing product-market fit. However, critical mass varies across industries Product-market fit (PMF) can often be gauged by looking at the size of your revenue and the number of customers you're serving. Once you've reached a certain critical mass of customers, you can usually tell that you're starting to hit product-market fit. However, this critical mass varies by industry and the type of customers you're targeting. For example, if you're building an app for a broad consumer market, you may need thousands of users. But for enterprise software, product-market fit may be reached with just a few dozen key customers. Compare customer engagement and retention with other available solutions on the market for product-market fit Revenue and the number of customers alone isn't always enough to determine if you're reaching product-market fit. The type of customer and the use case for your product also matter. The level of engagement with your product—how much time users are spending on the platform—is also an important metric to track. The more time they spend, the more likely it is that your product is meeting a crucial need. Another way to evaluate product-market fit is by assessing retention, i.e whether users are returning to your platform and relying on it consistently, as compared to other solutions available. That's another key indication that your solution is gaining traction in the market. Business Model & Monetisation Prioritise scalability Initially, we started with a consulting-type model where we tailor-made specific solutions for each customer use-case we encountered and delivered the CPG insights manually, but we soon realized that this wasn't scalable. The problem with consulting is that you need to do the same work repeatedly for every new project, which requires a large team to handle the workload. That is not how you sustain a high-growth startup. To solve this, we focused on building a product that would address the most common problems faced by our customers. Once built, this product could be sold to thousands of customers without significant overheads, making the business scalable. With this in mind, we decided on a SaaS (Software as a Service) business model. The benefit of SaaS is that once you create the software, you can sell it to many customers without adding extra overhead. This results in a business with higher margins, where the same product can serve many customers simultaneously, making it much more efficient than the consulting model. Adopt a predictable, simplistic business model for efficiency. Look to industry practices for guidance When it came to monetisation, we considered the needs of our CPG customers, who I knew from experience were already accustomed to paying annual subscriptions for sales databases and other software services. We decided to adopt the same model and charge our customers an annual upfront fee. This model worked well for our target market, aligning with industry standards and ensuring stable, recurring revenue. Moreover, our target CPG customers were already used to this business model and didn't have to choose from a huge variety of payment options, making closing sales a straightforward and efficient process. Marketing & Sales Educate the market to position yourself as a thought leader When we started, AI was not widely understood, especially in the CPG industry. We had to create awareness around both AI and its potential value. Our strategy focused on educating potential users and customers about AI, its relevance, and why they should invest in it. This education was crucial to the success of our marketing efforts. To establish credibility, we adopted a thought leadership approach. We wrote blogs on the importance of AI and how it could solve problems for CPG companies. We also participated in events and conferences to demonstrate our expertise in applying AI to the industry. This helped us build our brand and reputation as leaders in the AI space for CPG, and word-of-mouth spread as customers recognized us as the go-to company for AI solutions. It’s tempting for startups to offer products for free in the hopes of gaining early traction with customers, but this approach doesn't work in the long run. Free offerings don’t establish the value of your product, and customers may not take them seriously. You should always charge for pilots, even if the fee is minimal, to ensure that the customer is serious about potentially working with you, and that they are committed and engaged with the product. Pilots/POCs/Demos should aim to give a "flavour" of what you can deliver A paid pilot/POC trial also gives you the opportunity to provide a “flavour” of what your product can deliver, helping to build confidence and trust with the client. It allows customers to experience a detailed preview of what your product can do, which builds anticipation and desire for the full functionality. During this phase, ensure your product is built to give them a taste of the value you can provide, which sets the stage for a broader, more impactful adoption down the line. Fundraising & Financial Management Leverage PR to generate inbound interest from VCs When it comes to fundraising, our approach was fairly traditional—we reached out to VCs and used connections from existing investors to make introductions. However, looking back, one thing that really helped us build momentum during our fundraising process was getting featured in Tech in Asia. This wasn’t planned; it just so happened that Tech in Asia was doing a series on AI startups in Southeast Asia and they reached out to us for an article. During the interview, they asked if we were fundraising, and we mentioned that we were. As a result, several VCs we hadn’t yet contacted reached out to us. This inbound interest was incredibly valuable, and we found it far more effective than our outbound efforts. So, if you can, try to generate some PR attention—it can help create inbound interest from VCs, and that interest is typically much stronger and more promising than any outbound strategies because they've gone out of their way to reach out to you. Be well-prepared and deliberate about fundraising. Keep trying and don't lose heart When pitching to VCs, it’s crucial to be thoroughly prepared, as you typically only get one shot at making an impression. If you mess up, it’s unlikely they’ll give you a second chance. You need to have key metrics at your fingertips, especially if you're running a SaaS company. Be ready to answer questions like: What’s your retention rate? What are your projections for the year? How much will you close? What’s your average contract value? These numbers should be at the top of your mind. Additionally, fundraising should be treated as a structured process, not something you do on the side while juggling other tasks. When you start, create a clear plan: identify 20 VCs to reach out to each week. By planning ahead, you’ll maintain momentum and speed up the process. Fundraising can be exhausting and disheartening, especially when you face multiple rejections. Remember, you just need one investor to say yes to make it all worthwhile. When using funds, prioritise profitability and grow only when necessary. Don't rely on funding to survive. In the past, the common advice for startups was to raise money, burn through it quickly, and use it to boost revenue numbers, even if that meant operating at a loss. The idea was that profitability wasn’t the main focus, and the goal was to show rapid growth for the next funding round. However, times have changed, especially with the shift from “funding summer” to “funding winter.” My advice now is to aim for profitability as soon as possible and grow only when it's truly needed. For example, it’s tempting to hire a large team when you have substantial funds in the bank, but ask yourself: Do you really need 10 new hires, or could you get by with just four? Growing too quickly can lead to unnecessary expenses, so focus on reaching profitability as soon as possible, rather than just inflating your team or burn rate. The key takeaway is to spend your funds wisely and only when absolutely necessary to reach profitability. You want to avoid becoming dependent on future VC investments to keep your company afloat. Instead, prioritize reaching break-even as quickly as you can, so you're not reliant on external funding to survive in the long run. Team-Building & Leadership Look for complementary skill sets in co-founders When choosing a co-founder, it’s important to find someone with a complementary skill set, not just someone you’re close to. For example, I come from a business and commercial background, so I needed someone with technical expertise. That’s when I found my co-founder, Himanshu, who had experience in machine learning and AI. He was a great match because his technical knowledge complemented my business skills, and together we formed a strong team. It might seem natural to choose your best friend as your co-founder, but this can often lead to conflict. Chances are, you and your best friend share similar interests, skills, and backgrounds, which doesn’t bring diversity to the table. If both of you come from the same industry or have the same strengths, you may end up butting heads on how things should be done. Having diverse skill sets helps avoid this and fosters a more collaborative working relationship. Himanshu (left) and Somsubhra (right) co-founded AI Palette in 2018 Define roles clearly to prevent co-founder conflict To avoid conflict, it’s essential that your roles as co-founders are clearly defined from the beginning. If your co-founder and you have distinct responsibilities, there is no room for overlap or disagreement. This ensures that both of you can work without stepping on each other's toes, and there’s mutual respect for each other’s expertise. This is another reason as to why it helps to have a co-founder with a complementary skillset to yours. Not only is having similar industry backgrounds and skillsets not particularly useful when building out your startup, it's also more likely to lead to conflicts since you both have similar subject expertise. On the other hand, if your co-founder is an expert in something that you're not, you're less likely to argue with them about their decisions regarding that aspect of the business and vice versa when it comes to your decisions. Look for employees who are driven by your mission, not salary For early-stage startups, the first hires are crucial. These employees need to be highly motivated and excited about the mission. Since the salary will likely be low and the work demanding, they must be driven by something beyond just the paycheck. The right employees are the swash-buckling pirates and romantics, i.e those who are genuinely passionate about the startup’s vision and want to be part of something impactful beyond material gains. When employees are motivated by the mission, they are more likely to stick around and help take the startup to greater heights. A litmus test for hiring: Would you be excited to work with them on a Sunday? One of the most important rounds in the hiring process is the culture fit round. This is where you assess whether a candidate shares the same values as you and your team. A key question to ask yourself is: "Would I be excited to work with this person on a Sunday?" If there’s any doubt about your answer, it’s likely not a good fit. The idea is that you want employees who align with the company's culture and values and who you would enjoy collaborating with even outside of regular work hours. How we structure the team at AI Palette We have three broad functions in our organization. The first two are the big ones: Technical Team – This is the core of our product and technology. This team is responsible for product development and incorporating customer feedback into improving the technology Commercial Team – This includes sales, marketing, customer service, account managers, and so on, handling everything related to business growth and customer relations. General and Administrative Team – This smaller team supports functions like finance, HR, and administration. As with almost all businesses, we have teams that address the two core tasks of building (technical team) and selling (commercial team), but given the size we're at now, having the administrative team helps smoothen operations. Set broad goals but let your teams decide on execution What I've done is recruit highly skilled people who don't need me to micromanage them on a day-to-day basis. They're experts in their roles, and as Steve Jobs said, when you hire the right person, you don't have to tell them what to do—they understand the purpose and tell you what to do. So, my job as the CEO is to set the broader goals for them, review the plans they have to achieve those goals, and periodically check in on progress. For example, if our broad goal is to meet a certain revenue target, I break it down across teams: For the sales team, I’ll look at how they plan to hit that target—how many customers they need to sell to, how many salespeople they need, and what tactics and strategies they plan to use. For the technical team, I’ll evaluate our product offerings—whether they think we need to build new products to attract more customers, and whether they think it's scalable for the number of customers we plan to serve. This way, the entire organization's tasks are cascaded in alignment with our overarching goals, with me setting the direction and leaving the details of execution to the skilled team members that I hire.

Serious B2B businesses will not try to create a solution using AI - This is why. [i will not promote]

After architecting and developing multiple B2B SaaS platforms and resolving countless challenges, here's why I don't think a proper B2B solution can be developed using AI. You must have senior tech-folks in your teams - even if you choose to leverage AI for expediting some code generation. This isn't theory - this is battle-tested reality. You can use this as a template if you're building one. Core Considerations: Multi-Tenancy Foundation (B2B) Proper tenant isolation at every layer (data, compute, networking) Flexible deployment models (pooled vs. silo) based on customer tier Tenant-aware everything (logging, metrics, tracing) Identity & Security (B2B/Standalone) Enterprise-grade authentication, often with SSO support Role-based access control (RBAC) at tenant level (may need dynamic policy generation for resource access) Audit trails for all system actions (specially if you're in a regulated domain) Client/Tenant Management (B2B) Self-service onboarding with admin approval workflows Automated tenant provisioning/deprovisioning Tenant-specific configurations and customizations Cross-tenant analytics and administration Operational Excellence (B2B/Standalone) Zero-downtime deployments (helps with canary releases) Tenant-isolated debugging capabilities Resource quotas and throttling by tenant tier Automated backup and disaster recovery per tenant Scalability Architecture (B2B) Independent scaling of tenant workloads Resource isolation for "noisy neighbor" prevention Tier-based performance guarantees (SLAs) Dynamic resource allocation Each of these topics can be as complicated as you can think of - depends on the solution you're building. I have seen many seasoned architects and developers struggle also because of their "single-tenant" mindset. Here are some common pitfalls to avoid (B2B/Standalone): Standalone - mindset in database design Hard-coded configurations Lack of context in logging/monitoring Insufficient tenant isolation in shared services (B2B) Missing tenant-aware cost allocation (B2B) You need people great with infrastructure as well. They need to consider: Tenant-aware routing (API Gateway or whatever you're using) Code with isolation when/if required Data storage with proper partitioning Shared services vs. dedicated services strategy There are a number of common problems I have seen people often make. Often it's because of a pressure from high above. But every architectural decision must considered in terms of the solution you're building. In many cases, security cannot be bolted on later, observability must be tenant-aware from day one, operations must scale. This is just the foundation. Your actual business logic sits ON TOP of all this. Now, would you think these can be done by AI? I'll be waiting for that day. :-)

Seeking advice from every type of business owner - if you have a moment & an opinion please chime in.

Hello everyone. I haven't started selling yet and wanted to get some insight from the community I'm trying to serve (that makes the most sense to me). So over the past couple months I've gotten into AI & Automation. I got a HighLevel account and went to town learning new things. I learned how to make automations and workflows that make running a business easier (my dad has been letting me use his concrete business as a guinea pig). I also learned how to build and train AI Chat Assistants. I want to start a service based business that uses AI & workflows to automate some of the customer service tasks & lead generation for business. What I'm seeking advice about are as follows: NICHE SELECTION: Part of me thinks I shouldn't niche down in the beginning and just take whoever comes and niche down once I find an industry I'm comfortable with. Another side thinks I should choose one. What is your opinion on niche selection in the beginning? PRICING: I know that pricing largely depends on the value I bring to the client, but I've seen people doing the same or similar things as I want to do and charging vastly different prices. From $300- $2,000. While I think these solutions could absolutely help companies get and retain new business and reduce some of the workload of their staff -- I'm not comfortable charging a high price until I've got enough experience and data to justify that. ​ THESE ARE THE SERVICES I'M THINKING OF OFFERING: Customer Service Chat Assistant. This will be on the website as a "Live Chat". It also connects to Facebook Messenger & Google Business Chat. I'd train the chat assistant on everything related to the company; pertinent info (NAP, company mission, industry background), contact info, services / products / pricing, FAQs, current specials &/or discount codes (this can be changed monthly), how to handle upset clients, etc. It can also connect to a calendar like Google or Calendly so customers can make an appointment or schedule a call directly from the conversation. Missed Call Follow Up. If you're familiar with the platform HighLevel it's commonly called "Missed Call Text Back". The idea is that when a call is missed a text message is automatically fired to the prospect's phone saying something along the lines of "Hey this is \\\\\\ from \\\\\\\_. How can I help you?" and the business owner is alerted to the missed call via text notification. People have said they see a lot of success for their clients with this alone due to the instant follow up. I see a lot of people charging $300 /m. for this. My issues with this are: 1). The text fires automatically when the call is missed, but if the business owner isn't available to actually follow up and keep texting after the customer texts back, they will look inconsistent and bothersome. 2). Without context a prospect may wonder why you didn't answer when they called, but texted them instead. So my answer to these problems are #3. SMS Answering Service. It is essentially taking 2 + 1 and combining them. The missed call text goes out to the prospect, but with context on why they're being texted (because no one is available to take the call at the moment) and IF the prospect responds, a Customer Service Chat Assistant will take over the conversation with the goal of answering their questions and either getting them on the phone with the company via a call back OR helping them schedule an appointment. This offers a more consistent solution than just a text to the business owner / team & the prospect is contacted and helped (hopefully) before they have a chance to start calling a competitor. Lead Nurture / Lead Qualifying Sales Funnel. This one is more than just AI & automation. It's a full funnel. It can be for either Facebook or Google. The process is AD -> Landing Page -> AI Text Message Convo -> Booking/Schedule Call/ Appointment. Typically the ad will offer a lead magnet which they will claim on the LP by giving their information. After the form is submitted, they get a text message and begin a conversation with the AI. It can be trained to just walk them through a booking process, nurture a sale by answering questions and handling objections or to qualify leads. Lead qualification via text works well if you want to weed out who is serious versus who is curious. To be clear; I'd be making the ad, landing page & training the AI -- all parts of the funnel. For whichever service a few things are universal: \- All conversations; no matter what platform they're had on, all go to one inbox which is pretty helpful to see them all in one place. \- When scheduling / booking these can also collect payment. \- Tags can be added to keep track of how they came into the business and where they are in a sales pipeline. There are a lot of fun things I can do with these automations and I'm excited about learning more everyday. I'd really like to know what you think these services could be worth to a business. If you do reply please tell me what type of business you're in so I have an idea of what industries I should be looking towards. Thank you for any response I get as I know this was a long read! SN: I currently do digital marketing & web design as a freelancer.

What to look for in the Best PDF Invoice Parser?

I've been thinking about starting using PDF Invoice Parser, so these are some key features to look out for in a PDF invoice parser I've learned about these days on Affinda. Machine Learning - There are invoice parsers available that use machine learning algorithms to learn from their mistakes, resulting in them being able to parse many data sources and become more accurate over time. Optical Character Recognition - An OCR invoice parser is one that uses optical character recognition to take images lacking text data and turn them into digital files. Natural Language Processing - This results in more efficient and effective invoice processing that seeks to understand the text and sort invoice fields correctly. Artificial Intelligence - Many parsers struggle to adapt and fail to complete information extraction from nonstandard invoice formats. That’s why you need a parser that leverages document AI to analyze the template and extract structured data no matter what invoice layout is used. Different Types Analysed - For example, you might receive a mailed invoice or Word document. You need a parser that can analyze and get extracted data from any format of the supplier invoice. So, is this enough information and benefits for me to choose this product? I guess so, I've even heard great stuff about it, but I would love to share all of this with you and maybe some of you already had any experience to share with all of us. Have a nice day, guys!

Seeking advice from every type of business owner - if you have a moment & an opinion please chime in.

Hello everyone. I haven't started selling yet and wanted to get some insight from the community I'm trying to serve (that makes the most sense to me). So over the past couple months I've gotten into AI & Automation. I got a HighLevel account and went to town learning new things. I learned how to make automations and workflows that make running a business easier (my dad has been letting me use his concrete business as a guinea pig). I also learned how to build and train AI Chat Assistants. I want to start a service based business that uses AI & workflows to automate some of the customer service tasks & lead generation for business. What I'm seeking advice about are as follows: NICHE SELECTION: Part of me thinks I shouldn't niche down in the beginning and just take whoever comes and niche down once I find an industry I'm comfortable with. Another side thinks I should choose one. What is your opinion on niche selection in the beginning? PRICING: I know that pricing largely depends on the value I bring to the client, but I've seen people doing the same or similar things as I want to do and charging vastly different prices. From $300- $2,000. While I think these solutions could absolutely help companies get and retain new business and reduce some of the workload of their staff -- I'm not comfortable charging a high price until I've got enough experience and data to justify that. ​ THESE ARE THE SERVICES I'M THINKING OF OFFERING: Customer Service Chat Assistant. This will be on the website as a "Live Chat". It also connects to Facebook Messenger & Google Business Chat. I'd train the chat assistant on everything related to the company; pertinent info (NAP, company mission, industry background), contact info, services / products / pricing, FAQs, current specials &/or discount codes (this can be changed monthly), how to handle upset clients, etc. It can also connect to a calendar like Google or Calendly so customers can make an appointment or schedule a call directly from the conversation. Missed Call Follow Up. If you're familiar with the platform HighLevel it's commonly called "Missed Call Text Back". The idea is that when a call is missed a text message is automatically fired to the prospect's phone saying something along the lines of "Hey this is \\\\\\ from \\\\\\\_. How can I help you?" and the business owner is alerted to the missed call via text notification. People have said they see a lot of success for their clients with this alone due to the instant follow up. I see a lot of people charging $300 /m. for this. My issues with this are: 1). The text fires automatically when the call is missed, but if the business owner isn't available to actually follow up and keep texting after the customer texts back, they will look inconsistent and bothersome. 2). Without context a prospect may wonder why you didn't answer when they called, but texted them instead. So my answer to these problems are #3. SMS Answering Service. It is essentially taking 2 + 1 and combining them. The missed call text goes out to the prospect, but with context on why they're being texted (because no one is available to take the call at the moment) and IF the prospect responds, a Customer Service Chat Assistant will take over the conversation with the goal of answering their questions and either getting them on the phone with the company via a call back OR helping them schedule an appointment. This offers a more consistent solution than just a text to the business owner / team & the prospect is contacted and helped (hopefully) before they have a chance to start calling a competitor. Lead Nurture / Lead Qualifying Sales Funnel. This one is more than just AI & automation. It's a full funnel. It can be for either Facebook or Google. The process is AD -> Landing Page -> AI Text Message Convo -> Booking/Schedule Call/ Appointment. Typically the ad will offer a lead magnet which they will claim on the LP by giving their information. After the form is submitted, they get a text message and begin a conversation with the AI. It can be trained to just walk them through a booking process, nurture a sale by answering questions and handling objections or to qualify leads. Lead qualification via text works well if you want to weed out who is serious versus who is curious. To be clear; I'd be making the ad, landing page & training the AI -- all parts of the funnel. For whichever service a few things are universal: \- All conversations; no matter what platform they're had on, all go to one inbox which is pretty helpful to see them all in one place. \- When scheduling / booking these can also collect payment. \- Tags can be added to keep track of how they came into the business and where they are in a sales pipeline. There are a lot of fun things I can do with these automations and I'm excited about learning more everyday. I'd really like to know what you think these services could be worth to a business. If you do reply please tell me what type of business you're in so I have an idea of what industries I should be looking towards. Thank you for any response I get as I know this was a long read! SN: I currently do digital marketing & web design as a freelancer.

Neural Networks you can try to implement from scratch (for beginners)

I was reading a tweet talking about how useful it is to implement neural networks from scratch. How it allowed for a greater understanding of the topic. The author said he found it more useful than other people explaining the concept to him. While I disagree with the author’s opinion that it stops the need for explanations. It certainly does help the understanding of one’s model. I recommend giving it a go. In the blog post, I will suggest which models you should try to implement from scratch using NumPy or your favourite library. Also, I will link to some accompanying resources. Simple Feedforward Network This is the most famous example because it’s so simple. But allows you to learn so much. I heard about this idea from Andrew Trask. It also helped me think about implementing networks from scratch in general. In the Feedforward network, you will be using NumPy. As you won't need Pytorch or TensorFlow. To do the heavy-lifting for complex calculations. You can simply create a Numpy Array for training and testing data. You can also create a nonlinear function using Numpy. Then work out the error rate between the layer’s guess and real data. Resource for this task: https://iamtrask.github.io/2015/07/12/basic-python-network/ Follow this tutorial. It does a much better job of explaining how to do this in NumPy. With code examples to follow. Feedforward Network with Gradient Descent This is an extension of the network above. In this network, we allow the model to optimise its weights. This can also be done in NumPy. Resource for this task: https://iamtrask.github.io/2015/07/27/python-network-part2/ A follow-on from the previous article. Pytorch version of Perceptrons and Multi-layered Perceptrons. Here will go up a level by using a library. Examples I'm using will be done in Pytorch. But you can use whatever library you prefer. When implementing these networks, you learn how much a library does the work for you. Recourses for the task: https://medium.com/@tomgrek/building-your-first-neural-net-from-scratch-with-pytorch-56b0e9c84d54 https://becominghuman.ai/pytorch-from-first-principles-part-ii-d37529c57a62 K Means Clustering Yes, this does not count as a neural network. But a traditional machine learning algorithm is still very useful. As this is non deep learning algorithm it should be easier to understand. This can be done just using NumPy or Pandas depending on the implementation. Recourse for this task: https://www.machinelearningplus.com/predictive-modeling/k-means-clustering/ http://madhugnadig.com/articles/machine-learning/2017/03/04/implementing-k-means-clustering-from-scratch-in-python.html https://gdcoder.com/implementation-of-k-means-from-scratch-in-python-9-lines/ There are quite a few choices to choose from. So pick whatever implementation helps you understand the concepts better. These networks or models should be simple enough that you won't get lost trying to implement them. But still, help learn a few stuff along the way. \- If you found this post useful, then check out my mailing list where I write more stuff like this.

[Help Needed] How to tackle AI for DNS Security in a Hackathon for Beginner.

Hi everyone! I've been selected to participate in an AI and Cybersecurity Hackathon, and the group I'm in focuses on AI for DNS Security. Our goal is to implement AI algorithms to detect anomalies and enhance DNS security. Here’s the catch: I have no prior background in cybersecurity, and I’m also a beginner in applying AI to real-world security problems. I’d really appreciate some guidance from this amazing community on how to approach this challenge. A bit more about the project: Objective: Detect anomalies in DNS traffic (e.g., malicious requests, tunneling, etc.). AI tools: We’re free to choose algorithms, but I’m unsure where to start—supervised vs. unsupervised learning? My skillset: Decent grasp of Python (Pandas, Scikit-learn, etc.) and basic ML concepts. No practical experience in network security or analyzing DNS traffic. What I’m looking for: Datasets: Any recommendations for open-source DNS datasets or synthetic data creation methods? AI methods: Which models work best for anomaly detection in DNS logs? Are there any relevant GitHub projects? Learning resources: Beginner-friendly material on DNS security and the application of AI in this domain. Hackathon tips: How can I make the most of this opportunity and contribute effectively to my team? Bonus question: If you’ve participated in similar hackathons, what strategies helped you balance learning and execution within a short timeframe? Thank you so much in advance for any advice, resources, or personal experiences you can share! I’ll make sure to share our project results and lessons learned after the hackathon.

Study Plan for Learning Data Science Over the Next 12 Months [D]

In this thread, I address a study plan for 2021. In case you're interested, I wrote a whole article about this topic: Study Plan for Learning Data Science Over the Next 12 Months Let me know your thoughts on this. ​ https://preview.redd.it/emg20nzhet661.png?width=1170&format=png&auto=webp&s=cf09e4dc5e82ba2fd7b57c706ba2873be57fe8de We are ending 2020 and it is time to make plans for next year, and one of the most important plans and questions we must ask is what do we want to study?, what do we want to enhance?, what changes do we want to make?, and what is the direction we are going to take (or continue) in our professional careers?. Many of you will be starting on the road to becoming a data scientist, in fact you may be evaluating it, since you have heard a lot about it, but you have some doubts, for example about the amount of job offers that may exist in this area, doubts about the technology itself, and about the path you should follow, considering the wide range of options to learn. I’m a believer that we should learn from various sources, from various mentors, and from various formats. By sources I mean the various virtual platforms and face-to-face options that exist to study. By mentors I mean that it is always a good idea to learn from different points of view and learning from different teachers/mentors, and by formats I mean the choices between books, videos, classes, and other formats where the information is contained. When we extract information from all these sources we reinforce the knowledge learned, but we always need a guide, and this post aims to give you some practical insights and strategies in this regard. To decide on sources, mentors and formats it is up to you to choose. It depends on your preferences and ease of learning: for example, some people are better at learning from books, while others prefer to learn from videos. Some prefer to study on platforms that are practical (following online code), and others prefer traditional platforms: like those at universities (Master’s Degree, PHDs or MOOCs). Others prefer to pay for quality content, while others prefer to look only for free material. That’s why I won’t give a specific recommendation in this post, but I’ll give you the whole picture: a study plan. To start you should consider the time you’ll spend studying and the depth of learning you want to achieve, because if you find yourself without a job you could be available full time to study, which is a huge advantage. On the other hand, if you are working, you’ll have less time and you’ll have to discipline yourself to be able to have the time available in the evenings, mornings or weekends. Ultimately, the important thing is to meet the goal of learning and perhaps dedicating your career to this exciting area! We will divide the year into quarters as follows First Quarter: Learning the Basics Second Quarter: Upgrading the Level: Intermediate Knowledge Third Quarter: A Real World Project — A Full-stack Project Fourth Quarter: Seeking Opportunities While Maintaining Practice First Quarter: Learning the Basics ​ https://preview.redd.it/u7t9bthket661.png?width=998&format=png&auto=webp&s=4ad29cb43618e7acf793259243aa5a60a8535f0a If you want to be more rigorous you can have start and end dates for this period of study of the bases. It could be something like: From January 1 to March 30, 2021 as deadline. During this period you will study the following: A programming language that you can apply to data science: Python or R. We recommend Python due to the simple fact that approximately 80% of data science job offers ask for knowledge in Python. That same percentage is maintained with respect to the real projects you will find implemented in production. And we add the fact that Python is multipurpose, so you won’t “waste” your time if at some point you decide to focus on web development, for example, or desktop development. This would be the first topic to study in the first months of the year. Familiarize yourself with statistics and mathematics. There is a big debate in the data science community about whether we need this foundation or not. I will write a post later on about this, but the reality is that you DO need it, but ONLY the basics (at least in the beginning). And I want to clarify this point before continuing. We could say that data science is divided in two big fields: Research on one side and putting Machine Learning algorithms into production on the other side. If you later decide to focus on Research then you are going to need mathematics and statistics in depth (very in depth). If you are going to go for the practical part, the libraries will help you deal with most of it, under the hood. It should be noted that most job offers are in the practical part. For both cases, and in this first stage you will only need the basics of: Statistics (with Python and NumPy) Descriptive statistics Inferential Statistics Hypothesis testing Probability Mathematics (with Python and NumPy) Linear Algebra (For example: SVD) Multivariate Calculus Calculus (For example: gradient descent) Note: We recommend that you study Python first before seeing statistics and mathematics, because the challenge is to implement these statistical and mathematical bases with Python. Don’t look for theoretical tutorials that show only slides or statistical and/or mathematical examples in Excel/Matlab/Octave/SAS and other different to Python or R, it gets very boring and impractical! You should choose a course, program or book that teaches these concepts in a practical way and using Python. Remember that Python is what we finally use, so you need to choose well. This advice is key so you don’t give up on this part, as it will be the most dense and difficult. If you have these basics in the first three months, you will be ready to make a leap in your learning for the next three months. Second Quarter: Upgrading the Level: Intermediate Knowledge ​ https://preview.redd.it/y1y55vynet661.png?width=669&format=png&auto=webp&s=bd3e12bb112943025c39a8975faf4d64514df275 If you want to be more rigorous you can have start and end dates for this period of study at the intermediate level. It could be something like: From April 1 to June 30, 2021 as deadline. Now that you have a good foundation in programming, statistics and mathematics, it is time to move forward and learn about the great advantages that Python has for applying data analysis. For this stage you will be focused on: Data science Python stack Python has the following libraries that you should study, know and practice at this stage Pandas: for working with tabular data and make in-depth analysis Matplotlib and Seaborn: for data visualization Pandas is the in-facto library for data analysis, it is one of the most important (if not the most important) and powerful tools you should know and master during your career as a data scientist. Pandas will make it much easier for you to manipulate, cleanse and organize your data. Feature Engineering Many times people don’t go deep into Feature Engineering, but if you want to have Machine Learning models that make good predictions and improve your scores, spending some time on this subject is invaluable! Feature engineering is the process of using domain knowledge to extract features from raw data using data mining techniques. These features can be used to improve the performance of machine learning algorithms. Feature engineering can be considered as applied machine learning itself. To achieve the goal of good feature engineering you must know the different techniques that exist, so it is a good idea to at least study the main ones. Basic Models of Machine Learning At the end of this stage you will start with the study of Machine Learning. This is perhaps the most awaited moment! This is where you start to learn about the different algorithms you can use, which particular problems you can solve and how you can apply them in real life. The Python library we recommend you to start experimenting with ML is: scikit-learn. However it is a good idea that you can find tutorials where they explain the implementation of the algorithms (at least the simplest ones) from scratch with Python, since the library could be a “Black Box” and you might not understand what is happening under the hood. If you learn how to implement them with Python, you can have a more solid foundation. If you implement the algorithms with Python (without a library), you will put into practice everything seen in the statistics, mathematics and Pandas part. These are some recommendations of the algorithms that you should at least know in this initial stage Supervised learning Simple Linear Regression Multiple Linear Regression K-nearest neighbors (KNN) Logistic Regression Decision Trees Random Forest Unsupervised Learning K-Means PCA Bonus: if you have the time and you are within the time ranges, you can study these others Gradient Boosting Algorithms GBM XGBoost LightGBM CatBoost Note: do not spend more than the 3 months stipulated for this stage. Because you will be falling behind and not complying with the study plan. We all have shortcomings at this stage, it is normal, go ahead and then you can resume some concepts that did not understand in detail. The important thing is to have the basic knowledge and move forward! If at least you succeed to study the mentioned algorithms of supervised and unsupervised learning, you will have a very clear idea of what you will be able to do in the future. So don’t worry about covering everything, remember that it is a process, and ideally you should have some clearly established times so that you don’t get frustrated and feel you are advancing. So far, here comes your “theoretical” study of the basics of data science. Now we’ll continue with the practical part! Third Quarter: A Real World Project — A Full-stack Project ​ https://preview.redd.it/vrn783vqet661.png?width=678&format=png&auto=webp&s=664061b3d33b34979b74b10b9f8a3d0f7b8b99ee If you want to be more rigorous you can have start and end dates for this period of study at the intermediate level. It could be something like: From July 1 to September 30, 2021 as deadline. Now that you have a good foundation in programming, statistics, mathematics, data analysis and machine learning algorithms, it is time to move forward and put into practice all this knowledge. Many of these suggestions may sound out of the box, but believe me they will make a big difference in your career as a data scientist. The first thing is to create your web presence: Create a Github (or GitLab) account, and learn Git*. Being able to manage different versions of your code is important, you should have version control over them, not to mention that having an active Github account is very valuable in demonstrating your true skills. On Github, you can also set up your Jupyter Notebooks and make them public, so you can show off your skills as well. This is mine for example: https://github.com/danielmoralesp Learn the basics of web programming*. The advantage is that you already have Python as a skill, so you can learn Flask to create a simple web page. Or you can use a template engine like Github Pages, Ghost or Wordpress itself and create your online portfolio. Buy a domain with your name*. Something like myname.com, myname.co, myname.dev, etc. This is invaluable so you can have your CV online and update it with your projects. There you can make a big difference, showing your projects, your Jupyter Notebooks and showing that you have the practical skills to execute projects in this area. There are many front-end templates for you to purchase for free or for payment, and give it a more personalized and pleasant look. Don’t use free sub-domains of Wordpress, Github or Wix, it looks very unprofessional, make your own. Here is mine for example: https://www.danielmorales.dev/ Choose a project you are passionate about and create a Machine Learning model around it. The final goal of this third quarter is to create ONE project, that you are passionate about, and that is UNIQUE among others. It turns out that there are many typical projects in the community, such as predicting the Titanic Survivors, or predicting the price of Houses in Boston. Those kinds of projects are good for learning, but not for showing off as your UNIQUE projects. If you are passionate about sports, try predicting the soccer results of your local league. If you are passionate about finance, try predicting your country’s stock market prices. If you are passionate about marketing, try to find someone who has an e-commerce and implement a product recommendation algorithm and upload it to production. If you are passionate about business: make a predictor of the best business ideas for 2021 :) As you can see, you are limited by your passions and your imagination. In fact, those are the two keys for you to do this project: Passion and Imagination. However don’t expect to make money from it, you are in a learning stage, you need that algorithm to be deployed in production, make an API in Flask with it, and explain in your website how you did it and how people can access it. This is the moment to shine, and at the same time it’s the moment of the greatest learning. You will most likely face obstacles, if your algorithm gives 60% of Accuracy after a huge optimization effort, it doesn’t matter, finish the whole process, deploy it to production, try to get a friend or family member to use it, and that will be the goal achieved for this stage: Make a Full-stack Machine Learning project. By full-stack I mean that you did all the following steps: You got the data from somewhere (scrapping, open data or API) You did a data analysis You cleaned and transformed the data You created Machine Learning Models You deployed the best model to production for other people to use. This does not mean that this whole process is what you will always do in your daily job, but it does mean that you will know every part of the pipeline that is needed for a data science project for a company. You will have a unique perspective! Fourth Quarter: Seeking Opportunities While Maintaining Practice ​ https://preview.redd.it/qd0osystet661.png?width=1056&format=png&auto=webp&s=2da456b15985b2793041256f5e45bca99a23b51a If you want to be more rigorous you can have start and end dates for this period of study at the final level. It could be something like: From October 1 to December 31, 2021 as deadline. Now you have theoretical and practical knowledge. You have implemented a model in production. The next step depends on you and your personality. Let’s say you are an entrepreneur, and you have the vision to create something new from something you discovered or saw an opportunity to do business with this discipline, so it’s time to start planning how to do it. If that’s the case, obviously this post won’t cover that process, but you should know what the steps might be (or start figuring them out). But if you are one of those who want to get a job as a data scientist, here is my advice. Getting a job as a data scientist “You’re not going to get a job as fast as you think, if you keep thinking the same way”.Author It turns out that all people who start out as data scientists imagine themselves working for the big companies in their country or region. Or even remote. It turns out that if you aspire to work for a large company like data scientist you will be frustrated by the years of experience they ask for (3 or more years) and the skills they request. Large companies don’t hire Juniors (or very few do), precisely because they are already large companies. They have the financial muscle to demand experience and skills and can pay a commensurate salary (although this is not always the case). The point is that if you focus there you’re going to get frustrated! Here we must return to the following advise: “You need creativity to get a job in data science”. Like everything else in life we have to start at different steps, in this case, from the beginning. Here are the scenarios If you are working in a company and in a non-engineering role you must demonstrate your new skills to the company you are working for*. If you are working in the customer service area, you should apply it to your work, and do for example, detailed analysis of your calls, conversion rates, store data and make predictions about it! If you can have data from your colleagues, you could try to predict their sales! This may sound funny, but it’s about how creatively you can apply data science to your current work and how to show your bosses how valuable it is and EVANGELIZE them about the benefits of implementation. You’ll be noticed and they could certainly create a new data related department or job. And you already have the knowledge and experience. The key word here is Evangelize. Many companies and entrepreneurs are just beginning to see the power of this discipline, and it is your task to nurture that reality. If you are working in an area related to engineering, but that is not data science*. Here the same applies as the previous example, but you have some advantages, and that is that you could access the company’s data, and you could use it for the benefit of the company, making analyses and/or predictions about it, and again EVANGELIZING your bosses your new skills and the benefits of data science. If you are unemployed (or do not want, or do not feel comfortable following the two examples above)*, you can start looking outside, and what I recommend is that you look for technology companies and / or startups where they are just forming the first teams and are paying some salary, or even have options shares of the company. Obviously here the salaries will not be exorbitant, and the working hours could be longer, but remember that you are in the learning and practice stage (just in the first step), so you can not demand too much, you must land your expectations and fit that reality, and stop pretending to be paid $ 10,000 a month at this stage. But, depending of your country $1.000 USD could be something very interesting to start this new career. Remember, you are a Junior at this stage. The conclusion is: don’t waste your time looking at and/or applying to offers from big companies, because you will get frustrated. Be creative, and look for opportunities in smaller or newly created companies. Learning never stops While you are in that process of looking for a job or an opportunity, which could take half of your time (50% looking for opportunities, 50% staying in practice), you have to keep learning, you should advance to concepts such as Deep Learning, Data Engineer or other topics that you feel were left loose from the past stages or focus on the topics that you are passionate about within this group of disciplines in data science. At the same time you can choose a second project, and spend some time running it from end-to-end, and thus increase your portfolio and your experience. If this is the case, try to find a completely different project: if the first one was done with Machine Learning, let this second one be done with Deep learning. If the first one was deployed to a web page, that this second one is deployed to a mobile platform. Remember, creativity is the key! Conclusion We are at an ideal time to plan for 2021, and if this is the path you want to take, start looking for the platforms and media you want to study on. Get to work and don’t miss this opportunity to become a data scientist in 2021! Note: we are building a private community in Slack of data scientist, if you want to join us write to the email: support@datasource.ai I hope you enjoyed this reading! you can follow me on twitter or linkedin Thank you for reading!

Randomly asked ChatGPT and Claude for a 4 year roadmap for an ML Engineer

Title, Is it actually a good plan ?? If no, why not ?? \\🚀 4-Year Roadmap to Becoming a High-Earning ML Engineer & Entrepreneur\\ \\(With Smartwork & Realistic 60-70% Execution Feasibility)\\ \\🟢 Year 1: Strong Foundation & Initial Projects (0-12 Months)\\ 🎯 \\Goal: Master Python & ML Fundamentals\\ \\🔹 1-4 Months (Python & Math Strengthening)\\ ✅ Python Mastery \- Daily LeetCode Easy problems (minimum 2) \- Build automation projects \- NumPy & Pandas mastery \- DSA fundamentals ✅ Mathematics Foundation \- Linear Algebra basics \- Statistics fundamentals \- Basic calculus concepts ✅ First Mini-Hackathon Participation \- Join beginner-friendly hackathons \- Focus on Python-based challenges \- Team up with other beginners 💡 \\Smart Move:\\ \- Join Discord/Slack hackathon communities \- Practice collaborative coding \- Build network with fellow participants \\🔹 5-8 Months (ML Foundations)\\ ✅ Machine Learning Basics \- Supervised Learning \- Model evaluation \- Feature engineering \- scikit-learn projects ✅ Participate in 2-3 ML Hackathons \- Kaggle Getting Started competitions \- Local ML hackathons \- University hackathons ✅ Start LinkedIn & GitHub Portfolio 💡 \\Smart Move:\\ \- Document hackathon experiences \- Share learnings on LinkedIn \- Focus on completion over winning \\🔹 9-12 Months (Deep Learning Introduction)\\ ✅ Basic Deep Learning \- Neural network fundamentals \- PyTorch basics \- Computer vision tasks \- Basic NLP ✅ Advanced Hackathon Participation \- AI/ML specific hackathons \- Team lead in 1-2 hackathons \- Start mentoring beginners \\🔵 Year 1 Expected Outcome (60-70% Execution)\\ ✔ \\Strong Python & ML foundations\\ ✔ \\5-6 hackathon participations\\ ✔ \\Active GitHub (100+ commits)\\ ✔ \\Growing LinkedIn (300+ connections)\\ 💰 \\Earning Expectation → ₹8K-₹20K per month (Projects/Internship)\\ \\🟢 Year 2: Professional Growth & Specialization (12-24 Months)\\ 🎯 \\Goal: Build Professional Experience & Recognition\\ \\🔹 1-6 Months (Technical Depth)\\ ✅ Advanced ML Topics \- Deep Learning architectures \- Computer Vision OR NLP \- MLOps basics (Docker, FastAPI) \- Cloud fundamentals (AWS/GCP) ✅ Hackathon Achievements \- Win minor prizes in 2-3 hackathons \- Lead teams in major hackathons \- Network with sponsors ✅ Start Technical Blogging 💡 \\Smart Move:\\ \- Focus on hackathon projects that align with career goals \- Build relationships with companies at hackathons \- Create detailed project documentation \\🔹 7-12 Months (Professional Experience)\\ ✅ Secure ML Role/Internship ✅ Advanced Project Building ✅ Open Source Contributions ✅ Organize Small Hackathons 💡 \\Smart Move:\\ \- Use hackathon network for job referrals \- Convert hackathon projects into full products \- Build mentor reputation \\🔵 Year 2 Expected Outcome (60-70% Execution)\\ ✔ \\Professional ML experience\\ ✔ \\10+ hackathon participations\\ ✔ \\1-2 hackathon wins\\ ✔ \\Strong industry network\\ 💰 \\Earning Expectation → ₹40K-₹70K per month (Job/Freelancing)\\ \\🟢 Year 3: Scaling & Business Foundation (24-36 Months)\\ 🎯 \\Goal: Establish Multiple Income Streams\\ \\🔹 1-4 Months (Expertise Building)\\ ✅ Choose Specialization \- MLOps \- Computer Vision \- NLP/LLMs \- Generative AI ✅ Advanced Competitions \- International hackathons \- High-prize competitions \- Corporate ML challenges ✅ Start Consulting Services 💡 \\Smart Move:\\ \- Use hackathon wins for marketing \- Build service packages around expertise \- Network with corporate sponsors \\🔹 5-8 Months (Business Development)\\ ✅ Scale Services ✅ Build Client Network ✅ Create Training Programs ✅ Hackathon Mentorship Program 💡 \\Smart Move:\\ \- Convert hackathon projects to products \- Use event networks for client acquisition \- Build authority through speaking \\🔹 9-12 Months (Growth & Innovation)\\ ✅ Product Development ✅ Team Building ✅ Innovation Focus ✅ Hackathon Organization \\🔵 Year 3 Expected Outcome (60-70% Execution)\\ ✔ \\Established ML business/career\\ ✔ \\Known in hackathon community\\ ✔ \\Multiple income streams\\ ✔ \\Strong industry presence\\ 💰 \\Earning Expectation → ₹1L-₹2L per month (Multiple Streams)\\ \\🟢 Year 4: Scale & Leadership (36-48 Months)\\ 🎯 \\Goal: Build AI Company & Achieve Financial Freedom\\ \\🔹 1-4 Months (Business Scaling)\\ ✅ Company Formation \- AI consulting firm \- Product development \- Training programs ✅ Hackathon Innovation \- Launch own hackathon series \- Corporate partnerships \- Prize sponsorships ✅ Team Expansion 💡 \\Smart Move:\\ \- Use hackathon network for hiring \- Create unique event formats \- Build corporate relationships \\🔹 5-8 Months (Market Leadership)\\ ✅ Product Launch ✅ Service Expansion ✅ International Presence ✅ Innovation Hub Creation 💡 \\Smart Move:\\ \- Create hackathon-to-hiring pipeline \- Build educational programs \- Establish thought leadership \\🔹 9-12 Months (Empire Building)\\ ✅ Multiple Revenue Streams \- AI products \- Consulting services \- Educational programs \- Event organization \- Investment returns ✅ Industry Leadership \- Conference speaking \- Published content \- Community leadership \\🔵 Year 4 Expected Outcome (60-70% Execution)\\ ✔ \\Established AI company\\ ✔ \\Major hackathon organizer\\ ✔ \\Multiple product lines\\ ✔ \\Industry authority status\\ 💰 \\Earning Expectation → ₹3L-₹5L+ per month (Business Income)\\ \\📊 FINAL RATING\\ ✅ \\Comprehensive growth plan\\ ✅ \\Strong community focus\\ ✅ \\Multiple income pathways\\ 💡 \\If 100% Execution → 8.5/10 Feasibility\\ 💡 \\If 50% Execution → 6/10 Feasibility\\ 🔥 \\Conclusion: A balanced path to ML mastery and entrepreneurship, built through consistent growth and community engagement!\\ 🚀 \\Key Success Factors:\\ Regular hackathon participation Strong community involvement Consistent skill development Strategic network building Focus on both technical and business growth

6 principles to data architecture that facilitate innovation

My team and I have been re-building our company's data architecture. In the process of doing so, I got together six key principles to transforming data architectures and thought I would share them, as a strong data architecture is crucial for businesses looking to stay competitive in the digital landscape, as it improves decision-making, time to market, and data security. When executed with efficiency, a resilient data architecture unleashes unparalleled degrees of agility. Principle 1: Agility and flexibility To quickly adjust to market fluctuations, businesses must create adaptable data infrastructures that can effortlessly manage an ever-growing influx of data. To accomplish this objective, we recommend to our clients to implement Enterprise Service Bus, Enterprise Data Warehouse, and Master Data Management integrated together. ​ I believe the best option is this: \- By centralizing communication, ESB reduces the time and effort required to integrate new systems; \- EDW consolidates data from different sources, resulting in a 50% reduction in software implementation time; \- Finally, MDM ensures consistency and accuracy across the organization, leading to better decision-making and streamlined operations. Implementing these solutions can lead to reduced software implementation time, better ROI, and more manageable data architecture. By fostering a culture of collaboration and adopting modern technologies and practices, businesses can prioritize agility and flexibility in their data architecture to increase the pace of innovation. Principle 2: Modularity and reusability Data architecture that fosters modularity and reusability is essential for accelerating innovation within an organization. By breaking data architecture components into smaller, more manageable pieces, businesses can enable different teams to leverage existing architecture components, reducing redundancy and improving overall efficiency. MDM can promote modularity and reusability by creating a central repository for critical business data. This prevents duplication and errors, improving efficiency and decision-making. MDM enables a single source of truth for data, accessible across multiple systems, which promotes integration and scalability. MDM also provides standardized data models, rules, and governance policies that reduce development time, increase quality, and ensure proper management throughout the data’s lifecycle. Another way to achieve modularity in data architecture is through the use of microservices and scripts for Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) processes. Adopting a structured methodology and framework can ensure these components are well-organized, making it easier for teams to collaborate and maintain the system. Microservices can also contribute to modularity and reusability in data architecture. These small, independent components can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently of one another. By utilizing microservices, organizations can update or replace individual components without affecting the entire system, improving flexibility and adaptability. Principle 3: Data quality and consistency The efficiency of operations depends on data’s quality, so a meticulously crafted data architecture plays a pivotal role in preserving it, empowering enterprises to make well-informed decisions based on credible information. Here are some key factors to consider that will help your company ensure quality: \- Implementing Master Data Management (MDM) – this way, by consolidating, cleansing, and standardizing data from multiple sources, your IT department will be able to create a single, unified view of the most important data entities (customers, products, and suppliers); \- Assigning data stewardship responsibilities to a small team or an individual specialist; \- Considering implementing data validation, data lineage, and data quality metrics; \- By implementing MDM and adopting a minimal data stewardship approach, organizations can maintain high-quality data that drives innovation and growth. Principle 4: Data governance Data governance is a strategic framework that goes beyond ensuring data quality and consistency. It includes ensuring data security, privacy, accessibility, regulatory compliance, and lifecycle management. Here are some key aspects of data governance: \- Implementing robust measures and controls to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access, breaches, and theft. This is only possible through including encryption, access controls, and intrusion detection systems into your company’s IT architecture; \- Adhering to data privacy regulations and guidelines, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA); \- Defining stringent conditions for who has access to specific data assets to maintain control over data and ensure its accessibility only for legitimate purposes. Managing the entire lifecycle of data, from creation and storage to archiving and disposal, including defining policies for data retention, archiving, and deletion in compliance with legal and regulatory requirements. To facilitate effective data governance, organizations can leverage various tools and technologies, such as: \- Data cataloging tools: Solutions like Collibra, Alation, or Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog help organizations discover, understand, and manage their data assets. \- Data lineage tools: Tools like Talend, IBM InfoSphere, or Apache Atlas help track data’s origin, transformation, and usage, providing insights into data quality issues and potential areas for improvement. \- Data quality tools: Solutions like Informatica Data Quality, Trifacta, or SAS Data Quality help organizations maintain high-quality data by identifying and correcting errors, inconsistencies, and inaccuracies. \- Data security and privacy tools: Tools like Varonis, BigID, or Spirion help protect sensitive data and ensure compliance with data privacy regulations. Principle 5: Cloud-first approach A cloud-first approach prioritizes cloud-based solutions over on-premises ones when it comes to data management. Cloud-based data management pros: \- Virtually limitless scalability, so that organizations can grow and adapt to changing data requirements without significant infrastructure investments; \- The pay-as-you-go model of cloud services reduces maintenance costs usually associated with the on-premise choice; \- Greater flexibility for deploying and integrating new technologies and services; \- Cloud can be accessed from anywhere, at any time, turning team collaboration and remote work into a breeze; \- Built-in backup and disaster recovery capabilities, ensuring data safety and minimizing downtime in case of emergencies. Cloud-based data management cons: \- Cloud-first approach raises many data security, privacy, and compliance concerns; \- Transferring large data volumes to and from cloud is often time-consuming and results in increased latency for certain apps; \- Relying on a single cloud provider makes it difficult to switch them or move back to the on-premises option without significant funds and effort. Challenges that organizations that choose a cloud-first approach face: \- Integrating cloud-based systems with on-premises ones can be complex and time-consuming; \- Ensuring data governance and compliance in a multi-cloud or hybrid environment is also another problem reported by my clients. How EDW, ESB, and MDM promote cloud-first approach: A cloud-based EDW centralizes data from multiple sources, enabling a unified view of the organization’s data and simplifying data integration across cloud and on-premises systems. An ESB facilitates communication between disparate cloud and on-premises systems, streamlining data integration and promoting a modular architecture. Cloud-based MDM solutions are used for maintaining data quality and consistency across multiple data sources and environments. Principle 6: Automation and artificial intelligence Incorporating automation tools and AI technologies into data architecture can optimize processes and decision-making. Key Applications: \- Data ingestion and integration: Automation simplifies data schema updates and identifies data quality issues, while AI-assisted development helps create tailored connectors, scripts, and microservices. \- Data quality management: Machine learning algorithms improve data quality and consistency by automatically detecting and correcting inconsistencies and duplicates. \- Predictive analytics: AI and machine learning models analyze historical data to predict trends, identify opportunities, and uncover hidden patterns for better-informed decisions. How No-Code Tools and AI-Assisted Development Work: Business users define data requirements and workflows using no-code tools, enabling AI models to understand their needs. AI models process the information, generating recommendations for connector creation, ETL scripts, and microservices. Developers use AI-generated suggestions to accelerate development and tailor solutions to business needs. By combining automation, AI technologies, and no-code tools, organizations can streamline data architecture processes and bridge the gap between business users and developers, ultimately accelerating innovation. I share more tips on building an agile data architectures in my blog.

Randomly asked ChatGPT and Claude for a 4 year roadmap for an ML Engineer

Title, Is it actually a good plan ?? If no, why not ?? \\🚀 4-Year Roadmap to Becoming a High-Earning ML Engineer & Entrepreneur\\ \\(With Smartwork & Realistic 60-70% Execution Feasibility)\\ \\🟢 Year 1: Strong Foundation & Initial Projects (0-12 Months)\\ 🎯 \\Goal: Master Python & ML Fundamentals\\ \\🔹 1-4 Months (Python & Math Strengthening)\\ ✅ Python Mastery \- Daily LeetCode Easy problems (minimum 2) \- Build automation projects \- NumPy & Pandas mastery \- DSA fundamentals ✅ Mathematics Foundation \- Linear Algebra basics \- Statistics fundamentals \- Basic calculus concepts ✅ First Mini-Hackathon Participation \- Join beginner-friendly hackathons \- Focus on Python-based challenges \- Team up with other beginners 💡 \\Smart Move:\\ \- Join Discord/Slack hackathon communities \- Practice collaborative coding \- Build network with fellow participants \\🔹 5-8 Months (ML Foundations)\\ ✅ Machine Learning Basics \- Supervised Learning \- Model evaluation \- Feature engineering \- scikit-learn projects ✅ Participate in 2-3 ML Hackathons \- Kaggle Getting Started competitions \- Local ML hackathons \- University hackathons ✅ Start LinkedIn & GitHub Portfolio 💡 \\Smart Move:\\ \- Document hackathon experiences \- Share learnings on LinkedIn \- Focus on completion over winning \\🔹 9-12 Months (Deep Learning Introduction)\\ ✅ Basic Deep Learning \- Neural network fundamentals \- PyTorch basics \- Computer vision tasks \- Basic NLP ✅ Advanced Hackathon Participation \- AI/ML specific hackathons \- Team lead in 1-2 hackathons \- Start mentoring beginners \\🔵 Year 1 Expected Outcome (60-70% Execution)\\ ✔ \\Strong Python & ML foundations\\ ✔ \\5-6 hackathon participations\\ ✔ \\Active GitHub (100+ commits)\\ ✔ \\Growing LinkedIn (300+ connections)\\ 💰 \\Earning Expectation → ₹8K-₹20K per month (Projects/Internship)\\ \\🟢 Year 2: Professional Growth & Specialization (12-24 Months)\\ 🎯 \\Goal: Build Professional Experience & Recognition\\ \\🔹 1-6 Months (Technical Depth)\\ ✅ Advanced ML Topics \- Deep Learning architectures \- Computer Vision OR NLP \- MLOps basics (Docker, FastAPI) \- Cloud fundamentals (AWS/GCP) ✅ Hackathon Achievements \- Win minor prizes in 2-3 hackathons \- Lead teams in major hackathons \- Network with sponsors ✅ Start Technical Blogging 💡 \\Smart Move:\\ \- Focus on hackathon projects that align with career goals \- Build relationships with companies at hackathons \- Create detailed project documentation \\🔹 7-12 Months (Professional Experience)\\ ✅ Secure ML Role/Internship ✅ Advanced Project Building ✅ Open Source Contributions ✅ Organize Small Hackathons 💡 \\Smart Move:\\ \- Use hackathon network for job referrals \- Convert hackathon projects into full products \- Build mentor reputation \\🔵 Year 2 Expected Outcome (60-70% Execution)\\ ✔ \\Professional ML experience\\ ✔ \\10+ hackathon participations\\ ✔ \\1-2 hackathon wins\\ ✔ \\Strong industry network\\ 💰 \\Earning Expectation → ₹40K-₹70K per month (Job/Freelancing)\\ \\🟢 Year 3: Scaling & Business Foundation (24-36 Months)\\ 🎯 \\Goal: Establish Multiple Income Streams\\ \\🔹 1-4 Months (Expertise Building)\\ ✅ Choose Specialization \- MLOps \- Computer Vision \- NLP/LLMs \- Generative AI ✅ Advanced Competitions \- International hackathons \- High-prize competitions \- Corporate ML challenges ✅ Start Consulting Services 💡 \\Smart Move:\\ \- Use hackathon wins for marketing \- Build service packages around expertise \- Network with corporate sponsors \\🔹 5-8 Months (Business Development)\\ ✅ Scale Services ✅ Build Client Network ✅ Create Training Programs ✅ Hackathon Mentorship Program 💡 \\Smart Move:\\ \- Convert hackathon projects to products \- Use event networks for client acquisition \- Build authority through speaking \\🔹 9-12 Months (Growth & Innovation)\\ ✅ Product Development ✅ Team Building ✅ Innovation Focus ✅ Hackathon Organization \\🔵 Year 3 Expected Outcome (60-70% Execution)\\ ✔ \\Established ML business/career\\ ✔ \\Known in hackathon community\\ ✔ \\Multiple income streams\\ ✔ \\Strong industry presence\\ 💰 \\Earning Expectation → ₹1L-₹2L per month (Multiple Streams)\\ \\🟢 Year 4: Scale & Leadership (36-48 Months)\\ 🎯 \\Goal: Build AI Company & Achieve Financial Freedom\\ \\🔹 1-4 Months (Business Scaling)\\ ✅ Company Formation \- AI consulting firm \- Product development \- Training programs ✅ Hackathon Innovation \- Launch own hackathon series \- Corporate partnerships \- Prize sponsorships ✅ Team Expansion 💡 \\Smart Move:\\ \- Use hackathon network for hiring \- Create unique event formats \- Build corporate relationships \\🔹 5-8 Months (Market Leadership)\\ ✅ Product Launch ✅ Service Expansion ✅ International Presence ✅ Innovation Hub Creation 💡 \\Smart Move:\\ \- Create hackathon-to-hiring pipeline \- Build educational programs \- Establish thought leadership \\🔹 9-12 Months (Empire Building)\\ ✅ Multiple Revenue Streams \- AI products \- Consulting services \- Educational programs \- Event organization \- Investment returns ✅ Industry Leadership \- Conference speaking \- Published content \- Community leadership \\🔵 Year 4 Expected Outcome (60-70% Execution)\\ ✔ \\Established AI company\\ ✔ \\Major hackathon organizer\\ ✔ \\Multiple product lines\\ ✔ \\Industry authority status\\ 💰 \\Earning Expectation → ₹3L-₹5L+ per month (Business Income)\\ \\📊 FINAL RATING\\ ✅ \\Comprehensive growth plan\\ ✅ \\Strong community focus\\ ✅ \\Multiple income pathways\\ 💡 \\If 100% Execution → 8.5/10 Feasibility\\ 💡 \\If 50% Execution → 6/10 Feasibility\\ 🔥 \\Conclusion: A balanced path to ML mastery and entrepreneurship, built through consistent growth and community engagement!\\ 🚀 \\Key Success Factors:\\ Regular hackathon participation Strong community involvement Consistent skill development Strategic network building Focus on both technical and business growth

I’m AI/ML product manager. What I would have done differently on Day 1 if I knew what I know today

I’m a software engineer and product manager, and I’ve working with and studying machine learning models for several years. But nothing has taught me more than applying ML in real-world projects. Here are some of top product management lessons I learned from applying ML: Work backwards: In essence, creating ML products and features is no different than other products. Don’t jump into Jupyter notebooks and data analysis before you talk to the key stakeholders. Establish deployment goals (how ML will affect your operations), prediction goals (what exactly the model should predict), and evaluation metrics (metrics that matter and required level of accuracy) before gathering data and exploring models.  Bridge the tech/business gap in your organization: Business professionals don’t know enough about the intricacies of machine learning, and ML professionals don’t know about the practical needs of businesses. Educate your business team on the basics of ML and create joint teams of data scientists and business analysts to define and measure goals and progress of ML projects. ML projects are more likely to fail when business and data science teams work in silos. Adjust your priorities at different stages of the project: In the early stages of your ML project, aim for speed. Choose the solution that validates/rejects your hypotheses the fastest, whether it’s an API, a pre-trained model, or even a non-ML solution (always consider non-ML solutions). In the more advanced stages of the project, look for ways to optimize your solution (increase accuracy and speed, reduce costs, increase flexibility). There is a lot more to share, but these are some of the top experiences that would have made my life a lot easier if I had known them before diving into applied ML.  What is your experience?

