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5 Genius Ways to Make Money From Home (Using AI)
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LLM Vibe Score0.419
Human Vibe Score0.77
Charlie ChangNov 15, 2023

5 Genius Ways to Make Money From Home (Using AI)

Check out Fundrise to get started with investing in pre-IPO blue-chip companies that are leading the AI industry: http://fundrise.com/charliechang #fundrisetestimonial #fundrisepartner In this video, I'm going to share 5 genius ways to make money online, using AI (that are all proven). I'll also give you a clear outline and show you exactly how to leverage these new AI opportunities to make money online. ► Daily advice and BTS on my Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/charliechang/ ► Get access to my FREE side hustle courses: https://www.sidehustlemastery.com My favorite business must-haves: 💳 Best business credit cards: https://yourbestcreditcards.com/card-finder/?ccid=2004 🏦 Novo (best business bank): https://startupwise.com/novo 🖥️ Best AI website builder ($3/month using code CHARLIECHANG): https://hostinger.com/charliechang ⚙️ Northwest (best $39 LLC formation service): https://startupwise.com/northwestLLC 🥇 Hire top 1% overseas talent: https://paired.so Whether it's optimizing businesses, doing social media management, or investing in pre-IPO tech companies, there are so many interesting opportunities that are out there for you guys to take advantage of. I highly encourage every aspiring entrepreneur out there to find a way to use AI because this can absolutely change the efficiency and output of your business. If you liked the video, and you want to see more videos on AI and making money, check out my videos: How To Use ChatGPT To Learn ANY Skill Quickly (Tutorial): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYvOTGk7hOA 5 Passive Income Ideas - How I ACTUALLY Make $35K/Week in 2023 https://youtu.be/TVLgIKMOYJ0 I hope you guys found this video helpful, and if you did please share it with a friend or family member who you think could benefit and also LIKE and SUBSCRIBE for more videos like this in the future! Thank you for watching and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day! – Charlie #AI #Money #SideHustle Timeline: 0:00 - Introduction 0:28 - Social Media Management Business 3:11 - AI Optimization Agency 5:41 - Investing in Pre-IPO AI Companies With Fundrise 8:12 - Building an E-commerce Business 10:00 - AI Automated Affiliate Marketing Business 11:12 - Conclusion 11:40 - Outro Disclaimer: Some of the links above may be affiliate links, which means that if you click on them I may receive a small commission. The retailers and financial services companies pay the commission at no cost to you, and this helps to support our channel and keep our videos free. Thank you! In addition, I am not a financial advisor. Charlie Chang does not provide tax, legal or accounting advice. The ideas presented in this video are for entertainment purposes only. Please do your own due diligence before making any financial decisions. ► My Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/charliechang/

26 Ways to Make Money as a Startup Founder (for coders & noncoders)
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johnrushxThis week

26 Ways to Make Money as a Startup Founder (for coders & noncoders)

I've launched 24 projects (here is the proof johnrush.me). None of my projects is making millions a month, but many of them make over $1k a month, some do over $10k, and few do even more. I'd not recommend anyone to start by trying to build a unicorn. Better start simple. Aim for $2-4k a month first. Once you get there, either scale it or start a new project with large TAM. From my own experience, the 26 Ways to Make Money as a Startup Founder: One-Feature SaaS. Extract a feature from a popular tool and build a micro SaaS around it. Idea: A SaaS that only offers automated email follow-ups. Launchpads. Develop a launch platform for a specific industry. Idea: A launchpad for growth tools. SEO Tools. Create a tool that focuses on a single aspect of SEO. Idea: A tool that generates alt texts for images. Productized Services. Offer standardized services that are repeatable. Idea: design, coding or social media management. Marketplace Platforms. Create a platform that connects buyers and sellers, earning transaction fees. Idea: An online marketplace for domains. Membership Sites. A subscription-based site with exclusive content. Idea: A founder 0-to-1 site. White Labeling. A product that other businesses can rebrand as their own. Idea: A white-labeled website builder. Selling Data. Provide anonymized data insights to companies. Idea: Selling user behavior data. Affiliate Marketing. Promote products/services and earn commissions on sales. Idea: Recommending hosting services on a tech blog. Selling Leads. Generate and sell business leads. Idea: Selling leads who raised a fresh seed round. Niche Social Networks. Create a paid community around a specific interest. Idea: A network for SEO experts. Sell Domains. Buy and sell domain names for profit. Virtual Products. Sell digital products like templates or graphics. Idea: Website themes for nextjs or boilerplates. On-Demand Services. Build a platform for gigs like delivery or tutoring. Idea: An app for freelance tutors. Niche Job Boards. Start a job board focused on a specific industry. Idea: A job board for remote tech jobs. Crowdsourced Content. Create a user-generated content platform and monetize through ads. Idea: Site to share startup hacks. Buy and Flip Businesses. Purchase underperforming businesses, improve them, and sell for profit. Idea: Acquiring a low-traffic blog, optimizing it, and selling. AI-Powered agents. Develop AI tools that solve specific business problems. Idea: An AI tool that automates customer support. Microservices. Offer small, specialized tools, sdks or APIs. Idea: An api for currency conversion. Influencer Platforms. Create a platform connecting influencers with brands. Idea: Connect AI influencers with AI founders. Niche Directories. Build a paid directory for a specific industry. Idea: A directory of developers who can train models. E-Learning Platforms. Build a platform for educators to sell courses. Idea: A site where AI experts sell AI courses. Virtual assistants. Hire them and sell on subscription. No-Code Tools. Create tools that allow non-technical users to build things. Idea: A no-code website builder for bakeries. Labor arbitrage. Idea: Connect support agents from Portugal with US clients and charge commission.

Presenting my fresh new ideas for Google! Warning: These might make TOO much money
reddit
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Human Vibe Score1
Good0timesThis week

Presenting my fresh new ideas for Google! Warning: These might make TOO much money

It's well known that Google likes its safe avenues, such as email, word processing, and file storage. One would think that it has done everything it can. I disagree! There are so many untapped markets out there to compete in and employ its digital ~~monopoly~~ advantage. behold the future of Google projects and even more wealth at your fingertips: Google Street Crime: An app that uses AI/ML to identify easy places to rob or even just people to hit. Google Jail: The perfect way to communicate with your family, lawyers, and drug dealers. Google Prostitution: Similar to the 'Uber' style of business, albeit big pimping. Google Human Trafficking: Sell your victims on a competitive global marketplace! Or organs. Google Slavery: Kind of like the same but probably with different taxes. Google Death Sentence: Automated appeal process. Free cookies with all fails! Google Cartel: Another kind of marketplace. Premium gives you a free chainsaw. Google Misery: A VR-powered world which portrays hell. It's an improvement. Google Domination: The blissful removal of this tedious experiment of democracy. Google Religion: The worship of Google as a lovecraftian but benevolent creator of all existence. All of these shall be accompanied by chirpy music, minimalist graphics, and deliriously happy animated cartoons. Well now you've got the ideas so chase that money you freaks! It's right there. Smell of money! Smell of money!

Google AI Studio Took Over My Screen to Make Me Money Faster
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LLM Vibe Score0.395
Human Vibe Score0.52
SuperHumans LifeMar 25, 2025

Google AI Studio Took Over My Screen to Make Me Money Faster

🐝 Join our FREE AI Business Trailblazers Hive Community at https://www.skool.com/ai-trailblazers-hive-7394/about?ref=ff40ab4ff9184e7ca2d1971501f578df Get guidance, join challenges, get templates, in-depth tutorials and live Q&As to help you launch and scale your AI side hustle. In this video I let Google AI Studio take over my screen, analyze it and help me do work in minutes that would otherwise take me hours to complete. This AI tool is the one of the best I have seen recently, because it can help anyone deliver their freelance services, earn more from their side hustle or serve multiple clients as a solopreneur without having to hire entire teams which like before. It is an amazing example of what AI can do to boost productivity and our human potential. ALL GOOGLE CERTIFICATIONS THAT MATTER TO MAKE MONEY (START FREE) ⭐ Google Data Analytics Certificate: imp.i384100.net/xkRyXv ⭐ Google Digital Marketing Certificate: https://imp.i384100.net/JzWJoE ⭐ Google IT Support Certificate: https://imp.i384100.net/g14D5A ⭐ Google Project Management Certificate: https://imp.i384100.net/oqBzJO ⭐ Google UX Design Certificate: https://imp.i384100.net/B01xky ⭐ Google Ads for Beginners: https://imp.i384100.net/PyWxeQ ⭐ Introduction to Generative AI: https://imp.i384100.net/eKbz3z ⭐ Google Cybersecurity Certificate: https://imp.i384100.net/3eLQ2B ⭐ Google Google Advanced Data Analytics Certificate: https://imp.i384100.net/Y90eXR ⭐ Google IT Automation with Python Certificate https://imp.i384100.net/9grkmy ⭐ Google Business Intelligence Certificate: https://imp.i384100.net/eKbz3j ⭐ Google Crash Course on Python: https://imp.i384100.net/DKJoYd 👉 Freelancer Freedom Blueprint: https://superhumans.life/ffb-flow-landing-simple/ The start to finish step by step playbook to start making money online from scratch. 👉The Dream Job Challenge: https://superhumans.life/dream-career-landing-flow/ The best ways I know to get clear on what skills you can monetize and make money doing what you love. 👉 Create an Irresistible Profile - https://superhumans.life/irresistible-profile-flow-landing/ The ultimate strategies to create a perfect profile that attracts clients. 👉 Get a list with 99 validated remote job sites: https://superhumans.life/99-validated-remote-jobs-sites-flow-landing-2/ Start applying and earning money today. 👉 Get the 99 Ingenious Midjourney & ChatGPT Prompts for Digital Wall Art: https://superhumans.life/product/99-digital-art-etsy-shop-prompts/ Perfect if you want to start an Etsy shop to make money and don't have products to stand out. 🌐 MY WEBSITE: https://bit.ly/3KTY9sc with resources on how to get work from home online jobs that you can do remotely and how to get started as a freelancer. ✅ FREE Freelancing Masterclass - Step by step guide to get online work from home jobs ✅ https://www.superhumans.life/10xmasterclass ✅ Review your Upwork profile with my cheat sheet. DOWNLOAD HERE for FREE: https://www.superhumans.life/upworkchecklist/ OTHER MONEY MAKING VIDEOS: ►► This Simple Way to Make Money Copy Pasting Google News Will Blow Your Mind (Legit): https://youtu.be/mRJ2gmT69wo ►► Top Tier Google Certifications to Make $100,000+ Online (Start Free on Coursera): https://youtu.be/DOb_02gmdvM ►► Make $660/Day with Free Google Generative AI Certificates: https://youtu.be/0GjK1rvuI1Q ►► Make $100k+ working from home with FREE Google Certification trainings: https://youtu.be/K0pQvnYzjv8 ►► Make $917 / Day with Google News and AI posting Faceless Videos (Beginner friendly): https://youtu.be/mRJ2gmT69wo ►► Make Money Online as a Data Analyst with FREE Google Certifications & Training: https://youtu.be/j62iI6i47Yc ►► Make $100,000 / Year with Google Trainings (for High Paying Careers): https://youtu.be/t0GvneBaUjs ►► I Tried Making $800 in 4 Hours with Google Maps (To See If It Works): https://youtu.be/A0xA5vyDgzA ►► Make $550 a Day with These FREE Google Project Management Courses: https://youtu.be/S-lNEQ95bAU ►► How to Use ChatGPT to Find a High Paying Remote Job in Less Than 1 Hour: https://youtu.be/m3MwM6I0hBc _

How to use AI to make extra money
youtube
LLM Vibe Score0.414
Human Vibe Score0.63
Anik SingalApr 25, 2023

How to use AI to make extra money

FREE Courses from LURN == https://www.Lurn.com/getfreecourses ============================================ How to use AI to make extra money ============================================ 👇Subscribe To The Channel By Clicking Below!👇 https://www.youtube.com/user/aniksingalcom?sub_confirmation=1 CHECK OUT THESE TOP TRENDING PLAYLISTS NOW! Fighting Entrepreneur - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9nsNOu3gIE&list=PLEmF7qw7SECK1hy5U5nodHoCg7ANzXukz Master Copywriting With Anik Singal - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjOAWP1DKAk&list=PLEmF7qw7SECKouq97MqF5zFi1Xb-VFyMY&index=2&t=0s Facebook Advertising Strategies - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQh6zA3HUY&list=PLEmF7qw7SECJUULNlnAGHvcegeQbIAHZp How To Become A Better Entrepreneur - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEmF7qw7SECKVlP2eOsF_XpYBYhlTGAVU ============================================ “Lead Fighter” — That’s the title Anik Singal gives himself as a high-energy, trailblazing Entrepreneur. Anik got his start in the online scene back in 2003 from his college dorm room. Ever since then he’s gone on to build 6 successful companies, launched 22 top brands, generated over $250 Million in sales, and taught over 250,000 students worldwide - how to start, grow, and scale a successful online business. As the founder of Lurn, Inc., Anik Singal’s passion is in creating dynamic online classroom environments that teach people how to enhance their business, financial, and personal lives. Anik Singal has become a go-to authority in the areas of... ✅Digital Publishing. ✅Event-Based Marketing. ✅Product Launches. ✅Email Marketing. Anik has been voted one of the Top 3 Young Entrepreneurs by BusinessWeek Magazine. In addition, his company earned the prestigious Inc. 500 Fastest Growing Companies in America two years in a row. All of Anik’s experiences have made him the person he is today… From struggling for 18 months when he first started, then successfully building his business to over $10 Million a year. Then losing it all and falling to $1.7 Million in debt and almost declaring bankruptcy. Bouncing back and generating over $10 million in 16 months, paying back all of his debt and he hasn’t looked back since. He’s worked with and has been endorsed by some of the most influential Entrepreneurs of our time... Including Robert Kiyosaki, Les Brown, Daymond John, Bob Proctor, Grant Cardone, and many more. Anik is a dreamer. A thinker. A fighter. Most importantly, Anik is a teacher. His immediate goal is empowering 1 Million Entrepreneurs to live the life of their dreams by the end of 2019. ============================================ CONNECT WITH ANIK ON SOCIAL MEDIA YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCinyEr-Fly9Yp1zMFxD0cQ?viewas=subscriber Anik Singal Blog: https://lurn.com/blog/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aniksingal Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anik/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lurn-inc/ Podcast: https://podcast.lurnworkshop.com iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-fighting-entrepreneur/id1446089516?mt=2 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0HbielkIU1f88Bv4VuMHmh?si=Q1ujyoiMRF2LlHdBgTdAzw Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/thefightingentrepreneur Google Play: https://play.google.com/music/listen#/ps/Irckjhwglqgjnbia5t3zpyj4xcq #AnikSingal #Lurn #LurnNation ============================================ Join Lurn Nation: https://lurn.com/ Lurn is the Transformational home for modern entrepreneurs. We have 60+ training courses and programs to help you reach your business goals - join our community today!

How I run a $13,900/MONTH faceless Instagram theme page [FULL COURSE]
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LLM Vibe Score0.381
Human Vibe Score0.44
howtoaiMar 27, 2025

How I run a $13,900/MONTH faceless Instagram theme page [FULL COURSE]

How to create viral motivational videos for Instagram theme pages. Step-By-Step Document 👉 https://go.howtoai.pro/motivational Pre-monetized YouTube accounts with 1,000 subscribers & 4,000 watch hours ✅ https://tikaccounts.com/products/youtube ⭐️ Apply to work with me 1-on-1: https://apply.facelesslaunchpad.com/ 👉 100% FREE community: https://whop.com/howtoai/ 👉 More YouTube Automation videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwcK9-wSIWXHbhznPFFwgXlB1vr-HCkJR 👉 Newsletter about the latest AI news: https://www.dailyaiedge.com/subscribe This video will show you everything related to creating YouTube Shorts automation videos in the animal niche. If you want to start a faceless Shorts channel, watch this video. 🚨 ALL TOOL LINKS ARE IN THE STEP-BY-STEP DOCUMENT AT THE TOP OF THE DESCRIPTION 🚨 🔗 LINKS 🔗 📢 100% FREE Discord community: https://whop.com/howtoai/ 🚀 Viral TikTok Background Footage: https://howtoai.pro/products/viral-tiktok-gameplay 🔥 Trending Sound Effects Pack: https://howtoai.pro/products/trending-tiktok-sound-effects ✉️ Email newsletter on how to leverage AI (100% free): https://www.dailyaiedge.com/subscribe Welcome to howtoai, your ultimate destination for learning how to use AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney. Our channel provides high-quality tutorials and guides covering topics such as natural language processing, machine learning, and computer vision. Our goal is to make complex AI concepts easy to understand and accessible to all, whether you're a beginner or an experienced user. For extra clarification, this video will show you how to start a faceless Instagram theme page to make money online. I will teach you how to use certain AI tools to make money online, and most importantly, get good results running a faceless Instagram account. So if you want to start an Instagram theme page business, watch this video. Sponsorships or other business inquiries? Email us at: partnerships@howtoai.pro #howtomakemoneyonline #instagramreels

How I Make Money with AI Voiceovers (Step-by-Step)
youtube
LLM Vibe Score0.325
Human Vibe Score0.24
Adam ErhartFeb 14, 2025

How I Make Money with AI Voiceovers (Step-by-Step)

Start by signing up to my FREE course: https://www.gohighlevel.com/adam-erhart-start-here?fp_ref=adam86 Try HighLevel FREE – 30-Day FREE Trial of the Best Marketing Tool Ever! 👉 https://www.gohighlevel.com/adam-erhart-unlimited?fp_ref=adam86 Unlock my proven marketing system that delivers incredible client results, PLUS grab these exclusive FREE bonuses when you sign up: • $10K Agency Blueprint: Proven steps to build a $10K/month agency • Lead-Gen Playbook Bundle: Training, webinar series, and ready-to-use snapshots • Weekly Business Coaching: Live Zoom sessions for a tailored business strategy • Complete Marketing Campaigns: Profitable campaigns and funnels • 1-on-1 Kickoff Call: Personalized account kickoff call for a fast start • Exclusive Bonuses: Sales funnels, client strategies, and much more All included FREE with a 30-Day Extended Trial—cancel anytime! Get started here: https://www.gohighlevel.com/adam-erhart-unlimited?fp_ref=adam86 🚨 Heads Up 🚨: Disable any VPNs or ad blockers before signing up to ensure you receive all bonuses. ABOUT: I'm Adam Erhart, a marketing strategist with over 10 years of experience helping entrepreneurs build profitable, scalable marketing systems. I've worked with brands like Google, Meta, and Amazon, and my focus is on real results, not fluff. Feel free to explore the 1,000+ videos on this channel to verify everything I’m saying and let’s get started growing your business! Want a PROFITABLE marketing strategy? Go here: https://grow.adamerhart.com/cheatsheet?el=yt DISCLAIMER: Heads up—some of the links I share are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a small commission if you make a purchase (at no extra cost to you). Rest assured, I only recommend what I use, trust, and pay for myself.

AI Will Help you EARN CRORES! CRAZY BUSINESS IDEA! 🤑 | Ishan Sharma #shorts
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LLM Vibe Score0.393
Human Vibe Score0.62
Ishan SharmaOct 14, 2023

AI Will Help you EARN CRORES! CRAZY BUSINESS IDEA! 🤑 | Ishan Sharma #shorts

📸 Instagram: https://bit.ly/ishansharma7390ig Join MarkitUpX Discord Server: https://discord.gg/fwSpTje4rh 😁 About Me: https://bit.ly/aboutishansharma 📱 Twitter: https://bit.ly/ishansharma7390twt 📝 LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/ishansharma7390li 🌟 Please leave a LIKE ❤️ and SUBSCRIBE for more AMAZING content! 🌟 3 Books You Should Read 📈Psychology of Money: https://amzn.to/30wx4bW 👀Subtle Art of Not Giving a F: https://amzn.to/30zwWbP 💼Rework: https://amzn.to/3ALsAuz Tech I use every day 💻MacBook Air M1: https://amzn.to/2YWKPjG 📺LG 29' Ultrawide Monitor: https://amzn.to/3aG0p5p 🎥Sony ZV1: https://amzn.to/3ANqgDb 🎙Blue Yeti Mic: https://amzn.to/2YYbiNN ⽴Tripod Stand: https://amzn.to/3mVUiQc 🔅Ring Light: https://amzn.to/2YQlzLJ 🎧Marshall Major II Headphone: https://amzn.to/3lLhTDQ 🖱Logitech mouse: https://amzn.to/3p8edOC 💺Green Soul Chair: https://amzn.to/3mWIxZP ✨ Tags ✨ ishan sharma,THIS Will Help You EARN CRORES!,make money online,make money online 2023,ai tools for photo editing,ai tools for photos,earn money online,ishan sharma motivation,ishan sharma speech,ai tools,ai tools to earn money,money making apps,ai apps to make money,photo generator ai,ai photo generator,ai photo generator free,using ai tools,how to earn money using ai,best app store apps,app store,ishan sharma freelance,how to sell anything ✨ Hashtags ✨ #makemoneyonline #ai #growth

Finally Launched My First App Without Any Coding Experience
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Human Vibe Score1
Consistent_Access844This week

Finally Launched My First App Without Any Coding Experience

About Myself I am a structural engineer that are taught to design buildings in the day and I have been dreaming forever to build a SaaS business to get out of the rat race. However, as a structural engineer, coding is definitely not something I am capable of doing (I have some simple knowledge, but its no way close to building an app) The Journey As I've mentioned, I always wanted to build a SaaS business because in my mind the business model is most attractive to me, where you only need to build once and can sell to millions. So I started off searching and exploring on the internet and my first ever "SaaS" was from Wordpress. I am buying plugin from other user and then pluggin into my own Wordpress website. It was a project management tool SaaS. I was so excited about the website and can't even sleep well at night because I'm just so hype about it. But, the reality is because this is my first ever business, I totally didn't realise about the importance of UI UX or my business differentiation, thinking that everyone will be as excited as I am. Then, I went deeper and deeper into the journey (I can write more about this in another post if anyone is interested) and finally landed on Flutterflow to create my first ever app. No Code Journey Thanks to no code builder, I never thought that a non-coder like me can ever create an app and got accepted by the App Store/Play Store. Since that I am using a low-code builder, for any specific requirement that I need that are not covered natively, I will just talk to ChatGPT and boom I pretty much got most of the answer I needed. About The App As someone that always try to keep track of my expenses, I never able to find an app that are simple and interesting enough for me to continue on the journey. I realise that I could have incorporate AI into this journey and hence there go, I created an AI Money Tracker. Let me introduce Rolly: AI Money Tracker - a new AI expense tracker where you can easily record your transactions just by chatting with our bot Rolly and it will automatically record and categorise the transaction into the most suitable category (you can also create any of your own category and it will also take care of it in consideration). I am not sharing the app link here to avoid getting ban, but feel free to search up Rolly: AI Money Tracker on either App Store on Play Store. My Learnings As someone that can't code and never imagine that I could create a production app by myself and publish it on to the App Store and Play Store. Since I am not making any money yet and just at the beginning of my entrepreneur journey, I can't give any substantial advice, all I can say is just my own learnings and feelings. My advice is if you have a dream of building a business, just go for it, don't worry about all the problems that you can think of to convince yourself not making the start at all. From my point of view, as long as you're not giving up everything (eg, putting yourself in huge debt etc), why don't just go for it and you've got nothing much to lose. You'll only lose if you never even get started. And also, I believe that creating an app is always the easiest step out of the entreprenuership journey, marketing and distribution is the key to success. Even though you've spent days and nights on it and it might mean everything to you, the truth is people don't really cares and you'll need to market for it. I am still in journey to learn how to do marketing, content, building a business and everything. I think this is just a very beginning of my journey and hopefully there's more interesting one to share further down the road.

Hot Take: Not all your startups need AI forced into them
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bitorsicThis week

Hot Take: Not all your startups need AI forced into them

I'm a final year Computer Engineering student, hence applying for jobs all around. There's this particular trend I've noticed with startups that are coming up these days. That is, even for the absolute basic stuff they'll use 'AI', and they'll think they built something 'revolutionary'. No. You're breaking your product in ways you don't realise. An example, that even some well established companies are guilty of: AI Chatbots You absolutely don't need them and it's an entire gimmick. If you really wanna implement a chatbot, connect the user to an actual person on your end, which I think is not possible if you're at a 'startup' stage. You'll need employees who can handle user queries in real time. If the user really is stuck let them use the 'Contact Us' page. A really close relative of mine is very vocal about the frustration he faces whenever he tries to use the AI Chatbot on any well known e-com website. The only case for AI Chatbot that makes sense is when it's directing the customer to an actual customer support rep if none of the AI's solutions is working for the customer. Even then, implementing a search page for FAQ is extremely easy and user friendly. Another example: AI Interviewer I recently interviewed for a startup, and their whole interviewing process was AI'zed?!?! No real person at the other end, I was answering to their questions which were in video format. They even had a 'mascot' / 'AI interviewer' avatar designed by an AI (AI-ception???). This mascot just text-to-speech'ed all the questions for me to rewind and hear what I missed again. And I had to record video and audio to answer these questions on their platform itself. The entire interview process just could've been a questionnaire, or if you're really concerned on the integrity of the interviewee, just take a few minutes out of your oh-so-busy schedule as a startup owner. Atleast for hiring employees who would make the most impact on your product going ahead. I say the most impact, because (atleast as a developer) the work done by these employees would define how robust your product is, and/or how easily other features can be integrated into the codebase. Trust me, refactoring code later on would only cost you time and money. These resources would rather be more useful in other departments of your startup. The only use case for an AI Interviewer I see is for preparing for an actual interview, provided that feedback is given to the user at the earliest, which you don't need to worry about as a startup owner. So yeah, you're probably better off without integrating AI in your product. Thank you for reading. TLDR; The title; I know AI is the new thing and gets everyone drooling and all, but for the love of God, just focus on what your startup does best and put real people behind it; Integrating AI without human intervention is as good as a broken product; Do your hiring yourself, or through real people, emphasizing on the fact that the people you hire at an early stage will define your growth ahead;

I spent 6 months on building a tool, and got 0 zero users. Here is my story.
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LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.667
GDbuildsGDThis week

I spent 6 months on building a tool, and got 0 zero users. Here is my story.

Edit Thank you all so much for your time reading my story. Your support, feedback, criticism, and skepticism; all helped me a lot, and I couldn't appreciate it enough \^\_\^ TL;DR I spent 6 months on a tool that currently has 0 users. Below is what I learned during my journey, sharing because I believe most mistakes are easily avoidable. Do not overestimate your product and assume it will be an exception to fundamental principles. Principles are there for a reason. Always look for validation before you start. Avoid building products with a low money-to-effort ratio/in very competitive fields. Unless you have the means, you probably won't make it. Pick a problem space, pick your target audience, and talk to them before thinking about a solution. Identify and match their pain points. Only then should you think of a solution. If people are not overly excited or willing to pay in advance for a discounted price, it might be a sign to rethink. Sell one and only one feature at a time. Avoid everything else. If people don't pay for that one core feature, no secondary feature will change their mind. Always spend twice as much time marketing as you do building. You will not get users if they don't know it exists. Define success metrics ("1000 users in 3 months" or "$6000 in the account at the end of 6 months") before you start. If you don't meet them, strongly consider quitting the project. If you can't get enough users to keep going, nothing else matters. VALIDATION, VALIDATION, VALIDATION. Success is not random, but most of our first products will not make a success story. Know when to admit failure, and move on. Even if a product of yours doesn't succeed, what you learned during its journey will turn out to be invaluable for your future. My story So, this is the story of a product, Summ, that I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. As it's the first product I’ve ever built, after watching you all from the sidelines, I have learned a lot, made many mistakes, and did only a few things right. Just sharing what I’ve learned and some insights from my journey so far. I hope that this post will help you avoid the mistakes I made — most of which I consider easily avoidable — while you enjoy reading it, and get to know me a little bit more 🤓. A slow start after many years Summ isn’t the first product I really wanted to build. Lacking enough dev skills to even get started was a huge blocker for so many years. In fact, the first product I would’ve LOVED to build was a smart personal shopping assistant. I had this idea 4 years ago; but with no GPT, no coding skills, no technical co-founder, I didn’t have the means to make it happen. I still do not know if such a tool exists and is good enough. All I wanted was a tool that could make data-based predictions about when to buy stuff (“buy a new toothpaste every three months”) and suggest physical products that I might need or be strongly interested in. AFAIK, Amazon famously still struggles with the second one. Fast-forward a few years, I learned the very basics of HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS. Still was not there to build a product; but good enough to code my design portfolio from scratch. Yet, I couldn’t imagine myself building a product using Vanilla JS. I really hated it, I really sucked at it. So, back to tutorial hell, and to learn about this framework I just heard about: React.React introduced so many new concepts to me. “Thinking in React” is a phrase we heard a lot, and with quite good reasons. After some time, I was able to build very basic tutorial apps, both in React, and React Native; but I have to say that I really hated coding for mobile. At this point, I was already a fan of productivity apps, and had a concept for a time management assistant app in my design portfolio. So, why not build one? Surely, it must be easy, since every coding tutorial starts with a todo app. ❌ WRONG! Building a basic todo app is easy enough, but building one good enough for a place in the market was a challenge I took and failed. I wasted one month on that until I abandoned the project for good. Even if I continued working on it, as the productivity landscape is overly competitive, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to cover costs, assuming I make any. Since I was (and still am) in between jobs, I decided to abandon the project. 👉 What I learned: Do not start projects with a low ratio of money to effort and time. Example: Even if I get 500 monthly users, 200 of which are paid users (unrealistically high number), assuming an average subscription fee of $5/m (such apps are quite cheap, mostly due to the high competition), it would make me around $1000 minus any occurring costs. Any founder with a product that has 500 active users should make more. Even if it was relatively successful, due to the high competition, I wouldn’t make any meaningful money. PS: I use Todoist today. Due to local pricing, I pay less than $2/m. There is no way I could beat this competitive pricing, let alone the app itself. But, somehow, with a project that wasn’t even functional — let alone being an MVP — I made my first Wi-Fi money: Someone decided that the domain I preemptively purchased is worth something. By this point, I had already abandoned the project, certainly wasn’t going to renew the domain, was looking for a FT job, and a new project that I could work on. And out of nowhere, someone hands me some free money — who am I not to take it? Of course, I took it. The domain is still unused, no idea why 🤔. Ngl, I still hate the fact that my first Wi-Fi money came from this. A new idea worth pursuing? Fast-forward some weeks now. Around March, I got this crazy idea of building an email productivity tool. We all use emails, yet we all hate them. So, this must be fixed. Everyone uses emails, in fact everyone HAS TO use emails. So, I just needed to build a tool and wait for people to come. This was all, really. After all, the problem space is huge, there is enough room for another product, everyone uses emails, no need for any further validation, right? ❌ WRONG ONCE AGAIN! We all hear from the greatest in the startup landscape that we must validate our ideas with real people, yet at least some of us (guilty here 🥸) think that our product will be hugely successful and prove them to be an exception. Few might, but most are not. I certainly wasn't. 👉 Lesson learned: Always validate your ideas with real people. Ask them how much they’d pay for such a tool (not if they would). Much better if they are willing to pay upfront for a discount, etc. But even this comes later, keep reading. I think the difference between “How much” and “If” is huge for two reasons: (1) By asking them for “How much”, you force them to think in a more realistic setting. (2) You will have a more realistic idea on your profit margins. Based on my competitive analysis, I already had a solution in my mind to improve our email usage standards and email productivity (huge mistake), but I did my best to learn about their problems regarding those without pushing the idea too hard. The idea is this: Generate concise email summaries with suggested actions, combine them into one email, and send it at their preferred times. Save as much as time the AI you end up with allows. After all, everyone loves to save time. So, what kind of validation did I seek for? Talked with only a few people around me about this crazy, internet-breaking idea. The responses I got were, now I see, mediocre; no one got excited about it, just said things along the lines of “Cool idea, OK”. So, any reasonable person in this situation would think “Okay, not might not be working”, right? Well, I did not. I assumed that they were the wrong audience for this product, and there was this magical land of user segments waiting eagerly for my product, yet unknowingly. To this day, I still have not reached this magical place. Perhaps, it didn’t exist in the first place. If I cannot find it, whether it exists or not doesn’t matter. I am certainly searching for it. 👉 What I should have done: Once I decide on a problem space (time management, email productivity, etc.), I should decide on my potential user segments, people who I plan to sell my product to. Then I should go talk to those people, ask them about their pains, then get to the problem-solving/ideation phase only later. ❗️ VALIDATION COMES FROM THE REALITY OUTSIDE. What validation looks like might change from product to product; but what invalidation looks like is more or less the same for every product. Nico Jeannen told me yesterday “validation = money in the account” on Twitter. This is the ultimate form of validation your product could get. If your product doesn’t make any money, then something is invalidated by reality: Your product, you, your idea, who knows? So, at this point, I knew a little bit of Python from spending some time in tutorial hell a few years ago, some HTML/CSS/JS, barely enough React to build a working app. React could work for this project, but I needed easy-to-implement server interactivity. Luckily, around this time, I got to know about this new gen of indie hackers, and learned (but didn’t truly understand) about their approach to indie hacking, and this library called Nextjs. How good Next.js still blows my mind. So, I was back to tutorial hell once again. But, this time, with a promise to myself: This is the last time I would visit tutorial hell. Time to start building this "ground-breaking idea" Learning the fundamentals of Next.js was easier than learning of React unsurprisingly. Yet, the first time I managed to run server actions on Next.js was one of the rarest moments that completely blew my mind. To this day, I reject the idea that it is something else than pure magic under its hood. Did I absolutely need Nextjs for this project though? I do not think so. Did it save me lots of time? Absolutely. Furthermore, learning Nextjs will certainly be quite helpful for other projects that I will be tackling in the future. Already got a few ideas that might be worth pursuing in the head in case I decide to abandon Summ in the future. Fast-forward few weeks again: So, at this stage, I had a barely working MVP-like product. Since the very beginning, I spent every free hour (and more) on this project as speed is essential. But, I am not so sure it was worth it to overwork in retrospect. Yet, I know I couldn’t help myself. Everything is going kinda smooth, so what’s the worst thing that could ever happen? Well, both Apple and Google announced their AIs (Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, respectively) will have email summarization features for their products. Summarizing singular emails is no big deal, after all there were already so many similar products in the market. I still think that what truly matters is a frictionless user experience, and this is why I built this product in a certain way: You spend less than a few minutes setting up your account, and you get to enjoy your email summaries, without ever visiting its website again. This is still a very cool concept I really like a lot. So, at this point: I had no other idea that could be pursued, already spent too much time on this project. Do I quit or not? This was the question. Of course not. I just have to launch this product as quickly as possible. So, I did something right, a quite rare occurrence I might say: Re-planned my product, dropped everything secondary to the core feature immediately (save time on reading emails), tried launching it asap. 👉 Insight: Sell only one core feature at one time. Drop anything secondary to this core feature. Well, my primary occupation is product design. So one would expect that a product I build must have stellar design. I considered any considerable time spent on design at this stage would be simply wasted. I still think this is both true and wrong: True, because if your product’s core benefits suck, no one will care about your design. False, because if your design looks amateurish, no one will trust you and your product. So, I always targeted an average level design with it and the way this tool works made it quite easy as I had to design only 2 primary pages: Landing page and user portal (which has only settings and analytics pages). However, even though I knew spending time on design was not worth much of my time, I got a bit “greedy”: In fact, I redesigned those pages three times, and still ended up with a so-so design that I am not proud of. 👉 What I would do differently: Unless absolutely necessary, only one iteration per stage as long as it works. This, in my mind, applies to everything. If your product’s A feature works, then no need to rewrite it from scratch for any reason, or even refactor it. When your product becomes a success, and you absolutely need that part of your codebase to be written, do so, but only then. Ready to launch, now is th etime for some marketing, right? By July 26, I already had a “launchable” product that barely works (I marked this date on a Notion docs, this is how I know). Yet, I had spent almost no time on marketing, sales, whatever. After all, “You build and they will come”. Did I know that I needed marketing? Of course I did, but knowingly didn’t. Why, you might ask. Well, from my perspective, it had to be a dev-heavy product; meaning that you spend most of your time on developing it, mostly coding skills. But, this is simply wrong. As a rule of thumb, as noted by one of the greatests, Marc Louvion, you should spend at least twice of the building time on marketing. ❗️ Time spent on building \* 2 people don’t know your product > they don’t use your product > you don’t get users > you don’t make money Easy as that. Following the same reasoning, a slightly different approach to planning a project is possible. Determine an approximate time to complete the project with a high level project plan. Let’s say 6 months. By the reasoning above, 2 months should go into building, and 4 into marketing. If you need 4 months for building instead of 2, then you need 8 months of marketing, which makes the time to complete the project 12 months. If you don’t have that much time, then quit the project. When does a project count as completed? Well, in reality, never. But, I think we have to define success conditions even before we start for indie projects and startups; so we know when to quit when they are not met. A success condition could look like “Make $6000 in 12 months” or “Have 3000 users in 6 months”. It all depends on the project. But, once you set it, it should be set in stone: You don’t change it unless absolutely necessary. I suspect there are few principles that make a solopreneur successful; and knowing when to quit and when to continue is definitely one of them. Marc Louvion is famously known for his success, but he got there after failing so many projects. To my knowledge, the same applies to Nico Jeannen, Pieter Levels, or almost everyone as well. ❗️ Determining when to continue even before you start will definitely help in the long run. A half-aed launch Time-leap again. Around mid August, I “soft launched” my product. By soft launch, I mean lazy marketing. Just tweeting about it, posting it on free directories. Did I get any traffic? Surely I did. Did I get any users? Nope. Only after this time, it hit me: “Either something is wrong with me, or with this product” Marketing might be a much bigger factor for a project’s success after all. Even though I get some traffic, not convincing enough for people to sign up even for a free trial. The product was still perfect in my eyes at the time (well, still is ^(\_),) so the right people are not finding my product, I thought. Then, a question that I should have been asking at the very first place, one that could prevent all these, comes to my mind: “How do even people search for such tools?” If we are to consider this whole journey of me and my so-far-failed product to be an already destined failure, one metric suffices to show why. Search volume: 30. Even if people have such a pain point, they are not looking for email summaries. So, almost no organic traffic coming from Google. But, as a person who did zero marketing on this or any product, who has zero marketing knowledge, who doesn’t have an audience on social media, there is not much I could do. Finally, it was time to give up. Or not… In my eyes, the most important element that makes a founder (solo or not) successful (this, I am not by any means) is to solve problems. ❗️ So, the problem was this: “People are not finding my product by organic search” How do I make sure I get some organic traffic and gets more visibility? Learn digital marketing and SEO as much as I can within very limited time. Thankfully, without spending much time, I came across Neil Patel's YT channel, and as I said many times, it is an absolute gold mine. I learned a lot, especially about the fundamentals, and surely it will be fruitful; but there is no magic trick that could make people visit your website. SEO certainly helps, but only when people are looking for your keywords. However, it is truly a magical solution to get in touch with REAL people that are in your user segments: 👉 Understand your pains, understand their problems, help them to solve them via building products. I did not do this so far, have to admit. But, in case you would like to have a chat about your email usage, and email productivity, just get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear about them. Getting ready for a ProductHunt launch The date was Sept 1. And I unlocked an impossible achievement: Running out of Supabase’s free plan’s Egres limit while having zero users. I was already considering moving out of their Cloud server and managing a Supabase CLI service on my Hetzner VPS for some time; but never ever suspected that I would have to do this quickly. The cheapest plan Supabase offers is $25/month; yet, at that point, I am in between jobs for such a long time, basically broke, and could barely afford that price. One or two months could be okay, but why pay for it if I will eventually move out of their Cloud service? So, instead of paying $25, I spent two days migrating out of Supabase Cloud. Worth my time? Definitely not. But, when you are broke, you gotta do stupid things. This was the first time that I felt lucky to have zero users: I have no idea how I would manage this migration if I had any. I think this is one of the core tenets of an indie hacker: Controlling their own environment. I can’t remember whose quote this is, but I suspect it was Naval: Entrepreneurs have an almost pathological need to control their own fate. They will take any suffering if they can be in charge of their destiny, and not have it in somebody else’s hands. What’s truly scary is, at least in my case, we make people around us suffer at the expense of our attempting to control our own fates. I know this period has been quite hard on my wife as well, as I neglected her quite a bit, but sadly, I know that this will happen again. It is something that I can barely help with. Still, so sorry. After working the last two weeks on a ProductHunt Launch, I finally launched it this Tuesday. Zero ranking, zero new users, but 36 kind people upvoted my product, and many commented and provided invaluable feedback. I couldn't be more grateful for each one of them 🙏. Considering all these, what lies in the future of Summ though? I have no idea, to be honest. On one hand, I have zero users, have no job, no income. So, I need a way to make money asap. On the other hand, the whole idea of it revolves around one core premise (not an assumption) that I am not so willing to share; and I couldn’t have more trust in it. This might not be the best iteration of it, however I certainly believe that email usage is one of the best problem spaces one could work on. 👉 But, one thing is for certain: I need to get in touch with people, and talk with them about this product I built so far. In fact, this is the only item on my agenda. Nothing else will save my brainchild <3. Below are some other insights and notes that I got during my journey; as they do not 100% fit into this story, I think it is more suitable to list them here. I hope you enjoyed reading this. Give Summ a try, it comes with a generous free trial, no credit card required. Some additional notes and insights: Project planning is one of the most underestimated skills for solopreneurs. It saves you enormous time, and helps you to keep your focus up. Building B2C products beats building B2B products. Businesses are very willing to pay big bucks if your product helps them. On the other hand, spending a few hours per user who would pay $5/m probably is not worth your time. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is if no one uses it. If you cannot sell a product in a certain category/niche (or do not know how to sell it), it might be a good idea not to start a project in it. Going after new ideas and ventures is quite risky, especially if you don’t know how to market it. On the other hand, an already established category means that there is already demand. Whether this demand is sufficient or not is another issue. As long as there is enough demand for your product to fit in, any category/niche is good. Some might be better, some might be worse. Unless you are going hardcore B2B, you will need people to find your product by means of organic search. Always conduct thorough keyword research as soon as possible.

How I made a high tech salary in my first selling month
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How I made a high tech salary in my first selling month

For over 7 years I worked as a full-stack developer, helping other companies bring their ideas to life. But one day, I thought “Why not try making my own dream come true?”. That’s when I decided to quit my job and start my own journey to becoming an entrepreneur. At first, it wasn’t easy. I didn’t make any money for months and had no idea where to start. I felt lost. Then, I decided to focus on something popular and trending. AI was everywhere, and ChatGPT was the most used AI platform. So I looked into it and I found the OpenAI community forum where people had been asking for features that weren’t being added. That gave me an idea. Why not build those features myself? I created a Chrome extension and I worked on some of the most requested features, like: Downloading the advanced voice mode and messages as MP3 Adding folders to organize chats Saving and reusing prompts Pinning important chats Exporting chats to TXT/JSON files Deleting or archiving multiple chats at once Making chat history searches faster and better It took me about a week to build the first version, and when I published it, the response was incredible. People loved it! Some even said things like, “You’re a lifesaver!” That’s when I realized I had something that could not only help people but also turn into a real business. I kept the first version free to see how people would respond. Many users have been downloading my extension, which prompted Chrome to review it to determine if it qualified for the featured badge. I received the badge, and it has significantly boosted traffic to my extension ever since. After all the positive feedback, I launched a paid version one month ago. A few minutes after publishing it, I made my first sale! That moment was so exciting, and it motivated me to keep going. I already have over 4,000 users and have made more than $4,500 in my first selling month. I’ve decided to release 1-2 new features every month to keep improving the extension based on what users ask for. I also created the same extension for Firefox and Edge users because many people have been asking for it! I also started a Reddit community, where I share updates, sales, discount codes, and ideas for new features. It’s been awesome to connect with users directly and get their feedback. Additionally, I’ve started working on another extension for Claude, which I’m hoping will be as successful as this one. My message to you is this: never give up on your dreams. It might feel impossible at first, but with patience, hard work, and some creativity, you can make it happen. I hope this inspires you to go after what you want. Good luck to all of us!

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

Building in the open with Founder University - I will not promote
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Tim-SylvesterThis week

Building in the open with Founder University - I will not promote

Published Oct 30, 2024 I am on my fifth startup. I ran the last one for a decade, that’s a whole story. A hell of a story. But a different story. I’ll tell it to you when I can, but not right now. The one before that was an e-commerce site that did pretty well but I didn’t love it. Before that were two service businesses. The first one I did for the love of the game, the second one was an attempt to make people stop asking me to fix their computer by charging them outrageous prices, which backfired horribly when they were eager to pay. None are relevant except to say I’ve been around the block and have the scars to prove it. When it was time to get back out there, I wanted to use all I’ve learned to do better. Before I talk about what those lessons produced, I’m going to talk about what those lessons were. Cause before effect, after all. One thing I wanted to do better this time was pattern matching - making the startup look the way that the industry and investors “expect” a startup to look. My last startup was an awesome idea with awesome tech (still is, but like I said, another story), but that one didn’t match patterns. It didn’t match investor patterns, industry buying patterns, patterns of existing, immediate, recognized and admitted needs. Because it didn’t “look” right to anyone, everything about it was way harder than necessary. The “make it look right” approach runs the risk of building a cargo cult, imitating the trappings of something but without understanding the essence of that something, but then again, a thing that looks like a knife is going to make a better knife that a thing that looks like a bowling ball, so sometimes just sharing apparent similarities can get you pretty far, even if it doesn’t get you all the way there. Like how mimicking someone’s accent makes it easier for them to understand you. For this one, I wanted to adopt every tool, method, and pattern that I knew “the industry” wanted to see to minimize the friction from development, go-to-market, scaling, adoption, and that would make investment optional (and, therefore, available if desired) instead of necessary (and, therefore, largely unavailable). That required establishing some expectations for successful patterns I could match against. What patterns am I matching to? Here’s a general sketch of my pattern matching thought process: Software first and software only. It’s the easiest industry to start a business in, lowest startup costs, and easiest customer acquisition. I wanted to build software for an element of the industry that’s actively emerging (and therefore has room to grow) and part of an optimistic investor thesis (and therefore has a cohort of people who are intent on injecting capital into the market to help it grow). It needs to fills a niche that is underexplored (low competition) and highly potent (lots of opportunity), while being aligned to recognized and emerging needs within the industry (readily adopted). I wanted it to have evidence supporting the business thesis that proves the demand exists, but demonstrates that the demand is unanswered (as of yet) by sufficient or adequate supply.* I wanted the lowest number of dominoes to line up and tip for everything to work correctly - the more dominoes in the line, the less likely the last one will fall. I wanted to implement modern toolsets for everything, wherever possible. I wanted to obey the maxim, “When there’s a gold rush, don’t mine the gold, sell the picks and shovels.” Whatever I chose would need to produce cash flow almost immediately with minimal development time or go-to-market delays, because the end of ZIRP killed the “trust me bro” investment thesis predominant over the last 15 years. I wanted to match to YC best practices, not because YC can predict what will definitely work, but because they’ve churned through so many startups in the last 15 years that they have a good sense of what will definitely not work. And I wanted to build client-centric, because if my intent is to to produce cash flow immediately, we need to get clients immediately, and if we need to get clients immediately, we need to focus on what clients need right now. Extra credit: What’s the difference between a customer and a client? Note: Competition is awesome! Competition is validating and not scary, because competition proves a market exists. But competition, especially mature competition against an immature startup, makes it harder to break into a space. A first mover advantage isn’t everything, but seeing demand before it’s sufficiently supplied is a great advantage if you’re capital constrained or otherwise unproven. Think about how much money the first guy to sell fidget spinners or Silly Bandz made versus how much money the last guy to order a pallet of each made. Finding demand that exists already but is as of yet insufficiently satisfied is a great place to start. What opportunity spaces are most relevant? The industries and markets I chose to observe were: AI, because if I’m following a theme & pattern for today, it’s AI. Fintech, because cash is king, and fintech puts your hands on cash flow. Crypto/blockchain, because that’s the “new” fintech (or maybe the “old-new” fintech?), and crypto creates powerful incentives and capital formation strategies, along with a lot of flexibility for transaction systems. Tools, particularly unmet demand in tools, that enable these industries. If you wanted to do some brief and simple homework, you could map each of those bullets to several of the numbered list items preceding them. The reasoning was pretty simplistic - AI is what people want to build and invest in now, while fintech and crypto/blockchain are what people were building and investing in for the last major investment thesis. That means that there’s demand in the market for AI and AI-adjacent startups, while there’s a glut of underutilized and highly developed tools within fintech and crypto/blockchain, with a lot of motivated capital behind the adoption. When someone is thinking “I built this thing and not enough people are using it”, and you then build something that uses it creates a great way to find allies. This rationale harnesses technology that is being built and financed now (which means it needs tools and support methods, and a lot of other “picks and shovels”), while leveraging technology that was recently built and financed and is eager for more widespread adoption of the existing toolkits, which makes it suitable for using to build the AI-adjacent tools that are in demand now. It’s like two harmonics producing constructive interference - it makes two waves into one larger wave, which gives me more momentum to surf against. This was a learning process, and I iterated against my general paradigm repeatedly as I learned more. Neither of us have the patience to go through that in excruciating detail, so I’ll cover the highlights in my next post. Extra credit answer: A customer gets a product, a client gets a service. Challenge: Is software a product or a service?

I just had my best month after 18 months as a solopreneur
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stepitup9600This week

I just had my best month after 18 months as a solopreneur

Last month I reached important milestones both financially (60+ sales) and in terms of my personal brand (2.500+ new followers) But the most important part is that it has reinforced a belief in myself: it is possible, as long as I keep going, improving, learning and iterating. For the last year and a half, I've been grinding and launching project after project. But there was always something wrong: Product didn't solve a real problem Bad marketing (very often lol) Target market had low purchasing power Super-competitive niche (usually b2c) It's difficult to have failure after failure and keep going on. At times it would feel like everyone was making money, except for me. I was hacking on my projects every single day before and after my 9-5 and had mostly given up all my free time for this. But results were far from being what I wanted. So I would doubt myself all the time. One thing I had going for me is that I really enjoy building things - so that helped me a lot in staying consistent. I always knew this was a long-term thing and that I'd probably have to fail again and again before seeing some success. But even so, it was really hard to keep up the spirits at all time, especially after working so hard for so long. I wasn't going to give up but I also knew that continuing like this would lead nowhere. So I decided that for my next project I would do 2 things: 1) prioritize marketing and 2) build something strategic 1) Prioritize marketing I decided I was going to put in the same amount of effort into marketing as I put into building. Usually my time would be split 90% coding - 10% marketing. Now, for the first time ever it's probably 65% coding - 35% marketing. I organized myself and made an entire gameplan for it. This forced me to learn a lot about: Video editing Cold emails Copywriting Running ads Short-form content There are a lot of items I still need to execute on - but at least I have a good idea of how to approach most things. 2) Build something strategic I had to build something that I would be able to use even if nobody else did. For the last year and a half I had been building AI apps and my plan was to continue doing that. So I decided to leverage that and thought about how I could build something that would give me an unfair advantage + have a compounding effect over the long term: a) Unfair advantage Having AI demo apps that cover all type of AI functionalities would make my life easier & would allow me to ship new apps quickly, regardless of the required model/functionality So even if nobody bought this - I'd have built something really useful for myself & would have a slight edge over other people b) Compound over the long term Building "AnotherWrapper' (my new project) would have a good synergy with my future projects: It would allow me to build new projects faster While building new projects, I'd learn new things, which I would then be able to implement into AnotherWrapper and improve the product that way A win-win. Closing thoughts I did not expect things to go this well - it's been an amazing month and I'm truly grateful to everyone that has been supporting me. But at the end of the day, there is still a lot of work to be done. The initial 'hype' & effects from some viral tweets are starting to wear off. I still don't have a reliable distribution channel that guarantees me traffic. So I need to figure that out. I think the product has a lot of potential - it has been well received and has been a success so far, but my distribution is still lacking. The good thing is that I now have some extra cash to spend on things like ads, influencers, freelancers etc. So it opens some new doors that were previously closed! I also have some other projects down the pipeline which are coming soon. Will keep you guys updated!

Hot Take: Not all your startups need AI forced into them
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bitorsicThis week

Hot Take: Not all your startups need AI forced into them

I'm a final year Computer Engineering student, hence applying for jobs all around. There's this particular trend I've noticed with startups that are coming up these days. That is, even for the absolute basic stuff they'll use 'AI', and they'll think they built something 'revolutionary'. No. You're breaking your product in ways you don't realise. An example, that even some well established companies are guilty of: AI Chatbots You absolutely don't need them and it's an entire gimmick. If you really wanna implement a chatbot, connect the user to an actual person on your end, which I think is not possible if you're at a 'startup' stage. You'll need employees who can handle user queries in real time. If the user really is stuck let them use the 'Contact Us' page. A really close relative of mine is very vocal about the frustration he faces whenever he tries to use the AI Chatbot on any well known e-com website. The only case for AI Chatbot that makes sense is when it's directing the customer to an actual customer support rep if none of the AI's solutions is working for the customer. Even then, implementing a search page for FAQ is extremely easy and user friendly. Another example: AI Interviewer I recently interviewed for a startup, and their whole interviewing process was AI'zed?!?! No real person at the other end, I was answering to their questions which were in video format. They even had a 'mascot' / 'AI interviewer' avatar designed by an AI (AI-ception???). This mascot just text-to-speech'ed all the questions for me to rewind and hear what I missed again. And I had to record video and audio to answer these questions on their platform itself. The entire interview process just could've been a questionnaire, or if you're really concerned on the integrity of the interviewee, just take a few minutes out of your oh-so-busy schedule as a startup owner. Atleast for hiring employees who would make the most impact on your product going ahead. I say the most impact, because (atleast as a developer) the work done by these employees would define how robust your product is, and/or how easily other features can be integrated into the codebase. Trust me, refactoring code later on would only cost you time and money. These resources would rather be more useful in other departments of your startup. The only use case for an AI Interviewer I see is for preparing for an actual interview, provided that feedback is given to the user at the earliest, which you don't need to worry about as a startup owner. So yeah, you're probably better off without integrating AI in your product. Thank you for reading. TLDR; The title; I know AI is the new thing and gets everyone drooling and all, but for the love of God, just focus on what your startup does best and put real people behind it; Integrating AI without human intervention is as good as a broken product; Do your hiring yourself, or through real people, emphasizing on the fact that the people you hire at an early stage will define your growth ahead;

I spent 6 months on building a tool, and got 0 zero users. Here is my story.
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GDbuildsGDThis week

I spent 6 months on building a tool, and got 0 zero users. Here is my story.

Edit Thank you all so much for your time reading my story. Your support, feedback, criticism, and skepticism; all helped me a lot, and I couldn't appreciate it enough \^\_\^ TL;DR I spent 6 months on a tool that currently has 0 users. Below is what I learned during my journey, sharing because I believe most mistakes are easily avoidable. Do not overestimate your product and assume it will be an exception to fundamental principles. Principles are there for a reason. Always look for validation before you start. Avoid building products with a low money-to-effort ratio/in very competitive fields. Unless you have the means, you probably won't make it. Pick a problem space, pick your target audience, and talk to them before thinking about a solution. Identify and match their pain points. Only then should you think of a solution. If people are not overly excited or willing to pay in advance for a discounted price, it might be a sign to rethink. Sell one and only one feature at a time. Avoid everything else. If people don't pay for that one core feature, no secondary feature will change their mind. Always spend twice as much time marketing as you do building. You will not get users if they don't know it exists. Define success metrics ("1000 users in 3 months" or "$6000 in the account at the end of 6 months") before you start. If you don't meet them, strongly consider quitting the project. If you can't get enough users to keep going, nothing else matters. VALIDATION, VALIDATION, VALIDATION. Success is not random, but most of our first products will not make a success story. Know when to admit failure, and move on. Even if a product of yours doesn't succeed, what you learned during its journey will turn out to be invaluable for your future. My story So, this is the story of a product, Summ, that I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. As it's the first product I’ve ever built, after watching you all from the sidelines, I have learned a lot, made many mistakes, and did only a few things right. Just sharing what I’ve learned and some insights from my journey so far. I hope that this post will help you avoid the mistakes I made — most of which I consider easily avoidable — while you enjoy reading it, and get to know me a little bit more 🤓. A slow start after many years Summ isn’t the first product I really wanted to build. Lacking enough dev skills to even get started was a huge blocker for so many years. In fact, the first product I would’ve LOVED to build was a smart personal shopping assistant. I had this idea 4 years ago; but with no GPT, no coding skills, no technical co-founder, I didn’t have the means to make it happen. I still do not know if such a tool exists and is good enough. All I wanted was a tool that could make data-based predictions about when to buy stuff (“buy a new toothpaste every three months”) and suggest physical products that I might need or be strongly interested in. AFAIK, Amazon famously still struggles with the second one. Fast-forward a few years, I learned the very basics of HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS. Still was not there to build a product; but good enough to code my design portfolio from scratch. Yet, I couldn’t imagine myself building a product using Vanilla JS. I really hated it, I really sucked at it. So, back to tutorial hell, and to learn about this framework I just heard about: React.React introduced so many new concepts to me. “Thinking in React” is a phrase we heard a lot, and with quite good reasons. After some time, I was able to build very basic tutorial apps, both in React, and React Native; but I have to say that I really hated coding for mobile. At this point, I was already a fan of productivity apps, and had a concept for a time management assistant app in my design portfolio. So, why not build one? Surely, it must be easy, since every coding tutorial starts with a todo app. ❌ WRONG! Building a basic todo app is easy enough, but building one good enough for a place in the market was a challenge I took and failed. I wasted one month on that until I abandoned the project for good. Even if I continued working on it, as the productivity landscape is overly competitive, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to cover costs, assuming I make any. Since I was (and still am) in between jobs, I decided to abandon the project. 👉 What I learned: Do not start projects with a low ratio of money to effort and time. Example: Even if I get 500 monthly users, 200 of which are paid users (unrealistically high number), assuming an average subscription fee of $5/m (such apps are quite cheap, mostly due to the high competition), it would make me around $1000 minus any occurring costs. Any founder with a product that has 500 active users should make more. Even if it was relatively successful, due to the high competition, I wouldn’t make any meaningful money. PS: I use Todoist today. Due to local pricing, I pay less than $2/m. There is no way I could beat this competitive pricing, let alone the app itself. But, somehow, with a project that wasn’t even functional — let alone being an MVP — I made my first Wi-Fi money: Someone decided that the domain I preemptively purchased is worth something. By this point, I had already abandoned the project, certainly wasn’t going to renew the domain, was looking for a FT job, and a new project that I could work on. And out of nowhere, someone hands me some free money — who am I not to take it? Of course, I took it. The domain is still unused, no idea why 🤔. Ngl, I still hate the fact that my first Wi-Fi money came from this. A new idea worth pursuing? Fast-forward some weeks now. Around March, I got this crazy idea of building an email productivity tool. We all use emails, yet we all hate them. So, this must be fixed. Everyone uses emails, in fact everyone HAS TO use emails. So, I just needed to build a tool and wait for people to come. This was all, really. After all, the problem space is huge, there is enough room for another product, everyone uses emails, no need for any further validation, right? ❌ WRONG ONCE AGAIN! We all hear from the greatest in the startup landscape that we must validate our ideas with real people, yet at least some of us (guilty here 🥸) think that our product will be hugely successful and prove them to be an exception. Few might, but most are not. I certainly wasn't. 👉 Lesson learned: Always validate your ideas with real people. Ask them how much they’d pay for such a tool (not if they would). Much better if they are willing to pay upfront for a discount, etc. But even this comes later, keep reading. I think the difference between “How much” and “If” is huge for two reasons: (1) By asking them for “How much”, you force them to think in a more realistic setting. (2) You will have a more realistic idea on your profit margins. Based on my competitive analysis, I already had a solution in my mind to improve our email usage standards and email productivity (huge mistake), but I did my best to learn about their problems regarding those without pushing the idea too hard. The idea is this: Generate concise email summaries with suggested actions, combine them into one email, and send it at their preferred times. Save as much as time the AI you end up with allows. After all, everyone loves to save time. So, what kind of validation did I seek for? Talked with only a few people around me about this crazy, internet-breaking idea. The responses I got were, now I see, mediocre; no one got excited about it, just said things along the lines of “Cool idea, OK”. So, any reasonable person in this situation would think “Okay, not might not be working”, right? Well, I did not. I assumed that they were the wrong audience for this product, and there was this magical land of user segments waiting eagerly for my product, yet unknowingly. To this day, I still have not reached this magical place. Perhaps, it didn’t exist in the first place. If I cannot find it, whether it exists or not doesn’t matter. I am certainly searching for it. 👉 What I should have done: Once I decide on a problem space (time management, email productivity, etc.), I should decide on my potential user segments, people who I plan to sell my product to. Then I should go talk to those people, ask them about their pains, then get to the problem-solving/ideation phase only later. ❗️ VALIDATION COMES FROM THE REALITY OUTSIDE. What validation looks like might change from product to product; but what invalidation looks like is more or less the same for every product. Nico Jeannen told me yesterday “validation = money in the account” on Twitter. This is the ultimate form of validation your product could get. If your product doesn’t make any money, then something is invalidated by reality: Your product, you, your idea, who knows? So, at this point, I knew a little bit of Python from spending some time in tutorial hell a few years ago, some HTML/CSS/JS, barely enough React to build a working app. React could work for this project, but I needed easy-to-implement server interactivity. Luckily, around this time, I got to know about this new gen of indie hackers, and learned (but didn’t truly understand) about their approach to indie hacking, and this library called Nextjs. How good Next.js still blows my mind. So, I was back to tutorial hell once again. But, this time, with a promise to myself: This is the last time I would visit tutorial hell. Time to start building this "ground-breaking idea" Learning the fundamentals of Next.js was easier than learning of React unsurprisingly. Yet, the first time I managed to run server actions on Next.js was one of the rarest moments that completely blew my mind. To this day, I reject the idea that it is something else than pure magic under its hood. Did I absolutely need Nextjs for this project though? I do not think so. Did it save me lots of time? Absolutely. Furthermore, learning Nextjs will certainly be quite helpful for other projects that I will be tackling in the future. Already got a few ideas that might be worth pursuing in the head in case I decide to abandon Summ in the future. Fast-forward few weeks again: So, at this stage, I had a barely working MVP-like product. Since the very beginning, I spent every free hour (and more) on this project as speed is essential. But, I am not so sure it was worth it to overwork in retrospect. Yet, I know I couldn’t help myself. Everything is going kinda smooth, so what’s the worst thing that could ever happen? Well, both Apple and Google announced their AIs (Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, respectively) will have email summarization features for their products. Summarizing singular emails is no big deal, after all there were already so many similar products in the market. I still think that what truly matters is a frictionless user experience, and this is why I built this product in a certain way: You spend less than a few minutes setting up your account, and you get to enjoy your email summaries, without ever visiting its website again. This is still a very cool concept I really like a lot. So, at this point: I had no other idea that could be pursued, already spent too much time on this project. Do I quit or not? This was the question. Of course not. I just have to launch this product as quickly as possible. So, I did something right, a quite rare occurrence I might say: Re-planned my product, dropped everything secondary to the core feature immediately (save time on reading emails), tried launching it asap. 👉 Insight: Sell only one core feature at one time. Drop anything secondary to this core feature. Well, my primary occupation is product design. So one would expect that a product I build must have stellar design. I considered any considerable time spent on design at this stage would be simply wasted. I still think this is both true and wrong: True, because if your product’s core benefits suck, no one will care about your design. False, because if your design looks amateurish, no one will trust you and your product. So, I always targeted an average level design with it and the way this tool works made it quite easy as I had to design only 2 primary pages: Landing page and user portal (which has only settings and analytics pages). However, even though I knew spending time on design was not worth much of my time, I got a bit “greedy”: In fact, I redesigned those pages three times, and still ended up with a so-so design that I am not proud of. 👉 What I would do differently: Unless absolutely necessary, only one iteration per stage as long as it works. This, in my mind, applies to everything. If your product’s A feature works, then no need to rewrite it from scratch for any reason, or even refactor it. When your product becomes a success, and you absolutely need that part of your codebase to be written, do so, but only then. Ready to launch, now is th etime for some marketing, right? By July 26, I already had a “launchable” product that barely works (I marked this date on a Notion docs, this is how I know). Yet, I had spent almost no time on marketing, sales, whatever. After all, “You build and they will come”. Did I know that I needed marketing? Of course I did, but knowingly didn’t. Why, you might ask. Well, from my perspective, it had to be a dev-heavy product; meaning that you spend most of your time on developing it, mostly coding skills. But, this is simply wrong. As a rule of thumb, as noted by one of the greatests, Marc Louvion, you should spend at least twice of the building time on marketing. ❗️ Time spent on building \* 2 people don’t know your product > they don’t use your product > you don’t get users > you don’t make money Easy as that. Following the same reasoning, a slightly different approach to planning a project is possible. Determine an approximate time to complete the project with a high level project plan. Let’s say 6 months. By the reasoning above, 2 months should go into building, and 4 into marketing. If you need 4 months for building instead of 2, then you need 8 months of marketing, which makes the time to complete the project 12 months. If you don’t have that much time, then quit the project. When does a project count as completed? Well, in reality, never. But, I think we have to define success conditions even before we start for indie projects and startups; so we know when to quit when they are not met. A success condition could look like “Make $6000 in 12 months” or “Have 3000 users in 6 months”. It all depends on the project. But, once you set it, it should be set in stone: You don’t change it unless absolutely necessary. I suspect there are few principles that make a solopreneur successful; and knowing when to quit and when to continue is definitely one of them. Marc Louvion is famously known for his success, but he got there after failing so many projects. To my knowledge, the same applies to Nico Jeannen, Pieter Levels, or almost everyone as well. ❗️ Determining when to continue even before you start will definitely help in the long run. A half-aed launch Time-leap again. Around mid August, I “soft launched” my product. By soft launch, I mean lazy marketing. Just tweeting about it, posting it on free directories. Did I get any traffic? Surely I did. Did I get any users? Nope. Only after this time, it hit me: “Either something is wrong with me, or with this product” Marketing might be a much bigger factor for a project’s success after all. Even though I get some traffic, not convincing enough for people to sign up even for a free trial. The product was still perfect in my eyes at the time (well, still is ^(\_),) so the right people are not finding my product, I thought. Then, a question that I should have been asking at the very first place, one that could prevent all these, comes to my mind: “How do even people search for such tools?” If we are to consider this whole journey of me and my so-far-failed product to be an already destined failure, one metric suffices to show why. Search volume: 30. Even if people have such a pain point, they are not looking for email summaries. So, almost no organic traffic coming from Google. But, as a person who did zero marketing on this or any product, who has zero marketing knowledge, who doesn’t have an audience on social media, there is not much I could do. Finally, it was time to give up. Or not… In my eyes, the most important element that makes a founder (solo or not) successful (this, I am not by any means) is to solve problems. ❗️ So, the problem was this: “People are not finding my product by organic search” How do I make sure I get some organic traffic and gets more visibility? Learn digital marketing and SEO as much as I can within very limited time. Thankfully, without spending much time, I came across Neil Patel's YT channel, and as I said many times, it is an absolute gold mine. I learned a lot, especially about the fundamentals, and surely it will be fruitful; but there is no magic trick that could make people visit your website. SEO certainly helps, but only when people are looking for your keywords. However, it is truly a magical solution to get in touch with REAL people that are in your user segments: 👉 Understand your pains, understand their problems, help them to solve them via building products. I did not do this so far, have to admit. But, in case you would like to have a chat about your email usage, and email productivity, just get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear about them. Getting ready for a ProductHunt launch The date was Sept 1. And I unlocked an impossible achievement: Running out of Supabase’s free plan’s Egres limit while having zero users. I was already considering moving out of their Cloud server and managing a Supabase CLI service on my Hetzner VPS for some time; but never ever suspected that I would have to do this quickly. The cheapest plan Supabase offers is $25/month; yet, at that point, I am in between jobs for such a long time, basically broke, and could barely afford that price. One or two months could be okay, but why pay for it if I will eventually move out of their Cloud service? So, instead of paying $25, I spent two days migrating out of Supabase Cloud. Worth my time? Definitely not. But, when you are broke, you gotta do stupid things. This was the first time that I felt lucky to have zero users: I have no idea how I would manage this migration if I had any. I think this is one of the core tenets of an indie hacker: Controlling their own environment. I can’t remember whose quote this is, but I suspect it was Naval: Entrepreneurs have an almost pathological need to control their own fate. They will take any suffering if they can be in charge of their destiny, and not have it in somebody else’s hands. What’s truly scary is, at least in my case, we make people around us suffer at the expense of our attempting to control our own fates. I know this period has been quite hard on my wife as well, as I neglected her quite a bit, but sadly, I know that this will happen again. It is something that I can barely help with. Still, so sorry. After working the last two weeks on a ProductHunt Launch, I finally launched it this Tuesday. Zero ranking, zero new users, but 36 kind people upvoted my product, and many commented and provided invaluable feedback. I couldn't be more grateful for each one of them 🙏. Considering all these, what lies in the future of Summ though? I have no idea, to be honest. On one hand, I have zero users, have no job, no income. So, I need a way to make money asap. On the other hand, the whole idea of it revolves around one core premise (not an assumption) that I am not so willing to share; and I couldn’t have more trust in it. This might not be the best iteration of it, however I certainly believe that email usage is one of the best problem spaces one could work on. 👉 But, one thing is for certain: I need to get in touch with people, and talk with them about this product I built so far. In fact, this is the only item on my agenda. Nothing else will save my brainchild <3. Below are some other insights and notes that I got during my journey; as they do not 100% fit into this story, I think it is more suitable to list them here. I hope you enjoyed reading this. Give Summ a try, it comes with a generous free trial, no credit card required. Some additional notes and insights: Project planning is one of the most underestimated skills for solopreneurs. It saves you enormous time, and helps you to keep your focus up. Building B2C products beats building B2B products. Businesses are very willing to pay big bucks if your product helps them. On the other hand, spending a few hours per user who would pay $5/m probably is not worth your time. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is if no one uses it. If you cannot sell a product in a certain category/niche (or do not know how to sell it), it might be a good idea not to start a project in it. Going after new ideas and ventures is quite risky, especially if you don’t know how to market it. On the other hand, an already established category means that there is already demand. Whether this demand is sufficient or not is another issue. As long as there is enough demand for your product to fit in, any category/niche is good. Some might be better, some might be worse. Unless you are going hardcore B2B, you will need people to find your product by means of organic search. Always conduct thorough keyword research as soon as possible.

AI will obsolete most young vertical SAAS startups, I will not promote
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AI will obsolete most young vertical SAAS startups, I will not promote

This is an unpopular opinion, but living in New York City and working with a ton of vertical SaaS startups, meaning basically database wrapper startups that engineer workflows for specific industries and specific users, what they built was at one point in time kind of innovative, or their edge was the fact that they built these like very specific workflows. And so a lot of venture capital and seed funding has gone into these types of startups. But with AI, those database wrapper startups are basically obsolete. I personally feel like all of these companies are going to have to shift like quickly to AI or watch all of their edge and what value they bring to the table absolutely evaporate. It's something that I feel like it's not currently being priced in and no one really knows how to price, but it's going to be really interesting to watch as more software becomes generated and workflows get generated. I’m not saying these companies are worth nothing, but their products need to be completely redone EDIT: for people not understanding: The UX is completely different from traditional vertical saas. Also in real world scenarios, AI does not call the same APIs as the front end. The data handling and validation is different. It’s 50% rebuild. Then add in the technical debt, the fact that they might need a different tech stack to build agents correctly, different experience in their engineers. the power struggles that occur inside companies that need a huge change like this could tank the whole thing alone. It can be done, but these companies are vulnerable. The edge they have is working with existing customers to get it right. But they basically blew millions on a tech implementation that’s not as relevant going forwards. Investors maybe better served putting money into a fresh cap table

Looking for a tech cofounder. Revoltionary (yes really!) gig economy app. I will not promote.
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Looking for a tech cofounder. Revoltionary (yes really!) gig economy app. I will not promote.

Hey everyone! I’m building a new gig-work app that cuts out the hassles of interviews, applications, and sky-high fees. We’re aiming to make it easy for businesses to hire qualified freelancers for short shifts or one-off tasks—and for freelancers to set their own rates and get paid quickly. Why This App? Time-Saving Model: Instead of posting jobs and conducting multiple interviews, employers can instantly book from a list of KYC-verified freelancers who showcase their skills via 30-second video bios. Cost Leadership: We plan to charge only 5%, far below the 15–50% common in other gig platforms. This keeps more money in the pockets of both freelancers and businesses. Proven Demand: A beta test in 2018 drew nearly 600 active users, validating that there’s appetite for a simpler, fairer way to fill short shifts. About Me 20+ years’ experience in payroll, workforce management, and operations for Fortune 500 companies. Led cross-functional teams, implemented large-scale solutions, and believe in building with a user-first mindset. Offering meaningful equity—I want a true partner, not a hired gun. Who I’m Looking For Full-Stack Developer (comfortable with Node.js, React, Python, or similar and ML/Ai) who can manage everything from front-end to database integration (ideally Postgres/MySQL) and build a same day payments system. Passion for creating solutions that genuinely help gig workers and small businesses. Excitement to collaborate on the product roadmap, from the booking interface to same-day payment features. The Opportunity Major Market: The gig economy is huge and still growing. If we nail speed, cost-effectiveness, and ease of use, we can capture a significant share of it. Remote-Friendly: We can work together from anywhere, though I’m planning to relaunch in London where the initial beta gained momentum. If this sounds like your kind of challenge, drop a comment or DM me. Let’s chat about how we can merge our strengths—my operations background and your technical expertise—to build a platform that truly transforms the gig-work experience. Thanks for reading, and I look forward to creating something impactful together!

Competing with much bigger companies that have lame products? How do I market and carve out a niche? (I will not promote)
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Competing with much bigger companies that have lame products? How do I market and carve out a niche? (I will not promote)

I've been working on a product for the last few months that competes with CapCut, Adobe Premier, Veed, Descript, DaVinci Resolve, etc. Basically, it's a fancy video editor. (no link and I will not promote but just some background context) I'm very technical and started creating videos for TikTok but really wanted to take my game to the next level. My channel sort of blew up on me in the first month and I was able to get 2M views and 10k followers. My initial thinking was that I was going to use AI to make video editing fancy/faster and sort of have this as a "script" that I used personally. Basically, give myself a serious competitive advantage. However, it sort of spiraled out of control! What started off as a weekend project, turned into 2 weekends, which turned into about 2 months of continuous hacking. If I'm going to spend a significant amount of time on this, I might as well try to productize it and try to at least make enough money that I break even on my time. The thing I'm worried about, in the back of my mind, is that if I shop this, that my competitors, with their signifiant resources, could clone what I'm doing quickly. However, at the same time, why haven't they done so already? I mean maybe I have a better understanding of the market than they do because they don't actually use their products. I know that sounds like a bit of a cop out in a way but there are plenty of entrepreneurs who have started companies and crushed it just because they were heads down and focused. Another problem I face, is that I think VCs may not be super excited about this because it's B2C-ish and it's not in a super exciting space. Maybe you could say it's in the AI video space, and they're excited about AI video, but it's just an AI video editor, not fully creating AI videos from scratch like SORA. I think since I blew up my TikTok feed before, that I could do it again, and if I get 2M views, and I have a outro on my video, that I could start to convert some of these as customers. Especially, if I started to create videos for creators which is more focused on the target market. So without funding, can I really tackle these existing competitors? PS. "I will not promote" but I have to talk about this somewhat abstractly but I won't link to anything.

Finally Launched My First App Without Any Coding Experience
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Consistent_Access844This week

Finally Launched My First App Without Any Coding Experience

About Myself I am a structural engineer that are taught to design buildings in the day and I have been dreaming forever to build a SaaS business to get out of the rat race. However, as a structural engineer, coding is definitely not something I am capable of doing (I have some simple knowledge, but its no way close to building an app) The Journey As I've mentioned, I always wanted to build a SaaS business because in my mind the business model is most attractive to me, where you only need to build once and can sell to millions. So I started off searching and exploring on the internet and my first ever "SaaS" was from Wordpress. I am buying plugin from other user and then pluggin into my own Wordpress website. It was a project management tool SaaS. I was so excited about the website and can't even sleep well at night because I'm just so hype about it. But, the reality is because this is my first ever business, I totally didn't realise about the importance of UI UX or my business differentiation, thinking that everyone will be as excited as I am. Then, I went deeper and deeper into the journey (I can write more about this in another post if anyone is interested) and finally landed on Flutterflow to create my first ever app. No Code Journey Thanks to no code builder, I never thought that a non-coder like me can ever create an app and got accepted by the App Store/Play Store. Since that I am using a low-code builder, for any specific requirement that I need that are not covered natively, I will just talk to ChatGPT and boom I pretty much got most of the answer I needed. About The App As someone that always try to keep track of my expenses, I never able to find an app that are simple and interesting enough for me to continue on the journey. I realise that I could have incorporate AI into this journey and hence there go, I created an AI Money Tracker. Let me introduce Rolly: AI Money Tracker - a new AI expense tracker where you can easily record your transactions just by chatting with our bot Rolly and it will automatically record and categorise the transaction into the most suitable category (you can also create any of your own category and it will also take care of it in consideration). I am not sharing the app link here to avoid getting ban, but feel free to search up Rolly: AI Money Tracker on either App Store on Play Store. My Learnings As someone that can't code and never imagine that I could create a production app by myself and publish it on to the App Store and Play Store. Since I am not making any money yet and just at the beginning of my entrepreneur journey, I can't give any substantial advice, all I can say is just my own learnings and feelings. My advice is if you have a dream of building a business, just go for it, don't worry about all the problems that you can think of to convince yourself not making the start at all. From my point of view, as long as you're not giving up everything (eg, putting yourself in huge debt etc), why don't just go for it and you've got nothing much to lose. You'll only lose if you never even get started. And also, I believe that creating an app is always the easiest step out of the entreprenuership journey, marketing and distribution is the key to success. Even though you've spent days and nights on it and it might mean everything to you, the truth is people don't really cares and you'll need to market for it. I am still in journey to learn how to do marketing, content, building a business and everything. I think this is just a very beginning of my journey and hopefully there's more interesting one to share further down the road.

16 years old and thinking about creating a startup
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NCS001This week

16 years old and thinking about creating a startup

Hi to everyone, this is my first post on Reddit and r/Startups. Sorry in advance if there is any mistake. I'm 16 years old, and I'm already planning to create my startup. Growing up in the digital age has given me both inspiration and doubts. On one side, you hear advice like, “You need connections with powerful people to succeed.” On the other, there are stories of founders coming from poverty and now leading billion-dollar companies.That really sucks. I'm here because I believe this community offers honest and grounded insights. So you can analyze, I leave you my goals. I accept all the advice you have. I’ll finish high school in two years while using my free time to learn about AI, programming, agile methods, and business basics. After that, I plan to pursue a Systems Engineering degree, even though I’ve debated skipping university. My older siblings convinced me it’s worth it for the professional and technical foundation. During college, I aim to freelance, save money, and build connections with entrepreneurs and developers. Beyond that, my 15-year plan includes working in tech companies to gain experience, creating an MVP for my startup, and securing funding through investors or incubators. I want to solve real-world problems using tools that feel future-proof. While I sometimes feel behind, I’m determined to catch up and take advantage of the opportunities ahead. I know the startup journey is uncertain—like a vulnerable animal facing competition, funding issues, and market challenges. But I’m ready to adapt as my vision evolves. Like for example the time. Obviously I would like to keep it exactly but you never know what can happen along the way. I’d love to hear your thoughts or advice. Thanks in advance, and I apologize if anything is unclear

I spent 6 months on building a tool, and got 0 zero users. Here is my story.
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I spent 6 months on building a tool, and got 0 zero users. Here is my story.

Edit Thank you all so much for your time reading my story. Your support, feedback, criticism, and skepticism; all helped me a lot, and I couldn't appreciate it enough \^\_\^ TL;DR I spent 6 months on a tool that currently has 0 users. Below is what I learned during my journey, sharing because I believe most mistakes are easily avoidable. Do not overestimate your product and assume it will be an exception to fundamental principles. Principles are there for a reason. Always look for validation before you start. Avoid building products with a low money-to-effort ratio/in very competitive fields. Unless you have the means, you probably won't make it. Pick a problem space, pick your target audience, and talk to them before thinking about a solution. Identify and match their pain points. Only then should you think of a solution. If people are not overly excited or willing to pay in advance for a discounted price, it might be a sign to rethink. Sell one and only one feature at a time. Avoid everything else. If people don't pay for that one core feature, no secondary feature will change their mind. Always spend twice as much time marketing as you do building. You will not get users if they don't know it exists. Define success metrics ("1000 users in 3 months" or "$6000 in the account at the end of 6 months") before you start. If you don't meet them, strongly consider quitting the project. If you can't get enough users to keep going, nothing else matters. VALIDATION, VALIDATION, VALIDATION. Success is not random, but most of our first products will not make a success story. Know when to admit failure, and move on. Even if a product of yours doesn't succeed, what you learned during its journey will turn out to be invaluable for your future. My story So, this is the story of a product, Summ, that I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. As it's the first product I’ve ever built, after watching you all from the sidelines, I have learned a lot, made many mistakes, and did only a few things right. Just sharing what I’ve learned and some insights from my journey so far. I hope that this post will help you avoid the mistakes I made — most of which I consider easily avoidable — while you enjoy reading it, and get to know me a little bit more 🤓. A slow start after many years Summ isn’t the first product I really wanted to build. Lacking enough dev skills to even get started was a huge blocker for so many years. In fact, the first product I would’ve LOVED to build was a smart personal shopping assistant. I had this idea 4 years ago; but with no GPT, no coding skills, no technical co-founder, I didn’t have the means to make it happen. I still do not know if such a tool exists and is good enough. All I wanted was a tool that could make data-based predictions about when to buy stuff (“buy a new toothpaste every three months”) and suggest physical products that I might need or be strongly interested in. AFAIK, Amazon famously still struggles with the second one. Fast-forward a few years, I learned the very basics of HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS. Still was not there to build a product; but good enough to code my design portfolio from scratch. Yet, I couldn’t imagine myself building a product using Vanilla JS. I really hated it, I really sucked at it. So, back to tutorial hell, and to learn about this framework I just heard about: React.React introduced so many new concepts to me. “Thinking in React” is a phrase we heard a lot, and with quite good reasons. After some time, I was able to build very basic tutorial apps, both in React, and React Native; but I have to say that I really hated coding for mobile. At this point, I was already a fan of productivity apps, and had a concept for a time management assistant app in my design portfolio. So, why not build one? Surely, it must be easy, since every coding tutorial starts with a todo app. ❌ WRONG! Building a basic todo app is easy enough, but building one good enough for a place in the market was a challenge I took and failed. I wasted one month on that until I abandoned the project for good. Even if I continued working on it, as the productivity landscape is overly competitive, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to cover costs, assuming I make any. Since I was (and still am) in between jobs, I decided to abandon the project. 👉 What I learned: Do not start projects with a low ratio of money to effort and time. Example: Even if I get 500 monthly users, 200 of which are paid users (unrealistically high number), assuming an average subscription fee of $5/m (such apps are quite cheap, mostly due to the high competition), it would make me around $1000 minus any occurring costs. Any founder with a product that has 500 active users should make more. Even if it was relatively successful, due to the high competition, I wouldn’t make any meaningful money. PS: I use Todoist today. Due to local pricing, I pay less than $2/m. There is no way I could beat this competitive pricing, let alone the app itself. But, somehow, with a project that wasn’t even functional — let alone being an MVP — I made my first Wi-Fi money: Someone decided that the domain I preemptively purchased is worth something. By this point, I had already abandoned the project, certainly wasn’t going to renew the domain, was looking for a FT job, and a new project that I could work on. And out of nowhere, someone hands me some free money — who am I not to take it? Of course, I took it. The domain is still unused, no idea why 🤔. Ngl, I still hate the fact that my first Wi-Fi money came from this. A new idea worth pursuing? Fast-forward some weeks now. Around March, I got this crazy idea of building an email productivity tool. We all use emails, yet we all hate them. So, this must be fixed. Everyone uses emails, in fact everyone HAS TO use emails. So, I just needed to build a tool and wait for people to come. This was all, really. After all, the problem space is huge, there is enough room for another product, everyone uses emails, no need for any further validation, right? ❌ WRONG ONCE AGAIN! We all hear from the greatest in the startup landscape that we must validate our ideas with real people, yet at least some of us (guilty here 🥸) think that our product will be hugely successful and prove them to be an exception. Few might, but most are not. I certainly wasn't. 👉 Lesson learned: Always validate your ideas with real people. Ask them how much they’d pay for such a tool (not if they would). Much better if they are willing to pay upfront for a discount, etc. But even this comes later, keep reading. I think the difference between “How much” and “If” is huge for two reasons: (1) By asking them for “How much”, you force them to think in a more realistic setting. (2) You will have a more realistic idea on your profit margins. Based on my competitive analysis, I already had a solution in my mind to improve our email usage standards and email productivity (huge mistake), but I did my best to learn about their problems regarding those without pushing the idea too hard. The idea is this: Generate concise email summaries with suggested actions, combine them into one email, and send it at their preferred times. Save as much as time the AI you end up with allows. After all, everyone loves to save time. So, what kind of validation did I seek for? Talked with only a few people around me about this crazy, internet-breaking idea. The responses I got were, now I see, mediocre; no one got excited about it, just said things along the lines of “Cool idea, OK”. So, any reasonable person in this situation would think “Okay, not might not be working”, right? Well, I did not. I assumed that they were the wrong audience for this product, and there was this magical land of user segments waiting eagerly for my product, yet unknowingly. To this day, I still have not reached this magical place. Perhaps, it didn’t exist in the first place. If I cannot find it, whether it exists or not doesn’t matter. I am certainly searching for it. 👉 What I should have done: Once I decide on a problem space (time management, email productivity, etc.), I should decide on my potential user segments, people who I plan to sell my product to. Then I should go talk to those people, ask them about their pains, then get to the problem-solving/ideation phase only later. ❗️ VALIDATION COMES FROM THE REALITY OUTSIDE. What validation looks like might change from product to product; but what invalidation looks like is more or less the same for every product. Nico Jeannen told me yesterday “validation = money in the account” on Twitter. This is the ultimate form of validation your product could get. If your product doesn’t make any money, then something is invalidated by reality: Your product, you, your idea, who knows? So, at this point, I knew a little bit of Python from spending some time in tutorial hell a few years ago, some HTML/CSS/JS, barely enough React to build a working app. React could work for this project, but I needed easy-to-implement server interactivity. Luckily, around this time, I got to know about this new gen of indie hackers, and learned (but didn’t truly understand) about their approach to indie hacking, and this library called Nextjs. How good Next.js still blows my mind. So, I was back to tutorial hell once again. But, this time, with a promise to myself: This is the last time I would visit tutorial hell. Time to start building this "ground-breaking idea" Learning the fundamentals of Next.js was easier than learning of React unsurprisingly. Yet, the first time I managed to run server actions on Next.js was one of the rarest moments that completely blew my mind. To this day, I reject the idea that it is something else than pure magic under its hood. Did I absolutely need Nextjs for this project though? I do not think so. Did it save me lots of time? Absolutely. Furthermore, learning Nextjs will certainly be quite helpful for other projects that I will be tackling in the future. Already got a few ideas that might be worth pursuing in the head in case I decide to abandon Summ in the future. Fast-forward few weeks again: So, at this stage, I had a barely working MVP-like product. Since the very beginning, I spent every free hour (and more) on this project as speed is essential. But, I am not so sure it was worth it to overwork in retrospect. Yet, I know I couldn’t help myself. Everything is going kinda smooth, so what’s the worst thing that could ever happen? Well, both Apple and Google announced their AIs (Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, respectively) will have email summarization features for their products. Summarizing singular emails is no big deal, after all there were already so many similar products in the market. I still think that what truly matters is a frictionless user experience, and this is why I built this product in a certain way: You spend less than a few minutes setting up your account, and you get to enjoy your email summaries, without ever visiting its website again. This is still a very cool concept I really like a lot. So, at this point: I had no other idea that could be pursued, already spent too much time on this project. Do I quit or not? This was the question. Of course not. I just have to launch this product as quickly as possible. So, I did something right, a quite rare occurrence I might say: Re-planned my product, dropped everything secondary to the core feature immediately (save time on reading emails), tried launching it asap. 👉 Insight: Sell only one core feature at one time. Drop anything secondary to this core feature. Well, my primary occupation is product design. So one would expect that a product I build must have stellar design. I considered any considerable time spent on design at this stage would be simply wasted. I still think this is both true and wrong: True, because if your product’s core benefits suck, no one will care about your design. False, because if your design looks amateurish, no one will trust you and your product. So, I always targeted an average level design with it and the way this tool works made it quite easy as I had to design only 2 primary pages: Landing page and user portal (which has only settings and analytics pages). However, even though I knew spending time on design was not worth much of my time, I got a bit “greedy”: In fact, I redesigned those pages three times, and still ended up with a so-so design that I am not proud of. 👉 What I would do differently: Unless absolutely necessary, only one iteration per stage as long as it works. This, in my mind, applies to everything. If your product’s A feature works, then no need to rewrite it from scratch for any reason, or even refactor it. When your product becomes a success, and you absolutely need that part of your codebase to be written, do so, but only then. Ready to launch, now is th etime for some marketing, right? By July 26, I already had a “launchable” product that barely works (I marked this date on a Notion docs, this is how I know). Yet, I had spent almost no time on marketing, sales, whatever. After all, “You build and they will come”. Did I know that I needed marketing? Of course I did, but knowingly didn’t. Why, you might ask. Well, from my perspective, it had to be a dev-heavy product; meaning that you spend most of your time on developing it, mostly coding skills. But, this is simply wrong. As a rule of thumb, as noted by one of the greatests, Marc Louvion, you should spend at least twice of the building time on marketing. ❗️ Time spent on building \* 2 people don’t know your product > they don’t use your product > you don’t get users > you don’t make money Easy as that. Following the same reasoning, a slightly different approach to planning a project is possible. Determine an approximate time to complete the project with a high level project plan. Let’s say 6 months. By the reasoning above, 2 months should go into building, and 4 into marketing. If you need 4 months for building instead of 2, then you need 8 months of marketing, which makes the time to complete the project 12 months. If you don’t have that much time, then quit the project. When does a project count as completed? Well, in reality, never. But, I think we have to define success conditions even before we start for indie projects and startups; so we know when to quit when they are not met. A success condition could look like “Make $6000 in 12 months” or “Have 3000 users in 6 months”. It all depends on the project. But, once you set it, it should be set in stone: You don’t change it unless absolutely necessary. I suspect there are few principles that make a solopreneur successful; and knowing when to quit and when to continue is definitely one of them. Marc Louvion is famously known for his success, but he got there after failing so many projects. To my knowledge, the same applies to Nico Jeannen, Pieter Levels, or almost everyone as well. ❗️ Determining when to continue even before you start will definitely help in the long run. A half-aed launch Time-leap again. Around mid August, I “soft launched” my product. By soft launch, I mean lazy marketing. Just tweeting about it, posting it on free directories. Did I get any traffic? Surely I did. Did I get any users? Nope. Only after this time, it hit me: “Either something is wrong with me, or with this product” Marketing might be a much bigger factor for a project’s success after all. Even though I get some traffic, not convincing enough for people to sign up even for a free trial. The product was still perfect in my eyes at the time (well, still is ^(\_),) so the right people are not finding my product, I thought. Then, a question that I should have been asking at the very first place, one that could prevent all these, comes to my mind: “How do even people search for such tools?” If we are to consider this whole journey of me and my so-far-failed product to be an already destined failure, one metric suffices to show why. Search volume: 30. Even if people have such a pain point, they are not looking for email summaries. So, almost no organic traffic coming from Google. But, as a person who did zero marketing on this or any product, who has zero marketing knowledge, who doesn’t have an audience on social media, there is not much I could do. Finally, it was time to give up. Or not… In my eyes, the most important element that makes a founder (solo or not) successful (this, I am not by any means) is to solve problems. ❗️ So, the problem was this: “People are not finding my product by organic search” How do I make sure I get some organic traffic and gets more visibility? Learn digital marketing and SEO as much as I can within very limited time. Thankfully, without spending much time, I came across Neil Patel's YT channel, and as I said many times, it is an absolute gold mine. I learned a lot, especially about the fundamentals, and surely it will be fruitful; but there is no magic trick that could make people visit your website. SEO certainly helps, but only when people are looking for your keywords. However, it is truly a magical solution to get in touch with REAL people that are in your user segments: 👉 Understand your pains, understand their problems, help them to solve them via building products. I did not do this so far, have to admit. But, in case you would like to have a chat about your email usage, and email productivity, just get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear about them. Getting ready for a ProductHunt launch The date was Sept 1. And I unlocked an impossible achievement: Running out of Supabase’s free plan’s Egres limit while having zero users. I was already considering moving out of their Cloud server and managing a Supabase CLI service on my Hetzner VPS for some time; but never ever suspected that I would have to do this quickly. The cheapest plan Supabase offers is $25/month; yet, at that point, I am in between jobs for such a long time, basically broke, and could barely afford that price. One or two months could be okay, but why pay for it if I will eventually move out of their Cloud service? So, instead of paying $25, I spent two days migrating out of Supabase Cloud. Worth my time? Definitely not. But, when you are broke, you gotta do stupid things. This was the first time that I felt lucky to have zero users: I have no idea how I would manage this migration if I had any. I think this is one of the core tenets of an indie hacker: Controlling their own environment. I can’t remember whose quote this is, but I suspect it was Naval: Entrepreneurs have an almost pathological need to control their own fate. They will take any suffering if they can be in charge of their destiny, and not have it in somebody else’s hands. What’s truly scary is, at least in my case, we make people around us suffer at the expense of our attempting to control our own fates. I know this period has been quite hard on my wife as well, as I neglected her quite a bit, but sadly, I know that this will happen again. It is something that I can barely help with. Still, so sorry. After working the last two weeks on a ProductHunt Launch, I finally launched it this Tuesday. Zero ranking, zero new users, but 36 kind people upvoted my product, and many commented and provided invaluable feedback. I couldn't be more grateful for each one of them 🙏. Considering all these, what lies in the future of Summ though? I have no idea, to be honest. On one hand, I have zero users, have no job, no income. So, I need a way to make money asap. On the other hand, the whole idea of it revolves around one core premise (not an assumption) that I am not so willing to share; and I couldn’t have more trust in it. This might not be the best iteration of it, however I certainly believe that email usage is one of the best problem spaces one could work on. 👉 But, one thing is for certain: I need to get in touch with people, and talk with them about this product I built so far. In fact, this is the only item on my agenda. Nothing else will save my brainchild <3. Below are some other insights and notes that I got during my journey; as they do not 100% fit into this story, I think it is more suitable to list them here. I hope you enjoyed reading this. Give Summ a try, it comes with a generous free trial, no credit card required. Some additional notes and insights: Project planning is one of the most underestimated skills for solopreneurs. It saves you enormous time, and helps you to keep your focus up. Building B2C products beats building B2B products. Businesses are very willing to pay big bucks if your product helps them. On the other hand, spending a few hours per user who would pay $5/m probably is not worth your time. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is if no one uses it. If you cannot sell a product in a certain category/niche (or do not know how to sell it), it might be a good idea not to start a project in it. Going after new ideas and ventures is quite risky, especially if you don’t know how to market it. On the other hand, an already established category means that there is already demand. Whether this demand is sufficient or not is another issue. As long as there is enough demand for your product to fit in, any category/niche is good. Some might be better, some might be worse. Unless you are going hardcore B2B, you will need people to find your product by means of organic search. Always conduct thorough keyword research as soon as possible.