I Built Blainy - An AI Writing Tool for Students and Researchers

Hello Everyone, I built Blainy, an AI writing tool designed to make writing easier and more efficient, based on my own experiences as a student working part-time and struggling to find the time for essays and assignments. Blainy is perfect for students, researchers, content creators, and bloggers. It addresses the gaps where most writing tools fall short and helps you write essays, assignments, research papers, product descriptions, blog content, and more with ease. I created this tool based on the problems I faced, so I genuinely want to know your review on this. Blainy's Features: AI Suggestions: This feature provides you with suggestions while you are writing, so you don't face the writer's block issue. This was the main issue I usually faced when writing my essays. You will get suggestions while you are writing, and if you don't like them, you can always ask for alternatives. AI Automation: If you want AI to write for you, you can choose this feature. It will write one to two paragraphs according to what you select. You can choose to write an introduction, conclusion, arguments, etc. If you just want it to write casually, select the "continue writing" feature, and it will write all on its own. Paraphrasing: If you want to paraphrase your text, you can do it on Blainy. You can also select different tones for writing, such as academic, friendly, simplicity, and more. Citations: By using this feature, you no longer need to search for citations on Google or ChatGPT. Blainy will load millions of citations for you in seconds. You can select any citation you want, and if you want to add a custom citation, you can do that too. Built-in Plagiarism Checker: Blainy includes a plagiarism checker to ensure that your content is original and plagiarism-free. PDF Chat: If you have any questions about a document that you are curious about or don't understand, you can use this feature. It will answer your question and help you summarize the whole article, and more. Best of all, We provide daily credits so you can access all these features for free with daily credits! We understand the unique challenges faced by students, including those with dyslexia and other writing difficulties. That's why we're working on adding features like a voice-to-text converter to assist students who struggle with writing. Your feedback is invaluable to us, so please don't hesitate to reach out and share your thoughts. We're also considering adding some free tools like paraphrasing to attract more users. If you have any suggestions for additional features that would be beneficial, please let me know. Your input can help us improve Blainy and make it even more valuable for everyone. If you have any good ideas that you think can help us in any way, please let me know. Thank you in advance for your support and feedback! Check it out: Blainy

Compare trading strategies on the fly - pnl.ai - please check it out

Part of my covid project and part of my long obsession with prediction markets, I have created a web page that displays and allows to compare best and worst performing trading strategies. TL;DR: best stocks + best strategies -> the list of top and bottom performing trading algorithms.  Product Typically, trading newsletters and stock-scanners display only price return for top market gainers and losers. I have forever been interested in inspecting top and bottom performing trading strategies for a given set of securities and could not find any websites that do that. So, I decided to create a tool of my own. I wanted the tool that would help me to answer questions like if there is a better strategy than buy and hold, should I follow greed and fear indicator of the market or do the opposite. Top and bottom performing securities do not tell you if a stock is going to go up or down, but they do alert you to rapidly changing market conditions, such as change in the competitive landscape, impending lawsuits, changes in the company's management and, at the very least, the stocks you should avoid in your programmatic trading. Top strategies do all that, but they can also alert you to a change in the market regime. For example, MACD strategy, which is a variant of oscillator strategy, executed on Citibank stock returned 20% in the first half of 2020. In the same time period, the Citibank stock went down and "BuyAndHold" strategy, which is pretty much what it sounds, lost 45%. Now, compare that to the end of 2020 through spring of 2021, when MACD lost 1% and "BuyAndHold" gained 70%. This happened due to the change in the market due to the rally in financial stocks at the end of 2020. The market player who detect change in the market conditions first will reap most benefits. Another example, TSLA since the beginning of 2021 until end of April lost 7%. The StopLoss strategy sells the position after abrupt price drop and waits until the price returns to the level before the drop. For the same time interval the StopLoss strategy gained 10%. In this particular example, StopLoss outperformed BuyAndHold. To me personally, the most important feature is the ability to quickly tweak and modify trading strategies and observe change in their performance. You can change strategies parameters on the fly and even design your own custom trading strategy. In the end, I developed a tool I can use for myself but hope other investors who are experimenting with trading algorithms will find it useful as well. I called it "Profit and Loss AI", or PnL.ai for short. PnL.ai Description The web-tool in the link below allows you to customize parameters of existing strategies and essentially create your own strategy and seeing how it will compare to the set of original strategies. http://ec2-54-185-19-38.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com:5006/srv In the section above you can specify security and data range. In the section below you can choose strategy to customize and modify it's parameters. The strategy comparison table will automatically update and will display a newly created strategy side by side with the original strategies. Technology The tool is developed on bokeh and python and allows you to edit configuration parameters of each strategy all without programming knowledge. The strategies are fully specified via key/value pairs in the format of ini files used to initialize programs. The strategy classes are autogenerated by reading the ini config files dynamically using "factory" pattern. You can find a simplified code in this github repo: https://github.com/varturas/PnlAITk Next Steps In the future I want to give users ability to monitor their chosen strategy by receiving trading algo alerts whenever performance of their custom trading algo is changes significantly. I'm going to be adding more strategies, some of standard technical analysis variety and some will be more custom and more advanced. I'll also be adding more columns to the performance table to give better information. You can receive daily newsletter with the list of trading strategies generated by above-mentioned web-tool by registering on http://pnl.ai/ and checking subscribe checkmark.

How me and my team made 15+ apps and not made a single sale in 2023

Hey, my name is Michael, I am in Auckland NZ. This year was the official beginning of my adult life. I graduated from university and started a full-time job. I’ve also really dug into indiehacking/bootstrapping and started 15 projects (and it will be at least 17 before the year ends). I think I’ve learned a lot but I consciously repeated mistakes. Upto (Nov) Discord Statuses + Your Location + Facebook Poke https://preview.redd.it/4nqt7tp2tf5c1.png?width=572&format=png&auto=webp&s=b0223484bc54b45b5c65e0b1afd0dc52f9c02ad1 This was the end of uni, I often messaged (and got messaged) requests of status and location to (and from my) friends. I thought, what if we make a social app that’s super basic and all it does is show you where your friends are? To differentiate from snap maps and others we wanted something with more privacy where you select the location. However, never finished the codebase or launched it. This is because I slowly started to realize that B2C (especially social networks) are way too hard to make into an actual business and the story with Fistbump would repeat itself. However, this decision not to launch it almost launched a curse on our team. From that point, we permitted ourselves to abandon projects even before launching. Lessons: Don’t do social networks if your goal is 10k MRR ASAP. If you build something to 90% competition ship it or you will think it’s okay to abandon projects Insight Bites (Nov) Youtube Summarizer Extension ​ https://preview.redd.it/h6drqej4tf5c1.jpg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0f211456c390ac06f4fcb54aa51f9d50b0826658 Right after Upto, we started ideating and conveniently the biggest revolution in the recent history of tech was released → GPT. We instantly began ideating. The first problem we chose to use AI for is to summarize YouTube videos. Comical. Nevertheless, I am convinced we have had the best UX because you could right-click on a video to get a slideshow of insights instead of how everyone else did it. We dropped it because there was too much competition and unit economics didn’t work out (and it was a B2C). PodPigeon (Dec) Podcast → Tweet Threads https://preview.redd.it/0ukge245tf5c1.png?width=2498&format=png&auto=webp&s=23303e1cab330578a3d25cd688fa67aa3b97fb60 Then we thought, to make unit economics work we need to make this worthwhile for podcasters. This is when I got into Twitter and started seeing people summarize podcasts. Then I thought, what if we make something that converts a podcast into tweets? This was probably one of the most important projects because it connected me with Jason and Jonaed, both of whom I regularly stay in contact with and are my go-to experts on ideas related to content creation. Jonaed was even willing to buy Podpigeon and was using it on his own time. However, the unit economics still didn’t work out (and we got excited about other things). Furthermore, we got scared of the competition because I found 1 - 2 other people who did similar things poorly. This was probably the biggest mistake we’ve made. Very similar projects made 10k MRR and more, launching later than we did. We didn’t have a coherent product vision, we didn’t understand the customer well enough, and we had a bad outlook on competition and a myriad of other things. Lessons: I already made another post about the importance of outlook on competition. Do not quit just because there are competitors or just because you can’t be 10x better. Indiehackers and Bootstrappers (or even startups) need to differentiate in the market, which can be via product (UX/UI), distribution, or both. Asking Ace Intro.co + Crowdsharing ​ https://preview.redd.it/0hu2tt16tf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3d397568ef2331e78198d64fafc1a701a3e75999 As I got into Twitter, I wanted to chat with some people I saw there. However, they were really expensive. I thought, what if we made some kind of crowdfunding service for other entrepreneurs to get a private lecture from their idols? It seemed to make a lot of sense on paper. It was solving a problem (validated via the fact that Intro.co is a thing and making things cheaper and accessible is a solid ground to stand on), we understood the market (or so we thought), and it could monetize relatively quickly. However, after 1-2 posts on Reddit and Indiehackers, we quickly learned three things. Firstly, no one cares. Secondly, even if they do, they think they can get the same information for free online. Thirdly, the reasons before are bad because for the first point → we barely talked to people, and for the second people → we barely talked to the wrong people. However, at least we didn’t code anything this time and tried to validate via a landing page. Lessons Don’t give up after 1 Redditor says “I don’t need this” Don’t be scared to choose successful people as your audience. Clarito Journaling with AI analyzer https://preview.redd.it/8ria2wq6tf5c1.jpg?width=1108&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=586ec28ae75003d9f71b4af2520b748d53dd2854 Clarito is a classic problem all amateur entrepreneurs have. It’s where you lie to yourself that you have a real problem and therefore is validated but when your team asks you how much you would pay you say I guess you will pay, maybe, like 5 bucks a month…? Turns out, you’d have to pay me to use our own product lol. We sent it off to a few friends and posted on some forums, but never really got anything tangible and decided to move away. Honestly, a lot of it is us in our own heads. We say the market is too saturated, it’ll be hard to monetize, it’s B2C, etc. Lessons: You use the Mom Test on other people. You have to do it yourself as well. However, recognizing that the Mom Test requires a lot of creativity in its investigation because knowing what questions to ask can determine the outcome of the validation. I asked myself “Do I journal” but I didn’t ask myself “How often do I want GPT to chyme in on my reflections”. Which was practically never. That being said I think with the right audience and distribution, this product can work. I just don’t know (let alone care) about the audience that much (and I thought I was one of them)/ Horns & Claw Scrapes financial news texts you whether you should buy/sell the stock (news sentiment analysis) ​ https://preview.redd.it/gvfxdgc7tf5c1.jpg?width=1287&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=63977bbc33fe74147b1f72913cefee4a9ebec9c2 This one we didn’t even bother launching. Probably something internal in the team and also seemed too good to be true (because if this works, doesn’t that just make us ultra-rich fast?). I saw a similar tool making 10k MRR so I guess I was wrong. Lessons: This one was pretty much just us getting into our heads. I declared that without an audience it would be impossible to ship this product and we needed to start a YouTube channel. Lol, and we did. And we couldn’t even film for 1 minute. I made bold statements like “We will commit to this for at least 1 year no matter what”. Learnery Make courses about any subject https://preview.redd.it/1nw6z448tf5c1.jpg?width=1112&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f2c73e8af23b0a6c3747a81e785960d4004feb48 This is probably the most “successful” project we’ve made. It grew from a couple of dozen to a couple of hundred users. It has 11 buy events for $9.99 LTD (we couldn’t be bothered connecting Stripe because we thought no one would buy it anyway). However what got us discouraged from seriously pursuing it more is, that this has very low defensibility, “Why wouldn’t someone just use chatGPT?” and it’s B2C so it’s hard to monetize. I used it myself for a month or so but then stopped. I don’t think it’s the app, I think the act of learning a concept from scratch isn’t something you do constantly in the way Learnery delivers it (ie course). I saw a bunch of similar apps that look like Ass make like 10k MRR. Lessons: Don’t do B2C, or if you do, do it properly Don’t just Mixpanel the buy button, connect your Stripe otherwise, it doesn’t feel real and you won’t get momentum. I doubt anyone (even me) will make this mistake again. I live in my GPT bubble where I make assumptions that everyone uses GPT the same way and as much as I do. In reality, the argument that this has low defensibility against GPT is invalid. Platforms that deliver a differentiated UX from ChatGPT to audiences who are not tightly integrated into the habit of using ChatGPT (which is like - everyone except for SOME tech evangelists). CuriosityFM Make podcasts about any subject https://preview.redd.it/zmosrcp8tf5c1.jpg?width=638&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d04ddffabef9050050b0d87939273cc96a8637dc This was our attempt at making Learnery more unique and more differentiated from chatGPT. We never really launched it. The unit economics didn’t work out and it was actually pretty boring to listen to, I don’t think I even fully listened to one 15-minute episode. I think this wasn’t that bad, it taught us more about ElevenLabs and voice AI. It took us maybe only 2-3 days to build so I think building to learn a new groundbreaking technology is fine. SleepyTale Make children’s bedtime stories https://preview.redd.it/14ue9nm9tf5c1.jpg?width=807&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=267e18ec6f9270e6d1d11564b38136fa524966a1 My 8-year-old sister gave me that idea. She was too scared of making tea and I was curious about how she’d react if she heard a bedtime story about that exact scenario with the moral that I wanted her to absorb (which is that you shouldn’t be scared to try new things ie stop asking me to make your tea and do it yourself, it’s not that hard. You could say I went full Goebbels on her). Zane messaged a bunch of parents on Facebook but no one really cared. We showed this to one Lady at the place we worked from at Uni and she was impressed and wanted to show it to her kids but we already turned off our ElevenLabs subscription. Lessons: However, the truth behind this is beyond just “you need to be able to distribute”. It’s that you have to care about the audience. I don’t particularly want to build products for kids and parents. I am far away from that audience because I am neither a kid anymore nor going to be a parent anytime soon, and my sister still asked me to make her tea so the story didn’t work. I think it’s important to ask yourself whether you care about the audience. The way you answer that even when you are in full bias mode is, do you engage with them? Are you interested in what’s happening in their communities? Are you friends with them? Etc. User Survey Analyzer Big User Survey → GPT → Insights Report Me and my coworker were chatting about AI when he asked me to help him analyze a massive survey for him. I thought that was some pretty decent validation. Someone in an actual company asking for help. Lessons Market research is important but moving fast is also important. Ie building momentum. Also don’t revolve around 1 user. This has been a problem in multiple projects. Finding as many users as possible in the beginning to talk to is key. Otherwise, you are just waiting for 1 person to get back to you. AutoI18N Automated Internationalization of the codebase for webapps This one I might still do. It’s hard to find a solid distribution strategy. However, the idea came from me having to do it at my day job. It seems a solid problem. I’d say it’s validated and has some good players already. The key will be differentiation via the simplicity of UX and distribution (which means a slightly different audience). In the backlog for now because I don’t care about the problem or the audience that much. Documate - Part 1 Converts complex PDFs into Excel https://preview.redd.it/8b45k9katf5c1.jpg?width=1344&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=57324b8720eb22782e28794d2db674b073193995 My mom needed to convert a catalog of furniture into an inventory which took her 3 full days of data entry. I automated it for her and thought this could have a big impact but there was no distribution because there was no ICP. We tried to find the ideal customers by talking to a bunch of different demographics but I flew to Kazakhstan for a holiday and so this kind of fizzled out. I am not writing this blog post linearity, this is my 2nd hour and I am tired and don’t want to finish this later so I don’t even know what lessons I learned. Figmatic Marketplace of high-quality Figma mockups of real apps https://preview.redd.it/h13yv45btf5c1.jpg?width=873&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=aaa2896aeac2f22e9b7d9eed98c28bb8a2d2cdf1 This was a collab between me and my friend Alex. It was the classic Clarito where we both thought we had this problem and would pay to fix it. In reality, this is a vitamin. Neither I, nor I doubt Alex have thought of this as soon as we bought the domain. We posted it on Gumroad, sent it to a bunch of forums, and called it a day. Same issue as almost all the other ones. No distribution strategy. However, apps like Mobin show us that this concept is indeed profitable but it takes time. It needs SEO. It needs a community. None of those things, me and Alex had or was interested in. However shortly after HTML → Figma came out and it’s the best plugin. Maybe that should’ve been the idea. Podcast → Course Turns Podcaster’s episodes into a course This one I got baited by Jason :P I described to him the idea of repurposing his content for a course. He told me this was epic and he would pay. Then after I sent him the demo, he never checked it out. Anyhow during the development, we realized that doesn’t actually work because A podcast doesn’t have the correct format for the course, the most you can extract are concepts and ideas, seldom explanations. Most creators want video-based courses to be hosted on Kajabi or Udemy Another lesson is that when you pitch something to a user, what you articulate is a platform or a process, they imagine an outcome. However, the end result of your platform can be a very different outcome to what they had in mind and there is even a chance that what they want is not possible. You need to understand really well what the outcome looks like before you design the process. This is a classic problem where we thought of the solution before the problem. Yes, the problem exists. Podcasters want to make courses. However, if you really understand what they want, you can see how repurposing a podcast isn’t the best way to get there. However I only really spoke to 1-2 podcasters about this so making conclusions is dangerous for this can just be another asking ace mistake with the Redditor. Documate Part 2 Same concept as before but now I want to run some ads. We’ll see what happens. https://preview.redd.it/xb3npj0ctf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3cd4884a29fd11d870d010a2677b585551c49193 In conclusion https://preview.redd.it/2zrldc9dtf5c1.jpg?width=1840&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2b3105073e752ad41c23f205dbd1ea046c1da7ff It doesn’t actually matter that much whether you choose to do a B2C, or a social network or focus on growing your audience. All of these can make you successful. What’s important is that you choose. If I had to summarize my 2023 in one word it’s indecision. Most of these projects succeeded for other people, nothing was as fundamentally wrong about them as I proclaimed. In reality that itself was an excuse. New ideas seduce, and it is a form of discipline to commit to a single project for a respectful amount of time. https://preview.redd.it/zy9a2vzdtf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=901c621227bba0feb4efdb39142f66ab2ebb86fe Distribution is not just posting on Indiehackers and Reddit. It’s an actual strategy and you should think of it as soon as you think of the idea, even before the Figma designs. I like how Denis Shatalin taught me. You have to build a pipeline. That means a reliable way to get leads, launch campaigns at them, close deals, learn from them, and optimize. Whenever I get an idea now I always try to ask myself “Where can I find 1000s leads in one day?” If there is no good answer, this is not a good project to do now. ​ https://preview.redd.it/2boh3fpetf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1c0d5d7b000716fcbbb00cbad495e8b61e25be66 Talk to users before doing anything. Jumping on designing and coding to make your idea a reality is a satisfying activity in the short term. Especially for me, I like to create for the sake of creation. However, it is so important to understand the market, understand the audience, understand the distribution. There are a lot of things to understand before coding. https://preview.redd.it/lv8tt96ftf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6c8735aa6ad795f216ff9ddfa2341712e8277724 Get out of your own head. The real reason we dropped so many projects is that we got into our own heads. We let the negative thoughts creep in and kill all the optimism. I am really good at coming up with excuses to start a project. However, I am equally as good at coming up with reasons to kill a project. And so you have this yin and yang of starting and stopping. Building momentum and not burning out. I can say with certainty my team ran out of juice this year. We lost momentum so many times we got burnt out towards the end. Realizing that the project itself has momentum is important. User feedback and sales bring momentum. Building also creates momentum but unless it is matched with an equal force of impact, it can stomp the project down. That is why so many of our projects died quickly after we launched. The smarter approach is to do things that have a low investment of momentum (like talking to users) but result in high impact (sales or feedback). Yes, that means the project can get invalidated which makes it more short-lived than if we built it first, but it preserves team life energy. At the end of 2023 here is a single sentence I am making about how I think one becomes a successful indiehacker. One becomes a successful Indiehacker when one starts to solve pain-killer problems in the market they understand, for an audience they care about and consistently engage with for a long enough timeframe. Therefore an unsuccessful Indiehacker in a single sentence is An unsuccessful Indiehacker constantly enters new markets they don’t understand to build solutions for people whose problems they don’t care about, in a timeframe that is shorter than than the time they spent thinking about distribution. However, an important note to be made. Life is not just about indiehacking. It’s about learning and having fun. In the human world, the best journey isn’t the one that gets you the fastest to your goals but the one you enjoy the most. I enjoyed making those silly little projects and although I do not regret them, I will not repeat the same mistakes in 2024. But while it’s still 2023, I have 2 more projects I want to do :) EDIT: For Devs, frontend is always react with vite (ts) and backend is either node with express (ts) or python. For DB either Postgres or mongo (usually Prisma for ORM). For deployment all of it is on AWS (S3, EC2). In terms of libraries/APIs Whisper.cpp is best open source for transcription Obviously the gpt apis Eleven labs for voice related stuff And other random stuff here and there

Day 1 of my BIP for my AdonisJS Boilerplate (turbosaas) [Built in public]

Hello everyone, here is day 1 (not really, I started a bit earlier) of my project: A boilerplate using AdonisJS, Inertia What technologies are used/present? AdonisJS Inertia Stripe OpenAI TailwindCSS Vite (React) Why? Firstly, I want to save time when launching my projects, and I think you do too, so I've included as many relevant features as possible. I'm tired of seeing attitudes like 'develop your SaaS in 1 hour and produce terrible code!' The purpose of this codebase is to provide the highest quality code possible and to maintain that standard throughout the development process. You might spend an extra 20 minutes doing things right, but you'll save 2 hours on refactoring. And no, you won't have to pay for updates. (WTF by the way?) Why these technologies? I've seen a lot of NextJS for boilerplates, and I've also used NextJS before, but I quickly abandoned it. It quickly becomes a mess You lose track of what is what, and start doing anything Every update breaks your application Whereas with AdonisJS, life is beautiful. There are plenty of community packages already available, and everything you need is here. What am I offering? Authentication: Social authentication, OTP, Magic Links, and credentials, along with complete account management features like password recovery. Payment & Mailing Integration: Seamless integration from start to finish, with multiple options to choose from. Detailed Documentation: Thorough explanations of every aspect, covering even the smallest, potentially confusing details in the code. Maintainable & Scalable Code: Organized by features, allowing you to easily drag and drop features to extend functionality. Developer Tools: Handy commands for generating new features and automatically adding necessary imports; a complete config to enable/disable a feature in less than 10 seconds... Pre-made Pages: Ready-to-use pages such as an admin dashboard for tasks like automatically updating products on Stripe. Extensive Component Library: A variety of components to streamline development. I've designed this boilerplate to be as developer-friendly and robust as possible, aiming to support maintainability and scalability from the get-go. Summary of today and previous days Day 2 Stripe is a nightmare to set up if you've never done it before, it quickly becomes tedious. But I've finally finished setting everything up: one-time payments, subscriptions, and subscription updates. It was complicated. Today I finally implemented the 'forgot password' option, and I've completed all the authentication by adding magic links (working with OTP). I also set up automatic deployment with GitHub Actions, and everything works well. The build runs with the action to ensure everything goes smoothly, then using SSH, I pull the project, build it, and launch it. Tomorrow: What I want to do tomorrow Tomorrow, I want to create the blog, because yes, I want to include a blog as well, and especially complete it as soon as possible so it can be available on turbosaas(dot)dev, and write my build in public. It will probably use markdown. Thank you for reading this short build in public, you can also check out how it's going on turbosaas(dot)dev.

How I Built a $6k/mo Business with Cold Email

I scaled my SaaS to a $6k/mo business in under 6 months completely using cold email. However, the biggest takeaway for me is not a business that’s potentially worth 6-figure. It’s having a glance at the power of cold emails in the age of AI. It’s a rapidly evolving yet highly-effective channel, but no one talks about how to do it properly. Below is the what I needed 3 years ago, when I was stuck with 40 free users on my first app. An app I spent 2 years building into the void. Entrepreneurship is lonely. Especially when you are just starting out. Launching a startup feel like shouting into the dark. You pour your heart out. You think you have the next big idea, but no one cares. You write tweets, write blogs, build features, add tests. You talk to some lukewarm leads on Twitter. You do your big launch on Product Hunt. You might even get your first few sales. But after that, crickets... Then, you try every distribution channel out there. SEO Influencers Facebook ads Affiliates Newsletters Social media PPC Tiktok Press releases The reality is, none of them are that effective for early-stage startups. Because, let's face it, when you're just getting started, you have no clue what your customers truly desire. Without understanding their needs, you cannot create a product that resonates with them. It's as simple as that. So what’s the best distribution channel when you are doing a cold start? Cold emails. I know what you're thinking, but give me 10 seconds to change your mind: When I first heard about cold emailing I was like: “Hell no! I’m a developer, ain’t no way I’m talking to strangers.” That all changed on Jan 1st 2024, when I actually started sending cold emails to grow. Over the period of 6 months, I got over 1,700 users to sign up for my SaaS and grew it to a $6k/mo rapidly growing business. All from cold emails. Mastering Cold Emails = Your Superpower I might not recommend cold emails 3 years ago, but in 2024, I'd go all in with it. It used to be an expensive marketing channel bootstrapped startups can’t afford. You need to hire many assistants, build a list, research the leads, find emails, manage the mailboxes, email the leads, reply to emails, do meetings. follow up, get rejected... You had to hire at least 5 people just to get the ball rolling. The problem? Managing people sucks, and it doesn’t scale. That all changed with AI. Today, GPT-4 outperforms most human assistants. You can build an army of intelligent agents to help you complete tasks that’d previously be impossible without human input. Things that’d take a team of 10 assistants a week can now be done in 30 minutes with AI, at far superior quality with less headaches. You can throw 5000 names with website url at this pipeline and you’ll automatically have 5000 personalized emails ready to fire in 30 minutes. How amazing is that? Beyond being extremely accessible to developers who are already proficient in AI, cold email's got 3 superpowers that no other distribution channels can offer. Superpower 1/3 : You start a conversation with every single user. Every. Single. User. Let that sink in. This is incredibly powerful in the early stages, as it helps you establish rapport, bounce ideas off one another, offer 1:1 support, understand their needs, build personal relationships, and ultimately convert users into long-term fans of your product. From talking to 1000 users at the early stage, I had 20 users asking me to get on a call every week. If they are ready to buy, I do a sales call. If they are not sure, I do a user research call. At one point I even had to limit the number of calls I took to avoid burnout. The depth of the understanding of my customers’ needs is unparalleled. Using this insight, I refined the product to precisely cater to their requirements. Superpower 2/3 : You choose exactly who you talk to Unlike other distribution channels where you at best pick what someone's searching for, with cold emails, you have 100% control over who you talk to. Their company Job title Seniority level Number of employees Technology stack Growth rate Funding stage Product offerings Competitive landscape Social activity (Marital status - well, technically you can, but maybe not this one…) You can dial in this targeting to match your ICP exactly. The result is super low CAC and ultra high conversion rate. For example, My competitors are paying $10 per click for the keyword "HARO agency". I pay $0.19 per email sent, and $1.92 per signup At around $500 LTV, you can see how the first means a non-viable business. And the second means a cash-generating engine. Superpower 3/3 : Complete stealth mode Unlike other channels where competitors can easily reverse engineer or even abuse your marketing strategies, cold email operates in complete stealth mode. Every aspect is concealed from end to end: Your target audience Lead generation methods Number of leads targeted Email content Sales funnel This secrecy explains why there isn't much discussion about it online. Everyone is too focused on keeping their strategies close and reaping the rewards. That's precisely why I've chosen to share my insights on leveraging cold email to grow a successful SaaS business. More founders need to harness this channel to its fullest potential. In addition, I've more or less reached every user within my Total Addressable Market (TAM). So, if any competitor is reading this, don't bother trying to replicate it. The majority of potential users for this AI product are already onboard. To recap, the three superpowers of cold emails: You start a conversation with every single user → Accelerate to PMF You choose exactly who you talk to → Super-low CAC Complete stealth mode → Doesn’t attract competition By combining the three superpowers I helped my SaaS reach product-marketing-fit quickly and scale it to $6k per month while staying fully bootstrapped. I don't believe this was a coincidence. It's a replicable strategy for any startup. The blueprint is actually straightforward: Engage with a handful of customers Validate the idea Engage with numerous customers Scale to $5k/mo and beyond More early-stage founders should leverage cold emails for validation, and as their first distribution channel. And what would it do for you? Update: lots of DM asking about more specifics so I wrote about it here. https://coldstartblueprint.com/p/ai-agent-email-list-building

How me and my team made 15+ apps and not made a single sale in 2023

Hey, my name is Michael, I am in Auckland NZ. This year was the official beginning of my adult life. I graduated from university and started a full-time job. I’ve also really dug into indiehacking/bootstrapping and started 15 projects (and it will be at least 17 before the year ends). I think I’ve learned a lot but I consciously repeated mistakes. Upto (Nov) Discord Statuses + Your Location + Facebook Poke https://preview.redd.it/4nqt7tp2tf5c1.png?width=572&format=png&auto=webp&s=b0223484bc54b45b5c65e0b1afd0dc52f9c02ad1 This was the end of uni, I often messaged (and got messaged) requests of status and location to (and from my) friends. I thought, what if we make a social app that’s super basic and all it does is show you where your friends are? To differentiate from snap maps and others we wanted something with more privacy where you select the location. However, never finished the codebase or launched it. This is because I slowly started to realize that B2C (especially social networks) are way too hard to make into an actual business and the story with Fistbump would repeat itself. However, this decision not to launch it almost launched a curse on our team. From that point, we permitted ourselves to abandon projects even before launching. Lessons: Don’t do social networks if your goal is 10k MRR ASAP. If you build something to 90% competition ship it or you will think it’s okay to abandon projects Insight Bites (Nov) Youtube Summarizer Extension ​ https://preview.redd.it/h6drqej4tf5c1.jpg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0f211456c390ac06f4fcb54aa51f9d50b0826658 Right after Upto, we started ideating and conveniently the biggest revolution in the recent history of tech was released → GPT. We instantly began ideating. The first problem we chose to use AI for is to summarize YouTube videos. Comical. Nevertheless, I am convinced we have had the best UX because you could right-click on a video to get a slideshow of insights instead of how everyone else did it. We dropped it because there was too much competition and unit economics didn’t work out (and it was a B2C). PodPigeon (Dec) Podcast → Tweet Threads https://preview.redd.it/0ukge245tf5c1.png?width=2498&format=png&auto=webp&s=23303e1cab330578a3d25cd688fa67aa3b97fb60 Then we thought, to make unit economics work we need to make this worthwhile for podcasters. This is when I got into Twitter and started seeing people summarize podcasts. Then I thought, what if we make something that converts a podcast into tweets? This was probably one of the most important projects because it connected me with Jason and Jonaed, both of whom I regularly stay in contact with and are my go-to experts on ideas related to content creation. Jonaed was even willing to buy Podpigeon and was using it on his own time. However, the unit economics still didn’t work out (and we got excited about other things). Furthermore, we got scared of the competition because I found 1 - 2 other people who did similar things poorly. This was probably the biggest mistake we’ve made. Very similar projects made 10k MRR and more, launching later than we did. We didn’t have a coherent product vision, we didn’t understand the customer well enough, and we had a bad outlook on competition and a myriad of other things. Lessons: I already made another post about the importance of outlook on competition. Do not quit just because there are competitors or just because you can’t be 10x better. Indiehackers and Bootstrappers (or even startups) need to differentiate in the market, which can be via product (UX/UI), distribution, or both. Asking Ace Intro.co + Crowdsharing ​ https://preview.redd.it/0hu2tt16tf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3d397568ef2331e78198d64fafc1a701a3e75999 As I got into Twitter, I wanted to chat with some people I saw there. However, they were really expensive. I thought, what if we made some kind of crowdfunding service for other entrepreneurs to get a private lecture from their idols? It seemed to make a lot of sense on paper. It was solving a problem (validated via the fact that Intro.co is a thing and making things cheaper and accessible is a solid ground to stand on), we understood the market (or so we thought), and it could monetize relatively quickly. However, after 1-2 posts on Reddit and Indiehackers, we quickly learned three things. Firstly, no one cares. Secondly, even if they do, they think they can get the same information for free online. Thirdly, the reasons before are bad because for the first point → we barely talked to people, and for the second people → we barely talked to the wrong people. However, at least we didn’t code anything this time and tried to validate via a landing page. Lessons Don’t give up after 1 Redditor says “I don’t need this” Don’t be scared to choose successful people as your audience. Clarito Journaling with AI analyzer https://preview.redd.it/8ria2wq6tf5c1.jpg?width=1108&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=586ec28ae75003d9f71b4af2520b748d53dd2854 Clarito is a classic problem all amateur entrepreneurs have. It’s where you lie to yourself that you have a real problem and therefore is validated but when your team asks you how much you would pay you say I guess you will pay, maybe, like 5 bucks a month…? Turns out, you’d have to pay me to use our own product lol. We sent it off to a few friends and posted on some forums, but never really got anything tangible and decided to move away. Honestly, a lot of it is us in our own heads. We say the market is too saturated, it’ll be hard to monetize, it’s B2C, etc. Lessons: You use the Mom Test on other people. You have to do it yourself as well. However, recognizing that the Mom Test requires a lot of creativity in its investigation because knowing what questions to ask can determine the outcome of the validation. I asked myself “Do I journal” but I didn’t ask myself “How often do I want GPT to chyme in on my reflections”. Which was practically never. That being said I think with the right audience and distribution, this product can work. I just don’t know (let alone care) about the audience that much (and I thought I was one of them)/ Horns & Claw Scrapes financial news texts you whether you should buy/sell the stock (news sentiment analysis) ​ https://preview.redd.it/gvfxdgc7tf5c1.jpg?width=1287&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=63977bbc33fe74147b1f72913cefee4a9ebec9c2 This one we didn’t even bother launching. Probably something internal in the team and also seemed too good to be true (because if this works, doesn’t that just make us ultra-rich fast?). I saw a similar tool making 10k MRR so I guess I was wrong. Lessons: This one was pretty much just us getting into our heads. I declared that without an audience it would be impossible to ship this product and we needed to start a YouTube channel. Lol, and we did. And we couldn’t even film for 1 minute. I made bold statements like “We will commit to this for at least 1 year no matter what”. Learnery Make courses about any subject https://preview.redd.it/1nw6z448tf5c1.jpg?width=1112&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f2c73e8af23b0a6c3747a81e785960d4004feb48 This is probably the most “successful” project we’ve made. It grew from a couple of dozen to a couple of hundred users. It has 11 buy events for $9.99 LTD (we couldn’t be bothered connecting Stripe because we thought no one would buy it anyway). However what got us discouraged from seriously pursuing it more is, that this has very low defensibility, “Why wouldn’t someone just use chatGPT?” and it’s B2C so it’s hard to monetize. I used it myself for a month or so but then stopped. I don’t think it’s the app, I think the act of learning a concept from scratch isn’t something you do constantly in the way Learnery delivers it (ie course). I saw a bunch of similar apps that look like Ass make like 10k MRR. Lessons: Don’t do B2C, or if you do, do it properly Don’t just Mixpanel the buy button, connect your Stripe otherwise, it doesn’t feel real and you won’t get momentum. I doubt anyone (even me) will make this mistake again. I live in my GPT bubble where I make assumptions that everyone uses GPT the same way and as much as I do. In reality, the argument that this has low defensibility against GPT is invalid. Platforms that deliver a differentiated UX from ChatGPT to audiences who are not tightly integrated into the habit of using ChatGPT (which is like - everyone except for SOME tech evangelists). CuriosityFM Make podcasts about any subject https://preview.redd.it/zmosrcp8tf5c1.jpg?width=638&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d04ddffabef9050050b0d87939273cc96a8637dc This was our attempt at making Learnery more unique and more differentiated from chatGPT. We never really launched it. The unit economics didn’t work out and it was actually pretty boring to listen to, I don’t think I even fully listened to one 15-minute episode. I think this wasn’t that bad, it taught us more about ElevenLabs and voice AI. It took us maybe only 2-3 days to build so I think building to learn a new groundbreaking technology is fine. SleepyTale Make children’s bedtime stories https://preview.redd.it/14ue9nm9tf5c1.jpg?width=807&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=267e18ec6f9270e6d1d11564b38136fa524966a1 My 8-year-old sister gave me that idea. She was too scared of making tea and I was curious about how she’d react if she heard a bedtime story about that exact scenario with the moral that I wanted her to absorb (which is that you shouldn’t be scared to try new things ie stop asking me to make your tea and do it yourself, it’s not that hard. You could say I went full Goebbels on her). Zane messaged a bunch of parents on Facebook but no one really cared. We showed this to one Lady at the place we worked from at Uni and she was impressed and wanted to show it to her kids but we already turned off our ElevenLabs subscription. Lessons: However, the truth behind this is beyond just “you need to be able to distribute”. It’s that you have to care about the audience. I don’t particularly want to build products for kids and parents. I am far away from that audience because I am neither a kid anymore nor going to be a parent anytime soon, and my sister still asked me to make her tea so the story didn’t work. I think it’s important to ask yourself whether you care about the audience. The way you answer that even when you are in full bias mode is, do you engage with them? Are you interested in what’s happening in their communities? Are you friends with them? Etc. User Survey Analyzer Big User Survey → GPT → Insights Report Me and my coworker were chatting about AI when he asked me to help him analyze a massive survey for him. I thought that was some pretty decent validation. Someone in an actual company asking for help. Lessons Market research is important but moving fast is also important. Ie building momentum. Also don’t revolve around 1 user. This has been a problem in multiple projects. Finding as many users as possible in the beginning to talk to is key. Otherwise, you are just waiting for 1 person to get back to you. AutoI18N Automated Internationalization of the codebase for webapps This one I might still do. It’s hard to find a solid distribution strategy. However, the idea came from me having to do it at my day job. It seems a solid problem. I’d say it’s validated and has some good players already. The key will be differentiation via the simplicity of UX and distribution (which means a slightly different audience). In the backlog for now because I don’t care about the problem or the audience that much. Documate - Part 1 Converts complex PDFs into Excel https://preview.redd.it/8b45k9katf5c1.jpg?width=1344&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=57324b8720eb22782e28794d2db674b073193995 My mom needed to convert a catalog of furniture into an inventory which took her 3 full days of data entry. I automated it for her and thought this could have a big impact but there was no distribution because there was no ICP. We tried to find the ideal customers by talking to a bunch of different demographics but I flew to Kazakhstan for a holiday and so this kind of fizzled out. I am not writing this blog post linearity, this is my 2nd hour and I am tired and don’t want to finish this later so I don’t even know what lessons I learned. Figmatic Marketplace of high-quality Figma mockups of real apps https://preview.redd.it/h13yv45btf5c1.jpg?width=873&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=aaa2896aeac2f22e9b7d9eed98c28bb8a2d2cdf1 This was a collab between me and my friend Alex. It was the classic Clarito where we both thought we had this problem and would pay to fix it. In reality, this is a vitamin. Neither I, nor I doubt Alex have thought of this as soon as we bought the domain. We posted it on Gumroad, sent it to a bunch of forums, and called it a day. Same issue as almost all the other ones. No distribution strategy. However, apps like Mobin show us that this concept is indeed profitable but it takes time. It needs SEO. It needs a community. None of those things, me and Alex had or was interested in. However shortly after HTML → Figma came out and it’s the best plugin. Maybe that should’ve been the idea. Podcast → Course Turns Podcaster’s episodes into a course This one I got baited by Jason :P I described to him the idea of repurposing his content for a course. He told me this was epic and he would pay. Then after I sent him the demo, he never checked it out. Anyhow during the development, we realized that doesn’t actually work because A podcast doesn’t have the correct format for the course, the most you can extract are concepts and ideas, seldom explanations. Most creators want video-based courses to be hosted on Kajabi or Udemy Another lesson is that when you pitch something to a user, what you articulate is a platform or a process, they imagine an outcome. However, the end result of your platform can be a very different outcome to what they had in mind and there is even a chance that what they want is not possible. You need to understand really well what the outcome looks like before you design the process. This is a classic problem where we thought of the solution before the problem. Yes, the problem exists. Podcasters want to make courses. However, if you really understand what they want, you can see how repurposing a podcast isn’t the best way to get there. However I only really spoke to 1-2 podcasters about this so making conclusions is dangerous for this can just be another asking ace mistake with the Redditor. Documate Part 2 Same concept as before but now I want to run some ads. We’ll see what happens. https://preview.redd.it/xb3npj0ctf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3cd4884a29fd11d870d010a2677b585551c49193 In conclusion https://preview.redd.it/2zrldc9dtf5c1.jpg?width=1840&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2b3105073e752ad41c23f205dbd1ea046c1da7ff It doesn’t actually matter that much whether you choose to do a B2C, or a social network or focus on growing your audience. All of these can make you successful. What’s important is that you choose. If I had to summarize my 2023 in one word it’s indecision. Most of these projects succeeded for other people, nothing was as fundamentally wrong about them as I proclaimed. In reality that itself was an excuse. New ideas seduce, and it is a form of discipline to commit to a single project for a respectful amount of time. https://preview.redd.it/zy9a2vzdtf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=901c621227bba0feb4efdb39142f66ab2ebb86fe Distribution is not just posting on Indiehackers and Reddit. It’s an actual strategy and you should think of it as soon as you think of the idea, even before the Figma designs. I like how Denis Shatalin taught me. You have to build a pipeline. That means a reliable way to get leads, launch campaigns at them, close deals, learn from them, and optimize. Whenever I get an idea now I always try to ask myself “Where can I find 1000s leads in one day?” If there is no good answer, this is not a good project to do now. ​ https://preview.redd.it/2boh3fpetf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1c0d5d7b000716fcbbb00cbad495e8b61e25be66 Talk to users before doing anything. Jumping on designing and coding to make your idea a reality is a satisfying activity in the short term. Especially for me, I like to create for the sake of creation. However, it is so important to understand the market, understand the audience, understand the distribution. There are a lot of things to understand before coding. https://preview.redd.it/lv8tt96ftf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6c8735aa6ad795f216ff9ddfa2341712e8277724 Get out of your own head. The real reason we dropped so many projects is that we got into our own heads. We let the negative thoughts creep in and kill all the optimism. I am really good at coming up with excuses to start a project. However, I am equally as good at coming up with reasons to kill a project. And so you have this yin and yang of starting and stopping. Building momentum and not burning out. I can say with certainty my team ran out of juice this year. We lost momentum so many times we got burnt out towards the end. Realizing that the project itself has momentum is important. User feedback and sales bring momentum. Building also creates momentum but unless it is matched with an equal force of impact, it can stomp the project down. That is why so many of our projects died quickly after we launched. The smarter approach is to do things that have a low investment of momentum (like talking to users) but result in high impact (sales or feedback). Yes, that means the project can get invalidated which makes it more short-lived than if we built it first, but it preserves team life energy. At the end of 2023 here is a single sentence I am making about how I think one becomes a successful indiehacker. One becomes a successful Indiehacker when one starts to solve pain-killer problems in the market they understand, for an audience they care about and consistently engage with for a long enough timeframe. Therefore an unsuccessful Indiehacker in a single sentence is An unsuccessful Indiehacker constantly enters new markets they don’t understand to build solutions for people whose problems they don’t care about, in a timeframe that is shorter than than the time they spent thinking about distribution. However, an important note to be made. Life is not just about indiehacking. It’s about learning and having fun. In the human world, the best journey isn’t the one that gets you the fastest to your goals but the one you enjoy the most. I enjoyed making those silly little projects and although I do not regret them, I will not repeat the same mistakes in 2024. But while it’s still 2023, I have 2 more projects I want to do :) EDIT: For Devs, frontend is always react with vite (ts) and backend is either node with express (ts) or python. For DB either Postgres or mongo (usually Prisma for ORM). For deployment all of it is on AWS (S3, EC2). In terms of libraries/APIs Whisper.cpp is best open source for transcription Obviously the gpt apis Eleven labs for voice related stuff And other random stuff here and there

I built an AI social monitoring that looks for relevant posts, not just keywords

Hey everyone! I've been working on a side project that I'm excited to share with you all—it's called BillyBuzz What is BillyBuzz? BillyBuzz is an AI-powered social monitoring tool that helps businesses spot and analyze relevant conversations on social media platforms, starting with Reddit. It surfaces the most promising leads directly to your Slack channels, email, or Discord, so you don't have to spend hours scrolling through threads. Why I Built It I was spending a ton of time searching for relevant posts in niche subreddits for another product I was working to get off the ground. It was not only time-consuming but also distracting (you know how easy it is to fall into a Reddit rabbit hole). I couldn't find any existing tool that did more than basic keyword searches—which wasn't enough, especially if your brand name has multiple meanings (like "Apple"). So, I decided to build BillyBuzz. It uses AI to understand your business, products, target audience, and value proposition, alongside specific keywords you might want to include. This way, it finds posts where you can genuinely contribute by introducing your product. I used BillyBuzz for a previous product launch and managed to grow it to over $80k/month in volume within about 3 months, purely through Reddit engagement. How It Works Add Information About Your Business: Input details about your business and products. Select Subreddits to Monitor: Choose the subreddits relevant to your niche. Receive Timely Alerts: Get notified via Slack, email, or Discord when relevant posts are identified. Features AI-Powered Relevancy Scoring: Goes beyond keywords by understanding the context to identify truly relevant opportunities. Subreddit Tracking: Monitor specific subreddits with AI-recommended keywords tailored to your company's needs. Real-Time Alerts: Checks for new relevant conversations every 15 minutes, so you can engage at the perfect time. Automated Categorization (Coming Soon): The AI will categorize conversations into topics like competitors, customer complaints, and more. Who It's For BillyBuzz is designed for startup founders, growth marketers, and small business owners who are tech-savvy and focused on scaling their operations. If you're looking to save time and engage more effectively with your target audience on social media, this might be up your alley. Looking for Feedback I'm sharing this here because I'd love to get your thoughts, feedback, or any suggestions you might have. If you're interested in checking it out, you can find more info here: https://billybuzz.com. Feel free to ask me anything or share your experiences with similar challenges!

How me and my team made 15+ apps and not made a single sale in 2023

Hey, my name is Michael, I am in Auckland NZ. This year was the official beginning of my adult life. I graduated from university and started a full-time job. I’ve also really dug into indiehacking/bootstrapping and started 15 projects (and it will be at least 17 before the year ends). I think I’ve learned a lot but I consciously repeated mistakes. Upto (Nov) Discord Statuses + Your Location + Facebook Poke https://preview.redd.it/4nqt7tp2tf5c1.png?width=572&format=png&auto=webp&s=b0223484bc54b45b5c65e0b1afd0dc52f9c02ad1 This was the end of uni, I often messaged (and got messaged) requests of status and location to (and from my) friends. I thought, what if we make a social app that’s super basic and all it does is show you where your friends are? To differentiate from snap maps and others we wanted something with more privacy where you select the location. However, never finished the codebase or launched it. This is because I slowly started to realize that B2C (especially social networks) are way too hard to make into an actual business and the story with Fistbump would repeat itself. However, this decision not to launch it almost launched a curse on our team. From that point, we permitted ourselves to abandon projects even before launching. Lessons: Don’t do social networks if your goal is 10k MRR ASAP. If you build something to 90% competition ship it or you will think it’s okay to abandon projects Insight Bites (Nov) Youtube Summarizer Extension ​ https://preview.redd.it/h6drqej4tf5c1.jpg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0f211456c390ac06f4fcb54aa51f9d50b0826658 Right after Upto, we started ideating and conveniently the biggest revolution in the recent history of tech was released → GPT. We instantly began ideating. The first problem we chose to use AI for is to summarize YouTube videos. Comical. Nevertheless, I am convinced we have had the best UX because you could right-click on a video to get a slideshow of insights instead of how everyone else did it. We dropped it because there was too much competition and unit economics didn’t work out (and it was a B2C). PodPigeon (Dec) Podcast → Tweet Threads https://preview.redd.it/0ukge245tf5c1.png?width=2498&format=png&auto=webp&s=23303e1cab330578a3d25cd688fa67aa3b97fb60 Then we thought, to make unit economics work we need to make this worthwhile for podcasters. This is when I got into Twitter and started seeing people summarize podcasts. Then I thought, what if we make something that converts a podcast into tweets? This was probably one of the most important projects because it connected me with Jason and Jonaed, both of whom I regularly stay in contact with and are my go-to experts on ideas related to content creation. Jonaed was even willing to buy Podpigeon and was using it on his own time. However, the unit economics still didn’t work out (and we got excited about other things). Furthermore, we got scared of the competition because I found 1 - 2 other people who did similar things poorly. This was probably the biggest mistake we’ve made. Very similar projects made 10k MRR and more, launching later than we did. We didn’t have a coherent product vision, we didn’t understand the customer well enough, and we had a bad outlook on competition and a myriad of other things. Lessons: I already made another post about the importance of outlook on competition. Do not quit just because there are competitors or just because you can’t be 10x better. Indiehackers and Bootstrappers (or even startups) need to differentiate in the market, which can be via product (UX/UI), distribution, or both. Asking Ace Intro.co + Crowdsharing ​ https://preview.redd.it/0hu2tt16tf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3d397568ef2331e78198d64fafc1a701a3e75999 As I got into Twitter, I wanted to chat with some people I saw there. However, they were really expensive. I thought, what if we made some kind of crowdfunding service for other entrepreneurs to get a private lecture from their idols? It seemed to make a lot of sense on paper. It was solving a problem (validated via the fact that Intro.co is a thing and making things cheaper and accessible is a solid ground to stand on), we understood the market (or so we thought), and it could monetize relatively quickly. However, after 1-2 posts on Reddit and Indiehackers, we quickly learned three things. Firstly, no one cares. Secondly, even if they do, they think they can get the same information for free online. Thirdly, the reasons before are bad because for the first point → we barely talked to people, and for the second people → we barely talked to the wrong people. However, at least we didn’t code anything this time and tried to validate via a landing page. Lessons Don’t give up after 1 Redditor says “I don’t need this” Don’t be scared to choose successful people as your audience. Clarito Journaling with AI analyzer https://preview.redd.it/8ria2wq6tf5c1.jpg?width=1108&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=586ec28ae75003d9f71b4af2520b748d53dd2854 Clarito is a classic problem all amateur entrepreneurs have. It’s where you lie to yourself that you have a real problem and therefore is validated but when your team asks you how much you would pay you say I guess you will pay, maybe, like 5 bucks a month…? Turns out, you’d have to pay me to use our own product lol. We sent it off to a few friends and posted on some forums, but never really got anything tangible and decided to move away. Honestly, a lot of it is us in our own heads. We say the market is too saturated, it’ll be hard to monetize, it’s B2C, etc. Lessons: You use the Mom Test on other people. You have to do it yourself as well. However, recognizing that the Mom Test requires a lot of creativity in its investigation because knowing what questions to ask can determine the outcome of the validation. I asked myself “Do I journal” but I didn’t ask myself “How often do I want GPT to chyme in on my reflections”. Which was practically never. That being said I think with the right audience and distribution, this product can work. I just don’t know (let alone care) about the audience that much (and I thought I was one of them)/ Horns & Claw Scrapes financial news texts you whether you should buy/sell the stock (news sentiment analysis) ​ https://preview.redd.it/gvfxdgc7tf5c1.jpg?width=1287&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=63977bbc33fe74147b1f72913cefee4a9ebec9c2 This one we didn’t even bother launching. Probably something internal in the team and also seemed too good to be true (because if this works, doesn’t that just make us ultra-rich fast?). I saw a similar tool making 10k MRR so I guess I was wrong. Lessons: This one was pretty much just us getting into our heads. I declared that without an audience it would be impossible to ship this product and we needed to start a YouTube channel. Lol, and we did. And we couldn’t even film for 1 minute. I made bold statements like “We will commit to this for at least 1 year no matter what”. Learnery Make courses about any subject https://preview.redd.it/1nw6z448tf5c1.jpg?width=1112&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f2c73e8af23b0a6c3747a81e785960d4004feb48 This is probably the most “successful” project we’ve made. It grew from a couple of dozen to a couple of hundred users. It has 11 buy events for $9.99 LTD (we couldn’t be bothered connecting Stripe because we thought no one would buy it anyway). However what got us discouraged from seriously pursuing it more is, that this has very low defensibility, “Why wouldn’t someone just use chatGPT?” and it’s B2C so it’s hard to monetize. I used it myself for a month or so but then stopped. I don’t think it’s the app, I think the act of learning a concept from scratch isn’t something you do constantly in the way Learnery delivers it (ie course). I saw a bunch of similar apps that look like Ass make like 10k MRR. Lessons: Don’t do B2C, or if you do, do it properly Don’t just Mixpanel the buy button, connect your Stripe otherwise, it doesn’t feel real and you won’t get momentum. I doubt anyone (even me) will make this mistake again. I live in my GPT bubble where I make assumptions that everyone uses GPT the same way and as much as I do. In reality, the argument that this has low defensibility against GPT is invalid. Platforms that deliver a differentiated UX from ChatGPT to audiences who are not tightly integrated into the habit of using ChatGPT (which is like - everyone except for SOME tech evangelists). CuriosityFM Make podcasts about any subject https://preview.redd.it/zmosrcp8tf5c1.jpg?width=638&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d04ddffabef9050050b0d87939273cc96a8637dc This was our attempt at making Learnery more unique and more differentiated from chatGPT. We never really launched it. The unit economics didn’t work out and it was actually pretty boring to listen to, I don’t think I even fully listened to one 15-minute episode. I think this wasn’t that bad, it taught us more about ElevenLabs and voice AI. It took us maybe only 2-3 days to build so I think building to learn a new groundbreaking technology is fine. SleepyTale Make children’s bedtime stories https://preview.redd.it/14ue9nm9tf5c1.jpg?width=807&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=267e18ec6f9270e6d1d11564b38136fa524966a1 My 8-year-old sister gave me that idea. She was too scared of making tea and I was curious about how she’d react if she heard a bedtime story about that exact scenario with the moral that I wanted her to absorb (which is that you shouldn’t be scared to try new things ie stop asking me to make your tea and do it yourself, it’s not that hard. You could say I went full Goebbels on her). Zane messaged a bunch of parents on Facebook but no one really cared. We showed this to one Lady at the place we worked from at Uni and she was impressed and wanted to show it to her kids but we already turned off our ElevenLabs subscription. Lessons: However, the truth behind this is beyond just “you need to be able to distribute”. It’s that you have to care about the audience. I don’t particularly want to build products for kids and parents. I am far away from that audience because I am neither a kid anymore nor going to be a parent anytime soon, and my sister still asked me to make her tea so the story didn’t work. I think it’s important to ask yourself whether you care about the audience. The way you answer that even when you are in full bias mode is, do you engage with them? Are you interested in what’s happening in their communities? Are you friends with them? Etc. User Survey Analyzer Big User Survey → GPT → Insights Report Me and my coworker were chatting about AI when he asked me to help him analyze a massive survey for him. I thought that was some pretty decent validation. Someone in an actual company asking for help. Lessons Market research is important but moving fast is also important. Ie building momentum. Also don’t revolve around 1 user. This has been a problem in multiple projects. Finding as many users as possible in the beginning to talk to is key. Otherwise, you are just waiting for 1 person to get back to you. AutoI18N Automated Internationalization of the codebase for webapps This one I might still do. It’s hard to find a solid distribution strategy. However, the idea came from me having to do it at my day job. It seems a solid problem. I’d say it’s validated and has some good players already. The key will be differentiation via the simplicity of UX and distribution (which means a slightly different audience). In the backlog for now because I don’t care about the problem or the audience that much. Documate - Part 1 Converts complex PDFs into Excel https://preview.redd.it/8b45k9katf5c1.jpg?width=1344&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=57324b8720eb22782e28794d2db674b073193995 My mom needed to convert a catalog of furniture into an inventory which took her 3 full days of data entry. I automated it for her and thought this could have a big impact but there was no distribution because there was no ICP. We tried to find the ideal customers by talking to a bunch of different demographics but I flew to Kazakhstan for a holiday and so this kind of fizzled out. I am not writing this blog post linearity, this is my 2nd hour and I am tired and don’t want to finish this later so I don’t even know what lessons I learned. Figmatic Marketplace of high-quality Figma mockups of real apps https://preview.redd.it/h13yv45btf5c1.jpg?width=873&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=aaa2896aeac2f22e9b7d9eed98c28bb8a2d2cdf1 This was a collab between me and my friend Alex. It was the classic Clarito where we both thought we had this problem and would pay to fix it. In reality, this is a vitamin. Neither I, nor I doubt Alex have thought of this as soon as we bought the domain. We posted it on Gumroad, sent it to a bunch of forums, and called it a day. Same issue as almost all the other ones. No distribution strategy. However, apps like Mobin show us that this concept is indeed profitable but it takes time. It needs SEO. It needs a community. None of those things, me and Alex had or was interested in. However shortly after HTML → Figma came out and it’s the best plugin. Maybe that should’ve been the idea. Podcast → Course Turns Podcaster’s episodes into a course This one I got baited by Jason :P I described to him the idea of repurposing his content for a course. He told me this was epic and he would pay. Then after I sent him the demo, he never checked it out. Anyhow during the development, we realized that doesn’t actually work because A podcast doesn’t have the correct format for the course, the most you can extract are concepts and ideas, seldom explanations. Most creators want video-based courses to be hosted on Kajabi or Udemy Another lesson is that when you pitch something to a user, what you articulate is a platform or a process, they imagine an outcome. However, the end result of your platform can be a very different outcome to what they had in mind and there is even a chance that what they want is not possible. You need to understand really well what the outcome looks like before you design the process. This is a classic problem where we thought of the solution before the problem. Yes, the problem exists. Podcasters want to make courses. However, if you really understand what they want, you can see how repurposing a podcast isn’t the best way to get there. However I only really spoke to 1-2 podcasters about this so making conclusions is dangerous for this can just be another asking ace mistake with the Redditor. Documate Part 2 Same concept as before but now I want to run some ads. We’ll see what happens. https://preview.redd.it/xb3npj0ctf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3cd4884a29fd11d870d010a2677b585551c49193 In conclusion https://preview.redd.it/2zrldc9dtf5c1.jpg?width=1840&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2b3105073e752ad41c23f205dbd1ea046c1da7ff It doesn’t actually matter that much whether you choose to do a B2C, or a social network or focus on growing your audience. All of these can make you successful. What’s important is that you choose. If I had to summarize my 2023 in one word it’s indecision. Most of these projects succeeded for other people, nothing was as fundamentally wrong about them as I proclaimed. In reality that itself was an excuse. New ideas seduce, and it is a form of discipline to commit to a single project for a respectful amount of time. https://preview.redd.it/zy9a2vzdtf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=901c621227bba0feb4efdb39142f66ab2ebb86fe Distribution is not just posting on Indiehackers and Reddit. It’s an actual strategy and you should think of it as soon as you think of the idea, even before the Figma designs. I like how Denis Shatalin taught me. You have to build a pipeline. That means a reliable way to get leads, launch campaigns at them, close deals, learn from them, and optimize. Whenever I get an idea now I always try to ask myself “Where can I find 1000s leads in one day?” If there is no good answer, this is not a good project to do now. ​ https://preview.redd.it/2boh3fpetf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1c0d5d7b000716fcbbb00cbad495e8b61e25be66 Talk to users before doing anything. Jumping on designing and coding to make your idea a reality is a satisfying activity in the short term. Especially for me, I like to create for the sake of creation. However, it is so important to understand the market, understand the audience, understand the distribution. There are a lot of things to understand before coding. https://preview.redd.it/lv8tt96ftf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6c8735aa6ad795f216ff9ddfa2341712e8277724 Get out of your own head. The real reason we dropped so many projects is that we got into our own heads. We let the negative thoughts creep in and kill all the optimism. I am really good at coming up with excuses to start a project. However, I am equally as good at coming up with reasons to kill a project. And so you have this yin and yang of starting and stopping. Building momentum and not burning out. I can say with certainty my team ran out of juice this year. We lost momentum so many times we got burnt out towards the end. Realizing that the project itself has momentum is important. User feedback and sales bring momentum. Building also creates momentum but unless it is matched with an equal force of impact, it can stomp the project down. That is why so many of our projects died quickly after we launched. The smarter approach is to do things that have a low investment of momentum (like talking to users) but result in high impact (sales or feedback). Yes, that means the project can get invalidated which makes it more short-lived than if we built it first, but it preserves team life energy. At the end of 2023 here is a single sentence I am making about how I think one becomes a successful indiehacker. One becomes a successful Indiehacker when one starts to solve pain-killer problems in the market they understand, for an audience they care about and consistently engage with for a long enough timeframe. Therefore an unsuccessful Indiehacker in a single sentence is An unsuccessful Indiehacker constantly enters new markets they don’t understand to build solutions for people whose problems they don’t care about, in a timeframe that is shorter than than the time they spent thinking about distribution. However, an important note to be made. Life is not just about indiehacking. It’s about learning and having fun. In the human world, the best journey isn’t the one that gets you the fastest to your goals but the one you enjoy the most. I enjoyed making those silly little projects and although I do not regret them, I will not repeat the same mistakes in 2024. But while it’s still 2023, I have 2 more projects I want to do :) EDIT: For Devs, frontend is always react with vite (ts) and backend is either node with express (ts) or python. For DB either Postgres or mongo (usually Prisma for ORM). For deployment all of it is on AWS (S3, EC2). In terms of libraries/APIs Whisper.cpp is best open source for transcription Obviously the gpt apis Eleven labs for voice related stuff And other random stuff here and there

I Built Blainy - An AI Writing Tool for Students and Researchers

Hello Everyone, I built Blainy, an AI writing tool designed to make writing easier and more efficient, based on my own experiences as a student working part-time and struggling to find the time for essays and assignments. Blainy is perfect for students, researchers, content creators, and bloggers. It addresses the gaps where most writing tools fall short and helps you write essays, assignments, research papers, product descriptions, blog content, and more with ease. I created this tool based on the problems I faced, so I genuinely want to know your review on this. Blainy's Features: AI Suggestions: This feature provides you with suggestions while you are writing, so you don't face the writer's block issue. This was the main issue I usually faced when writing my essays. You will get suggestions while you are writing, and if you don't like them, you can always ask for alternatives. AI Automation: If you want AI to write for you, you can choose this feature. It will write one to two paragraphs according to what you select. You can choose to write an introduction, conclusion, arguments, etc. If you just want it to write casually, select the "continue writing" feature, and it will write all on its own. Paraphrasing: If you want to paraphrase your text, you can do it on Blainy. You can also select different tones for writing, such as academic, friendly, simplicity, and more. Citations: By using this feature, you no longer need to search for citations on Google or ChatGPT. Blainy will load millions of citations for you in seconds. You can select any citation you want, and if you want to add a custom citation, you can do that too. Built-in Plagiarism Checker: Blainy includes a plagiarism checker to ensure that your content is original and plagiarism-free. PDF Chat: If you have any questions about a document that you are curious about or don't understand, you can use this feature. It will answer your question and help you summarize the whole article, and more. Best of all, We provide daily credits so you can access all these features for free with daily credits! We understand the unique challenges faced by students, including those with dyslexia and other writing difficulties. That's why we're working on adding features like a voice-to-text converter to assist students who struggle with writing. Your feedback is invaluable to us, so please don't hesitate to reach out and share your thoughts. We're also considering adding some free tools like paraphrasing to attract more users. If you have any suggestions for additional features that would be beneficial, please let me know. Your input can help us improve Blainy and make it even more valuable for everyone. If you have any good ideas that you think can help us in any way, please let me know. Thank you in advance for your support and feedback! Check it out: Blainy

[D] Here are 17 ways of making PyTorch training faster – what did I miss?

I've been collecting methods to accelerate training in PyTorch – here's what I've found so far. What did I miss? What did I get wrong? The methods – roughly sorted from largest to smallest expected speed-up – are: Consider using a different learning rate schedule. Use multiple workers and pinned memory in DataLoader. Max out the batch size. Use Automatic Mixed Precision (AMP). Consider using a different optimizer. Turn on cudNN benchmarking. Beware of frequently transferring data between CPUs and GPUs. Use gradient/activation checkpointing. Use gradient accumulation. Use DistributedDataParallel for multi-GPU training. Set gradients to None rather than 0. Use .as\_tensor rather than .tensor() Turn off debugging APIs if not needed. Use gradient clipping. Turn off bias before BatchNorm. Turn off gradient computation during validation. Use input and batch normalization. Consider using another learning rate schedule The learning rate (schedule) you choose has a large impact on the speed of convergence as well as the generalization performance of your model. Cyclical Learning Rates and the 1Cycle learning rate schedule are both methods introduced by Leslie N. Smith (here and here), and then popularised by fast.ai's Jeremy Howard and Sylvain Gugger (here and here). Essentially, the 1Cycle learning rate schedule looks something like this: ​ https://preview.redd.it/sc37u5knmxa61.png?width=476&format=png&auto=webp&s=09b309b4dbd67eedb4ab5f86e03e0e83d7b072d1 Sylvain writes: \[1cycle consists of\]  two steps of equal lengths, one going from a lower learning rate to a higher one than go back to the minimum. The maximum should be the value picked with the Learning Rate Finder, and the lower one can be ten times lower. Then, the length of this cycle should be slightly less than the total number of epochs, and, in the last part of training, we should allow the learning rate to decrease more than the minimum, by several orders of magnitude. In the best case this schedule achieves a massive speed-up – what Smith calls Superconvergence – as compared to conventional learning rate schedules. Using the 1Cycle policy he needs \~10x fewer training iterations of a ResNet-56 on ImageNet to match the performance of the original paper, for instance). The schedule seems to perform robustly well across common architectures and optimizers. PyTorch implements both of these methods torch.optim.lrscheduler.CyclicLR and torch.optim.lrscheduler.OneCycleLR, see the documentation. One drawback of these schedulers is that they introduce a number of additional hyperparameters. This post and this repo, offer a nice overview and implementation of how good hyper-parameters can be found including the Learning Rate Finder mentioned above. Why does this work? It doesn't seem entirely clear but one possible explanation might be that regularly increasing the learning rate helps to traverse saddle points in the loss landscape more quickly. Use multiple workers and pinned memory in DataLoader When using torch.utils.data.DataLoader, set numworkers > 0, rather than the default value of 0, and pinmemory=True, rather than the default value of False. Details of this are explained here. Szymon Micacz achieves a 2x speed-up for a single training epoch by using four workers and pinned memory. A rule of thumb that people are using to choose the number of workers is to set it to four times the number of available GPUs with both a larger and smaller number of workers leading to a slow down. Note that increasing num\_workerswill increase your CPU memory consumption. Max out the batch size This is a somewhat contentious point. Generally, however, it seems like using the largest batch size your GPU memory permits will accelerate your training (see NVIDIA's Szymon Migacz, for instance). Note that you will also have to adjust other hyperparameters, such as the learning rate, if you modify the batch size. A rule of thumb here is to double the learning rate as you double the batch size. OpenAI has a nice empirical paper on the number of convergence steps needed for different batch sizes. Daniel Huynh runs some experiments with different batch sizes (also using the 1Cycle policy discussed above) where he achieves a 4x speed-up by going from batch size 64 to 512. One of the downsides of using large batch sizes, however, is that they might lead to solutions that generalize worse than those trained with smaller batches. Use Automatic Mixed Precision (AMP) The release of PyTorch 1.6 included a native implementation of Automatic Mixed Precision training to PyTorch. The main idea here is that certain operations can be run faster and without a loss of accuracy at semi-precision (FP16) rather than in the single-precision (FP32) used elsewhere. AMP, then, automatically decide which operation should be executed in which format. This allows both for faster training and a smaller memory footprint. In the best case, the usage of AMP would look something like this: import torch Creates once at the beginning of training scaler = torch.cuda.amp.GradScaler() for data, label in data_iter: optimizer.zero_grad() Casts operations to mixed precision with torch.cuda.amp.autocast(): loss = model(data) Scales the loss, and calls backward() to create scaled gradients scaler.scale(loss).backward() Unscales gradients and calls or skips optimizer.step() scaler.step(optimizer) Updates the scale for next iteration scaler.update() Benchmarking a number of common language and vision models on NVIDIA V100 GPUs, Huang and colleagues find that using AMP over regular FP32 training yields roughly 2x – but upto 5.5x – training speed-ups. Currently, only CUDA ops can be autocast in this way. See the documentation here for more details on this and other limitations. u/SVPERBlA points out that you can squeeze out some additional performance (\~ 20%) from AMP on NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs if you convert your tensors to the Channels Last memory format. Refer to this section in the NVIDIA docs for an explanation of the speedup and more about NCHW versus NHWC tensor formats. Consider using another optimizer AdamW is Adam with weight decay (rather than L2-regularization) which was popularized by fast.ai and is now available natively in PyTorch as torch.optim.AdamW. AdamW seems to consistently outperform Adam in terms of both the error achieved and the training time. See this excellent blog post on why using weight decay instead of L2-regularization makes a difference for Adam. Both Adam and AdamW work well with the 1Cycle policy described above. There are also a few not-yet-native optimizers that have received a lot of attention recently, most notably LARS (pip installable implementation) and LAMB. NVIDA's APEX implements fused versions of a number of common optimizers such as Adam. This implementation avoid a number of passes to and from GPU memory as compared to the PyTorch implementation of Adam, yielding speed-ups in the range of 5%. Turn on cudNN benchmarking If your model architecture remains fixed and your input size stays constant, setting torch.backends.cudnn.benchmark = True might be beneficial (docs). This enables the cudNN autotuner which will benchmark a number of different ways of computing convolutions in cudNN and then use the fastest method from then on. For a rough reference on the type of speed-up you can expect from this, Szymon Migacz achieves a speed-up of 70% on a forward pass for a convolution and a 27% speed-up for a forward + backward pass of the same convolution. One caveat here is that this autotuning might become very slow if you max out the batch size as mentioned above. Beware of frequently transferring data between CPUs and GPUs Beware of frequently transferring tensors from a GPU to a CPU using tensor.cpu() and vice versa using tensor.cuda() as these are relatively expensive. The same applies for .item() and .numpy() – use .detach() instead. If you are creating a new tensor, you can also directly assign it to your GPU using the keyword argument device=torch.device('cuda:0'). If you do need to transfer data, using .to(non_blocking=True), might be useful as long as you don't have any synchronization points after the transfer. If you really have to, you might want to give Santosh Gupta's SpeedTorch a try, although it doesn't seem entirely clear when this actually does/doesn't provide speed-ups. Use gradient/activation checkpointing Quoting directly from the documentation: Checkpointing works by trading compute for memory. Rather than storing all intermediate activations of the entire computation graph for computing backward, the checkpointed part does not save intermediate activations, and instead recomputes them in backward pass. It can be applied on any part of a model. Specifically, in the forward pass, function will run in torch.no\grad() manner, i.e., not storing the intermediate activations. Instead, the forward pass saves the inputs tuple and the functionparameter. In the backwards pass, the saved inputs and function is retrieved, and the forward pass is computed on function again, now tracking the intermediate activations, and then the gradients are calculated using these activation values. So while this will might slightly increase your run time for a given batch size, you'll significantly reduce your memory footprint. This in turn will allow you to further increase the batch size you're using allowing for better GPU utilization. While checkpointing is implemented natively as torch.utils.checkpoint(docs), it does seem to take some thought and effort to implement properly. Priya Goyal has a good tutorial demonstrating some of the key aspects of checkpointing. Use gradient accumulation Another approach to increasing the batch size is to accumulate gradients across multiple .backward() passes before calling optimizer.step(). Following a post by Hugging Face's Thomas Wolf, gradient accumulation can be implemented as follows: model.zero_grad() Reset gradients tensors for i, (inputs, labels) in enumerate(training_set): predictions = model(inputs) Forward pass loss = loss_function(predictions, labels) Compute loss function loss = loss / accumulation_steps Normalize our loss (if averaged) loss.backward() Backward pass if (i+1) % accumulation_steps == 0: Wait for several backward steps optimizer.step() Now we can do an optimizer step model.zero_grad() Reset gradients tensors if (i+1) % evaluation_steps == 0: Evaluate the model when we... evaluate_model() ...have no gradients accumulate This method was developed mainly to circumvent GPU memory limitations and I'm not entirely clear on the trade-off between having additional .backward() loops. This discussion on the fastai forum seems to suggest that it can in fact accelerate training, so it's probably worth a try. Use Distributed Data Parallel for multi-GPU training Methods to accelerate distributed training probably warrant their own post but one simple one is to use torch.nn.DistributedDataParallel rather than torch.nn.DataParallel. By doing so, each GPU will be driven by a dedicated CPU core avoiding the GIL issues of DataParallel. In general, I can strongly recommend reading the documentation on distributed training. Set gradients to None rather than 0 Use .zerograd(settonone=True) rather than .zerograd(). Doing so will let the memory allocator handle the gradients rather than actively setting them to 0. This will lead to yield a modest speed-up as they say in the documentation, so don't expect any miracles. Watch out, doing this is not side-effect free! Check the docs for the details on this. Use .as_tensor() rather than .tensor() torch.tensor() always copies data. If you have a numpy array that you want to convert, use torch.astensor() or torch.fromnumpy() to avoid copying the data. Turn on debugging tools only when actually needed PyTorch offers a number of useful debugging tools like the autograd.profiler, autograd.grad\check, and autograd.anomaly\detection. Make sure to use them to better understand when needed but to also turn them off when you don't need them as they will slow down your training. Use gradient clipping Originally used to avoid exploding gradients in RNNs, there is both some empirical evidence as well as some theoretical support that clipping gradients (roughly speaking: gradient = min(gradient, threshold)) accelerates convergence. Hugging Face's Transformer implementation is a really clean example of how to use gradient clipping as well as some of the other methods such as AMP mentioned in this post. In PyTorch this can be done using torch.nn.utils.clipgradnorm(documentation). It's not entirely clear to me which models benefit how much from gradient clipping but it seems to be robustly useful for RNNs, Transformer-based and ResNets architectures and a range of different optimizers. Turn off bias before BatchNorm This is a very simple one: turn off the bias of layers before BatchNormalization layers. For a 2-D convolutional layer, this can be done by setting the bias keyword to False: torch.nn.Conv2d(..., bias=False, ...).  (Here's a reminder why this makes sense.) You will save some parameters, I would however expect the speed-up of this to be relatively small as compared to some of the other methods mentioned here. Turn off gradient computation during validation This one is straightforward: set torch.no_grad() during validation. Use input and batch normalization You're probably already doing this but you might want to double-check: Are you normalizing your input? Are you using batch-normalization? And here's a reminder of why you probably should. Bonus tip from the comments: Use JIT to fuse point-wise operations. If you have adjacent point-wise operations you can use PyTorch JIT to combine them into one FusionGroup which can then be launched on a single kernel rather than multiple kernels as would have been done per default. You'll also save some memory reads and writes. Szymon Migacz shows how you can use the @torch.jit.script decorator to fuse the operations in a GELU, for instance: @torch.jit.script def fused_gelu(x): return x 0.5 (1.0 + torch.erf(x / 1.41421)) In this case, fusing the operations leads to a 5x speed-up for the execution of fused_gelu as compared to the unfused version. See also this post for an example of how Torchscript can be used to accelerate an RNN. Hat tip to u/Patient_Atmosphere45 for the suggestion. Sources and additional resources Many of the tips listed above come from Szymon Migacz' talk and post in the PyTorch docs. PyTorch Lightning's William Falcon has two interesting posts with tips to speed-up training. PyTorch Lightning does already take care of some of the points above per-default. Thomas Wolf at Hugging Face has a number of interesting articles on accelerating deep learning – with a particular focus on language models. The same goes for Sylvain Gugger and Jeremy Howard: they have many interesting posts in particular on learning rates and AdamW. Thanks to Ben Hahn, Kevin Klein and Robin Vaaler for their feedback on a draft of this post! I've also put all of the above into this blog post.

tools I use to not have to hire anyone

I’ve spent unreasonable amount of time with AI tools and here’s curated list of ones I recommend for productivity (honestly, some of them can replace an employee): General assistants ChatGPT \- You probably know it. It’s a great tool for ideating, brainstorming, document summarization and quick question-answer work. There’s a desktop app available so you can quickly pop it up by pressing control + space, which makes it even better for productivity. Claude \- Another chat interface, similar to ChatGPT. It’s a different model provider so the answers and behavior might be different. From my experience, Claude 3.5 Sonnet is performing better than GPT-4o (but not o1) in tasks that focus on reasoning, code writing and copywriting. There’s also a desktop app available. Gemini \- Honestly, I’m not even sure where to put it. It’s Google’s model, one of the most powerful in terms of multimodal capabilities (text, image, audio). And it’s tailored for your Google Workspace. Email, docs, spreadsheets, meets, presentation. Anything. Research Perplexity \- Perplexity is an AI search engine that provides answers to questions with up-to-date information. So, forget Google. Use Perplexity to get answers to questions and dive down the rabbit hole. Exa AI \- Exa is another advanced search engine that combines AI-driven neural search with traditional keyword search. It understands the semantic meaning of queries and documents. And you can also choose what you want to search: academic articles, news, reports, tweets etc. Meetings, calendar and email Granola \- Great AI notepad for meetings. It’s a desktop app, so there’s no bot joining your meetings. It automatically transcribes and enhances meeting notes, helping organize and summarize key takeaways and generates action items, follow-up emails, etc. It also allows you to ask questions about the transcript and get answers. Reclaim \- AI-powered calendar that optimizes for productivity. Essentially, it automates meetings, tracks tasks, and protects deep work time. Cool thing is that it syncs with Google Calendar and Slack. Cora \- Batch processing emails is one of the main productivity tactics. Cora enables that. You only see emails that you need to respond to. And it generates automatic replies for you. All other emails are summarized twice a day. Knowledge summarization Particle News \- Short summaries of the daily news. Pretty straightforward. Notebook LM \- Notebook LM helps process and summarize various types of content, such as PDFs, websites, videos, and more. The cool thing is that it provides insights and connections between topics, cites sources and offers audio summaries. I use it when the content to read is too long and I’m on the go. Napkin \- For creating visuals from text. You can easily generate and customize infographics, diagrams etc. So, if you’re brainstorming, writing or preparing for a presentation, Napkin will work well. Writing and brainstorming Grammarly \- Well known grammar checker. It helps improve writing by focusing on clarity and tone. Sometimes the Grammarly icon popping up is annoying though. Flow \- Flow helps you write and edit notes by speaking. And it integrates across all the apps you use, adapts to your tone and style. Cool tool for just yapping! Automations Gumloop \- Think AI-first Zapier, but 100x more powerful. It's is a platform for automating complex work using AI via a no-code drag and drop interface. It’s very easy to automate work without needing engineers. And they have loads of templates. Wordware \- A platform for building AI agents with natural language. Honestly, for folks who are a bit more technical. You simply prompt LLM to perform a task for you. And you can build any integration you want. If you’re a builder, you can later on connect the agent via API. I strongly believe that technology is leverage. And with AI we can be in top 0.1% of people. If you want bit deeper dive into the topic, I shared that on my substack (available via link in my profile) Any other recommendations for apps I could use? What works if you want to keep the team super lean in early days?

I run an AI automation agency (AAA). My honest overview and review of this new business model

I started an AI tools directory in February, and then branched off that to start an AI automation agency (AAA) in June. So far I've come across a lot of unsustainable "ideas" to make money with AI, but at the same time a few diamonds in the rough that aren't fully tapped into yet- especially the AAA model. Thought I'd share this post to shine light into this new business model and share some ways you could potentially start your own agency, or at the very least know who you are dealing with and how to pick and choose when you (inevitably) get bombarded with cold emails from them down the line. Foreword Running an AAA does NOT involve using AI tools directly to generate and sell content directly. That ship has sailed, and unless you are happy with $5 from Fiverr every month or so, it is not a real business model. Cry me a river but generating generic art with AI and slapping it onto a T-shirt to sell on Etsy won't make you a dime. At the same time, the AAA model will NOT require you to have a deep theoretical knowledge of AI, or any academic degree, as we are more so dealing with the practical applications of generative AI and how we can implement these into different workflows and tech-stacks, rather than building AI models from the ground up. Regardless of all that, common sense and a willingness to learn will help (a shit ton), as with anything. Keep in mind - this WILL involve work and motivation as well. The mindset that AI somehow means everything can be done for you on autopilot is not the right way to approach things. The common theme of businesses I've seen who have successfully implemented AI into their operations is the willingess to work with AI in a way that augments their existing operations, rather than flat out replace a worker or team. And this is exactly the train of thought you need when working with AI as a business model. However, as the field is relatively unsaturated and hype surrounding AI is still fresh for enterprises, right now is the prime time to start something new if generative AI interests you at all. With that being said, I'll be going over three of the most successful AI-adjacent businesses I've seen over this past year, in addition to some tips and resources to point you in the right direction. so.. WTF is an AI Automation Agency? The AI automation agency (or as some YouTubers have coined it, the AAA model) at its core involves creating custom AI solutions for businesses. I have over 1500 AI tools listed in my directory, however the feedback I've received from some enterprise users is that ready-made SaaS tools are too generic to meet their specific needs. Combine this with the fact virtually no smaller companies have the time or skills required to develop custom solutions right off the bat, and you have yourself real demand. I would say in practice, the AAA model is quite similar to Wordpress and even web dev agencies, with the major difference being all solutions you develop will incorporate key aspects of AI AND automation. Which brings me to my second point- JUST AI IS NOT ENOUGH. Rather than reducing the amount of time required to complete certain tasks, I've seen many AI agencies make the mistake of recommending and (trying to) sell solutions that more likely than not increase the workload of their clients. For example, if you were to make an internal tool that has AI answer questions based on their knowledge base, but this knowledge base has to be updated manually, this is creating unnecessary work. As such I think one of the key components of building successful AI solutions is incorporating the new (Generative AI/LLMs) with the old (programmtic automation- think Zapier, APIs, etc.). Finally, for this business model to be successful, ideally you should target a niche in which you have already worked and understand pain points and needs. Not only does this make it much easier to get calls booked with prospects, the solutions you build will have much greater value to your clients (meaning you get paid more). A mistake I've seen many AAA operators make (and I blame this on the "Get Rich Quick" YouTubers) is focusing too much on a specific productized service, rather than really understanding the needs of businesses. The former is much done via a SaaS model, but when going the agency route the only thing that makes sense is building custom solutions. This is why I always take a consultant-first approach. You can only build once you understand what they actually need and how certain solutions may impact their operations, workflows, and bottom-line. Basics of How to Get Started Pick a niche. As I mentioned previously, preferably one that you've worked in before. Niches I know of that are actively being bombarded with cold emails include real estate, e-commerce, auto-dealerships, lawyers, and medical offices. There is a reason for this, but I will tell you straight up this business model works well if you target any white-collar service business (internal tools approach) or high volume businesses (customer facing tools approach). Setup your toolbox. If you wanted to start a pressure washing business, you would need a pressure-washer. This is no different. For those without programming knowledge, I've seen two common ways AAA get setup to build- one is having a network of on-call web developers, whether its personal contacts or simply going to Upwork or any talent sourcing agency. The second is having an arsenal of no-code tools. I'll get to this more in a second, but this works beecause at its core, when we are dealing with the practical applications of AI, the code is quite simple, simply put. Start cold sales. Unless you have a network already, this is not a step you can skip. You've already picked a niche, so all you have to do is find the right message. Keep cold emails short, sweet, but enticing- and it will help a lot if you did step 1 correctly and intimately understand who your audience is. I'll be touching base later about how you can leverage AI yourself to help you with outreach and closing. The beauty of gen AI and the AAA model You don't need to be a seasoned web developer to make this business model work. The large majority of solutions that SME clients want is best done using an API for an LLM for the actual AI aspect. The value we create with the solutions we build comes with the conceptual framework and design that not only does what they need it to but integrates smoothly with their existing tech-stack and workflow. The actual implementation is quite straightforward once you understand the high level design and know which tools you are going to use. To give you a sense, even if you plan to build out these apps yourself (say in Python) the large majority of the nitty gritty technical work has already been done for you, especially if you leverage Python libraries and packages that offer high level abstraction for LLM-related functions. For instance, calling GPT can be as little as a single line of code. (And there are no-code tools where these functions are simply an icon on a GUI). Aside from understanding the capabilities and limitations of these tools and frameworks, the only thing that matters is being able to put them in a way that makes sense for what you want to build. Which is why outsourcing and no-code tools both work in our case. Okay... but how TF am I suppposed to actually build out these solutions? Now the fun part. I highly recommend getting familiar with Langchain and LlamaIndex. Both are Python libraires that help a lot with the high-level LLM abstraction I mentioned previously. The two most important aspects include being able to integrate internal data sources/knowledge bases with LLMs, and have LLMs perform autonomous actions. The two most common methods respectively are RAG and output parsing. RAG (retrieval augmented Generation) If you've ever seen a tool that seemingly "trains" GPT on your own data, and wonder how it all works- well I have an answer from you. At a high level, the user query is first being fed to what's called a vector database to run vector search. Vector search basically lets you do semantic search where you are searching data based on meaning. The vector databases then retrieves the most relevant sections of text as it relates to the user query, and this text gets APPENDED to your GPT prompt to provide extra context to the AI. Further, with prompt engineering, you can limit GPT to only generate an answer if it can be found within this extra context, greatly limiting the chance of hallucination (this is where AI makes random shit up). Aside from vector databases, we can also implement RAG with other data sources and retrieval methods, for example SQL databses (via parsing the outputs of LLM's- more on this later). Autonomous Agents via Output Parsing A common need of clients has been having AI actually perform tasks, rather than simply spitting out text. For example, with autonomous agents, we can have an e-commerce chatbot do the work of a basic customer service rep (i.e. look into orders, refunds, shipping). At a high level, what's going on is that the response of the LLM is being used programmtically to determine which API to call. Keeping on with the e-commerce example, if I wanted a chatbot to check shipping status, I could have a LLM response within my app (not shown to the user) with a prompt that outputs a random hash or string, and programmatically I can determine which API call to make based on this hash/string. And using the same fundamental concept as with RAG, I can append the the API response to a final prompt that would spit out the answer for the user. How No Code Tools Can Fit In (With some example solutions you can build) With that being said, you don't necessarily need to do all of the above by coding yourself, with Python libraries or otherwise. However, I will say that having that high level overview will help IMMENSELY when it comes to using no-code tools to do the actual work for you. Regardless, here are a few common solutions you might build for clients as well as some no-code tools you can use to build them out. Ex. Solution 1: AI Chatbots for SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) This involves creating chatbots that handle user queries, lead gen, and so forth with AI, and will use the principles of RAG at heart. After getting the required data from your client (i.e. product catalogues, previous support tickets, FAQ, internal documentation), you upload this into your knowledge base and write a prompt that makes sense for your use case. One no-code tool that does this well is MyAskAI. The beauty of it especially for building external chatbots is the ability to quickly ingest entire websites into your knowledge base via a sitemap, and bulk uploading files. Essentially, they've covered the entire grunt work required to do this manually. Finally, you can create a inline or chat widget on your client's website with a few lines of HTML, or altneratively integrate it with a Slack/Teams chatbot (if you are going for an internal Q&A chatbot approach). Other tools you could use include Botpress and Voiceflow, however these are less for RAG and more for building out complete chatbot flows that may or may not incorporate LLMs. Both apps are essentially GUIs that eliminate the pain and tears and trying to implement complex flows manually, and both natively incoporate AI intents and a knowledge base feature. Ex. Solution 2: Internal Apps Similar to the first example, except we go beyond making just chatbots but tools such as report generation and really any sort of internal tool or automations that may incorporate LLM's. For instance, you can have a tool that automatically generates replies to inbound emails based on your client's knowledge base. Or an automation that does the same thing but for replies to Instagram comments. Another example could be a tool that generates a description and screeenshot based on a URL (useful for directory sites, made one for my own :P). Getting into more advanced implementations of LLMs, we can have tools that can generate entire drafts of reports (think 80+ pages), based not only on data from a knowledge base but also the writing style, format, and author voice of previous reports. One good tool to create content generation panels for your clients would be MindStudio. You can train LLM's via prompt engineering in a structured way with your own data to essentially fine tune them for whatever text you need it to generate. Furthermore, it has a GUI where you can dictate the entire AI flow. You can also upload data sources via multiple formats, including PDF, CSV, and Docx. For automations that require interactions between multiple apps, I recommend the OG zapier/make.com if you want a no-code solution. For instance, for the automatic email reply generator, I can have a trigger such that when an email is received, a custom AI reply is generated by MyAskAI, and finally a draft is created in my email client. Or, for an automation where I can create a social media posts on multiple platforms based on a RSS feed (news feed), I can implement this directly in Zapier with their native GPT action (see screenshot) As for more complex LLM flows that may require multiple layers of LLMs, data sources, and APIs working together to generate a single response i.e. a long form 100 page report, I would recommend tools such as Stack AI or Flowise (open-source alternative) to build these solutions out. Essentially, you get most of the functions and features of Python packages such as Langchain and LlamaIndex in a GUI. See screenshot for an example of a flow How the hell are you supposed to find clients? With all that being said, none of this matters if you can't find anyone to sell to. You will have to do cold sales, one way or the other, especially if you are brand new to the game. And what better way to sell your AI services than with AI itself? If we want to integrate AI into the cold outreach process, first we must identify what it's good at doing, and that's obviously writing a bunch of text, in a short amount of time. Similar to the solutions that an AAA can build for its clients, we can take advantage of the same principles in our own sales processes. How to do outreach Once you've identified your niche and their pain points/opportunities for automation, you want to craft a compelling message in which you can send via cold email and cold calls to get prospects booked on demos/consultations. I won't get into too much detail in terms of exactly how to write emails or calling scripts, as there are millions of resources to help with this, but I will tell you a few key points you want to keep in mind when doing outreach for your AAA. First, you want to keep in mind that many businesses are still hesitant about AI and may not understand what it really is or how it can benefit their operations. However, we can take advantage of how mass media has been reporting on AI this past year- at the very least people are AWARE that sooner or later they may have to implement AI into their businesses to stay competitive. We want to frame our message in a way that introduces generative AI as a technology that can have a direct, tangible, and positive impact on their business. Although it may be hard to quantify, I like to include estimates of man-hours saved or costs saved at least in my final proposals to prospects. Times are TOUGH right now, and money is expensive, so you need to have a compelling reason for businesses to get on board. Once you've gotten your messaging down, you will want to create a list of prospects to contact. Tools you can use to find prospects include Apollo.io, reply.io, zoominfo (expensive af), and Linkedin Sales Navigator. What specific job titles, etc. to target will depend on your niche but for smaller companies this will tend to be the owner. For white collar niches, i.e. law, the professional that will be directly benefiting from the tool (i.e. partners) may be better to contact. And for larger organizations you may want to target business improvement and digital transformation leads/directors- these are the people directly in charge of projects like what you may be proposing. Okay- so you have your message, and your list, and now all it comes down to is getting the good word out. I won't be going into the details of how to send these out, a quick Google search will give you hundreds of resources for cold outreach methods. However, personalization is key and beyond simple dynamic variables you want to make sure you can either personalize your email campaigns directly with AI (SmartWriter.ai is an example of a tool that can do this), or at the very least have the ability to import email messages programmatically. Alternatively, ask ChatGPT to make you a Python Script that can take in a list of emails, scrape info based on their linkedin URL or website, and all pass this onto a GPT prompt that specifies your messaging to generate an email. From there, send away. How tf do I close? Once you've got some prospects booked in on your meetings, you will need to close deals with them to turn them into clients. Call #1: Consultation Tying back to when I mentioned you want to take a consultant-first appraoch, you will want to listen closely to their goals and needs and understand their pain points. This would be the first call, and typically I would provide a high level overview of different solutions we could build to tacke these. It really helps to have a presentation available, so you can graphically demonstrate key points and key technologies. I like to use Plus AI for this, it's basically a Google Slides add-on that can generate slide decks for you. I copy and paste my default company messaging, add some key points for the presentation, and it comes out with pretty decent slides. Call #2: Demo The second call would involve a demo of one of these solutions, and typically I'll quickly prototype it with boilerplate code I already have, otherwise I'll cook something up in a no-code tool. If you have a niche where one type of solution is commonly demanded, it helps to have a general demo set up to be able to handle a larger volume of calls, so you aren't burning yourself out. I'll also elaborate on how the final product would look like in comparison to the demo. Call #3 and Beyond: Once the initial consultation and demo is complete, you will want to alleviate any remaining concerns from your prospects and work with them to reach a final work proposal. It's crucial you lay out exactly what you will be building (in writing) and ensure the prospect understands this. Furthermore, be clear and transparent with timelines and communication methods for the project. In terms of pricing, you want to take this from a value-based approach. The same solution may be worth a lot more to client A than client B. Furthermore, you can create "add-ons" such as monthly maintenance/upgrade packages, training sessions for employeees, and so forth, separate from the initial setup fee you would charge. How you can incorporate AI into marketing your businesses Beyond cold sales, I highly recommend creating a funnel to capture warm leads. For instance, I do this currently with my AI tools directory, which links directly to my AI agency and has consistent branding throughout. Warm leads are much more likely to close (and honestly, much nicer to deal with). However, even without an AI-related website, at the very least you will want to create a presence on social media and the web in general. As with any agency, you will want basic a professional presence. A professional virtual address helps, in addition to a Google Business Profile (GBP) and TrustPilot. a GBP (especially for local SEO) and Trustpilot page also helps improve the looks of your search results immensely. For GBP, I recommend using ProfilePro, which is a chrome extension you can use to automate SEO work for your GBP. Aside from SEO optimzied business descriptions based on your business, it can handle Q/A answers, responses, updates, and service descriptions based on local keywords. Privacy and Legal Concerns of the AAA Model Aside from typical concerns for agencies relating to service contracts, there are a few issues (especially when using no-code tools) that will need to be addressed to run a successful AAA. Most of these surround privacy concerns when working with proprietary data. In your terms with your client, you will want to clearly define hosting providers and any third party tools you will be using to build their solution, and a DPA with these third parties listed as subprocessors if necessary. In addition, you will want to implement best practices like redacting private information from data being used for building solutions. In terms of addressing concerns directly from clients, it helps if you host your solutions on their own servers (not possible with AI tools), and address the fact only ChatGPT queries in the web app, not OpenAI API calls, will be used to train OpenAI's models (as reported by mainstream media). The key here is to be open and transparent with your clients about ALL the tools you are using, where there data will be going, and make sure to get this all in writing. have fun, and keep an open mind Before I finish this post, I just want to reiterate the fact that this is NOT an easy way to make money. Running an AI agency will require hours and hours of dedication and work, and constantly rearranging your schedule to meet prospect and client needs. However, if you are looking for a new business to run, and have a knack for understanding business operations and are genuinely interested in the pracitcal applications of generative AI, then I say go for it. The time is ticking before AAA becomes the new dropshipping or SMMA, and I've a firm believer that those who set foot first and establish themselves in this field will come out top. And remember, while 100 thousand people may read this post, only 2 may actually take initiative and start.

Raised $450k for my startup, here are the lessons I've learned along the way

2021 has been a pretty amazing year for Omnisearch. Having started initial work on Omnisearch at the end of 2020, we entered the new year with a working MVP yet no revenue, no significant partnerships, and no funding. Fast forward to the end of 2021, and we now have fantastic revenue growth, a partnership with a public company, and a far more powerful, complete and polished product. But one milestone really changed Omnisearch’s trajectory: our $450,000 USD pre-seed round by GoAhead Ventures. In this post I want to share the story of how it came about and offer a couple of takeaways to keep in mind when preparing for fundraising. ​ The story Contrary to most advice, my co-founder Matej and I didn’t allocate a specific time to switch to “fundraising mode” but rather talked to investors on an ongoing basis. It was a bit of a distraction from working on the product, but on the positive side we were able to constantly get feedback on the idea, pitch, go-to-market strategy and hiring, as well as hearing investors’ major concerns sooner rather than later. That being said, our six-month long fundraising efforts weren’t yielding results - we talked to about twenty investors, mostly angels or smaller funds, with no success. The feedback was generally of the “too early for us” variety (since we were still pre-revenue), with additional questions about our go-to-market strategy and ideal customer persona. The introduction to our eventual investors, California-based GoAhead Ventures, came through a friend who had pitched them previously. We wrote a simple blurb and sent our pitch deck. We then went through GoAhead’s hyper-efficient screening process, consisting of a 30-minute call, a recorded three-minute pitch, and filling out a simple Google doc. Throughout the whole process, the GoAhead team left an awesome impression thanks to their knowledge of enterprise software and their responsiveness. They ended up investing and the whole deal was closed within two weeks, which is super fast even by Silicon Valley standards. While our fundraising experience is a single data point and your case might be different, here are the key takeaways from our journey. ​ Perseverance wins: Like I said above, we talked to about twenty investors before we closed our round. Getting a series of “no”s sucks, but we took the feedback seriously and tried to prepare better for questions that caught us off guard. But we persevered, keeping in mind that from a bird’s eye perspective it’s an amazing time to be building startups and raising funds. Focus on traction: Sounds pretty obvious, right? The truth is, though, that even a small amount of revenue is infinitely better than none at all. One of the major differences between our eventual successful investor pitch and the earlier ones was that we had actual paying customers, though our MRR was low. This allows you to talk about customers in the present tense, showing there’s actual demand for your product and making the use cases more tangible. And ideally, highlight a couple of customer testimonials to boost your credibility. Have a demo ready: In Omnisearch’s case, the demo was oftentimes the best received part of the pitch or call. We’d show investors the live demo, and for bonus points even asked them to choose a video from YouTube and then try searching through it. This always had a “wow” effect on prospective investors and made the subsequent conversation more exciting and positive. Accelerators: Accelerators like Y Combinator or Techstars can add enormous value to a startup, especially in the early stages. And while it’s a great idea to apply, don’t rely on them too heavily. Applications happen only a few times a year, and you should have a foolproof fundraising plan in case you don’t get in. In our case, we just constantly looked for investors who were interested in our space (defined as enterprise SaaS more broadly), using LinkedIn, AngelList, and intros from our own network. Practice the pitch ad nauseam: Pitching is tough to get right even for seasoned pros, so it pays to practice as often as possible. We took every opportunity to perfect the pitch: attending meetups and giving the thirty-second elevator pitch to other attendees over beer and pizza, participating in startup competitions, going to conferences and exhibiting at our own booth, attending pre-accelerator programs, and pitching to friends who are in the startup world. Show an understanding of the competition: Frankly, this was one of the strongest parts of our pitch and investor conversations. If you’re in a similar space to ours, Gartner Magic Quadrants and Forrester Waves are an awesome resource, as well as sites like AlternativeTo or Capterra and G2. By thoroughly studying these resources we gained a great understanding of the industry landscape and were able to articulate our differentiation more clearly and succinctly. Presenting this visually in a coordinate system or a feature grid is, from our experience, even more effective. Remember it’s just the beginning! Getting your first round of funding is just the beginning of the journey, so it’s important to avoid euphoria and get back to building and selling the product as soon as possible. While securing funding enables you to scale the team, and is a particular relief if the founders had worked without a salary, the end goal is still to build a big, profitable, and overall awesome startup.

How a founder built a B2B AI startup to serve with 65+ global brands (including Fortune500 companies)

AI Palette is an AI-driven platform that helps food and beverage companies predict emerging product trends. I had the opportunity recently to sit down with the founder to get his advice on building an AI-first startup, which he'll be going through in this post. About AI Palette: Co-founders: >!2 (Somsubhra GanChoudhuri, Himanshu Upreti)!!100+!!$12.7M USD!!AI-powered predictive analytics for the CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) industry!!Signed first paying customer in the first year!!65+ global brands, including Cargill, Diageo, Ajinomoto, Symrise, Mondelez, and L’Oréal, use AI Palette!!Every new product launched has secured a paying client within months!!Expanded into Beauty & Personal Care (BPC), onboarding one of India’s largest BPC companies within weeks!!Launched multiple new product lines in the last two years, creating a unified suite for brand innovation!Identify the pain points in your industry for ideas* When I was working in the flavour and fragrance industry, I noticed a major issue CPG companies faced: launching a product took at least one to two years. For instance, if a company decided today to launch a new juice, it wouldn’t hit the market until 2027. This long timeline made it difficult to stay relevant and on top of trends. Another big problem I noticed was that companies relied heavily on market research to determine what products to launch. While this might work for current consumer preferences, it was highly inefficient since the product wouldn’t actually reach the market for several years. By the time the product launched, the consumer trends had already shifted, making that research outdated. That’s where AI can play a crucial role. Instead of looking at what consumers like today, we realised that companies should use AI to predict what they will want next. This allows businesses to create products that are ahead of the curve. Right now, the failure rate for new product launches is alarmingly high, with 8 out of 10 products failing. By leveraging AI, companies can avoid wasting resources on products that won’t succeed, leading to better, more successful launches. Start by talking to as many industry experts as possible to identify the real problems When we first had the idea for AI Palette, it was just a hunch, a gut feeling—we had no idea whether people would actually pay for it. To validate the idea, we reached out to as many people as we could within the industry. Since our focus area was all about consumer insights, we spoke to professionals in the CPG sector, particularly those in the insights departments of CPG companies. Through these early conversations, we began to see a common pattern emerge and identified the exact problem we wanted to solve. Don’t tell people what you’re building—listen to their frustrations and challenges first. Going into these early customer conversations, our goal was to listen and understand their challenges without telling them what we were trying to build. This is crucial as it ensures that you can gather as much data about the problem to truly understand it and that you aren't biasing their answers by showing your solution. This process helped us in two key ways: First, it validated that there was a real problem in the industry through the number of people who spoke about experiencing the same problem. Second, it allowed us to understand the exact scale and depth of the problem—e.g., how much money companies were spending on consumer research, what kind of tools they were currently using, etc. Narrow down your focus to a small, actionable area to solve initially. Once we were certain that there was a clear problem worth solving, we didn’t try to tackle everything at once. As a small team of two people, we started by focusing on a specific area of the problem—something big enough to matter but small enough for us to handle. Then, we approached customers with a potential solution and asked them for feedback. We learnt that our solution seemed promising, but we wanted to validate it further. If customers are willing to pay you for the solution, it’s a strong validation signal for market demand. One of our early customer interviewees even asked us to deliver the solution, which we did manually at first. We used machine learning models to analyse the data and presented the results in a slide deck. They paid us for the work, which was a critical moment. It meant we had something with real potential, and we had customers willing to pay us before we had even built the full product. This was the key validation that we needed. By the time we were ready to build the product, we had already gathered crucial insights from our early customers. We understood the specific information they wanted and how they wanted the results to be presented. This input was invaluable in shaping the development of our final product. Building & Product Development Start with a simple concept/design to validate with customers before building When we realised the problem and solution, we began by designing the product, but not by jumping straight into coding. Instead, we created wireframes and user interfaces using tools like InVision and Figma. This allowed us to visually represent the product without the need for backend or frontend development at first. The goal was to showcase how the product would look and feel, helping potential customers understand its value before we even started building. We showed these designs to potential customers and asked for feedback. Would they want to buy this product? Would they pay for it? We didn’t dive into actual development until we found a customer willing to pay a significant amount for the solution. This approach helped us ensure we were on the right track and didn’t waste time or resources building something customers didn’t actually want. Deliver your solution using a manual consulting approach before developing an automated product Initially, we solved problems for customers in a more "consulting" manner, delivering insights manually. Recall how I mentioned that when one of our early customer interviewees asked us to deliver the solution, we initially did it manually by using machine learning models to analyse the data and presenting the results to them in a slide deck. This works for the initial stages of validating your solution, as you don't want to invest too much time into building a full-blown MVP before understanding the exact features and functionalities that your users want. However, after confirming that customers were willing to pay for what we provided, we moved forward with actual product development. This shift from a manual service to product development was key to scaling in a sustainable manner, as our building was guided by real-world feedback and insights rather than intuition. Let ongoing customer feedback drive iteration and the product roadmap Once we built the first version of the product, it was basic, solving only one problem. But as we worked closely with customers, they requested additional features and functionalities to make it more useful. As a result, we continued to evolve the product to handle more complex use cases, gradually developing new modules based on customer feedback. Product development is a continuous process. Our early customers pushed us to expand features and modules, from solving just 20% of their problems to tackling 50–60% of their needs. These demands shaped our product roadmap and guided the development of new features, ultimately resulting in a more complete solution. Revenue and user numbers are key metrics for assessing product-market fit. However, critical mass varies across industries Product-market fit (PMF) can often be gauged by looking at the size of your revenue and the number of customers you're serving. Once you've reached a certain critical mass of customers, you can usually tell that you're starting to hit product-market fit. However, this critical mass varies by industry and the type of customers you're targeting. For example, if you're building an app for a broad consumer market, you may need thousands of users. But for enterprise software, product-market fit may be reached with just a few dozen key customers. Compare customer engagement and retention with other available solutions on the market for product-market fit Revenue and the number of customers alone isn't always enough to determine if you're reaching product-market fit. The type of customer and the use case for your product also matter. The level of engagement with your product—how much time users are spending on the platform—is also an important metric to track. The more time they spend, the more likely it is that your product is meeting a crucial need. Another way to evaluate product-market fit is by assessing retention, i.e whether users are returning to your platform and relying on it consistently, as compared to other solutions available. That's another key indication that your solution is gaining traction in the market. Business Model & Monetisation Prioritise scalability Initially, we started with a consulting-type model where we tailor-made specific solutions for each customer use-case we encountered and delivered the CPG insights manually, but we soon realized that this wasn't scalable. The problem with consulting is that you need to do the same work repeatedly for every new project, which requires a large team to handle the workload. That is not how you sustain a high-growth startup. To solve this, we focused on building a product that would address the most common problems faced by our customers. Once built, this product could be sold to thousands of customers without significant overheads, making the business scalable. With this in mind, we decided on a SaaS (Software as a Service) business model. The benefit of SaaS is that once you create the software, you can sell it to many customers without adding extra overhead. This results in a business with higher margins, where the same product can serve many customers simultaneously, making it much more efficient than the consulting model. Adopt a predictable, simplistic business model for efficiency. Look to industry practices for guidance When it came to monetisation, we considered the needs of our CPG customers, who I knew from experience were already accustomed to paying annual subscriptions for sales databases and other software services. We decided to adopt the same model and charge our customers an annual upfront fee. This model worked well for our target market, aligning with industry standards and ensuring stable, recurring revenue. Moreover, our target CPG customers were already used to this business model and didn't have to choose from a huge variety of payment options, making closing sales a straightforward and efficient process. Marketing & Sales Educate the market to position yourself as a thought leader When we started, AI was not widely understood, especially in the CPG industry. We had to create awareness around both AI and its potential value. Our strategy focused on educating potential users and customers about AI, its relevance, and why they should invest in it. This education was crucial to the success of our marketing efforts. To establish credibility, we adopted a thought leadership approach. We wrote blogs on the importance of AI and how it could solve problems for CPG companies. We also participated in events and conferences to demonstrate our expertise in applying AI to the industry. This helped us build our brand and reputation as leaders in the AI space for CPG, and word-of-mouth spread as customers recognized us as the go-to company for AI solutions. It’s tempting for startups to offer products for free in the hopes of gaining early traction with customers, but this approach doesn't work in the long run. Free offerings don’t establish the value of your product, and customers may not take them seriously. You should always charge for pilots, even if the fee is minimal, to ensure that the customer is serious about potentially working with you, and that they are committed and engaged with the product. Pilots/POCs/Demos should aim to give a "flavour" of what you can deliver A paid pilot/POC trial also gives you the opportunity to provide a “flavour” of what your product can deliver, helping to build confidence and trust with the client. It allows customers to experience a detailed preview of what your product can do, which builds anticipation and desire for the full functionality. During this phase, ensure your product is built to give them a taste of the value you can provide, which sets the stage for a broader, more impactful adoption down the line. Fundraising & Financial Management Leverage PR to generate inbound interest from VCs When it comes to fundraising, our approach was fairly traditional—we reached out to VCs and used connections from existing investors to make introductions. However, looking back, one thing that really helped us build momentum during our fundraising process was getting featured in Tech in Asia. This wasn’t planned; it just so happened that Tech in Asia was doing a series on AI startups in Southeast Asia and they reached out to us for an article. During the interview, they asked if we were fundraising, and we mentioned that we were. As a result, several VCs we hadn’t yet contacted reached out to us. This inbound interest was incredibly valuable, and we found it far more effective than our outbound efforts. So, if you can, try to generate some PR attention—it can help create inbound interest from VCs, and that interest is typically much stronger and more promising than any outbound strategies because they've gone out of their way to reach out to you. Be well-prepared and deliberate about fundraising. Keep trying and don't lose heart When pitching to VCs, it’s crucial to be thoroughly prepared, as you typically only get one shot at making an impression. If you mess up, it’s unlikely they’ll give you a second chance. You need to have key metrics at your fingertips, especially if you're running a SaaS company. Be ready to answer questions like: What’s your retention rate? What are your projections for the year? How much will you close? What’s your average contract value? These numbers should be at the top of your mind. Additionally, fundraising should be treated as a structured process, not something you do on the side while juggling other tasks. When you start, create a clear plan: identify 20 VCs to reach out to each week. By planning ahead, you’ll maintain momentum and speed up the process. Fundraising can be exhausting and disheartening, especially when you face multiple rejections. Remember, you just need one investor to say yes to make it all worthwhile. When using funds, prioritise profitability and grow only when necessary. Don't rely on funding to survive. In the past, the common advice for startups was to raise money, burn through it quickly, and use it to boost revenue numbers, even if that meant operating at a loss. The idea was that profitability wasn’t the main focus, and the goal was to show rapid growth for the next funding round. However, times have changed, especially with the shift from “funding summer” to “funding winter.” My advice now is to aim for profitability as soon as possible and grow only when it's truly needed. For example, it’s tempting to hire a large team when you have substantial funds in the bank, but ask yourself: Do you really need 10 new hires, or could you get by with just four? Growing too quickly can lead to unnecessary expenses, so focus on reaching profitability as soon as possible, rather than just inflating your team or burn rate. The key takeaway is to spend your funds wisely and only when absolutely necessary to reach profitability. You want to avoid becoming dependent on future VC investments to keep your company afloat. Instead, prioritize reaching break-even as quickly as you can, so you're not reliant on external funding to survive in the long run. Team-Building & Leadership Look for complementary skill sets in co-founders When choosing a co-founder, it’s important to find someone with a complementary skill set, not just someone you’re close to. For example, I come from a business and commercial background, so I needed someone with technical expertise. That’s when I found my co-founder, Himanshu, who had experience in machine learning and AI. He was a great match because his technical knowledge complemented my business skills, and together we formed a strong team. It might seem natural to choose your best friend as your co-founder, but this can often lead to conflict. Chances are, you and your best friend share similar interests, skills, and backgrounds, which doesn’t bring diversity to the table. If both of you come from the same industry or have the same strengths, you may end up butting heads on how things should be done. Having diverse skill sets helps avoid this and fosters a more collaborative working relationship. Himanshu (left) and Somsubhra (right) co-founded AI Palette in 2018 Define roles clearly to prevent co-founder conflict To avoid conflict, it’s essential that your roles as co-founders are clearly defined from the beginning. If your co-founder and you have distinct responsibilities, there is no room for overlap or disagreement. This ensures that both of you can work without stepping on each other's toes, and there’s mutual respect for each other’s expertise. This is another reason as to why it helps to have a co-founder with a complementary skillset to yours. Not only is having similar industry backgrounds and skillsets not particularly useful when building out your startup, it's also more likely to lead to conflicts since you both have similar subject expertise. On the other hand, if your co-founder is an expert in something that you're not, you're less likely to argue with them about their decisions regarding that aspect of the business and vice versa when it comes to your decisions. Look for employees who are driven by your mission, not salary For early-stage startups, the first hires are crucial. These employees need to be highly motivated and excited about the mission. Since the salary will likely be low and the work demanding, they must be driven by something beyond just the paycheck. The right employees are the swash-buckling pirates and romantics, i.e those who are genuinely passionate about the startup’s vision and want to be part of something impactful beyond material gains. When employees are motivated by the mission, they are more likely to stick around and help take the startup to greater heights. A litmus test for hiring: Would you be excited to work with them on a Sunday? One of the most important rounds in the hiring process is the culture fit round. This is where you assess whether a candidate shares the same values as you and your team. A key question to ask yourself is: "Would I be excited to work with this person on a Sunday?" If there’s any doubt about your answer, it’s likely not a good fit. The idea is that you want employees who align with the company's culture and values and who you would enjoy collaborating with even outside of regular work hours. How we structure the team at AI Palette We have three broad functions in our organization. The first two are the big ones: Technical Team – This is the core of our product and technology. This team is responsible for product development and incorporating customer feedback into improving the technology Commercial Team – This includes sales, marketing, customer service, account managers, and so on, handling everything related to business growth and customer relations. General and Administrative Team – This smaller team supports functions like finance, HR, and administration. As with almost all businesses, we have teams that address the two core tasks of building (technical team) and selling (commercial team), but given the size we're at now, having the administrative team helps smoothen operations. Set broad goals but let your teams decide on execution What I've done is recruit highly skilled people who don't need me to micromanage them on a day-to-day basis. They're experts in their roles, and as Steve Jobs said, when you hire the right person, you don't have to tell them what to do—they understand the purpose and tell you what to do. So, my job as the CEO is to set the broader goals for them, review the plans they have to achieve those goals, and periodically check in on progress. For example, if our broad goal is to meet a certain revenue target, I break it down across teams: For the sales team, I’ll look at how they plan to hit that target—how many customers they need to sell to, how many salespeople they need, and what tactics and strategies they plan to use. For the technical team, I’ll evaluate our product offerings—whether they think we need to build new products to attract more customers, and whether they think it's scalable for the number of customers we plan to serve. This way, the entire organization's tasks are cascaded in alignment with our overarching goals, with me setting the direction and leaving the details of execution to the skilled team members that I hire.