How I made a high tech salary in my first selling month
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Ok_Negotiation_2587This week

How I made a high tech salary in my first selling month

For over 7 years I worked as a full-stack developer, helping other companies bring their ideas to life. But one day, I thought “Why not try making my own dream come true?”. That’s when I decided to quit my job and start my own journey to becoming an entrepreneur. At first, it wasn’t easy. I didn’t make any money for months and had no idea where to start. I felt lost. Then, I decided to focus on something popular and trending. AI was everywhere, and ChatGPT was the most used AI platform. So I looked into it and I found the OpenAI community forum where people had been asking for features that weren’t being added. That gave me an idea. Why not build those features myself? I created a Chrome extension and I worked on some of the most requested features, like: Downloading the advanced voice mode and messages as MP3 Adding folders to organize chats Saving and reusing prompts Pinning important chats Exporting chats to TXT/JSON files Deleting or archiving multiple chats at once Making chat history searches faster and better It took me about a week to build the first version, and when I published it, the response was incredible. People loved it! Some even said things like, “You’re a lifesaver!” That’s when I realized I had something that could not only help people but also turn into a real business. I kept the first version free to see how people would respond. Many users have been downloading my extension, which prompted Chrome to review it to determine if it qualified for the featured badge. I received the badge, and it has significantly boosted traffic to my extension ever since. After all the positive feedback, I launched a paid version one month ago. A few minutes after publishing it, I made my first sale! That moment was so exciting, and it motivated me to keep going. I already have over 4,000 users and have made more than $4,500 in my first selling month. I’ve decided to release 1-2 new features every month to keep improving the extension based on what users ask for. I also created the same extension for Firefox and Edge users because many people have been asking for it! I also started a Reddit community, where I share updates, sales, discount codes, and ideas for new features. It’s been awesome to connect with users directly and get their feedback. Additionally, I’ve started working on another extension for Claude, which I’m hoping will be as successful as this one. My message to you is this: never give up on your dreams. It might feel impossible at first, but with patience, hard work, and some creativity, you can make it happen. I hope this inspires you to go after what you want. Good luck to all of us!

How to start online business in 7 days ?
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Prior-Inflation8755This week

How to start online business in 7 days ?

Easy to do now. There are several tips that I can give you to start your own digital business. 1) Solve your own problem. If you use the Internet, you know that there are a lot of problems that need to be solved. But focus on your problem first. Once you can figure it out and solve your problem. You can move on to solving people's problems. Ideally, to use tools and technology you know. If you don't know, use NO-CODE tools to build it. For example, if you need to create a website, use landing page builder. If you want to automate your own work, like booking meetings, use Zapier to automate tasks. If you want to create a game, sure, use AI Tools to solve it. I don't care what you will use. Use whatever you want. All I want from you is to solve that problem. 2) After solving your own problem. You can focus on people's problems. Because if you can't solve your own shit, why do you want to solve others problems? Remember that always. If you need to build e-commerce, use Shopify. If you need to build a directory, use directory builder. If you need to build landing pages, use landing page builders. Rule of thumb: Niche, Niche, Niche. Try to focus on a specific niche, solve their problem, and make money on it. Then only thinking about exploring new opportunities. You can use No-Code builders or AI tools or hire developers or hire agencies to do it. It depends on your choice. If you are good at coding, build on your own or delegate to a developer or agency. If you have enough time, use AI Tools to build your own thing. If you want to solve a common problem but with a different perspective, yeah, sure, use No-Code builders for that. 3) Digital business works exactly the same as offline business with one difference. You can move a lot faster, build a lot faster, risk a lot faster, fail a lot faster, earn a lot faster, sell a lot faster, and scale a lot faster. In one week, you can build e-commerce. In the second week, you can build SaaS. In the third week, you can build an AI agent. In the fourth week, you can build your own channel on social media. 4) It gives more power. With great power comes great responsibility. From day one, invest in SEO, social media presence, traffic, and acquiring customers. Don't focus on tech stuff. Don't focus on tools. Focus on the real problem: • Traffic • Marketing • Sales • Conversion rate

10y of product development, 2 bankruptcies, and 1 Exit — what next? [Extended Story]
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10y of product development, 2 bankruptcies, and 1 Exit — what next? [Extended Story]

10 years of obsessive pursuit from the bottom to impressive product-market fit and exit. Bootstrapping tech products as Software Developer and 3x Startup Founder (2 bankruptcies and 1 exit). Hi everyone, your motivation has inspired me to delve deeper into my story. So, as promised to some of you, I've expanded on it a bit more, along with my brief reflections. There are many founders, product creators, and proactive individuals, I’ve read many of your crazy stories and lessons so I decided to share mine and the lessons I learned from the bottom to impressive product-market fit and exit. I've spent almost the past 10 years building tech products as a Corporate Team Leader, Senior Software Developer, Online Course Creator, Programming Tutor, Head of Development/CTO, and 3x Startup Founder (2 bankruptcies, and 1 exit). And what next? good question... A brief summary of my journey: Chapter 1: Software Developer / Team Leader / Senior Software Developer I’ve always wanted to create products that win over users’ hearts, carry value, and influence users. Ever since my school days, I’ve loved the tech part of building digital products. At the beginning of school, I started hosting servers for games, blogs and internet forums, and other things that did not require much programming knowledge. My classmates and later even over 100 people played on servers that I hosted on my home PC. Later, as the only person in school, I passed the final exam in computer science. During my computer science studies, I started my first job as a software developer. It was crazy, I was spending 200–300 hours a month in the office attending also to daily classes. Yes, I didn’t have a life, but it truly was the fulfillment of my dreams. I was able to earn good money doing what I love, and I devoted fully myself to it. My key to effectively studying IT and growing my knowledge at rocket speed was learning day by day reading guides, building products to the portfolio, watching youtube channels and attending conferences, and even watching them online, even if I didn’t understand everything at the beginning. In one year we’ve been to every possible event within 400km. We were building healthcare products that were actually used in hospitals and medical facilities. It was a beautiful adventure and tons of knowledge I took from this place. That time I built my first product teams, hired many great people, and over the years became a senior developer and team leader. Even I convinced my study mates to apply to this company and we studied together and worked as well. Finally, there were 4 of us, when I left a friend of mine took over my position and still works there. If you’re reading this, I’m sending you a flood of love and appreciation. I joined as the 8th person, and after around 4 years, when I left hungry for change, there were already over 30 of us, now around 100. It was a good time, greetings to everyone. I finished my Master’s and Engineering degrees in Computer Science, and it was time for changes. Chapter 2: 1st time as a Co-founder — Marketplace In the meantime, there was also my first startup (a marketplace) with four of my friends. We all worked on the product, each of us spent thousands of hours, after hours, entire weekends… and I think finally over a year of work. As you might guess, we lacked the most important things: sales, marketing, and product-market fit. We thought users think like us. We all also worked commercially, so the work went very smoothly, but we didn’t know what we should do next with it… Finally, we didn’t have any customers, but you know what, I don’t regret it, a lot of learning things which I used many times later. The first attempts at validating the idea with the market and business activities. In the end, the product was Airbnb-sized. Landing pages, listings, user panels, customer panels, admin site, notifications, caches, queues, load balancing, and much more. We wanted to publish the fully ready product to the market. It was a marketplace, so if you can guess, we had to attract both sides to be valuable. “Marketplace” — You can imagine something like Uber, if you don’t have passengers it was difficult to convince taxi drivers, if you don’t have a large number of taxi drivers you cannot attract passengers. After a year of development, we were overloaded, and without business, marketing, sales knowledge, and budget. Chapter 3: Corp Team Lead / Programming Tutor / Programming Architecture Workshop Leader Working in a corporation, a totally different environment, an international fintech, another learning experience, large products, and workmates who were waiting for 5 pm to finish — it wasn’t for me. Very slow product development, huge hierarchy, being an ant at the bottom, and low impact on the final product. At that time I understood that being a software developer is not anything special and I compared my work to factory worker. Sorry for that. High rates have been pumped only by high demand. Friends of mine from another industry do more difficult things and have a bigger responsibility for lower rates. That’s how the market works. This lower responsibility time allowed for building the first online course after hours, my own course platform, individual teaching newbies programming, and my first huge success — my first B2C customers, and B2B clients for workshops. I pivoted to full focus on sales, marketing, funnels, advertisements, demand, understanding the market, etc. It was 10x easier than startups but allowed me to learn and validate my conceptions and ideas on an easier market and showed me that it’s much easier to locate their problem/need/want and create a service/product that responds to it than to convince people of your innovative ideas. It’s just supply and demand, such a simple and basic statement, in reality, is very deep and difficult to understand without personal experience. If you’re inexperienced and you think you understand, you don’t. To this day, I love to analyze this catchword in relation to various industries / services / products and rediscover it again and again... While writing this sentence, I’m wondering if I’m not obsessed. Chapter 4: Next try — 2nd time as a founder — Edtech Drawing upon my experiences in selling services, offering trainings, and teaching programming, I wanted to broaden my horizons, delve into various fields of knowledge, involve more teachers, and so on. We started with simple services in different fields of knowledge, mainly relying on teaching in the local area (without online lessons). As I had already gathered some knowledge and experience in marketing and sales, things were going well and were moving in the right direction. The number of teachers in various fields was growing, as was the number of students. I don’t remember the exact statistics anymore, but it was another significant achievement that brought me a lot of satisfaction and new experiences. As you know, I’m a technology lover and couldn’t bear to look at manual processes — I wanted to automate everything: lessons, payments, invoices, customer service, etc. That’s when I hired our first developers (if you’re reading this, I’m sending you a flood of love — we spent a lot of time together and I remember it as a very fruitful and great year) and we began the process of tool and automation development. After a year we had really extended tools for students, teachers, franchise owners, etc. We had really big goals, we wanted to climb higher and higher. Maybe I wouldn’t even fully call it Startup, as the client was paying for the lessons, not for the software. But it gave us positive income, bootstrap financing, and tool development for services provided. Scaling this model was not as costless as SaaS because customer satisfaction was mainly on the side of the teacher, not the quality of the product (software). Finally, we grew to nearly 10 people and dozens of teachers, with zero external funding, and almost $50k monthly revenue. We worked very hard, day and night, and by November 2019, we were packed with clients to the brim. And as you know, that’s when the pandemic hit. It turned everything upside down by 180 degrees. Probably no one was ready for it. With a drastic drop in revenues, society started to save. Tired from the previous months, we had to work even harder. We had to reduce the team, change the model, and save what we had built. We stopped the tool’s development and sales, and with the developers, we started supporting other product teams to not fire them in difficult times. The tool worked passively for the next two years, reducing incomes month by month. With a smaller team providing programming services, we had full stability and earned more than relying only on educational services. At the peak of the pandemic, I promised myself that it was the last digital product I built… Never say never… Chapter 5: Time for fintech — Senior Software Developer / Team Lead / Head of Development I worked for small startups and companies. Building products from scratch, having a significant impact on the product, and complete fulfillment. Thousands of hours and sacrifices. This article mainly talks about startups that I built, so I don’t want to list all the companies, products, and applications that I supported as a technology consultant. These were mainly start-ups with a couple of people up to around 100 people on board. Some of the products were just a rescue mission, others were building an entire tech team. I was fully involved in all of them with the hope that we would work together for a long time, but I wasn’t the only one who made mistakes when looking for a product-market fit. One thing I fully understood: You can’t spend 8–15 hours a day writing code, managing a tech team, and still be able to help build an audience. In marketing and sales, you need to be rested and very creative to bring results and achieve further results and goals. If you have too many responsibilities related to technology, it becomes ineffective. I noticed that when I have more free time, more time to think, and more time to bounce the ball against the wall, I come up with really working marketing/sales strategies and solutions. It’s impossible when you are focused on code all day. You must know that this chapter of my life was long and has continued until now. Chapter 6: 3rd time as a founder — sold Never say never… right?\\ It was a time when the crypto market was really high and it was really trending topic. You know that I love technology right? So I cannot miss the blockchain world. I had experience in blockchain topics by learning on my own and from startups where I worked before. I was involved in crypto communities and I noticed a “starving crowd”. People who did things manually and earned money(crypto) on it.I found potential for building a small product that solves a technological problem. I said a few years before that I don’t want to start from scratch. I decided to share my observations and possibilities with my good friend. He said, “If you gonna built it, I’m in”. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I had thought and planned every aspect of marketing and sales. And you know what. On this huge mindmap “product” was only one block. 90% of the mindmap was focused on marketing and sales. Now, writing this article, I understood what path I went from my first startup to this one. In the first (described earlier) 90% was the product, but in the last one 90% was sales and marketing. Many years later, I did this approach automatically. What has changed in my head over the years and so many mistakes? At that time, the company for which I provided services was acquired. The next day I got a thank you for my hard work and all my accounts were blocked. Life… I was shocked. We were simply replaced by their trusted technology managers. They wanted to get full control. They acted a bit unkindly, but I knew that they had all my knowledge about the product in the documentation, because I’m used to drawing everything so that in the moment of my weakness (illness, whatever) the team could handle it. That’s what solid leaders do, right? After a time, I know that these are normal procedures in financial companies, the point is that under the influence of emotions, do not do anything inappropriate. I quickly forgot about it, that I was brutally fired. All that mattered was to bring my plan to life. And it has been started, 15–20 hours a day every day. You have to believe me, getting back into the game was incredibly satisfying for me. I didn’t even know that I would be so excited. Then we also noticed that someone was starting to think about the same product as me. So the race began a game against time and the market. I assume that if you have reached this point, you are interested in product-market fit, marketing, and sales, so let me explain my assumptions to you: Product: A very very small tool that allowed you to automate proper tracking and creation of on-chain transactions. Literally, the whole app for the user was located on only three subpages. Starving Crowd: We tapped into an underserved market. The crypto market primarily operates via communities on platforms like Discord, Reddit, Twitter, Telegram, and so on. Therefore, our main strategy was directly communicating with users and demonstrating our tool. This was essentially “free marketing” (excluding the time we invested), as we did not need to invest in ads, promotional materials, or convince people about the efficacy of our tool. The community could directly observe on-chain transactions executed by our algorithms, which were processed at an exceptionally fast rate. This was something they couldn’t accomplish manually, so whenever someone conducted transactions using our algorithm, it was immediately noticeable and stirred a curiosity within the community (how did they do that!). Tests: I conducted the initial tests of the application on myself — we had already invested significantly in developing the product, but I preferred risking my own resources over that of the users. I provided the tool access to my wallet, containing 0.3ETH, and went to sleep. Upon waking up, I discovered that the transactions were successful and my wallet had grown to 0.99ETH. My excitement knew no bounds, it felt like a windfall. But, of course, there was a fair chance I could have lost it too. It worked. As we progressed, some users achieved higher results, but it largely hinged on the parameters set by them. As you can surmise, the strategy was simple — buy low, sell high. There was considerable risk involved. Churn: For those versed in marketing, the significance of repeat visitors cannot be overstated. Access to our tool was granted only after email verification and a special technique that I’d prefer to keep confidential. And this was all provided for free. While we had zero followers on social media, we saw an explosion in our email subscriber base and amassed a substantial number of users and advocates. Revenue Generation: Our product quickly gained popularity as we were effectively helping users earn — an undeniable value proposition. Now, it was time to capitalize on our efforts. We introduced a subscription model charging $300 per week or $1,000 per month — seemingly high rates, but the demand was so intense that it wasn’t an issue. Being a subscriber meant you were prioritized in the queue, ensuring you were among the first to reap benefits — thus adding more “value”. Marketing: The quality of our product and its ability to continually engage users contributed to it achieving what can best be described as viral. It was both a source of pride and astonishment to witness users sharing charts and analyses derived from our tool in forum discussions. They weren’t actively promoting our product but rather using screenshots from our application to illustrate certain aspects of the crypto world. By that stage, we had already assembled a team to assist with marketing, and programming, and to provide round-the-clock helpdesk support. Unforgettable Time: Despite the hype, my focus remained steadfast on monitoring our servers, their capacity, and speed. Considering we had only been on the market for a few weeks, we were yet to implement alerts, server scaling, etc. Our active user base spanned from Japan to the West Coast of the United States. Primarily, our application was used daily during the evenings, but considering the variety of time zones, the only time I could afford to sleep was during the evening hours in Far Eastern Europe, where we had the least users. However, someone always needed to be on guard, and as such, my phone was constantly by my side. After all, we couldn’t afford to let our users down. We found ourselves working 20 hours a day, catering to thousands of users, enduring physical fatigue, engaging in talks with VCs, and participating in conferences. Sudden Downturn: Our pinnacle was abruptly interrupted by the war in Ukraine (next macroeconomic shot straight in the face, lucky guy), a precipitous drop in cryptocurrency value, and swiftly emerging competition. By this time, there were 5–8 comparable tools had infiltrated the market. It was a challenging period as we continually stumbled upon new rivals. They immediately embarked on swift fundraising endeavors — a strategy we overlooked, which in retrospect was a mistake. Although our product was superior, the competitors’ rapid advancement and our insufficient funds for expeditious scaling posed significant challenges. Nonetheless, we made a good decision. We sold the product (exit) to competitors. The revenue from “exit” compensated for all the losses, leaving us with enough rest. We were a small team without substantial budgets for rapid development, and the risk of forming new teams without money to survive for more than 1–2 months was irresponsible. You have to believe me that this decision consumed us sleepless nights. Finally, we sold it. They turned off our app but took algorithms and users. Whether you believe it or not, after several months of toiling day and night, experiencing burnout, growing weary of the topic, and gaining an extra 15 kg in weight, we finally found our freedom… The exit wasn’t incredibly profitable, but we knew they had outdone us. The exit covered all our expenses and granted us a well-deserved rest for the subsequent quarter. It was an insane ride. Despite the uncertainty, stress, struggles, and sleepless nights, the story and experience will remain etched in my memory for the rest of my life. Swift Takeaways: Comprehending User Needs: Do you fully understand the product-market fit? Is your offering just an accessory or does it truly satisfy the user’s needs? The Power of Viral Marketing: Take inspiration from giants like Snapchat, ChatGPT, and Clubhouse. While your product might not attain the same scale (but remember, never say never…), the closer your concept is to theirs, the easier your journey will be. If your user is motivated to text a friend saying, “Hey, check out how cool this is” (like sharing ChatGPT), then you’re on the best track. Really. Even if it doesn’t seem immediately evident, there could be a way to incorporate this into your product. Keep looking until you find it. Niche targeting — the more specific and tailored your product is to a certain audience, the easier your journey will be People love buying from people — establishing a personal brand and associating yourself with the product can make things easier. Value: Seek to understand why users engage with your product and keep returning. The more specific and critical the issue you’re aiming to solve, the easier your path will be. Consider your offerings in terms of products and services and focus on sales and marketing, regardless of personal sentiments. These are just a few points, I plan to elaborate on all of them in a separate article. Many products undergo years of development in search of market fit, refining the user experience, and more. And guess what? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Each product and market follows its own rules. Many startups have extensive histories before they finally make their mark (for instance, OpenAI). This entire journey spanned maybe 6–8 months. I grasped and capitalized on the opportunity, but we understood from the start that establishing a startup carried a significant risk, and our crypto product was 10 times riskier. Was it worth it? Given my passion for product development — absolutely. Was it profitable? — No, considering the hours spent — we lose. Did it provide a stable, problem-free life — nope. Did this entire adventure offer a wealth of happiness, joy, and unforgettable experiences — definitely yes. One thing is certain — we’ve amassed substantial experience and it’s not over yet :) So, what lies ahead? Chapter 7: Reverting to the contractor, developing a product for a crypto StartupReturning to the past, we continue our journey… I had invested substantial time and passion into the tech rescue mission product. I came on board as the technical Team Leader of a startup that had garnered over $20M in seed round funding, affiliated with the realm of cryptocurrencies. The investors were individuals with extensive backgrounds in the crypto world. My role was primarily technical, and there was an abundance of work to tackle. I was fully immersed, and genuinely devoted to the role. I was striving for excellence, knowing that if we secured another round of financing, the startup would accelerate rapidly. As for the product and marketing, I was more of an observer. After all, there were marketing professionals with decades of experience on board. These were individuals recruited from large crypto-related firms. I had faith in them, kept an eye on their actions, and focused on my own responsibilities. However, the reality was far from satisfactory. On the last day, the principal investor for the Series A round withdrew. The board made the tough decision to shut down. It was a period of intense observation and gaining experience in product management. This was a very brief summary of the last 10 years. And what next? (Last) Chapter 8: To be announced — Product Owner / Product Consultant / Strategist / CTO After spending countless hours and days deliberating my next steps, one thing is clear: My aspiration is to continue traversing the path of software product development, with the hopeful anticipation that one day, I might ride the crest of the next big wave and ascend to the prestigious status of a unicorn company. I find myself drawn to the process of building products, exploring product-market fit, strategizing, engaging in software development, seeking out new opportunities, networking, attending conferences, and continuously challenging myself by understanding the market and its competitive landscape. Product Owner / Product Consultant / CTO / COO: I’m not entirely sure how to categorize this role, as I anticipate that it will largely depend on the product to which I will commit myself fully. My idea is to find one startup/company that wants to build a product / or already has a product, want to speed up, or simply doesn’t know what’s next. Alternatively, I could be a part of an established company with a rich business history, which intends to invest in digitization and technological advancements. The goal would be to enrich their customer experience by offering complementary digital products Rather than initiating a new venture from ground zero with the same team, I am receptive to new challenges. I am confident that my past experiences will prove highly beneficial for the founders of promising, burgeoning startups that already possess a product, or are in the initial phases of development. ‘Consultant’ — I reckon we interpret this term differently. My aim is to be completely absorbed in a single product, crafting funnels, niches, strategies, and all that is necessary to repeatedly achieve the ‘product-market fit’ and significant revenue. To me, ‘consultant’ resonates more akin to freelancing than being an employee. My current goal is to kickstart as a consultant and aide, dealing with facilitating startups in their journey from point A to B. Here are two theoretical scenarios to illustrate my approach: Scenario 1: (Starting from point A) You have a product but struggle with marketing, adoption, software, strategy, sales, fundraising, or something else. I conduct an analysis and develop a strategy to reach point B. I take on the “dirty work” and implement necessary changes, including potential pivots or shifts (going all-in) to guide the product to point B. The goal is to reach point B, which could involve achieving a higher valuation, expanding the user base, increasing sales, or generating monthly revenue, among other metrics. Scenario 2: (Starting from point A) You have a plan or idea but face challenges with marketing, adoption, strategy, software, sales, fundraising, or something else. I analyze the situation and devise a strategy to reach point B. I tackle the necessary tasks, build the team, and overcome obstacles to propel the product to point B. I have come across the view that finding the elusive product-market fit is the job of the founder, and it’s hard for me to disagree. However, I believe that my support and experiences can help save money, many failures, and most importantly, time. I have spent a great deal of time learning from my mistakes, enduring failure after failure, and even had no one to ask for support or opinion, which is why I offer my help. Saving even a couple of years, realistically speaking, seems like a value I’m eager to provide… I invite you to share your thoughts and insights on these scenarios :) Closing Remarks: I appreciate your time and effort in reaching this point. This has been my journey, and I wouldn’t change it for the world. I had an extraordinary adventure, and now I’m ready for the next exciting battle with the market and new software products. While my entire narrative is centered around startups, especially the ones I personally built, I’m planning to share more insights drawn from all of my experiences, not just those as a co-founder. If you’re currently developing your product or even just considering the idea, I urge you to reach out to me. Perhaps together, we can create something monumental :) Thank you for your time and insights. I eagerly look forward to engaging in discussions and hearing your viewpoints. Please remember to like and subscribe. Nothing motivates to write more than positive feedback :) Matt.

36 startup ideas found by analyzing podcasts (problem, solution & source episode)
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36 startup ideas found by analyzing podcasts (problem, solution & source episode)

Hey, I've been a bit of a podcast nerd for a long time. Around a year ago I began experimenting with transcription of podcasts for a SaaS I was running. I realized pretty quickly that there's a lot of knowledge and value in podcast discussions that is for all intents and purposes entirely unsearchable or discoverable to most people. I ended up stopping work on that SaaS product (party for lack of product/market fit, and partly because podcasting was far more interesting), and focusing on the podcast technology full-time instead. I'm a long-time lurker and poster of r/startups and thought this would make for some interesting content and inspiration for folks. Given I'm in this space, have millions of transcripts, and transcribe thousands daily... I've been exploring fun ways to expose some of the interesting knowledge and conversations taking place that utilize our own data/API. I'm a big fan of the usual startup podcasts (My First Million, Greg Isenberg, etc. etc.) and so I built an automation that turns all of the startup ideas discussed into a weekly email digest. I always struggle to listen to as many episodes as I'd actually like to, so I thought I'd summarise the stuff I care about instead (startup opportunities being discussed). I thought it would be interesting to post some of the ideas extracted so far. They range from being completely whacky and blue sky, to pretty boring but realistic. A word of warning before anyone complains – this is a big mixture of tech, ai, non-tech, local services, etc. ideas: Some of the ideas are completely mundane, but realistic (e.g. local window cleaning service) Some of the ideas are completely insane, blue sky, but sound super interesting Here's the latest 36 ideas: |Idea Name|Problem|Solution|Source| |:-|:-|:-|:-| |SalesForce-as-a-Service - White Label Enterprise Sales Teams|White-label enterprise sales teams for B2B SaaS. Companies need sales but can't hire/train. Recruit retail sellers, train for tech, charge 30% of deals closed.|Create a white-label enterprise sales team by recruiting natural salespeople from retail and direct sales backgrounds (e.g. mall kiosks, cutco knives). Train them specifically in B2B SaaS sales techniques and processes. Offer this trained sales force to tech companies on a contract basis.|My First Million - "Life Hacks From The King of Introverts + 7 Business Ideas| |TechButler - Mobile Device Maintenance Service|Mobile tech maintenance service. Clean/optimize devices, improve WiFi, basic support. $100/visit to homes. Target affluent neighborhoods.|Mobile tech support service providing in-home device cleaning, optimization, and setup. Focus on common issues like WiFi improvement, device maintenance, and basic tech support.|My First Million - "Life Hacks From The King of Introverts + 7 Business Ideas| |MemoryBox - At-Home Video Digitization Service|Door-to-door VHS conversion service. Parents have boxes of old tapes. Pick up, digitize, deliver. $30/tape with minimum order. Going extinct.|Door-to-door VHS to digital conversion service that handles everything from pickup to digital delivery. Make it extremely convenient for customers to preserve their memories.|My First Million - "Life Hacks From The King of Introverts + 7 Business Ideas| |Elite Match Ventures - Success-Based Luxury Matchmaking|High-end matchmaking for 50M+ net worth individuals. Only charge $1M+ when they get married. No upfront fees. Extensive vetting process.|Premium matchmaking service exclusively for ultra-high net worth individuals with a pure contingency fee model - only get paid ($1M+) upon successful marriage. Focus on quality over quantity with extensive vetting and personalized matching.|My First Million - "Life Hacks From The King of Introverts + 7 Business Ideas| |LocalHost - Simple Small Business Websites|Simple WordPress sites for local businesses. $50/month includes hosting, updates, security. Target restaurants and shops. Recurring revenue play.|Simplified web hosting and WordPress management service targeting local small businesses. Focus on basic sites with standard templates, ongoing maintenance, and reliable support for a fixed monthly fee.|My First Million - "Life Hacks From The King of Introverts + 7 Business Ideas| |VoiceJournal AI - Voice-First Smart Journaling|Voice-to-text journaling app with AI insights. 8,100 monthly searches. $15/month subscription. Partners with journaling YouTubers.|AI-powered journaling app that combines voice recording, transcription, and intelligent insights. Users can speak their thoughts, which are automatically transcribed and analyzed for patterns, emotions, and actionable insights.|Where It Happens - "7 $1M+ AI startup ideas you can launch tomorrow with $0"| |AIGenAds - AI-Generated UGC Content Platform|AI platform turning product briefs into UGC-style video ads. Brands spending $500/video for human creators. Generate 100 variations for $99/month.|AI platform that generates UGC-style video ads using AI avatars and scripting. System would allow rapid generation of multiple ad variations at a fraction of the cost. Platform would use existing AI avatar technology combined with script generation to create authentic-looking testimonial-style content.|Where It Happens - "7 $1M+ AI startup ideas you can launch tomorrow with $0"| |InfographAI - Automated Infographic Generation Platform|AI turning blog posts into branded infographics. Marketers spending hours on design. $99/month unlimited generation.|AI-powered platform that automatically converts blog posts and articles into visually appealing infographics. System would analyze content, extract key points, and generate professional designs using predefined templates and brand colors.|Where It Happens - "7 $1M+ AI startup ideas you can launch tomorrow with $0"| |KidFinance - Children's Financial Education Entertainment|Children's media franchise teaching financial literacy. Former preschool teacher creating 'Dora for money'. Books, videos, merchandise potential.|Character-driven financial education content for kids, including books, videos, and potentially TV show. Focus on making money concepts fun and memorable.|The Side Hustle Show - "How a Free Challenge Turned Into a $500,000 a Year Business (Greatest Hits)"| |FinanceTasker - Daily Financial Task Challenge|Free 30-day financial challenge with daily action items. People overwhelmed by money management. Makes $500k/year through books, speaking, and premium membership.|A free 30-day financial challenge delivering one simple, actionable task per day via email. Each task includes detailed scripts and instructions. Participants join a Facebook community for support and accountability. The program focuses on quick wins to build momentum. Automated delivery allows scaling.|The Side Hustle Show - "How a Free Challenge Turned Into a $500,000 a Year Business (Greatest Hits)"| |FinanceAcademy - Expert Financial Training Platform|Premium financial education platform. $13/month for expert-led courses and live Q&As. 4000+ members generating $40k+/month.|Premium membership site with expert-led courses, live Q&As, and community support. Focus on specific topics like real estate investing, business creation, and advanced money management.|The Side Hustle Show - "How a Free Challenge Turned Into a $500,000 a Year Business (Greatest Hits)"| |SecurityFirst Compliance - Real Security + Compliance Platform|Security-first compliance platform built by hackers. Companies spending $50k+ on fake security. Making $7M/year showing why current solutions don't work.|A compliance platform built by security experts that combines mandatory compliance requirements with real security measures. The solution includes hands-on security testing, expert guidance, and a focus on actual threat prevention rather than just documentation. It merges traditional compliance workflows with practical security implementations.|In the Pit with Cody Schneider| |LinkedInbound - Automated Professional Visibility Engine|LinkedIn automation for inbound job offers. Professionals spending hours on manual outreach. $99/month per job seeker.|Automated system for creating visibility and generating inbound interest on LinkedIn through coordinated profile viewing and engagement. Uses multiple accounts to create visibility patterns that trigger curiosity and inbound messages.|In the Pit with Cody Schneider| |ConvoTracker - Community Discussion Monitoring Platform|Community discussion monitoring across Reddit, Twitter, HN. Companies missing sales opportunities. $499/month per brand tracked.|Comprehensive monitoring system that tracks competitor mentions and industry discussions across multiple platforms (Reddit, Twitter, Hacker News, etc.) with automated alerts and engagement suggestions.|In the Pit with Cody Schneider| |ContentAds Pro - Smart Display Ad Implementation|Display ad implementation service for content creators. Bloggers losing thousands in ad revenue monthly. Makes $3-5k per site setup plus ongoing optimization fees.|Implementation of professional display advertising through networks like Mediavine that specialize in optimizing ad placement and revenue while maintaining user experience. Include features like turning off ads for email subscribers and careful placement to minimize impact on core metrics.|The Side Hustle Show - "636: Is Business Coaching Worth It? A Look Inside the last 12 months of Side Hustle Nation"| |MoneyAppReviews - Professional Side Hustle App Testing|Professional testing service for money-making apps. People wasting time on low-paying apps. Makes $20k/month from affiliate commissions and ads.|Professional app testing service that systematically reviews money-making apps and creates detailed, honest reviews including actual earnings data, time investment, and practical tips.|The Side Hustle Show - "636: Is Business Coaching Worth It? A Look Inside the last 12 months of Side Hustle Nation"| |LightPro - Holiday Light Installation Service|Professional Christmas light installation service. Homeowners afraid of ladders. $500-2000 per house plus storage.|Professional Christmas light installation service targeting residential and commercial properties. Full-service offering including design, installation, maintenance, removal and storage. Focus on safety and premium aesthetic results.|The Side Hustle Show - "639: 30 Ways to Make Extra Money for the Holidays"| |FocusMatch - Research Participant Marketplace|Marketplace connecting companies to paid research participants. Companies spending weeks finding people. $50-150/hour per study.|Online platform connecting companies directly with paid research participants. Participants create detailed profiles and get matched to relevant studies. Companies get faster access to their target demographic while participants earn money sharing opinions.|The Side Hustle Show - "639: 30 Ways to Make Extra Money for the Holidays"| |SolarShine Pro - Specialized Solar Panel Cleaning Service|Solar panel cleaning service using specialized equipment. Panels lose 50% efficiency when dirty. $650 per job, automated scheduling generates $18k/month from repeat customers.|Professional solar panel cleaning service using specialized deionized water system and European cleaning equipment. Includes automated 6-month scheduling, professional liability coverage, and warranty-safe cleaning processes. Service is bundled with inspection and performance monitoring.|The UpFlip Podcast - "156. $18K/Month with This ONE Service — Niche Business Idea"| |ExteriorCare Complete - One-Stop Exterior Maintenance Service|One-stop exterior home cleaning service (solar, windows, gutters, bird proofing). Automated scheduling. $650 average ticket. 60% repeat customers on 6-month contracts.|All-in-one exterior cleaning service offering comprehensive maintenance packages including solar, windows, gutters, roof cleaning and bird proofing. Single point of contact, consistent quality, and automated scheduling for all services.|The UpFlip Podcast - "156. $18K/Month with This ONE Service — Niche Business Idea"| |ContentMorph - Automated Cross-Platform Content Adaptation|AI platform converting blog posts into platform-optimized social content. Marketing teams spending 5hrs/post on manual adaptation. $199/mo per brand with 50% margins.|An AI-powered platform that automatically transforms long-form content (blog posts, podcasts, videos) into platform-specific formats (Instagram reels, TikToks, tweets). The system would preserve brand voice while optimizing for each platform's unique requirements and best practices.|Entrepreneurs on Fire - "Digital Threads: The Entrepreneur Playbook for Digital-First Marketing with Neal Schaffer"| |MarketerMatch - Verified Digital Marketing Talent Marketplace|Marketplace for pre-vetted digital marketing specialists. Entrepreneurs spending 15hrs/week on marketing tasks. Platform takes 15% commission averaging $900/month per active client.|A specialized marketplace exclusively for digital marketing professionals, pre-vetted for specific skills (video editing, social media, SEO, etc.). Platform includes skill verification, portfolio review, and specialization matching.|Entrepreneurs on Fire - "Digital Threads: The Entrepreneur Playbook for Digital-First Marketing with Neal Schaffer"| |Tiger Window Cleaning - Premium Local Window Service|Local window cleaning service targeting homeowners. Traditional companies charging 2x market rate. Making $10k/month from $200 initial investment.|Local window cleaning service combining competitive pricing ($5/pane), excellent customer service, and quality guarantees. Uses modern tools like water-fed poles for efficiency. Implements systematic approach to customer communication and follow-up.|The Side Hustle Show - "630: How this College Student’s Side Hustle Brings in $10k a Month"| |RealViz3D - Real Estate Visualization Platform|3D visualization service turning architectural plans into photorealistic renderings for real estate agents. Agents struggling with unbuilt property sales. Making $30-40k/year per operator.|Professional 3D modeling and rendering service that creates photorealistic visualizations of properties before they're built or renovated. The service transforms architectural plans into immersive 3D representations that show lighting, textures, and realistic details. This helps potential buyers fully understand and connect with the space before it physically exists.|Side Hustle School - "#2861 - TBT: An Architect’s Side Hustle in 3D Real Estate Modeling"| |Somewhere - Global Talent Marketplace|Platform connecting US companies with vetted overseas talent. Tech roles costing $150k locally filled for 50% less. Grew from $15M to $52M valuation in 9 months.|Platform connecting US companies with pre-vetted overseas talent at significantly lower rates while maintaining high quality. Handles payments, contracts, and quality assurance to remove friction from global hiring.|My First Million - "I Lost Everything Twice… Then Made $26M In 18 Months| |GymLaunch - Rapid Gym Turnaround Service|Consultants flying to struggling gyms to implement proven member acquisition systems. Gym owners lacking sales expertise. Made $100k in first 21 days.|Expert consultants fly in to implement proven member acquisition systems, train staff, and rapidly fill gyms with new members. The service combines sales training, marketing automation, and proven conversion tactics to transform struggling gyms into profitable businesses within weeks.|My First Million - "I Lost Everything Twice… Then Made $26M In 18 Months| |PublishPlus - Publishing Backend Monetization|Backend monetization system for publishing companies. One-time customers becoming recurring revenue. Grew business from $2M to $110M revenue.|Add complementary backend products and services to increase customer lifetime value. Develop software tools and additional services that natural extend from initial publishing product. Focus on high-margin recurring revenue streams.|My First Million - "I Lost Everything Twice… Then Made $26M In 18 Months| |WelcomeBot - Automated Employee Onboarding Platform|Automated employee welcome platform. HR teams struggling with consistent onboarding. $99/month per 100 employees.|An automated onboarding platform that creates personalized welcome experiences through pre-recorded video messages, scheduled check-ins, and automated swag delivery. The platform would ensure consistent high-quality onboarding regardless of timing or location.|Entrepreneurs on Fire - "Free Training on Building Systems and Processes to Scale Your Business with Chris Ronzio: An EOFire Classic from 2021"| |ProcessBrain - Business Knowledge Documentation Platform|SaaS platform turning tribal knowledge into documented processes. Business owners spending hours training new hires. $199/month per company.|A software platform that makes it easy to document and delegate business processes and procedures. The platform would include templates, guided documentation flows, and tools to easily share and update procedures. It would help businesses create a comprehensive playbook of their operations.|Entrepreneurs on Fire - "Free Training on Building Systems and Processes to Scale Your Business with Chris Ronzio: An EOFire Classic from 2021"| |TradeMatch - Modern Manufacturing Job Marketplace|Modern job board making manufacturing sexy again. Factory jobs paying $40/hr but can't recruit. $500 per successful referral.|A specialized job marketplace and recruitment platform focused exclusively on modern manufacturing and trade jobs. The platform would combine TikTok-style content marketing, referral programs, and modern UX to make manufacturing jobs appealing to Gen Z and young workers. Would leverage existing $500 referral fees and industry demand.|My First Million - "He Sold His Company For $15M, Then Got A Job At McDonald’s"| |GroundLevel - Executive Immersion Program|Structured program putting CEOs in front-line jobs. Executives disconnected from workers. $25k per placement.|A structured program that places executives and founders in front-line jobs (retail, warehouse, service) for 2-4 weeks with documentation and learning framework. Similar to Scott Heiferman's McDonald's experience but productized.|My First Million - "He Sold His Company For $15M, Then Got A Job At McDonald’s"| |OneStepAhead - Micro-Mentorship Marketplace|Marketplace for 30-min mentorship calls with people one step ahead. Professionals seeking specific guidance. Takes 15% of session fees.|MicroMentor Marketplace - Platform connecting people with mentors who are just one step ahead in their journey for focused, affordable micro-mentorship sessions.|Entrepreneurs on Fire - "How to Create an Unbroken Business with Michael Unbroken: An EOFire Classic from 2021"| |VulnerableLeader - Leadership Authenticity Training Platform|Leadership vulnerability training platform. Leaders struggling with authentic communication. $2k/month per company subscription.|Leadership Vulnerability Platform - A digital training platform combining assessment tools, guided exercises, and peer support to help leaders develop authentic communication skills. The platform would include real-world scenarios, video coaching, and measurable metrics for tracking leadership growth through vulnerability.|Entrepreneurs on Fire - "How to Create an Unbroken Business with Michael Unbroken: An EOFire Classic from 2021"| |NetworkAI - Smart Network Intelligence Platform|AI analyzing your network to find hidden valuable connections. Professionals missing opportunities in existing contacts. $49/month per user.|AI Network Navigator - Smart tool that analyzes your professional network across platforms, identifies valuable hidden connections, and suggests specific actionable ways to leverage relationships for mutual benefit.|Entrepreneurs on Fire - "How to Create an Unbroken Business with Michael Unbroken: An EOFire Classic from 2021"| |Porch Pumpkins - Seasonal Decoration Service|Full-service porch pumpkin decoration. Homeowners spend $300-1350 per season. One operator making $1M in 8 weeks seasonal revenue.|Full-service seasonal porch decoration service focused on autumn/Halloween, including design, installation, maintenance, and removal. Offering premium curated pumpkin arrangements with various package tiers.|My First Million - "The guy who gets paid $80K/yr to do nothing"| |Silent Companion - Professional Presence Service|Professional silent companions for lonely people. Huge problem in Japan/globally. $68/session, $80k/year per companion. Non-sexual, just presence.|A professional companion service where individuals can rent a non-judgmental, quiet presence for various activities. The companion provides silent company without the pressure of conversation or social performance. They accompany clients to events, meals, or just sit quietly together.|My First Million - "The guy who gets paid $80K/yr to do nothing"| Hope this is useful. If anyone would like to ensure I include any particular podcasts or episodes etc. in future posts, very happy to do so. I'll generally send \~5 ideas per week in a short weekly digest format (you can see the format I'd usually use in here: podcastmarketwatch.beehiiv.com). I find it mindblowing that the latest models with large context windows make it even possible to analyze full transcripts at such scale. It's a very exciting time we're living through! Would love some feedback on this stuff, happy to iterate and improve the analysis/ideas... or create a new newsletter on a different topic if anyone would like. Cheers!

How a founder built a B2B AI startup to serve with 65+ global brands (including Fortune500 companies) (I will not promote)
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Royal_Rest8409This week

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.