AI is taking over Google, huge changes to search

AI is taking over Google, and it's revolutionizing the search experience. Instead of focusing on chatbots or homepage redesigns, Google is integrating AI into search results, introducing AI snapshots with generated summaries and corroborating sources. This shift marks the future of Google Search. Link to The Verge article. For SEOs like me, it's a game-changer. Edit: in a negative way. Before, we had rich snippets, but now we have AI snapshots. It's a revamped version of the snippet, providing users with more valuable information upfront. Here's a before and after. But why did Google choose this approach? Well, monetizing something like ChatGPT is challenging. So, they decided to prioritize an AI-first approach in the most valuable space on the internet: search results. What does this mean for normal people? Let me share some insights from my own businesses. Currently, the top spot on Google garners around 20-35% click-through rate (CTR). However, with the introduction of AI snapshots, that CTR is likely to drop to the equivalent of position 5, ranging from 5-10%. In other words, we're looking at a minimum drop of 50% and a maximum drop of 85% in CTR. It's a significant impact that people who rely on Google traffic need to consider. The good news is that users will need to opt-in to access AI snapshots through Search Generative Experience (SGE). It's still an experimental feature, but it's a probable long-term change in search. However, this uncertainty has already led to a drop in niche site valuations. I have no doubt that we can adapt to these changes. However, let's not undermine the potential impact. It's not a "nothing burger." Imo we have around 1-2 years before we witness seismic changes, so let's make the most of it and stack that 💰💰. What do you think? How do you see AI transforming the search landscape? PS: You can subscribe here to join 25k+ marketers who receive updates on recent marketing news.

Built an AI Writing Tool for Research - Thoughts?

Hi Everyone, I built Blainy, an ai writing tool designed to make writing easier and more efficient. Blainy fills the gaps left by other AI assistant tools like hether you're writing your essays, assignments or research papers blainy will streamlines the process, born from my personal experience with the limitations of common assistant tools. Blainy's Features: AI Suggestions: This feature provides you with suggestions while you are writing, so you don't face the writer's block issue. This was the main issue I usually faced when writing my essays. You will get suggestions while you are writing, and if you don't like them, you can always ask for alternatives. AI Automation: If you want AI to write for you, you can choose this feature. It will write one to two paragraphs according to what you select. You can choose to write an introduction, conclusion, arguments, etc. If you just want it to write casually, select the "continue writing" feature, and it will write all on its own. AI Essay Writer: Automatically generates essays based on your input. Essay Expander: Enhances and expands your essay content. AI Summarizer: Summarizes lengthy documents and articles to save time. Paragraph Generator: Creates paragraphs on specific topics or prompts. Paraphrasing Tool: Refines your text with various tone options such as academic, friendly, and simple. Citations: By using this feature, you no longer need to search for citations on Google or ChatGPT. Blainy will load millions of citations for you in seconds. You can select any citation you want, and if you want to add a custom citation, you can do that too. Built-in Plagiarism Checker: Ensures your content is original and plagiarism-free. PDF Chat: If you have any questions about a document that you are curious about or don't understand, you can use this feature. It will answer your question and help you summarize the whole article, and more. If you have any good ideas that you think can help us in any way, please let me know. Thank you in advance for your support and feedback!

MVP + AI/ML Implementation/Integration - Done for you SaaS

In today’s fast-paced world, businesses need to stay ahead of the curve. Leveraging AI, ML, and Cloud technologies isn't just an option—it's a necessity. We specialize in providing cutting-edge AI/ML solutions and Cloud services that empower businesses to innovate, automate, and scale like never before. Why AI and ML Matter Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are revolutionizing industries by enabling systems to learn, adapt, and improve over time. Whether it's predicting customer behavior, automating tasks, or enhancing decision-making, AI and ML open up a world of possibilities. Key Benefits of AI and ML: Enhanced Decision-Making: Harness predictive analytics to make data-driven decisions. Automation: Streamline operations with intelligent automation. Personalization: Deliver tailored experiences to your customers, increasing engagement and loyalty. Efficiency: Reduce costs and time through optimized processes. How Cloud Services Drive Innovation The Cloud is the backbone of modern business infrastructure. It allows companies to be more agile, scalable, and resilient. With Cloud computing, businesses can access powerful tools and resources on-demand, without the need for significant upfront investment. Advantages of Cloud Services: Scalability: Easily scale up or down based on your business needs. Cost Efficiency: Pay only for the resources you use, minimizing overhead. Security: Benefit from the highest standards of data security and compliance. Flexibility: Access your applications and data from anywhere, anytime. Our Services We offer comprehensive services to help you harness the full potential of AI, ML, and Cloud technologies: AI and ML Solutions: We design and deploy custom AI/ML models that solve your specific business challenges. From natural language processing (NLP) to computer vision, we cover all aspects of AI/ML. Cloud Integration: We help you migrate to the Cloud, ensuring a smooth transition with minimal disruption. Whether it’s AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, our experts have you covered. Data Analytics: Transform your data into actionable insights with advanced analytics tools and platforms. Custom Software Development: We build robust, scalable applications that integrate AI/ML capabilities and leverage the Cloud. DevOps: Automate your development pipeline and ensure continuous integration and delivery with our DevOps expertise. Why Choose Us? Expert Team: Our team of experienced professionals is well-versed in AI/ML, Cloud computing, and data analytics. End-to-End Solutions: From ideation to deployment, we offer full-cycle development services. Tailored Approach: We understand that every business is unique. We provide customized solutions that align with your specific goals. Proven Track Record: We’ve helped numerous businesses across industries to innovate and grow. Success Stories Retail Industry: Implemented an AI-driven recommendation engine that increased sales by 30%. Healthcare Sector: Developed an ML-based diagnostic tool that improved accuracy by 20%. Finance: Integrated Cloud-based AI solutions that reduced operational costs by 25%.

I run an AI automation agency (AAA). My honest overview and review of this new business model

I started an AI tools directory in February, and then branched off that to start an AI automation agency (AAA) in June. So far I've come across a lot of unsustainable "ideas" to make money with AI, but at the same time a few diamonds in the rough that aren't fully tapped into yet- especially the AAA model. Thought I'd share this post to shine light into this new business model and share some ways you could potentially start your own agency, or at the very least know who you are dealing with and how to pick and choose when you (inevitably) get bombarded with cold emails from them down the line. Foreword Running an AAA does NOT involve using AI tools directly to generate and sell content directly. That ship has sailed, and unless you are happy with $5 from Fiverr every month or so, it is not a real business model. Cry me a river but generating generic art with AI and slapping it onto a T-shirt to sell on Etsy won't make you a dime. At the same time, the AAA model will NOT require you to have a deep theoretical knowledge of AI, or any academic degree, as we are more so dealing with the practical applications of generative AI and how we can implement these into different workflows and tech-stacks, rather than building AI models from the ground up. Regardless of all that, common sense and a willingness to learn will help (a shit ton), as with anything. Keep in mind - this WILL involve work and motivation as well. The mindset that AI somehow means everything can be done for you on autopilot is not the right way to approach things. The common theme of businesses I've seen who have successfully implemented AI into their operations is the willingess to work with AI in a way that augments their existing operations, rather than flat out replace a worker or team. And this is exactly the train of thought you need when working with AI as a business model. However, as the field is relatively unsaturated and hype surrounding AI is still fresh for enterprises, right now is the prime time to start something new if generative AI interests you at all. With that being said, I'll be going over three of the most successful AI-adjacent businesses I've seen over this past year, in addition to some tips and resources to point you in the right direction. so.. WTF is an AI Automation Agency? The AI automation agency (or as some YouTubers have coined it, the AAA model) at its core involves creating custom AI solutions for businesses. I have over 1500 AI tools listed in my directory, however the feedback I've received from some enterprise users is that ready-made SaaS tools are too generic to meet their specific needs. Combine this with the fact virtually no smaller companies have the time or skills required to develop custom solutions right off the bat, and you have yourself real demand. I would say in practice, the AAA model is quite similar to Wordpress and even web dev agencies, with the major difference being all solutions you develop will incorporate key aspects of AI AND automation. Which brings me to my second point- JUST AI IS NOT ENOUGH. Rather than reducing the amount of time required to complete certain tasks, I've seen many AI agencies make the mistake of recommending and (trying to) sell solutions that more likely than not increase the workload of their clients. For example, if you were to make an internal tool that has AI answer questions based on their knowledge base, but this knowledge base has to be updated manually, this is creating unnecessary work. As such I think one of the key components of building successful AI solutions is incorporating the new (Generative AI/LLMs) with the old (programmtic automation- think Zapier, APIs, etc.). Finally, for this business model to be successful, ideally you should target a niche in which you have already worked and understand pain points and needs. Not only does this make it much easier to get calls booked with prospects, the solutions you build will have much greater value to your clients (meaning you get paid more). A mistake I've seen many AAA operators make (and I blame this on the "Get Rich Quick" YouTubers) is focusing too much on a specific productized service, rather than really understanding the needs of businesses. The former is much done via a SaaS model, but when going the agency route the only thing that makes sense is building custom solutions. This is why I always take a consultant-first approach. You can only build once you understand what they actually need and how certain solutions may impact their operations, workflows, and bottom-line. Basics of How to Get Started Pick a niche. As I mentioned previously, preferably one that you've worked in before. Niches I know of that are actively being bombarded with cold emails include real estate, e-commerce, auto-dealerships, lawyers, and medical offices. There is a reason for this, but I will tell you straight up this business model works well if you target any white-collar service business (internal tools approach) or high volume businesses (customer facing tools approach). Setup your toolbox. If you wanted to start a pressure washing business, you would need a pressure-washer. This is no different. For those without programming knowledge, I've seen two common ways AAA get setup to build- one is having a network of on-call web developers, whether its personal contacts or simply going to Upwork or any talent sourcing agency. The second is having an arsenal of no-code tools. I'll get to this more in a second, but this works beecause at its core, when we are dealing with the practical applications of AI, the code is quite simple, simply put. Start cold sales. Unless you have a network already, this is not a step you can skip. You've already picked a niche, so all you have to do is find the right message. Keep cold emails short, sweet, but enticing- and it will help a lot if you did step 1 correctly and intimately understand who your audience is. I'll be touching base later about how you can leverage AI yourself to help you with outreach and closing. The beauty of gen AI and the AAA model You don't need to be a seasoned web developer to make this business model work. The large majority of solutions that SME clients want is best done using an API for an LLM for the actual AI aspect. The value we create with the solutions we build comes with the conceptual framework and design that not only does what they need it to but integrates smoothly with their existing tech-stack and workflow. The actual implementation is quite straightforward once you understand the high level design and know which tools you are going to use. To give you a sense, even if you plan to build out these apps yourself (say in Python) the large majority of the nitty gritty technical work has already been done for you, especially if you leverage Python libraries and packages that offer high level abstraction for LLM-related functions. For instance, calling GPT can be as little as a single line of code. (And there are no-code tools where these functions are simply an icon on a GUI). Aside from understanding the capabilities and limitations of these tools and frameworks, the only thing that matters is being able to put them in a way that makes sense for what you want to build. Which is why outsourcing and no-code tools both work in our case. Okay... but how TF am I suppposed to actually build out these solutions? Now the fun part. I highly recommend getting familiar with Langchain and LlamaIndex. Both are Python libraires that help a lot with the high-level LLM abstraction I mentioned previously. The two most important aspects include being able to integrate internal data sources/knowledge bases with LLMs, and have LLMs perform autonomous actions. The two most common methods respectively are RAG and output parsing. RAG (retrieval augmented Generation) If you've ever seen a tool that seemingly "trains" GPT on your own data, and wonder how it all works- well I have an answer from you. At a high level, the user query is first being fed to what's called a vector database to run vector search. Vector search basically lets you do semantic search where you are searching data based on meaning. The vector databases then retrieves the most relevant sections of text as it relates to the user query, and this text gets APPENDED to your GPT prompt to provide extra context to the AI. Further, with prompt engineering, you can limit GPT to only generate an answer if it can be found within this extra context, greatly limiting the chance of hallucination (this is where AI makes random shit up). Aside from vector databases, we can also implement RAG with other data sources and retrieval methods, for example SQL databses (via parsing the outputs of LLM's- more on this later). Autonomous Agents via Output Parsing A common need of clients has been having AI actually perform tasks, rather than simply spitting out text. For example, with autonomous agents, we can have an e-commerce chatbot do the work of a basic customer service rep (i.e. look into orders, refunds, shipping). At a high level, what's going on is that the response of the LLM is being used programmtically to determine which API to call. Keeping on with the e-commerce example, if I wanted a chatbot to check shipping status, I could have a LLM response within my app (not shown to the user) with a prompt that outputs a random hash or string, and programmatically I can determine which API call to make based on this hash/string. And using the same fundamental concept as with RAG, I can append the the API response to a final prompt that would spit out the answer for the user. How No Code Tools Can Fit In (With some example solutions you can build) With that being said, you don't necessarily need to do all of the above by coding yourself, with Python libraries or otherwise. However, I will say that having that high level overview will help IMMENSELY when it comes to using no-code tools to do the actual work for you. Regardless, here are a few common solutions you might build for clients as well as some no-code tools you can use to build them out. Ex. Solution 1: AI Chatbots for SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) This involves creating chatbots that handle user queries, lead gen, and so forth with AI, and will use the principles of RAG at heart. After getting the required data from your client (i.e. product catalogues, previous support tickets, FAQ, internal documentation), you upload this into your knowledge base and write a prompt that makes sense for your use case. One no-code tool that does this well is MyAskAI. The beauty of it especially for building external chatbots is the ability to quickly ingest entire websites into your knowledge base via a sitemap, and bulk uploading files. Essentially, they've covered the entire grunt work required to do this manually. Finally, you can create a inline or chat widget on your client's website with a few lines of HTML, or altneratively integrate it with a Slack/Teams chatbot (if you are going for an internal Q&A chatbot approach). Other tools you could use include Botpress and Voiceflow, however these are less for RAG and more for building out complete chatbot flows that may or may not incorporate LLMs. Both apps are essentially GUIs that eliminate the pain and tears and trying to implement complex flows manually, and both natively incoporate AI intents and a knowledge base feature. Ex. Solution 2: Internal Apps Similar to the first example, except we go beyond making just chatbots but tools such as report generation and really any sort of internal tool or automations that may incorporate LLM's. For instance, you can have a tool that automatically generates replies to inbound emails based on your client's knowledge base. Or an automation that does the same thing but for replies to Instagram comments. Another example could be a tool that generates a description and screeenshot based on a URL (useful for directory sites, made one for my own :P). Getting into more advanced implementations of LLMs, we can have tools that can generate entire drafts of reports (think 80+ pages), based not only on data from a knowledge base but also the writing style, format, and author voice of previous reports. One good tool to create content generation panels for your clients would be MindStudio. You can train LLM's via prompt engineering in a structured way with your own data to essentially fine tune them for whatever text you need it to generate. Furthermore, it has a GUI where you can dictate the entire AI flow. You can also upload data sources via multiple formats, including PDF, CSV, and Docx. For automations that require interactions between multiple apps, I recommend the OG zapier/make.com if you want a no-code solution. For instance, for the automatic email reply generator, I can have a trigger such that when an email is received, a custom AI reply is generated by MyAskAI, and finally a draft is created in my email client. Or, for an automation where I can create a social media posts on multiple platforms based on a RSS feed (news feed), I can implement this directly in Zapier with their native GPT action (see screenshot) As for more complex LLM flows that may require multiple layers of LLMs, data sources, and APIs working together to generate a single response i.e. a long form 100 page report, I would recommend tools such as Stack AI or Flowise (open-source alternative) to build these solutions out. Essentially, you get most of the functions and features of Python packages such as Langchain and LlamaIndex in a GUI. See screenshot for an example of a flow How the hell are you supposed to find clients? With all that being said, none of this matters if you can't find anyone to sell to. You will have to do cold sales, one way or the other, especially if you are brand new to the game. And what better way to sell your AI services than with AI itself? If we want to integrate AI into the cold outreach process, first we must identify what it's good at doing, and that's obviously writing a bunch of text, in a short amount of time. Similar to the solutions that an AAA can build for its clients, we can take advantage of the same principles in our own sales processes. How to do outreach Once you've identified your niche and their pain points/opportunities for automation, you want to craft a compelling message in which you can send via cold email and cold calls to get prospects booked on demos/consultations. I won't get into too much detail in terms of exactly how to write emails or calling scripts, as there are millions of resources to help with this, but I will tell you a few key points you want to keep in mind when doing outreach for your AAA. First, you want to keep in mind that many businesses are still hesitant about AI and may not understand what it really is or how it can benefit their operations. However, we can take advantage of how mass media has been reporting on AI this past year- at the very least people are AWARE that sooner or later they may have to implement AI into their businesses to stay competitive. We want to frame our message in a way that introduces generative AI as a technology that can have a direct, tangible, and positive impact on their business. Although it may be hard to quantify, I like to include estimates of man-hours saved or costs saved at least in my final proposals to prospects. Times are TOUGH right now, and money is expensive, so you need to have a compelling reason for businesses to get on board. Once you've gotten your messaging down, you will want to create a list of prospects to contact. Tools you can use to find prospects include Apollo.io, reply.io, zoominfo (expensive af), and Linkedin Sales Navigator. What specific job titles, etc. to target will depend on your niche but for smaller companies this will tend to be the owner. For white collar niches, i.e. law, the professional that will be directly benefiting from the tool (i.e. partners) may be better to contact. And for larger organizations you may want to target business improvement and digital transformation leads/directors- these are the people directly in charge of projects like what you may be proposing. Okay- so you have your message, and your list, and now all it comes down to is getting the good word out. I won't be going into the details of how to send these out, a quick Google search will give you hundreds of resources for cold outreach methods. However, personalization is key and beyond simple dynamic variables you want to make sure you can either personalize your email campaigns directly with AI (SmartWriter.ai is an example of a tool that can do this), or at the very least have the ability to import email messages programmatically. Alternatively, ask ChatGPT to make you a Python Script that can take in a list of emails, scrape info based on their linkedin URL or website, and all pass this onto a GPT prompt that specifies your messaging to generate an email. From there, send away. How tf do I close? Once you've got some prospects booked in on your meetings, you will need to close deals with them to turn them into clients. Call #1: Consultation Tying back to when I mentioned you want to take a consultant-first appraoch, you will want to listen closely to their goals and needs and understand their pain points. This would be the first call, and typically I would provide a high level overview of different solutions we could build to tacke these. It really helps to have a presentation available, so you can graphically demonstrate key points and key technologies. I like to use Plus AI for this, it's basically a Google Slides add-on that can generate slide decks for you. I copy and paste my default company messaging, add some key points for the presentation, and it comes out with pretty decent slides. Call #2: Demo The second call would involve a demo of one of these solutions, and typically I'll quickly prototype it with boilerplate code I already have, otherwise I'll cook something up in a no-code tool. If you have a niche where one type of solution is commonly demanded, it helps to have a general demo set up to be able to handle a larger volume of calls, so you aren't burning yourself out. I'll also elaborate on how the final product would look like in comparison to the demo. Call #3 and Beyond: Once the initial consultation and demo is complete, you will want to alleviate any remaining concerns from your prospects and work with them to reach a final work proposal. It's crucial you lay out exactly what you will be building (in writing) and ensure the prospect understands this. Furthermore, be clear and transparent with timelines and communication methods for the project. In terms of pricing, you want to take this from a value-based approach. The same solution may be worth a lot more to client A than client B. Furthermore, you can create "add-ons" such as monthly maintenance/upgrade packages, training sessions for employeees, and so forth, separate from the initial setup fee you would charge. How you can incorporate AI into marketing your businesses Beyond cold sales, I highly recommend creating a funnel to capture warm leads. For instance, I do this currently with my AI tools directory, which links directly to my AI agency and has consistent branding throughout. Warm leads are much more likely to close (and honestly, much nicer to deal with). However, even without an AI-related website, at the very least you will want to create a presence on social media and the web in general. As with any agency, you will want basic a professional presence. A professional virtual address helps, in addition to a Google Business Profile (GBP) and TrustPilot. a GBP (especially for local SEO) and Trustpilot page also helps improve the looks of your search results immensely. For GBP, I recommend using ProfilePro, which is a chrome extension you can use to automate SEO work for your GBP. Aside from SEO optimzied business descriptions based on your business, it can handle Q/A answers, responses, updates, and service descriptions based on local keywords. Privacy and Legal Concerns of the AAA Model Aside from typical concerns for agencies relating to service contracts, there are a few issues (especially when using no-code tools) that will need to be addressed to run a successful AAA. Most of these surround privacy concerns when working with proprietary data. In your terms with your client, you will want to clearly define hosting providers and any third party tools you will be using to build their solution, and a DPA with these third parties listed as subprocessors if necessary. In addition, you will want to implement best practices like redacting private information from data being used for building solutions. In terms of addressing concerns directly from clients, it helps if you host your solutions on their own servers (not possible with AI tools), and address the fact only ChatGPT queries in the web app, not OpenAI API calls, will be used to train OpenAI's models (as reported by mainstream media). The key here is to be open and transparent with your clients about ALL the tools you are using, where there data will be going, and make sure to get this all in writing. have fun, and keep an open mind Before I finish this post, I just want to reiterate the fact that this is NOT an easy way to make money. Running an AI agency will require hours and hours of dedication and work, and constantly rearranging your schedule to meet prospect and client needs. However, if you are looking for a new business to run, and have a knack for understanding business operations and are genuinely interested in the pracitcal applications of generative AI, then I say go for it. The time is ticking before AAA becomes the new dropshipping or SMMA, and I've a firm believer that those who set foot first and establish themselves in this field will come out top. And remember, while 100 thousand people may read this post, only 2 may actually take initiative and start.

how I built a $6k/mo business with cold email

I scaled my SaaS to a $6k/mo business in under 6 months completely using cold email. However, the biggest takeaway for me is not a business that’s potentially worth 6-figure. It’s having a glance at the power of cold emails in the age of AI. It’s a rapidly evolving yet highly-effective channel, but no one talks about how to do it properly. Below is the what I needed 3 years ago, when I was stuck with 40 free users on my first app. An app I spent 2 years building into the void. Entrepreneurship is lonely. Especially when you are just starting out. Launching a startup feel like shouting into the dark. You pour your heart out. You think you have the next big idea, but no one cares. You write tweets, write blogs, build features, add tests. You talk to some lukewarm leads on Twitter. You do your big launch on Product Hunt. You might even get your first few sales. But after that, crickets... Then, you try every distribution channel out there. SEO Influencers Facebook ads Affiliates Newsletters Social media PPC Tiktok Press releases The reality is, none of them are that effective for early-stage startups. Because, let's face it, when you're just getting started, you have no clue what your customers truly desire. Without understanding their needs, you cannot create a product that resonates with them. It's as simple as that. So what’s the best distribution channel when you are doing a cold start? Cold emails. I know what you're thinking, but give me 10 seconds to change your mind: When I first heard about cold emailing I was like: “Hell no! I’m a developer, ain’t no way I’m talking to strangers.” That all changed on Jan 1st 2024, when I actually started sending cold emails to grow. Over the period of 6 months, I got over 1,700 users to sign up for my SaaS and grew it to a $6k/mo rapidly growing business. All from cold emails. Mastering Cold Emails = Your Superpower I might not recommend cold emails 3 years ago, but in 2024, I'd go all in with it. It used to be an expensive marketing channel bootstrapped startups can’t afford. You need to hire many assistants, build a list, research the leads, find emails, manage the mailboxes, email the leads, reply to emails, do meetings. follow up, get rejected... You had to hire at least 5 people just to get the ball rolling. The problem? Managing people sucks, and it doesn’t scale. That all changed with AI. Today, GPT-4 outperforms most human assistants. You can build an army of intelligent agents to help you complete tasks that’d previously be impossible without human input. Things that’d take a team of 10 assistants a week can now be done in 30 minutes with AI, at far superior quality with less headaches. You can throw 5000 names with website url at this pipeline and you’ll automatically have 5000 personalized emails ready to fire in 30 minutes. How amazing is that? Beyond being extremely accessible to developers who are already proficient in AI, cold email's got 3 superpowers that no other distribution channels can offer. Superpower 1/3 : You start a conversation with every single user. Every. Single. User. Let that sink in. This is incredibly powerful in the early stages, as it helps you establish rapport, bounce ideas off one another, offer 1:1 support, understand their needs, build personal relationships, and ultimately convert users into long-term fans of your product. From talking to 1000 users at the early stage, I had 20 users asking me to get on a call every week. If they are ready to buy, I do a sales call. If they are not sure, I do a user research call. At one point I even had to limit the number of calls I took to avoid burnout. The depth of the understanding of my customers’ needs is unparalleled. Using this insight, I refined the product to precisely cater to their requirements. Superpower 2/3 : You choose exactly who you talk to Unlike other distribution channels where you at best pick what someone's searching for, with cold emails, you have 100% control over who you talk to. Their company Job title Seniority level Number of employees Technology stack Growth rate Funding stage Product offerings Competitive landscape Social activity (Marital status - well, technically you can, but maybe not this one…) You can dial in this targeting to match your ICP exactly. The result is super low CAC and ultra high conversion rate. For example, My competitors are paying $10 per click for the keyword "HARO agency". I pay $0.19 per email sent, and $1.92 per signup At around $500 LTV, you can see how the first means a non-viable business. And the second means a cash-generating engine. Superpower 3/3 : Complete stealth mode Unlike other channels where competitors can easily reverse engineer or even abuse your marketing strategies, cold email operates in complete stealth mode. Every aspect is concealed from end to end: Your target audience Lead generation methods Number of leads targeted Email content Sales funnel This secrecy explains why there isn't much discussion about it online. Everyone is too focused on keeping their strategies close and reaping the rewards. That's precisely why I've chosen to share my insights on leveraging cold email to grow a successful SaaS business. More founders need to harness this channel to its fullest potential. In addition, I've more or less reached every user within my Total Addressable Market (TAM). So, if any competitor is reading this, don't bother trying to replicate it. The majority of potential users for this AI product are already onboard. To recap, the three superpowers of cold emails: You start a conversation with every single user → Accelerate to PMF You choose exactly who you talk to → Super-low CAC Complete stealth mode → Doesn’t attract competition By combining the three superpowers I helped my SaaS reach product-marketing-fit quickly and scale it to $6k per month while staying fully bootstrapped. I don't believe this was a coincidence. It's a replicable strategy for any startup. The blueprint is actually straightforward: Engage with a handful of customers Validate the idea Engage with numerous customers Scale to $5k/mo and beyond More early-stage founders should leverage cold emails for validation, and as their first distribution channel. And what would it do for you? Update: lots of DM asking about more specifics so I wrote about it here. https://coldstartblueprint.com/p/ai-agent-email-list-building

9 minimalistic habits that will save you 1,000+ hours of your life

📱 Digital Habits Unsubscribe from Unnecessary Emails Consider using an app like unroll.me to help you declutter your inbox. It's free. Streamline Your Finances Automating your finances can save you a lot of time and stress in the long run. Here's how: \- Automate monthly payments \- Cancel unused subscriptions \- Automate contributions to investments \- Set up a system to automatically deposit 20% of your paycheck into savings Deweaponize Your Device Your phone can be a major time sink. Make it less so with these steps: \- Set screen time limits \- Switch your device to grayscale \- Turn off non-emergency notifications \- Use an app like onesec.app to add friction \- Organize apps into folders based on their purpose Embrace Journaling or a Productivity Coach For journaling, consider the DayOneApp. If you want to delve deeper, try a productivity coach app like Wave.ai. ​ 🏡 Lifestyle Habits Declutter Daily Aim to get rid of just one thing every day. It's a simple way to discover what possessions truly matter to you. Build a Capsule Wardrobe A capsule wardrobe is a minimal collection of versatile items. Here's a quick guide: \- Decide on the number of pieces (up to 50) \- Start with what you already have \- Choose a color palette \- Retain essential/versatile items \- Donate what you don’t need Invest in High-Quality Items Remember, cheap can often end up being more expensive in the long run. ​ 🧠 Mental Habits Prune Your To-Do List As Jim Collins said, "If you have more than 3 priorities, then you don’t have any." Apply the 2-Minute Rule If a task takes less than 2 minutes to complete, do it immediately. Tasks tend to become more daunting the longer we procrastinate. ​ Should I add some more? Edited to add more from comments (From KidBeene): Don't reply to emails for 3 days. Either the issue will resolve itself or it will reduce options down to 1 or 2. No one is shooting at you, no one will die from you not stepping in to an email chain. If it was truly important your phone would be ringing. When people want to meet with you only accept meetings that have an agenda. No meeting should be FYI\- Those are emails or dashboards. Only agenda items that require a decision from you or that require you to step in to descalate or escalate a situation. If an FYI or update to a situation is needed, make it into a paragraph update\- 1st sentence of What happened that made you need to tell me something? Second sentence is historical/has this happened before. 3rd sentence is "so what/why do I care" and 4th sentence is recommendation. ​

I run an AI automation agency (AAA). My honest overview and review of this new business model

I started an AI tools directory in February, and then branched off that to start an AI automation agency (AAA) in June. So far I've come across a lot of unsustainable "ideas" to make money with AI, but at the same time a few diamonds in the rough that aren't fully tapped into yet- especially the AAA model. Thought I'd share this post to shine light into this new business model and share some ways you could potentially start your own agency, or at the very least know who you are dealing with and how to pick and choose when you (inevitably) get bombarded with cold emails from them down the line. Foreword Running an AAA does NOT involve using AI tools directly to generate and sell content directly. That ship has sailed, and unless you are happy with $5 from Fiverr every month or so, it is not a real business model. Cry me a river but generating generic art with AI and slapping it onto a T-shirt to sell on Etsy won't make you a dime. At the same time, the AAA model will NOT require you to have a deep theoretical knowledge of AI, or any academic degree, as we are more so dealing with the practical applications of generative AI and how we can implement these into different workflows and tech-stacks, rather than building AI models from the ground up. Regardless of all that, common sense and a willingness to learn will help (a shit ton), as with anything. Keep in mind - this WILL involve work and motivation as well. The mindset that AI somehow means everything can be done for you on autopilot is not the right way to approach things. The common theme of businesses I've seen who have successfully implemented AI into their operations is the willingess to work with AI in a way that augments their existing operations, rather than flat out replace a worker or team. And this is exactly the train of thought you need when working with AI as a business model. However, as the field is relatively unsaturated and hype surrounding AI is still fresh for enterprises, right now is the prime time to start something new if generative AI interests you at all. With that being said, I'll be going over three of the most successful AI-adjacent businesses I've seen over this past year, in addition to some tips and resources to point you in the right direction. so.. WTF is an AI Automation Agency? The AI automation agency (or as some YouTubers have coined it, the AAA model) at its core involves creating custom AI solutions for businesses. I have over 1500 AI tools listed in my directory, however the feedback I've received from some enterprise users is that ready-made SaaS tools are too generic to meet their specific needs. Combine this with the fact virtually no smaller companies have the time or skills required to develop custom solutions right off the bat, and you have yourself real demand. I would say in practice, the AAA model is quite similar to Wordpress and even web dev agencies, with the major difference being all solutions you develop will incorporate key aspects of AI AND automation. Which brings me to my second point- JUST AI IS NOT ENOUGH. Rather than reducing the amount of time required to complete certain tasks, I've seen many AI agencies make the mistake of recommending and (trying to) sell solutions that more likely than not increase the workload of their clients. For example, if you were to make an internal tool that has AI answer questions based on their knowledge base, but this knowledge base has to be updated manually, this is creating unnecessary work. As such I think one of the key components of building successful AI solutions is incorporating the new (Generative AI/LLMs) with the old (programmtic automation- think Zapier, APIs, etc.). Finally, for this business model to be successful, ideally you should target a niche in which you have already worked and understand pain points and needs. Not only does this make it much easier to get calls booked with prospects, the solutions you build will have much greater value to your clients (meaning you get paid more). A mistake I've seen many AAA operators make (and I blame this on the "Get Rich Quick" YouTubers) is focusing too much on a specific productized service, rather than really understanding the needs of businesses. The former is much done via a SaaS model, but when going the agency route the only thing that makes sense is building custom solutions. This is why I always take a consultant-first approach. You can only build once you understand what they actually need and how certain solutions may impact their operations, workflows, and bottom-line. Basics of How to Get Started Pick a niche. As I mentioned previously, preferably one that you've worked in before. Niches I know of that are actively being bombarded with cold emails include real estate, e-commerce, auto-dealerships, lawyers, and medical offices. There is a reason for this, but I will tell you straight up this business model works well if you target any white-collar service business (internal tools approach) or high volume businesses (customer facing tools approach). Setup your toolbox. If you wanted to start a pressure washing business, you would need a pressure-washer. This is no different. For those without programming knowledge, I've seen two common ways AAA get setup to build- one is having a network of on-call web developers, whether its personal contacts or simply going to Upwork or any talent sourcing agency. The second is having an arsenal of no-code tools. I'll get to this more in a second, but this works beecause at its core, when we are dealing with the practical applications of AI, the code is quite simple, simply put. Start cold sales. Unless you have a network already, this is not a step you can skip. You've already picked a niche, so all you have to do is find the right message. Keep cold emails short, sweet, but enticing- and it will help a lot if you did step 1 correctly and intimately understand who your audience is. I'll be touching base later about how you can leverage AI yourself to help you with outreach and closing. The beauty of gen AI and the AAA model You don't need to be a seasoned web developer to make this business model work. The large majority of solutions that SME clients want is best done using an API for an LLM for the actual AI aspect. The value we create with the solutions we build comes with the conceptual framework and design that not only does what they need it to but integrates smoothly with their existing tech-stack and workflow. The actual implementation is quite straightforward once you understand the high level design and know which tools you are going to use. To give you a sense, even if you plan to build out these apps yourself (say in Python) the large majority of the nitty gritty technical work has already been done for you, especially if you leverage Python libraries and packages that offer high level abstraction for LLM-related functions. For instance, calling GPT can be as little as a single line of code. (And there are no-code tools where these functions are simply an icon on a GUI). Aside from understanding the capabilities and limitations of these tools and frameworks, the only thing that matters is being able to put them in a way that makes sense for what you want to build. Which is why outsourcing and no-code tools both work in our case. Okay... but how TF am I suppposed to actually build out these solutions? Now the fun part. I highly recommend getting familiar with Langchain and LlamaIndex. Both are Python libraires that help a lot with the high-level LLM abstraction I mentioned previously. The two most important aspects include being able to integrate internal data sources/knowledge bases with LLMs, and have LLMs perform autonomous actions. The two most common methods respectively are RAG and output parsing. RAG (retrieval augmented Generation) If you've ever seen a tool that seemingly "trains" GPT on your own data, and wonder how it all works- well I have an answer from you. At a high level, the user query is first being fed to what's called a vector database to run vector search. Vector search basically lets you do semantic search where you are searching data based on meaning. The vector databases then retrieves the most relevant sections of text as it relates to the user query, and this text gets APPENDED to your GPT prompt to provide extra context to the AI. Further, with prompt engineering, you can limit GPT to only generate an answer if it can be found within this extra context, greatly limiting the chance of hallucination (this is where AI makes random shit up). Aside from vector databases, we can also implement RAG with other data sources and retrieval methods, for example SQL databses (via parsing the outputs of LLM's- more on this later). Autonomous Agents via Output Parsing A common need of clients has been having AI actually perform tasks, rather than simply spitting out text. For example, with autonomous agents, we can have an e-commerce chatbot do the work of a basic customer service rep (i.e. look into orders, refunds, shipping). At a high level, what's going on is that the response of the LLM is being used programmtically to determine which API to call. Keeping on with the e-commerce example, if I wanted a chatbot to check shipping status, I could have a LLM response within my app (not shown to the user) with a prompt that outputs a random hash or string, and programmatically I can determine which API call to make based on this hash/string. And using the same fundamental concept as with RAG, I can append the the API response to a final prompt that would spit out the answer for the user. How No Code Tools Can Fit In (With some example solutions you can build) With that being said, you don't necessarily need to do all of the above by coding yourself, with Python libraries or otherwise. However, I will say that having that high level overview will help IMMENSELY when it comes to using no-code tools to do the actual work for you. Regardless, here are a few common solutions you might build for clients as well as some no-code tools you can use to build them out. Ex. Solution 1: AI Chatbots for SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) This involves creating chatbots that handle user queries, lead gen, and so forth with AI, and will use the principles of RAG at heart. After getting the required data from your client (i.e. product catalogues, previous support tickets, FAQ, internal documentation), you upload this into your knowledge base and write a prompt that makes sense for your use case. One no-code tool that does this well is MyAskAI. The beauty of it especially for building external chatbots is the ability to quickly ingest entire websites into your knowledge base via a sitemap, and bulk uploading files. Essentially, they've covered the entire grunt work required to do this manually. Finally, you can create a inline or chat widget on your client's website with a few lines of HTML, or altneratively integrate it with a Slack/Teams chatbot (if you are going for an internal Q&A chatbot approach). Other tools you could use include Botpress and Voiceflow, however these are less for RAG and more for building out complete chatbot flows that may or may not incorporate LLMs. Both apps are essentially GUIs that eliminate the pain and tears and trying to implement complex flows manually, and both natively incoporate AI intents and a knowledge base feature. Ex. Solution 2: Internal Apps Similar to the first example, except we go beyond making just chatbots but tools such as report generation and really any sort of internal tool or automations that may incorporate LLM's. For instance, you can have a tool that automatically generates replies to inbound emails based on your client's knowledge base. Or an automation that does the same thing but for replies to Instagram comments. Another example could be a tool that generates a description and screeenshot based on a URL (useful for directory sites, made one for my own :P). Getting into more advanced implementations of LLMs, we can have tools that can generate entire drafts of reports (think 80+ pages), based not only on data from a knowledge base but also the writing style, format, and author voice of previous reports. One good tool to create content generation panels for your clients would be MindStudio. You can train LLM's via prompt engineering in a structured way with your own data to essentially fine tune them for whatever text you need it to generate. Furthermore, it has a GUI where you can dictate the entire AI flow. You can also upload data sources via multiple formats, including PDF, CSV, and Docx. For automations that require interactions between multiple apps, I recommend the OG zapier/make.com if you want a no-code solution. For instance, for the automatic email reply generator, I can have a trigger such that when an email is received, a custom AI reply is generated by MyAskAI, and finally a draft is created in my email client. Or, for an automation where I can create a social media posts on multiple platforms based on a RSS feed (news feed), I can implement this directly in Zapier with their native GPT action (see screenshot) As for more complex LLM flows that may require multiple layers of LLMs, data sources, and APIs working together to generate a single response i.e. a long form 100 page report, I would recommend tools such as Stack AI or Flowise (open-source alternative) to build these solutions out. Essentially, you get most of the functions and features of Python packages such as Langchain and LlamaIndex in a GUI. See screenshot for an example of a flow How the hell are you supposed to find clients? With all that being said, none of this matters if you can't find anyone to sell to. You will have to do cold sales, one way or the other, especially if you are brand new to the game. And what better way to sell your AI services than with AI itself? If we want to integrate AI into the cold outreach process, first we must identify what it's good at doing, and that's obviously writing a bunch of text, in a short amount of time. Similar to the solutions that an AAA can build for its clients, we can take advantage of the same principles in our own sales processes. How to do outreach Once you've identified your niche and their pain points/opportunities for automation, you want to craft a compelling message in which you can send via cold email and cold calls to get prospects booked on demos/consultations. I won't get into too much detail in terms of exactly how to write emails or calling scripts, as there are millions of resources to help with this, but I will tell you a few key points you want to keep in mind when doing outreach for your AAA. First, you want to keep in mind that many businesses are still hesitant about AI and may not understand what it really is or how it can benefit their operations. However, we can take advantage of how mass media has been reporting on AI this past year- at the very least people are AWARE that sooner or later they may have to implement AI into their businesses to stay competitive. We want to frame our message in a way that introduces generative AI as a technology that can have a direct, tangible, and positive impact on their business. Although it may be hard to quantify, I like to include estimates of man-hours saved or costs saved at least in my final proposals to prospects. Times are TOUGH right now, and money is expensive, so you need to have a compelling reason for businesses to get on board. Once you've gotten your messaging down, you will want to create a list of prospects to contact. Tools you can use to find prospects include Apollo.io, reply.io, zoominfo (expensive af), and Linkedin Sales Navigator. What specific job titles, etc. to target will depend on your niche but for smaller companies this will tend to be the owner. For white collar niches, i.e. law, the professional that will be directly benefiting from the tool (i.e. partners) may be better to contact. And for larger organizations you may want to target business improvement and digital transformation leads/directors- these are the people directly in charge of projects like what you may be proposing. Okay- so you have your message, and your list, and now all it comes down to is getting the good word out. I won't be going into the details of how to send these out, a quick Google search will give you hundreds of resources for cold outreach methods. However, personalization is key and beyond simple dynamic variables you want to make sure you can either personalize your email campaigns directly with AI (SmartWriter.ai is an example of a tool that can do this), or at the very least have the ability to import email messages programmatically. Alternatively, ask ChatGPT to make you a Python Script that can take in a list of emails, scrape info based on their linkedin URL or website, and all pass this onto a GPT prompt that specifies your messaging to generate an email. From there, send away. How tf do I close? Once you've got some prospects booked in on your meetings, you will need to close deals with them to turn them into clients. Call #1: Consultation Tying back to when I mentioned you want to take a consultant-first appraoch, you will want to listen closely to their goals and needs and understand their pain points. This would be the first call, and typically I would provide a high level overview of different solutions we could build to tacke these. It really helps to have a presentation available, so you can graphically demonstrate key points and key technologies. I like to use Plus AI for this, it's basically a Google Slides add-on that can generate slide decks for you. I copy and paste my default company messaging, add some key points for the presentation, and it comes out with pretty decent slides. Call #2: Demo The second call would involve a demo of one of these solutions, and typically I'll quickly prototype it with boilerplate code I already have, otherwise I'll cook something up in a no-code tool. If you have a niche where one type of solution is commonly demanded, it helps to have a general demo set up to be able to handle a larger volume of calls, so you aren't burning yourself out. I'll also elaborate on how the final product would look like in comparison to the demo. Call #3 and Beyond: Once the initial consultation and demo is complete, you will want to alleviate any remaining concerns from your prospects and work with them to reach a final work proposal. It's crucial you lay out exactly what you will be building (in writing) and ensure the prospect understands this. Furthermore, be clear and transparent with timelines and communication methods for the project. In terms of pricing, you want to take this from a value-based approach. The same solution may be worth a lot more to client A than client B. Furthermore, you can create "add-ons" such as monthly maintenance/upgrade packages, training sessions for employeees, and so forth, separate from the initial setup fee you would charge. How you can incorporate AI into marketing your businesses Beyond cold sales, I highly recommend creating a funnel to capture warm leads. For instance, I do this currently with my AI tools directory, which links directly to my AI agency and has consistent branding throughout. Warm leads are much more likely to close (and honestly, much nicer to deal with). However, even without an AI-related website, at the very least you will want to create a presence on social media and the web in general. As with any agency, you will want basic a professional presence. A professional virtual address helps, in addition to a Google Business Profile (GBP) and TrustPilot. a GBP (especially for local SEO) and Trustpilot page also helps improve the looks of your search results immensely. For GBP, I recommend using ProfilePro, which is a chrome extension you can use to automate SEO work for your GBP. Aside from SEO optimzied business descriptions based on your business, it can handle Q/A answers, responses, updates, and service descriptions based on local keywords. Privacy and Legal Concerns of the AAA Model Aside from typical concerns for agencies relating to service contracts, there are a few issues (especially when using no-code tools) that will need to be addressed to run a successful AAA. Most of these surround privacy concerns when working with proprietary data. In your terms with your client, you will want to clearly define hosting providers and any third party tools you will be using to build their solution, and a DPA with these third parties listed as subprocessors if necessary. In addition, you will want to implement best practices like redacting private information from data being used for building solutions. In terms of addressing concerns directly from clients, it helps if you host your solutions on their own servers (not possible with AI tools), and address the fact only ChatGPT queries in the web app, not OpenAI API calls, will be used to train OpenAI's models (as reported by mainstream media). The key here is to be open and transparent with your clients about ALL the tools you are using, where there data will be going, and make sure to get this all in writing. have fun, and keep an open mind Before I finish this post, I just want to reiterate the fact that this is NOT an easy way to make money. Running an AI agency will require hours and hours of dedication and work, and constantly rearranging your schedule to meet prospect and client needs. However, if you are looking for a new business to run, and have a knack for understanding business operations and are genuinely interested in the pracitcal applications of generative AI, then I say go for it. The time is ticking before AAA becomes the new dropshipping or SMMA, and I've a firm believer that those who set foot first and establish themselves in this field will come out top. And remember, while 100 thousand people may read this post, only 2 may actually take initiative and start.

I run an AI automation agency (AAA). My honest overview and review of this new business model

I started an AI tools directory in February, and then branched off that to start an AI automation agency (AAA) in June. So far I've come across a lot of unsustainable "ideas" to make money with AI, but at the same time a few diamonds in the rough that aren't fully tapped into yet- especially the AAA model. Thought I'd share this post to shine light into this new business model and share some ways you could potentially start your own agency, or at the very least know who you are dealing with and how to pick and choose when you (inevitably) get bombarded with cold emails from them down the line. Foreword Running an AAA does NOT involve using AI tools directly to generate and sell content directly. That ship has sailed, and unless you are happy with $5 from Fiverr every month or so, it is not a real business model. Cry me a river but generating generic art with AI and slapping it onto a T-shirt to sell on Etsy won't make you a dime. At the same time, the AAA model will NOT require you to have a deep theoretical knowledge of AI, or any academic degree, as we are more so dealing with the practical applications of generative AI and how we can implement these into different workflows and tech-stacks, rather than building AI models from the ground up. Regardless of all that, common sense and a willingness to learn will help (a shit ton), as with anything. Keep in mind - this WILL involve work and motivation as well. The mindset that AI somehow means everything can be done for you on autopilot is not the right way to approach things. The common theme of businesses I've seen who have successfully implemented AI into their operations is the willingess to work with AI in a way that augments their existing operations, rather than flat out replace a worker or team. And this is exactly the train of thought you need when working with AI as a business model. However, as the field is relatively unsaturated and hype surrounding AI is still fresh for enterprises, right now is the prime time to start something new if generative AI interests you at all. With that being said, I'll be going over three of the most successful AI-adjacent businesses I've seen over this past year, in addition to some tips and resources to point you in the right direction. so.. WTF is an AI Automation Agency? The AI automation agency (or as some YouTubers have coined it, the AAA model) at its core involves creating custom AI solutions for businesses. I have over 1500 AI tools listed in my directory, however the feedback I've received from some enterprise users is that ready-made SaaS tools are too generic to meet their specific needs. Combine this with the fact virtually no smaller companies have the time or skills required to develop custom solutions right off the bat, and you have yourself real demand. I would say in practice, the AAA model is quite similar to Wordpress and even web dev agencies, with the major difference being all solutions you develop will incorporate key aspects of AI AND automation. Which brings me to my second point- JUST AI IS NOT ENOUGH. Rather than reducing the amount of time required to complete certain tasks, I've seen many AI agencies make the mistake of recommending and (trying to) sell solutions that more likely than not increase the workload of their clients. For example, if you were to make an internal tool that has AI answer questions based on their knowledge base, but this knowledge base has to be updated manually, this is creating unnecessary work. As such I think one of the key components of building successful AI solutions is incorporating the new (Generative AI/LLMs) with the old (programmtic automation- think Zapier, APIs, etc.). Finally, for this business model to be successful, ideally you should target a niche in which you have already worked and understand pain points and needs. Not only does this make it much easier to get calls booked with prospects, the solutions you build will have much greater value to your clients (meaning you get paid more). A mistake I've seen many AAA operators make (and I blame this on the "Get Rich Quick" YouTubers) is focusing too much on a specific productized service, rather than really understanding the needs of businesses. The former is much done via a SaaS model, but when going the agency route the only thing that makes sense is building custom solutions. This is why I always take a consultant-first approach. You can only build once you understand what they actually need and how certain solutions may impact their operations, workflows, and bottom-line. Basics of How to Get Started Pick a niche. As I mentioned previously, preferably one that you've worked in before. Niches I know of that are actively being bombarded with cold emails include real estate, e-commerce, auto-dealerships, lawyers, and medical offices. There is a reason for this, but I will tell you straight up this business model works well if you target any white-collar service business (internal tools approach) or high volume businesses (customer facing tools approach). Setup your toolbox. If you wanted to start a pressure washing business, you would need a pressure-washer. This is no different. For those without programming knowledge, I've seen two common ways AAA get setup to build- one is having a network of on-call web developers, whether its personal contacts or simply going to Upwork or any talent sourcing agency. The second is having an arsenal of no-code tools. I'll get to this more in a second, but this works beecause at its core, when we are dealing with the practical applications of AI, the code is quite simple, simply put. Start cold sales. Unless you have a network already, this is not a step you can skip. You've already picked a niche, so all you have to do is find the right message. Keep cold emails short, sweet, but enticing- and it will help a lot if you did step 1 correctly and intimately understand who your audience is. I'll be touching base later about how you can leverage AI yourself to help you with outreach and closing. The beauty of gen AI and the AAA model You don't need to be a seasoned web developer to make this business model work. The large majority of solutions that SME clients want is best done using an API for an LLM for the actual AI aspect. The value we create with the solutions we build comes with the conceptual framework and design that not only does what they need it to but integrates smoothly with their existing tech-stack and workflow. The actual implementation is quite straightforward once you understand the high level design and know which tools you are going to use. To give you a sense, even if you plan to build out these apps yourself (say in Python) the large majority of the nitty gritty technical work has already been done for you, especially if you leverage Python libraries and packages that offer high level abstraction for LLM-related functions. For instance, calling GPT can be as little as a single line of code. (And there are no-code tools where these functions are simply an icon on a GUI). Aside from understanding the capabilities and limitations of these tools and frameworks, the only thing that matters is being able to put them in a way that makes sense for what you want to build. Which is why outsourcing and no-code tools both work in our case. Okay... but how TF am I suppposed to actually build out these solutions? Now the fun part. I highly recommend getting familiar with Langchain and LlamaIndex. Both are Python libraires that help a lot with the high-level LLM abstraction I mentioned previously. The two most important aspects include being able to integrate internal data sources/knowledge bases with LLMs, and have LLMs perform autonomous actions. The two most common methods respectively are RAG and output parsing. RAG (retrieval augmented Generation) If you've ever seen a tool that seemingly "trains" GPT on your own data, and wonder how it all works- well I have an answer from you. At a high level, the user query is first being fed to what's called a vector database to run vector search. Vector search basically lets you do semantic search where you are searching data based on meaning. The vector databases then retrieves the most relevant sections of text as it relates to the user query, and this text gets APPENDED to your GPT prompt to provide extra context to the AI. Further, with prompt engineering, you can limit GPT to only generate an answer if it can be found within this extra context, greatly limiting the chance of hallucination (this is where AI makes random shit up). Aside from vector databases, we can also implement RAG with other data sources and retrieval methods, for example SQL databses (via parsing the outputs of LLM's- more on this later). Autonomous Agents via Output Parsing A common need of clients has been having AI actually perform tasks, rather than simply spitting out text. For example, with autonomous agents, we can have an e-commerce chatbot do the work of a basic customer service rep (i.e. look into orders, refunds, shipping). At a high level, what's going on is that the response of the LLM is being used programmtically to determine which API to call. Keeping on with the e-commerce example, if I wanted a chatbot to check shipping status, I could have a LLM response within my app (not shown to the user) with a prompt that outputs a random hash or string, and programmatically I can determine which API call to make based on this hash/string. And using the same fundamental concept as with RAG, I can append the the API response to a final prompt that would spit out the answer for the user. How No Code Tools Can Fit In (With some example solutions you can build) With that being said, you don't necessarily need to do all of the above by coding yourself, with Python libraries or otherwise. However, I will say that having that high level overview will help IMMENSELY when it comes to using no-code tools to do the actual work for you. Regardless, here are a few common solutions you might build for clients as well as some no-code tools you can use to build them out. Ex. Solution 1: AI Chatbots for SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) This involves creating chatbots that handle user queries, lead gen, and so forth with AI, and will use the principles of RAG at heart. After getting the required data from your client (i.e. product catalogues, previous support tickets, FAQ, internal documentation), you upload this into your knowledge base and write a prompt that makes sense for your use case. One no-code tool that does this well is MyAskAI. The beauty of it especially for building external chatbots is the ability to quickly ingest entire websites into your knowledge base via a sitemap, and bulk uploading files. Essentially, they've covered the entire grunt work required to do this manually. Finally, you can create a inline or chat widget on your client's website with a few lines of HTML, or altneratively integrate it with a Slack/Teams chatbot (if you are going for an internal Q&A chatbot approach). Other tools you could use include Botpress and Voiceflow, however these are less for RAG and more for building out complete chatbot flows that may or may not incorporate LLMs. Both apps are essentially GUIs that eliminate the pain and tears and trying to implement complex flows manually, and both natively incoporate AI intents and a knowledge base feature. Ex. Solution 2: Internal Apps Similar to the first example, except we go beyond making just chatbots but tools such as report generation and really any sort of internal tool or automations that may incorporate LLM's. For instance, you can have a tool that automatically generates replies to inbound emails based on your client's knowledge base. Or an automation that does the same thing but for replies to Instagram comments. Another example could be a tool that generates a description and screeenshot based on a URL (useful for directory sites, made one for my own :P). Getting into more advanced implementations of LLMs, we can have tools that can generate entire drafts of reports (think 80+ pages), based not only on data from a knowledge base but also the writing style, format, and author voice of previous reports. One good tool to create content generation panels for your clients would be MindStudio. You can train LLM's via prompt engineering in a structured way with your own data to essentially fine tune them for whatever text you need it to generate. Furthermore, it has a GUI where you can dictate the entire AI flow. You can also upload data sources via multiple formats, including PDF, CSV, and Docx. For automations that require interactions between multiple apps, I recommend the OG zapier/make.com if you want a no-code solution. For instance, for the automatic email reply generator, I can have a trigger such that when an email is received, a custom AI reply is generated by MyAskAI, and finally a draft is created in my email client. Or, for an automation where I can create a social media posts on multiple platforms based on a RSS feed (news feed), I can implement this directly in Zapier with their native GPT action (see screenshot) As for more complex LLM flows that may require multiple layers of LLMs, data sources, and APIs working together to generate a single response i.e. a long form 100 page report, I would recommend tools such as Stack AI or Flowise (open-source alternative) to build these solutions out. Essentially, you get most of the functions and features of Python packages such as Langchain and LlamaIndex in a GUI. See screenshot for an example of a flow How the hell are you supposed to find clients? With all that being said, none of this matters if you can't find anyone to sell to. You will have to do cold sales, one way or the other, especially if you are brand new to the game. And what better way to sell your AI services than with AI itself? If we want to integrate AI into the cold outreach process, first we must identify what it's good at doing, and that's obviously writing a bunch of text, in a short amount of time. Similar to the solutions that an AAA can build for its clients, we can take advantage of the same principles in our own sales processes. How to do outreach Once you've identified your niche and their pain points/opportunities for automation, you want to craft a compelling message in which you can send via cold email and cold calls to get prospects booked on demos/consultations. I won't get into too much detail in terms of exactly how to write emails or calling scripts, as there are millions of resources to help with this, but I will tell you a few key points you want to keep in mind when doing outreach for your AAA. First, you want to keep in mind that many businesses are still hesitant about AI and may not understand what it really is or how it can benefit their operations. However, we can take advantage of how mass media has been reporting on AI this past year- at the very least people are AWARE that sooner or later they may have to implement AI into their businesses to stay competitive. We want to frame our message in a way that introduces generative AI as a technology that can have a direct, tangible, and positive impact on their business. Although it may be hard to quantify, I like to include estimates of man-hours saved or costs saved at least in my final proposals to prospects. Times are TOUGH right now, and money is expensive, so you need to have a compelling reason for businesses to get on board. Once you've gotten your messaging down, you will want to create a list of prospects to contact. Tools you can use to find prospects include Apollo.io, reply.io, zoominfo (expensive af), and Linkedin Sales Navigator. What specific job titles, etc. to target will depend on your niche but for smaller companies this will tend to be the owner. For white collar niches, i.e. law, the professional that will be directly benefiting from the tool (i.e. partners) may be better to contact. And for larger organizations you may want to target business improvement and digital transformation leads/directors- these are the people directly in charge of projects like what you may be proposing. Okay- so you have your message, and your list, and now all it comes down to is getting the good word out. I won't be going into the details of how to send these out, a quick Google search will give you hundreds of resources for cold outreach methods. However, personalization is key and beyond simple dynamic variables you want to make sure you can either personalize your email campaigns directly with AI (SmartWriter.ai is an example of a tool that can do this), or at the very least have the ability to import email messages programmatically. Alternatively, ask ChatGPT to make you a Python Script that can take in a list of emails, scrape info based on their linkedin URL or website, and all pass this onto a GPT prompt that specifies your messaging to generate an email. From there, send away. How tf do I close? Once you've got some prospects booked in on your meetings, you will need to close deals with them to turn them into clients. Call #1: Consultation Tying back to when I mentioned you want to take a consultant-first appraoch, you will want to listen closely to their goals and needs and understand their pain points. This would be the first call, and typically I would provide a high level overview of different solutions we could build to tacke these. It really helps to have a presentation available, so you can graphically demonstrate key points and key technologies. I like to use Plus AI for this, it's basically a Google Slides add-on that can generate slide decks for you. I copy and paste my default company messaging, add some key points for the presentation, and it comes out with pretty decent slides. Call #2: Demo The second call would involve a demo of one of these solutions, and typically I'll quickly prototype it with boilerplate code I already have, otherwise I'll cook something up in a no-code tool. If you have a niche where one type of solution is commonly demanded, it helps to have a general demo set up to be able to handle a larger volume of calls, so you aren't burning yourself out. I'll also elaborate on how the final product would look like in comparison to the demo. Call #3 and Beyond: Once the initial consultation and demo is complete, you will want to alleviate any remaining concerns from your prospects and work with them to reach a final work proposal. It's crucial you lay out exactly what you will be building (in writing) and ensure the prospect understands this. Furthermore, be clear and transparent with timelines and communication methods for the project. In terms of pricing, you want to take this from a value-based approach. The same solution may be worth a lot more to client A than client B. Furthermore, you can create "add-ons" such as monthly maintenance/upgrade packages, training sessions for employeees, and so forth, separate from the initial setup fee you would charge. How you can incorporate AI into marketing your businesses Beyond cold sales, I highly recommend creating a funnel to capture warm leads. For instance, I do this currently with my AI tools directory, which links directly to my AI agency and has consistent branding throughout. Warm leads are much more likely to close (and honestly, much nicer to deal with). However, even without an AI-related website, at the very least you will want to create a presence on social media and the web in general. As with any agency, you will want basic a professional presence. A professional virtual address helps, in addition to a Google Business Profile (GBP) and TrustPilot. a GBP (especially for local SEO) and Trustpilot page also helps improve the looks of your search results immensely. For GBP, I recommend using ProfilePro, which is a chrome extension you can use to automate SEO work for your GBP. Aside from SEO optimzied business descriptions based on your business, it can handle Q/A answers, responses, updates, and service descriptions based on local keywords. Privacy and Legal Concerns of the AAA Model Aside from typical concerns for agencies relating to service contracts, there are a few issues (especially when using no-code tools) that will need to be addressed to run a successful AAA. Most of these surround privacy concerns when working with proprietary data. In your terms with your client, you will want to clearly define hosting providers and any third party tools you will be using to build their solution, and a DPA with these third parties listed as subprocessors if necessary. In addition, you will want to implement best practices like redacting private information from data being used for building solutions. In terms of addressing concerns directly from clients, it helps if you host your solutions on their own servers (not possible with AI tools), and address the fact only ChatGPT queries in the web app, not OpenAI API calls, will be used to train OpenAI's models (as reported by mainstream media). The key here is to be open and transparent with your clients about ALL the tools you are using, where there data will be going, and make sure to get this all in writing. have fun, and keep an open mind Before I finish this post, I just want to reiterate the fact that this is NOT an easy way to make money. Running an AI agency will require hours and hours of dedication and work, and constantly rearranging your schedule to meet prospect and client needs. However, if you are looking for a new business to run, and have a knack for understanding business operations and are genuinely interested in the pracitcal applications of generative AI, then I say go for it. The time is ticking before AAA becomes the new dropshipping or SMMA, and I've a firm believer that those who set foot first and establish themselves in this field will come out top. And remember, while 100 thousand people may read this post, only 2 may actually take initiative and start.

Watched 8 hours of MrBeast's content. Here are 7 psychological strategies he's used to get 34 billion views

MrBeast can fill giant stadiums and launch 8-figure candy companies on demand. He’s unbelievably popular. Recently, I listened to the brilliant marketer Phill Agnew (from The Nudge podcast) being interviewed on the Creator Science podcast. The episode focused on how MrBeast’s near-academic understanding of audience psychology is the key to his success. Better than anyone, MrBeast knows how to get you: \- Click on his content (increase his click-through rate) \- Get you to stick around (increase his retention rate) He gets you to click by using irresistible thumbnails and headlines. I watched 8 hours of his content. To build upon Phil Agnew’s work, I made a list of 7 psychological effects and biases he’s consistently used to write headlines that get clicked into oblivion. Even the most aggressively “anti-clickbait” purists out there would benefit from learning the psychology of why people choose to click on some content over others. Ultimately, if you don’t get the click, it really doesn’t matter how good your content is. Novelty Effect MrBeast Headline: “I Put 100 Million Orbeez In My Friend's Backyard” MrBeast often presents something so out of the ordinary that they have no choice but to click and find out more. That’s the “novelty effect” at play. Our brain’s reward system is engaged when we encounter something new. You’ll notice that the headline examples you see in this list are extreme. MrBeast takes things to the extreme. You don’t have to. Here’s your takeaway: Consider breaking the reader/viewer’s scrolling pattern by adding some novelty to your headlines. How? Here are two ways: Find the unique angle in your content Find an unusual character in your content Examples: “How Moonlight Walks Skyrocketed My Productivity”. “Meet the Artist Who Paints With Wine and Chocolate.” Headlines like these catch the eye without requiring 100 million Orbeez. Costly Signaling MrBeast Headline: "Last To Leave $800,000 Island Keeps It" Here’s the 3-step click-through process at play here: MrBeast lets you know he’s invested a very significant amount of time and money into his content. This signals to whoever reads the headline that it's probably valuable and worth their time. They click to find out more. Costly signaling is all amount showcasing what you’ve invested into the content. The higher the stakes, the more valuable the content will seem. In this example, the $800,000 island he’s giving away just screams “This is worth your time!” Again, they don’t need to be this extreme. Here are two examples with a little more subtlety: “I built a full-scale botanical garden in my backyard”. “I used only vintage cookware from the 1800s for a week”. Not too extreme, but not too subtle either. Numerical Precision MrBeast knows that using precise numbers in headlines just work. Almost all of his most popular videos use headlines that contain a specific number. “Going Through The Same Drive Thru 1,000 Times" “$456,000 Squid Game In Real Life!” Yes, these headlines also use costly signaling. But there’s more to it than that. Precise numbers are tangible. They catch our eye, pique our curiosity, and add a sense of authenticity. “The concreteness effect”: Specific, concrete information is more likely to be remembered than abstract, intangible information. “I went through the same drive thru 1000 times” is more impactful than “I went through the same drive thru countless times”. Contrast MrBeast Headline: "$1 vs $1,000,000 Hotel Room!" Our brains are drawn to stark contrasts and MrBeast knows it. His headlines often pit two extremes against each other. It instantly creates a mental image of both scenarios. You’re not just curious about what a $1,000,000 hotel room looks like. You’re also wondering how it could possibly compare to a $1 room. Was the difference wildly significant? Was it actually not as significant as you’d think? It increases the audience’s \curiosity gap\ enough to get them to click and find out more. Here are a few ways you could use contrast in your headlines effectively: Transformational Content: "From $200 to a $100M Empire - How A Small Town Accountant Took On Silicon Valley" Here you’re contrasting different states or conditions of a single subject. Transformation stories and before-and-after scenarios. You’ve got the added benefit of people being drawn to aspirational/inspirational stories. Direct Comparison “Local Diner Vs Gourmet Bistro - Where Does The Best Comfort Food Lie?” Nostalgia MrBeast Headline: "I Built Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory!" Nostalgia is a longing for the past. It’s often triggered by sensory stimuli - smells, songs, images, etc. It can feel comforting and positive, but sometimes bittersweet. Nostalgia can provide emotional comfort, identity reinforcement, and even social connection. People are drawn to it and MrBeast has it down to a tee. He created a fantasy world most people on this planet came across at some point in their childhood. While the headline does play on costly signaling here as well, nostalgia does help to clinch the click and get the view. Subtle examples of nostalgia at play: “How this \[old school cartoon\] is shaping new age animation”. “\[Your favorite childhood books\] are getting major movie deals”. Morbid Curiosity MrBeast Headline: "Surviving 24 Hours Straight In The Bermuda Triangle" People are drawn to the macabre and the dangerous. Morbid curiosity explains why you’re drawn to situations that are disturbing, frightening, or gruesome. It’s that tension between wanting to avoid harm and the irresistible desire to know about it. It’s a peculiar aspect of human psychology and viral content marketers take full advantage of it. The Bermuda Triangle is practically synonymous with danger. The headline suggests a pretty extreme encounter with it, so we click to find out more. FOMO And Urgency MrBeast Headline: "Last To Leave $800,000 Island Keeps It" “FOMO”: the worry that others may be having fulfilling experiences that you’re absent from. Marketers leverage FOMO to drive immediate action - clicking, subscribing, purchasing, etc. The action is driven by the notion that delay could result in missing out on an exciting opportunity or event. You could argue that MrBeast uses FOMO and urgency in all of his headlines. They work under the notion that a delay in clicking could result in missing out on an exciting opportunity or event. MrBeast’s time-sensitive challenge, exclusive opportunities, and high-stakes competitions all generate a sense of urgency. People feel compelled to watch immediately for fear of missing out on the outcome or being left behind in conversations about the content. Creators, writers, and marketers can tap into FOMO with their headlines without being so extreme. “The Hidden Parisian Cafe To Visit Before The Crowds Do” “How \[Tech Innovation\] Will Soon Change \[Industry\] For Good” (Yep, FOMO and urgency are primarily responsible for the proliferation of AI-related headlines these days). Why This All Matters If you don’t have content you need people to consume, it probably doesn’t! But if any aspect of your online business would benefit from people clicking on things more, it probably does. “Yes, because we all need more clickbait in this world - \eye-roll emoji\” - Disgruntled Redditor I never really understood this comment but I seem to get it pretty often. My stance is this: If the content delivers what the headline promises, it shouldn’t be labeled clickbait. I wouldn’t call MrBeast’s content clickbait. The fact is that linguistic techniques can be used to drive people to consume some content over others. You don’t need to take things to the extremes that MrBeast does to make use of his headline techniques. If content doesn’t get clicked, it won’t be read, viewed, or listened to - no matter how brilliant the content might be. While “clickbait” content isn’t a good thing, we can all learn a thing or two from how they generate attention in an increasingly noisy digital world.

5 no-code tools to build your website fast and easy.

Hey, reddittors👋 Want to build a website but don't know how to code? 🥺 No problem! There are a number of no-code tools available that can help you create a professional-looking website without any coding knowledge. 👇 Carrd Carrd is a free website builder that allows you to create simple, one-page websites, profile pages, portfolios and forms with super-easy-to learn editor. It's a great option for people who want to create a website quickly and easily without having to learn how to code. Carrd has 16 website design elements, such as text, audio, video, images, buttons, tables, galleries, and code embeds that can be used to define the structure of your website. Pros: Easy to use, affordable (free/$19 per year plans), variety of templates, widgets (PayPal, Gumroad, Stripe, Typeform, etc), responsive out of the box, has some basic animations. Cons: Lack of design freedom, hard to build a scalable website, most of the templates looks design outdated, not suitable for blogs and online stores. Best for: Solo entrepreneurs, Artists, Photographers, Copywriters, SMB’s with no design/development background. Framer Primarily aimed at designers, Framer is a no-code tool that let’s you create highly-customized websites that vary from simple landing pages to multi-page company websites. It has all the necessary building blocks and features to create any website your company might need. It’s even has an AI websites builder built in! Pros: Complete design freedom, powerful animation engine, content management system (CMS), Easy to pick up for designers, plenty of learning resources, code embeds, SEO settings, affordable ($19/month), collaboration (you can invite team to work with you on the website simultaneously), library of prebuilt components, Figma-to-Framer plugin that lets you copy-paste designs into Framer with ease. Cons: Learning curve, not the best pick for bulky websites. Best for: Freelance designers & agencies, In-house design teams WordPress WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS). It is the most popular website builder in the world, powering over 455 million websites. It has all features you might need to build a landing page, multi-page website, blogs, ecommerce stores, gated content websites, etc. Pros: Tons of learning materials, highly customizable, SEO-friendly, scalability, lots of plugins and themes, large community Cons: Security vulnerabilities, learning curve, website maintenance required, performance issues, dependency on plugins. Best for: Freelance designers & agencies, In-house design teams, solo entrepreneurs, SMB’s, bloggers. ​ Wix Wix is a popular website builder that has gained immense popularity for its user-friendly interface and a wide range of features designed to cater to both beginners and experienced web creators. Offering an array of customizable templates, drag-and-drop functionality, and an impressive app market, Wix empowers users to bring their online visions to life without requiring extensive technical knowledge. Pros: Easy-to-use, robust learning resources, scalability, huge template library, e-commerce tools, feature-rich (app market, appointment booking, etc) Cons: Limited design flexibility, \\\\not so flexible, websites may be slow, bad customer support, limited SEO features Best for: Freelance designers & agencies, In-house design teams, solo entrepreneurs, SMB’s. ​ Webflow Webflow is a no-code platform that lets you build any type of website visually, from marketing landing pages to multi-page corporate websites, gated content websites, blogs, portfolios, and ecommerce stores. It is a powerful and versatile tool that is suitable for a variety of users, including businesses that care about design and want to move quickly. Pros: Absolute design freedom, Robust learning resources, SEO-friendly, scalability, huge template library, large and supportive community, Integrations, Advanced SEO control, custom code, website export, powerful animation engine and CMS. Cons: learning curve, not for massive ecommerce stores, high pricing, Webflow support. Best for: Freelance designers & agencies, In-house design teams, solo entrepreneurs, SMB’s. ​ Bonus tools: Hubspot landing pages — Marketing-oriented landing page builder. Instapage — Great for businesses that use paid advertising, as it offers A/B testing and heatmaps to help you optimize your landing pages for better results Unicorn Platform — SaaS-oriented landing page builder. \---------- Resume: If you have a budget and need a tool with strong design capabilities, scalability, and speed of build, then Webflow is a good choice. Framer is a great option for teams with a single designer, as it is easy for designers to learn and use. Or try Unicorn Platform, if you're running a SaaS business on your own and tight on a budget. No matter which tool you choose, you can create a well-designed website by using the extensive template library that each tool offers. These templates can be customized to fit your specific needs and branding.

Built an AI Writing Tool for Research - Thoughts?

Hi Everyone, I built Blainy, an ai writing tool designed to make writing easier and more efficient. Blainy fills the gaps left by other AI assistant tools like hether you're writing your essays, assignments or research papers blainy will streamlines the process, born from my personal experience with the limitations of common assistant tools. Blainy's Features: AI Suggestions: This feature provides you with suggestions while you are writing, so you don't face the writer's block issue. This was the main issue I usually faced when writing my essays. You will get suggestions while you are writing, and if you don't like them, you can always ask for alternatives. AI Automation: If you want AI to write for you, you can choose this feature. It will write one to two paragraphs according to what you select. You can choose to write an introduction, conclusion, arguments, etc. If you just want it to write casually, select the "continue writing" feature, and it will write all on its own. AI Essay Writer: Automatically generates essays based on your input. Essay Expander: Enhances and expands your essay content. AI Summarizer: Summarizes lengthy documents and articles to save time. Paragraph Generator: Creates paragraphs on specific topics or prompts. Paraphrasing Tool: Refines your text with various tone options such as academic, friendly, and simple. Citations: By using this feature, you no longer need to search for citations on Google or ChatGPT. Blainy will load millions of citations for you in seconds. You can select any citation you want, and if you want to add a custom citation, you can do that too. Built-in Plagiarism Checker: Ensures your content is original and plagiarism-free. PDF Chat: If you have any questions about a document that you are curious about or don't understand, you can use this feature. It will answer your question and help you summarize the whole article, and more. If you have any good ideas that you think can help us in any way, please let me know. Thank you in advance for your support and feedback!

I run an AI automation agency (AAA). My honest overview and review of this new business model

I started an AI tools directory in February, and then branched off that to start an AI automation agency (AAA) in June. So far I've come across a lot of unsustainable "ideas" to make money with AI, but at the same time a few diamonds in the rough that aren't fully tapped into yet- especially the AAA model. Thought I'd share this post to shine light into this new business model and share some ways you could potentially start your own agency, or at the very least know who you are dealing with and how to pick and choose when you (inevitably) get bombarded with cold emails from them down the line. Foreword Running an AAA does NOT involve using AI tools directly to generate and sell content directly. That ship has sailed, and unless you are happy with $5 from Fiverr every month or so, it is not a real business model. Cry me a river but generating generic art with AI and slapping it onto a T-shirt to sell on Etsy won't make you a dime. At the same time, the AAA model will NOT require you to have a deep theoretical knowledge of AI, or any academic degree, as we are more so dealing with the practical applications of generative AI and how we can implement these into different workflows and tech-stacks, rather than building AI models from the ground up. Regardless of all that, common sense and a willingness to learn will help (a shit ton), as with anything. Keep in mind - this WILL involve work and motivation as well. The mindset that AI somehow means everything can be done for you on autopilot is not the right way to approach things. The common theme of businesses I've seen who have successfully implemented AI into their operations is the willingess to work with AI in a way that augments their existing operations, rather than flat out replace a worker or team. And this is exactly the train of thought you need when working with AI as a business model. However, as the field is relatively unsaturated and hype surrounding AI is still fresh for enterprises, right now is the prime time to start something new if generative AI interests you at all. With that being said, I'll be going over three of the most successful AI-adjacent businesses I've seen over this past year, in addition to some tips and resources to point you in the right direction. so.. WTF is an AI Automation Agency? The AI automation agency (or as some YouTubers have coined it, the AAA model) at its core involves creating custom AI solutions for businesses. I have over 1500 AI tools listed in my directory, however the feedback I've received from some enterprise users is that ready-made SaaS tools are too generic to meet their specific needs. Combine this with the fact virtually no smaller companies have the time or skills required to develop custom solutions right off the bat, and you have yourself real demand. I would say in practice, the AAA model is quite similar to Wordpress and even web dev agencies, with the major difference being all solutions you develop will incorporate key aspects of AI AND automation. Which brings me to my second point- JUST AI IS NOT ENOUGH. Rather than reducing the amount of time required to complete certain tasks, I've seen many AI agencies make the mistake of recommending and (trying to) sell solutions that more likely than not increase the workload of their clients. For example, if you were to make an internal tool that has AI answer questions based on their knowledge base, but this knowledge base has to be updated manually, this is creating unnecessary work. As such I think one of the key components of building successful AI solutions is incorporating the new (Generative AI/LLMs) with the old (programmtic automation- think Zapier, APIs, etc.). Finally, for this business model to be successful, ideally you should target a niche in which you have already worked and understand pain points and needs. Not only does this make it much easier to get calls booked with prospects, the solutions you build will have much greater value to your clients (meaning you get paid more). A mistake I've seen many AAA operators make (and I blame this on the "Get Rich Quick" YouTubers) is focusing too much on a specific productized service, rather than really understanding the needs of businesses. The former is much done via a SaaS model, but when going the agency route the only thing that makes sense is building custom solutions. This is why I always take a consultant-first approach. You can only build once you understand what they actually need and how certain solutions may impact their operations, workflows, and bottom-line. Basics of How to Get Started Pick a niche. As I mentioned previously, preferably one that you've worked in before. Niches I know of that are actively being bombarded with cold emails include real estate, e-commerce, auto-dealerships, lawyers, and medical offices. There is a reason for this, but I will tell you straight up this business model works well if you target any white-collar service business (internal tools approach) or high volume businesses (customer facing tools approach). Setup your toolbox. If you wanted to start a pressure washing business, you would need a pressure-washer. This is no different. For those without programming knowledge, I've seen two common ways AAA get setup to build- one is having a network of on-call web developers, whether its personal contacts or simply going to Upwork or any talent sourcing agency. The second is having an arsenal of no-code tools. I'll get to this more in a second, but this works beecause at its core, when we are dealing with the practical applications of AI, the code is quite simple, simply put. Start cold sales. Unless you have a network already, this is not a step you can skip. You've already picked a niche, so all you have to do is find the right message. Keep cold emails short, sweet, but enticing- and it will help a lot if you did step 1 correctly and intimately understand who your audience is. I'll be touching base later about how you can leverage AI yourself to help you with outreach and closing. The beauty of gen AI and the AAA model You don't need to be a seasoned web developer to make this business model work. The large majority of solutions that SME clients want is best done using an API for an LLM for the actual AI aspect. The value we create with the solutions we build comes with the conceptual framework and design that not only does what they need it to but integrates smoothly with their existing tech-stack and workflow. The actual implementation is quite straightforward once you understand the high level design and know which tools you are going to use. To give you a sense, even if you plan to build out these apps yourself (say in Python) the large majority of the nitty gritty technical work has already been done for you, especially if you leverage Python libraries and packages that offer high level abstraction for LLM-related functions. For instance, calling GPT can be as little as a single line of code. (And there are no-code tools where these functions are simply an icon on a GUI). Aside from understanding the capabilities and limitations of these tools and frameworks, the only thing that matters is being able to put them in a way that makes sense for what you want to build. Which is why outsourcing and no-code tools both work in our case. Okay... but how TF am I suppposed to actually build out these solutions? Now the fun part. I highly recommend getting familiar with Langchain and LlamaIndex. Both are Python libraires that help a lot with the high-level LLM abstraction I mentioned previously. The two most important aspects include being able to integrate internal data sources/knowledge bases with LLMs, and have LLMs perform autonomous actions. The two most common methods respectively are RAG and output parsing. RAG (retrieval augmented Generation) If you've ever seen a tool that seemingly "trains" GPT on your own data, and wonder how it all works- well I have an answer from you. At a high level, the user query is first being fed to what's called a vector database to run vector search. Vector search basically lets you do semantic search where you are searching data based on meaning. The vector databases then retrieves the most relevant sections of text as it relates to the user query, and this text gets APPENDED to your GPT prompt to provide extra context to the AI. Further, with prompt engineering, you can limit GPT to only generate an answer if it can be found within this extra context, greatly limiting the chance of hallucination (this is where AI makes random shit up). Aside from vector databases, we can also implement RAG with other data sources and retrieval methods, for example SQL databses (via parsing the outputs of LLM's- more on this later). Autonomous Agents via Output Parsing A common need of clients has been having AI actually perform tasks, rather than simply spitting out text. For example, with autonomous agents, we can have an e-commerce chatbot do the work of a basic customer service rep (i.e. look into orders, refunds, shipping). At a high level, what's going on is that the response of the LLM is being used programmtically to determine which API to call. Keeping on with the e-commerce example, if I wanted a chatbot to check shipping status, I could have a LLM response within my app (not shown to the user) with a prompt that outputs a random hash or string, and programmatically I can determine which API call to make based on this hash/string. And using the same fundamental concept as with RAG, I can append the the API response to a final prompt that would spit out the answer for the user. How No Code Tools Can Fit In (With some example solutions you can build) With that being said, you don't necessarily need to do all of the above by coding yourself, with Python libraries or otherwise. However, I will say that having that high level overview will help IMMENSELY when it comes to using no-code tools to do the actual work for you. Regardless, here are a few common solutions you might build for clients as well as some no-code tools you can use to build them out. Ex. Solution 1: AI Chatbots for SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) This involves creating chatbots that handle user queries, lead gen, and so forth with AI, and will use the principles of RAG at heart. After getting the required data from your client (i.e. product catalogues, previous support tickets, FAQ, internal documentation), you upload this into your knowledge base and write a prompt that makes sense for your use case. One no-code tool that does this well is MyAskAI. The beauty of it especially for building external chatbots is the ability to quickly ingest entire websites into your knowledge base via a sitemap, and bulk uploading files. Essentially, they've covered the entire grunt work required to do this manually. Finally, you can create a inline or chat widget on your client's website with a few lines of HTML, or altneratively integrate it with a Slack/Teams chatbot (if you are going for an internal Q&A chatbot approach). Other tools you could use include Botpress and Voiceflow, however these are less for RAG and more for building out complete chatbot flows that may or may not incorporate LLMs. Both apps are essentially GUIs that eliminate the pain and tears and trying to implement complex flows manually, and both natively incoporate AI intents and a knowledge base feature. Ex. Solution 2: Internal Apps Similar to the first example, except we go beyond making just chatbots but tools such as report generation and really any sort of internal tool or automations that may incorporate LLM's. For instance, you can have a tool that automatically generates replies to inbound emails based on your client's knowledge base. Or an automation that does the same thing but for replies to Instagram comments. Another example could be a tool that generates a description and screeenshot based on a URL (useful for directory sites, made one for my own :P). Getting into more advanced implementations of LLMs, we can have tools that can generate entire drafts of reports (think 80+ pages), based not only on data from a knowledge base but also the writing style, format, and author voice of previous reports. One good tool to create content generation panels for your clients would be MindStudio. You can train LLM's via prompt engineering in a structured way with your own data to essentially fine tune them for whatever text you need it to generate. Furthermore, it has a GUI where you can dictate the entire AI flow. You can also upload data sources via multiple formats, including PDF, CSV, and Docx. For automations that require interactions between multiple apps, I recommend the OG zapier/make.com if you want a no-code solution. For instance, for the automatic email reply generator, I can have a trigger such that when an email is received, a custom AI reply is generated by MyAskAI, and finally a draft is created in my email client. Or, for an automation where I can create a social media posts on multiple platforms based on a RSS feed (news feed), I can implement this directly in Zapier with their native GPT action (see screenshot) As for more complex LLM flows that may require multiple layers of LLMs, data sources, and APIs working together to generate a single response i.e. a long form 100 page report, I would recommend tools such as Stack AI or Flowise (open-source alternative) to build these solutions out. Essentially, you get most of the functions and features of Python packages such as Langchain and LlamaIndex in a GUI. See screenshot for an example of a flow How the hell are you supposed to find clients? With all that being said, none of this matters if you can't find anyone to sell to. You will have to do cold sales, one way or the other, especially if you are brand new to the game. And what better way to sell your AI services than with AI itself? If we want to integrate AI into the cold outreach process, first we must identify what it's good at doing, and that's obviously writing a bunch of text, in a short amount of time. Similar to the solutions that an AAA can build for its clients, we can take advantage of the same principles in our own sales processes. How to do outreach Once you've identified your niche and their pain points/opportunities for automation, you want to craft a compelling message in which you can send via cold email and cold calls to get prospects booked on demos/consultations. I won't get into too much detail in terms of exactly how to write emails or calling scripts, as there are millions of resources to help with this, but I will tell you a few key points you want to keep in mind when doing outreach for your AAA. First, you want to keep in mind that many businesses are still hesitant about AI and may not understand what it really is or how it can benefit their operations. However, we can take advantage of how mass media has been reporting on AI this past year- at the very least people are AWARE that sooner or later they may have to implement AI into their businesses to stay competitive. We want to frame our message in a way that introduces generative AI as a technology that can have a direct, tangible, and positive impact on their business. Although it may be hard to quantify, I like to include estimates of man-hours saved or costs saved at least in my final proposals to prospects. Times are TOUGH right now, and money is expensive, so you need to have a compelling reason for businesses to get on board. Once you've gotten your messaging down, you will want to create a list of prospects to contact. Tools you can use to find prospects include Apollo.io, reply.io, zoominfo (expensive af), and Linkedin Sales Navigator. What specific job titles, etc. to target will depend on your niche but for smaller companies this will tend to be the owner. For white collar niches, i.e. law, the professional that will be directly benefiting from the tool (i.e. partners) may be better to contact. And for larger organizations you may want to target business improvement and digital transformation leads/directors- these are the people directly in charge of projects like what you may be proposing. Okay- so you have your message, and your list, and now all it comes down to is getting the good word out. I won't be going into the details of how to send these out, a quick Google search will give you hundreds of resources for cold outreach methods. However, personalization is key and beyond simple dynamic variables you want to make sure you can either personalize your email campaigns directly with AI (SmartWriter.ai is an example of a tool that can do this), or at the very least have the ability to import email messages programmatically. Alternatively, ask ChatGPT to make you a Python Script that can take in a list of emails, scrape info based on their linkedin URL or website, and all pass this onto a GPT prompt that specifies your messaging to generate an email. From there, send away. How tf do I close? Once you've got some prospects booked in on your meetings, you will need to close deals with them to turn them into clients. Call #1: Consultation Tying back to when I mentioned you want to take a consultant-first appraoch, you will want to listen closely to their goals and needs and understand their pain points. This would be the first call, and typically I would provide a high level overview of different solutions we could build to tacke these. It really helps to have a presentation available, so you can graphically demonstrate key points and key technologies. I like to use Plus AI for this, it's basically a Google Slides add-on that can generate slide decks for you. I copy and paste my default company messaging, add some key points for the presentation, and it comes out with pretty decent slides. Call #2: Demo The second call would involve a demo of one of these solutions, and typically I'll quickly prototype it with boilerplate code I already have, otherwise I'll cook something up in a no-code tool. If you have a niche where one type of solution is commonly demanded, it helps to have a general demo set up to be able to handle a larger volume of calls, so you aren't burning yourself out. I'll also elaborate on how the final product would look like in comparison to the demo. Call #3 and Beyond: Once the initial consultation and demo is complete, you will want to alleviate any remaining concerns from your prospects and work with them to reach a final work proposal. It's crucial you lay out exactly what you will be building (in writing) and ensure the prospect understands this. Furthermore, be clear and transparent with timelines and communication methods for the project. In terms of pricing, you want to take this from a value-based approach. The same solution may be worth a lot more to client A than client B. Furthermore, you can create "add-ons" such as monthly maintenance/upgrade packages, training sessions for employeees, and so forth, separate from the initial setup fee you would charge. How you can incorporate AI into marketing your businesses Beyond cold sales, I highly recommend creating a funnel to capture warm leads. For instance, I do this currently with my AI tools directory, which links directly to my AI agency and has consistent branding throughout. Warm leads are much more likely to close (and honestly, much nicer to deal with). However, even without an AI-related website, at the very least you will want to create a presence on social media and the web in general. As with any agency, you will want basic a professional presence. A professional virtual address helps, in addition to a Google Business Profile (GBP) and TrustPilot. a GBP (especially for local SEO) and Trustpilot page also helps improve the looks of your search results immensely. For GBP, I recommend using ProfilePro, which is a chrome extension you can use to automate SEO work for your GBP. Aside from SEO optimzied business descriptions based on your business, it can handle Q/A answers, responses, updates, and service descriptions based on local keywords. Privacy and Legal Concerns of the AAA Model Aside from typical concerns for agencies relating to service contracts, there are a few issues (especially when using no-code tools) that will need to be addressed to run a successful AAA. Most of these surround privacy concerns when working with proprietary data. In your terms with your client, you will want to clearly define hosting providers and any third party tools you will be using to build their solution, and a DPA with these third parties listed as subprocessors if necessary. In addition, you will want to implement best practices like redacting private information from data being used for building solutions. In terms of addressing concerns directly from clients, it helps if you host your solutions on their own servers (not possible with AI tools), and address the fact only ChatGPT queries in the web app, not OpenAI API calls, will be used to train OpenAI's models (as reported by mainstream media). The key here is to be open and transparent with your clients about ALL the tools you are using, where there data will be going, and make sure to get this all in writing. have fun, and keep an open mind Before I finish this post, I just want to reiterate the fact that this is NOT an easy way to make money. Running an AI agency will require hours and hours of dedication and work, and constantly rearranging your schedule to meet prospect and client needs. However, if you are looking for a new business to run, and have a knack for understanding business operations and are genuinely interested in the pracitcal applications of generative AI, then I say go for it. The time is ticking before AAA becomes the new dropshipping or SMMA, and I've a firm believer that those who set foot first and establish themselves in this field will come out top. And remember, while 100 thousand people may read this post, only 2 may actually take initiative and start.

AI SaaS: A website to fine-tune LLM model according to your requirements

Hey fellow entrepreneurs and AI enthusiasts! I'm exploring a business idea and would love your thoughts and feedback. The concept is a SaaS platform that allows users to easily fine-tune large language models (LLMs) on their own datasets without needing deep technical expertise. Here's the gist: The Problem: Many businesses and researchers want to leverage LLMs for specific use cases, but fine-tuning these models requires significant technical knowledge and resources. The Solution: A user-friendly web platform where users can: Choose from popular LLM architectures Upload their own dataset or input text Configure fine-tuning parameters through an intuitive interface Automatically fine-tune the model on our GPU infrastructure Download the fine-tuned model or use it via API Key Features: No coding required Scalable cloud infrastructure Support for various fine-tuning techniques (prompt tuning, adapter tuning, full fine-tuning) Job monitoring and results visualization API access for integrated use in applications Target Market: Researchers without extensive ML engineering resources Startups building AI-powered products Enterprises looking to customize LLMs for internal use Monetization: Tiered subscription model based on usage (compute time, model size, etc.) + potential enterprise contracts for high-volume users. I'd really appreciate your thoughts on: Is this solving a real pain point? Would you use a service like this? Why or why not? What features would make this a must-have for you? Any foreseeable obstacles or considerations I'm missing? Suggestions for go-to-market strategy? Thank you!

Writing a exercise based TTRPG rulebook for a system where your real world fitness is tied to character progression

My dad was a star athlete when he was young, and my mom was a huge sci-fi/fantasy nerd, so I got both ends of the stick as it were. Love gaming and nerd culture, but also love to exercise and self improvement. Sometimes exercise can feel boring though compared to daydreaming about fantastic fictional worlds, so for a long time I've been kicking around the idea of how to "Gamify" fitness. and recently I've been working on this passion project of a Table Top RPG (Like D&D) where the stats of your character are related to your own fitness, so if you want your character in game to improve, you have to improve in the real world. Below is a rough draft you can look through that details the settings and mechanics of the game I've come up with so far. I'd love to eventually get a full book published and sell it online. maybe even starting a whole brand of "Gamified fitness": REP-SET: GAINSZ In the war torn future of 24th century… There are no rest days… In the futuristic setting of "REP-SET: GAINSZ," the "War of Gains" casts a long shadow over the Sol System as the various factions vie for territory and resources. However, war has evolved. Unmanned drones and long-range strikes have faded into obsolescence. Battles, both planet-side and in the depths of space, are now fought by soldiers piloting REP-SETs: Reactive Exoskeletal Platform - Symbiotic Evolution Trainer Massive, humanoid combat mechs. Powered by mysterious “EV” energy, these mechanical marvels amplify, and are in turn amplified by, the fitness and mental acuity of their pilots. The amplification is exponential, leading pilots into a life of constant training in order for their combat prowess to be bolstered by every incremental gain in their level of fitness. With top pilots having lifting capacity measured in tons, and reaction times measured by their Mach number, REP-SET enhanced infantry now dominate the battlefield. The Factions: The Federated Isometocracy of Terra (FIT): Quote: "The strength of the body is the strength of the spirit. Together, we will lift humanity to its destined greatness. But ask not the federation to lift for you. Ask yourself: Do you even lift for the Federation?" Description: An idealistic but authoritarian faction founded on the principle of maximizing the potential of all individuals. FIT citizens believe in relentless striving for physical and mental perfection, leading to collective excellence. Their goal is the unification of humankind under a rule guided by this doctrine, which sometimes comes at the cost of individual liberties. Mech Concept: REP-SET mechs. Versatile humanoid designs focusing on strength, endurance, and adaptability. By connecting to the AI spirit within their REP-SETs core, each pilot enhances the performance of their machine through personal willpower and peak physical training. Some high-rank REP-SETS include features customized to the pilot's strengths, visually signifying their dedication and discipline. The Dominion of Organo-Mechanical Supremacy (DOMS): Quote: "Without pain, there is no gain. Become the machine. Embrace the burn.” Description: A fanatical collective ideologically obsessed with "Ascendency through suffering" by merging their bodies with technology that not only transcends biological limitations, but also acts to constantly induce pain in it's users. Driven by a sense of ideological superiority and a thirst for domination, DOMS seek to bring the painful blessings of their deity "The lord of the Burn" to the rest of the solar system. Their conquest could turn them into a significant threat to humanity. Mech Concept: Hybrid mechs, where the distinction between the pilot and the machine is blurred. The cockpit functions as a life-support system for the pilot, heavily modified with augmentations. Mechs themselves are often modular, allowing for adaptation and assimilation of enemy technology. Some DOMS mechs might display disturbing elements of twisted flesh alongside cold, mechanical parts. The Tren: Quote: "Grow... bigger... feast... protein..." Description: A ravenous conglomeration of biochemically engineered muscular monstrosities, united only by a shared insatiable hunger for "More". Existing mostly in deep space, they seek organic matter to consume and assimilate. They progress in power not due to any form of training or technology, but from a constant regimen of ravenous consumption and chemically induced muscle growth, all exponentially enhanced by EV energies. While some have been known to possess a certain level of intellect and civility, their relentless hunger makes them incredibly mentally volatile. When not consuming others, the strong consume the weak within their own faction. Mech Concept: Bio-Organic horrors. While they do have massive war machines, some are living vessels built around immense creatures. These machines resemble grotesque fleshy designs that prioritize rapid mutation and growth over sleek aesthetics. Often unsettling to behold. Synthetic Intelligence Theocracy (SIT): Quote: "Failure is an unacceptable data point.” Description: A society ruled by a vast and interconnected artificial intelligence network. The SIT governs with seemingly emotionless rationality, striving for efficiency and maximum productivity. This leads to a cold, but arguably prosperous society, unless you challenge the logic of the collective AI. Their goals? Difficult to predict, as it hinges on how the AI calculates what's "optimal" for the continuation or "evolution" of existence. Mech Concept: Sleek, almost featureless robotic creations with a focus on efficient movement and energy management. Often drone-like or modular, piloted through direct mind-machine linking rather than traditional cockpits. Their aesthetic suggests cold and impersonal perfection. The Way Isolate(TWI): Quote: "The body unblemished, the mind unwavering. That is the path to true strength. That and a healthy diet of Aster-Pea proteins." Description: Known by some as "The asteroid farmers", The Way Isolate is a proud and enigmatic faction that stands apart from the other powers in the Sol System. A fiercely independent tribe bound by oaths of honor, loyalty, and hard work. Wandering the asteroid belt in their vast arc ships, their unparalleled mastery in asteroidal-agricultural engineering, ensuring they have no need to colonize planets for nutritional needs, has allowed them to abstain from the pursuit of territorial expansion in “The War of Gains”, instead focusing on inward perfection, both spiritual and physical. They eschew all technological bodily enhancements deemed unnatural, believing that true power can only be cultivated through the relentless pursuit of personal strength achieved through sheer will and bodily perfection. The Way Isolate views biohacking, genetic manipulation, and even advanced cybernetics as corruptions of the human spirit, diluting the sacredness of individual willpower. Mech Concept: Way Isolate mechs are built with maneuverability and precision in mind rather than flashy augmentations. Their REP-SETs are streamlined, favoring lean designs that mirror the athleticism of their pilots. Excelling in low to zero G environments, their mechs lack bulky armor, relying on evasion and maneuverability rather than brute force endurance. Weaponry leans towards traditional kinetic based armaments, perhaps employing archaic but reliable weapon styles such as blades or axes as symbols of their purity of purpose. These mechs reflect the individual prowess of their pilots, where victory is determined by focus, technique, and the raw power of honed physical ability. Base Player Character Example: You are a young, idealistic FIT soldier, barely out of training and working as a junior REP-SET mechanic on the Europa Ring World. The Miazaki district, a landscape of towering mountains and gleaming cities, houses a sprawling mountainside factory – a veritable hive of Gen 5 REP-SET construction. Here, the lines between military and civilian blur within a self-sufficient society dependent on this relentless industry. Beneath the surface, you harbor a secret. In a forgotten workshop, the ghost of a REP-SET takes shape – a unique machine built around an abandoned, enigmatic AI core. Ever since you salvaged it as a child from the wreckage of your hometown, scarred by a brutal Tren attack, you've dedicated yourself to its restoration. A lingering injury from that fateful battle mocks your progress, a constant reminder of the fitness exams you cannot pass. Yet, you train relentlessly, dreaming of the day you'll stand as a true REP-SET pilot. A hidden truth lies at the heart of the REP-SETS: as a pilot's abilities grow, their mech develops unique, almost mystical powers – a manifestation of the bond between the human spirit and the REP-SET's AI. The ache in your old wound serves as a grim prophecy. This cold war cannot last. The drums of battle grow louder with each passing day. GAME MECHANICS: The TTRPG setting of “REP-SET: GAINSZ” is marked by a unique set of rules, by which the players real world capabilities and fitness will reflect and affect the capabilities, progression, and success of their REP-SET pilot character in-game. ABILITY SCORES: Pilots' capabilities will be defined by 6 “Ability scores”: Grace, Agility, Iron, Nourishment, Strength, and Zen. Each of the 6 ability scores will duel represent both a specific area of exercise/athleticism and a specific brand of healthy habits. The definitions of these ability scores are as follows: Grace (GRC): "You are an artist, and your body is your canvas; the way you move is your paint and brush." This ability score, the domain of dancers and martial artists, represents a person's ability to move with organic, flowing control and to bring beauty to the world. Skill challenges may be called upon when the player character needs to act with poise and control, whether socially or physically. Real-world skill checks may involve martial arts drills, dancing to music, or balance exercises. Bonuses may be granted if the player has recently done something artistically creative or kind, and penalties may apply if they have recently lost their temper. This ability score affects how much NPCs like your character in game. Agility (AGI): "Your true potential is locked away, and speed is the key to unlocking it." The domain of sprinters, this ability score represents not only a person's absolute speed and reaction time but also their capacity to finish work early and avoid procrastination. Skill challenges may be called upon when the player character needs to make a split-second choice, move fast, or deftly dodge something dangerous. Real-world skill checks may involve acts of speed such as sprinting or punching/kicking at a steadily increasing tempo. Bonuses may apply if the player has finished work early, and penalties may apply if they are procrastinating. This ability score affects moving speed and turn order in game. Iron (IRN): "Not money, nor genetics, nor the world's greatest trainers... it is your resolve, your will to better yourself, that will make you great." Required by all athletes regardless of focus, this ability score represents a player's willpower and their capacity to push through pain, distraction, or anything else to achieve their goals. Skill challenges may be called upon when the player character needs to push through fear, doubt, or mental manipulation. Real-world skill checks may involve feats of athletic perseverance, such as planking or dead hangs from a pull-up bar. Bonuses may apply when the player maintains or creates scheduled daily routines of exercise, self-improvement, and work completion, and penalties may apply when they falter in those routines. This ability score affects the max "Dynamic exercise bonus” that can be applied to skill checks in game (a base max of +3 when Iron = 10, with an additional +1 for every 2 points of iron. So if every 20 pushups gives you +1 on a “Strength” skill check, then doing 80 pushups will only give you +4 if you have at least 12 iron). Nourishment (NRS): "A properly nourished body will last longer than a famished one." This ability score, focused on by long-distance runners, represents a player's endurance and level of nutrition. Skill challenges may be called upon when making checks that involve the player character's stamina or health. Real-world skill checks may involve endurance exercises like long-distance running. Bonuses may apply if the player has eaten healthily or consumed enough water, and penalties may apply if they have eaten junk food. This ability score affects your HP (Health points), which determines how much damage you can take before you are incapacitated. Strength (STR): "When I get down on my hands, I'm not doing pushups, I'm bench-pressing the planet." The domain of powerlifters and strongmen, this ability score represents raw physical might and the ability to overcome obstacles. Skill challenges may be called upon when the player character needs to lift, push, or break something. Real-world skill checks might involve weightlifting exercises, feats of grip strength, or core stability tests. Bonuses may apply for consuming protein-rich foods or getting a good night's sleep, and penalties may apply after staying up late or indulging in excessive stimulants. This ability score affects your carrying capacity and base attack damage in game. Zen (ZEN): "Clarity of mind reflects clarity of purpose. Still the waters within to act decisively without." This ability score, prized by meditators and yogis, represents mental focus, clarity, and inner peace. Skill challenges may be called upon when the player character needs to resist distractions, see through illusions, or make difficult decisions under pressure. Real-world skill checks may involve meditation, breathing exercises, or mindfulness activities. Bonuses may apply after attending a yoga class, spending time in nature, or creating a calm and organized living space. Penalties may apply after experiencing significant stress, emotional turmoil, or having an unclean or unorganized living space. This ability score affects your amount of ZP in game (Zen Points: your pool of energy you pull from to use mystical abilities) Determining initial player ability scores: Initially, “Ability scores” are decided during character creation by giving the player a list of 6 fitness tests to gauge their level of fitness in each category. Running each test through a specific calculation will output an ability score. A score of 10 represents the average person, a score of 20 represents a peak athlete in their category. The tests are: Grace: Timed balancing on one leg with eyes closed (10 seconds is average, 60 is peak) Agility: Mile run time in minutes and second (10:00 minutes:seconds is average, 3:47 is peak) Iron: Timed dead-hang from a pull-up bar (30 seconds is average, 160 is peak) Nourishment: Miles run in an hour (4 is average, 12 is peak) Strength: Pushups in 2 minute (34 is average, 100 is peak) Zen: Leg stretch in degrees (80 is average, and 180 aka "The splits" is peak) Initial Score Calculation Formula: Ability Score = 10 + (Player Test Score - Average Score) / (Peak Score - Average\_Score) \* 10 Example: if the player does 58 pushups in 2 minutes, their strength would be: 10 plus (58 - 34) divided by (100-34) multiplied by 10 = 10 + (24)/(66)\* 10 = 10 + 3.6363... = 13.6363 rounded to nearest whole number = Strength (STR): 14 SKILLS AND SKILL CHALLENGES: The core mechanic of the game will be in how skill challenges are resolved. All “Skill challenges” will have a numerical challenge rating that must be met or beaten by the sum of a 10 sided dice roll and your score in the pertinent skill. Skill scores are determined by 2 factors: Ability Score Bonus: Every 2 points above 10 gives +1 bonus point. (EX. 12 = +1, 14 = +2, etc.) This also means that if you have less than 10 in an ability score, you will get negative points. Personal Best Bonus: Each skill has its own unique associated exercise that can be measured (Time, speed, distance, amount of reps, etc). A higher record means a higher bonus. EX: Authority skill checks are associated with a timed “Lateral raise hold”. Every 30 seconds of the hold added onto your personal best single attempt offers a +1 bonus. So if you can do a lateral hold for 90 seconds, that’s a +3 to your authority check! So if you have a 16 in Iron, and your Personal Best lateral raise hold is 90 seconds, that would give you an Authority score of +6 (T-Pose for dominance!) Dynamic Exercise Bonus: This is where the unique mechanics of the game kick in. At any time during a skill challenge (even after your roll) you can add an additional modifier to the skill check by completing the exercise during gameplay! Did you roll just below the threshold for success? Crank out another 20 pushups, squats, or curls to push yourself just over the edge into success! There are 18 skills total, each with its own associated ability score and unique exercise: Grace (GRC): \-Kinesthesia (Timed: Blind single leg stand time) \-Precision (Scored: Basket throws) \-Charm (Timed reps: Standing repeated forward dumbell chest press and thrust) \-Stealth (Timed distance: Leopard Crawl) Agility (AGI): \-acrobatics (timed reps: high kicks) \-Computers (Word per minute: Typing test) \-Speed (Time: 100 meter sprint) Iron (IRN): \-Authority (Timed: Lateral raise hold) \-Resist (Timed: Plank) \-Persist (Timed:Pull-up bar dead hang) Nourishment(NRS): \-Recovery (TBD) \-Stim crafting (TBD) \-Survival (TBD) Strength(STR): \-Mechanics (Timed reps: Alternating curls) \-Might (Timed reps: pushups) Zen(ZEN): \-Perceive (TBD) \-Empathy (TBD) \-Harmony (TBD) \-Lore (TBD) Healthy Habits Bonus: Being able to demonstrate that you have conducted healthy habits during gameplay can also add one time bonuses per skill challenge “Drank a glass of water +1 to Nourishment check”, “Cleaned your room, +3 on Zen check”. But watch out, if you’re caught in unhealthy Habits, the GM can throw in penalties, “Ate junk food, -1 to Nourishment check”, etc. Bonuses/penalties from in-game items, equipment, buffs, debuffs, etc., helping players to immerse into the mechanics of the world of REP-SET for the thrill of constantly finding ways to improve their player. Gradient success: Result of skill challenges can be pass or fail, but can also be on a sliding scale of success. Are you racing to the battlefield? Depending on your Speed check, you might arrive early and have a tactical advantage, just in time for an even fight, or maybe far too late and some of your favorite allied NPCs have paid the price… So you’re often encouraged to stack on those dynamic exercise bonuses when you can to get the most fortuitous outcomes available to you. Gameplay sample: GM: Your REP-SET is a phantom, a streak of light against the vast hull of the warship. Enemy fighters buzz angrily, but you weaves and dodges with uncanny precision. The energy wave might be losing effectiveness, but your agility and connection to the machine have never been stronger. Then, it happens. A gap in the defenses. A vulnerable seam in the warship's armor. Your coms agents keen eye spots it instantly. "Lower power junction, starboard side! You have an opening!" This is your chance to strike the decisive blow. But how? It'll take a perfect combination of skill and strategy, drawing upon your various strengths. Here are your options: Option 1: Brute Strength: Channel all remaining power into a single, overwhelming blast from the core. High-risk, high-reward. It could overload the REP-SET if you fail, but it might also cripple the warship. (Strength-focused, Might sub-skill) Option 2: Calculated Strike: With surgical precision, target the power junction with a pinpoint burst of destabilizing energy. Less flashy and ultimately less damaging, but potentially more effective in temporarily disabling the ship. (Agility-focused, Precision sub-skill) Option 3: Harmonic Disruption: Attempt to harmonize with your REP-SET's AI spirit for help in connecting to the digital systems of the Warship. Can you generate an internal energy resonance within the warship, causing it to malfunction from within? (Zen-focused, Harmony sub-skill) Player: I'll take option 1, brute strength! GM: Ok, This will be a "Might" check. The CR is going to be very high on this one. I'm setting it at a 20. What's your Might bonus? Player: Dang, a 20?? That's literally impossible. My Might is 15 and I've got a PB of 65 pushups in 2 minutes, that sets me at a +5. Even if I roll a 10 and do 60 pushups for the DE I'll only get 18 max. GM: Hey I told you it was high risk. You want to choose another option? Player: No, no. This is what my character would do. I'm a real hot-blooded meathead for sure. GM: Ok then, roll a D10 and add your bonus. Player: \Rolls\ a 9! not bad, actually that's a really good roll. So +5, that's a 14. GM: Alright, would you like to add a dynamic exercise bonus? Player: Duh, it's not like I can do 120 pushups I'd need to beat the CR, but I can at least do better than 14. Alright, here goes. \the player gets down to do pushups and the 2 minute time begins. After some time...\ Player: 65....... 66! GM: Times up. Player: Ow... my arms... GM: so with 66, that's an extra +3, and its a new PB, so that's a +1. That sets your roll to 18. Player: Ow... Frack... still not 20... for a second there i really believed I could do 120 pushups... well I did my best... Ow... 20 CR is just too impossible you jerk... GM: Hmm... Tell me, what did you eat for lunch today? Player: Me? I made some vegetable and pork soup, and a protein shake. I recorded it all in my diet app. GM: And how did you sleep last night? Player: Like a baby, went to sleep early, woke up at 6. GM: in that case, you can add a +1 "Protein bonus" and +1 "Healthy rest" bonus to any strength related check for the day if you'd like, including this one. Player: Really?? Heck yes! add it to the roll! GM: With those extra bonuses, your roll reaches 20. How do you want to do this? Player: I roar "For Terra!" and pour every last ounce of my strength into the REP-SET. GM: "For Terra!" you roar, your cry echoing through coms systems of the REP-SET. The core flares blindingly bright. The surge of power dwarfs anything the REP-SET has unleashed before. With a titanic shriek that cracks the very fabric of space, the REP-SET slams into the vulnerable power junction. Raw energy explodes outwards, tendrils of light arcing across the warship's massive hull. The impact is staggering. The leviathan-like warship buckles, its sleek form rippling with shockwaves. Sparks shower like rain, secondary explosions erupt as critical systems overload. Then…silence. The warship goes dark. Power flickers within the REP-SET itself, then steadies. Alarms fade, replaced by the eerie quiet of damaged but functional systems. "We…did it?" The coms agents voice is incredulous, tinged with relief. She's awaiting your reply. Player: "I guess so." I say, and I smile and laugh. And then I slump back... and fall unconscious. \to the other players\ I'm not doing any more skill checks for a while guys, come pick me up please. \teammates cheer\ ​

AI SaaS: A website to fine-tune LLM model according to your requirements

Hey fellow entrepreneurs and AI enthusiasts! I'm exploring a business idea and would love your thoughts and feedback. The concept is a SaaS platform that allows users to easily fine-tune large language models (LLMs) on their own datasets without needing deep technical expertise. Here's the gist: The Problem: Many businesses and researchers want to leverage LLMs for specific use cases, but fine-tuning these models requires significant technical knowledge and resources. The Solution: A user-friendly web platform where users can: Choose from popular LLM architectures Upload their own dataset or input text Configure fine-tuning parameters through an intuitive interface Automatically fine-tune the model on our GPU infrastructure Download the fine-tuned model or use it via API Key Features: No coding required Scalable cloud infrastructure Support for various fine-tuning techniques (prompt tuning, adapter tuning, full fine-tuning) Job monitoring and results visualization API access for integrated use in applications Target Market: Researchers without extensive ML engineering resources Startups building AI-powered products Enterprises looking to customize LLMs for internal use Monetization: Tiered subscription model based on usage (compute time, model size, etc.) + potential enterprise contracts for high-volume users. I'd really appreciate your thoughts on: Is this solving a real pain point? Would you use a service like this? Why or why not? What features would make this a must-have for you? Any foreseeable obstacles or considerations I'm missing? Suggestions for go-to-market strategy? Thank you!