What I Learned from a Failed Startup: Seeking Advice on Engineering, Co-Founder Agreements & Execution (i will not promote)
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GummyBear8659This week

What I Learned from a Failed Startup: Seeking Advice on Engineering, Co-Founder Agreements & Execution (i will not promote)

Hey everyone! Long-time lurker, first-time founder here. I’m reaching out to get feedback on a recent startup experience—what went wrong, what I could have done better, and how I should approach future opportunities. The Background There were three founders in this venture: • Founder A (CEO, 50%) – The product/growth guy who identified the problem space. • Founder B (Me, CTO, 37.5%) – A software engineer with a software dev shop and multiple clients. I wanted to diversify into building my own products but am not inherently a “product person.” • Founder C (COO, 12.5%) – Brought into the mix by Founder A, with the goal of leveraging his network for traction once the product was built. The idea was to create Product X, a solution targeting the SMB space while competitors were moving upmarket. It wasn’t revolutionary—more of a strategic market play. The Initial Plan & My Role • Founder A would define and prioritize product specs, guiding what needed to be built. • I (Founder B) didn’t have time to code myself, so I allocated engineers from my dev shop (which I personally paid for). My stake was adjusted from 32.5% to 37.5% to reflect this contribution. • Founder C was more of an observer early on, planning to help with traction once we had a product ready. We agreed on a 1-year cliff and a 4-year vesting schedule for equity. Where Things Started to Go Wrong • Lack of a Clear Product Roadmap – Founder A was very focused on getting something built fast, but we never signed off on a structured roadmap or milestones. I underestimated the complexity of what was actually needed for customer conversations. • Engineering Expectations vs. Reality – The team (one part-time lead + two full-time juniors from my dev shop) faced early feedback that development was too slow. In response, I ramped up the lead to full-time and added a part-time PM. But Founder A continued pushing for speed, despite real hurdles (OAuth integrations, etc.). • Shifting MVP Goalposts – Midway, Founder A concluded that an MVP wouldn’t cut it—we needed a more complete product to be competitive. This meant more engineering, more delays, and more of my own money spent on development. The Breaking Point Near the 1-year vesting mark, we had an opportunity: a paying client willing to fund an app. I didn’t have devs on the bench, so I asked Founder A to hold off our project briefly while I hired more engineers to avoid stalling either effort. This was the final straw. Founder A (with Founder C somewhat aligned) decided the arrangement wasn’t working—citing past disagreements and the “slowness” issue. The decision was made to end the partnership. Now, Founder A, as majority holder, is requesting a full handover of the code, Founder C is indifferent, and all engineering costs I covered are essentially lost. Key Takeaways (So Far) Crystal-Clear Agreements Upfront – A formalized product roadmap and timeline should’ve been locked in from day one. Business Needs > Engineering Standards – I wanted to build something solid and scalable, but in an early-stage startup, speed to market is king. This was before AI tools became mainstream, so our approach wasn’t as optimized. Don’t Overextend Without Protection – I personally financed all engineering, but without clear safeguards, that investment became a sunk cost. Expenses Must Be Distributed – I was solely covering engineering salaries, which created an imbalance in financial risk. Future partnerships should ensure costs are shared proportionally, rather than one person shouldering the burden. Where I Need Advice Looking back, I want to improve as an engineer, CEO, and co-founder. • What should I have done differently in structuring this partnership? • How do you balance engineering quality with the startup need for speed? • As a dev shop owner, how can I better navigate equity deals where I’m also bringing in engineering resources? I really appreciate everyone who went through this long post and provide any insights from founders, engineers, or anyone who has been in a similar situation. Thanks for reading! ===================================================================== For readers who might be thinking what set this type of expectation? Because I had a dev shop and I thought my co-founders will be understanding of my business circumstance and I was a bit trigger to build a product with a C-exec team, I gave the impression of "unlimited" engineering which I later realized down the line that it was not feasible for me. Something I learned that I have to be more careful with and set expectations accordingly from the very beginning. And from the feedback of the commenters here, I am much more aware what I should offer and how to set expectations, esp. in the early stages of execution. So thank you all! 🙏🏾 EDIT: I would like to thank everyone who contributed to this thread. You not only helped me but future founders who are considering to get into the startup scene!

Hot Take: Not all your startups need AI forced into them
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bitorsicThis week

Hot Take: Not all your startups need AI forced into them

I'm a final year Computer Engineering student, hence applying for jobs all around. There's this particular trend I've noticed with startups that are coming up these days. That is, even for the absolute basic stuff they'll use 'AI', and they'll think they built something 'revolutionary'. No. You're breaking your product in ways you don't realise. An example, that even some well established companies are guilty of: AI Chatbots You absolutely don't need them and it's an entire gimmick. If you really wanna implement a chatbot, connect the user to an actual person on your end, which I think is not possible if you're at a 'startup' stage. You'll need employees who can handle user queries in real time. If the user really is stuck let them use the 'Contact Us' page. A really close relative of mine is very vocal about the frustration he faces whenever he tries to use the AI Chatbot on any well known e-com website. The only case for AI Chatbot that makes sense is when it's directing the customer to an actual customer support rep if none of the AI's solutions is working for the customer. Even then, implementing a search page for FAQ is extremely easy and user friendly. Another example: AI Interviewer I recently interviewed for a startup, and their whole interviewing process was AI'zed?!?! No real person at the other end, I was answering to their questions which were in video format. They even had a 'mascot' / 'AI interviewer' avatar designed by an AI (AI-ception???). This mascot just text-to-speech'ed all the questions for me to rewind and hear what I missed again. And I had to record video and audio to answer these questions on their platform itself. The entire interview process just could've been a questionnaire, or if you're really concerned on the integrity of the interviewee, just take a few minutes out of your oh-so-busy schedule as a startup owner. Atleast for hiring employees who would make the most impact on your product going ahead. I say the most impact, because (atleast as a developer) the work done by these employees would define how robust your product is, and/or how easily other features can be integrated into the codebase. Trust me, refactoring code later on would only cost you time and money. These resources would rather be more useful in other departments of your startup. The only use case for an AI Interviewer I see is for preparing for an actual interview, provided that feedback is given to the user at the earliest, which you don't need to worry about as a startup owner. So yeah, you're probably better off without integrating AI in your product. Thank you for reading. TLDR; The title; I know AI is the new thing and gets everyone drooling and all, but for the love of God, just focus on what your startup does best and put real people behind it; Integrating AI without human intervention is as good as a broken product; Do your hiring yourself, or through real people, emphasizing on the fact that the people you hire at an early stage will define your growth ahead;

Looking for a tech cofounder. Revoltionary (yes really!) gig economy app. I will not promote.
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sweetpea___This week

Looking for a tech cofounder. Revoltionary (yes really!) gig economy app. I will not promote.

Hey everyone! I’m building a new gig-work app that cuts out the hassles of interviews, applications, and sky-high fees. We’re aiming to make it easy for businesses to hire qualified freelancers for short shifts or one-off tasks—and for freelancers to set their own rates and get paid quickly. Why This App? Time-Saving Model: Instead of posting jobs and conducting multiple interviews, employers can instantly book from a list of KYC-verified freelancers who showcase their skills via 30-second video bios. Cost Leadership: We plan to charge only 5%, far below the 15–50% common in other gig platforms. This keeps more money in the pockets of both freelancers and businesses. Proven Demand: A beta test in 2018 drew nearly 600 active users, validating that there’s appetite for a simpler, fairer way to fill short shifts. About Me 20+ years’ experience in payroll, workforce management, and operations for Fortune 500 companies. Led cross-functional teams, implemented large-scale solutions, and believe in building with a user-first mindset. Offering meaningful equity—I want a true partner, not a hired gun. Who I’m Looking For Full-Stack Developer (comfortable with Node.js, React, Python, or similar and ML/Ai) who can manage everything from front-end to database integration (ideally Postgres/MySQL) and build a same day payments system. Passion for creating solutions that genuinely help gig workers and small businesses. Excitement to collaborate on the product roadmap, from the booking interface to same-day payment features. The Opportunity Major Market: The gig economy is huge and still growing. If we nail speed, cost-effectiveness, and ease of use, we can capture a significant share of it. Remote-Friendly: We can work together from anywhere, though I’m planning to relaunch in London where the initial beta gained momentum. If this sounds like your kind of challenge, drop a comment or DM me. Let’s chat about how we can merge our strengths—my operations background and your technical expertise—to build a platform that truly transforms the gig-work experience. Thanks for reading, and I look forward to creating something impactful together!

We received 25k investment offer, need advice [I will not promote]
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Agreeable_Ad6424This week

We received 25k investment offer, need advice [I will not promote]

We received a $25k for 2.5% on a convertible note offer from a US based investor. The note matures in 18 months with an interest rate of 5%, but the investor said they can extend it further. It’s an AI SaaS in graphic design. We have been bootstrapping till now, and we feel that this money could help us hire better engineers and marketeers, we want to grow it to a good revenue, but don't see it becoming a billion dollar startup as such. Our initial plans were to build it like an indie-hacker, grow it a decent revenue and sell it to someone who can take better care of it. We built it as a side project with full time jobs. We already have decent traction with 10k+ signups and $600+ in revenue per month with <100 dollars spent on marketing. But our AI model costs are high, 0.2 USD per user that we onboard and provide free credits. But we as founders are more interested in another idea that we have been thinking about and see a bigger potential + founder market fit in. The current product is good, and we can foresee that with better hiring and marketing, we can grow our revenue to about 10-20k a month, like a regular online business. What should we do? We don't want to simply let go of the product because it's not that it doesn't work, it's just that we as founders are better fit for something else. We can't sell it yet as the revenue isn't too high and we haven't even incorporated. Is it okay if we think of growing it to 10-20k+ a month and then intend to sell it to someone who can take better care of it? Should we take the investment in such a case, given this investment is definitely gonna help us grow? Process of incorporation will also help us in selling this business later I think?

I spent 6 months on building a tool, and got 0 zero users. Here is my story.
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GDbuildsGDThis week

I spent 6 months on building a tool, and got 0 zero users. Here is my story.

Edit Thank you all so much for your time reading my story. Your support, feedback, criticism, and skepticism; all helped me a lot, and I couldn't appreciate it enough \^\_\^ TL;DR I spent 6 months on a tool that currently has 0 users. Below is what I learned during my journey, sharing because I believe most mistakes are easily avoidable. Do not overestimate your product and assume it will be an exception to fundamental principles. Principles are there for a reason. Always look for validation before you start. Avoid building products with a low money-to-effort ratio/in very competitive fields. Unless you have the means, you probably won't make it. Pick a problem space, pick your target audience, and talk to them before thinking about a solution. Identify and match their pain points. Only then should you think of a solution. If people are not overly excited or willing to pay in advance for a discounted price, it might be a sign to rethink. Sell one and only one feature at a time. Avoid everything else. If people don't pay for that one core feature, no secondary feature will change their mind. Always spend twice as much time marketing as you do building. You will not get users if they don't know it exists. Define success metrics ("1000 users in 3 months" or "$6000 in the account at the end of 6 months") before you start. If you don't meet them, strongly consider quitting the project. If you can't get enough users to keep going, nothing else matters. VALIDATION, VALIDATION, VALIDATION. Success is not random, but most of our first products will not make a success story. Know when to admit failure, and move on. Even if a product of yours doesn't succeed, what you learned during its journey will turn out to be invaluable for your future. My story So, this is the story of a product, Summ, that I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. As it's the first product I’ve ever built, after watching you all from the sidelines, I have learned a lot, made many mistakes, and did only a few things right. Just sharing what I’ve learned and some insights from my journey so far. I hope that this post will help you avoid the mistakes I made — most of which I consider easily avoidable — while you enjoy reading it, and get to know me a little bit more 🤓. A slow start after many years Summ isn’t the first product I really wanted to build. Lacking enough dev skills to even get started was a huge blocker for so many years. In fact, the first product I would’ve LOVED to build was a smart personal shopping assistant. I had this idea 4 years ago; but with no GPT, no coding skills, no technical co-founder, I didn’t have the means to make it happen. I still do not know if such a tool exists and is good enough. All I wanted was a tool that could make data-based predictions about when to buy stuff (“buy a new toothpaste every three months”) and suggest physical products that I might need or be strongly interested in. AFAIK, Amazon famously still struggles with the second one. Fast-forward a few years, I learned the very basics of HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS. Still was not there to build a product; but good enough to code my design portfolio from scratch. Yet, I couldn’t imagine myself building a product using Vanilla JS. I really hated it, I really sucked at it. So, back to tutorial hell, and to learn about this framework I just heard about: React.React introduced so many new concepts to me. “Thinking in React” is a phrase we heard a lot, and with quite good reasons. After some time, I was able to build very basic tutorial apps, both in React, and React Native; but I have to say that I really hated coding for mobile. At this point, I was already a fan of productivity apps, and had a concept for a time management assistant app in my design portfolio. So, why not build one? Surely, it must be easy, since every coding tutorial starts with a todo app. ❌ WRONG! Building a basic todo app is easy enough, but building one good enough for a place in the market was a challenge I took and failed. I wasted one month on that until I abandoned the project for good. Even if I continued working on it, as the productivity landscape is overly competitive, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to cover costs, assuming I make any. Since I was (and still am) in between jobs, I decided to abandon the project. 👉 What I learned: Do not start projects with a low ratio of money to effort and time. Example: Even if I get 500 monthly users, 200 of which are paid users (unrealistically high number), assuming an average subscription fee of $5/m (such apps are quite cheap, mostly due to the high competition), it would make me around $1000 minus any occurring costs. Any founder with a product that has 500 active users should make more. Even if it was relatively successful, due to the high competition, I wouldn’t make any meaningful money. PS: I use Todoist today. Due to local pricing, I pay less than $2/m. There is no way I could beat this competitive pricing, let alone the app itself. But, somehow, with a project that wasn’t even functional — let alone being an MVP — I made my first Wi-Fi money: Someone decided that the domain I preemptively purchased is worth something. By this point, I had already abandoned the project, certainly wasn’t going to renew the domain, was looking for a FT job, and a new project that I could work on. And out of nowhere, someone hands me some free money — who am I not to take it? Of course, I took it. The domain is still unused, no idea why 🤔. Ngl, I still hate the fact that my first Wi-Fi money came from this. A new idea worth pursuing? Fast-forward some weeks now. Around March, I got this crazy idea of building an email productivity tool. We all use emails, yet we all hate them. So, this must be fixed. Everyone uses emails, in fact everyone HAS TO use emails. So, I just needed to build a tool and wait for people to come. This was all, really. After all, the problem space is huge, there is enough room for another product, everyone uses emails, no need for any further validation, right? ❌ WRONG ONCE AGAIN! We all hear from the greatest in the startup landscape that we must validate our ideas with real people, yet at least some of us (guilty here 🥸) think that our product will be hugely successful and prove them to be an exception. Few might, but most are not. I certainly wasn't. 👉 Lesson learned: Always validate your ideas with real people. Ask them how much they’d pay for such a tool (not if they would). Much better if they are willing to pay upfront for a discount, etc. But even this comes later, keep reading. I think the difference between “How much” and “If” is huge for two reasons: (1) By asking them for “How much”, you force them to think in a more realistic setting. (2) You will have a more realistic idea on your profit margins. Based on my competitive analysis, I already had a solution in my mind to improve our email usage standards and email productivity (huge mistake), but I did my best to learn about their problems regarding those without pushing the idea too hard. The idea is this: Generate concise email summaries with suggested actions, combine them into one email, and send it at their preferred times. Save as much as time the AI you end up with allows. After all, everyone loves to save time. So, what kind of validation did I seek for? Talked with only a few people around me about this crazy, internet-breaking idea. The responses I got were, now I see, mediocre; no one got excited about it, just said things along the lines of “Cool idea, OK”. So, any reasonable person in this situation would think “Okay, not might not be working”, right? Well, I did not. I assumed that they were the wrong audience for this product, and there was this magical land of user segments waiting eagerly for my product, yet unknowingly. To this day, I still have not reached this magical place. Perhaps, it didn’t exist in the first place. If I cannot find it, whether it exists or not doesn’t matter. I am certainly searching for it. 👉 What I should have done: Once I decide on a problem space (time management, email productivity, etc.), I should decide on my potential user segments, people who I plan to sell my product to. Then I should go talk to those people, ask them about their pains, then get to the problem-solving/ideation phase only later. ❗️ VALIDATION COMES FROM THE REALITY OUTSIDE. What validation looks like might change from product to product; but what invalidation looks like is more or less the same for every product. Nico Jeannen told me yesterday “validation = money in the account” on Twitter. This is the ultimate form of validation your product could get. If your product doesn’t make any money, then something is invalidated by reality: Your product, you, your idea, who knows? So, at this point, I knew a little bit of Python from spending some time in tutorial hell a few years ago, some HTML/CSS/JS, barely enough React to build a working app. React could work for this project, but I needed easy-to-implement server interactivity. Luckily, around this time, I got to know about this new gen of indie hackers, and learned (but didn’t truly understand) about their approach to indie hacking, and this library called Nextjs. How good Next.js still blows my mind. So, I was back to tutorial hell once again. But, this time, with a promise to myself: This is the last time I would visit tutorial hell. Time to start building this "ground-breaking idea" Learning the fundamentals of Next.js was easier than learning of React unsurprisingly. Yet, the first time I managed to run server actions on Next.js was one of the rarest moments that completely blew my mind. To this day, I reject the idea that it is something else than pure magic under its hood. Did I absolutely need Nextjs for this project though? I do not think so. Did it save me lots of time? Absolutely. Furthermore, learning Nextjs will certainly be quite helpful for other projects that I will be tackling in the future. Already got a few ideas that might be worth pursuing in the head in case I decide to abandon Summ in the future. Fast-forward few weeks again: So, at this stage, I had a barely working MVP-like product. Since the very beginning, I spent every free hour (and more) on this project as speed is essential. But, I am not so sure it was worth it to overwork in retrospect. Yet, I know I couldn’t help myself. Everything is going kinda smooth, so what’s the worst thing that could ever happen? Well, both Apple and Google announced their AIs (Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, respectively) will have email summarization features for their products. Summarizing singular emails is no big deal, after all there were already so many similar products in the market. I still think that what truly matters is a frictionless user experience, and this is why I built this product in a certain way: You spend less than a few minutes setting up your account, and you get to enjoy your email summaries, without ever visiting its website again. This is still a very cool concept I really like a lot. So, at this point: I had no other idea that could be pursued, already spent too much time on this project. Do I quit or not? This was the question. Of course not. I just have to launch this product as quickly as possible. So, I did something right, a quite rare occurrence I might say: Re-planned my product, dropped everything secondary to the core feature immediately (save time on reading emails), tried launching it asap. 👉 Insight: Sell only one core feature at one time. Drop anything secondary to this core feature. Well, my primary occupation is product design. So one would expect that a product I build must have stellar design. I considered any considerable time spent on design at this stage would be simply wasted. I still think this is both true and wrong: True, because if your product’s core benefits suck, no one will care about your design. False, because if your design looks amateurish, no one will trust you and your product. So, I always targeted an average level design with it and the way this tool works made it quite easy as I had to design only 2 primary pages: Landing page and user portal (which has only settings and analytics pages). However, even though I knew spending time on design was not worth much of my time, I got a bit “greedy”: In fact, I redesigned those pages three times, and still ended up with a so-so design that I am not proud of. 👉 What I would do differently: Unless absolutely necessary, only one iteration per stage as long as it works. This, in my mind, applies to everything. If your product’s A feature works, then no need to rewrite it from scratch for any reason, or even refactor it. When your product becomes a success, and you absolutely need that part of your codebase to be written, do so, but only then. Ready to launch, now is th etime for some marketing, right? By July 26, I already had a “launchable” product that barely works (I marked this date on a Notion docs, this is how I know). Yet, I had spent almost no time on marketing, sales, whatever. After all, “You build and they will come”. Did I know that I needed marketing? Of course I did, but knowingly didn’t. Why, you might ask. Well, from my perspective, it had to be a dev-heavy product; meaning that you spend most of your time on developing it, mostly coding skills. But, this is simply wrong. As a rule of thumb, as noted by one of the greatests, Marc Louvion, you should spend at least twice of the building time on marketing. ❗️ Time spent on building \* 2 people don’t know your product > they don’t use your product > you don’t get users > you don’t make money Easy as that. Following the same reasoning, a slightly different approach to planning a project is possible. Determine an approximate time to complete the project with a high level project plan. Let’s say 6 months. By the reasoning above, 2 months should go into building, and 4 into marketing. If you need 4 months for building instead of 2, then you need 8 months of marketing, which makes the time to complete the project 12 months. If you don’t have that much time, then quit the project. When does a project count as completed? Well, in reality, never. But, I think we have to define success conditions even before we start for indie projects and startups; so we know when to quit when they are not met. A success condition could look like “Make $6000 in 12 months” or “Have 3000 users in 6 months”. It all depends on the project. But, once you set it, it should be set in stone: You don’t change it unless absolutely necessary. I suspect there are few principles that make a solopreneur successful; and knowing when to quit and when to continue is definitely one of them. Marc Louvion is famously known for his success, but he got there after failing so many projects. To my knowledge, the same applies to Nico Jeannen, Pieter Levels, or almost everyone as well. ❗️ Determining when to continue even before you start will definitely help in the long run. A half-aed launch Time-leap again. Around mid August, I “soft launched” my product. By soft launch, I mean lazy marketing. Just tweeting about it, posting it on free directories. Did I get any traffic? Surely I did. Did I get any users? Nope. Only after this time, it hit me: “Either something is wrong with me, or with this product” Marketing might be a much bigger factor for a project’s success after all. Even though I get some traffic, not convincing enough for people to sign up even for a free trial. The product was still perfect in my eyes at the time (well, still is ^(\_),) so the right people are not finding my product, I thought. Then, a question that I should have been asking at the very first place, one that could prevent all these, comes to my mind: “How do even people search for such tools?” If we are to consider this whole journey of me and my so-far-failed product to be an already destined failure, one metric suffices to show why. Search volume: 30. Even if people have such a pain point, they are not looking for email summaries. So, almost no organic traffic coming from Google. But, as a person who did zero marketing on this or any product, who has zero marketing knowledge, who doesn’t have an audience on social media, there is not much I could do. Finally, it was time to give up. Or not… In my eyes, the most important element that makes a founder (solo or not) successful (this, I am not by any means) is to solve problems. ❗️ So, the problem was this: “People are not finding my product by organic search” How do I make sure I get some organic traffic and gets more visibility? Learn digital marketing and SEO as much as I can within very limited time. Thankfully, without spending much time, I came across Neil Patel's YT channel, and as I said many times, it is an absolute gold mine. I learned a lot, especially about the fundamentals, and surely it will be fruitful; but there is no magic trick that could make people visit your website. SEO certainly helps, but only when people are looking for your keywords. However, it is truly a magical solution to get in touch with REAL people that are in your user segments: 👉 Understand your pains, understand their problems, help them to solve them via building products. I did not do this so far, have to admit. But, in case you would like to have a chat about your email usage, and email productivity, just get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear about them. Getting ready for a ProductHunt launch The date was Sept 1. And I unlocked an impossible achievement: Running out of Supabase’s free plan’s Egres limit while having zero users. I was already considering moving out of their Cloud server and managing a Supabase CLI service on my Hetzner VPS for some time; but never ever suspected that I would have to do this quickly. The cheapest plan Supabase offers is $25/month; yet, at that point, I am in between jobs for such a long time, basically broke, and could barely afford that price. One or two months could be okay, but why pay for it if I will eventually move out of their Cloud service? So, instead of paying $25, I spent two days migrating out of Supabase Cloud. Worth my time? Definitely not. But, when you are broke, you gotta do stupid things. This was the first time that I felt lucky to have zero users: I have no idea how I would manage this migration if I had any. I think this is one of the core tenets of an indie hacker: Controlling their own environment. I can’t remember whose quote this is, but I suspect it was Naval: Entrepreneurs have an almost pathological need to control their own fate. They will take any suffering if they can be in charge of their destiny, and not have it in somebody else’s hands. What’s truly scary is, at least in my case, we make people around us suffer at the expense of our attempting to control our own fates. I know this period has been quite hard on my wife as well, as I neglected her quite a bit, but sadly, I know that this will happen again. It is something that I can barely help with. Still, so sorry. After working the last two weeks on a ProductHunt Launch, I finally launched it this Tuesday. Zero ranking, zero new users, but 36 kind people upvoted my product, and many commented and provided invaluable feedback. I couldn't be more grateful for each one of them 🙏. Considering all these, what lies in the future of Summ though? I have no idea, to be honest. On one hand, I have zero users, have no job, no income. So, I need a way to make money asap. On the other hand, the whole idea of it revolves around one core premise (not an assumption) that I am not so willing to share; and I couldn’t have more trust in it. This might not be the best iteration of it, however I certainly believe that email usage is one of the best problem spaces one could work on. 👉 But, one thing is for certain: I need to get in touch with people, and talk with them about this product I built so far. In fact, this is the only item on my agenda. Nothing else will save my brainchild <3. Below are some other insights and notes that I got during my journey; as they do not 100% fit into this story, I think it is more suitable to list them here. I hope you enjoyed reading this. Give Summ a try, it comes with a generous free trial, no credit card required. Some additional notes and insights: Project planning is one of the most underestimated skills for solopreneurs. It saves you enormous time, and helps you to keep your focus up. Building B2C products beats building B2B products. Businesses are very willing to pay big bucks if your product helps them. On the other hand, spending a few hours per user who would pay $5/m probably is not worth your time. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is if no one uses it. If you cannot sell a product in a certain category/niche (or do not know how to sell it), it might be a good idea not to start a project in it. Going after new ideas and ventures is quite risky, especially if you don’t know how to market it. On the other hand, an already established category means that there is already demand. Whether this demand is sufficient or not is another issue. As long as there is enough demand for your product to fit in, any category/niche is good. Some might be better, some might be worse. Unless you are going hardcore B2B, you will need people to find your product by means of organic search. Always conduct thorough keyword research as soon as possible.

How I made a high tech salary in my first selling month
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Ok_Negotiation_2587This week

How I made a high tech salary in my first selling month

For over 7 years I worked as a full-stack developer, helping other companies bring their ideas to life. But one day, I thought “Why not try making my own dream come true?”. That’s when I decided to quit my job and start my own journey to becoming an entrepreneur. At first, it wasn’t easy. I didn’t make any money for months and had no idea where to start. I felt lost. Then, I decided to focus on something popular and trending. AI was everywhere, and ChatGPT was the most used AI platform. So I looked into it and I found the OpenAI community forum where people had been asking for features that weren’t being added. That gave me an idea. Why not build those features myself? I created a Chrome extension and I worked on some of the most requested features, like: Downloading the advanced voice mode and messages as MP3 Adding folders to organize chats Saving and reusing prompts Pinning important chats Exporting chats to TXT/JSON files Deleting or archiving multiple chats at once Making chat history searches faster and better It took me about a week to build the first version, and when I published it, the response was incredible. People loved it! Some even said things like, “You’re a lifesaver!” That’s when I realized I had something that could not only help people but also turn into a real business. I kept the first version free to see how people would respond. Many users have been downloading my extension, which prompted Chrome to review it to determine if it qualified for the featured badge. I received the badge, and it has significantly boosted traffic to my extension ever since. After all the positive feedback, I launched a paid version one month ago. A few minutes after publishing it, I made my first sale! That moment was so exciting, and it motivated me to keep going. I already have over 4,000 users and have made more than $4,500 in my first selling month. I’ve decided to release 1-2 new features every month to keep improving the extension based on what users ask for. I also created the same extension for Firefox and Edge users because many people have been asking for it! I also started a Reddit community, where I share updates, sales, discount codes, and ideas for new features. It’s been awesome to connect with users directly and get their feedback. Additionally, I’ve started working on another extension for Claude, which I’m hoping will be as successful as this one. My message to you is this: never give up on your dreams. It might feel impossible at first, but with patience, hard work, and some creativity, you can make it happen. I hope this inspires you to go after what you want. Good luck to all of us!

What I Learned from a Failed Startup: Seeking Advice on Engineering, Co-Founder Agreements & Execution (i will not promote)
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GummyBear8659This week

What I Learned from a Failed Startup: Seeking Advice on Engineering, Co-Founder Agreements & Execution (i will not promote)

Hey everyone! Long-time lurker, first-time founder here. I’m reaching out to get feedback on a recent startup experience—what went wrong, what I could have done better, and how I should approach future opportunities. The Background There were three founders in this venture: • Founder A (CEO, 50%) – The product/growth guy who identified the problem space. • Founder B (Me, CTO, 37.5%) – A software engineer with a software dev shop and multiple clients. I wanted to diversify into building my own products but am not inherently a “product person.” • Founder C (COO, 12.5%) – Brought into the mix by Founder A, with the goal of leveraging his network for traction once the product was built. The idea was to create Product X, a solution targeting the SMB space while competitors were moving upmarket. It wasn’t revolutionary—more of a strategic market play. The Initial Plan & My Role • Founder A would define and prioritize product specs, guiding what needed to be built. • I (Founder B) didn’t have time to code myself, so I allocated engineers from my dev shop (which I personally paid for). My stake was adjusted from 32.5% to 37.5% to reflect this contribution. • Founder C was more of an observer early on, planning to help with traction once we had a product ready. We agreed on a 1-year cliff and a 4-year vesting schedule for equity. Where Things Started to Go Wrong • Lack of a Clear Product Roadmap – Founder A was very focused on getting something built fast, but we never signed off on a structured roadmap or milestones. I underestimated the complexity of what was actually needed for customer conversations. • Engineering Expectations vs. Reality – The team (one part-time lead + two full-time juniors from my dev shop) faced early feedback that development was too slow. In response, I ramped up the lead to full-time and added a part-time PM. But Founder A continued pushing for speed, despite real hurdles (OAuth integrations, etc.). • Shifting MVP Goalposts – Midway, Founder A concluded that an MVP wouldn’t cut it—we needed a more complete product to be competitive. This meant more engineering, more delays, and more of my own money spent on development. The Breaking Point Near the 1-year vesting mark, we had an opportunity: a paying client willing to fund an app. I didn’t have devs on the bench, so I asked Founder A to hold off our project briefly while I hired more engineers to avoid stalling either effort. This was the final straw. Founder A (with Founder C somewhat aligned) decided the arrangement wasn’t working—citing past disagreements and the “slowness” issue. The decision was made to end the partnership. Now, Founder A, as majority holder, is requesting a full handover of the code, Founder C is indifferent, and all engineering costs I covered are essentially lost. Key Takeaways (So Far) Crystal-Clear Agreements Upfront – A formalized product roadmap and timeline should’ve been locked in from day one. Business Needs > Engineering Standards – I wanted to build something solid and scalable, but in an early-stage startup, speed to market is king. This was before AI tools became mainstream, so our approach wasn’t as optimized. Don’t Overextend Without Protection – I personally financed all engineering, but without clear safeguards, that investment became a sunk cost. Expenses Must Be Distributed – I was solely covering engineering salaries, which created an imbalance in financial risk. Future partnerships should ensure costs are shared proportionally, rather than one person shouldering the burden. Where I Need Advice Looking back, I want to improve as an engineer, CEO, and co-founder. • What should I have done differently in structuring this partnership? • How do you balance engineering quality with the startup need for speed? • As a dev shop owner, how can I better navigate equity deals where I’m also bringing in engineering resources? I really appreciate everyone who went through this long post and provide any insights from founders, engineers, or anyone who has been in a similar situation. Thanks for reading! ===================================================================== For readers who might be thinking what set this type of expectation? Because I had a dev shop and I thought my co-founders will be understanding of my business circumstance and I was a bit trigger to build a product with a C-exec team, I gave the impression of "unlimited" engineering which I later realized down the line that it was not feasible for me. Something I learned that I have to be more careful with and set expectations accordingly from the very beginning. And from the feedback of the commenters here, I am much more aware what I should offer and how to set expectations, esp. in the early stages of execution. So thank you all! 🙏🏾 EDIT: I would like to thank everyone who contributed to this thread. You not only helped me but future founders who are considering to get into the startup scene!

Should we give up?
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Should we give up?

I'm currently very demotivated because we're working on our SaaS startup since 1,5 years and we still haven't found active users, let alone a customer. We're building an AI-first tool that automates user research analysis. We've released two MVPs so far and are planning to build a third. People respond well to outreach (5-7% book a demo from those who received a first message) but then they fail to use it. We are talking with users a lot so we are aware of the problems, and we might be able to solve them if we continue building and testing. I find it hard though to solve these problems efficiently, because there are no similar established AI-first products on the market and it feels like we have to create a new UX standard. Some problems might be very hard to be solved, e.g. there are high cost of switching products for many of our potential users. Also, my time is limited, as I recently (5 months ago) became a mother. I can only work 30 hours per week. It's a competitive area we're in and our competitors have gradually developed into the same direction and it's getting harder to position ourselves. Also, GPTs might soon be able to do what we're doing - for free. I feel like AI tools are generally expected by many to be free. The price we're expecting to be able to bill is getting lower and lower and our finance plan is already looking tight. However, there are adjacent audiences which we could target as well, but none of us knows them. Is it normal as a founder to struggle so much at the beginning? I've read that it took established SaaS 2,5 years on average from founding to first revenue. We haven't founded so far so you could say we're not behind \sarcasm\ Shall we keep pushing? My tech co-founder is optimistic and thinks this is where the wheat is separated from the chaff. We're currently supported financially by a government fund so we haven't spent much private money. However, I feel like my career outlook gets worse with each day that I unsuccessfully try to raise this startup.

I am considering starting a SaaS business that automates the creation of long-form SEO-optimized blog posts. Is this something you would find useful, as a business owner?
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What_The_HexThis week

I am considering starting a SaaS business that automates the creation of long-form SEO-optimized blog posts. Is this something you would find useful, as a business owner?

Trying to gauge the general interest level, from other entrepreneurs/business owners. The idea is, a tool that automates the process of creating long-form SEO optimized blog posts to promote your business -- perhaps creating entire batches of such posts, all from just one button click. Like if you could just describe your business, click a button, and BAM, it just outputs like an entire month's worth of absolutely fire SEO-optimized long-form blog posts? That would be super fucking convenient. Yes you can use ChatGPT for this, but the character limits make it so it can only output very short posts. Otherwise it requires first asking for an outline, then getting the different sections piecemeal and pasting it all together yourself. Still super time-consuming to do it that way. A GPT-based solution could probably automate the process I've hit upon in my own SEO blog-posting workflow -- where I output not just finished long-form blog posts, but also convert them into SEO-optimized HTML code so you can just paste it into your blog post website and have all the header tags etc set up for optimal SEO/keyword ranking purposes. Biggest counter-argument I make against this is, there are undoubtedly lots of companies already offering this. Doesn't mean I can't make money doing it. I just don't like entering super crowded marketplaces. Other main argument I have is, if I used my OpenAI account for this, there's the risk of some malicious/idiot user firing prompts that violate the OpenAI ToS and get me banned. I COULD have them input their own OpenAI API tokens, but that just adds adoption/usage barriers that would make it way harder to market/acquire initial customers. I guess I could sanitize the user inputs as a pre-processing step to block any obscene prompts or anything like that, but still, it's a risk. Let me know your thoughts on this idea. ASSUMING it worked effectively -- and made it very easy for you to just describe your business offerings / value propositions / target market(s), then get genuinely useful long-form SEO-optimized blog posts, is this something you'd be willing to pay for? If so, what dollar amount, to you, would seem reasonable? It would probably just be hosted on a website. Then you'd just copy the outputted final result for use as needed on your website. That would be the simplest way to do it. Technically it could function as like, a plugin for specific websites that maybe auto-posts them for you too -- it would be simpler, on my end, to start out doing this on a standalone website. (Might also make it easier to allow users to try it out, on first visit.) One last point -- MAYBE it would have an optional intermediate step, where it would first output the planned outline for the blog post, allowing you to pop in, quickly modify that, add your own thoughts / valuable ideas (to help make the blog post more unique, truly useful for readers, more your own) -- THEN you could finalize it and hit submit. Again, that's the workflow I've hit upon in my own semi-automated blog-posting workflow, and it's led to some pretty useful long-form content that isn't just, boring garbage, but contains lots of genuinely useful ideas that I would include in my own uniquely-created blog posts on the subject. But instead of me taking the time to write it, I just kinda toss in a few quickly typed out ideas to expand upon, and ChatGPT does the rest. Imagine that kind of optional / customizable workflow, but the rest of it is fully automated. OR you could just get the fully automated blog posts with no revisions on your part. Thanks!

I spent 6 months on building a web product, and got zero users. Here is my story.
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GDbuildsGDThis week

I spent 6 months on building a web product, and got zero users. Here is my story.

Edit Thank you all so much for your time reading my story. Your support, feedback, criticism, and skepticism; all helped me a lot, and I couldn't appreciate it enough \^\_\^ I have stuff to post on Reddit very rarely, but I share how my project is going on, random stuff, and memes on X. Just in case few might want to keep in touch 👀 TL;DR I spent 6 months on a tool that currently has 0 users. Below is what I learned during my journey, sharing because I believe most mistakes are easily avoidable. Do not overestimate your product and assume it will be an exception to fundamental principles. Principles are there for a reason. Always look for validation before you start. Avoid building products with a low money-to-effort ratio/in very competitive fields. Unless you have the means, you probably won't make it. Pick a problem space, pick your target audience, and talk to them before thinking about a solution. Identify and match their pain points. Only then should you think of a solution. If people are not overly excited or willing to pay in advance for a discounted price, it might be a sign to rethink. Sell one and only one feature at a time. Avoid everything else. If people don't pay for that one core feature, no secondary feature will change their mind. Always spend twice as much time marketing as you do building. You will not get users if they don't know it exists. Define success metrics ("1000 users in 3 months" or "$6000 in the account at the end of 6 months") before you start. If you don't meet them, strongly consider quitting the project. If you can't get enough users to keep going, nothing else matters. VALIDATION, VALIDATION, VALIDATION. Success is not random, but most of our first products will not make a success story. Know when to admit failure, and move on. Even if a product of yours doesn't succeed, what you learned during its journey will turn out to be invaluable for your future. My story So, this is the story of a product that I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. As it's the first product I’ve ever built, after watching you all from the sidelines, I have learned a lot, made many mistakes, and did only a few things right. Just sharing what I’ve learned and some insights from my journey so far. I hope that this post will help you avoid the mistakes I made — most of which I consider easily avoidable — while you enjoy reading it, and get to know me a little bit more 🤓. A slow start after many years Summ isn’t the first product I really wanted to build. Lacking enough dev skills to even get started was a huge blocker for so many years. In fact, the first product I would’ve LOVED to build was a smart personal shopping assistant. I had this idea 4 years ago; but with no GPT, no coding skills, no technical co-founder, I didn’t have the means to make it happen. I still do not know if such a tool exists and is good enough. All I wanted was a tool that could make data-based predictions about when to buy stuff (“buy a new toothpaste every three months”) and suggest physical products that I might need or be strongly interested in. AFAIK, Amazon famously still struggles with the second one. Fast-forward a few years, I learned the very basics of HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS. Still was not there to build a product; but good enough to code my design portfolio from scratch. Yet, I couldn’t imagine myself building a product using Vanilla JS. I really hated it, I really sucked at it. So, back to tutorial hell, and to learn about this framework I just heard about: React.React introduced so many new concepts to me. “Thinking in React” is a phrase we heard a lot, and with quite good reasons. After some time, I was able to build very basic tutorial apps, both in React, and React Native; but I have to say that I really hated coding for mobile. At this point, I was already a fan of productivity apps, and had a concept for a time management assistant app in my design portfolio. So, why not build one? Surely, it must be easy, since every coding tutorial starts with a todo app. ❌ WRONG! Building a basic todo app is easy enough, but building one good enough for a place in the market was a challenge I took and failed. I wasted one month on that until I abandoned the project for good. Even if I continued working on it, as the productivity landscape is overly competitive, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to cover costs, assuming I make any. Since I was (and still am) in between jobs, I decided to abandon the project. 👉 What I learned: Do not start projects with a low ratio of money to effort and time. Example: Even if I get 500 monthly users, 200 of which are paid users (unrealistically high number), assuming an average subscription fee of $5/m (such apps are quite cheap, mostly due to the high competition), it would make me around $1000 minus any occurring costs. Any founder with a product that has 500 active users should make more. Even if it was relatively successful, due to the high competition, I wouldn’t make any meaningful money. PS: I use Todoist today. Due to local pricing, I pay less than $2/m. There is no way I could beat this competitive pricing, let alone the app itself. But, somehow, with a project that wasn’t even functional — let alone being an MVP — I made my first Wi-Fi money: Someone decided that the domain I preemptively purchased is worth something. By this point, I had already abandoned the project, certainly wasn’t going to renew the domain, was looking for a FT job, and a new project that I could work on. And out of nowhere, someone hands me some free money — who am I not to take it? Of course, I took it. The domain is still unused, no idea why 🤔. Ngl, I still hate the fact that my first Wi-Fi money came from this. A new idea worth pursuing? Fast-forward some weeks now. Around March, I got this crazy idea of building an email productivity tool. We all use emails, yet we all hate them. So, this must be fixed. Everyone uses emails, in fact everyone HAS TO use emails. So, I just needed to build a tool and wait for people to come. This was all, really. After all, the problem space is huge, there is enough room for another product, everyone uses emails, no need for any further validation, right? ❌ WRONG ONCE AGAIN! We all hear from the greatest in the startup landscape that we must validate our ideas with real people, yet at least some of us (guilty here 🥸) think that our product will be hugely successful and prove them to be an exception. Few might, but most are not. I certainly wasn't. 👉 Lesson learned: Always validate your ideas with real people. Ask them how much they’d pay for such a tool (not if they would). Much better if they are willing to pay upfront for a discount, etc. But even this comes later, keep reading. I think the difference between “How much” and “If” is huge for two reasons: (1) By asking them for “How much”, you force them to think in a more realistic setting. (2) You will have a more realistic idea on your profit margins. Based on my competitive analysis, I already had a solution in my mind to improve our email usage standards and email productivity (huge mistake), but I did my best to learn about their problems regarding those without pushing the idea too hard. The idea is this: Generate concise email summaries with suggested actions, combine them into one email, and send it at their preferred times. Save as much as time the AI you end up with allows. After all, everyone loves to save time. So, what kind of validation did I seek for? Talked with only a few people around me about this crazy, internet-breaking idea. The responses I got were, now I see, mediocre; no one got excited about it, just said things along the lines of “Cool idea, OK”. So, any reasonable person in this situation would think “Okay, not might not be working”, right? Well, I did not. I assumed that they were the wrong audience for this product, and there was this magical land of user segments waiting eagerly for my product, yet unknowingly. To this day, I still have not reached this magical place. Perhaps, it didn’t exist in the first place. If I cannot find it, whether it exists or not doesn’t matter. I am certainly searching for it. 👉 What I should have done: Once I decide on a problem space (time management, email productivity, etc.), I should decide on my potential user segments, people who I plan to sell my product to. Then I should go talk to those people, ask them about their pains, then get to the problem-solving/ideation phase only later. ❗️ VALIDATION COMES FROM THE REALITY OUTSIDE. What validation looks like might change from product to product; but what invalidation looks like is more or less the same for every product. Nico Jeannen told me yesterday “validation = money in the account” on Twitter. This is the ultimate form of validation your product could get. If your product doesn’t make any money, then something is invalidated by reality: Your product, you, your idea, who knows? So, at this point, I knew a little bit of Python from spending some time in tutorial hell a few years ago, some HTML/CSS/JS, barely enough React to build a working app. React could work for this project, but I needed easy-to-implement server interactivity. Luckily, around this time, I got to know about this new gen of indie hackers, and learned (but didn’t truly understand) about their approach to indie hacking, and this library called Nextjs. How good Next.js still blows my mind. So, I was back to tutorial hell once again. But, this time, with a promise to myself: This is the last time I would visit tutorial hell. Time to start building this "ground-breaking idea" Learning the fundamentals of Next.js was easier than learning of React unsurprisingly. Yet, the first time I managed to run server actions on Next.js was one of the rarest moments that completely blew my mind. To this day, I reject the idea that it is something else than pure magic under its hood. Did I absolutely need Nextjs for this project though? I do not think so. Did it save me lots of time? Absolutely. Furthermore, learning Nextjs will certainly be quite helpful for other projects that I will be tackling in the future. Already got a few ideas that might be worth pursuing in the head in case I decide to abandon Summ in the future. Fast-forward few weeks again: So, at this stage, I had a barely working MVP-like product. Since the very beginning, I spent every free hour (and more) on this project as speed is essential. But, I am not so sure it was worth it to overwork in retrospect. Yet, I know I couldn’t help myself. Everything is going kinda smooth, so what’s the worst thing that could ever happen? Well, both Apple and Google announced their AIs (Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, respectively) will have email summarization features for their products. Summarizing singular emails is no big deal, after all there were already so many similar products in the market. I still think that what truly matters is a frictionless user experience, and this is why I built this product in a certain way: You spend less than a few minutes setting up your account, and you get to enjoy your email summaries, without ever visiting its website again. This is still a very cool concept I really like a lot. So, at this point: I had no other idea that could be pursued, already spent too much time on this project. Do I quit or not? This was the question. Of course not. I just have to launch this product as quickly as possible. So, I did something right, a quite rare occurrence I might say: Re-planned my product, dropped everything secondary to the core feature immediately (save time on reading emails), tried launching it asap. 👉 Insight: Sell only one core feature at one time. Drop anything secondary to this core feature. Well, my primary occupation is product design. So one would expect that a product I build must have stellar design. I considered any considerable time spent on design at this stage would be simply wasted. I still think this is both true and wrong: True, because if your product’s core benefits suck, no one will care about your design. False, because if your design looks amateurish, no one will trust you and your product. So, I always targeted an average level design with it and the way this tool works made it quite easy as I had to design only 2 primary pages: Landing page and user portal (which has only settings and analytics pages). However, even though I knew spending time on design was not worth much of my time, I got a bit “greedy”: In fact, I redesigned those pages three times, and still ended up with a so-so design that I am not proud of. 👉 What I would do differently: Unless absolutely necessary, only one iteration per stage as long as it works. This, in my mind, applies to everything. If your product’s A feature works, then no need to rewrite it from scratch for any reason, or even refactor it. When your product becomes a success, and you absolutely need that part of your codebase to be written, do so, but only then. Ready to launch, now is th etime for some marketing, right? By July 26, I already had a “launchable” product that barely works (I marked this date on a Notion docs, this is how I know). Yet, I had spent almost no time on marketing, sales, whatever. After all, “You build and they will come”. Did I know that I needed marketing? Of course I did, but knowingly didn’t. Why, you might ask. Well, from my perspective, it had to be a dev-heavy product; meaning that you spend most of your time on developing it, mostly coding skills. But, this is simply wrong. As a rule of thumb, as noted by one of the greatests, Marc Louvion, you should spend at least twice of the building time on marketing. ❗️ Time spent on building \* 2 people don’t know your product > they don’t use your product > you don’t get users > you don’t make money Easy as that. Following the same reasoning, a slightly different approach to planning a project is possible. Determine an approximate time to complete the project with a high level project plan. Let’s say 6 months. By the reasoning above, 2 months should go into building, and 4 into marketing. If you need 4 months for building instead of 2, then you need 8 months of marketing, which makes the time to complete the project 12 months. If you don’t have that much time, then quit the project. When does a project count as completed? Well, in reality, never. But, I think we have to define success conditions even before we start for indie projects and startups; so we know when to quit when they are not met. A success condition could look like “Make $6000 in 12 months” or “Have 3000 users in 6 months”. It all depends on the project. But, once you set it, it should be set in stone: You don’t change it unless absolutely necessary. I suspect there are few principles that make a solopreneur successful; and knowing when to quit and when to continue is definitely one of them. Marc Louvion is famously known for his success, but he got there after failing so many projects. To my knowledge, the same applies to Nico Jeannen, Pieter Levels, or almost everyone as well. ❗️ Determining when to continue even before you start will definitely help in the long run. A half-aed launch Time-leap again. Around mid August, I “soft launched” my product. By soft launch, I mean lazy marketing. Just tweeting about it, posting it on free directories. Did I get any traffic? Surely I did. Did I get any users? Nope. Only after this time, it hit me: “Either something is wrong with me, or with this product” Marketing might be a much bigger factor for a project’s success after all. Even though I get some traffic, not convincing enough for people to sign up even for a free trial. The product was still perfect in my eyes at the time (well, still is ^(\_),) so the right people are not finding my product, I thought. Then, a question that I should have been asking at the very first place, one that could prevent all these, comes to my mind: “How do even people search for such tools?” If we are to consider this whole journey of me and my so-far-failed product to be an already destined failure, one metric suffices to show why. Search volume: 30. Even if people have such a pain point, they are not looking for email summaries. So, almost no organic traffic coming from Google. But, as a person who did zero marketing on this or any product, who has zero marketing knowledge, who doesn’t have an audience on social media, there is not much I could do. Finally, it was time to give up. Or not… In my eyes, the most important element that makes a founder (solo or not) successful (this, I am not by any means) is to solve problems. ❗️ So, the problem was this: “People are not finding my product by organic search” How do I make sure I get some organic traffic and gets more visibility? Learn digital marketing and SEO as much as I can within very limited time. Thankfully, without spending much time, I came across Neil Patel's YT channel, and as I said many times, it is an absolute gold mine. I learned a lot, especially about the fundamentals, and surely it will be fruitful; but there is no magic trick that could make people visit your website. SEO certainly helps, but only when people are looking for your keywords. However, it is truly a magical solution to get in touch with REAL people that are in your user segments: 👉 Understand your pains, understand their problems, help them to solve them via building products. I did not do this so far, have to admit. But, in case you would like to have a chat about your email usage, and email productivity, just get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear about them. Getting ready for a ProductHunt launch The date was Sept 1. And I unlocked an impossible achievement: Running out of Supabase’s free plan’s Egres limit while having zero users. I was already considering moving out of their Cloud server and managing a Supabase CLI service on my Hetzner VPS for some time; but never ever suspected that I would have to do this quickly. The cheapest plan Supabase offers is $25/month; yet, at that point, I am in between jobs for such a long time, basically broke, and could barely afford that price. One or two months could be okay, but why pay for it if I will eventually move out of their Cloud service? So, instead of paying $25, I spent two days migrating out of Supabase Cloud. Worth my time? Definitely not. But, when you are broke, you gotta do stupid things. This was the first time that I felt lucky to have zero users: I have no idea how I would manage this migration if I had any. I think this is one of the core tenets of an indie hacker: Controlling their own environment. I can’t remember whose quote this is, but I suspect it was Naval: Entrepreneurs have an almost pathological need to control their own fate. They will take any suffering if they can be in charge of their destiny, and not have it in somebody else’s hands. What’s truly scary is, at least in my case, we make people around us suffer at the expense of our attempting to control our own fates. I know this period has been quite hard on my wife as well, as I neglected her quite a bit, but sadly, I know that this will happen again. It is something that I can barely help with. Still, so sorry. After working the last two weeks on a ProductHunt Launch, I finally launched it this Tuesday. Zero ranking, zero new users, but 36 kind people upvoted my product, and many commented and provided invaluable feedback. I couldn't be more grateful for each one of them 🙏. Considering all these, what lies in the future of Summ though? I have no idea, to be honest. On one hand, I have zero users, have no job, no income. So, I need a way to make money asap. On the other hand, the whole idea of it revolves around one core premise (not an assumption) that I am not so willing to share; and I couldn’t have more trust in it. This might not be the best iteration of it, however I certainly believe that email usage is one of the best problem spaces one could work on. 👉 But, one thing is for certain: I need to get in touch with people, and talk with them about this product I built so far. In fact, this is the only item on my agenda. Nothing else will save my brainchild <3. Below are some other insights and notes that I got during my journey; as they do not 100% fit into this story, I think it is more suitable to list them here. I hope you enjoyed reading this. Give Summ a try, it comes with a generous free trial, no credit card required. Some additional notes and insights: Project planning is one of the most underestimated skills for solopreneurs. It saves you enormous time, and helps you to keep your focus up. Building B2C products beats building B2B products. Businesses are very willing to pay big bucks if your product helps them. On the other hand, spending a few hours per user who would pay $5/m probably is not worth your time. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is if no one uses it. If you cannot sell a product in a certain category/niche (or do not know how to sell it), it might be a good idea not to start a project in it. Going after new ideas and ventures is quite risky, especially if you don’t know how to market it. On the other hand, an already established category means that there is already demand. Whether this demand is sufficient or not is another issue. As long as there is enough demand for your product to fit in, any category/niche is good. Some might be better, some might be worse. Unless you are going hardcore B2B, you will need people to find your product by means of organic search. Always conduct thorough keyword research as soon as possible.