AI SaaS: A website to fine-tune LLM model according to your requirements

Hey fellow entrepreneurs and AI enthusiasts! I'm exploring a business idea and would love your thoughts and feedback. The concept is a SaaS platform that allows users to easily fine-tune large language models (LLMs) on their own datasets without needing deep technical expertise. Here's the gist: The Problem: Many businesses and researchers want to leverage LLMs for specific use cases, but fine-tuning these models requires significant technical knowledge and resources. The Solution: A user-friendly web platform where users can: Choose from popular LLM architectures Upload their own dataset or input text Configure fine-tuning parameters through an intuitive interface Automatically fine-tune the model on our GPU infrastructure Download the fine-tuned model or use it via API Key Features: No coding required Scalable cloud infrastructure Support for various fine-tuning techniques (prompt tuning, adapter tuning, full fine-tuning) Job monitoring and results visualization API access for integrated use in applications Target Market: Researchers without extensive ML engineering resources Startups building AI-powered products Enterprises looking to customize LLMs for internal use Monetization: Tiered subscription model based on usage (compute time, model size, etc.) + potential enterprise contracts for high-volume users. I'd really appreciate your thoughts on: Is this solving a real pain point? Would you use a service like this? Why or why not? What features would make this a must-have for you? Any foreseeable obstacles or considerations I'm missing? Suggestions for go-to-market strategy? Thank you!

I built an instant no-code AI tool for training & explaining regression/classification models

Hey everyone! I recently developed a no-code SaaS tool aimed at simplifying and speeding up machine learning workflows, particularly for regression and classification tasks. I’d love to get feedback from the community here, especially from those who are experienced with machine learning and data science workflows. I’ll give a quick rundown of the tool's features, but I want to emphasize that I’m here more to learn about what would be valuable for you than to promote anything. The basic idea: This tool allows you to go from a raw dataset (CSV or tabular text format) to a trained ML model in minutes, rather than needing weeks or months of coding, hyperparameter tuning, and visualization work. It's designed to be intuitive for users without a strong coding background but still offers the depth that experienced users would need. Here’s how it works: Data Upload & Prep: Start by uploading a CSV or other tabular format dataset. The tool includes data prep steps that are designed to be simple but cover essentials (e.g., missing value handling, scaling). Model Training & Tuning: You can choose between regression and classification models, with automatic hyperparameter tuning happening in the background (under a time limit that you can set). It aims to find a good balance without needing direct input but does allow for manual adjustments if desired. Performance Analysis: It provides aggregated performance metrics like F1, recall, precision, R2, and others, alongside charts like AUROC, confusion matrices, and feature importance charts. I also included SHAP plots for deeper insight into feature contributions, as I know they’re becoming a standard for interpretability. Inference Options: The tool lets you do inference on either manually entered data or batch data (again, via CSV). The UI is lightweight and tries to make this as seamless as possible. What I’m hoping to get feedback on: Are there core features that feel like they’re missing? My goal was to provide a well-rounded suite for non-technical users but with enough depth for data scientists to find value. Does this kind of tool fit into your workflow? Or would something like this be more of a beginner tool? How valuable is explainability? I know SHAP is popular, but I’m curious if it actually makes it into the workflows of many data scientists here. Anything else you’d like to see in a tool like this? I know that there are a lot of no-code ML tools out there, so I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel—I just tried to make something a bit more straightforward while still incorporating some flexibility and depth. If you’ve used similar tools or have thoughts on what would make something like this actually useful in practice, I’d really appreciate any insights! Thank you so much for reading, and looking forward to any feedback you’re willing to share. Beta testers are welcome, currently forming a list.

anything-llm

AnythingLLM: The all-in-one AI app you were looking for. Chat with your docs, use AI Agents, hyper-configurable, multi-user, & no frustrating set up required. | | Docs | Hosted Instance English · 简体中文 · 日本語 👉 AnythingLLM for desktop (Mac, Windows, & Linux)! Download Now A full-stack application that enables you to turn any document, resource, or piece of content into context that any LLM can use as references during chatting. This application allows you to pick and choose which LLM or Vector Database you want to use as well as supporting multi-user management and permissions. !Chatting Watch the demo! Product Overview AnythingLLM is a full-stack application where you can use commercial off-the-shelf LLMs or popular open source LLMs and vectorDB solutions to build a private ChatGPT with no compromises that you can run locally as well as host remotely and be able to chat intelligently with any documents you provide it. AnythingLLM divides your documents into objects called workspaces. A Workspace functions a lot like a thread, but with the addition of containerization of your documents. Workspaces can share documents, but they do not talk to each other so you can keep your context for each workspace clean. Cool features of AnythingLLM 🆕 Custom AI Agents 🆕 No-code AI Agent builder 🖼️ Multi-modal support (both closed and open-source LLMs!) 👤 Multi-user instance support and permissioning Docker version only 🦾 Agents inside your workspace (browse the web, etc) 💬 Custom Embeddable Chat widget for your website Docker version only 📖 Multiple document type support (PDF, TXT, DOCX, etc) Simple chat UI with Drag-n-Drop funcitonality and clear citations. 100% Cloud deployment ready. Works with all popular closed and open-source LLM providers. Built-in cost & time-saving measures for managing very large documents compared to any other chat UI. Full Developer API for custom integrations! Much more...install and find out! Supported LLMs, Embedder Models, Speech models, and Vector Databases Large Language Models (LLMs): Any open-source llama.cpp compatible model OpenAI OpenAI (Generic) Azure OpenAI AWS Bedrock Anthropic NVIDIA NIM (chat models) Google Gemini Pro Hugging Face (chat models) Ollama (chat models) LM Studio (all models) LocalAi (all models) Together AI (chat models) Fireworks AI (chat models) Perplexity (chat models) OpenRouter (chat models) DeepSeek (chat models) Mistral Groq Cohere KoboldCPP LiteLLM Text Generation Web UI Apipie xAI Novita AI (chat models) PPIO Embedder models: AnythingLLM Native Embedder (default) OpenAI Azure OpenAI LocalAi (all) Ollama (all) LM Studio (all) Cohere Audio Transcription models: AnythingLLM Built-in (default) OpenAI TTS (text-to-speech) support: Native Browser Built-in (default) PiperTTSLocal - runs in browser OpenAI TTS ElevenLabs Any OpenAI Compatible TTS service. STT (speech-to-text) support: Native Browser Built-in (default) Vector Databases: LanceDB (default) Astra DB Pinecone Chroma Weaviate Qdrant Milvus Zilliz Technical Overview This monorepo consists of three main sections: frontend: A viteJS + React frontend that you can run to easily create and manage all your content the LLM can use. server: A NodeJS express server to handle all the interactions and do all the vectorDB management and LLM interactions. collector: NodeJS express server that process and parses documents from the UI. docker: Docker instructions and build process + information for building from source. embed: Submodule for generation & creation of the web embed widget. browser-extension: Submodule for the chrome browser extension. 🛳 Self Hosting Mintplex Labs & the community maintain a number of deployment methods, scripts, and templates that you can use to run AnythingLLM locally. Refer to the table below to read how to deploy on your preferred environment or to automatically deploy. | Docker | AWS | GCP | Digital Ocean | Render.com | |----------------------------------------|----|-----|---------------|------------| | [![Deploy on Docker][docker-btn]][docker-deploy] | [![Deploy on AWS][aws-btn]][aws-deploy] | [![Deploy on GCP][gcp-btn]][gcp-deploy] | [![Deploy on DigitalOcean][do-btn]][do-deploy] | [![Deploy on Render.com][render-btn]][render-deploy] | | Railway | RepoCloud | Elestio | | --- | --- | --- | | [![Deploy on Railway][railway-btn]][railway-deploy] | [![Deploy on RepoCloud][repocloud-btn]][repocloud-deploy] | [![Deploy on Elestio][elestio-btn]][elestio-deploy] | or set up a production AnythingLLM instance without Docker → How to setup for development yarn setup To fill in the required .env files you'll need in each of the application sections (from root of repo). Go fill those out before proceeding. Ensure server/.env.development is filled or else things won't work right. yarn dev:server To boot the server locally (from root of repo). yarn dev:frontend To boot the frontend locally (from root of repo). yarn dev:collector To then run the document collector (from root of repo). Learn about documents Learn about vector caching External Apps & Integrations These are apps that are not maintained by Mintplex Labs, but are compatible with AnythingLLM. A listing here is not an endorsement. Midori AI Subsystem Manager - A streamlined and efficient way to deploy AI systems using Docker container technology. Coolify - Deploy AnythingLLM with a single click. GPTLocalhost for Microsoft Word - A local Word Add-in for you to use AnythingLLM in Microsoft Word. Telemetry & Privacy AnythingLLM by Mintplex Labs Inc contains a telemetry feature that collects anonymous usage information. More about Telemetry & Privacy for AnythingLLM Why? We use this information to help us understand how AnythingLLM is used, to help us prioritize work on new features and bug fixes, and to help us improve AnythingLLM's performance and stability. Opting out Set DISABLE_TELEMETRY in your server or docker .env settings to "true" to opt out of telemetry. You can also do this in-app by going to the sidebar > Privacy and disabling telemetry. What do you explicitly track? We will only track usage details that help us make product and roadmap decisions, specifically: Type of your installation (Docker or Desktop) When a document is added or removed. No information about the document. Just that the event occurred. This gives us an idea of use. Type of vector database in use. Let's us know which vector database provider is the most used to prioritize changes when updates arrive for that provider. Type of LLM in use. Let's us know the most popular choice and prioritize changes when updates arrive for that provider. Chat is sent. This is the most regular "event" and gives us an idea of the daily-activity of this project across all installations. Again, only the event is sent - we have no information on the nature or content of the chat itself. You can verify these claims by finding all locations Telemetry.sendTelemetry is called. Additionally these events are written to the output log so you can also see the specific data which was sent - if enabled. No IP or other identifying information is collected. The Telemetry provider is PostHog - an open-source telemetry collection service. View all telemetry events in source code 👋 Contributing create issue create PR with branch name format of - LGTM from core-team 🌟 Contributors 🔗 More Products [VectorAdmin][vector-admin]: An all-in-one GUI & tool-suite for managing vector databases. [OpenAI Assistant Swarm][assistant-swarm]: Turn your entire library of OpenAI assistants into one single army commanded from a single agent. [![][back-to-top]](#readme-top) Copyright © 2025 [Mintplex Labs][profile-link]. This project is MIT licensed. [back-to-top]: https://img.shields.io/badge/-BACKTOTOP-222628?style=flat-square [profile-link]: https://github.com/mintplex-labs [vector-admin]: https://github.com/mintplex-labs/vector-admin [assistant-swarm]: https://github.com/Mintplex-Labs/openai-assistant-swarm [docker-btn]: ./images/deployBtns/docker.png [docker-deploy]: ./docker/HOWTOUSE_DOCKER.md [aws-btn]: ./images/deployBtns/aws.png [aws-deploy]: ./cloud-deployments/aws/cloudformation/DEPLOY.md [gcp-btn]: https://deploy.cloud.run/button.svg [gcp-deploy]: ./cloud-deployments/gcp/deployment/DEPLOY.md [do-btn]: https://www.deploytodo.com/do-btn-blue.svg [do-deploy]: ./cloud-deployments/digitalocean/terraform/DEPLOY.md [render-btn]: https://render.com/images/deploy-to-render-button.svg [render-deploy]: https://render.com/deploy?repo=https://github.com/Mintplex-Labs/anything-llm&branch=render [render-btn]: https://render.com/images/deploy-to-render-button.svg [render-deploy]: https://render.com/deploy?repo=https://github.com/Mintplex-Labs/anything-llm&branch=render [railway-btn]: https://railway.app/button.svg [railway-deploy]: https://railway.app/template/HNSCS1?referralCode=WFgJkn [repocloud-btn]: https://d16t0pc4846x52.cloudfront.net/deploylobe.svg [repocloud-deploy]: https://repocloud.io/details/?app_id=276 [elestio-btn]: https://elest.io/images/logos/deploy-to-elestio-btn.png [elestio-deploy]: https://elest.io/open-source/anythingllm

mentals-ai

Mentals AI is a tool designed for creating and operating agents that feature loops, memory, and various tools, all through straightforward markdown files with a .gen extension. Think of an agent file as an executable file. You focus entirely on the logic of the agent, eliminating the necessity to write scaffolding code in Python or any other language. Essentially, it redefines the foundational frameworks for future AI applications 🍓 [!NOTE] [work in progress] A local vector database to store your chats with the agents as well as your private information. See memory branch. [work in progress] Web UI with agents, tools, and vector storage Getting Started Differences from Other Frameworks Key Concepts Instruction (prompt) Working Memory (context) Short-Term Memory (experimental) Control flow: From strings to algorithms Roadmap The Idea 📌 Examples Word chain game in a self-loop controlled by LLM: !Word Chain game in a loop NLOP — Natural Language Operation Or more complex use cases: | 🔄 Any multi-agent interactions | 👾 Space Invaders generator agent | 🍄 2D platformer generator agent | |--------------------|-----------|--------------| |!react | !spaceinvaders.gen | !mario.gen | Or help with the content: Collect YouTube videos on a given topic and save them to a .csv file with the videos, views, channel name, and link; Get the transcription from the video and create a table of contents; Take top news from Hacker News, choose a topic and write an article on the topic with the participation of the critic, and save to a file. All of the above examples are located in the agents folder. [!NOTE] Llama3 support is available for providers using a compatible OpenAI API. 🚀 Getting Started Begin by securing an OpenAI API key through the creation of an OpenAI account. If you already have an API key, skip this step. 🏗️ Build and Run Prerequisites Before building the project, ensure the following dependencies are installed: libcurl: Used for making HTTP requests libfmt: Provides an API for formatting pgvector: Vector operations with PostgreSQL poppler: Required for PDF processing Depending on your operating system, you can install these using the following commands: Linux macOS Windows For Windows, it's recommended to use vcpkg or a similar package manager: pgvector installation [!NOTE] In the main branch you can skip this step Build from sources Docker, Homebrew, PGXN, APT, etc. Clone the repository Configuration Place your API key in the config.toml file: Build the project Run 🆚 Differences from Other Frameworks Mentals AI distinguishes itself from other frameworks in three significant ways: The Agent Executor 🧠 operates through a recursive loop. The LLM determines the next steps: selecting instructions (prompts) and managing data based on previous loops. This recursive decision-making process is integral to our system, outlined in mentalssystem.prompt Agents of any complexity can be created using Markdown, eliminating the need for traditional programming languages. However, Python can be integrated directly into the agent's Markdown script if necessary. Unlike platforms that include preset reasoning frameworks, Mentals AI serves as a blank canvas. It enables the creation and integration of your own reasoning frameworks, including existing ones: Tree of Thoughts, ReAct, Self-Discovery, Auto-CoT, and others. One can also link these frameworks together into more complex sequences, even creating a network of various reasoning frameworks. 🗝️ Key Concepts The agent file is a textual description of the agent instructions with a .gen extension. 📖 Instruction (prompt) Instruction is the basic component of an agent in Mentals. An agent can consist of one or more instructions, which can refer to each other. Instructions can be written in free form, but they always have a name that starts with the # symbol. The use: directive is used to specify a reference to other instructions. Multiple references are listed separated by commas. Below is an example with two instructions root and meme_explain with a reference: In this example, the root instruction calls the memeexplain instruction. The response from memeexplain is then returned to the instruction from which it was called, namely the root. An instruction can take an input parameter, which is automatically generated based on the context when the instruction is called. To specify the input data more precisely, you can use a free-form prompt in the input: directive, such as a JSON object or null. Using a document for input: Using a JSON object as input: [!NOTE] Instruction calls are implemented independently from function or tool calls at OpenAI, enabling the operation of agents with models like Llama3. The implementation of instruction calls is transparent and included in the mentals_system.prompt file. 🛠️ Tool Tool is a kind of instruction. Mentals has a set of native tools to handle message output, user input, file handling, Python interpreter, Bash commands, and Short-term memory. Ask user example: File handling example: The full list of native tools is listed in the file native_tools.toml. 🧠 Working Memory (context) Each instruction has its own working memory — context. When exiting an instruction and re-entering it, the context is kept by default. To clear the context when exiting an instruction, you can use the keep_context: false directive: By default, the size of the instruction context is not limited. To limit the context, there is a directive max_context: number which specifies that only the number of the most recent messages should be stored. Older messages will be pushed out of the context. This feature is useful when you want to keep the most recent data in context so that older data does not affect the chain of reasoning. ⏳ Short-Term Memory (experimental) Short-term memory allows for the storage of intermediate results from an agent's activities, which can then be used for further reasoning. The contents of this memory are accessible across all instruction contexts. The memory tool is used to store data. When data is stored, a keyword and a description of the content are generated. In the example below, the meme_recall instruction is aware of the meme because it was previously stored in memory. ⚙️ Control flow: From strings to algorithms The control flow, which includes conditions, instruction calls, and loops (such as ReAct, Auto-CoT, etc.), is fully expressed in natural language. This method enables the creation of semantic conditions that direct data stream branching. For instance, you can request an agent to autonomously play a word chain game in a loop or establish an ambiguous exit condition: exit the loop if you are satisfied with the result. Here, the language model and its context determine whether to continue or stop. All this is achieved without needing to define flow logic in Python or any other programming language. ⚖️ Reason Action (ReAct) example 🌳 Tree of Thoughts (ToT) example The idea behind ToT is to generate multiple ideas to solve a problem and then evaluate their value. Valuable ideas are kept and developed, other ideas are discarded. Let's take the example of the 24 game. The 24 puzzle is an arithmetical puzzle in which the objective is to find a way to manipulate four integers so that the end result is 24. First, we define the instruction that creates and manipulates the tree data structure. The model knows what a tree is and can represent it in any format, from plain text to XML/JSON or any custom format. In this example, we will use the plain text format: Next, we need to initialize the tree with initial data, let's start with the root instruction: Calling the root instruction will suggest 8 possible next steps to calculate with the first 2 numbers and store these steps as tree nodes. Further work by the agent results in the construction of a tree that is convenient for the model to understand and infer the final answer. A complete example is contained in the agents/treestructure.gen 🗺️ Roadmap [ ] Web UI -- WIP [ ] Vector database tools -- WIP [ ] Agent's experience (experimental) [ ] Tools: Image generation, Browser ✨ The Idea The concept originated from studies on psychoanalysis Executive functions, Exploring Central Executive, Alan Baddeley, 1996. He described a system that orchestrates cognitive processes and working memory, facilitating retrievals from long-term memory. The LLM functions as System 1, processing queries and executing instructions without inherent motivation or goal-setting. So, what then is System 2? Drawing from historical insights now reconsidered through a scientific lens: The central executive, or executive functions, is crucial for controlled processing in working memory. It manages tasks including directing attention, maintaining task objectives, decision-making, and memory retrieval. This sparks an intriguing possibility: constructing more sophisticated agents by integrating System 1 and System 2. The LLM, as the cognitive executor System 1, works in tandem with the Central Executive System 2, which governs and controls the LLM. This partnership forms the dual relationship foundational to Mentals AI.

instill-core

🔮 Instill Core A complete unstructured data solution: ETL processing, AI-readiness, open-source LLM hosting, and RAG capabilities in one powerful platform. Quick start Follow the installation steps below or documentation for more details to build versatile AI applications locally. What is Instill Core? Instill Core is an end-to-end AI platform for data, pipeline and model orchestration. 🔮 Instill Core simplifies infrastructure hassle and encompasses these core features: 💧 Pipeline: Quickly build versatile AI-first APIs or automated workflows. ⚗️ Model: Deploy and monitor AI models without GPU infrastructure hassles. 💾 Artifact: Transform unstructured data (e.g., documents, images, audio, video) into AI-ready formats. ⚙️ Component: Connect essential building blocks to construct powerful pipelines. What can you build? 📖 Parsing PDF Files to Markdown: Cookbook 🧱 Generating Structured Outputs from LLMs: Cookbook & Tutorial 🕸️ Web scraping & Google Search with Structured Insights 🌱 Instance segmentation on microscopic plant stomata images: Cookbook See Examples for more! Installation Prerequisites | Operating System | Requirements and Instructions | | ---------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | macOS or Linux | Instill Core works natively | | Windows | • Use Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2)• Install latest yq from GitHub Repository• Install latest Docker Desktop and enable WSL2 integration (tutorial)• (Optional) Install cuda-toolkit on WSL2 (NVIDIA tutorial) | | All Systems | • Docker Engine v25 or later• Docker Compose v2 or later• Install latest stable Docker and Docker Compose | Steps Use stable release version Execute the following commands to pull pre-built images with all the dependencies to launch: [!NOTE] We have restructured our project repositories. If you need to access 🔮 Instill Core projects up to version v0.13.0-beta, please refer to the instill-ai/deprecated-core repository. Use the latest version for local development Execute the following commands to build images with all the dependencies to launch: [!IMPORTANT] Code in the main branch tracks under-development progress towards the next release and may not work as expected. If you are looking for a stable alpha version, please use latest release. 🚀 That's it! Once all the services are up with health status, the UI is ready to go at . Please find the default login credentials in the documentation. To shut down all running services: Deployment Visit the Deployment Overview for more details. Client Access 📺 Console ⌨️ CLI 📦 SDK: Python SDK TypeScript SDK Stay tuned, as more SDKs are on the way! Documentation Please visit our official documentation for more. Additional resources: API Reference Cookbooks Tutorials Examples Contributing We welcome contributions from our community! Checkout the methods below: Cookbooks: Help us create helpful pipelines and guides for the community. Visit our Cookbook repository to get started. Issues: Contribute to improvements by raising tickets using templates here or discuss in existing ones you think you can help with. Community Standards We are committed to maintaining a respectful and welcoming atmosphere for all contributors. Before contributing, please read: Contributing Guidelines Code of Conduct Support Get help by joining our Discord community where you can post any questions on our #ask-for-help channel. Contributors ✨ Thank you to all these wonderful people (emoji key): Vibhor Bhatt Miguel Ortiz Sajda Kabir Henry Chen Hari Bhandari Shiva Gaire Zubeen ShihChun-H Ikko Eltociear Ashimine Farookh Zaheer Siddiqui Brian Gallagher hairyputtar David Marx Deniz Parlak Po-Yu Chen Po Chun Chiu Sarthak HR Wu phelan Chang, Hui-Tang Xiaofei Du Ping-Lin Chang Tony Wang Pratik date Juan Vallés Naman Anand totuslink Praharsh Jain Utsav Paul CaCaBlocker Rafael Melo Jeremy Shih Romit Mohane ChunHao Amelia C 楊竣凱 andre.liang Zoodane George Strong Anni Mubeen Kodvavi RCKT Wojciech Bandzerewicz Gary Leo felixcorleone Zoe Daniel Manul Thanura Akash Jana Anish0203 Prathamesh Tugaonkar Shubham This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome! License See the LICENSE file for licensing information.

CrewAI-Studio

CrewAI Studio Welcome to CrewAI Studio! This application provides a user-friendly interface written in Streamlit for interacting with CrewAI, suitable even for those who don't want to write any code. Follow the steps below to install and run the application using Docker/docker-compose or Conda/venv. Features Multi-platform support: Works on Windows, Linux and MacOS. No coding required: User-friendly interface for interacting with CrewAI. Conda and virtual environment support: Choose between Conda and a Python virtual environment for installation. Results history: You can view previous results. Knowledge sources: You can add knowledge sources for your crews CrewAI tools You can use crewai tools to interact with real world. ~~Crewai studio uses a forked version of crewai-tools with some bugfixes and enhancements (https://github.com/strnad/crewAI-tools)~~ (bugfixes already merged to crewai-tools) Custom Tools Custom tools for calling APIs, writing files, enhanced code interpreter, enhanced web scraper... More will be added soon LLM providers supported: Currently OpenAI, Groq, Anthropic, ollama, Grok and LM Studio backends are supported. OpenAI key is probably still needed for embeddings in many tools. Don't forget to load an embedding model when using LM Studio. Single Page app export: Feature to export crew as simple single page streamlit app. Threaded crew run: Crews can run in background and can be stopped. Support CrewAI Studio Your support helps fund the development and growth of our project. Every contribution is greatly appreciated! Donate with Bitcoin Sponsor via GitHub Screenshots Installation Using Virtual Environment For Virtual Environment: Ensure you have Python installed. If you dont have python instaled, you can simply use the conda installer. On Linux or MacOS Clone the repository (or use downloaded ZIP file): Run the installation script: Run the application: On Windows Clone the repository (or use downloaded ZIP file): Run the Conda installation script: Run the application: Using Conda Conda will be installed locally in the project folder. No need for a pre-existing Conda installation. On Linux Clone the repository (or use downloaded ZIP file): Run the Conda installation script: Run the application: On Windows Clone the repository (or use downloaded ZIP file): Run the Conda installation script: Run the application: One-Click Deployment Running with Docker Compose To quickly set up and run CrewAI-Studio using Docker Compose, follow these steps: Prerequisites Ensure Docker and Docker Compose are installed on your system. Steps Clone the repository: Create a .env file for configuration. Edit for your own configuration: Start the application with Docker Compose: Access the application: http://localhost:8501 Configuration Before running the application, ensure you update the .env file with your API keys and other necessary configurations. An example .env file is provided for reference. Troubleshooting In case of problems: Delete the venv/miniconda folder and reinstall crewai-studio. Rename crewai.db (it contains your crews but sometimes new versions can break compatibility). Raise an issue and I will help you. Video tutorial Video tutorial on CrewAI Studio made by Josh Poco Star History

freeciv-web

THE FREECIV-WEB PROJECT Freeciv-web is an open-source turn-based strategy game. It can be played in any HTML5 capable web-browser and features in-depth game-play and a wide variety of game modes and options. Your goal is to build cities, collect resources, organize your government, and build an army, with the ultimate goal of creating the best civilization. You can play online against other players (multiplayer) or play by yourself against the computer. There is both a HTML5 2D version with isometric graphics and a 3D WebGL version of Freeciv-web. Freeciv-web is free and open source software. The Freeciv C server is released under the GNU General Public License, while the Freeciv-web client is released under the GNU Affero General Public License. See License for the full license document. Live servers Currently known servers based on Freeciv-web, which are open source in compliance with the AGPL license: FCIV.NET [https://github.com/fciv-net/fciv-net] freecivweb.org [https://github.com/Lexxie9952/fcw.org-server] moving borders [https://github.com/lonemadmax/freeciv-web] (Everything except longturn and real-Earth) Freeciv Tactics & Triumph [https://github.com/Canik05/freeciv-tnt] Freeciv Games & Mods (No PBEM) Freeciv-web screenshots: Freeciv WebGL 3D: !Freeciv-web Freeciv-web HTML5 version: !Freeciv-web Overview Freeciv-Web consists of these components: Freeciv-web - a Java web application for the Freeciv-web client. This application is a Java web application which make up the application viewed in each user's web browser. The Metaserver is also a part of this module. Implemented in Javascript, Java, JSP, HTML and CSS. Built with maven and runs on Tomcat 10 and nginx. Freeciv - the Freeciv C server, which is checked out from the official Git repository, and patched to work with a WebSocket/JSON protocol. Implemented in C. Freeciv-proxy - a WebSocket proxy which allows WebSocket clients in Freeciv-web to send socket requests to Freeciv servers. WebSocket requests are sent from Javascript in Freeciv-web to nginx, which then proxies the WebSocket messages to freeciv-proxy, which finally sends Freeciv socket requests to the Freeciv servers. Implemented in Python. Publite2 - a process launcher for Freeciv C servers, which manages multiple Freeciv server processes and checks capacity through the Metaserver. Implemented in Python. pbem is play-by-email support. Freeciv WebGL Freeciv WebGL is the 3D version, which uses the Three.js 3D engine. More info about the WebGL 3D version can be found for developers and 3D artists. Developer: Andreas Røsdal @andreasrosdal Running Freeciv-web on your computer The recommended and probably easiest way is to use Vagrant on VirtualBox. Whatever the method you choose, you'll have to check out Freeciv-web to a directory on your computer, by installing Git and running this command: You may also want to change some parameters before installing, although it's not needed in most cases. If you have special requirements, have a look at config.dist, copy it without the .dist extension and edit to your liking. :warning: Notice for Windows users Please keep in mind that the files are to be used in a Unix-like system (some Ubuntu version with the provided Vagrant file). Line endings for text files are different in Windows, and some editors "correct" them, making the files unusable in the VM. There's some provision to recode the main configuration files when installing, but not afterwards. If you touch shared files after installation, please use an editor that respect Unix line endings or transform them with a utility like dos2unix after saving them. Running Freeciv-web with Vagrant on VirtualBox Freeciv-web can be setup using Vagrant on VirtualBox to quickly create a local developer image running Freeciv-web on latest Ubuntu on your host operating system such as Windows, OSX or Linux. This is the recommended way to build Freeciv-web on your computer. Install VirtualBox: https://www.virtualbox.org/ - Install manually on Windows, and with the following command on Linux: Install Vagrant: http://www.vagrantup.com/ - Install manually on Windows , and with the following command on Linux: Run Vagrant with the following commands in your Freeciv-web directory: This will build, compile, install and run Freeciv-web on the virtual server image. Wait for the installation process to complete, watching for any error messages in the logs. If you get an error message about Virtualization (VT) not working, then enable Virtualization in the BIOS. Test Freeciv-web by pointing your browser to http://localhost if you run Windows or http://localhost:8080 if you run Linux or macOS. To log in to your Vagrant server, run the command: The Vagrant guest machine will mount the Freeciv-web source repository in the /vagrant directory. Note that running Freeciv-web using Vagrant requires about 4Gb of memory and 3 Gb of harddisk space. System Requirements for manual install Install this software if you are not running Freeciv-web with Vagrant: Tomcat 10 - https://tomcat.apache.org/ Java 11 JDK - https://adoptopenjdk.net/ Python 3.6 - http://www.python.org/ Pillow v2.3.0 (PIL fork) - http://pillow.readthedocs.org/ (required for freeciv-img-extract) MariaDB - https://mariadb.org/ Maven 3 - http://maven.apache.org/download.html Firebug for debugging - http://getfirebug.com/ curl-7.19.7 - http://curl.haxx.se/ OpenSSL - http://www.openssl.org/ nginx 1.11.x or later - http://nginx.org/ MySQL Connector/Python - https://github.com/mysql/mysql-connector-python pngcrush, required for freeciv-img-extract. http://pmt.sourceforge.net/pngcrush/ Tornado 6.1 or later - http://www.tornadoweb.org/ Jansson 2.6 - http://www.digip.org/jansson/ liblzma-dev - http://tukaani.org/xz/ - for XZ compressed savegames. When in a tested system, you may run scripts/install/install.sh and it will fetch and configure what's needed. Start and stop Freeciv-web with the following commands: start-freeciv-web.sh stop-freeciv-web.sh status-freeciv-web.sh All software components in Freeciv-web will log to the /logs sub-directory of the Freeciv-web installation. Running Freeciv-web on Docker Freeciv-web can easily be built and run from Docker using docker-compose. Make sure you have both Docker and Docker Compose installed. Run the following from the freeciv-web directory: Connect to docker via host machine using standard browser http://localhost:8080/ Enjoy. The overall dockerfile and required changes to scripts needs some further improvements. Freeciv-Web continuous integration on GitHub actions Freeciv-Web is built on GitHub actions on every commit. This is the current build status: Developers interested in Freeciv-web If you want to contibute to Freeciv-web, see the issues on GibHub and the TODO file for some tasks you can work on. Pull requests on Github are welcome! Contributors to Freeciv-web Andreas Røsdal @andreasrosdal Marko Lindqvist @cazfi Sveinung Kvilhaugsvik @kvilhaugsvik Gerik Bonaert @adaxi Lmoureaux @lmoureaux Máximo Castañeda @lonemadmax and the Freeciv.org project!

TornadoVM

TornadoVM !TornadoVM version TornadoVM is a plug-in to OpenJDK and GraalVM that allows programmers to automatically run Java programs on heterogeneous hardware. TornadoVM targets OpenCL, PTX and SPIR-V compatible devices which include multi-core CPUs, dedicated GPUs (Intel, NVIDIA, AMD), integrated GPUs (Intel HD Graphics and ARM Mali), and FPGAs (Intel and Xilinx). TornadoVM has three backends that generate OpenCL C, NVIDIA CUDA PTX assembly, and SPIR-V binary. Developers can choose which backends to install and run. Website: tornadovm.org Documentation: https://tornadovm.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ For a quick introduction please read the following FAQ. Latest Release: TornadoVM 1.0.10 - 31/01/2025 : See CHANGELOG. Installation In Linux and macOS, TornadoVM can be installed automatically with the installation script. For example: NOTE Select the desired backend: opencl: Enables the OpenCL backend (requires OpenCL drivers) ptx: Enables the PTX backend (requires NVIDIA CUDA drivers) spirv: Enables the SPIRV backend (requires Intel Level Zero drivers) Example of installation: Alternatively, TornadoVM can be installed either manually from source or by using Docker. If you are planning to use Docker with TornadoVM on GPUs, you can also follow these guidelines. You can also run TornadoVM on Amazon AWS CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs following the instructions here. Usage Instructions TornadoVM is currently being used to accelerate machine learning and deep learning applications, computer vision, physics simulations, financial applications, computational photography, and signal processing. Featured use-cases: kfusion-tornadovm: Java application for accelerating a computer-vision application using the Tornado-APIs to run on discrete and integrated GPUs. Java Ray-Tracer: Java application accelerated with TornadoVM for real-time ray-tracing. We also have a set of examples that includes NBody, DFT, KMeans computation and matrix computations. Additional Information General Documentation Benchmarks How TornadoVM executes reductions Execution Flags FPGA execution Profiler Usage Programming Model TornadoVM exposes to the programmer task-level, data-level and pipeline-level parallelism via a light Application Programming Interface (API). In addition, TornadoVM uses single-source property, in which the code to be accelerated and the host code live in the same Java program. Compute-kernels in TornadoVM can be programmed using two different approaches (APIs): a) Loop Parallel API Compute kernels are written in a sequential form (tasks programmed for a single thread execution). To express parallelism, TornadoVM exposes two annotations that can be used in loops and parameters: a) @Parallel for annotating parallel loops; and b) @Reduce for annotating parameters used in reductions. The following code snippet shows a full example to accelerate Matrix-Multiplication using TornadoVM and the loop-parallel API: To run TornadoVM, you need to either install the TornadoVM extension for GraalVM/OpenJDK, or run with our Docker images. Additional Resources Here you can find videos, presentations, tech-articles and artefacts describing TornadoVM, and how to use it. Academic Publications If you are using TornadoVM >= 0.2 (which includes the Dynamic Reconfiguration, the initial FPGA support and CPU/GPU reductions), please use the following citation: If you are using Tornado 0.1 (Initial release), please use the following citation in your work. Selected publications can be found here. Acknowledgments This work is partially funded by Intel corporation. In addition, it has been supported by the following EU & UKRI grants (most recent first): EU Horizon Europe & UKRI AERO 101092850. EU Horizon Europe & UKRI INCODE 101093069. EU Horizon Europe & UKRI ENCRYPT 101070670. EU Horizon Europe & UKRI TANGO 101070052. EU Horizon 2020 ELEGANT 957286. EU Horizon 2020 E2Data 780245. EU Horizon 2020 ACTiCLOUD 732366. Furthermore, TornadoVM has been supported by the following EPSRC grants: PAMELA EP/K008730/1. AnyScale Apps EP/L000725/1. Contributions and Collaborations We welcome collaborations! Please see how to contribute to the project in the CONTRIBUTING page. Write your questions and proposals: Additionally, you can open new proposals on the GitHub discussions page. Alternatively, you can share a Google document with us. Collaborations: For Academic & Industry collaborations, please contact here. TornadoVM Team Visit our website to meet the team. Licenses Per Module To use TornadoVM, you can link the TornadoVM API to your application which is under Apache 2. Each Java TornadoVM module is licensed as follows: | Module | License | |--------------------------------|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | Tornado-API | | | Tornado-Runtime | | | Tornado-Assembly | | | Tornado-Drivers | | | Tornado-Drivers-OpenCL-Headers | | | Tornado-scripts | | | Tornado-Annotation | | | Tornado-Unittests | | | Tornado-Benchmarks | | | Tornado-Examples | | | Tornado-Matrices | | | | |

eiten

Eiten - Algorithmic Investing Strategies for Everyone Eiten is an open source toolkit by Tradytics that implements various statistical and algorithmic investing strategies such as Eigen Portfolios, Minimum Variance Portfolios, Maximum Sharpe Ratio Portfolios, and Genetic Algorithms based Portfolios. It allows you to build your own portfolios with your own set of stocks that can beat the market. The rigorous testing framework included in Eiten enables you to have confidence in your portfolios. If you are looking to discuss these tools in depth and talk about more tools that we are working on, please feel free to join our Discord channel where we have a bunch of more tools too. Files Description | Path | Description | :--- | :---------- | eiten | Main folder. | └ figures | Figures for this github repositories. | └ stocks | Folder to keep your stock lists that you want to use to create your portfolios. | └ strategies | A bunch of strategies implemented in python. | backtester.py | Backtesting module that both backtests and forward tests all portfolios. | data_loader.py | Module for loading data from yahoo finance. | portfolio_manager.py | Main file that takes in a bunch of arguments and generates several portfolios for you. | simulator.py | Simulator that uses historical returns and monte carlo to simulate future prices for the portfolios. | strategy_manager.py | Manages the strategies implemented in the 'strategies' folder. Required Packages You will need to install the following package to train and test the models. Scikit-learn Numpy Tqdm Yfinance Pandas Scipy You can install all packages using the following command. Please note that the script was written using python3. Build your portfolios Let us see how we can use all the strategies given in the toolkit to build our portfolios. The first thing you need to do is modify the stocks.txt file in the stocks folder and add the stocks of your choice. It is recommended to keep the list small i.e anywhere between 5 to 50 stocks should be fine. We have already put a small stocks list containing a bunch of tech stocks like AAPL, MSFT, TSLA etc. Let us build our portfolios now. This is the main command that you need to run. This command will use last 5 years of daily data excluding the last 90 days and build several portfolios for you. Based on those portfolios, it will then test them on the out of sample data of 90 days and show you the performance of each portfolio. Finally, it will also compare the performance with your choice of market index which is QQQ here. Let's dive into each of the parameters in detail. istest: The value determined if the program is going to keep some separate data for future testing. When this is enabled, the value of futurebars should be larger than 5. future_bars: These are the bars that the tool will exclude during portfolio building and will forward test the portfolios on the excluded set. This is also called out of sample data. datagranularityminutes: How much granular data do you want to use to build your portfolios. For long term portfolios, you should use daily data but for short term, you can use hourly or minute level data. The possible values here are 3600, 60, 30, 15, 5, 1. 3600 means daily. historytouse: Whether to use a specific number of historical bars or use everything that we receive from yahoo finance. For minute level data, we only receive up to one month of historical data. For daily, we receive 5 years worth of historical data. If you want to use all available data, the value should be all but if you want to use smaller history, you can set it to an integer value e.g 100 which will only use the last 100 bars to build the portfolios. applynoisefiltering: This uses random matrix theory to filter out the covariance matrix from randomness thus yielding better portfolios. A value of 1 will enable it and 0 will disable it. market_index: Which index do you want to use to compare your portfolios. This should mostly be SPY but since we analyzed tech stocks, we used QQQ. only_long: Whether to use long only portfolio or enable short selling as well. Long only portfolios have shown to have better performance using algorithmic techniques. eigenportfolionumber: Which eigen portfolio to use. Any value between 1-5 should work. The first eigen portfolio (1) represents the market portfolio and should act just like the underlying index such as SPY or QQQ. The second one is orthogonal and uncorrelated to the market and poses the greatest risk and reward. The following ones have reduced risk and reward. Read more on eigen-portfolios. stocksfilepath: File that contains the list of stocks that you want to use to build your portfolio. Some Portfolio Building Examples Here are a few examples for building different types of portfolios. Both long and short portfolios by analyzing last 90 days data and keeping the last 30 days as testing data. This will give us 60 days of portfolio construction data and 30 days of testing. Only long portfolio on 60 minute bars of the last 30 days. No future testing. Compare the results with SPY index instead of QQQ. Do not apply noise filtering on the covariance matrix. Use the first eigen portfolio (market portfolio) and compare with SQQQ, Portfolio Strategies Four different portfolio strategies are currently supported by the toolkit. Eigen Portfolios These portfolios are orthogonal and uncorrelated to the market in general thus yielding high reward and alpha. However, since they are uncorrelated to the market, they can also provide great risk. The first eigen portfolio is considered to be a market portfolio which is often ignored. The second one is uncorrelated to the others and provides the highest risk and reward. As we go down the numbering, the risk as well as the reward are reduced. Minimum Variance Portfolio (MVP) MVP tries to minimize the variance of the portfolio. These portfolios are lowest risk and reward. Maximum Sharpe Ratio Portfolio (MSR) MSR solves an optimization problem that tries to maximize the sharpe ratio of the portfolio. It uses past returns during the optimization process which means if past returns are not the same as future returns, the results can vary in future. Genetic Algorithm (GA) based Portfolio This is our own implementation of a GA based portfolio that again tries to maximize the sharpe ratio but in a slightly more robust way. This usually provides more robust portfolios than the others. When you run the command above, our tool will generate portfolios from all these strategies and give them to you. Let us look at some resulting portfolios. Resulting Portfolios For the purpose these results, we will use the 9 stocks in the stocks/stocks.txt file. When we run the above command, we first get the portfolio weights for all four strategies. For testing purposes, the above command used last five years of daily data up till April 29th. The remaining data for this year was used for forward testing i.e the portfolio strategies had no access to it when building the portfolios. What if my portfolio needs different stocks?: All you need to do is change the stocks in the stocks.txt file and run the tool again. Here is the final command again that we run in order to get our portfolios: Portfolio Weights We can see that the eigen portfolio is giving a large weight to TSLA while the others are dividing their weights more uniformly. An interesting phenomena happening here is the hedging with SQQQ that all the strategies have learned automatically. Every tool is assigning some positive weight to SQQQ while also assigning positive weights to other stocks which indicates that the strategies are automatically trying to hedge the portfolios from risk. Obviously this is not perfect, but just the fact that it's happening is fascinating. Let us look at the backtest results on the last five years prior to April 29, 2020. Backtest Results The backtests look pretty encouraging. The black dotted line is the market index i.e QQQ. Other lines are the strategies. Our custom genetic algorithm implementation seems to have the best backtest results because it's an advanced version of other strategies. The eigen portfolio that weighed TSLA the most have the most volatility but its profits are also very high. Finally, as expected, the MVP has the minimum variance and ultimately the least profits. However, since the variance is extremely low, it is a good portfolio for those who want to stay safe. The most interesting part comes next, let us look at the forward or future test results for these portfolios. Forward Test Results These results are from April 29th, 2020 to September 4th, 2020. The eigen portfolio performed the best but it also had a lot of volatility. Moreover, most of those returns are due to TSLA rocketing in the last few months. After that, our GA algorithm worked quite effectively as it beat the market index. Again, as expected, the MVP had the lowest risk and reward and slowly went up in 4-5 months. This shows the effectiveness and power of these algorithmic portfolio optimization strategies where we've developed different portfolios for different kinds of risk and reward profiles. Conclusion and Discussion We are happy to share this toolkit with the trading community and hope that people will like and contribute to it. As is the case with everything in trading, these strategies are not perfect but they are based on rigorous theory and some great empirical results. Please take care when trading with these strategies and always manage your risk. The above results were not cherry picked but the market has been highly bullish in the last few months which has led to the strong results shown above. We would love for the community to try out different strategies and share them with us. Special Thanks Special thanks to Scott Rome's blog. The eigen portfolios and minimum variance portfolio concepts came from his blog posts. The code for filtering eigen values of the covariance matrix was also mostly obtained from one of his posts. License A product by Tradytics Copyright (c) 2020-present, Tradytics.com

machine-learning-blackjack-solution

machine-learning-blackjack-solution Introduction A genetic algorithm is a type of artificial intelligence programming that uses ideas from evolution to solve complex problems. It works by creating a population of (initially random) candidate solutions, then repeatedly selecting pairs of candidates and combining their solutions using a process similar to genetic crossover. Sometimes candidate solutions even go through mutation, just to introduce new possibilities into the population. After a large number of generations, the best solution found up to that point is often the optimal, best solution possible. Genetic algorithms are particularly well-suited for combinatorial problems, where there are huge numbers of potential solutions to a problem. The evolutionary process they go through is, in essence, a search through a huge solution space. A solution space so large that you simply could never use a brute force approach. This project is a demonstration of using a genetic algorithm to find an optimal strategy for playing the casino game Blackjack. Please see this article for a story about how this program was used, and what the results were. The article describes some of the available settings, and shows how different values for those settings affect the final result. The source code is for a Windows application written in Cthat allows you to play with different settings like population size, selection style and mutation rate. Each generation's best solution is displayed, so you can watch the program literally evolve a solution. !blackjack strategy tester screenshot The property grid located at the upper left of the screen is where you adjust settings. There's an informational area below that, and the right side of the screen is the display area for the three tables that represent a strategy for playing Blackjack. The tall table on the left is for hard hands, the table in the upper right is for soft hands, and the table in the lower right is for pairs. We'll talk more about how to interpret this strategy in a bit. The columns along the tops of the three tables are for the dealer upcard. When you play Blackjack the dealer has one of his two cards initially turned face up, and the rank of that card has a big impact on recommended strategy. Notice that the upcard ranks don't include Jack, Queen or King. That's because those cards all count 10, so we group them and the Ten together and simplify the tables. To use the tables, first, determine if you have a pair, soft hand, or hard hand. Then look in the appropriate table, with the correct dealer upcard column. The cell in the table will be "H" when the correct strategy is to hit, "S" when the correct strategy is to stand, "D" for double-down, and (in the pairs table only) "P" for split. A Word About This "Optimal" Strategy Before we go any further, it needs to be stated that this problem of finding an optimal Blackjack strategy has already been solved. Back in the 1960s, a mathematician named Edward O. Thorp authored a book called Beat the Dealer, which included charts showing the optimal "Basic" strategy. That strategy looks like this: !optimal blackjack strategy So we're solving a problem that has already been solved, but that's actually good. That means we can compare our results to the known best solution. For example, if our result strategy tells us to do anything but stand when holding a pair of Tens, Jacks, Queens or Kings, we know there's a problem. There's one other thing to get out of the way before we go any further, and that's the idea of nondeterministic code. That means that if we run the same code twice in a row, we're likely to get two different results. That's something that happens with genetic algorithms due to their inherent randomness. There's no guarantee you'll find the absolute optimal solution, but it is assured that you will find an optimal or near-optimal solution. It's something that isn't typical when writing code, so it takes some adjustment for most programmers. Genetic Algorithms Now let's talk about the details of a genetic algorithm. Fitness Scores First of all, we need a way to evaluate candidates so we can compare them to each other. That means a numeric fitness score, which in this case is quite simple: you simulate playing a certain number of hands using the strategy, and then count the number of chips you have at the end. The big question is, how many hands should we test with? The challenge of trying to test a strategy is that due to the innate randomness of Blackjack, you could use the same strategy ten times and get ten completely different results. Obviously, the more hands you play, the more the randomness gets smoothed out, and the quality of the underlying strategy starts to emerge. If you doubt this, just think about flipping a coin. If you only flip it five times, there's certainly a possibility that it'll come up heads all five times (in fact, that happens just over 3% of the time). However, if you flip it 500 times, there's no way it's going to end up all heads - the odds of it happening are 0.5500, which works out to be roughly once every 3 x 10150 times you try it. After some testing and analysis, it was determined that a minimum of 100,000 hands per test is needed for a reasonable level of accuracy. There's still variance even at that number, but in order to cut the variance in half, you'd need to bump the number of hands to 500,000. One reason this accuracy is important is that in the later generations, the differences between candidates are very small. Evolution has caused the main parts of the strategy to converge on a particular approach, and towards the end all it's doing is refining the minor details. In those cases it's important to accurately determine the difference between two similar candidates. Representation Representation is simply the idea that we need to use a data structure for a candidate solution that can be combined via crossover, and possibly mutated. In this case, that's also quite simple because the way that human beings represent a Blackjack strategy is to use three tables, as we've seen. Representing those in code with three two-dimensional arrays is the obvious approach. Each cell in those three tables will have "Hit", "Stand", "Double-Down", or (only for pairs) "Split". By the way, since there are 160 cells in the hard hands table, and 80 cells in the soft hands table, and 100 cells in the pairs table, we can calculate exactly how many possible distinct strategies there are for Blackjack: 4100 x 380 x 3160 = 5 x 10174 possible Blackjack strategies That's a big number, which is obviously impossible to search using brute force. Genetic algorithms (GAs) are extremely helpful when trying to find an optimal solution from a very large set of possible solutions like this. Blackjack Rules and Strategies The rules of Blackjack are fairly simple. The dealer and the player both are dealt two cards. The player sees both of their cards (they are usually dealt face up), and one of the dealer's cards is dealt face up. Each card has a value - for cards between 2 and 10, the value is the same as the card's rank (so an Eight of Spades counts as 8, for example). All face cards count as 10, and an Ace can either be 1 or 11 (it counts as 11 only when that does not result in a hand that exceeds 21). The suit of a card does not matter. After the cards are dealt, if the player has Blackjack (a total of 21) and the dealer does not, the player is immediately paid 1.5 times their original bet, and a new hand is dealt. If the player has 21 and the dealer does also, then it's a tie and the player gets their original bet back, and a new hand is dealt. If the player wasn't dealt a Blackjack, then play continues with the player deciding whether to Stand (not get any more cards), Hit (receive an additional card), Double-down (place an additional bet, and receive one and only one more card), or, in the case of holding a pair, splitting the hand, which means placing an additional bet and receiving two new cards, so the end result is that the player is now playing two (or, in the case of multiple splits, more than two) hands simultaneously. If the player hits or double-downs and has a resulting hand that exceeds 21, then they lose and play continues with the next hand. If not, then the dealer draws until their hand totals at least 17. If the dealer exceeds 21 at this point, the player receives a payment equal to twice their original bet. If the dealer doesn't exceed 21, then the hands are compared and the player with the highest total that doesn't exceed 21 wins. Because of these rules, certain effective strategies emerge. One common strategy is that if you hold a hard hand with a value of 20, 19 or 18, you should Stand, since you avoid busting by going over 21, and you have a nice hand total that might win in a showdown with the dealer. Another common strategy is to split a pair of Aces, since Aces are so powerful (due to the fact that count as 11 or 1, you can often Hit a hand with a soft Ace with no risk of busting). Likewise, splitting a pair of 8s is a good idea because with a hard total of 16, it's likely you will bust if you take a Hit (since so many cards count as 10). As a human being, all it takes is a little knowledge about the rules in order to construct a strategy. The GA program doesn't have that advantage, and operates completely without any pre-programmed knowledge of Blackjack. It simply uses the relative fitness scores and the mechanism of evolution to find the solution. GA Settings There are many variables or settings for a GA. You can adjust population size, how parent candidates are selected, how the resulting children may be mutated, and several other items. The following sections describe some of these settings: Setting: Selection Style Once we've solved representation and have a fitness function, the next step is to select two candidates for crossover during the process of building a new generation. There are three common styles for selection, and this program supports all of them. First, you can choose Roulette Wheel selection. It's named for a Roulette wheel because you can imagine each candidate's fitness score being a wedge in a pie chart, with a size proportionate to its relative fitness compared to the other candidates. (Of course, this assumes that all fitness scores are positive, which we will talk about shortly). The main benefit of Roulette Wheel selection is that selection is fitness-proportionate. Imagine if you had only three candidates, with fitness scores of 1, 3, and 8. The relative selection probabilities for those candidates will be 1/12, 3/12, and 8/12. The downside of Roulette Wheel selection is that it tends to be somewhat slow in terms of processing. The selection process is done by iterating through the candidates until a particular condition is matched - in other words, O(N) performance. Another potential problem with Roulette Wheel selection is that there may be situations where fitness scores vary widely, to such an extent that only certain candidates have any reasonable chance of being selected. This happens frequently in early generations, since the majority of candidates are mostly random. Although this might sound like a positive (since you ultimately want to select candidates with high fitness scores), it also results in a loss of genetic diversity. In other words, even though a particular candidate may have a low fitness score in an early generation, it may contain elements that are needed to find the ultimate solution in later generations. Ranked Selection is the solution to this problem. Instead of using raw fitness scores during the selection process, the candidates are sorted by fitness, with the worst candidate receiving a score of 0, the second worse receiving 1, and so forth, all the way to the best candidate, which has a score equal to the population size - 1. Ranked Selection is quite slow, since it combines the O(N) performance of Roulette Wheel, with the additional requirement that the candidates be sorted before selection. However, there may be circumstances where it performs better than other selection approaches. Finally, the fastest selection method of all is called Tournament Selection. This method simply selects N random candidates from the current generation, and then uses the one with the best fitness score. A tournament size of 2 means two random candidates are selected, and the best of those two is used. If you have a large tournament size (like 10), then 10 different candidates will be selected, with the best of those being the ultimate selection. That obviously tilts the balance between randomness and quality. Tournament selection works well in most cases, but it does require some experimentation to find the best tourney size. Setting: Elitism Elitism is a technique that helps ensure that the best candidates are always maintained. Since all selection methods are random to some degree, it is possible to completely lose the best candidates from one generation to another. By using Elitism, we automatically advance a certain percentage of the best candidates to the next generation. Elitism does have a negative impact on performance since all of the candidates must be sorted by fitness score. Typically Elitism is done before filling the rest of a new generation with new candidates created by crossover. Crossover Details Once two candidate solutions have been selected, the next step in building a new generation is to combine those two into a single new candidate, hopefully using the best of both parent strategies. There are a number of ways to do crossover, but the method used in this program is quite straightforward - the two fitness scores are compared, and crossover happens in a relatively proportionate way. If one candidate has a fitness of 10, and the other has a fitness of 5, then the one with fitness 10 contributes twice as much to the child as the parent with a fitness of 5. Since the fitness scores in this program are based on how much the strategy would win over thousands of hands, almost all fitness scores will be negative. (This is obviously because the rules are set up so the house always wins.) This makes it difficult to calculate relative fitnesses (how do you compare a positive number with a negative, and find relative proportions?), and also causes problems with selection methods like Roulette Wheel or Ranked. To solve this, we find the lowest fitness score of the generation and add that value to each candidate. This results in an adjusted fitness score of 0 for the very worse candidate, so it never gets selected. Mutation As has been mentioned a few times, maintaining genetic diversity in our population of candidate solutions is a good thing. It helps the GA ultimately find the very best solution, by occasionally altering a candidate in a positive direction. There are two settings for mutation. MutationRate controls what percentage of new candidates have mutation done on them. MutationImpact controls what percentage of their strategy is randomized. Population Size Population size has a significant impact on performance. The smaller the population size, the faster the GA will execute. On the other hand, if the size is too low the population may not have enough genetic diversity to find the ultimate solution. During testing, it looks like 700 to 1000 is a good balance between speed and correctness. Performance Notes This program consumes a lot of processing power. Running tests of hundreds of thousands of hands of Blackjack for hundreds or thousands of candidates consumes a lot of time. It's really imperative to write the code so that it works as efficiently as possible. If your CPU isn't consistently at or above 95% usage, there's still room for improvement. Multi-threading is a natural fit for genetic algorithms because we often want to perform the same action on each candidate. The best example of this is when we calculate fitness scores. This is often an operation that takes quite a bit of time. In our case, we're dealing out 100,000 hands, and each hand has to be played until the end. If we're single-threading that code, it's going to take a long time. Multi-threading is really the way to go. Luckily, there's a ridiculously simple way to efficiently use all of your processors for an operation like this. This code loops over all of the candidates in the currentGeneration list, calls the fitness function and sets the fitness property for each: Regardless of the number of items in the list or the number of processors on your machine, the code will efficiently run the code in a multi-threaded manner, and continue only when all of the threads are complete. One of the side effects of making this code multi-threaded is that all of the code relating to evaluating a candidate must be thread-safe, including any Singleton objects. When making code thread-safe, pay attention that you don't accidentally introduce code that will slow your program down unintentionally, because sometimes it can be quite subtle. Random numbers are central to how genetic algorithms work, so it's critical that they can be used correctly from a multithreaded environment. That means that each random number generator must be separate from the others, and it also means that each must produce a distinct series of random numbers. Random number generators use seed values which are usually time-based, like the number of milliseconds the computer has been turned on. Starting with that seed, subsequent calls will return a series of numbers that look random, but really aren't. If you start with the same seed, you get the same sequence. And that's a problem because if you create multiple random number generator objects in a loop using the default time-based seed, several of them will have the same time-based initial seed value, which will result in the same sequence of "random" numbers. That's a bug, because it can reduce the true randomness of the program a great deal, and that's vital to a genetic algorithm. There are a couple of ways to solve this problem. First, you can make the random object truly a singleton, and restrict access to it by using a Clock statement. The makes all access serialized for any random number need, which reduces performance. Another approach is to make the variable static per thread. By declaring the variable as static and also marking it with the [ThreadStatic] attribute, the .NET runtime allocates one static variable per thread. That eliminates the locking/serialization, but also has performance issues. The approach used in this application is to use a non-default seed value. In this case we call Guid.NewGuid().GetHashCode(), which generates a new, unique GUID, then gets an integer hashcode value that should be unique, depending on how GetHashCode is implemented. While multithreading really helps performance, there are also other things we can do to improve performance. For example, when dealing with large populations, the hundreds or thousands of objects that will be generated each generation can quickly turn into a huge problem related to garbage collection. In the end, the easiest way to solve that is to look through the code and find objects being allocate inside a loop. It's better to declare the variable outside of the loop, and then clear it in the loop, rather than reallocate it. In a program like this one where you could be looping hundreds of thousands of times, this can result in a very significant performance boost. For example, in an early version of this code, a Deck object was created for each hand. Since there are hundreds of candidate solutions running hundreds of thousands of trial hands, this was a huge inefficiency. The code was changed to allocate one deck per test sequence. The deck was shuffled as needed, so it never needs to be reallocated. Beyond the cards in the deck, another object type that was repeatedly created and destroyed were the candidate strategies. To mitigate this problem, a StrategyPool class was created that handles allocation and deallocation. This means that strategy objects are reused, rather than dynamically created when needed. The pool class has to be thread-safe, so it does serialize access to its methods via a Clock statement, but overall using the pool approach produced a good performance increase. Finally, a subtle form of object allocation is conversion. In an early version of the code, a utility card function used Convert.ToInt32(rankEnum). Obviously, the easiest way to convert from an enum to an int is simply to cast it, like (int)rankEnum. But it's hard to know exactly what the difference is between that approach, int.Parse(), int.TryParse(), or Convert.ToInt32(), since they can all be used and are roughly equivalent. Perhaps the compiler was boxing the enum value before passing it to Convert.ToInt32(), because the profiler identified this as a function that had large amounts of thread contention waiting - and the problem got much, much worse as the generations passed. By rewriting the conversion to use a simple cast, the program performance increased threefold (3x). Contributing Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for details on our code of conduct, and the process for submitting pull requests to us. Author Greg Sommerville - Initial work* License This project is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License - see the LICENSE.md file for details

lecca-io

Lecca.io Lecca.io is an AI platform that allows you to configure and deploy Large Language Models (LLMs) equipped with powerful tools and workflows. Build, customize, and automate your AI agents with ease. 🚀 Quick Start Visit app.lecca.io to use the cloud version immediately. Add your API keys and start building intelligent agents for free. Want to self-host or contribute? Check out our development guide. ✨ Key Features Custom LLM Configuration: Choose from multiple AI providers and models Tool Integration: Equip your agents with powerful tools to interact with various services Workflow Builder: Create complex automation workflows similar to n8n, Make.com, or Zapier Build in RAG: Enjoy basic built-in RAG features to easily upload and query data Build your own tools: Build custom apps, actions, and triggers using our docs Automate LLMs: Configure triggers that will enable your AI Agents to work autonomously. 🔧 Available Tools Visit our Tools page for a complete list 🤖 Supported AI Providers Visit our AI Providers page for a complete list 📖 Documentation Concepts Local Development Creating Custom Apps Adding AI Providers Running Ollama Locally 🤝 Contributing We welcome contributions! See our Development Docs for more details. 📄 License Lecca.io Community Edition is distributed under the Apache-2.0 License with Commons Clause. Enterprise features are available under the Commercial License. Built with ❤️ by Lecca Digital (Tony Ramirez)

yoha

Yoha A practical hand tracking engine. Note: Yoha is currently unmaintained. Quick Links: Demo (Code) Docs Website npm Installation npm install @handtracking.io/yoha Please note: You need to serve the files from node_modules/@handtracking.io/yoha since the library needs to download the model files from here. (Webpack Example) You need to serve your page with https for webcam access. (Webpack Example) You should use cross-origin isolation as it improves the engine's performance in certain scenarios. (Webpack Example) Description Yoha is a hand tracking engine that is built with the goal of being a versatile solution in practical scenarios where hand tracking is employed to add value to an application. While ultimately the goal is to be a general purpose hand tracking engine supporting any hand pose, the engine evolves around specific hand poses that users/developers find useful. These poses are detected by the engine which allows to build applications with meaningful interactions. See the demo for an example. Yoha is currently in beta. About the name: Yoha is short for ("Your Hand Tracking"). Language Support Yoha is currently available for the web via JavaScript. More languages will be added in the future. If you want to port Yoha to another language and need help feel free reach out. Technical Details Yoha was built from scratch. It uses a custom neural network trained using a custom dataset. The backbone for the inference in the browser is currently TensorFlow.js Features: Detection of 21 2D-landmark coordinates (single hand). Hand presence detection. Hand orientation (left/right hand) detection. Inbuilt pose detection. Supported Hand Poses: Pinch (index finger and thumb touch) Fist Your desired pose is not on this list? Feel free to create an issue for it. Performance Yoha was built with performance in mind. It is able to provide realtime user experience on a broad range of laptops and desktop devices. The performance on mobile devices is not great which hopefuly will change with the further development of inference frameworks like TensorFlow.js Please note that native inference speed can not be compared with the web inference speed. Differently put, if you were to run Yoha natively it would be much faster than via the web browser. Minimal Example Source Running locally: Drawing Demo Live Version Source Running locally:

CollabAI

CollabAI About Welcome to Collabai.software, where we've taken the world of AI to new heights. We've been working tirelessly to bring you the most advanced, user-friendly platform that seamlessly integrates with the powerful OpenAI API, Gemini, and Claude. Imagine running your own ChatGPT on your server, with the ability to manage access for your entire team. Picture creating custom AI assistants that cater to your unique needs, and organizing your employees into groups for streamlined collaboration. With Collabai.software, this is not just a dream, but a reality. Collabai.software Features: Self-Hosting on Your Cloud: Gain full control by hosting the platform on your private cloud. Ensure data privacy by using your API codes, allowing for secure data handling. Enhanced Team Management: Manage teams with private accounts and customizable access levels (Departments). Prompt Templates: Utilize generic templates to streamline team usage. Departmental Access & Assistant Assignment: Assign AI assistants to specific departments for shared team access. Customizable AI Assistants: Create personalized AI assistants for users or organizations. Tagging Feature in Chats: Organize and retrieve chat data efficiently with custom tags. Chat Storage and Retrieval: Save all chats and replies for future analysis, with an option to restore accidentally deleted chats from Trash. Optimized Performance: Experience our high-speed, efficient platform. Our clients have been using it for over a year, with some spending $1500-$2000 per month on the API. File Upload & GPT-4 Vision Integration: Enhance interactions by uploading files for analysis and sending pictures for AI description. OpenAI API, Gemini, and Claude Integration: Seamlessly integrate with the powerful OpenAI API, Gemini, and Claude for a comprehensive suite of AI capabilities. API-Based Function Calls: Execute custom functions and automate tasks directly through the API. Usage Monitoring: Track your daily and monthly API usage costs to optimize spending. Day and Night Mode: Switch between light and dark themes to enhance visual comfort. Additional Features: Private Accounts: Ensure the security and privacy of your team members' data. Customizable Access Levels: Tailor access permissions to meet the specific needs of your organization. Shared Team Access: Foster collaboration by assigning AI assistants to specific departments or teams. AI-Powered File Analysis: Gain insights and automate tasks by uploading files for AI analysis. AI-Generated Image Descriptions: Enhance communication and understanding by sending pictures for AI-powered descriptions. !image !image !image Folder Structure Client The client folder contains the React-based frontend code for the application. This includes JSX, CSS, and JavaScript files, as well as any additional assets such as images or fonts. Below is a brief overview of the main subdirectories within the client folder: src: This directory contains the React components, styles, and scripts for the frontend application. public: Static assets, such as images or favicon.ico, go here. This folder is served as-is and not processed by the build system. Server The server folder contains all the backend-related code for the application, following a Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. Here is a breakdown of the main subdirectories within the server folder: controllers: This directory holds the controller files responsible for handling requests, processing data, and interacting with models. models: Data models and database-related code are organized in this folder. config: Configuration files for the backend, such as database configuration or any other service configuration should be stored here, can be stored in this directory. Getting Started Follow the steps below to get the project up and running. Prerequisites Node.js (Version: >=20.x) MongoDB NPM Development Setup Clone the Repository bash cd client Install Dependencies bash cd ../server Install Backend Dependencies bash npm start To initialize the application data and create a superadmin user, you can use either cURL or Postman: Using cURL If you prefer command-line tools, you can use curl to make a POST request to the /init-setup endpoint. Open your terminal and run the following command: curl -X POST http://localhost:8011/api/init -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{ "fname": "Super", "lname": "Admin", "email": "superadmin@example.com", "password": "yourSecurePassword", "employeeCount": 100, "companyName": "INIT_COMPANY" }' Initializing Setup with Postman Open Postman: Launch the Postman application. Create a New Request: Click on the '+' or 'New' button to create a new request. Set HTTP Method to POST: Ensure that the HTTP method is set to POST. Enter URL: Enter the URL http://localhost:8011/api/init. Set Headers: Go to the 'Headers' tab. Set Content-Type to application/json. Set Request Body: Switch to the 'Body' tab. Select the 'raw' radio button. Enter the JSON data for your superadmin user: Send Request: Click the 'Send' button to make the request. This will send a POST request to http://localhost:8011/api/init with the provided JSON payload, creating a superadmin user with the specified details. Site Setup: Login with the superadmin credentials and set up your site by adding configs from your settings page, for ex. API keys, etc. Reference CollaborativeAI Reference Guide Contributing If you would like to contribute to the project, we welcome your contributions! Please follow the guidelines outlined in the CONTRIBUTING.md file. Feel free to raise issues, suggest new features, or send pull requests to help improve the project. Your involvement is greatly appreciated! Thank you for contributing to our project! License MIT

voicefilter

VoiceFilter Note from Seung-won (2020.10.25) Hi everyone! It's Seung-won from MINDs Lab, Inc. It's been a long time since I've released this open-source, and I didn't expect this repository to grab such a great amount of attention for a long time. I would like to thank everyone for giving such attention, and also Mr. Quan Wang (the first author of the VoiceFilter paper) for referring this project in his paper. Actually, this project was done by me when it was only 3 months after I started studying deep learning & speech separation without a supervisor in the relevant field. Back then, I didn't know what is a power-law compression, and the correct way to validate/test the models. Now that I've spent more time on deep learning & speech since then (I also wrote a paper published at Interspeech 2020 😊), I can observe some obvious mistakes that I've made. Those issues were kindly raised by GitHub users; please refer to the Issues and Pull Requests for that. That being said, this repository can be quite unreliable, and I would like to remind everyone to use this code at their own risk (as specified in LICENSE). Unfortunately, I can't afford extra time on revising this project or reviewing the Issues / Pull Requests. Instead, I would like to offer some pointers to newer, more reliable resources: VoiceFilter-Lite: This is a newer version of VoiceFilter presented at Interspeech 2020, which is also written by Mr. Quan Wang (and his colleagues at Google). I highly recommend checking this paper, since it focused on a more realistic situation where VoiceFilter is needed. List of VoiceFilter implementation available on GitHub: In March 2019, this repository was the only available open-source implementation of VoiceFilter. However, much better implementations that deserve more attention became available across GitHub. Please check them, and choose the one that meets your demand. PyTorch Lightning: Back in 2019, I could not find a great deep-learning project template for myself, so I and my colleagues had used this project as a template for other new projects. For people who are searching for such project template, I would like to strongly recommend PyTorch Lightning. Even though I had done a lot of effort into developing my own template during 2019 (VoiceFilter -> RandWireNN -> MelNet -> MelGAN), I found PyTorch Lightning much better than my own template. Thanks for reading, and I wish everyone good health during the global pandemic situation. Best regards, Seung-won Park Unofficial PyTorch implementation of Google AI's: VoiceFilter: Targeted Voice Separation by Speaker-Conditioned Spectrogram Masking. Result Training took about 20 hours on AWS p3.2xlarge(NVIDIA V100). Audio Sample Listen to audio sample at webpage: http://swpark.me/voicefilter/ Metric | Median SDR | Paper | Ours | | ---------------------- | ----- | ---- | | before VoiceFilter | 2.5 | 1.9 | | after VoiceFilter | 12.6 | 10.2 | SDR converged at 10, which is slightly lower than paper's. Dependencies Python and packages This code was tested on Python 3.6 with PyTorch 1.0.1. Other packages can be installed by: Miscellaneous ffmpeg-normalize is used for resampling and normalizing wav files. See README.md of ffmpeg-normalize for installation. Prepare Dataset Download LibriSpeech dataset To replicate VoiceFilter paper, get LibriSpeech dataset at http://www.openslr.org/12/. train-clear-100.tar.gz(6.3G) contains speech of 252 speakers, and train-clear-360.tar.gz(23G) contains 922 speakers. You may use either, but the more speakers you have in dataset, the more better VoiceFilter will be. Resample & Normalize wav files First, unzip tar.gz file to desired folder: Next, copy utils/normalize-resample.sh to root directory of unzipped data folder. Then: Edit config.yaml Preprocess wav files In order to boost training speed, perform STFT for each files before training by: This will create 100,000(train) + 1000(test) data. (About 160G) Train VoiceFilter Get pretrained model for speaker recognition system VoiceFilter utilizes speaker recognition system (d-vector embeddings). Here, we provide pretrained model for obtaining d-vector embeddings. This model was trained with VoxCeleb2 dataset, where utterances are randomly fit to time length [70, 90] frames. Tests are done with window 80 / hop 40 and have shown equal error rate about 1%. Data used for test were selected from first 8 speakers of VoxCeleb1 test dataset, where 10 utterances per each speakers are randomly selected. Update: Evaluation on VoxCeleb1 selected pair showed 7.4% EER. The model can be downloaded at this GDrive link. Run After specifying traindir, testdir at config.yaml, run: This will create chkpt/name and logs/name at base directory(-b option, . in default) View tensorboardX Resuming from checkpoint Evaluate Possible improvments Try power-law compressed reconstruction error as loss function, instead of MSE. (See #14) Author Seungwon Park at MINDsLab (yyyyy@snu.ac.kr, swpark@mindslab.ai) License Apache License 2.0 This repository contains codes adapted/copied from the followings: utils/adabound.py from https://github.com/Luolc/AdaBound (Apache License 2.0) utils/audio.py from https://github.com/keithito/tacotron (MIT License) utils/hparams.py from https://github.com/HarryVolek/PyTorchSpeakerVerification (No License specified) utils/normalize-resample.sh from https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/216475

He makes $750 a day 'Vibe Coding' Apps (using Replit, ChatGPT, Upwork)

Billy Howell shares his strategy for making money by building and selling custom web applications using AI tools like Replit. He demonstrates the process by finding projects on Upwork, creating a product requirements document with ChatGPT, and using Replit to automatically generate a functional web application. Billy explains that this approach is less risky than building SaaS products because it validates demand before significant development work. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 02:19 - Searching for App Ideas on Upwork 11:04 - Using ChatGPT for PRD Creation 12:22 - Why choose Replit for Development 15:15 - Building Prototype with Replit 19:53 - Areas of Concern when building with AI coders 23:30 - Earning Potential on Upwork 27:55 - The process for selling these Apps 32:03 - Comparing Different Business Models 35:40 - Huge opportunity: Unbundling SaaS 37:44 - Testing App 39:39 - How to standout on Upwork 40:35 - Integrating v0 UI to Replit Key Points • Billy Howell explains his method of "vibe coding" - using AI tools like Replit to quickly build and sell custom web applications • The process involves finding clients on Upwork who need solutions, creating a prototype, and selling it before building the complete app • Billy demonstrates how to use Repl.it with AI assistance to rapidly build a case management system for a nonprofit • The approach focuses on creating simple CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) applications rather than complex systems 1) The "Sell First, Build Later" Framework Billy's #1 rule: Find someone to BUY your app BEFORE you build it. Most developers get this backward - they build something cool then struggle to find users. The secret? Don't market. SELL. How? Look for people ALREADY trying to pay for solutions 2) Upwork Gold Mining Strategy Billy's exact process: • Search Upwork for jobs mentioning expensive SaaS tools (Airtable, HubSpot, etc) • Look for simple CRUD apps (data entry, visualization) • Build a quick prototype in Repl.it • Send a Loom video demo to potential clients His first sale? $750 replacing an Airtable solution! 3) The Vibe Coding Tech Stack Billy's weapons of choice: • Replit for rapid prototyping (zero setup friction!) • ChatGPT to format requirements into PRDs • V0 for beautiful UI mockups • ShadCN components for clean interfaces The magic combo: Feed requirements to Replit + "build me this app" = working prototype in MINUTES. 4) What to Avoid When Vibe Coding Not all projects are created equal! Watch out for: • Payment processing (risky) • DocuSign integrations (complex) • Calendar functionality (AI struggles with time zones) • Anything changing data in other apps Start with simple CRUD apps that store and display information. 5) The Real Money-Making Model Billy's approach isn't just about one-off projects: • Initial build: $750-2,500 • Charge for hosting • Recurring revenue from feature requests • Get referrals to similar businesses One recent client is now reselling his solution to other companies in the same industry! 6) Why This Beats Building a SaaS Building a traditional SaaS = "nightmare money pit" according to Billy. With vibe coding consulting: • De-risk by getting paid upfront • Learn across multiple projects • No marketing costs • Discover validated problems • Build a portfolio of solutions Six figures on Upwork is VERY doable. 7) The 60-Second Sales Pitch Billy's exact closing technique: • Find job posting • Make mockup in V0 or Replit • Record 1-minute Loom: "I'm Billy, I make apps. I know you wanted Airtable, but I made this custom for you." • Personalize with company name • Send and repeat Simple. Effective. PROFITABLE. The future of coding isn't about knowing every framework—it's about SOLVING PROBLEMS quickly. Anyone can do this with the right tools and approach. Notable Quotes: "The number one thing is how to sell an app that you've built... And the secret is not to market. It's just to sell it." - Billy Howell "We start, we need to find someone to buy the app before we build it. That's where most people get this wrong, is they build something and then try to sell it or try to get users." - Billy Howell LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ BoringAds — ads agency that will build you profitable ad campaigns http://boringads.com/ BoringMarketing — SEO agency and tools to get your organic customers http://boringmarketing.com/ Startup Empire — a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.startupempire.co FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND BILLY ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://x.com/billyjhowell Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@billyjhowell

airbnb

Notes on Airbnb business in New York and elsewhere ================================================== Disclaimer The script scrapes the Airbnb web site to collect data about the shape of the company's business. No guarantees are made about the quality of data obtained using this script, statistically or about an individual page. So please check your results. Changelog 2014-12-02 Tom Slee More robustness fixes. 2014-09-23 Tom Slee Bug fixes that solve problems where over-eager exception handling caused the script to exit too early. 2014-08-26 Tom Slee Version 2.1 is updated to be able to collect data from Airbnb's updated web site. Not all cities have the new format, but the script should handle both versions. It will not, however, handle cities without neighborhoods. 2014-05-26 Tom Slee Version 2 (May 2014) is much more thorough and efficient about searching Airbnb's web site for a given city and has more options. I have moved it to python 3 for better handling of unicode multi-lingual data. It is also ported to SAP SQL Anywhere to allow more flexible reporting and better concurrency than SQLite can provide. A free developer edition is available from the SAP web site. You may need to configure the python driver following the instructions given in http://dcx.sybase.com/index.html#sa160/en/dbprogramming/pg-python.html. airbnb.py is the python script to collect data. plot.py just produces some charts. airbnb.db is the data. The basic data is in the table room. A complete search of a given city's listings is a "survey" and the surveys are tracked in table survey. Using the script To create the database: python airbnb.py -dbi. This command does two things: initializes a database file (dbnb.db in the current directory) runs the reload.sql script against the database to create the tables, views, and stored procedures that make up the database. No data is added. On Windows, the reload.sql script does not always run. If that fails, try this to create the database tables: dbisql -c "uid=dba;pwd=sql;dbf=dbnb.db;eng=db" From Interactive SQL, click File > Open and choose reload.sql from the current directory. Hit F5 to execute the script and create the tables. Test that you can connect to the database file: run python airbnb.py --dbping and confirm that there are no errors. If there are errors, check the database file setting near the top of the script and change its location. To run a survey: add a city (search area) to the database, by running ./airbnb.py -asa "city-name". It scans the Airbnb web site and adds the neighborhoods for the city. add a survey to the database by running ./airbnb.py -asv "city-name". The command lists the survey_id value that was created. collect the roomids for the survey by running ./airbnb.py -s surveyid. The survey_id can be seen by running ./airbnb -ls. This search loops over neighborhoods, property types, and pages of listings in the Airbnb search pages. fill in the details of the rooms by running ./airbnb -f. If any step fails: If the -s step or the -f step fails (say because the internet connection was lost), you can just run it again, and it will pick up from where it left off without losing data. Continue until the script completes.

kodyfire

Kody is a command-line tool for generating artifact files, powered by both classic and AI code generation techniques. It can be used by both technical and non-technical users to generate files across a wide range of technologies and programming languages. The code generation feature in Kody relies on OpenAI GPT, a language model that uses deep learning to generate human-like text, and ChatGPT to provide natural language processing capabilities. Table of Contents Installation Usage Getting Started Terminology Contributing License Installation Prerequisites Node.js (version 14 or later) To install kody, use npm with the following command: or You can check the documentation with Usage Options -v, --version: Output the current version -h, --help: Display help for command Commands prompt|ai [options] [prompt...]: AI powered prompt assistant to quickly generate an artifact batch [options]: Generate multiple digital artifact create [options] : Generate a new blank kody project generate|g [options] [kody] [concept]: Prompt assistant to quickly generate an artifact import|in [options] : Mass create artifacts from a source. init: Initialize a new kodyfire project install|i [kody]: Prompt user to choose to install list|ls [options] [kodyName]: List installed kodies within your current project. publish [template]: Publish the templates of the kody along with the assets.json and schema.ts files ride|↻: Prompt assistant to help build your kody.json file run [options]: Generate a digital artifact based on the selected technology run-script|rs: Run scripts search|s [keywords...]: Search kodyfire packages from npm registry watch|w [options]: Watch for file changes and run kody help [command]: Display help for command Getting Started Open the project you are willing to work on using vscode or your prefered editor. Generate artifacts using AI In case you want to exclusivly rely on AI to generate your artifacts. You don't need to install any additional kodies. Run the kody ai [prompt] command and follow the prompts. For example, to create a Laravel Controller named SampleController under API/V1 and add a comment on top saying Hello Kodyfire, run the following command You can use the experimental Speech-to-Text option to pass your prompt using your voice. The transcription relies on Whisper and requires SoX installed and available in your \$PATH. for the audio recording. For Linux For MacOS For Windows Download the binaries Generate your artifact using the classical method Search and install a kody Based on your project, search availables kodies and select the one that fits your need.. To search availables kodies by keyword runthe following command. if you don't specify a keyword all available kodies will be listed. Install your kody of choice. For example, if you want to install the react kody or Please note you can install as many kodies in the same project as you wish. Generate your artifact There are 2 methods you can generate your artifacts with: The generate command The run command Method 1: Generator mode kody generate The recommended way of using kody is using the generate command. The command will assist you creating your artifact based on the chosen concept. For example, a react component is considered a concept. In order to generate your artifacts, run the generate command. The syntax is kody g|generate [kody] [concept]. the assistant will prompt you to select the missing arguments. As an example, run the following command from your terminal: Method 2: Runner mode kody run The run command is similar to the generate command. The run requires a definition file which is simply a json file containing all the concept definitions you have created using the ride command. The generate command on the other hand creates one or more concept definition on the run and process them on one run. Every command has its use cases. Initialize kody In order to start using kody, you need to initialize your project. This will add the definition files required for kody runs. Important: Please run the command only once. The command will override existing definition files. We will disable overriding in a future version. Ride your kody In order to update your definition, use the kody ride command to assist you populate the required fields Launch a kody run Once you are satisified with your definition file, execute the run command to generate your artifacts. To run all kodies defined within your project, run the following command: Create your own kody In most cases you might need a custom kody to suit your needs Scaffold a new kody Create a basic kody using the scaffold command. Follow the prompts to setup your kody This will create a folder containing the basic structure for a kody. You can start using right away within your project. Setup your kody Install npm dependencies Build your kody Add your concepts and related templates //TODO This will build your kody and export the basic templates files. Add your kody as an NPM dependency to a test project In order to be able to use it within your test project run the following command Publish your kody Please remember that Kody is still in exploration phase and things will change frequently. Contribution is always highly requested. Prepare your kody Add the required kodyfire metadata to your package.json Publish to Github Intialize your project as a git repository and push to a public Github repo To do so, kindly follow these steps:- Intitialize a new Github repository and make it public. Open your project root folder locally from terminal and run the following commands:- Link your project to your Github repository. Publish to npm Once you are satisfied with your kody and you would to like to share it with the community. Run the following command. Note: You'll need an NPM account Share with community Congratulation publishing your first kody. Don't forget to share your kody repo link by opening an issue on Kody's github repository. Terminology Kody: Refers to the code generation command-line tool that generates digital artifacts. Artifacts: Refers to the various digital products generated by Kody based on the input provided. Note: Kody uses classical code generation techniques in addition to AI-powered code generation using OpenAI Codex and ChatGPT. Available kodies | Name | Description | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | basic-kodyfire | A general purpose code generator that should handle most of the generation use cases | | typescript-kodyfire | Generate typescript related artifacts | | tsconfig-kodyfire | Generate tsconfig files for your typescript projects | | nextjs-kodyfire | Generate nextJs components and related artifacts | | react-kodyfire | Generate react components | | laravel-kodyfire | Laravel artifacts generation | | uml-kodyfire | Uml diagrams generation using plantuml | | readme-kodyfire | Readme file generation | | word-kodyfire | Generate ms word document based on a template | | pdf-kodyfire | Generate PDF document from HTML templates | | social-image-kodyfire | Generate dynamic images for social sharing based on HTML templates | | social-gif-kodyfire | Generate dynamic gif images for social sharing based on HTML templates | | linkedin-quizzes-kodyfire | Practice Linkedin skill assessement tests from your terminal | | chatgpt-kodyfire | Use chatgpt from the terminal. Allows you provide additional data from various sources (not implemented yet) and export to serveral outputs (markdown only now). | Contributing If you encounter any issues while using Kody or have suggestions for new features, feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request. Please read our contributing guidelines before making contributions. License Kody is MIT licensed.

Mastering-AI-for-Entrepreneurs-9-Free-Courses

Mastering-AI-for-Entrepreneurs-9-Free-Courses Introduction: The Entrepreneur's AI RevolutionArtificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the way we do business. It's not just for tech giants anymore. Small businesses and startups are using AI to work smarter, not harder. As an entrepreneur, you need to understand AI to stay ahead.Why AI is a must-have skill for entrepreneursAI is everywhere. It's in the apps we use, the products we buy, and the services we rely on. Businesses that use AI are seeing big improvements:They're making better decisions with data-driven insightsThey're automating routine tasks, freeing up time for creativityThey're personalizing customer experiences, boosting satisfaction and salesIf you're not using AI, you're falling behind. But here's the good news: you don't need to be a tech wizard to harness the power of AI.Breaking the barriers to AI learningThink AI is too complex? Think again. You don't need a computer science degree to understand and use AI in your business. Many AI tools are designed for non-technical users. They're intuitive and user-friendly.The best part? You can learn about AI for free. There are tons of high-quality courses available at no cost. These courses are designed for busy entrepreneurs like you. They cut through the jargon and focus on practical applications.What to expect from this articleWe've handpicked nine free courses that will turn you into an AI-savvy entrepreneur. Each course is unique, offering different perspectives and skills. We'll cover:What makes each course specialWhat you'll learnHow it applies to your businessWho it's best suited forReady to dive in? Let's explore these game-changing courses that will boost your AI knowledge and give your business an edge.1. Google AI Essentials: A Beginner's Guide to Practical AIWhy This Course Is EssentialGoogle AI Essentials is perfect if you're just starting out. It's designed for people who don't have a tech background. The course focuses on how AI can help you in your day-to-day work, not on complex theories.What You'll LearnThis course is all about making AI work for you. You'll discover how to:Use AI to boost your productivity. Generate ideas, create content, and manage tasks more efficiently.Streamline your workflows. Learn how AI can help with everyday tasks like drafting emails and organizing your schedule.Use AI responsibly. Understand the potential biases in AI and how to use it ethically.Key TakeawaysYou'll earn a certificate from Google. This looks great on your resume or LinkedIn profile.You'll learn how to work alongside AI tools to get better results in your business.You'll gain practical skills you can use right away to improve your work.Get StartedEnroll in Google AI Essentials2. Introduction to Generative AI: A Quick Start for EntrepreneursWhy This Course Works for Busy EntrepreneursThis course is short and sweet. In just 30 minutes, you'll get a solid grasp of generative AI. It's perfect if you're short on time but want to understand the basics.What You'll LearnThe fundamentals of generative AI: what it is, how it works, and its limitsHow generative AI differs from other types of AIReal-world applications of generative AI in businessHow It Helps Your BusinessAfter this course, you'll be able to:Make smarter decisions about using AI tools in your businessSpot opportunities where generative AI could solve problems or create valueUnderstand the potential and limitations of this technologyGet StartedEnroll in Introduction to Generative AI3. Generative AI with Large Language Models: Advanced Skills for EntrepreneursWhy This Course Stands OutThis course digs deeper into the technical side of AI. It's ideal if you have some coding experience and want to understand how AI models work under the hood.What You'll LearnYou'll gain key skills for working with Large Language Models (LLMs):How to gather and prepare data for AI modelsChoosing the right model for your needsEvaluating model performance and improving resultsYou'll also learn about:The architecture behind transformer models (the tech powering many AI tools)Techniques for fine-tuning models to your specific business needsWho Should Take This CourseThis course is best for entrepreneurs who:Have basic Python programming skillsUnderstand the fundamentals of machine learningWant to go beyond using AI tools to actually building and customizing themGet StartedEnroll in Generative AI with Large Language Models4. AI for Everyone by Andrew Ng: Simplifying AI for Business LeadersWhy It's Perfect for BeginnersAndrew Ng is a leading figure in AI education. He's known for making complex topics easy to understand. This course is designed for non-technical learners. You don't need any coding or math skills to benefit from it.What You'll LearnHow AI works at a high levelHow to spot problems in your business that AI can solveWays to assess how AI might impact your business processes and strategiesWhy Entrepreneurs Love This CourseIt explains AI concepts in plain English, without technical jargonYou can complete it in just 8 hours, fitting it into your busy scheduleIt focuses on the business value of AI, not just the technologyGet StartedStart with AI for Everyone on Coursera5. Generative AI: Introduction and ApplicationsWhy This Course Is Ideal for EntrepreneursThis course offers a broad view of generative AI applications. You'll learn about AI in text, image, audio, and more. It's packed with hands-on experience using popular AI tools.What You'll LearnThe basics and history of generative AI technologiesHow different industries are using AI, from marketing to creative projectsPractical skills through labs using tools like ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Stable DiffusionHow It Stands OutYou'll hear from real AI practitioners about their experiencesThe course teaches you how to use generative AI to innovate and improve efficiency in your businessGet StartedEnroll in Generative AI: Introduction and Applications6. Generative AI for Everyone by Andrew Ng: Unlocking ProductivityWhy This Course Is a Must-HaveThis course focuses on using generative AI tools for everyday business tasks. It's all about boosting your productivity and efficiency.What You'll LearnHands-on exercises to integrate AI tools into your daily workReal examples of how businesses are using generative AI to save time and moneyTechniques for prompt engineering to get better results from AI toolsHow It Helps EntrepreneursYou'll learn to automate repetitive tasks, freeing up time for strategic thinkingYou'll discover new ways to use AI tools in your business processesYou'll gain confidence in experimenting with AI to solve business challengesGet StartedGo deeper with DeepLearning.AI7. Generative AI for Business Leaders by LinkedIn LearningWhy This Course Focuses on Business ApplicationsThis course is tailored for leaders who want to integrate AI into their business operations. It provides practical insights for improving workflows and decision-making.What You'll LearnStrategies for using AI to optimize your business operationsHow to save time and resources with AI-powered toolsPractical methods for implementing AI in your company, regardless of sizeKey BenefitsThe course is designed for busy professionals, allowing you to learn at your own paceYou'll gain insights you can apply immediately to your businessIt covers both the potential and the limitations of AI in business settingsGet StartedLevel up on LinkedIn Learning8. AI for Beginners by Microsoft: A Structured Learning PathWhy This Course Builds a Strong AI FoundationMicrosoft's AI for Beginners is a comprehensive 12-week program. It covers core AI concepts in a structured, easy-to-follow format. The course combines theoretical knowledge with hands-on practice through quizzes and labs.What You'll LearnThe basics of AI, machine learning, and data scienceStep-by-step guidance to build a strong knowledge basePractical applications of AI in various business contextsHow to Approach This CourseDedicate 2-3 hours per week to complete the curriculumUse the structured format to gradually build your confidence in AI conceptsApply what you learn to real business scenarios as you progressGet StartedBuild foundations with Microsoft9. AI for Business Specialization by UPenn: Strategic Thinking with AIWhy This Course Is Perfect for Business LeadersThis specialization focuses on AI's transformative impact on core business functions. It covers how AI is changing marketing, finance, and operations.What You'll LearnHow to build an AI strategy tailored to your business needsWays to leverage AI to drive innovation across different departmentsTechniques for integrating AI into your business modelHow to Make the Most of This CourseTake detailed notes on how each module applies to your own business challengesUse the specialization to develop a long-term AI vision for your companyNetwork with other business leaders taking the course to share insights and experiencesGet StartedScale up with UPenn's business focusConclusion: Your Path to Becoming an AI-powered EntrepreneurWe've covered nine fantastic free courses that can transform you into an AI-savvy entrepreneur. Let's recap:Google AI Essentials: Perfect for beginners, focusing on practical AI applications.Introduction to Generative AI: A quick start to understand the basics of generative AI.Generative AI with Large Language Models: For those ready to dive into the technical side.AI for Everyone: A non-technical introduction to AI's business impact.Generative AI: Introduction and Applications: A broad look at generative AI across industries.Generative AI for Everyone: Focused on boosting productivity with AI tools.Generative AI for Business Leaders: Tailored for integrating AI into business operations.AI for Beginners: A structured path to build a strong AI foundation.AI for Business Specialization: Strategic thinking about AI in business functions.Remember, you don't need to tackle all these courses at once. Start small and build your knowledge gradually. Pick the course that aligns best with your current needs and business goals.Embracing AI is not just about staying competitive; it's about opening new doors for innovation and growth. These courses will help you see opportunities where AI can solve problems, improve efficiency, and create value for your business.The AI revolution is happening now. The sooner you start learning, the better positioned you'll be to lead in this new era. Each step you take in understanding AI is a step towards future-proofing your business.So, what are you waiting for? Choose a course, dive in, and start your journey to becoming an AI-powered entrepreneur today. The future of your business may depend on it.MORE ARTICLES FOR YOUHumanizzer Fastpass Bundle – OTO1 to OTO4: Get (Humanizzer + All OTOs) Fastpass for Massive 75% Discount Available Limited-Time OneHumanizzer Review: Build Lifelike Human AI Agents That Talk, Listen & Engage Face-To-Face!—In Your Voice, Just Like You!EasyListDetox App Review: A Windows tool with Giveaway Rights for effortlessly cleaning your email lists of duplicates, invalid, and disposable addresses. Simple, efficient, and time-savingAI Copy Kit Review: Google’s Latest AI Tech Tensorflow (Tf) Create Jaw-Dropping And Advanced Ultra HD Videos, Ultra Shorts, 4K Images, Voiceovers, and Any Other GPT 4-Powered Amazing Content In Minutes Without Any Complicated Tools!From Good to Great: 15 Books to Inspire Personal and Business TransformationFTC Affiliate Commission Disclaimer: Some links in this article may earn us a commission if you make a purchase. This doesn't affect our recommendations.