The Advantages of a Custom CRM Solution
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NeerajKumarChaurasiaThis week

The Advantages of a Custom CRM Solution

The growth in the global CRM market continues to accelerate. According to techspective, the global CRM market is now worth \~ $40B USD and is expected to surpass $80B USD by 2025. Despite this phenomenal growth, the CRM market is still dominated by off-the-shelf solutions that are “cookie-cutter” in design and that provide little to no options for customization. These non-customized CRM solutions can significantly inhibit an enterprise’s ability to maximize the advantages of CRM adoption and to realize a robust ROI. As a result, companies are increasingly opting for digital CRM solutions that are customized to meet the unique needs of the enterprise. What is driving the increased demand for custom CRM solutions? What are some of the inherent advantages of a custom CRM solution when compared to a typical off-the-shelf product? Off-the-Shelf CRM Solutions – the Limitations Static CRM solutions are inflexible and self-limiting. Enterprises saddled with these cookie-cutter solutions increasingly report a consistent listing of issues that limit business growth.  These include…. A lack of real-time visibility into shifting customer trends and demands Delayed reaction to coordination of internal resources to meet changing business conditions Lost business opportunities due to lack of flexible, and real-time, opportunity lifecycle management Reporting and dashboarding capabilities that are slow, static, and disconnected Poor quote-to-cash performance that degrades financial performance A CRM investment that delivers poor ROI and that cannot grow with the enterprise All of the above can combine to limit the enterprise’s ability to fully capitalize on its hard-won business opportunities and, over time, limit its ability to create new opportunities. A Customized CRM – What is it? What is a “customized CRM”? Simply put, it is a holistic CRM solution that has been specifically tailored for the individual enterprise. The provider of a truly customized CRM solution will deliver a solution that has been designed to meet the specific—and unique—demands and objectives of the enterprise. A tailored CRM solution will address the enterprise’s sales and operational requirements as well as its customer experience objectives. Unlike standard off-the-shelf CRM providers, a provider of enterprise-grade custom CRM solutions will employ a comprehensive project discovery and requirements gathering process. This is an integral process that provides the foundation for the development of a custom solution that will provide the enterprise with long term flexibility and scalability. A customized digital CRM solution can provide distinct competitive advantages; including: Dynamic, Flexible, Powerful, Real-Time Management and Engagement A customized, technology\-fueled, CRM solution provides the enterprise with the means with which to dynamically engage with customers in ways that build customer loyalty, generate market growth, and drive strong financial performance. Distinct advantages include: Real-time sales opportunity tracking. Helps eliminate lost opportunities due to slow or inadequate reaction. Customized, AI and IoT-fueled, data analytics. A customized CRM solution can be designed to deliver real-time insights. Allows the enterprise to anticipate, and then satisfy, the needs of the customer. Customizable Dashboards and Reports. Widget-based, customized, dashboards and reports that provide real-time data and actionable insights. Sales process automation. Intelligent Workflow-based automation and control of critical sales processes. Increases overall operational efficiency. Outstanding ROI. A custom CRM solution typically delivers superior ROI when compared to off-the-shelf CRM products. Enterprises today spend considerable time, money, and effort in the development of customer relationships. For many enterprises, the continued use of CRM solutions that are rigid and outdated can prove to be impediments to business growth. When considering investment in a new CRM solution any enterprise will be well served by full consideration of a CRM solution that can be fully customized to meet its long-range requirements.

My app has gone viral and I grew from 1k users (take 5months) to 100k user in 5 days
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Consistent_Access844This week

My app has gone viral and I grew from 1k users (take 5months) to 100k user in 5 days

I've always dreamt of building an online side business where I can build once and sell to millions. I love that business model but have never dreamt that I can achieve that, given that I am not a programmer in my career. I have been following side hustle school and some other business podcast for the past years as a drive and motivation to create my own business.  Over the years, I've delve a little on to web development using WordPress and in the hope of earning some money from that. I learnt in the hard way but is a good learning story and journey. I realised that what you put all your efforts building and excited for doesn't mean anything for anyone else and also learnt the importance of UI UX.  Fast forward to 5 months ago (July 2024), I've came across several low code app builder. With the help of the low code tools in combination with chatgpt, I've finally launched my first mobile app - Rolly: AI Money Tracker. But the business challenges doesn't end here, but it's just the beginning. I got no experience and skills on marketing but I've got my drive and passion that keep propelling me forward. By keep listening on people sharing their journey, looking at different apps to brainstorm etc, I've managed to now grow my user base from 1k (in 5 months) to 100k (in 5days). What's happening was my app somehow got viral in Vietnam when people are getting interest funny comments from my AI during entering the transaction and it has been sharing around in the social media and even featured on the news. What a crazy journey as the inflow of users has been too sudden, my server has been down for a few times until I progressively upgrade it until it got stable these couple of days. As for my advice to people dreaming the to be entreprenuer - Don't overthinking about all the problems you will face before starting. You will encounter hundreds of problems along the way and you just need to solve them one by one. You will never start if you think about what's not working and there will never be an answer for everything - even I don't have an answer for everything now.

Struggling with my dog-themed clothing store – How can I make it better?
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BirnenHansThis week

Struggling with my dog-themed clothing store – How can I make it better?

TL;DR: I own a dog-inspired store that’s struggling to make sales. I need your honest feedback to make it better. Hey reddit, I’m turning to you because I really need your honest feedback. I run a small online shop, dogloverclothing.com, where I sell dog-inspired fashion items and accessories (product list is growing). I poured my heart into creating it because I’m a huge dog lover (I own a Corgi and a Beagle), and I thought there must be others out there who’d resonate with the style of my designs. I truly believe my shop is fun and creative and I thought other dog lovers would easily connect with the dog-theme behind it. But I’m struggling. I’ve only made 1-2 sales a year and I feel like I’ve hit a wall. Let me be completely transparent about my situation: I have a small child who needs my care in the afternoons. I work part-time in the mornings, and the only time I'm able to work on my shop is in the evenings (once all the usual household chaos is settled) or on weekends. That gives me maybe 1-2 hours a day to focus on this project. I don’t have the money or time for big ad campaigns, influencer cooperations, daily social media activity, or even professional photoshoots for my products. My visuals are mostly created with AI tools, stock imagery, and mockup generators, but I think they look professional enough to be converting. I tried small ad campaigns, and while I got a few sales, the ad costs ended up being higher than my revenue, so I had to stop. I also tried organic Social Media activity, but the time I put into that did not turn into any traffic, followers or sales, so I also stopped that. I know that putting myself/my face out there on social media could help, but I’m not comfortable showing my face or apartment in videos or ads. I could do flatlays or simple videos with the products I have at home. Right now, I’m putting all my energy into SEO, hoping to attract organic traffic and customers. Otherwise, I feel stuck with marketing. I want to make the most of the limited time and resources I have. My dream definitely isn’t to get rich here from this shop. I would love to make an extra $300-500 a month to make life a little easier for my family, while fulfilling my creative streak – and that's about it. I’m not sure if that’s even realistic, but it’s what keeps me going. So, guys: What do you think I’m doing wrong or could do better? Is it the designs? The pricing? The website layout? The lack of time/lack of money? How can I make this work with my limited time and resources? Are there any affordable, creative marketing strategies you’d recommend for someone in my shoes? Is my goal of $300-500/month realistic for a store like mine? I’m open to all your ideas, tips, and even brutal honesty. This isn’t just a business for me, it’s my passion project, and I’d love to make it somewhat of sustainable. I’m not here to sell you something. I’m here to learn. I know Reddit doesn’t hold back, and that’s what I need. Can you take a look at my site, tell me what you think, and help me figure out why this dream hasn’t taken off yet? I know running a business is tough, and I deeply admire everyone in this community who’s making it work. I’d love to hear your insights, experiences, and even your tough love if that’s what it takes to get my dream back on track. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this and for any advice you can offer!

Restarting My Agency / Compared To Full Time Corporate
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nomadpaddyThis week

Restarting My Agency / Compared To Full Time Corporate

I’m currently thinking about going back to consulting / agency work compared to my current tech job I have. Over a year ago I signed this tech client and they wanted more and more from me which ended up becoming a full time role. At the time, the challenge excited me as it was working on a very large project on a global scale, competing with some of the biggest brands in the world. I was making good money before working in my agency and consulting with lots of different brands on their paid media, websites and e-commerce. I have a healthy package where I’m at at the moment but want more. Working with different clients always created curiosity, no day was the same and that what I loved about it. So now I’m considering going to back to starting the business and working with clients again. My question is: What do businesses ACTUALLY want? Everyone wants great roas and an amazing site but what are core things people are looking for in a growth partner / agency? I’m thinking of relaunching with three pillars in mind: Digital (Paid Media, Lead Gen, Web Dev) AI implementation as a lot of businesses don’t know how to leverage AI completely for cost saving and efficiencies. Content (Video, SEO, Content Writing) for modern day ranking I’m currently rebuilding my pitch deck and thought I would ask the question here before I go back to my network and start opening up conversations again. Would love to hear people’s thoughts in addition to anyone that’s done the same?

I spent 6 months on building a web product, and got zero users. Here is my story.
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GDbuildsGDThis week

I spent 6 months on building a web product, and got zero users. Here is my story.

Edit Thank you all so much for your time reading my story. Your support, feedback, criticism, and skepticism; all helped me a lot, and I couldn't appreciate it enough \^\_\^ I have stuff to post on Reddit very rarely, but I share how my project is going on, random stuff, and memes on X. Just in case few might want to keep in touch 👀 TL;DR I spent 6 months on a tool that currently has 0 users. Below is what I learned during my journey, sharing because I believe most mistakes are easily avoidable. Do not overestimate your product and assume it will be an exception to fundamental principles. Principles are there for a reason. Always look for validation before you start. Avoid building products with a low money-to-effort ratio/in very competitive fields. Unless you have the means, you probably won't make it. Pick a problem space, pick your target audience, and talk to them before thinking about a solution. Identify and match their pain points. Only then should you think of a solution. If people are not overly excited or willing to pay in advance for a discounted price, it might be a sign to rethink. Sell one and only one feature at a time. Avoid everything else. If people don't pay for that one core feature, no secondary feature will change their mind. Always spend twice as much time marketing as you do building. You will not get users if they don't know it exists. Define success metrics ("1000 users in 3 months" or "$6000 in the account at the end of 6 months") before you start. If you don't meet them, strongly consider quitting the project. If you can't get enough users to keep going, nothing else matters. VALIDATION, VALIDATION, VALIDATION. Success is not random, but most of our first products will not make a success story. Know when to admit failure, and move on. Even if a product of yours doesn't succeed, what you learned during its journey will turn out to be invaluable for your future. My story So, this is the story of a product that I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. As it's the first product I’ve ever built, after watching you all from the sidelines, I have learned a lot, made many mistakes, and did only a few things right. Just sharing what I’ve learned and some insights from my journey so far. I hope that this post will help you avoid the mistakes I made — most of which I consider easily avoidable — while you enjoy reading it, and get to know me a little bit more 🤓. A slow start after many years Summ isn’t the first product I really wanted to build. Lacking enough dev skills to even get started was a huge blocker for so many years. In fact, the first product I would’ve LOVED to build was a smart personal shopping assistant. I had this idea 4 years ago; but with no GPT, no coding skills, no technical co-founder, I didn’t have the means to make it happen. I still do not know if such a tool exists and is good enough. All I wanted was a tool that could make data-based predictions about when to buy stuff (“buy a new toothpaste every three months”) and suggest physical products that I might need or be strongly interested in. AFAIK, Amazon famously still struggles with the second one. Fast-forward a few years, I learned the very basics of HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS. Still was not there to build a product; but good enough to code my design portfolio from scratch. Yet, I couldn’t imagine myself building a product using Vanilla JS. I really hated it, I really sucked at it. So, back to tutorial hell, and to learn about this framework I just heard about: React.React introduced so many new concepts to me. “Thinking in React” is a phrase we heard a lot, and with quite good reasons. After some time, I was able to build very basic tutorial apps, both in React, and React Native; but I have to say that I really hated coding for mobile. At this point, I was already a fan of productivity apps, and had a concept for a time management assistant app in my design portfolio. So, why not build one? Surely, it must be easy, since every coding tutorial starts with a todo app. ❌ WRONG! Building a basic todo app is easy enough, but building one good enough for a place in the market was a challenge I took and failed. I wasted one month on that until I abandoned the project for good. Even if I continued working on it, as the productivity landscape is overly competitive, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to cover costs, assuming I make any. Since I was (and still am) in between jobs, I decided to abandon the project. 👉 What I learned: Do not start projects with a low ratio of money to effort and time. Example: Even if I get 500 monthly users, 200 of which are paid users (unrealistically high number), assuming an average subscription fee of $5/m (such apps are quite cheap, mostly due to the high competition), it would make me around $1000 minus any occurring costs. Any founder with a product that has 500 active users should make more. Even if it was relatively successful, due to the high competition, I wouldn’t make any meaningful money. PS: I use Todoist today. Due to local pricing, I pay less than $2/m. There is no way I could beat this competitive pricing, let alone the app itself. But, somehow, with a project that wasn’t even functional — let alone being an MVP — I made my first Wi-Fi money: Someone decided that the domain I preemptively purchased is worth something. By this point, I had already abandoned the project, certainly wasn’t going to renew the domain, was looking for a FT job, and a new project that I could work on. And out of nowhere, someone hands me some free money — who am I not to take it? Of course, I took it. The domain is still unused, no idea why 🤔. Ngl, I still hate the fact that my first Wi-Fi money came from this. A new idea worth pursuing? Fast-forward some weeks now. Around March, I got this crazy idea of building an email productivity tool. We all use emails, yet we all hate them. So, this must be fixed. Everyone uses emails, in fact everyone HAS TO use emails. So, I just needed to build a tool and wait for people to come. This was all, really. After all, the problem space is huge, there is enough room for another product, everyone uses emails, no need for any further validation, right? ❌ WRONG ONCE AGAIN! We all hear from the greatest in the startup landscape that we must validate our ideas with real people, yet at least some of us (guilty here 🥸) think that our product will be hugely successful and prove them to be an exception. Few might, but most are not. I certainly wasn't. 👉 Lesson learned: Always validate your ideas with real people. Ask them how much they’d pay for such a tool (not if they would). Much better if they are willing to pay upfront for a discount, etc. But even this comes later, keep reading. I think the difference between “How much” and “If” is huge for two reasons: (1) By asking them for “How much”, you force them to think in a more realistic setting. (2) You will have a more realistic idea on your profit margins. Based on my competitive analysis, I already had a solution in my mind to improve our email usage standards and email productivity (huge mistake), but I did my best to learn about their problems regarding those without pushing the idea too hard. The idea is this: Generate concise email summaries with suggested actions, combine them into one email, and send it at their preferred times. Save as much as time the AI you end up with allows. After all, everyone loves to save time. So, what kind of validation did I seek for? Talked with only a few people around me about this crazy, internet-breaking idea. The responses I got were, now I see, mediocre; no one got excited about it, just said things along the lines of “Cool idea, OK”. So, any reasonable person in this situation would think “Okay, not might not be working”, right? Well, I did not. I assumed that they were the wrong audience for this product, and there was this magical land of user segments waiting eagerly for my product, yet unknowingly. To this day, I still have not reached this magical place. Perhaps, it didn’t exist in the first place. If I cannot find it, whether it exists or not doesn’t matter. I am certainly searching for it. 👉 What I should have done: Once I decide on a problem space (time management, email productivity, etc.), I should decide on my potential user segments, people who I plan to sell my product to. Then I should go talk to those people, ask them about their pains, then get to the problem-solving/ideation phase only later. ❗️ VALIDATION COMES FROM THE REALITY OUTSIDE. What validation looks like might change from product to product; but what invalidation looks like is more or less the same for every product. Nico Jeannen told me yesterday “validation = money in the account” on Twitter. This is the ultimate form of validation your product could get. If your product doesn’t make any money, then something is invalidated by reality: Your product, you, your idea, who knows? So, at this point, I knew a little bit of Python from spending some time in tutorial hell a few years ago, some HTML/CSS/JS, barely enough React to build a working app. React could work for this project, but I needed easy-to-implement server interactivity. Luckily, around this time, I got to know about this new gen of indie hackers, and learned (but didn’t truly understand) about their approach to indie hacking, and this library called Nextjs. How good Next.js still blows my mind. So, I was back to tutorial hell once again. But, this time, with a promise to myself: This is the last time I would visit tutorial hell. Time to start building this "ground-breaking idea" Learning the fundamentals of Next.js was easier than learning of React unsurprisingly. Yet, the first time I managed to run server actions on Next.js was one of the rarest moments that completely blew my mind. To this day, I reject the idea that it is something else than pure magic under its hood. Did I absolutely need Nextjs for this project though? I do not think so. Did it save me lots of time? Absolutely. Furthermore, learning Nextjs will certainly be quite helpful for other projects that I will be tackling in the future. Already got a few ideas that might be worth pursuing in the head in case I decide to abandon Summ in the future. Fast-forward few weeks again: So, at this stage, I had a barely working MVP-like product. Since the very beginning, I spent every free hour (and more) on this project as speed is essential. But, I am not so sure it was worth it to overwork in retrospect. Yet, I know I couldn’t help myself. Everything is going kinda smooth, so what’s the worst thing that could ever happen? Well, both Apple and Google announced their AIs (Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, respectively) will have email summarization features for their products. Summarizing singular emails is no big deal, after all there were already so many similar products in the market. I still think that what truly matters is a frictionless user experience, and this is why I built this product in a certain way: You spend less than a few minutes setting up your account, and you get to enjoy your email summaries, without ever visiting its website again. This is still a very cool concept I really like a lot. So, at this point: I had no other idea that could be pursued, already spent too much time on this project. Do I quit or not? This was the question. Of course not. I just have to launch this product as quickly as possible. So, I did something right, a quite rare occurrence I might say: Re-planned my product, dropped everything secondary to the core feature immediately (save time on reading emails), tried launching it asap. 👉 Insight: Sell only one core feature at one time. Drop anything secondary to this core feature. Well, my primary occupation is product design. So one would expect that a product I build must have stellar design. I considered any considerable time spent on design at this stage would be simply wasted. I still think this is both true and wrong: True, because if your product’s core benefits suck, no one will care about your design. False, because if your design looks amateurish, no one will trust you and your product. So, I always targeted an average level design with it and the way this tool works made it quite easy as I had to design only 2 primary pages: Landing page and user portal (which has only settings and analytics pages). However, even though I knew spending time on design was not worth much of my time, I got a bit “greedy”: In fact, I redesigned those pages three times, and still ended up with a so-so design that I am not proud of. 👉 What I would do differently: Unless absolutely necessary, only one iteration per stage as long as it works. This, in my mind, applies to everything. If your product’s A feature works, then no need to rewrite it from scratch for any reason, or even refactor it. When your product becomes a success, and you absolutely need that part of your codebase to be written, do so, but only then. Ready to launch, now is th etime for some marketing, right? By July 26, I already had a “launchable” product that barely works (I marked this date on a Notion docs, this is how I know). Yet, I had spent almost no time on marketing, sales, whatever. After all, “You build and they will come”. Did I know that I needed marketing? Of course I did, but knowingly didn’t. Why, you might ask. Well, from my perspective, it had to be a dev-heavy product; meaning that you spend most of your time on developing it, mostly coding skills. But, this is simply wrong. As a rule of thumb, as noted by one of the greatests, Marc Louvion, you should spend at least twice of the building time on marketing. ❗️ Time spent on building \* 2 people don’t know your product > they don’t use your product > you don’t get users > you don’t make money Easy as that. Following the same reasoning, a slightly different approach to planning a project is possible. Determine an approximate time to complete the project with a high level project plan. Let’s say 6 months. By the reasoning above, 2 months should go into building, and 4 into marketing. If you need 4 months for building instead of 2, then you need 8 months of marketing, which makes the time to complete the project 12 months. If you don’t have that much time, then quit the project. When does a project count as completed? Well, in reality, never. But, I think we have to define success conditions even before we start for indie projects and startups; so we know when to quit when they are not met. A success condition could look like “Make $6000 in 12 months” or “Have 3000 users in 6 months”. It all depends on the project. But, once you set it, it should be set in stone: You don’t change it unless absolutely necessary. I suspect there are few principles that make a solopreneur successful; and knowing when to quit and when to continue is definitely one of them. Marc Louvion is famously known for his success, but he got there after failing so many projects. To my knowledge, the same applies to Nico Jeannen, Pieter Levels, or almost everyone as well. ❗️ Determining when to continue even before you start will definitely help in the long run. A half-aed launch Time-leap again. Around mid August, I “soft launched” my product. By soft launch, I mean lazy marketing. Just tweeting about it, posting it on free directories. Did I get any traffic? Surely I did. Did I get any users? Nope. Only after this time, it hit me: “Either something is wrong with me, or with this product” Marketing might be a much bigger factor for a project’s success after all. Even though I get some traffic, not convincing enough for people to sign up even for a free trial. The product was still perfect in my eyes at the time (well, still is ^(\_),) so the right people are not finding my product, I thought. Then, a question that I should have been asking at the very first place, one that could prevent all these, comes to my mind: “How do even people search for such tools?” If we are to consider this whole journey of me and my so-far-failed product to be an already destined failure, one metric suffices to show why. Search volume: 30. Even if people have such a pain point, they are not looking for email summaries. So, almost no organic traffic coming from Google. But, as a person who did zero marketing on this or any product, who has zero marketing knowledge, who doesn’t have an audience on social media, there is not much I could do. Finally, it was time to give up. Or not… In my eyes, the most important element that makes a founder (solo or not) successful (this, I am not by any means) is to solve problems. ❗️ So, the problem was this: “People are not finding my product by organic search” How do I make sure I get some organic traffic and gets more visibility? Learn digital marketing and SEO as much as I can within very limited time. Thankfully, without spending much time, I came across Neil Patel's YT channel, and as I said many times, it is an absolute gold mine. I learned a lot, especially about the fundamentals, and surely it will be fruitful; but there is no magic trick that could make people visit your website. SEO certainly helps, but only when people are looking for your keywords. However, it is truly a magical solution to get in touch with REAL people that are in your user segments: 👉 Understand your pains, understand their problems, help them to solve them via building products. I did not do this so far, have to admit. But, in case you would like to have a chat about your email usage, and email productivity, just get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear about them. Getting ready for a ProductHunt launch The date was Sept 1. And I unlocked an impossible achievement: Running out of Supabase’s free plan’s Egres limit while having zero users. I was already considering moving out of their Cloud server and managing a Supabase CLI service on my Hetzner VPS for some time; but never ever suspected that I would have to do this quickly. The cheapest plan Supabase offers is $25/month; yet, at that point, I am in between jobs for such a long time, basically broke, and could barely afford that price. One or two months could be okay, but why pay for it if I will eventually move out of their Cloud service? So, instead of paying $25, I spent two days migrating out of Supabase Cloud. Worth my time? Definitely not. But, when you are broke, you gotta do stupid things. This was the first time that I felt lucky to have zero users: I have no idea how I would manage this migration if I had any. I think this is one of the core tenets of an indie hacker: Controlling their own environment. I can’t remember whose quote this is, but I suspect it was Naval: Entrepreneurs have an almost pathological need to control their own fate. They will take any suffering if they can be in charge of their destiny, and not have it in somebody else’s hands. What’s truly scary is, at least in my case, we make people around us suffer at the expense of our attempting to control our own fates. I know this period has been quite hard on my wife as well, as I neglected her quite a bit, but sadly, I know that this will happen again. It is something that I can barely help with. Still, so sorry. After working the last two weeks on a ProductHunt Launch, I finally launched it this Tuesday. Zero ranking, zero new users, but 36 kind people upvoted my product, and many commented and provided invaluable feedback. I couldn't be more grateful for each one of them 🙏. Considering all these, what lies in the future of Summ though? I have no idea, to be honest. On one hand, I have zero users, have no job, no income. So, I need a way to make money asap. On the other hand, the whole idea of it revolves around one core premise (not an assumption) that I am not so willing to share; and I couldn’t have more trust in it. This might not be the best iteration of it, however I certainly believe that email usage is one of the best problem spaces one could work on. 👉 But, one thing is for certain: I need to get in touch with people, and talk with them about this product I built so far. In fact, this is the only item on my agenda. Nothing else will save my brainchild <3. Below are some other insights and notes that I got during my journey; as they do not 100% fit into this story, I think it is more suitable to list them here. I hope you enjoyed reading this. Give Summ a try, it comes with a generous free trial, no credit card required. Some additional notes and insights: Project planning is one of the most underestimated skills for solopreneurs. It saves you enormous time, and helps you to keep your focus up. Building B2C products beats building B2B products. Businesses are very willing to pay big bucks if your product helps them. On the other hand, spending a few hours per user who would pay $5/m probably is not worth your time. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is if no one uses it. If you cannot sell a product in a certain category/niche (or do not know how to sell it), it might be a good idea not to start a project in it. Going after new ideas and ventures is quite risky, especially if you don’t know how to market it. On the other hand, an already established category means that there is already demand. Whether this demand is sufficient or not is another issue. As long as there is enough demand for your product to fit in, any category/niche is good. Some might be better, some might be worse. Unless you are going hardcore B2B, you will need people to find your product by means of organic search. Always conduct thorough keyword research as soon as possible.

The "AI Agent" Hype is out of control and businesses suffer
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ImpossibleBell4759This week

The "AI Agent" Hype is out of control and businesses suffer

Ah, the sweet smell of AI hype in the morning. Nothing quite like it to get the blood pumping and the venture capital flowing. Let's cut through the BS... The "AI Agent" craze is the tech industry's latest attempt to separate businesses from their hard-earned cash. It's like watching a bunch of sheep rushing towards a cliff, except the cliff is made of overpriced software and empty promises. The tech giants are having a field day with this nonsense. Microsoft, Google, Salesforce - they're all pushing AI agents like they're the second coming. The sad truth is, businesses are suffering from a severe case of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). They're so terrified of being left behind in the AI race that they're willing to throw good money after bad. Here's a radical idea: how about focusing on actual business problems instead of chasing the latest tech fad? I know, I know, it's not as sexy as having an AI Agent, but it might actually, you know, work. In the end, the only ones truly benefiting from this AI agent hype are the vendors selling the snake oil and the consultants charging exorbitant fees to implement it. Everyone else is just along for the ride, hoping they don't crash and burn too spectacularly. So, to all the businesses out there considering jumping on the AI Agent bandwagon... take a step back, take a deep breath, and ask yourself if you really need an overpriced chatbot with delusions of grandeur. Chances are, you don't. The AI agent hype is like a bad reality TV show—overproduced, lacking substance, and leaving businesses with nothing but regret. Companies are throwing money at AI solutions, expecting miracles, only to find they've bought into overpriced fantasies. The AI agent hype is nothing more than a high-tech emperor with no clothes. It's time for businesses to wake up, smell the silicon, and start making decisions based on reality rather than sci-fi fantasies.  I think AI Agents are the future, but as of right now AI Agents aren't autonomous or agentic. From what I've seen as of now is glorified Chatbots, ChatGPT wrappers and basic automations, and nothing actually autonomous. So far it's all just hype, but we'll see how it improves businesses and the bottom line! How do you think AI Agents will help small businesses now or in the future?

Seeking co-founder to build LinkedIn’s biggest rival(curated version)
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ItzdreeThis week

Seeking co-founder to build LinkedIn’s biggest rival(curated version)

How do you connect with likeminded people? You see the polished wins everywhere, but what about the messy drafts , the awkward pitches and the moments you’re not sure you’ve got it right? Problem: The whole idea of founding and starting a business can be super intimidating for some people, specially those who don’t know any founders personally, those who don’t have a large network, those who don’t have rich parents with large networks, those not inserted in an entrepreneurial culture like in the US for example (which is my case). Sometimes all you need is the right support network, and too see others do what you want, to know that it’s possible! Everyone has an “ultimate guide” to make 7 figures or build a business on YouTube but NO ONE shoes you the HOW, just the results… I’ve tried joining founder communities, LinkedIn ,Reddit … you name it. Most of these founder communities are inaccessible for regular people and often ask for you to have an already existing business with a min ARR… or their simply geography based and if you’re not in a certain area you can’t really participate… As of LinkedIn… full of empty AI generated posts about how some random dude raised $10m in 7 days. Okay Jonathan, but what about the HOW?? How did you write your first pitch? How many rejection calls did you get? What is an MVP? There simply isn’t a platform out there to document your founding journey and find inspiration within a community of people who are doing the same as you. What better way to feel motivated then to see someone actually document their process? Solution: I’m working on building a social media platform for aspiring/founders to connect through the RAW, UNFILTERED process of turning ideas into reality in REAL time. It’s all gonna be around the “building in public “ concept and content creation. Picture an instagram/tiktok profile where instead of seeing someone’s dog you see them documenting their founding process—from the moment they had the idea, to the moment they launched, you’re going to see the successes, the fails, the rejected calls, all documented through actual content and not some AI generated LinkedIn post. Imagine if you wanted to learn about how Steve Jobs started Apple , you could simply go through his profile on this app—exactly. To make sure all interactions are meaningful people would have to apply. It’s a truly curated community, with REAL people, building REAL things in REAL time, and not just tell us the story of how they did it… Audience: I’m targeting people who have a burning desire of building a business and early stage founders starting their founder journeys, that don’t have a support network and simply don’t know where to start. People who are tired of watching 30 min “ultimate guides “ on how to make it on YouTube from “business gurus” selling courses. People who haven’t reached the min ARR required to join an “exclusive “ founder a community. People who can’t simply just move to the US to get into the “exclusive” YC combinator. People who want to connect with real people building real things and not anonymous people on Reddit, or LinkedIn influencers again trying to promote their services. I believe in the idea because I’m also part of my audience. Have always wanted to start my own thing just never knew how to and where to find a community of likeminded people . I don’t know any founders myself, I come from a non-entrepreneurial society and I’d pay good money to access a community of REAL passionate founders building REAL things, in REAL time. This would be my first ever business, and I want to share my journey building it and hopefully inspire others to just start so I’ve created a mailing list to keep anyone interested in the project updated on my fails , learnings and successes. I’m not worried about “making it” but just “starting” and hopefully reach the right audience and inspire anyone to start whatever they have marinating in their thoughts. If you’re a founder struggling with staying consistent or an aspiring founder with an insane desire of starting and don’t know how to start, I’d love to get your feedback on what’s stopping you, your challenges starting out and what you’d find useful in such platform. And finally would this be something that interests you?? PS: casually looking for a technical co-founder

Looking for Feedback on this Idea
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Separate-Employer394This week

Looking for Feedback on this Idea

Hey everyone, I’d love some honest feedback on an idea I’ve been working on (currently just in paper). A little about me: I started in hospitality across South America and Asia, then moved into social entrepreneurship in a rural area, and eventually ecommerce using WordPress. Now, I’m deep into programming here in Europe, which I’ve really come to enjoy. So yes, I understand the perspective of businesses, entrepreneurs and programmers.  Back when I had tons of ideas for businesses and optimizing processes, I always hit the same drama: "You need a developer." But hiring one was too expensive or unreliable or shady business practice, and partnering with a programmer, someone I barely knew often felt too risky (I've learned the hard way that partnerships can feel like marriages). Now, as a programmer, I get a lot of requests from small businesses needing help and sometimes with very simple ideas. And while I can do it, I often don’t have the time, so I have to tell them I can't. And when I do have time, I know the cost can be too much for their budget. This got me thinking: What if I created a course to teach business owners just enough programming to solve their own problems? Not to become full time coders, but to gain enough knowledge to build simple tools or, better yet, understand code enough to ask the right questions whether it's to AI or a future developer. The course would focus on programming but talking business language, starting with building more flexible websites, managing your own content and creating custom tools without the limitations of templates or paid widgets. I’m thinking of creating a supportive community where we learn and grow together (maybe using your business as an example), and I’d be available to help along the way, plus I will be adding tools that you could reuse for your business (mostly because you will be able to read it and understand it → that's the goal). Talking about money, I can only tell you will be way more affordable compared to multiple payments in different places. So, does this resonate with you? I’d really appreciate your honest thoughts. Do you feel you have the time to learn or you still prefer looking for a developer? Feel free to share any frustrations or ideas. And if this sounds interesting, write me a PM, and I’ll keep you updated. Thanks for reading. I'm excited to hear what you think! :)

I’ve Tested All the Image Generation Tools for My Small Business
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astronautlyraThis week

I’ve Tested All the Image Generation Tools for My Small Business

Personally I hate paying for subscriptions unless it was absolutely necessary. Given that I don't have the budget to hire a graphic designer I started playing with all the new Generative AI tools and these are the ones I've narrowed it down to that have made the most impact. I posted this breakdown on r/AIforBusinessFounders but will share it here as well. Hope this compilation helps a fellow entrepreneur. If you’ve been exploring AI tools for generating images, you’ve probably come across big names like DALL·E, Adobe Photoshop, and MidJourney (finally moved off the dreadful Discord prompting thankfully!)  While they each have their strengths, they also have their quirks. Here’s the breakdown: DALL·E by OpenAI Pros: It’s integrated directly into ChatGPT, so if you’re already on a paid plan, you’re good to go—no extra fees. It's also embedded in Canva which is convenient if you’re designing social media posts or quick mockups. Cons: The image quality isn’t amazing. It often looks a bit flat or off, but I think where I struggle is you only get one output per generation, so there’s not much variety. Adobe Photoshop Pros: If you’re already using Photoshop, this is a nice addition. It lets you partially generate images within your edits, which can be handy for things like background replacements. When it comes to generating full images though, I find this tool really struggles. Cons: The image quality still has room for improvement—hands and fingers, in particular, are a consistent issue. Plus, you need an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription to access it. MidJourney Pros: Hands down, this tool produces the best-quality images. You get multiple outputs per prompt, and what really sets it apart is the ability to refine your favorite image. You can subtly tweak or drastically change it, depending on your needs. It previously only operated on Discord but it now has migrated to it's own platform so that's been a huge pro for me. Cons: It’s not cheap—MidJourney requires its own paid membership and comes with limited tokens, so you’ll need to budget your usage. The biggest con for me in the past was that you had to prompt in a Discord channel but now that it has own platform, it's no longer an issue. After putting all three to the test, my personal favorite is MidJourney. If image quality and creative control are your priorities, it’s hard to beat. That said, DALL·E and Adobe are solid options if you’re already using their platforms and want to save money. Are there any hidden gems I might have missed? If so let me know, I'd love to give them a try.

I spent 6 months on building a web product, and got zero users. Here is my story.
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GDbuildsGDThis week

I spent 6 months on building a web product, and got zero users. Here is my story.