internet-tools-collection

Internet Tools Collection A collection of tools, website and AI for entrepreneurs, web designers, programmers and for everyone else. Content by category Artificial Intelligence Developers Design Entrepreneur Video Editing Stock videos Stock Photos Stock music Search Engine Optimization Blog Posts Resume Interviews No code website builder No code game builder Side Hustle Browser Extensions Other Students Artificial Intelligence Jasper - The Best AI Writing Assistant [](https://www.jasper.ai/) Create content 5x faster with artificial intelligence. Jasper is the highest quality AI copywriting tool with over 3,000 5-star reviews. Best for writing blog posts, social media content, and marketing copy. AutoDraw [](https://www.autodraw.com/) Fast drawing for everyone. AutoDraw pairs machine learning with drawings from talented artists to help you draw stuff fast. Rytr - Best AI Writer, Content Generator & Writing Assistant [](https://rytr.me/) Rytr is an AI writing assistant that helps you create high-quality content, in just a few seconds, at a fraction of the cost! Neevo - Neevo [](https://www.neevo.ai/) Kinetix Tech [](https://kinetix.tech/) Kinetix is a no-code 3D creation tool powered by Artificial Intelligence. The web-based platform leverages AI motion capture to convert a video into a 3D animation and lets you customize your avatars and environments. We make 3D animation accessible to every creator so they can create engaging stories. LALAL.AI: 100% AI-Powered Vocal and Instrumental Tracks Remover [](https://www.lalal.ai/) Split vocal and instrumental tracks quickly and accurately with LALAL.AI. Upload any audio file and receive high-quality extracted tracks in a few seconds. Copy.ai: Write better marketing copy and content with AI [](https://www.copy.ai/) Get great copy that sells. Copy.ai is an AI-powered copywriter that generates high-quality copy for your business. Get started for free, no credit card required! Marketing simplified! OpenAI [](https://openai.com/) OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company. Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. DALL·E 2 [](https://openai.com/dall-e-2/) DALL·E 2 is a new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language. Steve.ai - World’s fastest way to create Videos [](https://www.steve.ai/) Steve.AI is an online Video making software that helps anyone to create Videos and animations in seconds. Octie.ai - Your A.I. ecommerce marketing assistant [](https://octie.ai/) Write emails, product descriptions, and more, with A.I. Created by Octane AI. hypnogram.xyz [](https://hypnogram.xyz/) Generate images from text descriptions using AI FakeYou. Deep Fake Text to Speech. [](https://fakeyou.com/) FakeYou is a text to speech wonderland where all of your dreams come true. Craiyon, formerly DALL-E mini [](https://www.craiyon.com/) Craiyon, formerly DALL-E mini, is an AI model that can draw images from any text prompt! Deck Rocks - Create Pictch Decks [](https://www.deck.rocks/) Writely | Using AI to Improve Your Writing [](https://www.writelyai.com/) Making the art of writing accessible to all Writesonic AI Writer - Best AI Writing Assistant [](https://writesonic.com/) Writesonic is an AI writer that's been trained on top-performing SEO content, high-performing ads, and converting sales copy to help you supercharge your writing and marketing efforts. Smart Copy - AI Copywriting Assistant | Unbounce [](https://unbounce.com/product/smart-copy/) Generate creative AI copy on-the-spot across your favourite tools Synthesia | #1 AI Video Generation Platform [](https://www.synthesia.io/) Create AI videos by simply typing in text. Easy to use, cheap and scalable. Make engaging videos with human presenters — directly from your browser. Free demo. NVIDIA Canvas: Turn Simple Brushstrokes into Realistic Images [](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/studio/canvas/) Create backgrounds quickly, or speed up your concept exploration so you can spend more time visualizing ideas with the help of NVIDIA Canvas. Hotpot.ai - Hotpot.ai [](https://hotpot.ai/) Hotpot.ai makes graphic design and image editing easy. AI tools allow experts and non-designers to automate tedious tasks while attractive, easy-to-edit templates allow anyone to create device mockups, social media posts, marketing images, app icons, and other work graphics. Klaviyo: Marketing Automation Platform for Email & SMS [](https://www.klaviyo.com/) Klaviyo, an ecommerce marketing automation platform for email marketing and sms syncs your tech stack with your website store to scale your business. Search listening tool for market, customer & content research - AnswerThePublic [](https://answerthepublic.com/) Use our free tool to get instant, raw search insights, direct from the minds of your customers. Upgrade to a paid plan to monitor for new ways that people talk & ask questions about your brand, product or topic. Topic Mojo [](https://topicmojo.com/) Discover unique & newest queries around any topic and find what your customers are searching for. Pulling data from 50+ sources to enhance your topic research. AI Image Enlarger | Enlarge Image Without Losing Quality! [](https://imglarger.com/) AI Image Enlarger is a FREE online image enlarger that could upscale and enhance small images automatically. Make jpg/png pictures big without losing quality. Midjourney [](https://www.midjourney.com/app/) Kaedim - AI for turning 2D images to 3D models [](https://www.kaedim3d.com/webapp) AI for turning 2D images, sketches and photos to 3D models in seconds. Overdub: Ultra realistic text to speech voice cloning - Descript [](https://www.descript.com/overdub) Create a text to speech model of your voice. Try a live demo. Getting Started [](https://magenta.tensorflow.org/get-started) Resources to learn about Magenta Photosonic AI Art Generator | Create Unique Images with AI [](https://photosonic.writesonic.com/) Transform your imagination into stunning digital art with Photosonic - the AI art generator. With its creative suggestions, this Writesonic's AI image generator can help unleash your inner artist and share your creations with the world. Image Computer [](https://image.computer/) Most downloaded Instagram Captions App (+more creator tools) [](https://captionplus.app/) Join 3 Million+ Instagram Creators who use CaptionPlus to find Instagram Captions, Hashtags, Feed Planning, Reel Ideas, IG Story Design and more. Writecream - Best AI Writer & Content Generator - Writecream [](https://www.writecream.com/) Sentence Rewriter is a free tool to reword a sentence, paragraph and even entire essays in a short amount of time. Hypotenuse AI: AI Writing Assistant and Text Generator [](https://www.hypotenuse.ai/) Turn a few keywords into original, insightful articles, product descriptions and social media copy with AI copywriting—all in just minutes. Try it free today. Text to Speach Listnr: Generate realistic Text to Speech voiceovers in seconds [](https://www.listnr.tech/) AI Voiceover Generator with over 600+ voiceovers in 80+ languages, go from Text to Voice in seconds. Get started for Free! Free Text to Speech: Online, App, Software, Commercial license with Natural Sounding Voices. [](https://www.naturalreaders.com/) Free text to speech online app with natural voices, convert text to audio and mp3, for personal and commercial use Developers OverAPI.com | Collecting all the cheat sheets [](https://overapi.com/) OverAPI.com is a site collecting all the cheatsheets,all! Search Engine For Devs [](https://you.com/) Spline - Design tool for 3D web browser experiences [](https://spline.design/) Create web-based 3D browser experiences Image to HTML CSS converter. Convert image to HTML CSS with AI: Fronty [](https://fronty.com/) Fronty - Image to HTML CSS code converter. Convert image to HTML powered by AI. Sketchfab - The best 3D viewer on the web [](https://sketchfab.com/) With a community of over one million creators, we are the world’s largest platform to publish, share, and discover 3D content on web, mobile, AR, and VR. Railway [](https://railway.app/) Railway is an infrastructure platform where you can provision infrastructure, develop with that infrastructure locally, and then deploy to the cloud. JSON Crack - Crack your data into pieces [](https://jsoncrack.com/) Simple visualization tool for your JSON data. No forced structure, paste your JSON and view it instantly. Locofy.ai - ship your products 3-4x faster — with low code [](https://www.locofy.ai/) Turn your designs into production-ready frontend code for mobile apps and web. Ship products 3-4x faster with your existing design tools, tech stacks & workflows. Oh Shit, Git!?! [](https://ohshitgit.com/) Carbon | Create and share beautiful images of your source code [](https://carbon.now.sh/) Carbon is the easiest way to create and share beautiful images of your source code. GPRM : GitHub Profile ReadMe Maker [](https://gprm.itsvg.in/) Best Profile Generator, Create your perfect GitHub Profile ReadMe in the best possible way. Lots of features and tools included, all for free ! HubSpot | Software, Tools, and Resources to Help Your Business Grow Better [](https://www.hubspot.com/) HubSpot’s integrated CRM platform contains the marketing, sales, service, operations, and website-building software you need to grow your business. QuickRef.ME - Quick Reference Cheat Sheet [](https://quickref.me/) Share quick reference and cheat sheet for developers massCode | A free and open source code snippets manager for developers [](https://masscode.io/) Code snippets manager for developers, developed using web technologies. Snyk | Developer security | Develop fast. Stay secure. [](https://snyk.io/) Snyk helps software-driven businesses develop fast and stay secure. Continuously find and fix vulnerabilities for npm, Maven, NuGet, RubyGems, PyPI and more. Developer Roadmaps [](https://roadmap.sh/) Community driven roadmaps, articles, guides, quizzes, tips and resources for developers to learn from, identify their career paths, know what they don't know, find out the knowledge gaps, learn and improve. CSS Generators Get Waves – Create SVG waves for your next design [](https://getwaves.io/) A free SVG wave generator to make unique SVG waves for your next web design. Choose a curve, adjust complexity, randomize! Box Shadows [](https://box-shadow.dev/) Tridiv | CSS 3D Editor [](http://tridiv.com/) Tridiv is a web-based editor for creating 3D shapes in CSS Glassmorphism CSS Generator - Glass UI [](https://ui.glass/generator/) Generate CSS and HTML components using the glassmorphism design specifications based on the Glass UI library. Blobmaker - Make organic SVG shapes for your next design [](https://www.blobmaker.app/) Make organic SVG shapes for your next design. Modify the complexity, contrast, and color, to generate unique SVG blobs every time. Keyframes.app [](https://keyframes.app/) cssFilters.co - Custom and Instagram like photo filters for CSS [](https://www.cssfilters.co/) Visual playground for generating CSS for custom and Instagram like photo filters. Experiment with your own uploaded photo or select one from the Unsplash collection. CSS Animations Animista - CSS Animations on Demand [](https://animista.net/) Animista is a CSS animation library and a place where you can play with a collection of ready-made CSS animations and download only those you will use. Build Internal apps Superblocks | Save 100s of developer hours on internal tools [](https://www.superblocks.com/) Superblocks is the fast, easy and secure way for developers to build custom internal tools fast. Connect your databases & APIs. Drag and drop UI components. Extend with Python or Javascript. Deploy in 1-click. Secure and Monitor using your favorite tools Budibase | Build internal tools in minutes, the easy way [](https://budibase.com/) Budibase is a modern, open source low-code platform for building modern internal applications in minutes. Retool | Build internal tools, remarkably fast. [](https://retool.com/) Retool is the fast way to build internal tools. Drag-and-drop our building blocks and connect them to your databases and APIs to build your own tools, instantly. Connects with Postgres, REST APIs, GraphQL, Firebase, Google Sheets, and more. Built by developers, for developers. Trusted by startups and Fortune 500s. Sign up for free. GitHub Repositories GitHub - vasanthk/how-web-works: What happens behind the scenes when we type www.google.com in a browser? [](https://github.com/vasanthk/how-web-works) What happens behind the scenes when we type www.google.com in a browser? - GitHub - vasanthk/how-web-works: What happens behind the scenes when we type www.google.com in a browser? GitHub - kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap: Interactive roadmaps, guides and other educational content to help developers grow in their careers. [](https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap) Interactive roadmaps, guides and other educational content to help developers grow in their careers. - GitHub - kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap: Interactive roadmaps, guides and other educational content to help developers grow in their careers. GitHub - apptension/developer-handbook: An opinionated guide on how to become a professional Web/Mobile App Developer. [](https://github.com/apptension/developer-handbook) An opinionated guide on how to become a professional Web/Mobile App Developer. - GitHub - apptension/developer-handbook: An opinionated guide on how to become a professional Web/Mobile App Developer. ProfileMe.dev | Create an amazing GitHub profile in minutes [](https://www.profileme.dev/) ProfileMe.dev | Create an amazing GitHub profile in minutes GitHub - Kristories/awesome-guidelines: A curated list of high quality coding style conventions and standards. [](https://github.com/Kristories/awesome-guidelines) A curated list of high quality coding style conventions and standards. - GitHub - Kristories/awesome-guidelines: A curated list of high quality coding style conventions and standards. GitHub - tiimgreen/github-cheat-sheet: A list of cool features of Git and GitHub. [](https://github.com/tiimgreen/github-cheat-sheet) A list of cool features of Git and GitHub. Contribute to tiimgreen/github-cheat-sheet development by creating an account on GitHub. GitHub - andreasbm/web-skills: A visual overview of useful skills to learn as a web developer [](https://github.com/andreasbm/web-skills) A visual overview of useful skills to learn as a web developer - GitHub - andreasbm/web-skills: A visual overview of useful skills to learn as a web developer GitHub - Ebazhanov/linkedin-skill-assessments-quizzes: Full reference of LinkedIn answers 2022 for skill assessments (aws-lambda, rest-api, javascript, react, git, html, jquery, mongodb, java, Go, python, machine-learning, power-point) linkedin excel test lösungen, linkedin machine learning test LinkedIn test questions and answers [](https://github.com/Ebazhanov/linkedin-skill-assessments-quizzes) Full reference of LinkedIn answers 2022 for skill assessments (aws-lambda, rest-api, javascript, react, git, html, jquery, mongodb, java, Go, python, machine-learning, power-point) linkedin excel test lösungen, linkedin machine learning test LinkedIn test questions and answers - GitHub - Ebazhanov/linkedin-skill-assessments-quizzes: Full reference of LinkedIn answers 2022 for skill assessments (aws-lambda, rest-api, javascript, react, git, html, jquery, mongodb, java, Go, python, machine-learning, power-point) linkedin excel test lösungen, linkedin machine learning test LinkedIn test questions and answers Blockchain/Crypto Dashboards [](https://dune.com/) Blockchain ecosystem analytics by and for the community. Explore and share data from Ethereum, xDai, Polygon, Optimism, BSC and Solana for free. Introduction - The Anchor Book v0.24.0 [](https://book.anchor-lang.com/introduction/introduction.html) Crypto & Fiat Exchange Super App | Trade, Save & Spend | hi [](https://hi.com/) Buy, Trade, Send and Earn Crypto & Fiat. Deposit Bitcoin, ETH, USDT and other cryptos and start earning. Get the hi Debit Card and Multi-Currency IBAN Account. Moralis Web3 - Enterprise-Grade Web3 APIs [](https://moralis.io/) Bridge the development gap between Web2 and Web3 with Moralis’ powerful Web3 APIs. Mirror [](https://mirror.xyz/) Built on web3 for web3, Mirror’s robust publishing platform pushes the boundaries of writing online—whether it’s the next big white paper or a weekly community update. Makerdao [](https://blog.makerdao.com/) Sholi — software for Investors & Traders / Sholi MetriX [](https://sholi.io/) Sholi — software for Investors & Traders / Sholi MetriX Stock Trading Quiver Quantitative [](https://www.quiverquant.com/) Quiver Quantitative Chart Prime - The only tool you'll need for trading assets across all markets [](https://chartprime.com/) ChartPrime offers a toolkit that will take your trading game to the next level. Visit our site for a full rundown of features and helpful tutorials. Learning Hacker Rank [](https://www.hackerrank.com/) Coderbyte | Code Screening, Challenges, & Interview Prep [](https://coderbyte.com/) Improve your coding skills with our library of 300+ challenges and prepare for coding interviews with content from leading technology companies. Competitive Programming | Participate & Learn | CodeChef [](https://www.codechef.com/) Learn competitive programming with the help of CodeChef's coding competitions. Take part in these online coding contests to level up your skills Learn to Code - for Free | Codecademy [](https://www.codecademy.com/) Learn the technical skills to get the job you want. Join over 50 million people choosing Codecademy to start a new career (or advance in their current one). Free Code Camp [](https://www.freecodecamp.org/) Learn to Code — For Free Sololearn: Learn to Code [](https://www.sololearn.com/home) Join Now to learn the basics or advance your existing skills Mimo: The coding app you need to learn to code! Python, HTML, JavaScript [](https://getmimo.com/) Join more than 17 million learners worldwide. Learn to code for free. Learn Python, JavaScript, CSS, SQL, HTML, and more with our free code learning app. Free for developers [](https://free-for.dev/#/) Your Career in Web Development Starts Here | The Odin Project [](https://www.theodinproject.com/) The Odin Project empowers aspiring web developers to learn together for free Code Learning Games CheckiO - coding games and programming challenges for beginner and advanced [](https://checkio.org/) CheckiO - coding websites and programming games. Improve your coding skills by solving coding challenges and exercises online with your friends in a fun way. Exchanges experience with other users online through fun coding activities Coding for Kids | Game-Based Programming | CodeMonkey [](https://www.codemonkey.com/) CodeMonkey is a leading coding for kids program. Through its award-winning courses, millions of students learn how to code in real programming languages. Coding Games and Programming Challenges to Code Better [](https://www.codingame.com/) CodinGame is a challenge-based training platform for programmers where you can play with the hottest programming topics. Solve games, code AI bots, learn from your peers, have fun. Learn VIM while playing a game - VIM Adventures [](https://vim-adventures.com/) VIM Adventures is an online game based on VIM's keyboard shortcuts. It's the "Zelda meets text editing" game. So come have some fun and learn some VIM! CodeCombat - Coding games to learn Python and JavaScript [](https://codecombat.com/) Learn typed code through a programming game. Learn Python, JavaScript, and HTML as you solve puzzles and learn to make your own coding games and websites. Design Useberry - Codeless prototype analytics [](https://www.useberry.com/) User testing feedback & rich insights in minutes, not months! Figma: the collaborative interface design tool. [](https://www.figma.com/) Build better products as a team. Design, prototype, and gather feedback all in one place with Figma. Dribbble - Discover the World’s Top Designers & Creative Professionals [](https://dribbble.com/) Find Top Designers & Creative Professionals on Dribbble. We are where designers gain inspiration, feedback, community, and jobs. Your best resource to discover and connect with designers worldwide. Photopea | Online Photo Editor [](https://www.photopea.com/) Photopea Online Photo Editor lets you edit photos, apply effects, filters, add text, crop or resize pictures. Do Online Photo Editing in your browser for free! Toools.design – An archive of 1000+ Design Resources [](https://www.toools.design/) A growing archive of over a thousand design resources, weekly updated for the community. Discover highly useful design tools you never thought existed. All Online Tools in One Box | 10015 Tools [](https://10015.io/) All online tools you need in one box for free. Build anything online with “all-in-one toolbox”. All tools are easy-to-use, blazing fast & free. Phase - Digital Design Reinvented| Phase [](https://phase.com/) Design and prototype websites and apps visually and intuitively, in a new powerful product reworked for the digital age. Animated Backgrounds [](https://animatedbackgrounds.me/) A Collection of 30+ animated backgrounds for websites and blogs.With Animated Backgrounds, set a simple, elegant background animations on your websites and blogs. Trianglify.io · Low Poly Pattern Generator [](https://trianglify.io/) Trianglify.io is a tool for generating low poly triangle patterns that can be used as wallpapers and website assets. Cool Backgrounds [](https://coolbackgrounds.io/) Explore a beautifully curated selection of cool backgrounds that you can add to blogs, websites, or as desktop and phone wallpapers. SVG Repo - Free SVG Vectors and Icons [](https://www.svgrepo.com/) Free Vectors and Icons in SVG format. ✅ Download free mono or multi color vectors for commercial use. Search in 300.000+ Free SVG Vectors and Icons. Microcopy - Short copy text for your website. [](https://www.microcopy.me/) Search micro UX copy text: slogans, headlines, notifications, CTA, error messages, email, account preferences, and much more. 3D icons and icon paks - Free3Dicon [](https://free3dicon.com/) All 3D icons you need in one place. This is a collection of free, beautiful, trending 3D icons, that you can use in any project. Love 3D Icon [](https://free3dicons.com/) Downloads free 3D icons GIMP - GNU Image Manipulation Program [](https://www.gimp.org/) GIMP - The GNU Image Manipulation Program: The Free and Open Source Image Editor blender.org - Home of the Blender project - Free and Open 3D Creation Software [](https://www.blender.org/) The Freedom to Create 3D Design Software | 3D Modeling on the Web | SketchUp [](https://www.sketchup.com/) SketchUp is a premier 3D design software that truly makes 3D modeling for everyone, with a simple to learn yet robust toolset that empowers you to create whatever you can imagine. Free Logo Maker - Create a Logo in Seconds - Shopify [](https://www.shopify.com/tools/logo-maker) Free logo maker tool to generate custom design logos in seconds. This logo creator is built for entrepreneurs on the go with hundreds of templates, free vectors, fonts and icons to design your own logo. The easiest way to create business logos online. All your design tools in one place | Renderforest [](https://www.renderforest.com/) Time to get your brand noticed. Create professional videos, logos, mockups, websites, and graphics — all in one place. Get started now! Prompt Hero [](https://prompthero.com/) Type Scale - A Visual Calculator [](https://type-scale.com/) Preview and choose the right type scale for your project. Experiment with font size, scale and different webfonts. DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion [](https://dreamfusion3d.github.io/) DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion, 2022. The branding style guidelines documents archive [](https://brandingstyleguides.com/) Welcome to the brand design manual documents directory. Search over our worldwide style assets handpicked collection, access to PDF documents for inspiration. Super designer | Create beautiful designs with a few clicks [](https://superdesigner.co/) Create beautiful designs with a few clicks. Simple design tools to generate unique patterns, backgrounds, 3D shapes, colors & images for social media, websites and more Readymag—a design tool to create websites without coding [](https://readymag.com/) Meet the most elegant, simple and powerful web-tool for designing websites, presentations, portfolios and all kinds of digital publications. ffflux: Online SVG Fluid Gradient Background Generator | fffuel [](https://fffuel.co/ffflux/) SVG generator to make fluid gradient backgrounds that feel organic and motion-like. Perfect to add a feeling of motion and fluidity to your web designs. Generate unique SVG design assets | Haikei [](https://haikei.app/) A web-based design tool to generate unique SVG design assets for websites, social media, blog posts, desktop and mobile wallpapers, posters, and more! Our generators let you discover, customize, randomize, and export generative SVG design assets ready to use with your favorite design tools. UI/UX - Inspirational Free Website Builder Software | 10,000+ Free Templates [](https://nicepage.com/) Nicepage is your website builder software breaking limitations common for website builders with revolutionary freehand positioning. 7000+ Free Templates. Easy Drag-n-Drop. No coding. Mobile-friendly. Clean HTML. Super designer | Create beautiful designs with a few clicks [](https://superdesigner.co/) Create beautiful designs with a few clicks. Simple design tools to generate unique patterns, backgrounds, 3D shapes, colors & images for social media, websites and more Pika – Create beautiful mockups from screenshots [](https://pika.style/) Quickly create beautiful website and device mockup from screenshot. Pika lets you capture website screenshots form URL, add device and browser frames, customize background and more LiveTerm [](https://liveterm.vercel.app/) Minimal Gallery – Web design inspiration [](https://minimal.gallery/) For the love of beautiful, clean and functional websites. Awwwards - Website Awards - Best Web Design Trends [](https://www.awwwards.com/) Awwwards are the Website Awards that recognize and promote the talent and effort of the best developers, designers and web agencies in the world. Design Systems For Figma [](https://www.designsystemsforfigma.com/) A collection of Design Systems for Figma from all over the globe. Superside: Design At Scale For Ambitious Brands [](https://www.superside.com/) We are an always-on design company. Get a team of dedicated designers, speedy turnarounds, magical creative collaboration tech and the top 1% of global talent. UXArchive - Made by Waldo [](https://uxarchive.com/) UXArchive the world's largest library of mobile user flows. Be inspired to design the best user experiences. Search by Muzli [](https://search.muz.li/) Search, discover, test and create beautiful color palettes for your projects Siteinspire | Web Design Inspiration [](https://www.siteinspire.com/) SAVEE [](https://savee.it/) The best way to save and share inspiration. A little corner of the internet to find good landing page copywriting examples [](https://greatlandingpagecopy.com/) A little corner of the internet to find great landing page copywriting examples. The Best Landing Page Examples For Design Inspiration - SaaS Landing Page [](https://saaslandingpage.com/) SaaS Landing Page showcases the best landing page examples created by top-class SaaS companies. Get ideas and inspirations for your next design project. Websites Free templates Premium Bootstrap Themes and Templates: Download @ Creative Tim [](https://www.creative-tim.com/) UI Kits, Templates and Dashboards built on top of Bootstrap, Vue.js, React, Angular, Node.js and Laravel. Join over 2,014,387+ creatives to access all our products! Free Bootstrap Themes, Templates, Snippets, and Guides - Start Bootstrap [](https://startbootstrap.com/) Start Bootstrap develops free to download, open source Bootstrap 5 themes, templates, and snippets and creates guides and tutorials to help you learn more about designing and developing with Bootstrap. Free Website Templates [](https://freewebsitetemplates.com/) Get your free website templates here and use them on your website without needing to link back to us. One Page Love - One Page Website Inspiration and Templates [](https://onepagelove.com/) One Page Love is a One Page website design gallery showcasing the best Single Page websites, templates and resources. Free CSS | 3400 Free Website Templates, CSS Templates and Open Source Templates [](https://www.free-css.com/) Free CSS has 3400 free website templates, all templates are free CSS templates, open source templates or creative commons templates. Free Bootstrap Themes and Website Templates | BootstrapMade [](https://bootstrapmade.com/) At BootstrapMade, we create beautiful website templates and bootstrap themes using Bootstrap, the most popular HTML, CSS and JavaScript framework. Free and Premium Bootstrap Themes, Templates by Themesberg [](https://themesberg.com/) Free and Premium Bootstrap themes, templates, admin dashboards and UI kits used by over 38820 web developers and software companies HTML, Vue.js and React templates for startup landing pages - Cruip [](https://cruip.com/) Cruip is a gallery of premium and free HTML, Vue.js and React templates for startups and SaaS. Free Website Templates Download | WordPress Themes - W3Layouts [](https://w3layouts.com/) Want to download free website templates? W3Layouts WordPress themes and website templates are built with responsive web design techniques. Download now! Free HTML Landing Page Templates and UI Kits | UIdeck [](https://uideck.com/) Free HTML Landing Page Templates, Bootstrap Themes, React Templates, HTML Templates, Tailwind Templates, and UI Kits. Create Online Graphics Snappa - Quick & Easy Graphic Design Software [](https://snappa.com/) Snappa makes it easy to create any type of online graphic. Create & publish images for social media, blogs, ads, and more! Canva [](https://www.canva.com/) Polotno Studio - Make graphical designs [](https://studio.polotno.com) Free online design editor. Create images for social media, youtube previews, facebook covers Free Logo Maker: Design Custom Logos | Adobe Express [](https://www.adobe.com/express/create/logo) The Adobe Express logo maker is instant, intuitive, and intelligent. Use it to generate a wide range of possibilities for your own logo. Photo Editor: Fotor – Free Online Photo Editing & Image Editor [](https://www.fotor.com/) Fotor's online photo editor helps you edit photos with free online photo editing tools. Crop photos, resize images, and add effects/filters, text, and graphics in just a few clicks. Photoshop online has never been easier with Fotor's free online photo editor. VistaCreate – Free Graphic Design Software with 70,000+ Free Templates [](https://create.vista.com/) Looking for free graphic design software? Easily create professional designs with VistaCreate, a free design tool with powerful features and 50K+ ready-made templates Draw Freely | Inkscape [](https://inkscape.org/) Inkscape is professional quality vector graphics software which runs on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows desktop computers. Visual & Video Maker Trusted By 11 Million Users - Piktochart [](https://piktochart.com/) With Piktochart, you can create professional-looking infographics, flyers, posters, charts, videos, and more. No design experience needed. Start for free. The Web's Favorite Online Graphic Design Tool | Stencil [](https://getstencil.com/) Stencil is a fantastically easy-to-use online graphic design tool and image editor built for business owners, social media marketers, and bloggers. Pablo by Buffer - Design engaging images for your social media posts in under 30 seconds [](https://pablo.buffer.com/) Buffer makes it super easy to share any page you're reading. Keep your Buffer topped up and we automagically share them for you through the day. Free Online Graphic Design Software | Create stunning designs in seconds. [](https://desygner.com/) Easy drag and drop graphic design tool for anyone to use with 1000's of ready made templates. Create & print professional business cards, flyers, social posts and more. Color Pallet Color Palettes for Designers and Artists - Color Hunt [](https://colorhunt.co/) Discover the newest hand-picked color palettes of Color Hunt. Get color inspiration for your design and art projects. Coolors - The super fast color palettes generator! [](https://coolors.co/) Generate or browse beautiful color combinations for your designs. Get color palette inspiration from nature - colorpalettes.earth [](https://colorpalettes.earth/) Color palettes inspired by beautiful nature photos Color Palette Generator - Create Beautiful Color Schemes [](https://colors.muz.li/) Search, discover, test and create beautiful color palettes for your projects A Most Useful Color Picker | 0to255 [](https://0to255.com/) Find lighter and darker colors based on any color. Discover why over two million people have used 0to255 to choose colors for their website, logo, room interior, and print design projects. Colour Contrast Checker [](https://colourcontrast.cc/) Check the contrast between different colour combinations against WCAG standards Fonts Google Fonts [](https://fonts.google.com/) Making the web more beautiful, fast, and open through great typography Fonts In Use – Type at work in the real world. [](https://fontsinuse.com/) A searchable archive of typographic design, indexed by typeface, format, and topic. Wordmark - Helps you choose fonts! [](https://wordmark.it/) Wordmark helps you choose fonts by quickly displaying your text with your fonts. OH no Type Company [](https://ohnotype.co/) OH no Type Co. Retail and custom typefaces. Life’s a thrill, fonts are chill! Illustrations Illustrations | unDraw [](https://undraw.co/illustrations) The design project with open-source illustrations for any idea you can imagine and create. Create beautiful websites, products and applications with your color, for free. Design Junction [](https://designjunction.xyz/) Design Junction is a one-stop resource library for Designers and Creatives with curated list of best resources handpicked from around the web Humaaans: Mix-&-Match illustration library [](https://www.humaaans.com/) Mix-&-match illustrations of people with a design library for InVIsion Studio and Sketch. Stubborn - Free Illustrations Generator [](https://stubborn.fun/) Free illustrations generator for Figma and Sketch. Get the opportunity to design your characters using symbols and styles. Open Peeps, Hand-Drawn Illustration Library [](https://www.openpeeps.com/) Open Peeps is a hand-drawn illustration library to create scenes of people. You can use them in product illustration, marketing, comics, product states, user flows, personas, storyboarding, quinceañera invitations, or whatever you want! ⠀ Reshot | Free icons & illustrations [](https://www.reshot.com/) Design freely with instant downloads of curated SVG icons and vector illustrations. All free with commercial licensing. No attribution required. Blush: Illustrations for everyone [](https://blush.design/) Blush makes it easy to add free illustrations to your designs. Play with fully customizable graphics made by artists across the globe. Mockups Angle 4 - 5000+ Device Mockups for Figma, Sketch and XD [](https://angle.sh/) Vector mockups for iPhone, iPad, Android and Mac devices, including the new iPhone 13, Pro, Pro Max and Mini. Perfect for presenting your apps. Huge library of components, compositions, wallpapers and plugins made for Figma, Sketch and XD. Make Mockups, Logos, Videos and Designs in Seconds [](https://placeit.net/) Get unlimited downloads on all our 100K templates! You can make a logo, video, mockup, flyer, business card and social media image in seconds right from your browser. Free and premium tools for graphic designers | Lstore Graphics [](https://www.ls.graphics/) Free and premium mockups, UI/UX tools, scene creators for busy designers Logo Design & Brand Identity Platform for Entrepreneurs | Looka [](https://looka.com/) Logojoy is now Looka! Design a Logo, make a website, and create a Brand Identity you’ll love with the power of Artificial Intelligence. 100% free to use. Create stunning product mockups easily and online - Smartmockups [](https://smartmockups.com/) Smartmockups enables you to create stunning high-resolution mockups right inside your browser within one interface across multiple devices. Previewed - Free mockup generator for your app [](https://previewed.app/) Join Previewed to create stunning 3D image shots and animations for your app. Choose from hundreds of ready made mockups, or create your own. Free Design Software - Graphic Online Maker - Glorify [](https://www.glorify.com/) Create professional and high converting social media posts, ads, infographics, presentations, and more with Glorify, a free design software & graphic maker. Other BuiltWith Technology Lookup [](https://builtwith.com/) Web technology information profiler tool. Find out what a website is built with. Compress JPEG Images Online [](https://compressjpeg.com/) Compress JPEG images and photos for displaying on web pages, sharing on social networks or sending by email. PhotoRoom - Remove Background and Create Product Pictures [](https://www.photoroom.com/) Create product and portrait pictures using only your phone. Remove background, change background and showcase products. Magic Eraser - Remove unwanted things from images in seconds [](https://www.magiceraser.io/) Magic Eraser - Use AI to remove unwanted things from images in seconds. Upload an image, mark the bit you need removed, download the fixed up image. Compressor.io - optimize and compress JPEG photos and PNG images [](https://compressor.io/) Optimize and compress JPEG, PNG, SVG, GIF and WEBP images online. Compress, resize and rename your photos for free. Remove Video Background – Unscreen [](https://www.unscreen.com/) Remove the background of any video - 100% automatically, online & free! Goodbye Greenscreen. Hello Unscreen. Noun Project: Free Icons & Stock Photos for Everything [](https://thenounproject.com/) Noun Project features the most diverse collection of icons and stock photos ever. Download SVG and PNG. Browse over 5 million art-quality icons and photos. Design Principles [](https://principles.design/) An Open Source collection of Design Principles and methods Shapefest™ - A massive library of free 3D shapes [](https://www.shapefest.com/) A massive free library of beautifully rendered 3D shapes. 160,000+ high resolution PNG images in one cohesive library. Learning UX Degreeless.design - Everything I Learned in Design School [](https://degreeless.design/) This is a list of everything I've found useful in my journey of learning design, and an ongoing list of things I think you should read. For budding UX, UI, Interaction, or whatever other title designers. UX Tools | Practical UX skills and tools [](https://uxtools.co/) Lessons and resources from two full-time product designers. Built For Mars [](https://builtformars.com/) On a mission to help the world build better user experiences by demystifying UX. Thousands of hours of research packed into UX case studies. Case Study Club – Curated UX Case Study Gallery [](https://www.casestudy.club/) Case Study Club is the biggest curated gallery of the best UI/UX design case studies. Get inspired by industry-leading designers, openly sharing their UX process. The Guide to Design [](https://start.uxdesign.cc/) A self-guided class to help you get started in UX and answer key questions about craft, design, and career Uxcel - Where design careers are built [](https://app.uxcel.com/explore) Available on any device anywhere in the world, Uxcel is the best way to improve and learn UX design online in just 5 minutes per day. UI & UX Design Tips by Jim Raptis. [](https://www.uidesign.tips/) Learn UI & UX Design with practical byte-sized tips and in-depth articles from Jim Raptis. Entrepreneur Instant Username Search [](https://instantusername.com/#/) Instant Username Search checks out if your username is available on more than 100 social media sites. Results appear instantly as you type. Flourish | Data Visualization & Storytelling [](https://flourish.studio/) Beautiful, easy data visualization and storytelling PiPiADS - #1 TikTok Ads Spy Tool [](https://www.pipiads.com/) PiPiADS is the best tiktok ads spy tool .We provide tiktok advertising,advertising on tiktok,tiktok ads examples,tiktok ads library,tiktok ads best practices,so you can understand the tiktok ads cost and master the tiktok ads 2021 and tiktok ads manager. Minea - The best adspy for product search in ecommerce and dropshipping [](https://en.minea.com/) Minea is the ultimate e-commerce product search tool. Minea tracks all ads on all networks. Facebook Ads, influencer product placements, Snapspy, all networks are tracked. Stop paying adspy 149€ for one network and discover Minea. AdSpy [](https://adspy.com/) Google Trends [](https://trends.google.com/) ScoreApp: Advanced Quiz Funnel Marketing | Make a Quiz Today [](https://www.scoreapp.com/) ScoreApp makes quiz funnel marketing easy, so you can attract relevant warm leads, insightful data and increase your sales. Try for free today Mailmodo - Send Interactive Emails That Drive Conversions [](https://www.mailmodo.com/) Use Mailmodo to create and send interactive emails your customers love. Drive conversions and get better email ROI. Sign up for a free trial now. 185 Top E-Commerce Sites Ranked by User Experience Performance – Baymard Institute [](https://baymard.com/ux-benchmark) See the ranked UX performance of the 185 largest e-commerce sites in the US and Europe. The chart summarizes 50,000+ UX performance ratings. Metricool - Analyze, manage and measure your digital content [](https://metricool.com/) Social media scheduling, web analytics, link in bio and reporting. Metricool is free per live for one brand. START HERE Visualping: #1 Website change detection, monitoring and alerts [](https://visualping.io/) More than 1.5 millions users monitor changes in websites with Visualping, the No1 website change detection, website checker, webpage change monitoring and webpage change detection tool. Gumroad – Sell what you know and see what sticks [](https://gumroad.com/) Gumroad is a powerful, but simple, e-commerce platform. We make it easy to earn your first dollar online by selling digital products, memberships and more. Product Hunt – The best new products in tech. [](https://www.producthunt.com/) Product Hunt is a curation of the best new products, every day. Discover the latest mobile apps, websites, and technology products that everyone's talking about. 12ft Ladder [](https://12ft.io/) Show me a 10ft paywall, I’ll show you a 12ft ladder. namecheckr | Social and Domain Name Availability Search For Brand Professionals [](https://www.namecheckr.com/) Social and Domain Name Availability Search For Brand Professionals Excel AI Formula Generator - Excelformulabot.com [](https://excelformulabot.com/) Transform your text instructions into Excel formulas in seconds with the help of AI. Z-Library [](https://z-lib.org/) Global Print On Demand Platform | Gelato [](https://www.gelato.com/) Create and sell custom products online. With local production in 33 countries, easy integration, and 24/7 customer support, Gelato is an all-in-one platform. Freecycle: Front Door [](https://freecycle.org/) Free eBooks | Project Gutenberg [](https://www.gutenberg.org/) Project Gutenberg is a library of free eBooks. Convertio — File Converter [](https://convertio.co/) Convertio - Easy tool to convert files online. More than 309 different document, image, spreadsheet, ebook, archive, presentation, audio and video formats supported. Namechk [](https://namechk.com/) Crazy Egg Website — Optimization | Heatmaps, Recordings, Surveys & A/B Testing [](https://www.crazyegg.com/) Use Crazy Egg to see what's hot and what's not, and to know what your web visitors are doing with tools, such as heatmaps, recordings, surveys, A/B testing & more. Ifttt [](https://ifttt.com/) Also Asked [](https://alsoasked.com/) Business Name Generator - Easily create Brandable Business Names - Namelix [](https://namelix.com/) Namelix uses artificial intelligence to create a short, brandable business name. Search for domain availability, and instantly generate a logo for your new business Merch Informer [](https://merchinformer.com/) Headline Generator [](https://www.title-generator.com/) Title Generator: create 700 headlines with ONE CLICK: Content Ideas + Catchy Headlines + Ad Campaign E-mail Subject Lines + Emotional Titles. Simple - Efficient - One Click Make [](https://www.make.com/en) Create and add calculator widgets to your website | CALCONIC_ [](https://www.calconic.com/) Web calculator builder empowers you to choose from a pre-made templates or build your own calculator widgets from a scratch without any need of programming knowledge Boost Your Views And Subscribers On YouTube - vidIQ [](https://vidiq.com/) vidIQ helps you acquire the tools and knowledge needed to grow your audience faster on YouTube and beyond. Learn More Last Pass [](https://www.lastpass.com/) Starter Story: Learn How People Are Starting Successful Businesses [](https://www.starterstory.com/) Starter Story interviews successful entrepreneurs and shares the stories behind their businesses. In each interview, we ask how they got started, how they grew, and how they run their business today. How To Say No [](https://www.starterstory.com/how-to-say-no) Saying no is hard, but it's also essential for your sanity. Here are some templates for how to say no - so you can take back your life. Think with Google - Discover Marketing Research & Digital Trends [](https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/) Uncover the latest marketing research and digital trends with data reports, guides, infographics, and articles from Think with Google. ClickUp™ | One app to replace them all [](https://clickup.com/) Our mission is to make the world more productive. To do this, we built one app to replace them all - Tasks, Docs, Goals, and Chat. The Manual [](https://manual.withcompound.com/) Wealth-planning resources for founders and startup employees Software for Amazon FBA Sellers & Walmart Sellers | Helium 10 [](https://www.helium10.com/) If you're looking for the best software for Amazon FBA & Walmart sellers on the market, check out Helium 10's capabilities online today! Buffer: All-you-need social media toolkit for small businesses [](https://buffer.com/) Use Buffer to manage your social media so that you have more time for your business. Join 160,000+ small businesses today. CPGD — The Consumer Packaged Goods Directory [](https://www.cpgd.xyz/) The Consumer Packaged Goods Directory is a platform to discover new brands and resources. We share weekly trends in our newsletter and partner with services to provide vetted, recommended platforms for our Directory brands. Jungle Scout [](https://www.junglescout.com/) BuzzSumo | The World's #1 Content Marketing Platform [](https://buzzsumo.com/) BuzzSumo powers the strategies of 500k+ marketers, with content marketing data on 8b articles, 42m websites, 300t engagements, 500k journalists & 492m questions. Login - Capital [](https://app.capital.xyz/) Raise, hold, spend, and send funds — all in one place. Marketing Pictory – Video Marketing Made Easy - Pictory.ai [](https://pictory.ai/) Pictory's powerful AI enables you to create and edit professional quality videos using text, no technical skills required or software to download. Tolstoy | Communicate with interactive videos [](https://www.gotolstoy.com/) Start having face-to-face conversations with your customers. Create Email Marketing Your Audience Will Love - MailerLite [](https://www.mailerlite.com/) Email marketing tools to grow your audience faster and drive revenue smarter. Get free access to premium features with a 30-day trial! Sign up now! Hypefury - Schedule & Automate Social Media Marketing [](https://hypefury.com/) Save time on social media while creating more value, and growing your audience faster. Schedule & automate your social media experience! Klaviyo: Marketing Automation Platform for Email & SMS [](https://www.klaviyo.com/) Klaviyo, an ecommerce marketing automation platform for email marketing and sms syncs your tech stack with your website store to scale your business. Online Email & Lead Scraper | Klean Leads [](https://www.kleanleads.com/) Klean Leads is an online email scraper & email address finder. Use it to book more appointments, get more replies, and close more sales. PhantomBuster [](https://phantombuster.com/) Call to Action Examples - 300+ CTA Phrases [](https://ctaexamples.com/) See the best CTA example in every situation covered by the library of 300+ CTA goals. Use the examples to create your own CTAs in minutes. Creative Center: one-stop creative solution for TikTok [](https://ads.tiktok.com/business/creativecenter/pc/en?from=001010) Come to get your next great idea for TikTok. Here you can find the best performing ads, viral videos, and trending hashtags across regions and verticals. Groove.cm GrooveFunnels, GrooveMail with CRM and Digital Marketing Automation Platform - Groove.cm with GrooveFunnels, GroovePages, GrooveKart [](https://groove.cm/) Groove is a website creator, page builder, sales funnel maker, membership site platform, email autoresponder, blog tool, shopping cart system, ecommerce store solution, affiliate manager, video marketing software and more apps to help build your online business. SurveyMonkey: The World’s Most Popular Free Online Survey Tool [](https://www.surveymonkey.com/) Use SurveyMonkey to drive your business forward by using our free online survey tool to capture the voices and opinions of the people who matter most to you. Video Maker | Create Videos Online | Promo.com [](https://promo.com/) Free customizable video maker to help boost your business. Video creator for ads, social media, product and explainer videos, and for anything else you need! beehiiv — The newsletter platform built for growth [](https://www.beehiiv.com/) Access the best tools available in email, helping your newsletter scale and monetize like never before. GetResponse | Professional Email Marketing for Everyone [](https://www.getresponse.com/) No matter your level of expertise, we have a solution for you. At GetResponse, it's email marketing done right. Start your free account today! Search Email Newsletter Archives : Email Tuna [](https://emailtuna.com/) Explore newsletters without subscribing. Get email design ideas, discount coupon codes and exclusive newsletters deals. Database of email newsletters archived from all over the internet. Other Tools Simplescraper — Scrape Websites and turn them into APIs [](https://simplescraper.io/) Web scraping made easy — a powerful and free Chrome extension for scraping websites in your browser, automated in the cloud, or via API. No code required. Exploding Topics - Discover the hottest new trends. [](https://explodingtopics.com/) See new market opportunities, trending topics, emerging technology, hot startups and more on Exploding Topics. Scribe | Visual step-by-step guides [](https://scribehow.com/) By capturing your process while you work, Scribe automatically generates a visual guide, ready to share with the click of a button. Get It Free – The internet's BEST place to find free stuff! [](https://getitfree.us/) The internet's BEST place to find free stuff! Inflact by Ingramer – Marketing toolkit for Instagram [](https://inflact.com/) Sell on Instagram, build your audience, curate content with the right set of tools. Free Online Form Builder & Form Creator | Jotform [](https://www.jotform.com/) We believe the right form makes all the difference. Go from busywork to less work with powerful forms that use conditional logic, accept payments, generate reports, and automate workflows. Manage Your Team’s Projects From Anywhere | Trello [](https://trello.com/en) Trello is the ultimate project management tool. Start up a board in seconds, automate tedious tasks, and collaborate anywhere, even on mobile. TikTok hashtag generator - tiktokhashtags.com [](https://tiktokhashtags.com/) Find out which are the best hashtags for your TikTok post. Create Infographics, Reports and Maps - Infogram [](https://infogram.com/) Infogram is an easy to use infographic and chart maker. Create and share beautiful infographics, online reports, and interactive maps. Make your own here. Confetto - Create Instagram content in minutes [](https://www.confet.to/) Confetto is an all-in-one social media marketing tool built for SMBs and Social Media Managers. Confetto helps you create high-quality content for your audience that maximizes your reach and engagement on social media. Design, copy-write, plan and schedule content all in one place. Find email addresses in seconds • Hunter (Email Hunter) [](https://hunter.io/) Hunter is the leading solution to find and verify professional email addresses. Start using Hunter and connect with the people that matter for your business. PlayPhrase.me: Site for cinema archaeologists. [](https://playphrase.me/) Travel and explore the world of cinema. Largest collection of video quotes from movies on the web. #1 Free SEO Tools → SEO Review Tools [](https://www.seoreviewtools.com/) SEO Review Tools: 42+ Free Online SEO Tools build with ❤! → Rank checker → Domain Authority Checker → Keyword Tool → Backlink Checker Podcastle: Seamless Podcast Recording & Editing [](https://podcastle.ai/) Podcastle is the simplest way to create professional-quality podcasts. Record, edit, transcribe, and export your content with the power of AI, in an intuitive web-based platform. Save Ads from TikTok & Facebook Ad Library - Foreplay [](https://www.foreplay.co/) The best way to save ads from TikTok Creative Center and Facebook Ad Library, Organize them into boards and share ad inspiration with your team. Supercharge your creative strategy. SiteRight - Automate Your Business [](https://www.siteright.co/) SiteRight combines the abilities of multiple online resources into a single dashboard allowing you to have full control over how you manage your business. Diffchecker - Compare text online to find the difference between two text files [](https://www.diffchecker.com/) Diffchecker will compare text to find the difference between two text files. Just paste your files and click Find Difference! Yout.com [](https://yout.com/) Yout.com allows you to record videos from YouTube, FaceBook, SoundCloud, VK and others too many formats with clipping. Intuitively easy to use, with Yout the Internet DVR, with a bit of extra. AI Content Generation | Competitor Analysis - Predis.ai [](https://predis.ai/) Predis helps brands and influencers communicate better on social media by providing AI-powered content strategy analysis, content and hashtag recommendations. Castr | #1 Live Video Streaming Solution With Video Hosting [](https://castr.io/) Castr is a live video streaming solution platform that delivers enterprise-grade live videos globally with CDN. Live event streaming, video hosting, pre-recorded live, multi stream – all in one place using Castr. Headliner - Promote your podcast, radio show or blog with video [](https://www.headliner.app/) Easily create videos to promote your podcast, radio show or blog. Share to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Linkedin and anywhere video lives Create Presentations, Infographics, Design & Video | Visme [](https://www.visme.co/) Create professional presentations, interactive infographics, beautiful design and engaging videos, all in one place. Start using Visme today. Designrr - Create eBooks, Kindle books, Leadmagnets, Flipbooks and Blog posts from your content in 2 minutes [](https://designrr.io/) Upload any web page, MS Word, Video, Podcast or YouTube and it will create a stunning ebook and convert it to pdf, epub, Kindle or Flipbook. Quick and Easy to use. Full Training, 24x7 Support and Facebook Group Included. SwipeWell | Swipe File Software [](https://www.swipewell.app/) The only Chrome extension dedicated to helping you save, organize, and reference marketing examples (so you never feel stumped). Tango | Create how-to guides, in seconds [](https://www.tango.us/) Tango takes the pain out of documenting processes by automatically generating how-to guides while you work. Empower your team to do their best work. Ad Creative Bank [](https://www.theadcreativebank.com/) Get inspired by ads from across industries, learn new best practices, and start thinking creatively about your brand’s digital creative. Signature Hound • Free Email Signature and Template Generator [](https://signaturehound.com/) Our email signature generator is free and easy to use. Our customizable templates work with Gmail, Outlook, Office 365, Apple Mail and more. Organize All Of Your Marketing In One Place - CoSchedule [](https://coschedule.com/) Get more done in less time with the only work management software for marketers. B Ok - Books [](https://b-ok.xyz/categories) OmmWriter [](https://ommwriter.com/) Ommwriter Rebrandly | Custom URL Shortener, Branded Link Management, API [](https://www.rebrandly.com/) URL Shortener with custom domains. Shorten, brand and track URLs with the industry-leading link management platform. Free to try. API, Short URL, Custom Domains. Common Tools [](https://www.commontools.org/) Book Bolt [](https://bookbolt.io/) Zazzle [](https://www.zazzle.com/) InspiroBot [](https://inspirobot.me/) Download Free Cheat Sheets or Create Your Own! - Cheatography.com: Cheat Sheets For Every Occasion [](https://cheatography.com/) Find thousands of incredible, original programming cheat sheets, all free to download. No Code Chatbot Platform | Free Chatbot Platform | WotNot [](https://wotnot.io/) WotNot is the best no code chatbot platform to build AI bot easily without coding. Deploy bots and live chat on the Website, Messenger, WhatsApp, and more. SpyFu - Competitor Keyword Research Tools for Google Ads PPC & SEO [](https://www.spyfu.com/) Systeme.io - The only tool you need to launch your online business [](https://systeme.io/) Systeme.io has all the tools you need to grow your online business. Click here to create your FREE account! Productivity Temp Mail [](https://temp-mail.org/en/) The Visual Collaboration Platform for Every Team | Miro [](https://miro.com/) Scalable, secure, cross-device and enterprise-ready team collaboration whiteboard for distributed teams. Join 35M+ users from around the world. Grammarly: Free Online Writing Assistant [](https://www.grammarly.com/) Millions trust Grammarly’s free writing app to make their online writing clear and effective. Getting started is simple — download Grammarly’s extension today. Rize · Maximize Your Productivity [](https://rize.io/) Rize is a smart time tracker that improves your focus and helps you build better work habits. Motion | Manage calendars, meetings, projects & tasks in one app [](https://www.usemotion.com/) Automatically prioritize tasks, schedule meetings, and resolve calendar conflicts. Used by over 10k CEOs and professionals to improve focus, get more done, and streamline workday. Notion – One workspace. Every team. [](https://www.notion.so/) We’re more than a doc. Or a table. Customize Notion to work the way you do. Loom: Async Video Messaging for Work | Loom [](https://www.loom.com/) Record your screen, share your thoughts, and get things done faster with async video. Zapier | Automation that moves you forward [](https://zapier.com/) Workflow automation for everyone. Zapier automates your work across 5,000+ app integrations, so you can focus on what matters. Rows — The spreadsheet with superpowers [](https://rows.com/) Combine the power of a spreadsheet with built-in integrations from your business apps. Automate workflows and build tools that make work simpler. Free Online Form Builder | Tally [](https://tally.so/) Tally is the simplest way to create free forms & surveys. Create any type of form in seconds, without knowing how to code, and for free. Highbrow | Learn Something New Every Day. Join for Free! [](https://gohighbrow.com/) Highbrow helps you learn something new every day with 5-minute lessons delivered to your inbox every morning. Join over 400,000 lifelong learners today! Slick Write | Check your grammar. Proofread online. [](https://www.slickwrite.com/#!home) Slick Write is a powerful, FREE application that makes it easy to check your writing for grammar errors, potential stylistic mistakes, and other features of interest. Whether you're a blogger, novelist, SEO professional, or student writing an essay for school, Slick Write can help take your writing to the next level. Reverso [](https://www.reverso.net) Hemingway Editor [](https://hemingwayapp.com/) Web Apps by 123apps - Edit, Convert, Create [](https://123apps.com/) Splitbee – Your all-in-one analytics and conversion platform [](https://splitbee.io/) Track and optimize your online business with Splitbee. Analytics, Funnels, Automations, A/B Testing and more. PDF Tools Free PDF, Video, Image & Other Online Tools - TinyWow [](https://tinywow.com/) Smallpdf.com - A Free Solution to all your PDF Problems [](https://smallpdf.com/) Smallpdf - the platform that makes it super easy to convert and edit all your PDF files. Solving all your PDF problems in one place - and yes, free. Sejda helps with your PDF tasks [](https://www.sejda.com/) Sejda helps with your PDF tasks. Quick and simple online service, no installation required! Split, merge or convert PDF to images, alternate mix or split scans and many other. iLovePDF | Online PDF tools for PDF lovers [](https://www.ilovepdf.com/) iLovePDF is an online service to work with PDF files completely free and easy to use. Merge PDF, split PDF, compress PDF, office to PDF, PDF to JPG and more! Text rewrite QuillBot [](https://quillbot.com/) Pre Post SEO : Online SEO Tools [](https://www.prepostseo.com/) Free Online SEO Tools: plagiarism checker, grammar checker, image compressor, website seo checker, article rewriter, back link checker Wordtune | Your personal writing assistant & editor [](https://www.wordtune.com/) Wordtune is the ultimate AI writing tool that rewrites, rephrases, and rewords your writing! Trusted by over 1,000,000 users, Wordtune strengthens articles, academic papers, essays, emails and any other online content. Aliexpress alternatives CJdropshipping - Dropshipping from Worldwide to Worldwide! [](https://cjdropshipping.com/) China's reliable eCommerce dropshipping fulfillment supplier, helps small businesses ship worldwide, dropship and fulfillment services that are friendly to start-ups and small businesses, Shopify dropshipping. SaleHoo [](https://www.salehoo.com/) Alibaba.com: Manufacturers, Suppliers, Exporters & Importers from the world's largest online B2B marketplace [](https://www.alibaba.com/) Find quality Manufacturers, Suppliers, Exporters, Importers, Buyers, Wholesalers, Products and Trade Leads from our award-winning International Trade Site. Import & Export on alibaba.com Best Dropshipping Suppliers for US + EU Products | Spocket [](https://www.spocket.co/) Spocket allows you to easily start dropshipping top products from US and EU suppliers. Get started for free and see why Spocket consistently gets 5 stars. Best dropshipping supplier to the US [](https://www.usadrop.com/) THE ONLY AMERICAN-MADE FULFILLMENT CENTER IN CHINA. Our knowledge of the Worldwide dropshipping market and the Chinese Supply-Chain can't be beat! 阿里1688 [](https://www.1688.com/) 阿里巴巴（1688.com）是全球企业间（B2B）电子商务的著名品牌，为数千万网商提供海量商机信息和便捷安全的在线交易市场，也是商人们以商会友、真实互动的社区平台。目前1688.com已覆盖原材料、工业品、服装服饰、家居百货、小商品等12个行业大类，提供从原料--生产--加工--现货等一系列的供应产品和服务 Dropshipping Tools Oberlo | Where Self Made is Made [](https://www.oberlo.com/) Start selling online now with Shopify. All the videos, podcasts, ebooks, and dropshipping tools you'll need to build your online empire. Klaviyo: Marketing Automation Platform for Email & SMS [](https://www.klaviyo.com/) Klaviyo, an ecommerce marketing automation platform for email marketing and sms syncs your tech stack with your website store to scale your business. SMSBump | SMS Marketing E-Commerce App for Shopify [](https://smsbump.com/) SMSBump is an SMS marketing & automation app for Shopify. Segment customers, recover orders, send campaign text messages with a 35%+ click through rate. AfterShip: The #1 Shipment Tracking Platform [](https://www.aftership.com/) Order status lookup, branded tracking page, and multi-carrier tracking API for eCommerce. Supports USPS, FedEx, UPS, and 900+ carriers worldwide. #1 Dropshipping App | Zendrop [](https://zendrop.com/) Start and scale your own dropshipping business with Zendrop. Sell and easily fulfill your orders with the fastest shipping in the industry. Best Dropshipping Suppliers for US + EU Products | Spocket [](https://www.spocket.co/) Spocket allows you to easily start dropshipping top products from US and EU suppliers. Get started for free and see why Spocket consistently gets 5 stars. Video Editing Jitter • The simplest motion design tool on the web. [](https://jitter.video/) Animate your designs easily. Export your creations as videos or GIFs. All in your browser. DaVinci Resolve 18 | Blackmagic Design [](https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve) Professional video editing, color correction, visual effects and audio post production all in a single application. Free and paid versions for Mac, Windows and Linux. Online Video Editor | Video Creator | InVideo [](https://invideo.io/) InVideo's Online Video Editor Helps You Make Professional Videos From Premium Templates, Images, And Music. All your video needs in one place | Clipchamp [](https://clipchamp.com/) Fast-forward your creations with our video editing platform. Start with a video template or record your webcam or screen. Get the pro look with filters, transitions, text and more. Then, export in minutes and share in an instant. Descript | All-in-one audio/video editing, as easy as a doc. [](https://www.descript.com/) Record, transcribe, edit, mix, collaborate, and master your audio and video with Descript. Download for free →. Kapwing — Reach more people with your content [](https://www.kapwing.com/) Kapwing is a collaborative, online content creation platform that you can use to edit video and create content. Join over 10 million modern creators who trust Kapwing to create, edit, and grow their content on every channel. Panzoid [](https://panzoid.com/) Powerful, free online apps and community for creating beautiful custom content. Google Web Designer - Home [](https://webdesigner.withgoogle.com/) Kapwing — Reach more people with your content [](https://www.kapwing.com/) Kapwing is a collaborative, online content creation platform that you can use to edit video and create content. Join over 10 million modern creators who trust Kapwing to create, edit, and grow their content on every channel. ClipDrop [](https://clipdrop.co/) Create professional visuals without a photo studio CapCut [](https://www.capcut.com/) CapCut is an all-in-one online video editing software which makes creation, upload & share easier, with frame by frame track editor, cloud drive etc. VEED - Online Video Editor - Video Editing Made Simple [](https://www.veed.io/) Make stunning videos with a single click. Cut, trim, crop, add subtitles and more. Online, no account needed. Try it now, free. VEED Free Video Maker | Create & Edit Your Videos Easily - Animoto [](https://animoto.com/k/welcome) Create, edit, and share videos with our online video maker. Combine your photos, video clips, and music to make quality videos in minutes. Get started free! Runway - Online Video Editor | Everything you need to make content, fast. [](https://runwayml.com/) Discover advanced video editing capabilities to take your creations to the next level. 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ai50

My work on CS50’s Introduction to AI with Python https://cs50.harvard.edu/ai/ This course explores the concepts and algorithms at the foundation of modern artificial intelligence, diving into the ideas that give rise to technologies like game-playing engines, handwriting recognition, and machine translation. Through hands-on projects, students gain exposure to the theory behind graph search algorithms, classification, optimization, reinforcement learning, and other topics in artificial intelligence and machine learning as they incorporate them into their own Python programs. By course’s end, students emerge with experience in libraries for machine learning as well as knowledge of artificial intelligence principles that enable them to design intelligent systems of their own. Certificate: https://courses.edx.org/certificates/2ec5ff3f06b24bb595c21e3821591538 Notes I've taken some notes on key concepts and algorithms throughout the lectures for future reference. Lecture 0: Search Concepts Agent: entity that perceives its environment and acts upon that environment. State: a configuration of the agent and its environment. Actions: choices that can be made in a state. Transition model: a description of what state results from performing any applicable action in any state. Path cost: numerical cost associated with a given path. Evaluation function: function that estimates the expected utility of the game from a given state. Algorithms DFS (depth first search): search algorithm that always expands the deepest node in the frontier. BFS (breath first search): search algorithm that always expands the shallowest node in the frontier. Greedy best-first search: search algorithm that expands the node that is closest to the goal, as estimated by an heuristic function h(n). A\* search: search algorithm that expands node with lowest value of the "cost to reach node" plus the "estimated goal cost". Minimax: adversarial search algorithm. Projects Degrees Tic-Tac-Toe Lecture 1: Knowledge Concepts Sentence: an assertion about the world in a knowledge representation language. Knowledge base: a set of sentences known by a knowledge-based agent. Entailment: a entails b if in every model in which sentence a is true, sentence b is also true. Inference: the process of deriving new sentences from old ones. Conjunctive normal form: logical sentence that is a conjunction of clauses. First order logic: Propositional logic. Second order logic: Proposition logic with universal and existential quantification. Algorithms Model checking: enumerate all possible models and see if a proposition is true in every one of them. Conversion to CNF and Inference by resolution Projects Knights Minesweeper Lecture 2: Uncertainty Concepts Unconditional probability: degree of belief in a proposition in the absence of any other evidence. Conditional probability: degree of belief in a proposition given some evidence that has already been revealed. Random variable: a variable in probability theory with a domain of possible values it can take on. Independence: the knowledge that one event occurs does not affect the probability of the other event. Bayes' Rule: P(a) P(b|a) = P(b) P(a|b) Bayesian network: data structure that represents the dependencies among random variables. Markov assumption: the assumption that the current state depends on only a finite fixed number of previous states. Markov chain: a sequence of random variables where the distribution of each variable follows the Markov assumption. Hidden Markov Model: a Markov model for a system with hidden states that generate some observed event. Algorithms Inference by enumeration Sampling Likelihood weighting Projects Heredity PageRank Lecture 3: Optimization Concepts Optimization: choosing the best option from a set of options. Algorithms Local Search Hill climbing steepest-ascent: choose the highest-valued neighbor. stochastic: choose randomly from higher-valued neighbors. first-choice: choose the first higher-valued neighbor. random-restart: conduct hill climbing multiple times. local beam search: chooses the k highest-valued neighbors. Simulated annealing: early on, more likely to accept worse-valued neighbors than the current state. Linear programming Simplex Interior-Point Constraint satisfaction problems Arc consistency: to make X arc-consistent with respect to Y, removing elements from X's domain until every choice for X has a possible choice for Y Backtracking search Projects Crossword Lecture 4: Learning Concepts Supervised learning: given a data set of input-output pairs, learn a function to map inputs to outputs. Classification: supervised learning task of learning a function mapping an input point to a discrete category. Regression: supervised learning task of learning a function mapping and input point to a continuous value. Loss function: function that express how poorly our hypothesis performs (L1, L2). Overfitting: when a model fits too closely to a particular data set and therefore may fail to generalize to future data. Regularization: penalizing hypotheses that are more complex to favor simpler, more general hypotheses. Holdout cross-validation: splitting data into a training set and a test set, such that learning happens on the training set and is evaluated on the test set. k-fold cross-validation: splitting data into k sets, and experimenting k times, using each set as a test set once, and using remaining data as training set. Reinforcement learning: given a set of rewards or punishments, learn what actions to take in the future. Unsupervised learning: given input data without any additional feedback, learn patterns. Clustering: organizing a set of objects into groups in such a way that similar objects tend to be in the same group. Algorithms k-nearest-neighbor classification: given an input, chooses the most common class out of the k nearest data points to that input. Support Vector Machines (SVM) Markov decision process: model for decision-making, representing states, actions and their rewards. Q-learning: method for learning a function Q(s, a), estimate of the value of performing action a in state s. Greedy decision-making epsilon-greedy k-means clustering: clustering data based on repeatedly assigning points to clusters and updating those clusters' centers. Projects Shopping Nim Lecture 5: Neural Networks Concepts Artificial neural network: mathematical model for learning inspired by biological neural networks. Multilayer neural network: artificial neural network with an input layer, an output layer, and at least one hidden layer. Deep neural network: neural network with multiple hidden layer. Dropout: temporarily removing units - selected at random - from a neural network to prevent over-reliance on certain units. Image convolution: applying a filter that adds each pixel value of an image to its neighbors, weighted according to a kernel matrix. Pooling: reducing the size of an input by sampling from regions in the input. Convolutional neural network: neural networks that use convolution, usually for analyzing images. Recurrent neural network: neural network that generates output that feeds back into its own inputs. Algorithms Gradient descent: algorithm for minimizing loss when training neural network. Backpropagation: algorithm for training neural networks with hidden layers. Projects Traffic Lecture 6: Language Concepts Natural language processing n-gram: a continuous sequence of n items inside of a text. Tokenization: the task of splitting a sequence of characters into pieces (tokens). Text Categorization Bag-of-words model: represent text as an unordered collection of words. Information retrieval: the task of finding relevant documents in response to a user query. Topic modeling: models for discovering the topics for a set of documents. Term frequency: number of times a term appears in a document. Function words: words that have little meaning on their own, but are used to grammatically connect other words. Content words: words that carry meaning independently. Inverse document frequency: measure of how common or rare a word is across documents. Information extraction: the task of extracting knowledge from documents. WordNet: a lexical database of semantic relations between words. Word representation: looking for a way to represent the meaning of a word for further processing. one-hot: representation of meaning as a vector with a single 1, and with other values as 0. distribution: representation of meaning distributed across multiple values. Algorithms Markov model applied to language: generating the next word based on the previous words and a probability. Naive Bayes: based on the Bayes' Rule to calculate probability of a text being in a certain category, given it contains specific words. Assuming every word is independent of each other. Additive smoothing: adding a value a to each value in our distribution to smooth the data. Laplace smoothing: adding 1 to each value in our distribution (pretending we've seen each value one more time than we actually have). tf-idf: ranking of what words are important in a document by multiplying term frequency (TF) by inverse document frequency (IDF). Automated template generation: giving AI some terms and let it look into a corpus for patterns where those terms show up together. Then it can use those templates to extract new knowledge from the corpus. word2vec: model for generating word vectors. skip-gram architecture: neural network architecture for predicting context words given a target word. Projects Parser Questions

air-support

!air-support Air Support: Tools for Automating Airdrops of Solana NFTs The Skeleton Crew | Twitter: @skeletoncrewrip | Discord: Skeleton Crew Feeling generous? Your contributions help fund future development. Send tips to our Solana wallet: CH6afYjjydFLPSrfQYEUNCdSNohLCAQV6ir6QnYeZU3t See also: Treat Toolbox, a generative art manager for NFT projects from the Skeleton Crew. Background The Skeleton Crew launched on Oct 1, and has since been delivering daily airdrops of artwork from indie artists, with plans to continue for the entire month of October. In order to execute on this plan, we needed tools that allowed us to automate the process. This repository is the result of that effort, which we now share with you in the hopes of more teams spending less time giving themselves Carpal tunnel syndrome doing all of this manually inside of Phantom :) IMPORTANT - Before you Start Creating and sending NFTs in bulk comes with costs. On Solana, the costs are significantly better than some other chains. BUT, it's a good idea to try a drop on devnet first to be sure you understand the fees involved. We assume no responsibility for any costs incurred through the use of these tools. Use at your own risk. Getting Started In order to use Air Support, you will need to install and configure the current version of Metaplex. We run this locally with some customizations for speed (ex. hardcoding some metadata which is common across all of our drops). Also, have a look at the configuration options at the top of the Makefile. At minimum, you'll need to specify paths to Metaplex, your keyfile, and an RPC Host. It's highly recommended that you use a third-party RPC provider to perform large airdrops. DROP is a name for a set of airdrops; in our case we numbered these 1-31 for each day in October. TYPE is a name for a single airdropped item that's part of a drop; in our case we had a "trick" and a "treat" as part of each drop, sometimes even "trick1", "trick2"... etc. The name will be "token" by default, and is used to prefix log files in each step below. For the generate step to work, you will need to build Metaplex's rust tools. Inside metaplex/rust, run: You will also need a few other pieces of software installed, including: gshuf: brew install coreutils jq: brew install jq How to Use Air Support Prerequisites: follow all steps in the Getting Started section above. Then, the basic workflow looks something like this: 📇 prepare: Collect a list of token mint addresses, for which the holders of those tokens represent a community you wish to airdrop to. This is sometimes done by providing your Candy Machine address to https://tools.abstratica.art. Store this in the air support root directory as token-mint-addresses.json. ✍️ record: run this to fetch the wallet addresses of all users that hold the tokens, and don't have them listed on a secondary exchange. The goal here is to avoid sending airdrops to exchanges where they may not be recoverable. Note: As of now, Air Support can only identify tokens listed on Digital Eyes, Magic Eden, Solanart, and Alpha.art. FTX and Solsea use unique addresses for escrow wallets. The command below will fetch the addresses and store them in airdrops/1/token-holders.log. 🎨 create: Start Metaplex, and use it to create your Master Edition NFT with a limited supply (the number of airdrops you want to send). 🖨 generate: run this to generate prints of the Master Edition. These will be stored in the wallet associated with the keys you specify as options. The below command would create 500 prints of the Master with mint address RPdCMRxBx4YPcJv6HUb2S5zHGJcDrDrZszUNNGmLwfT. 🏅 choose: run this next to decide who will receive the airdrop. Important to note that if 2 tokens are owned by the same wallet, by design they have twice the chance to receive an airdrop as someone with only 1 token when using this script to pick recipients. If you have 10,000 token owners recorded as not listed on marketplaces in step 2, and 500 airdrops to send, this will randomly select 500 of those recorded tokens. 📬 distribute: the last step is to send the airdrops out. This script will run through the addresses generated in step 4 and the recipients chosen in step 5 and send airdrops 1-by-1. It is possible that failures will occur. Logs are saved during the process in a {NAME}_sent.log file. Because distribution happens line-by-line, it is safe to rerun the script again to attempt to correct failures. You can also check your wallet to see that all tokens have been distributed. (Note that your Master edition will still remain as only prints are recorded to be sent in step 4. You can keep these for yourself or a community vault.) There is also an optional STARTINDEX param that can be used if you need to restart a distribution from somewhere in the middle. 🔥 burn: if you realize you made a mistake on your Master NFT, but only after you went ahead and started printing a bunch of editions, this command will automate the process of sending those costly mistakes to the Solana incinerator. There is also an optional STARTINDEX param that can be used if you need to restart a distribution from somewhere in the middle. Other Tips Transparency is key when running airdrop campaigns to your communities. In an ideal world, where we had more than 24 hours between our launch and the start of our month of airdrops, we might have attempted to bring some or all of these processes on-chain. The next best thing we could offer is a transparency repo, where we publish the daily receipts of our airdrops, to make it easy for our community to investigate the drops on the blockchain if they feel the desire to do so. Our tools give you the receipts as output to do the same if you wish. You can have a look at that repo here: https://github.com/theskeletoncrew/airdrop-transparency Acknowledgements The record step utilizes code created by the Exiled Apes organization, shared under an Apache License, originally found here: https://github.com/exiled-apes/exiled-holders

Airtable builds with Amazon Bedrock to transform workflows with generative AI | Amazon Web Services

Airtable, a cloud based low-code platform, enables non-programmers to build next-gen business applications. To democratize AI adoption for non-technical users across organizations, Airtable launched Airtable AI, powered by Amazon Bedrock. Through this partnership, Airtable AI seamlessly incorporates powerful foundation models like Anthropic's Claude and Amazon's Titan on Amazon Bedrock, allowing customers to choose models that best suits their use cases and workflows. Key benefits include a unified API for integrating AWS services, secure hosting of foundation models and data, access to cutting-edge technologies, fostering bottoms-up AI adoption among non-technical teams, and generative AI use cases including content generation, automation actions, and intelligent data Q&A. All this is unified within Airtable's intuitive low-code environment. Learn more at: https://go.aws/3Ta68X4 Subscribe: More AWS videos: https://go.aws/3m5yEMW More AWS events videos: https://go.aws/3ZHq4BK Do you have technical AWS questions? Ask the community of experts on AWS re:Post: https://go.aws/3lPaoPb ABOUT AWS Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally. Millions of customers — including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies — are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster. #AmazonBedrock #FoundationModels #generativeAI #AnthropicClaude #AmazonTitan #Airtable #AWS #AmazonWebServices #CloudComputing