Edit Thank you all so much for your time reading my story. Your support, feedback, criticism, and skepticism; all helped me a lot, and I couldn't appreciate it enough \^\_\^ I have stuff to post on Reddit very rarely, but I share how my project is going on, random stuff, and memes on X. Just in case few might want to keep in touch 👀 TL;DR I spent 6 months on a tool that currently has 0 users. Below is what I learned during my journey, sharing because I believe most mistakes are easily avoidable. Do not overestimate your product and assume it will be an exception to fundamental principles. Principles are there for a reason. Always look for validation before you start. Avoid building products with a low money-to-effort ratio/in very competitive fields. Unless you have the means, you probably won't make it. Pick a problem space, pick your target audience, and talk to them before thinking about a solution. Identify and match their pain points. Only then should you think of a solution. If people are not overly excited or willing to pay in advance for a discounted price, it might be a sign to rethink. Sell one and only one feature at a time. Avoid everything else. If people don't pay for that one core feature, no secondary feature will change their mind. Always spend twice as much time marketing as you do building. You will not get users if they don't know it exists. Define success metrics ("1000 users in 3 months" or "$6000 in the account at the end of 6 months") before you start. If you don't meet them, strongly consider quitting the project. If you can't get enough users to keep going, nothing else matters. VALIDATION, VALIDATION, VALIDATION. Success is not random, but most of our first products will not make a success story. Know when to admit failure, and move on. Even if a product of yours doesn't succeed, what you learned during its journey will turn out to be invaluable for your future. My story So, this is the story of a product that I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. As it's the first product I’ve ever built, after watching you all from the sidelines, I have learned a lot, made many mistakes, and did only a few things right. Just sharing what I’ve learned and some insights from my journey so far. I hope that this post will help you avoid the mistakes I made — most of which I consider easily avoidable — while you enjoy reading it, and get to know me a little bit more 🤓. A slow start after many years Summ isn’t the first product I really wanted to build. Lacking enough dev skills to even get started was a huge blocker for so many years. In fact, the first product I would’ve LOVED to build was a smart personal shopping assistant. I had this idea 4 years ago; but with no GPT, no coding skills, no technical co-founder, I didn’t have the means to make it happen. I still do not know if such a tool exists and is good enough. All I wanted was a tool that could make data-based predictions about when to buy stuff (“buy a new toothpaste every three months”) and suggest physical products that I might need or be strongly interested in. AFAIK, Amazon famously still struggles with the second one. Fast-forward a few years, I learned the very basics of HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS. Still was not there to build a product; but good enough to code my design portfolio from scratch. Yet, I couldn’t imagine myself building a product using Vanilla JS. I really hated it, I really sucked at it. So, back to tutorial hell, and to learn about this framework I just heard about: React.React introduced so many new concepts to me. “Thinking in React” is a phrase we heard a lot, and with quite good reasons. After some time, I was able to build very basic tutorial apps, both in React, and React Native; but I have to say that I really hated coding for mobile. At this point, I was already a fan of productivity apps, and had a concept for a time management assistant app in my design portfolio. So, why not build one? Surely, it must be easy, since every coding tutorial starts with a todo app. ❌ WRONG! Building a basic todo app is easy enough, but building one good enough for a place in the market was a challenge I took and failed. I wasted one month on that until I abandoned the project for good. Even if I continued working on it, as the productivity landscape is overly competitive, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to cover costs, assuming I make any. Since I was (and still am) in between jobs, I decided to abandon the project. 👉 What I learned: Do not start projects with a low ratio of money to effort and time. Example: Even if I get 500 monthly users, 200 of which are paid users (unrealistically high number), assuming an average subscription fee of $5/m (such apps are quite cheap, mostly due to the high competition), it would make me around $1000 minus any occurring costs. Any founder with a product that has 500 active users should make more. Even if it was relatively successful, due to the high competition, I wouldn’t make any meaningful money. PS: I use Todoist today. Due to local pricing, I pay less than $2/m. There is no way I could beat this competitive pricing, let alone the app itself. But, somehow, with a project that wasn’t even functional — let alone being an MVP — I made my first Wi-Fi money: Someone decided that the domain I preemptively purchased is worth something. By this point, I had already abandoned the project, certainly wasn’t going to renew the domain, was looking for a FT job, and a new project that I could work on. And out of nowhere, someone hands me some free money — who am I not to take it? Of course, I took it. The domain is still unused, no idea why 🤔. Ngl, I still hate the fact that my first Wi-Fi money came from this. A new idea worth pursuing? Fast-forward some weeks now. Around March, I got this crazy idea of building an email productivity tool. We all use emails, yet we all hate them. So, this must be fixed. Everyone uses emails, in fact everyone HAS TO use emails. So, I just needed to build a tool and wait for people to come. This was all, really. After all, the problem space is huge, there is enough room for another product, everyone uses emails, no need for any further validation, right? ❌ WRONG ONCE AGAIN! We all hear from the greatest in the startup landscape that we must validate our ideas with real people, yet at least some of us (guilty here 🥸) think that our product will be hugely successful and prove them to be an exception. Few might, but most are not. I certainly wasn't. 👉 Lesson learned: Always validate your ideas with real people. Ask them how much they’d pay for such a tool (not if they would). Much better if they are willing to pay upfront for a discount, etc. But even this comes later, keep reading. I think the difference between “How much” and “If” is huge for two reasons: (1) By asking them for “How much”, you force them to think in a more realistic setting. (2) You will have a more realistic idea on your profit margins. Based on my competitive analysis, I already had a solution in my mind to improve our email usage standards and email productivity (huge mistake), but I did my best to learn about their problems regarding those without pushing the idea too hard. The idea is this: Generate concise email summaries with suggested actions, combine them into one email, and send it at their preferred times. Save as much as time the AI you end up with allows. After all, everyone loves to save time. So, what kind of validation did I seek for? Talked with only a few people around me about this crazy, internet-breaking idea. The responses I got were, now I see, mediocre; no one got excited about it, just said things along the lines of “Cool idea, OK”. So, any reasonable person in this situation would think “Okay, not might not be working”, right? Well, I did not. I assumed that they were the wrong audience for this product, and there was this magical land of user segments waiting eagerly for my product, yet unknowingly. To this day, I still have not reached this magical place. Perhaps, it didn’t exist in the first place. If I cannot find it, whether it exists or not doesn’t matter. I am certainly searching for it. 👉 What I should have done: Once I decide on a problem space (time management, email productivity, etc.), I should decide on my potential user segments, people who I plan to sell my product to. Then I should go talk to those people, ask them about their pains, then get to the problem-solving/ideation phase only later. ❗️ VALIDATION COMES FROM THE REALITY OUTSIDE. What validation looks like might change from product to product; but what invalidation looks like is more or less the same for every product. Nico Jeannen told me yesterday “validation = money in the account” on Twitter. This is the ultimate form of validation your product could get. If your product doesn’t make any money, then something is invalidated by reality: Your product, you, your idea, who knows? So, at this point, I knew a little bit of Python from spending some time in tutorial hell a few years ago, some HTML/CSS/JS, barely enough React to build a working app. React could work for this project, but I needed easy-to-implement server interactivity. Luckily, around this time, I got to know about this new gen of indie hackers, and learned (but didn’t truly understand) about their approach to indie hacking, and this library called Nextjs. How good Next.js still blows my mind. So, I was back to tutorial hell once again. But, this time, with a promise to myself: This is the last time I would visit tutorial hell. Time to start building this "ground-breaking idea" Learning the fundamentals of Next.js was easier than learning of React unsurprisingly. Yet, the first time I managed to run server actions on Next.js was one of the rarest moments that completely blew my mind. To this day, I reject the idea that it is something else than pure magic under its hood. Did I absolutely need Nextjs for this project though? I do not think so. Did it save me lots of time? Absolutely. Furthermore, learning Nextjs will certainly be quite helpful for other projects that I will be tackling in the future. Already got a few ideas that might be worth pursuing in the head in case I decide to abandon Summ in the future. Fast-forward few weeks again: So, at this stage, I had a barely working MVP-like product. Since the very beginning, I spent every free hour (and more) on this project as speed is essential. But, I am not so sure it was worth it to overwork in retrospect. Yet, I know I couldn’t help myself. Everything is going kinda smooth, so what’s the worst thing that could ever happen? Well, both Apple and Google announced their AIs (Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, respectively) will have email summarization features for their products. Summarizing singular emails is no big deal, after all there were already so many similar products in the market. I still think that what truly matters is a frictionless user experience, and this is why I built this product in a certain way: You spend less than a few minutes setting up your account, and you get to enjoy your email summaries, without ever visiting its website again. This is still a very cool concept I really like a lot. So, at this point: I had no other idea that could be pursued, already spent too much time on this project. Do I quit or not? This was the question. Of course not. I just have to launch this product as quickly as possible. So, I did something right, a quite rare occurrence I might say: Re-planned my product, dropped everything secondary to the core feature immediately (save time on reading emails), tried launching it asap. 👉 Insight: Sell only one core feature at one time. Drop anything secondary to this core feature. Well, my primary occupation is product design. So one would expect that a product I build must have stellar design. I considered any considerable time spent on design at this stage would be simply wasted. I still think this is both true and wrong: True, because if your product’s core benefits suck, no one will care about your design. False, because if your design looks amateurish, no one will trust you and your product. So, I always targeted an average level design with it and the way this tool works made it quite easy as I had to design only 2 primary pages: Landing page and user portal (which has only settings and analytics pages). However, even though I knew spending time on design was not worth much of my time, I got a bit “greedy”: In fact, I redesigned those pages three times, and still ended up with a so-so design that I am not proud of. 👉 What I would do differently: Unless absolutely necessary, only one iteration per stage as long as it works. This, in my mind, applies to everything. If your product’s A feature works, then no need to rewrite it from scratch for any reason, or even refactor it. When your product becomes a success, and you absolutely need that part of your codebase to be written, do so, but only then. Ready to launch, now is th etime for some marketing, right? By July 26, I already had a “launchable” product that barely works (I marked this date on a Notion docs, this is how I know). Yet, I had spent almost no time on marketing, sales, whatever. After all, “You build and they will come”. Did I know that I needed marketing? Of course I did, but knowingly didn’t. Why, you might ask. Well, from my perspective, it had to be a dev-heavy product; meaning that you spend most of your time on developing it, mostly coding skills. But, this is simply wrong. As a rule of thumb, as noted by one of the greatests, Marc Louvion, you should spend at least twice of the building time on marketing. ❗️ Time spent on building \* 2 people don’t know your product > they don’t use your product > you don’t get users > you don’t make money Easy as that. Following the same reasoning, a slightly different approach to planning a project is possible. Determine an approximate time to complete the project with a high level project plan. Let’s say 6 months. By the reasoning above, 2 months should go into building, and 4 into marketing. If you need 4 months for building instead of 2, then you need 8 months of marketing, which makes the time to complete the project 12 months. If you don’t have that much time, then quit the project. When does a project count as completed? Well, in reality, never. But, I think we have to define success conditions even before we start for indie projects and startups; so we know when to quit when they are not met. A success condition could look like “Make $6000 in 12 months” or “Have 3000 users in 6 months”. It all depends on the project. But, once you set it, it should be set in stone: You don’t change it unless absolutely necessary. I suspect there are few principles that make a solopreneur successful; and knowing when to quit and when to continue is definitely one of them. Marc Louvion is famously known for his success, but he got there after failing so many projects. To my knowledge, the same applies to Nico Jeannen, Pieter Levels, or almost everyone as well. ❗️ Determining when to continue even before you start will definitely help in the long run. A half-aed launch Time-leap again. Around mid August, I “soft launched” my product. By soft launch, I mean lazy marketing. Just tweeting about it, posting it on free directories. Did I get any traffic? Surely I did. Did I get any users? Nope. Only after this time, it hit me: “Either something is wrong with me, or with this product” Marketing might be a much bigger factor for a project’s success after all. Even though I get some traffic, not convincing enough for people to sign up even for a free trial. The product was still perfect in my eyes at the time (well, still is ^(\_),) so the right people are not finding my product, I thought. Then, a question that I should have been asking at the very first place, one that could prevent all these, comes to my mind: “How do even people search for such tools?” If we are to consider this whole journey of me and my so-far-failed product to be an already destined failure, one metric suffices to show why. Search volume: 30. Even if people have such a pain point, they are not looking for email summaries. So, almost no organic traffic coming from Google. But, as a person who did zero marketing on this or any product, who has zero marketing knowledge, who doesn’t have an audience on social media, there is not much I could do. Finally, it was time to give up. Or not… In my eyes, the most important element that makes a founder (solo or not) successful (this, I am not by any means) is to solve problems. ❗️ So, the problem was this: “People are not finding my product by organic search” How do I make sure I get some organic traffic and gets more visibility? Learn digital marketing and SEO as much as I can within very limited time. Thankfully, without spending much time, I came across Neil Patel's YT channel, and as I said many times, it is an absolute gold mine. I learned a lot, especially about the fundamentals, and surely it will be fruitful; but there is no magic trick that could make people visit your website. SEO certainly helps, but only when people are looking for your keywords. However, it is truly a magical solution to get in touch with REAL people that are in your user segments: 👉 Understand your pains, understand their problems, help them to solve them via building products. I did not do this so far, have to admit. But, in case you would like to have a chat about your email usage, and email productivity, just get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear about them. Getting ready for a ProductHunt launch The date was Sept 1. And I unlocked an impossible achievement: Running out of Supabase’s free plan’s Egres limit while having zero users. I was already considering moving out of their Cloud server and managing a Supabase CLI service on my Hetzner VPS for some time; but never ever suspected that I would have to do this quickly. The cheapest plan Supabase offers is $25/month; yet, at that point, I am in between jobs for such a long time, basically broke, and could barely afford that price. One or two months could be okay, but why pay for it if I will eventually move out of their Cloud service? So, instead of paying $25, I spent two days migrating out of Supabase Cloud. Worth my time? Definitely not. But, when you are broke, you gotta do stupid things. This was the first time that I felt lucky to have zero users: I have no idea how I would manage this migration if I had any. I think this is one of the core tenets of an indie hacker: Controlling their own environment. I can’t remember whose quote this is, but I suspect it was Naval: Entrepreneurs have an almost pathological need to control their own fate. They will take any suffering if they can be in charge of their destiny, and not have it in somebody else’s hands. What’s truly scary is, at least in my case, we make people around us suffer at the expense of our attempting to control our own fates. I know this period has been quite hard on my wife as well, as I neglected her quite a bit, but sadly, I know that this will happen again. It is something that I can barely help with. Still, so sorry. After working the last two weeks on a ProductHunt Launch, I finally launched it this Tuesday. Zero ranking, zero new users, but 36 kind people upvoted my product, and many commented and provided invaluable feedback. I couldn't be more grateful for each one of them 🙏. Considering all these, what lies in the future of Summ though? I have no idea, to be honest. On one hand, I have zero users, have no job, no income. So, I need a way to make money asap. On the other hand, the whole idea of it revolves around one core premise (not an assumption) that I am not so willing to share; and I couldn’t have more trust in it. This might not be the best iteration of it, however I certainly believe that email usage is one of the best problem spaces one could work on. 👉 But, one thing is for certain: I need to get in touch with people, and talk with them about this product I built so far. In fact, this is the only item on my agenda. Nothing else will save my brainchild <3. Below are some other insights and notes that I got during my journey; as they do not 100% fit into this story, I think it is more suitable to list them here. I hope you enjoyed reading this. Give Summ a try, it comes with a generous free trial, no credit card required. Some additional notes and insights: Project planning is one of the most underestimated skills for solopreneurs. It saves you enormous time, and helps you to keep your focus up. Building B2C products beats building B2B products. Businesses are very willing to pay big bucks if your product helps them. On the other hand, spending a few hours per user who would pay $5/m probably is not worth your time. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is if no one uses it. If you cannot sell a product in a certain category/niche (or do not know how to sell it), it might be a good idea not to start a project in it. Going after new ideas and ventures is quite risky, especially if you don’t know how to market it. On the other hand, an already established category means that there is already demand. Whether this demand is sufficient or not is another issue. As long as there is enough demand for your product to fit in, any category/niche is good. Some might be better, some might be worse. Unless you are going hardcore B2B, you will need people to find your product by means of organic search. Always conduct thorough keyword research as soon as possible.

The Advantages of a Custom CRM Solution
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NeerajKumarChaurasiaThis week

The Advantages of a Custom CRM Solution

The growth in the global CRM market continues to accelerate. According to techspective, the global CRM market is now worth \~ $40B USD and is expected to surpass $80B USD by 2025. Despite this phenomenal growth, the CRM market is still dominated by off-the-shelf solutions that are “cookie-cutter” in design and that provide little to no options for customization. These non-customized CRM solutions can significantly inhibit an enterprise’s ability to maximize the advantages of CRM adoption and to realize a robust ROI. As a result, companies are increasingly opting for digital CRM solutions that are customized to meet the unique needs of the enterprise. What is driving the increased demand for custom CRM solutions? What are some of the inherent advantages of a custom CRM solution when compared to a typical off-the-shelf product? Off-the-Shelf CRM Solutions – the Limitations Static CRM solutions are inflexible and self-limiting. Enterprises saddled with these cookie-cutter solutions increasingly report a consistent listing of issues that limit business growth.  These include…. A lack of real-time visibility into shifting customer trends and demands Delayed reaction to coordination of internal resources to meet changing business conditions Lost business opportunities due to lack of flexible, and real-time, opportunity lifecycle management Reporting and dashboarding capabilities that are slow, static, and disconnected Poor quote-to-cash performance that degrades financial performance A CRM investment that delivers poor ROI and that cannot grow with the enterprise All of the above can combine to limit the enterprise’s ability to fully capitalize on its hard-won business opportunities and, over time, limit its ability to create new opportunities. A Customized CRM – What is it? What is a “customized CRM”? Simply put, it is a holistic CRM solution that has been specifically tailored for the individual enterprise. The provider of a truly customized CRM solution will deliver a solution that has been designed to meet the specific—and unique—demands and objectives of the enterprise. A tailored CRM solution will address the enterprise’s sales and operational requirements as well as its customer experience objectives. Unlike standard off-the-shelf CRM providers, a provider of enterprise-grade custom CRM solutions will employ a comprehensive project discovery and requirements gathering process. This is an integral process that provides the foundation for the development of a custom solution that will provide the enterprise with long term flexibility and scalability. A customized digital CRM solution can provide distinct competitive advantages; including: Dynamic, Flexible, Powerful, Real-Time Management and Engagement A customized, technology\-fueled, CRM solution provides the enterprise with the means with which to dynamically engage with customers in ways that build customer loyalty, generate market growth, and drive strong financial performance. Distinct advantages include: Real-time sales opportunity tracking. Helps eliminate lost opportunities due to slow or inadequate reaction. Customized, AI and IoT-fueled, data analytics. A customized CRM solution can be designed to deliver real-time insights. Allows the enterprise to anticipate, and then satisfy, the needs of the customer. Customizable Dashboards and Reports. Widget-based, customized, dashboards and reports that provide real-time data and actionable insights. Sales process automation. Intelligent Workflow-based automation and control of critical sales processes. Increases overall operational efficiency. Outstanding ROI. A custom CRM solution typically delivers superior ROI when compared to off-the-shelf CRM products. Enterprises today spend considerable time, money, and effort in the development of customer relationships. For many enterprises, the continued use of CRM solutions that are rigid and outdated can prove to be impediments to business growth. When considering investment in a new CRM solution any enterprise will be well served by full consideration of a CRM solution that can be fully customized to meet its long-range requirements.

Seeking Feedback on My Business Idea – SaaS + Lead Generation for Small Businesses
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sarveshpandey89This week

Seeking Feedback on My Business Idea – SaaS + Lead Generation for Small Businesses

Edit: TL;DR I’m Sarvesh, a digital marketer with 10 years of experience in paid ads. After losing my job last year, I started freelancing and discovered how much small businesses struggle with getting reviews (Google, Yelp, TrustPilot, etc.). My Business Idea – SaaS + Paid Ads Free Plan: Businesses can track & reply to reviews across 40+ platforms in one dashboard. Paid Plan ($99/month): Automates review collection, AI-powered responses, social media posting, and spam detection. Custom Plan: Paid ads to generate leads, offered only to businesses on my paid plan for 3+ months. Goal: SaaS platform attracts users → Some upgrade to paid plan → Best clients get lead-generation help → More leads → More reviews → More organic customers → A profitable business cycle. Need Feedback: Does this idea have potential? How can I get my first beta users? Any features I should add/remove? Would love your thoughts—thanks for reading! 😊 TL: Hi everyone, I’m Sarvesh, and I’m in the process of starting my own business. Since my target audience is small businesses, I’d love to get some input, advice, or critiques from this community. A Little About Me I’ve spent the last 10 years working in paid advertising, helping medium and large businesses generate leads through Facebook and Google Ads. I also have experience running e-commerce campaigns. You can check out my background on LinkedIn: LinkedIn Profile Last year, my second daughter was born, and around the same time, my company shut down all its offices (India & UK), leaving me without a job. I decided to take a break and spend time with my wife and newborn, something I regretted not doing with my first child. By November, I started job hunting again, but in the meantime, I got some freelance work through Reddit, helping small businesses with ads for the first time. For context, in my previous jobs, I managed ad campaigns with daily budgets of £4K–£8K. Working with small businesses was a new challenge, but to my surprise, I was able to generate solid leads for beauty salons, hair salons, and nail salons, helping them grow. What stood out to me was how much impact my work had—unlike my corporate job, where I was just another person in the system, here I felt truly valued. That feeling led me to explore starting my own business. The Problem I Noticed While working with small businesses, I realized that online reviews (Google, Yelp, Trustpilot, etc.) are critical for them, yet many struggle to get them. Customers often don’t leave reviews, and employees are either too shy or don’t prioritize asking for them. This gave me an idea—to build a system that helps businesses get more genuine Google reviews from customers. I developed the system but struggled to find businesses willing to test it, even for free. My target audience is U.S. small businesses, but since I’m based in India, cold emails and Reddit outreach didn’t get much traction. My Business Idea – SaaS + Custom Plans I’m now thinking of pivoting my business model into a SaaS platform with optional paid upgrades. Here’s how it would work: Free Plan (Review Tracking & Management) Businesses can track their reviews across 40+ platforms (Google, Yelp, Facebook, Trustpilot, TripAdvisor, etc.) in one dashboard. They can reply to reviews manually from a single place instead of switching between platforms. This will be completely free forever. Paid Plan ($99/month, Plus SMS/Email Costs) For businesses that struggle to get reviews, they can upgrade to a paid plan that includes: Automated Review Requests – Automatically send review requests via SMS & email. Website Widget – Showcase 4- and 5-star reviews dynamically. Social Media Automation – Automatically post positive reviews on Facebook/Instagram. AI-Powered Responses – AI can reply to reviews automatically. Spam Detection – The system will notify businesses of suspicious reviews (but won’t take direct action). Custom Plan (Lead Generation via Paid Ads) I will personally manage paid ad campaigns to generate leads. Pricing depends on the niche, budget, and contract duration. Money-Back Guarantee – If I don’t deliver results, I refund the month’s fee. Small businesses can’t afford wasted ad spend, and I want to ensure I provide real value. Limited spots per month to maintain quality and avoid burnout. How Everything Ties Together The SaaS platform serves as a lead generation tool for my custom plans: Businesses use the free plan to track their reviews. Some upgrade to the paid plan to automate and improve reviews. A select few, after 3 months on the paid plan, can join my custom plan for paid ads to generate more leads. More leads → More reviews → Better Google Maps ranking → More organic customers → A more profitable business. Would Love Your Feedback! What do you think about this approach? Do you see potential for this business to take off? Any features I should add or remove? Any suggestions on how I can get my first beta users to test the SaaS platform? What about pricing? Do you think $99 is good pricing? I know this is a long post, but I really appreciate anyone taking the time to read and share their thoughts. Thanks in advance!

What I learn from my $200 MRR App I built 4 months ago?
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ricky0603This week

What I learn from my $200 MRR App I built 4 months ago?

4 month ago, I am just a 10-years experienced product manager without any software development experience. I have an $3K/month job, but I am so tired, I don’t like my life, don’t like my boss, don’t like my daily work, that make me feeling I already died however I am still living. I yearn for freedom and want to live each day the way I want to. So I quit my job, and become a Indie developer to build my own business, my own app, even my own life. I am so grateful for this time and experience, now my app reach $200 MRR, still very little compared to my previous salary, but I never regret. I have learned lots of things from this time and experience, more than I had in last 10 years. Here is the time-line of my App: \- Sep 2023: Launch first version to iOS App store \- Oct 2023: Release in-app-purchase features and have first subscriber, the revenue in October is $154 \- Nov 2023: Change from subscription to pay per use, and I did lots of marketing jobs in November, however, the revenue reduced to only $40. \- Dec 2023: Change back to subscription, and stop some invalid marketing jobs, only keep the ones that actually work. I almost did nothing in December, and the revenue come to $243. During this process, I have learned lots of things, there are some of them that I think could help you as well. Web or App My App is an iOS app that only can running on Apple’s device such like iPhone/iPad or Mac with Apple silicon. Many people ask me why my product is an iOS app not a website, because they don’t have any Apple device. It's true that promoting an app is much harder than promoting a website. However I am now very glad I made an App and not a website! If I make a website, I don't think it's possible to make $100 in the first month. My App is about keyword research, to help people find some ideas from search keyword, because every keyword people searched in Google are representing a real need of them, also can be used in SEO field. However there are a lot of website tools about keyword research, some of them are famous like Ahrefs, SEMrush… I have no intention of competing with them. Actually I don’t have any chance. While in app store, there are little apps about keyword research, each of them have terrible data and user experience, that means if my app has better data and experience that could be my chance. In fact, the App store brings me 20 organic installs a day that Google would never have been able to bring me if I had a website, at least for the first few months. Furthermore, Apple nearly did everything for developer, I don’t need to care about user login, payment and so on, Apple did everything, I just need to call their API, that save lots of time, if I build a website, I need to implement login and payment by myself, that would add some extra work. Not to mention I'd need to buy servers and domains, that would cost me a lot of money. Although Apple will take 30% of the revenue, I can live with that in the early stages because the most important thing for me is to get the product to market as soon as possible. Actually thought Apple’s SMB program, the take rate is 15% now. So Web or App is not important in the early stage, time is important, if people need my product, it's easy to make a website one. More Users or More Valuable Users In November, I notice some users would like use my app, and they were meet paywall, but they never subscribe. I provided 7 day free trail, but it seem that they don’t like it. So I decide to change subscription to pay per use. Because as a user, I don’t like subscription as well, pay per use seem like more friendly. So I change from subscription to pay per use. People can afford $9.99 to subscribe monthly for unlimited use or pay $1.99 for each data they want(First purchase is $0.99 then $1.99). I was expecting more user to pay, but it was the complete opposite! Some users who would have paid a higher subscription fee are switching to a lower priced single payment. Users are encountering paywalls more often, and each time they need to make a decision about whether or not to pay, which increases the probability that they will abandon payment. This resulted in a 75% decrease in revenue in November. In fact, the mostly of my revenue comes from a handful of long-cycle subscribers, such as annual subscription. \\Few bring in most of the revenue,\\ that is the most important thing I learned. You don't need a lot of customers, you just need more valuable ones. That's why it's only right to design a mechanism to filter out high-value customers and focus on them, all the things you want do is just let more people into the filter, and from that point of view, subscription with free trial period is the best way, even if most people don't like it. The rule of 20/80 will always be there. The most important thing is always focus on the 20 percent things and people. Effort does not always guarantee rewards. Unless one engages in deep thinking, or most efforts are invalid. I have been working very hard to promote my product for a period of time. It’s about in November. I did a lot of job, such as write script to send message to my potential clients on Fiverr, post and write comments on others post on Reddit, find related questions and answer them on Quora, post and comments on Twitte, etc. During that period, I was exhausted every day, but the outcome did not meet my expectations. There is only little growth on App installation, even less revenue than before. That make me frustrated. I finally realized that If I need to put in a tremendous amount of effort just to make a little progress, there is must something wrong. So I stop 80% of promote work I have ever did, only keep app store search ad, which will bring a installation with less than $0.5 cost. Then I dive into long time and deeply thinking, I spent more time on reading books, investigate other product with great MRR, watch interviews with people who are already living the kind of life I aspire to live, for example, u/levelsio. These things have given me great inspiration, and my life has become easier. It seems that the life I anticipated when I resigned is getting closer. I also have a clearer understanding of my app. Meanwhile, MRR has been growing. This experience let me learn that effort does not always guarantee results. Many times, our efforts are just wishful thinking, they are invalid, do the right thing after deeply thinking is more important. What Next? My goal is reach $3K MRR, as same as my job payment, I will never stop to building things, and I will keep my currently lifestyle. I still don't know how to get more people to use my app, but levelsio's interviews give me some inspiration that I can verified something by manually instead of build a software. I plan to launch a trend analysis product based on the keyword data provided by my current app. I have always wanted to combine AI to build such a product, but I didn't know how to do it. Now I intend to manually complete it first and start software development once there are paying users. If you are interested to my App, you could try it.

40% Of SMBs Still Can't Pay Their Rent, Extending High Delinquency From September Into October
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40% Of SMBs Still Can't Pay Their Rent, Extending High Delinquency From September Into October

https://www.alignable.com/forum/q4s-off-to-a-rough-start-40-of-smbs-still-cant-pay-their-rent October 31, 2023: While the federal government reported a surge in economic growth for the U.S. last week, that news doesn't hold true for many small business owners. In fact, in October polling by Alignable, only 12% said their companies are experiencing significant growth this month. Beyond that, Alignable’s October Rent Report, released today, shows that a whopping 40% of SMBs couldn't even pay their October rent in full and on time. This marks the second consecutive month of a 40% rent delinquency rate -- extending 2023's record high from September through October. These findings are based on responses from 4,246 randomly selected small business owners surveyed from 10/1/23 to 10/30/23, as well as input from 44,000+ other respondents over the past year. As the chart below shows, October's SMB rent delinquency rate is 10 percentage points higher than it was in January, reflecting cumulative economic struggles: increased rents, high interest rates, still-stifling inflation, rising labor costs, and revenues that have declined since this time last year. Rent delinquency rates among small businesses during 2023 based on Alignable surveys So, Why's Rent Delinquency At 40% For A 2nd Month? Here’s the current list of problems contributing to two months' worth of the highest delinquency rate 2023 has seen so far: Consumer Spending Declines On Main Street: Quarterly, we ask about customer spending habits at retailers. This month, 45% of independent Mom and Pop Shops said spending has been down over the last 30 days. Some said it was due to more people spending money online with big retailers like Amazon. This figure is quite high, especially considering that back in July, only 24% reported a drop in consumer spending -- 21 percentage points less severe than it is now. Revenue Troubles: 42% are making half or less of the income they generated monthly prior to COVID. For businesses that are less than three years old, this situation is even worse: 53% of this group reports making half or less of what they generated this time last year. High Interest Rates: Over half of all SMB owners polled said the past 19 months of high interest rates have hurt their margins, reduced revenues, and put their expansion plans on hold, as they don't want to apply for loans. Increased Rent Prices: 50% say they’re being charged more for rent now than they were six months ago, with 15% saying rent has increased by 20% or more. At present, only 37% of pre-COVID businesses have recovered financially from the pandemic era, leaving 63% still striving to make up for time they lost due to COVID, inflationary pressures, and high interest rates. There's a slight silver lining here, though, as the 37% figure is three percentage points higher than it was in September. But, with that said, a recovery rate of 37% after more than three and a half years is still very low and speaks volumes about the ongoing list of troubles small business owners face looking into the rest of 2023. Tech, Manufacturing, Gyms, Beauty & Retail Struggle Examining the rent delinquency landscape in terms of sectors, there's quite a negative shift occurring among some industries in October. Let's look at the charts below to see what's really happening. Sectors most affected by rent delinquency include tech and retail Details on sectors affected by rent delinquency in October This is alarming for a few reasons: The countless technology layoffs at larger companies over the past year appear to be affecting the small companies now, too, who are often dependent on the larger ones as clients. Right now, 54% of science/technology small companies couldn't pay their October rent, up 10 percentage points from September and 16 percentage points since August. There are also some comments in the surveys of technology roles being reduced or replaced by ChatGPT and other AI, which can write software programs. Gyms have been struggling now for a while and now 50% of them can't afford the rent, up 8 percentage points from September. The biggest shift between October and September occurred among manufacturers, partially due to ongoing fluctuation in the price of gas and other inflationary issues. For quite some time, manufacturers were improving a lot in terms of their rent delinquency rates, but in October, they jumped 25 percentage points, doubling their rate, which is now 50%. This is also a record high for manufacturers in 2023. We hope this is just a blip, but we'll see in November. Also due, in part, to fluctuating gas prices and costs of vehicles, 45% of transportation companies couldn't pay October rent in full and on time. That's up 6 percentage points from last month. Sadly, 47% of salon owners couldn't cover October rent, after showing a lot of stability over the past few months. But that stability ended this month, as salons' rent delinquency rates jumped nine percentage points. Though rates have dropped three percentage points in October, a high percentage of retailers are still having trouble paying the rent. Last month, it was 47%. This month, it's better, but is still over 40%, landing at 44%. This is worrisome, especially since Q4 is a "make it or break it" time for many Main Street merchants. Looking more closely at the industries, there was some good news, in that a few others experienced lower delinquency rates in October, including restaurants, which dipped to 40% from 44% in September. Travel/lodging dropped seven percentage points to 38% (from 45% last month), as did education, which is also at 38%, down from 43%. When looking at rent delinquency from the vantage point of the states that are most affected, many surges can be seen between October and September, while a few states saw some dramatic, encouraging declines, too. Rent Troubles Increase For IL, VA, TX, MA, FL, & CO Looking at the states' charts, you can see how tumultuous the rent story has become this fall. Let's first talk about those with significant jumps in their delinquency rates. Here's the rundown: Illinois leads the list once again. After having a better month in September, its delinquency rate has soared, once more, landing at 54% for October (up from 46% last month). In fact, the 54% figure is the highest rate IL-based SMBs have seen in 2023. Virginia was in great shape last month, with a delinquency rate of just 19%. But Virginia-based small business owners have had a very rough month, at least in terms of rent. Now, 50% of them who took our poll say they couldn't cover rent (an increase of 31 percentage points). Texas is third on the list, with an 11-percentage-point lift from 38% in September to 49% in October. MA is next up at 48%, which marks the largest jump on the chart -- 32 percentage points from a low of just 16% in September. Small businesses in Florida have also experienced two challenging months in terms of rent delinquency. Right now, 45% of SMBs there couldn't afford to pay, up nine percentage points from September and 15 percentage points from August. Colorado's businesses regressed in October, hitting a new record high of 40%. That rent delinquency rate jumped 13 percentage points from September to October. While we just covered states with some very high delinquency rates, there were also several more positive swings that have occurred in October. Though encouraging, we'll have to see how long those delinquency rates continue. Here are the most remarkable: New York -- After reaching a record rate of 55% last month, New York's small business owners now report a more stable number: just 29%. That's down 26 percentage points. New Jersey -- New York's neighbor has an even more impressive story in October: only 20% of New Jersey's SMBs couldn't pay rent this month, a record low over at least the past 14 months, down 34 percentage points from a record high of 54%. Michigan -- Similarly, Michigan's small business owners boast a rate of just 20%, down from 45% in September.

GPT Weekly - 19the June Edition - OpenAI's function calling, Meta's free LLM, EU Regulation and more.
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GPT Weekly - 19the June Edition - OpenAI's function calling, Meta's free LLM, EU Regulation and more.

This is a recap covering the major news from last week. 🔥Top 3 news - OpenAI’s updates, Meta’s upcoming free LLM and EU Regulation 🗞️Interesting reads include PSA about protecting your keys, The GPT ouroboros, Reddit - OpenAI’s moat, and more.. 🧑‍🎓Learning includes a Step-by-step guide from a non-technical founder who launched his MVP, Chatbot for your Gdrive and more 🔥Top 3 AI news in the past week OpenAI: New Pricing, Models, & Functions OpenAI has been on a roll. Last week we saw the release of OpenAI best practice on using GPT. This week we saw some amazing updates. Three major buckets were: First, the price decreases for both embeddings and GPT-3.5 tokens. Second, new models for gpt-4 and gpt-3.5. A new longer context model for gpt-3.5. Third, a new function calling capability. Why is it important? Previously, the output from OpenAI was all text. So, calling an external API from GPT was quite difficult. You had to parse the text data and things were often incorrect. Langchain created the Agents and Tools feature to tackle this problem. It was still unreliable and prone to issues. Now you get native support to generate a fixed format output. You can use the output to generate functional calls and also pass functions which need to be called. For example, if your app has multiple API endpoints then you can use GPT to generate the API calls with parameters. You can also pass the endpoints as function calls to ensure the correct function is executed. This functionality can further be used to generate structured data (JSON) out of GPT. So, you can generate data from GPT and load it into your backend. What’s next? This functionality allows turning natural language responses into structured data. This can be used to create “intelligent” backends using LLMs. We might see implementations in no-code tools to allow more robust and natural-language tools for non-technical folks. The structured data process goes both ways. You can also feed structured data into GPT for better responses. This feature also has its share of issues. Function calling suffers from the same prompt injection issues. Malicious actors can pass malicious code in function or the responses. For example, creation of queries using functions might contain malicious code to delete data. Without proper user validation this code will be executed automatically and delete data. So, using LLM as the back-end layer needs proper security implementation. Meta's LLM: Commercial Use Ahead Llama has been a boon for the open source community. Many of the open source models rely on Llama. The issue is that Llama is research-only and cannot be used commercially. So, no one can use it to build any product. Meta is now working on the next version of the model. This model will be available for commercial use. This is in stark contrast to both OpenAI and Google. Both safe-guarde their models and make it available through API. Why is it important? Certain industries cannot use LLM APIs because of strict restrictions on data privacy. These companies would want to run their own instance of a foundational model. A commercially available foundational model is also going to help people who want to keep their “API call” costs next to 0. A commercially available free-for-all model will also help push the open source community further. Just like Llama. What’s next? Sam Altman has said OpenAI didn’t release GPT-3 as open-source because they didn’t think people would be able to run it. Now OpenAI is working on an open-source model. This is going to be weaker than GPT-4. Let the battle of LLMs begin. EU's Proposed Legislation and Its Impact on AI Usage The EU parliament voted to move ahead with the E.U. AI Act. This act aims to ensure consumer protection against the dangers of AI. Why is it important? OpenAI and Sam Altman want regulations for models. They have proposed a IAEA-type of agency to stop the proliferation of LLM models. As per OpenAI, all models should be regulated and monitored. The suggestion of a license based regulation has led to significant backlash. Many people have called it “regulatory capture” - with the aim of shutting down competing LLMs. Licensing based regulations might not really be effective. The EU is approaching regulation from a different angle. It doesn’t focus on how models are developed. Rather focuses on how AI will/can be used. They have broken down use cases into 4 categories - unacceptable (prohibited), high, medium and low risk. For example, Building a Pre-Crime software,on%20crimes%20not%20yet%20committed.) to predict crimes? Building a Social credit system? Unacceptable. Using tools to influence elections or recommendation algorithms? High (Highly regulated). Using generative AI tools to create text or images on news sites? Medium (Add label that the content is AI generated) AI providers also need to disclose their training source. To me this sounds like good legislation. What do you guys think? But, OpenAI has warned that EU regulations might force them to pull out completely. What’s next? The disclosure requirements might help various publishing companies. AI and media companies are in talks to pay for training data. Google has been leading the charge. Additionally, OpenAI and Deepmind will open their models for safety and research purposes to the UK government. 🗞️10 AI news highlights and interesting reads PSA: If you are using Repl to write code, you might want to check your OpenAI API keys. If you have left them embedded then people can pirate and steal the keys. LLMs rely on human annotation or human feedback to learn. And one way to generate human annotation is crowdsourcing. But what if the crowdsource human annotators use LLMs? Research shows 33-46% workers used LLMs. So, basically we go from Human -> AI -> Human -> AI. The AI ouroboros. Researchers also say generated data to train models might cause serious issue. All the talks about moats \- Reddit might be OpenAI’s \future\ moat. Given the amount of complaints about how Google search experience has deteriorated during the blackout, this might be true? Doctors are using ChatGPT but not to diagnose.Rather to be more empathetic. We discussed this just a month ago. And guess where the data for this study came from? Reddit AskDocs. Moat FTW?! Beatles to make a comeback…using Generative AI. SnapFusion - Text to Image diffusion on mobile phones. Large context lengths are important for better GPT experience. The secret sauce for 100k context length. There is a lot of bad AI research out there. Some border on snake oil. Most AI “research” should be double checked and challenged. A new research on huggingface said that GPT-4 can ace MIT curriculum. Now someone is replicating the results and say that GPT-4 can’t beat MIT. Are we seeing peak AI? Especially when people from Deepmind and Meta are involved? Mistral AI raised $113 million in seed round with no product. Some might say this funding is for the team and the team is really solid. The issue though is whether the valuation is justified when OpenAI and Google already have a head start. The AI Hype Wall of Shame. \- Collection of articles which mislead people about AI in various aspects. 🧑‍🎓3 Learning Resources Building and Launching a company using GPT-4 with prompts. (The author didn’t know how to code but created and launched the MVP in a month). Chatbot for your Gdrive - https://www.haihai.ai/gpt-gdrive/ Building ChatGPT plugin using Supabase - https://supabase.com/blog/building-chatgpt-plugins-template That’s it folks. Thank you for reading and have a great week ahead. If you are interested in a focused weekly recap delivered to your inbox on Mondays you can subscribe here. It is FREE!

Study Plan for Learning Data Science Over the Next 12 Months [D]
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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. &#x200B; 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 &#x200B; 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 &#x200B; 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 &#x200B; 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 &#x200B; 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!

Is it too late for me to do a PhD in the US?
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StarxelThis week

Is it too late for me to do a PhD in the US?

In 2019 I started an integrated Masters of Physics at Oxford. Graduated summer of 2023. During that time I first authored an AI research paper with the Oxford AI Society. We tried to get it into ICLR but it got rejected. Managed to get it into a NeurIPS workshop though, however I'm unsure if that holds much weight. The paper also got 21 citations on arxiv which is nice. After graduating, my gf and I broke up (mutually, long distance was too much) and life after university made me quite down. Bad market and struggled to get a job. A friend reached out to me about doing a startup in San Francisco. Did that startup until January 2024 when I quit because I had no money left. Through the connections I made out there I landed a gig at Chroma DB. Did a research contract with them. We didn't make a paper but instead made a technical report. The GitHub repo for the project has gained over 200 stars. However, since I was remote and US visas are a pain, my contract wasn't renewed. I tried starting my own business from July 2024 till December. I managed to secure a long term contract with a US construction company building them software that automates admin via GPT. Still doing this contract now and they've said they're happy to keep me for as long as I want. That's the context. During the winter of 2024 I thought heavily about applying for a PhD in the US. At: CMU, Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, CalTech, etc. However, I knew my profile wasn't strong enough. So I want to apply the winter of 2025. I'm in talks with a few institutions and research groups about doing projects. But is it possible that, starting in February 2025, I can co-author, submit and have accepted a paper into a top conference by December 2025? I feel like I'm too late to this decision and should have skipped that San Francisco startup to just do research projects from the start.

What AI tools sounds best for you?
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gigicr1This week

What AI tools sounds best for you?

Hey, I'm a developer who's been lurking here for a while and I want to build something actually useful or at least fun(or both) that is AI-related. Here are 4 ideas (but I'm open to completely different ones): AGI Timeline Prediction Market (🎯 no real money, just bragging rights) Finally settle those "AGI by 2030?" debates with some skin in the game Watch your prediction accuracy score climb (or hilariously tank) Monthly milestone tracking to see who really knows their stuff Like fantasy football, but for the robot apocalypse AI Model Release Calendar Never miss another GPT launch again Compare models without diving into 50 different Discord servers Clear "what can it actually do?" benchmarks Get pinged when something wild drops Research Paper Difficulty Rater Browser extension that saves you from opening papers way above your pay grade Community ratings from "ELI5" to "PhD Required" Shows what you need to know before diving in "Time to comprehend" estimates (coffee breaks vs weekend projects) AI Progress Newsletter + Extension Track what you've actually read vs. saved for "later" (we all know how that goes) Weekly TL;DR of the important stuff Focus on real breakthroughs, not just PR Impact ratings from "neat trick" to "call Elon" Before I dive in and build one of these - has anyone seen something similar already? What would make these actually useful vs just another tool that collects dust? P.S. Open to wildly different ideas or improvements too. Maybe we need something completely different to track our march towards AGI?

I created leadsnavi that helps small businesses find quality leads without breaking the bank
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BrightCook5861This week

I created leadsnavi that helps small businesses find quality leads without breaking the bank

Hey Redditors, I’m excited to share LeadsNavi, a tool I built specifically to help small businesses and B2B professionals automatically generate leads and reach potential customers in a smarter way. After talking to a lot of small business owners, I realized how tough it is to juggle lead generation with limited resources. So, I decided to create a tool that could simplify the process and make it more accessible to those who don’t have the budget to invest in expensive solutions. What Exactly Is LeadsNavi? LeadsNavi is an intuitive, cost-effective platform that automates the process of lead generation. It's designed to make it easy for small businesses and entrepreneurs to identify quality leads and grow their customer base without the need for manual prospecting. Here’s what makes it stand out: Automatic Lead Tracking: Tracks visitors to your website and matches them with company data, so you get real insights into who’s interested in your business. AI-Powered Lead Recommendations: Based on your website’s traffic, LeadsNavi uses AI to suggest similar companies that could be interested in your product or service, helping you find new leads faster and more accurately. Affordable & Scalable: For only $49/month, you can use a highly effective tool that scales with your business. It’s designed to be affordable even for small businesses. CRM Integration: Connect your CRM to directly import leads and sync your outreach efforts. How Does It Work? LeadsNavi uses advanced algorithms to track website visitors' IP addresses and match them with a comprehensive business database. It provides details like company names, contact information, and helps you identify potential leads for follow-up. The best part? It works automatically, saving you hours of manual work and effort. Lead Identification: Get insights into which companies are visiting your website. AI-Driven Lead Recommendations: The AI analyzes your site’s traffic and suggests other companies in the same industry or with similar needs that might be a great fit for your product or service. Data-Enriched Leads: Gather real-time, actionable data on these leads to make your outreach more targeted. Easy Setup: Simply integrate with your website and CRM to start getting quality leads in minutes. Who’s It For? Small Businesses: You don’t have to be a marketing expert to generate quality leads. B2B Sales Teams: Perfect for anyone looking to target other businesses with a streamlined and automated approach. Entrepreneurs & Startups: Focus on scaling your business without worrying about lead generation overhead. Why Try It? LeadsNavi gives you the power to focus on what really matters—connecting with potential customers and scaling your business. If you’ve been struggling with finding quality leads, or if you’re just getting started, I believe LeadsNavi can help you save time, effort, and money. I’m offering a 14-day free trial, so you can see the tool in action before committing to anything. Give it a try and let me know what you think! I’d love to hear your thoughts, suggestions, and how it works for your business. https://preview.redd.it/fdwil4rssgle1.png?width=1867&format=png&auto=webp&s=eb73b41a2b7665ae1b651fe2a6b7459df6990530

Why I would encourage everyone to create a side project
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EffectiveTrifle7284This week

Why I would encourage everyone to create a side project

Many people are afraid to start working on their projects, fearing they will be unsuccessful and waste a lot of time without gaining anything in return. However, this is the biggest trap of all: you actually gain much more than just money. Even if you don't become super successful and make millions of dollars, what is it really about? When you work on your project, you immerse yourself in development across all aspects. For example, when I used to work, I focused solely on my direct responsibilities. But when you create your project, you cannot limit yourself to a narrow range of tasks; you need to handle everything. If it's a website or an app, you must manage the frontend, backend, and deployment. If it's an app, you need to upload it to stores and understand legal nuances like terms of use and privacy policies. This is just one part of it. Here, you already realize the wealth of knowledge you can gain. Additionally, you are likely to enhance your competence in the technical aspects of your work. Now, let's move to part two—part one is about creating, and part two is about selling. Selling is essentially a separate art and often more complex than development. Thus, you will probably have to immerse yourself in a completely new area and gain experience in it. On top of that, there's another nice bonus: introductions. If you develop a product publicly, you will receive feedback, and perhaps someone will appreciate your project. That person may reach out to you, leading to new connections and acquaintances—often very valuable ones. So even if you don't earn a penny from your project, you will have gained tremendous experience. Of course, if your project consists merely of jumping into AI, writing something, and publishing it immediately without thoughtful consideration, it's unlikely you'll gain any benefit. Therefore, every time I complete a project, I never focus on making millions of dollars. Instead, I first thank the universe for the opportunities I had to create this project, gain experience, and meet wonderful people. Good luck!

I got 400+ new customers in first 48 hours after launch!!!!
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iamjasonlevinThis week

I got 400+ new customers in first 48 hours after launch!!!!

Yesterday I launched my new software and got 400+ customers in 48 hours. I'm gonna break down the product and my launch strategy. What is it? Remember when Elon was taking over Twitter and he emailed the CEO of Twitter Parag Agrawal saying “What did you get done this week?” Well I turned this idea into a software lol. A couple months ago, I had a realization while talking with some friends: I love asking ChatGPT for business advice, but I never remember to actually do it. Now what if there was a pro-active AI business coach that checked in on me every week? Something to keep me accountable and track my progress building my empire. It could have a database where I could see my progress every single week!!! And what if this AI business coach was a simple email that says “What did you get done this week?” So I built this: Elon Email. A weekly 1-on-1 with Elon Musk Every Sunday night for the last month, I’ve been getting a weekly email from Elon Musk saying “What did you get done this week?” I take a few minutes to write back with everything I got done that week: new revenue metrics, a list of the new features I shipped, new employees onboarded, number of workouts, exciting calls and collaboration opportunities, etc. Then an AI trained on Elon would give me tailored advice all in my email. And here's the best part. Rather than a nice friendly soft-spoken AI, I prompted the AI to be as savage and ruthless as Elon with its business advice. And it actually worked. One user said "it's like a slap in the face". I knew with 2025 New Years resolutions coming, I needed to launch it ASAP so I pushed through an all-nighter on Friday and got it launched today. Launch strategy: \> Focus on X (fka Twitter) as main source. I have 31,000 followers on X from the last few years building startups, so I posted my launch this morning there. X is Elon's social media network now so I didn't waste time on other platforms. I basically didn't look up from my phone for like 12 hours (my wife was pissed at me because we're technically on vacation but yolo) and I commented, engaged, and DMed with everyone I could. It paid off with 50,000+ views on the post and nearly 300 likes so far. \> Purposely exclude people. Yes, I know this sounds weird, but you need to purposely exclude some people to focus on the people who will actually use your product. I know a lot of people hate Elon and will hate me for making this. I don't care. I only care about the people who will actually use it aka my customers. The same thing with making it a "savage AI". I know there will be some people who prefer a nice friendly soft AI, but that's not my customer base. The internet is big enough you can find your customer base but you've gotta be willing to exclude some people to speak to the right people! \> Free tier. The weekly Elon email and AI reply is free. I also have a paid tier for a daily email and database access. I know I'm technically losing money on API fees for the free email and AI requests, but it's a loss leader, the costs are actually quite minimal since it's only 1 API request/week, and some % will convert and already have. Doing free was worth it to give people a chance to try it. I hope this helps with your next launch!!!

My Marketing App made $10,000 in 2024. Here is how I target to make $100,000 in 2025:
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MonkDiThis week

My Marketing App made $10,000 in 2024. Here is how I target to make $100,000 in 2025:

You totally get me, I think. It’s a bizarre feeling when you build something, and people appreciate it and are even ready to pay! Pleasant though) In early 2024 my mate and I created a marketing tool that generates ads, content and strategy blocks with a click – Aiter.io. Users can just insert a URL, hit the button and everything is ready. TBH, I built this tool because I’m too lazy to chat with ChatGPT) https://preview.redd.it/ew2kud7ceyde1.png?width=1140&format=png&auto=webp&s=f3fe5b67075858cea3d52278e8063113efa3b97e In 2024 we made $10,000, here is what worked for us: AI directories. Still is the best channel of traffic and clients for us. We listed on TAAFT and other directories scrape TAAFT, so, eventually, we became listed on all major ones. I wrote a Reddit post earlier that explained this process in detail. Email marketing. Gosh, I thought it was dead – I have never been so wrong! We set up automatic emails that share marketing insights and they have a \~25% open rate + consistently convert people. It works great. Product marketing. Having a free version really helps with word-of-mouth and leads, which can be converted via email. Also, we consistently worked on product improvement. I’d say, that our free updates give people a feeling that the devs care about their stuff that’s why they are more confident investing in it. Google Ads. TBH, we had a shitty landing page all the time because were busy with the product. So, Google Ads didn’t work well for us. But we’ve launched the 2.0 version which has a better landing page, and will try it again. Influencers. Worked well for us, but we didn’t pay a dime for this. They just found our tool on directories and created videos about Aiter, so it was a sporadic marketing channel for us. We hope to change it in 2025. We see that our product works and attracts the audience, so we want to deliver and get more in 2025. Here is the plan: Product: add ad banners and video generation. So far, we generate only text data and it’s not so valuable in the time of ChatGPT and Claude. But to generate a high-quality ad banner is still challenging, so we put this on our roadmap. Another feature – one-click market analysis to get marketing insights. Become a TOP50 tool on TAAFT. We’ve become a top tool in our category (content generation) but will need to promote our profile on the profile far more aggressively to get into TOP50 Email marketing. We are fools because we almost didn’t have product emails that explain how it works. Will fix it. Also, we are considering participating more in paid newsletters, like collaborating with Substack influencers. Youtube marketing. Search for low-tail marketing keywords on YouTube and create videos on them, placing my product in them. Blog. Our new platform is Webflow which gives a lot of flexibility in terms of blogging. So, we will repeat the YouTube strategy with blogging. Paid marketing. With an updated landing page, we hope that paid campaigns will work better. We plan to launch campaigns that target different jobs to be done and customer objections to find the right message. Product Management. For 2025, our two key product metrics are retention and product activation rate. For this, we plan to simplify onboarding and make it simpler as well as conduct a lot of in-depth interviews to understand how we can retain users better. Funding. All of this exciting stuff requires money, so we are in the process of securing funding (fingers crossed). Having an indie project is exciting and invigorating. With all these activities, I hope we will achieve the goal of $100,000 in 2025. And what are your goals and marketing steps for 2025? Or maybe you could share some exciting marketing ideas I overlooked?

I retired at 32 from my side project. Here's the path I took.
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inputoriginThis week

I retired at 32 from my side project. Here's the path I took.

EDIT 2: Thanks for the award kind stranger! I've stopped responding to reddit comments for this post. I'm adding an FAQ to the original post based on the most common high quality questions. If you have a question that you're dying to know the answer to and that only I can help you with (vs. Google, ChatGPT, etc.), DM me. EDIT: I love how controversial this post has become (50% upvote rate), and only in this subreddit (vs. other subreddits that I posted the same content in). I trust that the open-minded half of you will find something useful in this post and my other posts and comments. I retired at 32 years old, in large part thanks to a B2C SaaS app that I developed on my own. Now, I don't have to work in order to cover my living expenses, and wouldn't have to work for quite a while. In other words, I can finally sip mai tais at the beach. I've condensed how I got there into this post. First, a super simplified timeline of events, followed by some critical details. Timeline 2013 Graduated college in the US 2013 Started first corporate job 2013 Started side project (B2C app) that would eventually lead to my retirement 2020 Started charging for use of my B2C app (was free, became freemium) 2021 Quit my last corporate job 2022 Retired: time freedom attained Details First, some summary statistics of my path to retirement: 9 years: time between graduating college and my retirement. 8 years: total length of my career where I worked at some corporate day job. 7 years: time it took my B2C app to make its first revenue dollar 2 years: time between my first dollar of SaaS revenue and my retirement. "Something something overnight success a decade in the making". I got extremely lucky on my path to retirement, both in terms of the business environment I was in and who I am as a person. I'd also like to think that some of the conscious decisions I made along the way contributed to my early retirement. Lucky Breaks Was born in the US middle class. Had a natural affinity for computer programming and entrepreneurial mindset (initiative, resourcefulness, pragmatism, courage, growth mindset). Had opportunities to develop these mindsets throughout life. Got into a good college which gave me the credentials to get high paying corporate jobs. Was early to a platform that saw large adoption (see "barnacle on whale" strategy). Business niche is shareworthy: my SaaS received free media. Business niche is relatively stable, and small enough to not be competitive. "Skillful" Decisions I decided to spend the nights and weekends of my early career working on side projects in the hopes that one would hit. I also worked a day job to support myself and build my savings. My launch funnel over roughly 7 years of working on side projects: Countless side projects prototyped. 5 side projects publically launched. 2 side projects made > $0. 1 side project ended up becoming the SaaS that would help me retire. At my corporate day jobs, I optimized for learning and work-life balance. My learning usually stalled after a year or two at one company, so I’d quit and find another job. I invested (and continute to do so) in physical and mental wellbeing via regular workouts, meditation, journaling, traveling, and good food. My fulfilling non-work-life re-energized me for my work-life, and my work-life supported my non-work-life: a virtuous cycle. I automated the most time-consuming aspects of my business (outside of product development). Nowadays, I take long vacations and work at most 20 hours a week / a three-day work week . I decided to keep my business entirely owned and operated by me. It's the best fit for my work-style (high autonomy, deep focus, fast decision-making) and need to have full creative freedom and control. I dated and married a very supportive and inspiring partner. I try not to succumb to outrageous lifestyle creep, which keeps my living expenses low and drastically extends my burn-rate. Prescription To share some aphorisms I’ve leaned with the wantrepreneurs or those who want to follow a similar path: Maximize your at bats, because you only need one hit. Bias towards action. Launch quickly. Get your ideas out into the real world for feedback. Perfect is the enemy of good. If you keep swinging and improving, you'll hit the ball eventually. Keep the big picture in mind. You don't necessarily need a home-run to be happy: a base hit will often do the job. Think about what matters most to you in life: is it a lot of money or status? Or is it something more satisfying, and often just as if not more attainable, like freedom, loving relationships, or fulfillment? Is what you’re doing now a good way to get what you want? Or is there a better way? At more of a micro-level of "keep the big picture in mind", I often see talented wantrepreneurs get stuck in the weeds of lower-level optimizations, usually around technical design choices. They forget (or maybe subconsciously avoid) the higher-level and more important questions of customer development, user experience, and distribution. For example: “Are you solving a real problem?” or “Did you launch an MVP and what did your users think?” Adopt a growth mindset. Believe that you are capable of learning whatever you need to learn in order to do what you want to do. The pain of regret is worse than the pain of failure. I’ve noticed that fear of failure is the greatest thing holding people back from taking action towards their dreams. Unless failure means death in your case, a debilitating fear of failure is a surmountable mental block. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take. When all is said and done, we often regret the things we didn't do in life than the things we did. There’s more to life than just work. Blasphemous (at least among my social circle)! But the reality is that many of the dying regret having worked too much in their lives. As Miss Frizzle from The Magic Schoolbus says: "Take chances, make mistakes, get messy!" Original post

I spent 6 months on a web app as a side project, and got 0 users. Here is my story.
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GDbuildsGDThis week

I spent 6 months on a web app as a side project, and got 0 users. Here is my story.

Edit Thank you all so much for your time reading my story. Your support, feedback, criticism, and skepticism; all helped me a lot, and I couldn't appreciate it enough \^\_\^ I very rarely have stuff to post on Reddit, but I share how my project is going on, just random stuff, and memes on X. In case few might want to keep up 👀 TL;DR I spent 6 months on a tool that currently has 0 users. Below is what I learned during my journey, sharing because I believe most mistakes are easily avoidable. Do not overestimate your product and assume it will be an exception to fundamental principles. Principles are there for a reason. Always look for validation before you start. Avoid building products with a low money-to-effort ratio/in very competitive fields. Unless you have the means, you probably won't make it. Pick a problem space, pick your target audience, and talk to them before thinking about a solution. Identify and match their pain points. Only then should you think of a solution. If people are not overly excited or willing to pay in advance for a discounted price, it might be a sign to rethink. Sell one and only one feature at a time. Avoid everything else. If people don't pay for that one core feature, no secondary feature will change their mind. Always spend twice as much time marketing as you do building. You will not get users if they don't know it exists. Define success metrics ("1000 users in 3 months" or "$6000 in the account at the end of 6 months") before you start. If you don't meet them, strongly consider quitting the project. If you can't get enough users to keep going, nothing else matters. VALIDATION, VALIDATION, VALIDATION. Success is not random, but most of our first products will not make a success story. Know when to admit failure, and move on. Even if a product of yours doesn't succeed, what you learned during its journey will turn out to be invaluable for your future. My story So, this is the story of a product that I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. As it's the first product I’ve ever built, after watching you all from the sidelines, I have learned a lot, made many mistakes, and did only a few things right. Just sharing what I’ve learned and some insights from my journey so far. I hope that this post will help you avoid the mistakes I made — most of which I consider easily avoidable — while you enjoy reading it, and get to know me a little bit more 🤓. A slow start after many years Summ isn’t the first product I really wanted to build. Lacking enough dev skills to even get started was a huge blocker for so many years. In fact, the first product I would’ve LOVED to build was a smart personal shopping assistant. I had this idea 4 years ago; but with no GPT, no coding skills, no technical co-founder, I didn’t have the means to make it happen. I still do not know if such a tool exists and is good enough. All I wanted was a tool that could make data-based predictions about when to buy stuff (“buy a new toothpaste every three months”) and suggest physical products that I might need or be strongly interested in. AFAIK, Amazon famously still struggles with the second one. Fast-forward a few years, I learned the very basics of HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS. Still was not there to build a product; but good enough to code my design portfolio from scratch. Yet, I couldn’t imagine myself building a product using Vanilla JS. I really hated it, I really sucked at it. So, back to tutorial hell, and to learn about this framework I just heard about: React.React introduced so many new concepts to me. “Thinking in React” is a phrase we heard a lot, and with quite good reasons. After some time, I was able to build very basic tutorial apps, both in React, and React Native; but I have to say that I really hated coding for mobile. At this point, I was already a fan of productivity apps, and had a concept for a time management assistant app in my design portfolio. So, why not build one? Surely, it must be easy, since every coding tutorial starts with a todo app. ❌ WRONG! Building a basic todo app is easy enough, but building one good enough for a place in the market was a challenge I took and failed. I wasted one month on that until I abandoned the project for good. Even if I continued working on it, as the productivity landscape is overly competitive, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to cover costs, assuming I make any. Since I was (and still am) in between jobs, I decided to abandon the project. 👉 What I learned: Do not start projects with a low ratio of money to effort and time. Example: Even if I get 500 monthly users, 200 of which are paid users (unrealistically high number), assuming an average subscription fee of $5/m (such apps are quite cheap, mostly due to the high competition), it would make me around $1000 minus any occurring costs. Any founder with a product that has 500 active users should make more. Even if it was relatively successful, due to the high competition, I wouldn’t make any meaningful money. PS: I use Todoist today. Due to local pricing, I pay less than $2/m. There is no way I could beat this competitive pricing, let alone the app itself. But, somehow, with a project that wasn’t even functional — let alone being an MVP — I made my first Wi-Fi money: Someone decided that the domain I preemptively purchased is worth something. By this point, I had already abandoned the project, certainly wasn’t going to renew the domain, was looking for a FT job, and a new project that I could work on. And out of nowhere, someone hands me some free money — who am I not to take it? Of course, I took it. The domain is still unused, no idea why 🤔. Ngl, I still hate the fact that my first Wi-Fi money came from this. A new idea worth pursuing? Fast-forward some weeks now. Around March, I got this crazy idea of building an email productivity tool. We all use emails, yet we all hate them. So, this must be fixed. Everyone uses emails, in fact everyone HAS TO use emails. So, I just needed to build a tool and wait for people to come. This was all, really. After all, the problem space is huge, there is enough room for another product, everyone uses emails, no need for any further validation, right? ❌ WRONG ONCE AGAIN! We all hear from the greatest in the startup landscape that we must validate our ideas with real people, yet at least some of us (guilty here 🥸) think that our product will be hugely successful and prove them to be an exception. Few might, but most are not. I certainly wasn't. 👉 Lesson learned: Always validate your ideas with real people. Ask them how much they’d pay for such a tool (not if they would). Much better if they are willing to pay upfront for a discount, etc. But even this comes later, keep reading. I think the difference between “How much” and “If” is huge for two reasons: (1) By asking them for “How much”, you force them to think in a more realistic setting. (2) You will have a more realistic idea on your profit margins. Based on my competitive analysis, I already had a solution in my mind to improve our email usage standards and email productivity (huge mistake), but I did my best to learn about their problems regarding those without pushing the idea too hard. The idea is this: Generate concise email summaries with suggested actions, combine them into one email, and send it at their preferred times. Save as much as time the AI you end up with allows. After all, everyone loves to save time. So, what kind of validation did I seek for? Talked with only a few people around me about this crazy, internet-breaking idea. The responses I got were, now I see, mediocre; no one got excited about it, just said things along the lines of “Cool idea, OK”. So, any reasonable person in this situation would think “Okay, not might not be working”, right? Well, I did not. I assumed that they were the wrong audience for this product, and there was this magical land of user segments waiting eagerly for my product, yet unknowingly. To this day, I still have not reached this magical place. Perhaps, it didn’t exist in the first place. If I cannot find it, whether it exists or not doesn’t matter. I am certainly searching for it. 👉 What I should have done: Once I decide on a problem space (time management, email productivity, etc.), I should decide on my potential user segments, people who I plan to sell my product to. Then I should go talk to those people, ask them about their pains, then get to the problem-solving/ideation phase only later. ❗️ VALIDATION COMES FROM THE REALITY OUTSIDE. What validation looks like might change from product to product; but what invalidation looks like is more or less the same for every product. Nico Jeannen told me yesterday “validation = money in the account” on Twitter. This is the ultimate form of validation your product could get. If your product doesn’t make any money, then something is invalidated by reality: Your product, you, your idea, who knows? So, at this point, I knew a little bit of Python from spending some time in tutorial hell a few years ago, some HTML/CSS/JS, barely enough React to build a working app. React could work for this project, but I needed easy-to-implement server interactivity. Luckily, around this time, I got to know about this new gen of indie hackers, and learned (but didn’t truly understand) about their approach to indie hacking, and this library called Nextjs. How good Next.js still blows my mind. So, I was back to tutorial hell once again. But, this time, with a promise to myself: This is the last time I would visit tutorial hell. Time to start building this "ground-breaking idea" Learning the fundamentals of Next.js was easier than learning of React unsurprisingly. Yet, the first time I managed to run server actions on Next.js was one of the rarest moments that completely blew my mind. To this day, I reject the idea that it is something else than pure magic under its hood. Did I absolutely need Nextjs for this project though? I do not think so. Did it save me lots of time? Absolutely. Furthermore, learning Nextjs will certainly be quite helpful for other projects that I will be tackling in the future. Already got a few ideas that might be worth pursuing in the head in case I decide to abandon Summ in the future. Fast-forward few weeks again: So, at this stage, I had a barely working MVP-like product. Since the very beginning, I spent every free hour (and more) on this project as speed is essential. But, I am not so sure it was worth it to overwork in retrospect. Yet, I know I couldn’t help myself. Everything is going kinda smooth, so what’s the worst thing that could ever happen? Well, both Apple and Google announced their AIs (Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, respectively) will have email summarization features for their products. Summarizing singular emails is no big deal, after all there were already so many similar products in the market. I still think that what truly matters is a frictionless user experience, and this is why I built this product in a certain way: You spend less than a few minutes setting up your account, and you get to enjoy your email summaries, without ever visiting its website again. This is still a very cool concept I really like a lot. So, at this point: I had no other idea that could be pursued, already spent too much time on this project. Do I quit or not? This was the question. Of course not. I just have to launch this product as quickly as possible. So, I did something right, a quite rare occurrence I might say: Re-planned my product, dropped everything secondary to the core feature immediately (save time on reading emails), tried launching it asap. 👉 Insight: Sell only one core feature at one time. Drop anything secondary to this core feature. Well, my primary occupation is product design. So one would expect that a product I build must have stellar design. I considered any considerable time spent on design at this stage would be simply wasted. I still think this is both true and wrong: True, because if your product’s core benefits suck, no one will care about your design. False, because if your design looks amateurish, no one will trust you and your product. So, I always targeted an average level design with it and the way this tool works made it quite easy as I had to design only 2 primary pages: Landing page and user portal (which has only settings and analytics pages). However, even though I knew spending time on design was not worth much of my time, I got a bit “greedy”: In fact, I redesigned those pages three times, and still ended up with a so-so design that I am not proud of. 👉 What I would do differently: Unless absolutely necessary, only one iteration per stage as long as it works. This, in my mind, applies to everything. If your product’s A feature works, then no need to rewrite it from scratch for any reason, or even refactor it. When your product becomes a success, and you absolutely need that part of your codebase to be written, do so, but only then. Ready to launch, now is th etime for some marketing, right? By July 26, I already had a “launchable” product that barely works (I marked this date on a Notion docs, this is how I know). Yet, I had spent almost no time on marketing, sales, whatever. After all, “You build and they will come”. Did I know that I needed marketing? Of course I did, but knowingly didn’t. Why, you might ask. Well, from my perspective, it had to be a dev-heavy product; meaning that you spend most of your time on developing it, mostly coding skills. But, this is simply wrong. As a rule of thumb, as noted by one of the greatests, Marc Louvion, you should spend at least twice of the building time on marketing. ❗️ Time spent on building \* 2 people don’t know your product > they don’t use your product > you don’t get users > you don’t make money Easy as that. Following the same reasoning, a slightly different approach to planning a project is possible. Determine an approximate time to complete the project with a high level project plan. Let’s say 6 months. By the reasoning above, 2 months should go into building, and 4 into marketing. If you need 4 months for building instead of 2, then you need 8 months of marketing, which makes the time to complete the project 12 months. If you don’t have that much time, then quit the project. When does a project count as completed? Well, in reality, never. But, I think we have to define success conditions even before we start for indie projects and startups; so we know when to quit when they are not met. A success condition could look like “Make $6000 in 12 months” or “Have 3000 users in 6 months”. It all depends on the project. But, once you set it, it should be set in stone: You don’t change it unless absolutely necessary. I suspect there are few principles that make a solopreneur successful; and knowing when to quit and when to continue is definitely one of them. Marc Louvion is famously known for his success, but he got there after failing so many projects. To my knowledge, the same applies to Nico Jeannen, Pieter Levels, or almost everyone as well. ❗️ Determining when to continue even before you start will definitely help in the long run. A half-aed launch Time-leap again. Around mid August, I “soft launched” my product. By soft launch, I mean lazy marketing. Just tweeting about it, posting it on free directories. Did I get any traffic? Surely I did. Did I get any users? Nope. Only after this time, it hit me: “Either something is wrong with me, or with this product” Marketing might be a much bigger factor for a project’s success after all. Even though I get some traffic, not convincing enough for people to sign up even for a free trial. The product was still perfect in my eyes at the time (well, still is ^(\_),) so the right people are not finding my product, I thought. Then, a question that I should have been asking at the very first place, one that could prevent all these, comes to my mind: “How do even people search for such tools?” If we are to consider this whole journey of me and my so-far-failed product to be an already destined failure, one metric suffices to show why. Search volume: 30. Even if people have such a pain point, they are not looking for email summaries. So, almost no organic traffic coming from Google. But, as a person who did zero marketing on this or any product, who has zero marketing knowledge, who doesn’t have an audience on social media, there is not much I could do. Finally, it was time to give up. Or not… In my eyes, the most important element that makes a founder (solo or not) successful (this, I am not by any means) is to solve problems. ❗️ So, the problem was this: “People are not finding my product by organic search” How do I make sure I get some organic traffic and gets more visibility? Learn digital marketing and SEO as much as I can within very limited time. Thankfully, without spending much time, I came across Neil Patel's YT channel, and as I said many times, it is an absolute gold mine. I learned a lot, especially about the fundamentals, and surely it will be fruitful; but there is no magic trick that could make people visit your website. SEO certainly helps, but only when people are looking for your keywords. However, it is truly a magical solution to get in touch with REAL people that are in your user segments: 👉 Understand your pains, understand their problems, help them to solve them via building products. I did not do this so far, have to admit. But, in case you would like to have a chat about your email usage, and email productivity, just get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear about them. Getting ready for a ProductHunt launch The date was Sept 1. And I unlocked an impossible achievement: Running out of Supabase’s free plan’s Egres limit while having zero users. I was already considering moving out of their Cloud server and managing a Supabase CLI service on my Hetzner VPS for some time; but never ever suspected that I would have to do this quickly. The cheapest plan Supabase offers is $25/month; yet, at that point, I am in between jobs for such a long time, basically broke, and could barely afford that price. One or two months could be okay, but why pay for it if I will eventually move out of their Cloud service? So, instead of paying $25, I spent two days migrating out of Supabase Cloud. Worth my time? Definitely not. But, when you are broke, you gotta do stupid things. This was the first time that I felt lucky to have zero users: I have no idea how I would manage this migration if I had any. I think this is one of the core tenets of an indie hacker: Controlling their own environment. I can’t remember whose quote this is, but I suspect it was Naval: Entrepreneurs have an almost pathological need to control their own fate. They will take any suffering if they can be in charge of their destiny, and not have it in somebody else’s hands. What’s truly scary is, at least in my case, we make people around us suffer at the expense of our attempting to control our own fates. I know this period has been quite hard on my wife as well, as I neglected her quite a bit, but sadly, I know that this will happen again. It is something that I can barely help with. Still, so sorry. After working the last two weeks on a ProductHunt Launch, I finally launched it this Tuesday. Zero ranking, zero new users, but 36 kind people upvoted my product, and many commented and provided invaluable feedback. I couldn't be more grateful for each one of them 🙏. Considering all these, what lies in the future of Summ though? I have no idea, to be honest. On one hand, I have zero users, have no job, no income. So, I need a way to make money asap. On the other hand, the whole idea of it revolves around one core premise (not an assumption) that I am not so willing to share; and I couldn’t have more trust in it. This might not be the best iteration of it, however I certainly believe that email usage is one of the best problem spaces one could work on. 👉 But, one thing is for certain: I need to get in touch with people, and talk with them about this product I built so far. In fact, this is the only item on my agenda. Nothing else will save my brainchild <3. Below are some other insights and notes that I got during my journey; as they do not 100% fit into this story, I think it is more suitable to list them here. I hope you enjoyed reading this. Give Summ a try, it comes with a generous free trial, no credit card required. Some additional notes and insights: Project planning is one of the most underestimated skills for solopreneurs. It saves you enormous time, and helps you to keep your focus up. Building B2B products beats building B2C products. Businesses are very willing to pay big bucks if your product helps them. On the other hand, spending a few hours per user who would pay $5/m probably is not worth your time. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is if no one uses it. If you cannot sell a product in a certain category/niche (or do not know how to sell it), it might be a good idea not to start a project in it. Going after new ideas and ventures is quite risky, especially if you don’t know how to market it. On the other hand, an already established category means that there is already demand. Whether this demand is sufficient or not is another issue. As long as there is enough demand for your product to fit in, any category/niche is good. Some might be better, some might be worse. Unless you are going hardcore B2B, you will need people to find your product by means of organic search. Always conduct thorough keyword research as soon as possible.

Solopreneur making $40k MRR with a No Code SaaS sideproject
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Solopreneur making $40k MRR with a No Code SaaS sideproject

Hey, I'm Elias and I do case studies analyzing successful startups and solopreneurs. I wanted to share the summarized version of this one with you because this entrepreneurial journey blew my mind. This post will be about FormulaBot (ExcelFormulaBot), an AI No Code SaaS founded by David Bressler back in August 2022. FormulaBot is currently making $40k MRR (monthly recurring revenue). How did the founder come up with the idea. David is a data guy who worked in analytics for several years. In July 2022, David got really interested in AI, especially ChatGPT. One night, he tried it out at home, just like we all did back in the time. But in his case, trying ChatGPT gave him a big idea. That idea ended up making him a lot of money and changing the life of 750 million people who use Excel. That night David started by asking GPT easy questions, then complex ones. Since he used Excel a lot and helped his colleagues with it, he thought about an AI that could make Excel easier, like generating formulas from text. He looked online but found nothing. Seeing a big chance, he decided to do something about it. What challenges did the founder face. But David didn’t have any idea about how to develop an app. However, with no-code tools this is not a problem anymore. He discovered Bubble, a no-code web app tool that could connect with the OpenAI API.After, learning Bubble from YouTube tutorials and through trial and error and spending his nights studying the OpenAI API documentation, he launched the first version of the app in around three weeks. Strategies that made the project successful. David validated his idea by posting about ExcelFormulaBot on a Reddit Excel subreddit, receiving surprising attention with 10,000 upvotes. This encouraged him to offer the tool for free to gather feedback. Facing a hefty $4,999 API bill after the Reddit post, David quickly monetized his product with a subscription-based SaaS website. On launch day, 82 customers signed up, surpassing his expectations. A successful Product Hunt launch followed, generating $2.4k in sales within 24 hours, and a TikTok influencer with 4.5 million followers brought in thousands of new users overnight with a viral video. Marketing approach: -Paid ads: FormulaBot boosted website traffic with Paid Ads, notably on Google Ads, prioritizing Quality Score. This ensured ads aligned better with user searches, maximizing visibility and cost-efficiency, targeting those seeking Excel formula assistance. -SEO: a) Content/Keyword optimization: FormulaBot improved its SEO by making helpful pages about Excel formulas, like guides on topics such as "How to use SUMIFS." b) Site Speed Enhancement: David boosted FormulaBot's marketing site speed by moving it from Bubble to Framer, aiming to improve user experience and SEO performance. c) On-page optimization: David optimized FormulaBot's on-page elements by adjusting title tags, meta descriptions, and content to enhance SEO performance and align with search intent. These strategic refinements aimed to address ranking declines and emphasize FormulaBot's uniqueness, ultimately improving its visibility and competitiveness in search results. -Virality: FormulaBot went viral as users found it highly useful and cool. Influencers on platforms like TikTok and Twitter shared it with their followers because they found it valuable. Offering numerous free features further enhanced its appeal. Lessons: successes and mistakes. ✅ Leverage industry expertise: David identified a problem in analytics and used his experience to start an online business addressing it, turning an industry challenge into a profitable venture. ✅ Embrace learning new skills: Despite lacking initial technical know-how, David learned what he needed to develop the software himself, demonstrating a commitment to continuous learning and adaptability crucial for success. ❌ Minimize dependency on third parties: Relying solely on the ChatGPT API poses risks for FormulaBot. Any issues with the API could disrupt functionality and limit scalability. ⁉️ Caution with free tools: Offering a free tool can attract users and drive viral growth, but converting them to paying customers is challenging. Avoid relying solely on a 100% free model unless your revenue comes from non-user sources like ads. For businesses dependent on user subscriptions or purchases, balancing user attraction with conversion challenges is crucial. How could you replicate this idea step-by-step. To replicate the success of FormulaBot and similar AI wrapper startups, it's crucial to tread carefully in a competitive market. Avoid mere replication of existing solutions unless you can offer something distinct or superior. Consider these steps to effectively develop an AI Wrapper/ChatGPT wrapper product using Bubble as a no-code tool: Design the user interface: Utilize Bubble's drag-and-drop editor to create a user-friendly interface with input fields, buttons, and result displays. Set up workflows: Define workflows to connect the interface with the ChatGPT API, enabling seamless interaction between users and the AI. Integrate the ChatGPT API: Obtain the API key from OpenAI and integrate it into your app using Bubble's API connector feature. Test and gather feedback: Thoroughly test your app, soliciting feedback to refine functionality and usability. Refine and optimize: Continuously improve your app based on user input and testing results to enhance performance and user experience. The in-depth version of the case study was originally posted here. Feel free to comment if you have any questions, and let me know which similar ideas you'd like me to analyze.

What are Boilerplates?
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What are Boilerplates?

What are Boilerplates? Boilerplate originally referred to the rolled steel used to make boilers for steam engines in the 19th century. Over time, the term evolved to describe any standardized piece of text or code that can be reused without significant changes. Interest in SaaS has been on the rise, and many more people now want to build products. However, building products from scratch takes a lot of time, and it can be extremely frustrating. Enter SaaS Boilerplates With the standardization of stacks and basic systems that govern SaaS tools, it has become evident that there was a need, and the time was ripe for SaaS Boilerplates. SaaS Boilerplates come with landing pages, website components, authentication modules, payment modules, and various other standard features that can save developers a significant amount of time and cost. The market is flooded with Boilerplates for various tech stacks, such as NextJS, Laravel, Swift, NuxtJS, and so forth. Pros and Cons of Boilerplates Pros Save a significant amount of time and money Reduce frustration for developers as the redundant tasks are taken care of Boilerplates often follow best practices For anywhere between $49 and $299, they provide terrific value for those looking to build something very quickly Most importantly, Boilerplates also enable aspiring founders and builders with limited technical resources or abilities to ship their products faster and more cheaply. They are beacons of hope for non-technical founders looking to build a product quickly. Cons Limited flexibility May become outdated fairly quickly Setting them up still requires time Similar landing pages and design themes can make the product look like a clone Marc Lou’s Shipfast For most of us, Marc Lou popularized the idea of SaaS Boilerplate. Marc Lou launched Shipfast in August 2023. He had built 27 projects prior to this and Shipfast was nothing but all his basic code organised properly. At that time, there were no solid NextJS boilerplates, and Shipfast just took off. He got traction via Product Hunt, Twitter and Hacker News and soon Shipfast went viral. Shipfast now generates $130K/mo, just 9 months after its launch. Marc has been building Shipfast in public, which has led to a lot of interest in SaaS Boilerplates. The market is now flooded with boilerplates for every major tech stack. Marc reaped the benefits of the first mover’s advantage as well as the social proof via his Shipfast community. I don’t think any other boilerplates are as successful as Shipfast, but there are quite a few good ones out there. Shipixen* has grossed over $20K in the 5 months Makerkit* does \~$3500/mo Moreover, there are many open-source boilerplates available for popular stacks such as NextJS. The Evolution of Boilerplates Boilerplates are quickly turning into no-code/low-code code generation tools. For instance, Shipixen allows you to generate custom code for landing pages, waitlist pages and blogs using a simple User Interface. Boilerplates are perfectly posied to sit between code and no-code. Allow the flexibility of code with the interface of a no-code tool — that will be the core value proposition of SaaS boilerplates. Should you build a Boilerplate? Well, the market is flooded, but I believe there’s still an opportunity to leverage boilerplates. You can build boilerplates for certain types of apps or tools, such as Chrome extensions Boilerplates can act as a great lead funnel for building out a great productized services business No-code/low-code code generation boilerplates can become a big thing if you can help build complex tools Niche tech stack boilerplates may still be lucrative Known strategies for successfully building a boilerplate 👇🏻 Shipfast thrives because of social proof and community SaaSRock generates most of its traffic from its Gumroad listings and blogs Usenextbase and Shipixen are being built in public Many boilerplates start with waitlists They have a very clear value proposition around saving time and cost Design & No-Code Boilerplates Here is the corrected version with improved grammar and clarity: While SaaS (code) boilerplates have become fairly popular, other types of boilerplates are emerging in the market, such as design boilerplates and no-code boilerplates. To be honest, design boilerplates have been around for a while. You will find numerous landing page packs, component libraries, and so forth. Makers are now building kits that leverage standard libraries and technologies such as Tailwind CSS, Daisy UI, and more. Nick Buzz from the famous baked.design has this *50 Landing Page Design Kit* in Tailwind CSS & Figma which is wildly popular. Lastly, there is a trend of no-code boilerplates as well. Mohit is building a Bubble Boilerplate for the popular no-code platform — Bubble. All in all, I think that people want to build products and build them fast. Boilerplates help them save a significant amount of time and cost. More importantly, boilerplates are impulse purchases for people who have not shipped but who want to ship. Introducing BuilderKit.ai We have been building AI SaaS tools for quite a while now. 10+ products across text, image, speech, RAG — we have built em all. We figured that it seems easy but actually building these so called AI Wrappers can be time consuming and frustrating — there is a lot of nuance to it. So we built BuidlerKit.ai — a NextJS SaaS Boilerpalte It takes care of everything from landing pages, authentication, dashboarding, emails, SEO to payments — everything that you need to build your tool. It also comes with 8+ production-ready apps. Moreover, the BuilderKit community is an exclusive community of AI SaaS builders (Pro Only Access) The Pre Orders are now live at https://www.builderkit.ai (First 100 Customers get $100 Off — I think we have already done \~20 odd orders since the announcement yesterday, Grab your seat asap!) Starter Plan $49, Pro Plan @ $99

Running and selling multiple side projects alongside a 9-5
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Running and selling multiple side projects alongside a 9-5

My current side project started 56 days ago when I started writing 1,000 words per day. My core businesses are an agency and job board, and I just needed a creative outlet. The likes of Chris Guillebeau and Nathan Barry attribute their progression to writing so I thought I’d see if it might do the same for me. At first I was just vomiting words onto the screen, I made a blog and wrote mainly technical guides related to my skills. Over time I realised I was writing more and more about running a business as a solopreneur, or lean operator. There is tons of content out there giving you the Birds Eye of going from 0 to £10m. Inspiring stuff, but I think there is a void in real content, explaining the nuts and bolts of the how.  What is the day-to-day like for the solopreneurs who make a good living and have plenty of free time? That’s what I’m striving for anyway. I’m not talking about the 7-figure outliers. Or the ones teaching you to make content so you can have a business teaching others how to make content, and so on. I’m also sick of the ‘I made $X in 5 minutes and how you can too’  So, I started chatting to people in my network who run lean businesses and/or side hustles. I ask them a bit about their journey and ask them to teach something - how they operate, or a skill/process/system/tool that other people like you/me will find useful. One of my first chats was with Sam Dickie, who runs multiple side projects so thought I’d share here, see if others find it useful and get some feedback. I’ve removed all links as I’ve never posted on Reddit before so conscious of not being promotional, I’m posting this stuff to a tiny email list of friends with no upsells. Just finding my feet on whether others find it useful or not: — Sam is a serial entrepreneur who builds projects in his spare time whilst working a 9-5. He’s scaled and sold multiple ventures and currently runs one of the best newsletters out there for builders and entrepreneurs. Building audience through newsletters has always been a cornerstone strategy for him, so, along with sharing his advice on solopreneurism, he’s also generously shared his lean newsletter writing process. About Sam Sam is a Senior Product Manager who has spent the last 15 years working in the tech sector after starting his career as a town planner. In addition to his job he spends some of his spare time building side projects. These have included a 3D printing startup, a tech directory, a newsletter, a beta product directory, and consultancy. Sam is the epitome of making a success out of following your interest and curiosity. It’s clear he enjoys his business ventures and builds in a risk-free way.   It’s often touted by business gurus to avoid building around your interests, but Sam bucks the trend successfully. I think he’s someone who has already found his 1,000 true fans.  Descending rabbit holes, Sam’s journey of invention and curation 3D printing Sam’s first foray into launching a startup was with Fiilo, a 3D printing business. This was at the height of the 3D printing craze and he self-admits that he used the launch as an excuse to buy a 3D printer. He ended up with two and launching a product called GrowGo. GrowGo is a sustainable 3D-printed product that turns any bottle into somewhere that you can grow plants and herbs. He eventually sold this business and the printers, making around £10k. Along the way, he was exposed to various business tasks, including building a website in Weebly, the biggest nocode website builder of the time, and built an API that enabled print on demand for his product. NoCode.Tech The experiences of building as someone non-technical led to numerous friends asking how he built all of this tech. Back then, nocode wasn’t popular, and it had almost zero search volume, so Sam created a basic directory. A quick landing page on Weebly with a basic value prop, a short explanation and a list of the tools he had used before. It hit the top spot on Product Hunt, and he landed 2,000 subscribers in the first 48 hours. But, he hadn’t built it at this point, so he set about getting to work. He built the directory and list to 30,000 subs and monetised the site through advertising. At its peak with Sam, it was receiving about £2,000 per month in ad revenue. He was still working his 9-5 at this point, so thought it might be a good time to exit. The site was still growing, but it was becoming anxiety inducing whilst he was still working full-time. So, he ended up selling the site and making friend’s with the buyer. Fast forwarding a bit, Nocode.tech was eventually acquired by Stackr, a nocode app. Sam was working for their competitor at the time and ended up being offered a job by his friend who acquired the site. All of this from a side project in his area of passion. Creator Club After selling the directory, Sam lost his outlet for sharing his tools and learnings.  Being fascinated with curation and loving sifting through for nuggets, he invested more time into his personal website and launched Creator Club newsletter. Sam writes monthly and currently has over 8,000 subs. It’s one of the few newsletters that I let bypass my email filters and land in my main inbox. Life as a Part-Time Multipreneur Side Hustler If it’s not obvious already Sam is a curiosity led business creator. He’s found that the products without a revenue focus or intention have ironically outperformed those created for the sole purpose of creating money. He enjoys working on his side hustles. He could have run the Nocode.Tech for 10 more years and wouldn’t have tired of it as it’s a byproduct of his interest. For this reason, he has also created the Beta Directory, simply because he loves unearthing early-stage products. He admits he gets the fear when he thinks about quitting his 9-5, although he suspects if he devoted the same energy to one of his projects it could replace his income (no doubts from me here). This same fear means that he can run his ventures with less fear. This way, he can experiment with freedom and isn’t risking the ranch with a young family to consider. For example, recently he stopped paid sponsors on his newsletter as it was more stress than the value of the income to him. Sam divides his time on evenings and weekends (unequally) between the following: Creator Club Validation Co Beta directory Consultancy The pure side hustle status magnifies the need to run lean, let’s jump into his process…. Sam’s lean newsletter curation and creation process Starting out publishing his personal newsletter Going against his expertise, Sam originally over-engineered his process.  He curated with Feedly and tried to automate the full writing process with Zapier. The trouble is that there are too many points of failure which can lead the whole  chain to break down, and you spend more time fixing the system. For a 200 subscriber newsletter, he needed to pare things back. His set-up now Sam scaled back and now simple builds automations when he needs them. He keeps the process simple, right down to the design and any welcome automations. Keeping things real We touched on the trend that keeping things raw is better. Content has come full circle with the advent of AI. Everything looks too perfect and consequently, people’s tastes are changing. Sam mentioned watermarks that show content isn’t AI written, and we referenced content such as Greg Isenberg’s sketches, and Chris Donnelly’s image posts. \\Step by Step Process:\\ Using Stoop Inbox to manage sources Curation with Pocket Managing content with Airtable and Zapier Using Bearly to summarise Substack for writing Monitoring content sources Sam uses Stoop Inbox, an RSS curation tool, to manage his content sources. It gives him a dedicated email address for newsletters and he follows an Inbox Zero methodology. He checks in daily in Stoop, and on X, Reddit and IndieHackers. With X, he just uses the standard interface but has been careful to curate his feed, sometimes adding in extra notifications to hear from interesting people. Highlighting content When curating links, Sam uses Arc browser and the Pocket extension to save links. It’s super simple and lightweight. He creates tags which trigger an automation that curates the link to Airtable. If you watch the video, here’s a shoutout to Alice, the AI interface I use which has recently featured on Product Hunt. It’s a fantastic tool with bags of potential to enhance a solopreneur’s life. Ranking and sorting content He sends the links indexed using Pocket to a basic Airtable base via Zapier. From there, he grades the content and sets aside some time to read it in more depth. Pocket pulls through the title, metadata, and URL link. Review Sam does this manually but has used a tool as a shortcut for digesting long form content — Bearly.ai. Bearly.ai was created by Trung Phan and linking back to raw content, Trung is 1/3 of the hosts on the Not Investment Advice podcast. Its irreverent style and thumbnail are an example of a successful podcast that doesn’t over polish. Writing it all up Being a huge Notion fan (check out the free templates on his site), Sam originally used Notion for writing and linked it into Revue. When Elon sunsetted Revue, he switched to Substack. He loves the Substack interface so drafts in Substack based on a duplication of last month’s edition. Before publishing, Sam runs through a 10-point Notion checklist, which he shared with me. Parting Advice Keep your tool stack as lean as possible. Avoid tool switching to the shiny new object. Getting launched quickly is key. Don’t think that you have to be everywhere for distribution, Sam sticks with what he knows on X and LinkedIn. Overall, he advises just keeping things simple and therefore minimising risk. Resources He says they’re cliche, but I don’t agree; they’re timeless. Paul Graham of Y Combinator is someone Sam recommends following. He doesn’t write much, which is great as Sam gets anxiety when someone good often writes and he can’t keep up with the writing. His content is well thought out and distills complex concepts in entrepreneurship and startups. In addition, Sam loves Naval Ravikant’s approach. He mentions checking out the Almanac of Naval Ravikant for collected wisdom. Follow Sam’s Journey Again, not going to link here but you can find Sam’s stuff easily enough if you want to. His personal website is beautiful and contains loads of free downloads. He has also curated personal websites he admires if you need some inspiration. Sam is a super nice guy so reach out to him, I did before I started my personal blog recently, and he gave me some great advice. Also, worth keeping an eye on Validation Co, where he aims to help early-stage makers and creators validate their ideas. He’s building super slow — trying to enjoy the process without unachievable deadlines. Maintaining his stamina and passion. Amazing, I hope he writes more about that soon! -- That’s my second shot at an interview, hope you enjoyed it and found something useful in it. I’m talking to a marketplace founder who spends 2–3 hours per month his project, a multiple job board owner with a 9-5 and a leading book designer next. As this is my side project, should I keep going?

I Launched a Side Project That People Love, But Scaling It Is Brutal
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I Launched a Side Project That People Love, But Scaling It Is Brutal

I Built a Side Project with Great Engagement—But It’s Still Not Making Money Six months ago, I started a side project in the consumer AI space: opencharacter.org. It’s been a grind, but I’ve built something people actually love—high retention, strong engagement, and users spending a ton of time on the platform. By all product metrics, it’s a success. But financially? It’s not quite there yet. The biggest challenge hasn’t been technical, managing infrastructure, or even dealing with a community. It’s distribution. Getting people to actually find and use your side project at scale is insanely hard. What’s Worked Reddit – Thoughtful, non-spammy comments in relevant threads drove early users. Instagram – Short-form videos brought in surprising traction. Paid ads – Somewhat effective, but tough to balance customer acquisition costs and revenue. What Hasn’t (Yet) TikTok – Dozens of videos later, still struggling to make it a reliable growth channel. Discord – Great for engagement, but not a strong acquisition channel. Recently, I brought on a co-founder who has done over 100 million views on Instagram Reels in under two years, so I’m hopeful we can crack the growth formula. Because without a scalable system for getting users, even a great side project won’t reach its potential. If I could start over, I’d think much more about distribution before building. Would love to hear from others—how do you drive growth for your side project?

Looking for a technical co-founder to build LinkedIn’s rival
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Looking for a technical co-founder to build LinkedIn’s rival

How do you connect with likeminded people? You see the polished wins everywhere, but what about the messy drafts , the awkward pitches and the moments you’re not sure you’ve got it right? Problem: The whole idea of founding and starting a business can be super intimidating for some people, specially those who don’t know any founders personally, those who don’t have a large network, those who don’t have rich parents with large networks, those not inserted in an entrepreneurial culture like in the US for example (which is my case). Sometimes all you need is the right support network, and too see others do what you want, to know that it’s possible! Everyone has an “ultimate guide” to make 7 figures or build a business on YouTube but NO ONE shoes you the HOW, just the results… I’ve tried joining founder communities, LinkedIn ,Reddit … you name it. Most of these founder communities are inaccessible for regular people and often ask for you to have an already existing business with a min ARR… or their simply geography based and if you’re not in a certain area you can’t really participate… As of LinkedIn… full of empty AI generated posts about how some random dude raised $10m in 7 days. Okay Jonathan, but what about the HOW?? How did you write your first pitch? How many rejection calls did you get? What is an MVP? There simply isn’t a platform out there to document your founding journey and find inspiration within a community of people who are doing the same as you. What better way to feel motivated then to see someone actually document their process? Solution: I’m working on building a social media platform for aspiring/founders to connect through the RAW, UNFILTERED process of turning ideas into reality in REAL time. It’s all gonna be around the “building in public “ concept and content creation. Picture an instagram/tiktok profile where instead of seeing someone’s dog you see them documenting their founding process—from the moment they had the idea, to the moment they launched, you’re going to see the successes, the fails, the rejected calls, all documented through actual content and not some AI generated LinkedIn post. Imagine if you wanted to learn about how Steve Jobs started Apple , you could simply go through his profile on this app—exactly. To make sure all interactions are meaningful people would have to apply. It’s a truly curated community, with REAL people, building REAL things in REAL time, and not just tell us the story of how they did it… Audience: I’m targeting people who have a burning desire of building a business and early stage founders starting their founder journeys, that don’t have a support network and simply don’t know where to start. People who are tired of watching 30 min “ultimate guides “ on how to make it on YouTube from “business gurus” selling courses. People who haven’t reached the min ARR required to join an “exclusive “ founder a community. People who can’t simply just move to the US to get into the “exclusive” YC combinator. People who want to connect with real people building real things and not anonymous people on Reddit, or LinkedIn influencers again trying to promote their services. I believe in the idea because I’m also part of my audience. Have always wanted to start my own thing just never knew how to and where to find a community of likeminded people . I don’t know any founders myself, I come from a non-entrepreneurial society and I’d pay good money to access a community of REAL passionate founders building REAL things, in REAL time. This would be my first ever business, and I want to share my journey building it and hopefully inspire others to just start so I’ve created a mailing list to keep anyone interested in the project updated on my fails , learnings and successes. I’m not worried about “making it” but just “starting” and hopefully reach the right audience and inspire anyone to start whatever they have marinating in their thoughts. If you’re a founder struggling with staying consistent or an aspiring founder with an insane desire of starting and don’t know how to start, I’d love to get your feedback on what’s stopping you, your challenges starting out and what you’d find useful in such platform. And finally would this be something that interests you?? Feel free to subscribe to get new updates 🫶🏼 : https://mailchi.mp/037c56b89994/d-founder PS: casually looking for a technical co-founder

Things I did to promote my product, and how they turned out
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Things I did to promote my product, and how they turned out

(I will share more updates in the future, you can find me on Twitter and/or Mastodon) Ask any ten indie developers about the toughest part of their job, and nine will likely say "marketing." I recently got a taste of this firsthand when I launched Xylect. Here's a rundown of my promotional attempts - hopefully, my experiences can help fellow developers out there. Podcast Community (✅ Success) I kicked things off by promoting Xylect in my podcast listener group. It wasn't a blockbuster, but I managed to sell a few copies and got some invaluable feedback from friends. Shoutout to those early supporters! Reddit r/macapps (✅ Success) Having had some luck promoting open-source projects on Reddit before, I decided to make r/macapps my first stop in the English-speaking world. I made an app to help you automate boring tasks with one click This post turned out to be a hit! I sold about ten copies and got a ton of useful feedback. Users pointed out compatibility issues with PopClip and suggested improvements for the website. One Italian user even requested localization, which I happily added. https://preview.redd.it/y4fuwh6hleqd1.png?width=959&format=png&auto=webp&s=7bb1b68cbf8a4f94998999e0832b9b7bd85bac67 https://preview.redd.it/8uu4cmyhleqd1.png?width=683&format=png&auto=webp&s=8f1744636aee8074b0e7491a334ef06076b143b0 I also got an intriguing email from a French user - more on that later. More Reddit Posts (❌ Failure) Riding high on my r/macapps success, I branched out to r/SideProject, r/Entrepreneur, and r/indiehackers. These subreddits frown upon direct self-promotion, so I took a softer approach with an article: The unexpected emotional cost of being an indiehacker While the article was heartfelt, it fell flat. Across all three posts, I got a grand total of three comments - two of which were complaints about the font size on mobile. Needless to say, I didn't sell a single copy. Hacker News (❌ Failure) As one of the tech world's major forums, I had to give Hacker News a shot. I wasn't too optimistic, given my past experiences there. Posting on HN feels like a mix of luck and dark magic. As expected, my post vanished without a trace - no comments, no sales. I might give it another go someday. If you're curious, you can check out my previous HN submissions. Tools Directory Websites (❌ Failure) These sites have a simple premise: you list your app, they display it. Seemed like an easy way to get some backlinks, right? Well, I learned the hard way that it's not that simple. I stumbled upon a Reddit post where someone claimed to have made a killing with their directory site in just a few days. The catch? Each listing cost $19. The site had a handful of apps listed, so I thought, "Why not? Early bird gets the worm." I paid up and listed Xylect. Spoiler alert: all I got was $19 poorer 🥲 Lesson learned: These directory sites won't magically sell your product. At best, they're just glorified backlinks. There might be some value in paid promotions on these platforms, but I can't speak to that from experience. V2EX (❌ Failure) After striking out in the English-speaking world, I turned my attention to the Chinese market, starting with V2EX (think of it as China's hybrid of HN and Reddit). This turned out to be my most unexpected flop. Here's the post: [\[Launch Discount\] Mac's most powerful AI search (Perplexity + Wikipedia + Google), boost your efficiency tenfold with one click. No API key required, no prompt needed, no token limit 🔥 - V2EX](https://www.v2ex.com/t/1064930?p=1#reply36) I'd seen decent engagement on other promo posts, so I had high hopes. I posted late at night (US time) and went to bed dreaming of waking up to a flood of comments. Reality check: The next morning, I had exactly one reply - from Kilerd, a loyal podcast listener showing some love. I was baffled. After re-reading my post, I realized I'd missed a crucial element: promo codes. A quick scan of popular posts confirmed my suspicion. Nearly every successful promo post was offering codes, and most comments were just base64-encoded email addresses. Talk about a facepalm moment. I scrambled to add a note about an upcoming free trial and invited users to drop their emails. This got the ball rolling with some code requests, but by then, the damage was done. The post fizzled out, and I didn't sell a single copy 🫠 A French Friend's Newsletter (✅ Success) At this point, my promotional efforts were looking pretty grim. My sales chart had a depressing stretch of flatline. But then, a glimmer of hope appeared in my inbox. Remember that French user I mentioned earlier? He ran a newsletter called vvmac and offered to feature Xylect if I added French support and sent him a free license. It was an offer I couldn't refuse. What followed was a crash course in French localization (thank you, Claude!) and the start of an incredible partnership. This guy was the most thorough beta tester I've ever encountered. We exchanged over sixty emails, covering everything from translations to UI tweaks to bug fixes. His response time was lightning-fast - I'd fix a bug, and five minutes later, he'd confirm it was sorted. The result? A much-improved Xylect and a glowing feature in his newsletter. https://preview.redd.it/ylcq2wxoleqd1.png?width=991&format=png&auto=webp&s=ee395110f50417d5c7f61318f27bf3dc30247809 I'm still in awe of his dedication. He single-handedly transformed Xylect from a buggy mess into a polished product. I'll be forever grateful for his help. The newsletter feature led to a few more sales, but honestly, that felt like a bonus at that point. Influencers (❌ Failure) I knew from the start that to really make waves, I'd need influencer backing. So, I added a note offering free licenses to content creators willing to collaborate. https://preview.redd.it/tyb2m1rqleqd1.png?width=799&format=png&auto=webp&s=56eabf126e772515322595613c546e6ba69fb431 I did get one taker: Hey, I'll be honest, I am not a huge content creator but I think I put a lot of effort in evaluating and figuring out which apps work... So I was wondering if I could get a license in case you are willing to share it. Thank you for considering. Have a great weekend. But I knew I needed to aim higher. With the new French localization, I thought I'd try my luck with some French-speaking Mac YouTubers. I crafted emails highlighting how Xylect could help their French audience with English content. https://preview.redd.it/07oqzemrleqd1.png?width=542&format=png&auto=webp&s=3d160c1d149f28e9029816a277c6ab2496fcd57e After days of silence, I got one reply. It was... not what I was hoping for: Hi, Thank you for your proposal. I can help you to promote your service on Tiktok, Instagram et YouTube, with unique short video. Price for this project is 3500€. Unless I've completely lost my marbles, there's no way I'm dropping 3500€ on promotion. Sure, given their follower count (YouTube: 348K, TikTok: 2.7M, Instagram: 400K), it's not an outrageous ask. For some products, it might even be worth it. But for Xylect? No way. I also reached out to a Chinese influencer on Xiaohongshu, but they weren't interested. Back to the drawing board. Conclusion If you've made it this far, you've probably realized this isn't exactly a success story. My search for effective promotional channels came up largely empty-handed. I'd naively thought that my success with open-source projects would translate seamlessly to the indie dev world. Boy, was I wrong. As I mentioned in my previous article, open-source projects create a dynamic where users feel indebted to developers for their free labor. But in the commercial world of indie development, that dynamic completely flips. While this experience was often frustrating, it was also enlightening - which was kind of the point. As my first foray into indie development, my main goal was to learn the ropes and understand the process. Making money would've been nice, sure, but it wasn't my primary focus. Thanks for sticking with me through this post. I will share more updates in the future, you can follow me on  Twitter and/or Mastodon.

I spent 6 months on a web app as a side project, and got 0 users. Here is my story.
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I spent 6 months on a web app as a side project, and got 0 users. Here is my story.

Edit Thank you all so much for your time reading my story. Your support, feedback, criticism, and skepticism; all helped me a lot, and I couldn't appreciate it enough \^\_\^ I very rarely have stuff to post on Reddit, but I share how my project is going on, just random stuff, and memes on X. In case few might want to keep up 👀 TL;DR I spent 6 months on a tool that currently has 0 users. Below is what I learned during my journey, sharing because I believe most mistakes are easily avoidable. Do not overestimate your product and assume it will be an exception to fundamental principles. Principles are there for a reason. Always look for validation before you start. Avoid building products with a low money-to-effort ratio/in very competitive fields. Unless you have the means, you probably won't make it. Pick a problem space, pick your target audience, and talk to them before thinking about a solution. Identify and match their pain points. Only then should you think of a solution. If people are not overly excited or willing to pay in advance for a discounted price, it might be a sign to rethink. Sell one and only one feature at a time. Avoid everything else. If people don't pay for that one core feature, no secondary feature will change their mind. Always spend twice as much time marketing as you do building. You will not get users if they don't know it exists. Define success metrics ("1000 users in 3 months" or "$6000 in the account at the end of 6 months") before you start. If you don't meet them, strongly consider quitting the project. If you can't get enough users to keep going, nothing else matters. VALIDATION, VALIDATION, VALIDATION. Success is not random, but most of our first products will not make a success story. Know when to admit failure, and move on. Even if a product of yours doesn't succeed, what you learned during its journey will turn out to be invaluable for your future. My story So, this is the story of a product that I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. As it's the first product I’ve ever built, after watching you all from the sidelines, I have learned a lot, made many mistakes, and did only a few things right. Just sharing what I’ve learned and some insights from my journey so far. I hope that this post will help you avoid the mistakes I made — most of which I consider easily avoidable — while you enjoy reading it, and get to know me a little bit more 🤓. A slow start after many years Summ isn’t the first product I really wanted to build. Lacking enough dev skills to even get started was a huge blocker for so many years. In fact, the first product I would’ve LOVED to build was a smart personal shopping assistant. I had this idea 4 years ago; but with no GPT, no coding skills, no technical co-founder, I didn’t have the means to make it happen. I still do not know if such a tool exists and is good enough. All I wanted was a tool that could make data-based predictions about when to buy stuff (“buy a new toothpaste every three months”) and suggest physical products that I might need or be strongly interested in. AFAIK, Amazon famously still struggles with the second one. Fast-forward a few years, I learned the very basics of HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS. Still was not there to build a product; but good enough to code my design portfolio from scratch. Yet, I couldn’t imagine myself building a product using Vanilla JS. I really hated it, I really sucked at it. So, back to tutorial hell, and to learn about this framework I just heard about: React.React introduced so many new concepts to me. “Thinking in React” is a phrase we heard a lot, and with quite good reasons. After some time, I was able to build very basic tutorial apps, both in React, and React Native; but I have to say that I really hated coding for mobile. At this point, I was already a fan of productivity apps, and had a concept for a time management assistant app in my design portfolio. So, why not build one? Surely, it must be easy, since every coding tutorial starts with a todo app. ❌ WRONG! Building a basic todo app is easy enough, but building one good enough for a place in the market was a challenge I took and failed. I wasted one month on that until I abandoned the project for good. Even if I continued working on it, as the productivity landscape is overly competitive, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to cover costs, assuming I make any. Since I was (and still am) in between jobs, I decided to abandon the project. 👉 What I learned: Do not start projects with a low ratio of money to effort and time. Example: Even if I get 500 monthly users, 200 of which are paid users (unrealistically high number), assuming an average subscription fee of $5/m (such apps are quite cheap, mostly due to the high competition), it would make me around $1000 minus any occurring costs. Any founder with a product that has 500 active users should make more. Even if it was relatively successful, due to the high competition, I wouldn’t make any meaningful money. PS: I use Todoist today. Due to local pricing, I pay less than $2/m. There is no way I could beat this competitive pricing, let alone the app itself. But, somehow, with a project that wasn’t even functional — let alone being an MVP — I made my first Wi-Fi money: Someone decided that the domain I preemptively purchased is worth something. By this point, I had already abandoned the project, certainly wasn’t going to renew the domain, was looking for a FT job, and a new project that I could work on. And out of nowhere, someone hands me some free money — who am I not to take it? Of course, I took it. The domain is still unused, no idea why 🤔. Ngl, I still hate the fact that my first Wi-Fi money came from this. A new idea worth pursuing? Fast-forward some weeks now. Around March, I got this crazy idea of building an email productivity tool. We all use emails, yet we all hate them. So, this must be fixed. Everyone uses emails, in fact everyone HAS TO use emails. So, I just needed to build a tool and wait for people to come. This was all, really. After all, the problem space is huge, there is enough room for another product, everyone uses emails, no need for any further validation, right? ❌ WRONG ONCE AGAIN! We all hear from the greatest in the startup landscape that we must validate our ideas with real people, yet at least some of us (guilty here 🥸) think that our product will be hugely successful and prove them to be an exception. Few might, but most are not. I certainly wasn't. 👉 Lesson learned: Always validate your ideas with real people. Ask them how much they’d pay for such a tool (not if they would). Much better if they are willing to pay upfront for a discount, etc. But even this comes later, keep reading. I think the difference between “How much” and “If” is huge for two reasons: (1) By asking them for “How much”, you force them to think in a more realistic setting. (2) You will have a more realistic idea on your profit margins. Based on my competitive analysis, I already had a solution in my mind to improve our email usage standards and email productivity (huge mistake), but I did my best to learn about their problems regarding those without pushing the idea too hard. The idea is this: Generate concise email summaries with suggested actions, combine them into one email, and send it at their preferred times. Save as much as time the AI you end up with allows. After all, everyone loves to save time. So, what kind of validation did I seek for? Talked with only a few people around me about this crazy, internet-breaking idea. The responses I got were, now I see, mediocre; no one got excited about it, just said things along the lines of “Cool idea, OK”. So, any reasonable person in this situation would think “Okay, not might not be working”, right? Well, I did not. I assumed that they were the wrong audience for this product, and there was this magical land of user segments waiting eagerly for my product, yet unknowingly. To this day, I still have not reached this magical place. Perhaps, it didn’t exist in the first place. If I cannot find it, whether it exists or not doesn’t matter. I am certainly searching for it. 👉 What I should have done: Once I decide on a problem space (time management, email productivity, etc.), I should decide on my potential user segments, people who I plan to sell my product to. Then I should go talk to those people, ask them about their pains, then get to the problem-solving/ideation phase only later. ❗️ VALIDATION COMES FROM THE REALITY OUTSIDE. What validation looks like might change from product to product; but what invalidation looks like is more or less the same for every product. Nico Jeannen told me yesterday “validation = money in the account” on Twitter. This is the ultimate form of validation your product could get. If your product doesn’t make any money, then something is invalidated by reality: Your product, you, your idea, who knows? So, at this point, I knew a little bit of Python from spending some time in tutorial hell a few years ago, some HTML/CSS/JS, barely enough React to build a working app. React could work for this project, but I needed easy-to-implement server interactivity. Luckily, around this time, I got to know about this new gen of indie hackers, and learned (but didn’t truly understand) about their approach to indie hacking, and this library called Nextjs. How good Next.js still blows my mind. So, I was back to tutorial hell once again. But, this time, with a promise to myself: This is the last time I would visit tutorial hell. Time to start building this "ground-breaking idea" Learning the fundamentals of Next.js was easier than learning of React unsurprisingly. Yet, the first time I managed to run server actions on Next.js was one of the rarest moments that completely blew my mind. To this day, I reject the idea that it is something else than pure magic under its hood. Did I absolutely need Nextjs for this project though? I do not think so. Did it save me lots of time? Absolutely. Furthermore, learning Nextjs will certainly be quite helpful for other projects that I will be tackling in the future. Already got a few ideas that might be worth pursuing in the head in case I decide to abandon Summ in the future. Fast-forward few weeks again: So, at this stage, I had a barely working MVP-like product. Since the very beginning, I spent every free hour (and more) on this project as speed is essential. But, I am not so sure it was worth it to overwork in retrospect. Yet, I know I couldn’t help myself. Everything is going kinda smooth, so what’s the worst thing that could ever happen? Well, both Apple and Google announced their AIs (Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, respectively) will have email summarization features for their products. Summarizing singular emails is no big deal, after all there were already so many similar products in the market. I still think that what truly matters is a frictionless user experience, and this is why I built this product in a certain way: You spend less than a few minutes setting up your account, and you get to enjoy your email summaries, without ever visiting its website again. This is still a very cool concept I really like a lot. So, at this point: I had no other idea that could be pursued, already spent too much time on this project. Do I quit or not? This was the question. Of course not. I just have to launch this product as quickly as possible. So, I did something right, a quite rare occurrence I might say: Re-planned my product, dropped everything secondary to the core feature immediately (save time on reading emails), tried launching it asap. 👉 Insight: Sell only one core feature at one time. Drop anything secondary to this core feature. Well, my primary occupation is product design. So one would expect that a product I build must have stellar design. I considered any considerable time spent on design at this stage would be simply wasted. I still think this is both true and wrong: True, because if your product’s core benefits suck, no one will care about your design. False, because if your design looks amateurish, no one will trust you and your product. So, I always targeted an average level design with it and the way this tool works made it quite easy as I had to design only 2 primary pages: Landing page and user portal (which has only settings and analytics pages). However, even though I knew spending time on design was not worth much of my time, I got a bit “greedy”: In fact, I redesigned those pages three times, and still ended up with a so-so design that I am not proud of. 👉 What I would do differently: Unless absolutely necessary, only one iteration per stage as long as it works. This, in my mind, applies to everything. If your product’s A feature works, then no need to rewrite it from scratch for any reason, or even refactor it. When your product becomes a success, and you absolutely need that part of your codebase to be written, do so, but only then. Ready to launch, now is th etime for some marketing, right? By July 26, I already had a “launchable” product that barely works (I marked this date on a Notion docs, this is how I know). Yet, I had spent almost no time on marketing, sales, whatever. After all, “You build and they will come”. Did I know that I needed marketing? Of course I did, but knowingly didn’t. Why, you might ask. Well, from my perspective, it had to be a dev-heavy product; meaning that you spend most of your time on developing it, mostly coding skills. But, this is simply wrong. As a rule of thumb, as noted by one of the greatests, Marc Louvion, you should spend at least twice of the building time on marketing. ❗️ Time spent on building \* 2 people don’t know your product > they don’t use your product > you don’t get users > you don’t make money Easy as that. Following the same reasoning, a slightly different approach to planning a project is possible. Determine an approximate time to complete the project with a high level project plan. Let’s say 6 months. By the reasoning above, 2 months should go into building, and 4 into marketing. If you need 4 months for building instead of 2, then you need 8 months of marketing, which makes the time to complete the project 12 months. If you don’t have that much time, then quit the project. When does a project count as completed? Well, in reality, never. But, I think we have to define success conditions even before we start for indie projects and startups; so we know when to quit when they are not met. A success condition could look like “Make $6000 in 12 months” or “Have 3000 users in 6 months”. It all depends on the project. But, once you set it, it should be set in stone: You don’t change it unless absolutely necessary. I suspect there are few principles that make a solopreneur successful; and knowing when to quit and when to continue is definitely one of them. Marc Louvion is famously known for his success, but he got there after failing so many projects. To my knowledge, the same applies to Nico Jeannen, Pieter Levels, or almost everyone as well. ❗️ Determining when to continue even before you start will definitely help in the long run. A half-aed launch Time-leap again. Around mid August, I “soft launched” my product. By soft launch, I mean lazy marketing. Just tweeting about it, posting it on free directories. Did I get any traffic? Surely I did. Did I get any users? Nope. Only after this time, it hit me: “Either something is wrong with me, or with this product” Marketing might be a much bigger factor for a project’s success after all. Even though I get some traffic, not convincing enough for people to sign up even for a free trial. The product was still perfect in my eyes at the time (well, still is ^(\_),) so the right people are not finding my product, I thought. Then, a question that I should have been asking at the very first place, one that could prevent all these, comes to my mind: “How do even people search for such tools?” If we are to consider this whole journey of me and my so-far-failed product to be an already destined failure, one metric suffices to show why. Search volume: 30. Even if people have such a pain point, they are not looking for email summaries. So, almost no organic traffic coming from Google. But, as a person who did zero marketing on this or any product, who has zero marketing knowledge, who doesn’t have an audience on social media, there is not much I could do. Finally, it was time to give up. Or not… In my eyes, the most important element that makes a founder (solo or not) successful (this, I am not by any means) is to solve problems. ❗️ So, the problem was this: “People are not finding my product by organic search” How do I make sure I get some organic traffic and gets more visibility? Learn digital marketing and SEO as much as I can within very limited time. Thankfully, without spending much time, I came across Neil Patel's YT channel, and as I said many times, it is an absolute gold mine. I learned a lot, especially about the fundamentals, and surely it will be fruitful; but there is no magic trick that could make people visit your website. SEO certainly helps, but only when people are looking for your keywords. However, it is truly a magical solution to get in touch with REAL people that are in your user segments: 👉 Understand your pains, understand their problems, help them to solve them via building products. I did not do this so far, have to admit. But, in case you would like to have a chat about your email usage, and email productivity, just get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear about them. Getting ready for a ProductHunt launch The date was Sept 1. And I unlocked an impossible achievement: Running out of Supabase’s free plan’s Egres limit while having zero users. I was already considering moving out of their Cloud server and managing a Supabase CLI service on my Hetzner VPS for some time; but never ever suspected that I would have to do this quickly. The cheapest plan Supabase offers is $25/month; yet, at that point, I am in between jobs for such a long time, basically broke, and could barely afford that price. One or two months could be okay, but why pay for it if I will eventually move out of their Cloud service? So, instead of paying $25, I spent two days migrating out of Supabase Cloud. Worth my time? Definitely not. But, when you are broke, you gotta do stupid things. This was the first time that I felt lucky to have zero users: I have no idea how I would manage this migration if I had any. I think this is one of the core tenets of an indie hacker: Controlling their own environment. I can’t remember whose quote this is, but I suspect it was Naval: Entrepreneurs have an almost pathological need to control their own fate. They will take any suffering if they can be in charge of their destiny, and not have it in somebody else’s hands. What’s truly scary is, at least in my case, we make people around us suffer at the expense of our attempting to control our own fates. I know this period has been quite hard on my wife as well, as I neglected her quite a bit, but sadly, I know that this will happen again. It is something that I can barely help with. Still, so sorry. After working the last two weeks on a ProductHunt Launch, I finally launched it this Tuesday. Zero ranking, zero new users, but 36 kind people upvoted my product, and many commented and provided invaluable feedback. I couldn't be more grateful for each one of them 🙏. Considering all these, what lies in the future of Summ though? I have no idea, to be honest. On one hand, I have zero users, have no job, no income. So, I need a way to make money asap. On the other hand, the whole idea of it revolves around one core premise (not an assumption) that I am not so willing to share; and I couldn’t have more trust in it. This might not be the best iteration of it, however I certainly believe that email usage is one of the best problem spaces one could work on. 👉 But, one thing is for certain: I need to get in touch with people, and talk with them about this product I built so far. In fact, this is the only item on my agenda. Nothing else will save my brainchild <3. Below are some other insights and notes that I got during my journey; as they do not 100% fit into this story, I think it is more suitable to list them here. I hope you enjoyed reading this. Give Summ a try, it comes with a generous free trial, no credit card required. Some additional notes and insights: Project planning is one of the most underestimated skills for solopreneurs. It saves you enormous time, and helps you to keep your focus up. Building B2B products beats building B2C products. Businesses are very willing to pay big bucks if your product helps them. On the other hand, spending a few hours per user who would pay $5/m probably is not worth your time. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is if no one uses it. If you cannot sell a product in a certain category/niche (or do not know how to sell it), it might be a good idea not to start a project in it. Going after new ideas and ventures is quite risky, especially if you don’t know how to market it. On the other hand, an already established category means that there is already demand. Whether this demand is sufficient or not is another issue. As long as there is enough demand for your product to fit in, any category/niche is good. Some might be better, some might be worse. Unless you are going hardcore B2B, you will need people to find your product by means of organic search. Always conduct thorough keyword research as soon as possible.

How I went from $27 to $3K as a solopreneur still in a 9-5
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jottrledThis week

How I went from $27 to $3K as a solopreneur still in a 9-5

My journey started back in November 2023. I was scrolling through Twitter and YouTube and saw a word that I had never come across before. Solopreneur. The word caught my eye. Mainly because I was pretty sure I knew what it meant even though it's not a word you'll find in the dictionary. I liked what it was describing. A solo entrepreneur. A one man business. It completely resonated with me. As a software engineer by trade I'm used to working alone, especially since the pandemic hit and we were forced to work remotely. See, I always wanted to ditch the 9-5 thing but thought that was too big and too scary for a single person to do. Surely you would need a lot of money to get started, right? Surely you would need investors? The whole concept seemed impossible to me. That was until I found all the success stories. I became obsessed with the concept of solopreneurship. As I went further down the rabbit hole I found people like Justin Welsh, Kieran Drew and Marc Louvion to name a few. All of whom have one person businesses making huge money every year. So I thought, if they can do it, why can't I? People like this have cleared the pathway for those looking to escape the 9-5 grind. I decided 2024 would be the year I try this out. My main goal for the year? Build a one man business, earn my first $ online and learn a sh\*t ton along the way. My main goal in general? Build my business to $100K per year, quit my 9-5 and live with freedom. From December 2023 to February 2024 I began brainstorming ideas. I was like a lost puppy looking for his ball. How on earth did people find good ideas? I began writing everything and anything that came to mind down in my notes app on my phone. By February I would have approximately 70 ideas. Each as weird and whacky as the other. I was skeptical though. If I went through all the trouble of building a product for one of these ideas how would I know if anyone would even be interested in using it? I got scared and took a break for a week. All these ideas seemed too big and the chance that they would take off into the atmosphere was slim (in my mind anyways). I was learning more and more about solopreneurship as the weeks went on so I decided to build a product centered around everything I was learning about. The idea was simple. Enter a business idea and use AI to give the user details about how to market it, who their target customers were, what to write on their landing page, etc. All for a measly $27 per use. I quickly built it and launched on March 3rd 2024. I posted about it on Indie Hackers, Reddit and Hacker News. I was so excited about the prospect of earning my first internet $! Surely everyone wanted to use my product! Nope...all I got was crickets. I was quickly brought back down to earth. That was until 5 days later. I looked at my phone and had a new Stripe notification! Cha-ching! My first internet $. What a feeling! That was goal number 1 complete. It would be another 6 days before I would get my second sale...and then another 15 days to get my third. It was an emotional rollercoaster. I went from feeling like quitting the 9-5 was actually possible to thinking that maybe the ups and downs aren't worth it. On one hand I had made my first internet dollar so I should my ecstatic, and don't get me wrong, I was but I wanted more. More validation that I could do this long term. By May I was starting to give up on the product. I had learned so much in the past few months about marketing, SEO, building an audience, etc. and I wanted to build something that I thought could have more success so I focused on one critical thing that I had learned about. What was it? Building a product that had SEO potential. A product that I knew hundreds of people were looking for. See this was my thinking - If I could find a keyword that people were searching for on Google hundreds/thousands of times every month and it was easy to rank high on search engines then I would go all in (in SEO land this equates to a Keyword that has a Keyword Difficulty of = 500). I began researching and found that the keyword "micro saas ideas" was being searched for around 600 times each month. Micro Saas was something that really interested me. It was perfect for solopreneurs. Small software products that 1 person could build. What's not to like if you're in the game of software and solopreneurship? Researching keywords like this became like a game for me. I was hooked. I was doing it every day, finding gems that were being searched for hundreds and thousands of times every month that still had potential. That's when I came up with my next product idea. I decided to create a database of Micro Saas Ideas all with this sort of SEO potential. See if you can build a product that you know people are looking for then that's all the validation you need. So I put this theory to the test. I created a database of Micro Saas Ideas with SEO Potential and launched it in June 2024. This time it was different. I made $700 in the first week of launching. A large contrast to my previous failed attempt at becoming the worlds greatest solopreneur. Since launch I have grown the product to $3K and I couldn't be happier. I know what you're saying, $3K isn't a lot. But it's validation. It's validation that I can earn $ online. Validation that I can grow a business and it gives me hope that one day I'll be able to quit that 9-5 grind. My plan is to keep growing the business. I expect there to be a few challenges up ahead but I'll tackle them as I go and learn from the failures and successes. I have a newsletter where I share Micro Saas Ideas with SEO potential every week which I'll leave below in the first comment. Feel free to come along for the ride. If not I hope this post brings you some value If you're thinking about starting as a solopreneur, stop thinking and start doing, you won't regret it.

How to get your first 10 customers with cold email
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LieIgnorant6304This week

How to get your first 10 customers with cold email

Cold email is an insane channel for growth, especially for bootstrapped startups as it's very low cost but completely scalable. Yet there's a huge difference between blind cold emailing and crafting personalized outreach for select individuals. The latter is a legit channel which makes many businesses scale in short amounts of time (i.e. see Alex Hormozi’s ‘$100 Million Dollar Offer’). My goal here is to help other founders do what I did but quicker. So you can learn faster. And then teach me something new too. These are the step-by-step lessons I've learnt as a bootstrapped founder, showing you how to use cold email to get your first customers: Find your leads Write engaging email copy Personalize your outreach Send emails Scale up Find your leads This is a key step. Once you figure out exactly who you want to target and where to find them, you'll be printing money. There's a few different ways to go about finding valuable leads. The secret? Keep testing different approaches until you strike gold. First, dedicate some time every day to find and organise leads. Then, keep an eye on your numbers and bounce rates. If something's not working, switch it up. Stick with what's bringing in results and ditch what's not. It's all about staying flexible and learning as you go. Apollo.io is a great starting point as an effective lead source. Their tool allows you to specify filters including job titles, location, company size, industry, keywords, technologies, and revenue. Get specific with your searches to find your ideal customers. Once you have some results you can save and export them, you'll get a list of contact information including name, email, company, LinkedIn, ready to be verified and used. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is another good source. You can either do manual searches or use a scraper to automate the process. The scrapers I'd recommend checking out are FindyMail and Evaboot. As with Apollo, it's best to get very specific with your targeting so you know the prospect will be interested in your offer. BuiltWith is more expensive but ideal if you're targeting competitors. With BuiltWith you can build lists based on what technologies companies are using. For example if you're selling a Shopify app, you'd want to know websites or stores using Shopify, and reach out to them. The best lead sources will always be those that haven't been contacted a lot in the past. If you are able to find places where your target audience uniquely hangs out, and you can get their company website domains, they have the potential to be scrapped, and you have a way to personalize like "I spotted your comment on XYZ website". Once you've got your leads, keep them organized. Set up folders for different niches, countries, company sizes, so you can review what works and what doesn't. One more thing – before you start firing off emails, make sure those addresses are verified. Always use an email verifier to clean up your list and avoid bounces that may affect your sending reputation, and land you in the spam folder. I use Neverbounce for this but there are other tools available. Write engaging email copy Writing a good copy that gets replies is difficult, it changes depending on your offer/audience and nobody knows what's going to work. The best approach is to keep testing different targeting and messaging until you find what works. However, there are some key rules to stick to that I've outlined. For the subject line, keep it short and personalized. Try to write something that sparks interest, and mention the recipients name: Thought you’d like this {{first name}} {{firstName}} - quick question For the email body it's best to use a framework of personalization, offer, then call to action. Personalization is an entire subject in its own right, which I've covered below. In short, a personalized email opener is the best way to grab their attention, and let them know the email is relevant to them and to keep reading. Take it from Alex Hormozi and his $100M Offers playbook – your offer is very important to get right. Make sure your offer hits the mark for your target audience, and get as specific as possible. For example: I built a SaaS shopify app for small ecommerce businesses selling apparel that doubles your revenue in 60-days or your money back. We developed a cold email personalization tool for lead generation agencies that saves hundreds of hours, and can 3x your reply rate. Lastly, the CTA. The goal here isn't to get sign-ups directly from your first email. It's better to ask a brief question about whether the prospect would be interested in learning more. Something very low friction, that warrants a response. Some examples might include: Would you be interested in learning more about this? Can we connect a bit more on this? Mind if I send over a loom I recorded for you? Never send any links in the first email. You've reached out to this person because you have good reason to believe they'd find real value in your offer, and you want to verify if that's the case. After you get one reply, this is a great positive signal and from there you can send a link, book a call, provide a free resource, whatever makes sense based on their response. Personalize your outreach Personalization is one of the most important parts of the process to get right. Your recipient probably receives a multitude of emails every day, how can you make yours stand out, letting them know you've done your research, and that your email is relevant to them? Personalizing each email ensures you get more positive replies, and avoid spam filters, as your email is unique and hasn't been copied and pasted a million times over. The goal is to spark the recipient's interest, and let them know that you're contacting them for good reason. You might mention a recent achievement, blog post or product release that led you to reach out to the prospect specifically. For example: Your post on "Doing Nothing" gave me a good chuckle. Savvy marketing on Cadbury's part. Saw that you've been at Google for just under a year now as a new VP of sales. Spotted that you've got over 7 years of experience in the digital marketing space. Ideally you'll mention something specifically about the prospect or their company that relates to your offer. The downside to personalization is that it's hard to get right, and very time consuming at scale, but totally worth it. Full disclosure, me and my partner Igor just launched our new startup ColdClicks which uses AI to generate hyper-personalized email openers at scale. We built the tool as we were sending hundreds of emails a day, and personalizing every individual email took hours out of our day. ColdClicks automates this process, saving you time and getting you 2-3x more replies. Send emails At this stage you've decided on who you're targeting, you've mined some leads, and written copy. Now it's time to get sending. You can do this manually by copy and pasting each message, but one of the reasons cold email is so powerful is that it's scalable. When you build a process that gets customers, you'll want to send as many emails as you can to your target market. To get started quickly, you can use a mail-merge gmail tool, the best I've used is Maileteor. With Maileteor you upload your lead data to Google sheets, set-up an email template and Mailmetor will send out emails every day automatically. In your template you can define variables including name, company, and personalization to ensure your email is unique for each recipient. Alternatively, you may opt for a more comprehensive tool such as Instantly. Instantly includes unlimited email sending and accounts. There's more initial setup involved as you'll need to set-up Google workspace, buy sending domains, and warm up your email accounts, but when you become familiar with the process you can build a powerful lead generation / customer acquisition machine. Some key points to note, it's very important to warm up any new email accounts you set up. Warmup is the process of gradually establishing a positive reputation with email service providers like Gmail or Yahoo. Make sure to set up DKIM and DMARC on those new email accounts too, to maximise your chances of landing in the inbox. Scale up Once you've found a process that works, good things happen, and it becomes a numbers game. As you get replies and start to see new users signing up, you'll want to scale the process and send more emails. It's straightforward to add new sending accounts in a sending tool like Instantly, and you'll want to broaden your targeting when mining to test new markets. Unfortunately, sending more emails usually comes with a drop in reply rate as you have less time to personalize your messaging for each recipient. This is where ColdClicks shines. The tool allows you to upload thousands of leads and generate perfectly relevant email personalizations for every lead in your list, then export to your favorite sending tool. The examples I listed above in the personalization section were all generated by ColdClicks. Wrapping it up Cold email is an amazing way to validate your product and get new customers. The channel gets a bad rap, but there's a huge difference between blind cold emailing and crafting personalized outreach for individuals who will find value in your product. It's perfect for bootstrapped founders due to its affordability and scalability, and it's the driver of growth for many SaaS businesses. Time to get your first 10 customers! As you start sending, make it a habit to regularly check for new leads. Always experiment with market/messaging, track every campaign so you can learn what's working and iterate, and when you do get positive responses, reply as soon as you can!

How to start online business in 7 days ?
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Prior-Inflation8755This week

How to start online business in 7 days ?

Easy to do now. There are several tips that I can give you to start your own digital business. 1) Solve your own problem. If you use the Internet, you know that there are a lot of problems that need to be solved. But focus on your problem first. Once you can figure it out and solve your problem. You can move on to solving people's problems. Ideally, to use tools and technology you know. If you don't know, use NO-CODE tools to build it. For example, if you need to create a website, use landing page builder. If you want to automate your own work, like booking meetings, use Zapier to automate tasks. If you want to create a game, sure, use AI Tools to solve it. I don't care what you will use. Use whatever you want. All I want from you is to solve that problem. 2) After solving your own problem. You can focus on people's problems. Because if you can't solve your own shit, why do you want to solve others problems? Remember that always. If you need to build e-commerce, use Shopify. If you need to build a directory, use directory builder. If you need to build landing pages, use landing page builders. Rule of thumb: Niche, Niche, Niche. Try to focus on a specific niche, solve their problem, and make money on it. Then only thinking about exploring new opportunities. You can use No-Code builders or AI tools or hire developers or hire agencies to do it. It depends on your choice. If you are good at coding, build on your own or delegate to a developer or agency. If you have enough time, use AI Tools to build your own thing. If you want to solve a common problem but with a different perspective, yeah, sure, use No-Code builders for that. 3) Digital business works exactly the same as offline business with one difference. You can move a lot faster, build a lot faster, risk a lot faster, fail a lot faster, earn a lot faster, sell a lot faster, and scale a lot faster. In one week, you can build e-commerce. In the second week, you can build SaaS. In the third week, you can build an AI agent. In the fourth week, you can build your own channel on social media. 4) It gives more power. With great power comes great responsibility. From day one, invest in SEO, social media presence, traffic, and acquiring customers. Don't focus on tech stuff. Don't focus on tools. Focus on the real problem: • Traffic • Marketing • Sales • Conversion rate

I’ve built a gaming recommendation and exploration platform called Which Game Next
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kasperooThis week

I’ve built a gaming recommendation and exploration platform called Which Game Next

Hello there! Me and a few of my best friends are software engineers, and we’ve been working part-time on developing a side project for the past 12 months. It’s called www.whichgamenext.com, and we’ve recently launched into open beta for everyone to check out. Your feedback would be invaluable to us! Our aim has been to build a gaming recommendation engine, alongside providing market oversight for where you can legally and officially purchase or obtain modern games from multiple stores and/or subscriptions. It’s often difficult to figure out what you have access to if you only have a single specific subscription, like Game Pass PC, or if you’re only interested in games on GOG/Nintendo (what a mix!). We started by identifying the available digital stores and subscriptions and slowly compiling our database using multiple automated services to gather data on these games. Think JustWatch, but for games! One major service we’ve partnered with is IGDB, which has been supplying us with JSON data dumps that served as the initial seed for our game data. A massive thank you to them for their continued support! With the data in place, we’ve been focusing on exploring new features. So far, this has included private and public user-generated lists, personal backlog tracking, and the ability to like or dislike games. We’re now improving our recommendation engine, tackling the complexities that come with it, and having a lot of fun along the way. We’re utilising modern AI strategies and solving fascinating problems related to large-scale data aggregation. We truly can’t wait to share this fantastic work! In addition to this, you can soon expect curated collections, articles about games, and supporting links to help you make informed, unbiased purchasing decisions. Your shared data will drive the recommendations. But it doesn’t stop there—we have plenty of other features on our radar, such as importing games from your favourite stores, syncing your gameplay time, surfacing data like “How Long to Beat,” and creating new and exciting ways to interact with this growing community! This is a passion project created by a group of gamers who want to spend their time and money wisely, without purchasing biases. Since it’s a side project, we mostly work on it at night, but we’re excited to grow the community, share our vision, and, who knows, maybe one day make it our full-time job! Let’s dive into the technical details: • Monorepo architecture: This speeds up development by sharing libraries, living style guides, configs, etc. Nx.js has been brilliant, enabling us to create a dependency graph of changes and only build/deploy what’s modified in a PR. • AWS: We’re using the free tier (with a few exceptions where we pay for smaller services). Achieving self-sufficiency is critical for us. Additionally, we applied to the AWS Startup Foundation programme and received $1,000 in AWS credits, which has been incredibly helpful! • Infrastructure: Fully deployed as code with Terraform. • Backends: Built using Express and Nest.js, split into around 40 projects and counting! Each project plays a unique role in gathering and syncing game data. • Scalability: Designed from the ground up, utilising AWS Lambdas with auto-scaling and load balancing. • Databases: We use Postgres with RDS and DynamoDB for storing various data. • Frontend stack: Built with React, Next.js, Tailwind, Zustand, TanStack Query, Jest, and Storybook. • CI/CD: Managed with GitHub Actions and Amplify hooks for deploying the frontends. • Admin portal: We’ve built a bespoke CMS to control the main website. It synchronises with external services, tracks game data changes, and allows us to selectively apply ‘patches’ from sites like IGDB. The system also includes data override and rollback capabilities, ensuring we maintain control over game data. • Automation: Partially automated, so manual intervention is rarely needed. • Scraping tools: Fully integrated into the admin portal with log trail capabilities. • Cloudflare: Used for on-the-fly image transformations; we’re considering moving to it full-time as our CDN for free WebP conversions. • Authentication: Handled by Cognito, with a custom frontend built from scratch. Key learnings so far: • AWS cold starts: Not ideal! While the platform is still new, we ping endpoints to keep them responsive. This won’t be an issue once traffic increases. • Lambda memory matters: We learned the hard way that low-memory configurations can delay responses by 2-3 seconds. • DynamoDB partition keys: If not designed correctly from the start, you might have to start over (yes, we’ve been there!). • GitHub Actions: Setting up node\_modules cache reuse takes time, but it’s worth it—don’t give up! We don’t know where this project will take us yet, but it’s been a fantastic journey so far. We’ve learned a lot, explored technologies we don’t typically use in our day jobs, and built something we’re genuinely passionate about. Your feedback would mean the world to us. What do you think of what we’ve done so far? What would you like to see added? Is this a service you’d use? Do you see the value in it as we do? Thanks for reading, and we hope to see you in the comments! (or our newly created /r/whichgamenext

I retired at 32 from my side project. Here's the path I took.
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inputoriginThis week

I retired at 32 from my side project. Here's the path I took.

EDIT 2: Thanks for the award kind stranger! I've stopped responding to reddit comments for this post. I'm adding an FAQ to the original post based on the most common high quality questions. If you have a question that you're dying to know the answer to and that only I can help you with (vs. Google, ChatGPT, etc.), DM me. EDIT: I love how controversial this post has become (50% upvote rate), and only in this subreddit (vs. other subreddits that I posted the same content in). I trust that the open-minded half of you will find something useful in this post and my other posts and comments. I retired at 32 years old, in large part thanks to a B2C SaaS app that I developed on my own. Now, I don't have to work in order to cover my living expenses, and wouldn't have to work for quite a while. In other words, I can finally sip mai tais at the beach. I've condensed how I got there into this post. First, a super simplified timeline of events, followed by some critical details. Timeline 2013 Graduated college in the US 2013 Started first corporate job 2013 Started side project (B2C app) that would eventually lead to my retirement 2020 Started charging for use of my B2C app (was free, became freemium) 2021 Quit my last corporate job 2022 Retired: time freedom attained Details First, some summary statistics of my path to retirement: 9 years: time between graduating college and my retirement. 8 years: total length of my career where I worked at some corporate day job. 7 years: time it took my B2C app to make its first revenue dollar 2 years: time between my first dollar of SaaS revenue and my retirement. "Something something overnight success a decade in the making". I got extremely lucky on my path to retirement, both in terms of the business environment I was in and who I am as a person. I'd also like to think that some of the conscious decisions I made along the way contributed to my early retirement. Lucky Breaks Was born in the US middle class. Had a natural affinity for computer programming and entrepreneurial mindset (initiative, resourcefulness, pragmatism, courage, growth mindset). Had opportunities to develop these mindsets throughout life. Got into a good college which gave me the credentials to get high paying corporate jobs. Was early to a platform that saw large adoption (see "barnacle on whale" strategy). Business niche is shareworthy: my SaaS received free media. Business niche is relatively stable, and small enough to not be competitive. "Skillful" Decisions I decided to spend the nights and weekends of my early career working on side projects in the hopes that one would hit. I also worked a day job to support myself and build my savings. My launch funnel over roughly 7 years of working on side projects: Countless side projects prototyped. 5 side projects publically launched. 2 side projects made > $0. 1 side project ended up becoming the SaaS that would help me retire. At my corporate day jobs, I optimized for learning and work-life balance. My learning usually stalled after a year or two at one company, so I’d quit and find another job. I invested (and continute to do so) in physical and mental wellbeing via regular workouts, meditation, journaling, traveling, and good food. My fulfilling non-work-life re-energized me for my work-life, and my work-life supported my non-work-life: a virtuous cycle. I automated the most time-consuming aspects of my business (outside of product development). Nowadays, I take long vacations and work at most 20 hours a week / a three-day work week . I decided to keep my business entirely owned and operated by me. It's the best fit for my work-style (high autonomy, deep focus, fast decision-making) and need to have full creative freedom and control. I dated and married a very supportive and inspiring partner. I try not to succumb to outrageous lifestyle creep, which keeps my living expenses low and drastically extends my burn-rate. Prescription To share some aphorisms I’ve leaned with the wantrepreneurs or those who want to follow a similar path: Maximize your at bats, because you only need one hit. Bias towards action. Launch quickly. Get your ideas out into the real world for feedback. Perfect is the enemy of good. If you keep swinging and improving, you'll hit the ball eventually. Keep the big picture in mind. You don't necessarily need a home-run to be happy: a base hit will often do the job. Think about what matters most to you in life: is it a lot of money or status? Or is it something more satisfying, and often just as if not more attainable, like freedom, loving relationships, or fulfillment? Is what you’re doing now a good way to get what you want? Or is there a better way? At more of a micro-level of "keep the big picture in mind", I often see talented wantrepreneurs get stuck in the weeds of lower-level optimizations, usually around technical design choices. They forget (or maybe subconsciously avoid) the higher-level and more important questions of customer development, user experience, and distribution. For example: “Are you solving a real problem?” or “Did you launch an MVP and what did your users think?” Adopt a growth mindset. Believe that you are capable of learning whatever you need to learn in order to do what you want to do. The pain of regret is worse than the pain of failure. I’ve noticed that fear of failure is the greatest thing holding people back from taking action towards their dreams. Unless failure means death in your case, a debilitating fear of failure is a surmountable mental block. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take. When all is said and done, we often regret the things we didn't do in life than the things we did. There’s more to life than just work. Blasphemous (at least among my social circle)! But the reality is that many of the dying regret having worked too much in their lives. As Miss Frizzle from The Magic Schoolbus says: "Take chances, make mistakes, get messy!" Original post

AI-Powered Business Analyst Tool Looking for Feedback
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ondro949This week

AI-Powered Business Analyst Tool Looking for Feedback

Hey r/sideproject! I’m excited to share a project I’ve been working on called Bianalytiq, a next-gen business intelligence platform designed to transform the way businesses interact with data through the power of AI. The Problem: SME companies struggle with data overload and the significant time investment required to generate actionable insights. Traditional data analysis methods are not only slow but often require extensive manual effort and are prone to errors. This makes it difficult for businesses to react quickly to new information and make informed decisions efficiently. Not everybody can write SQL or create/understand data dashboards.... AND - one big opportunity on market - non of the AI tools available on market offer reusable contexts focused on you as a company and your products. The Solution: Bianalytiq aims to solve these issues by automating tedious data analysis tasks and providing real-time insights. Here’s how: Reusable contexts: Let Bianalytiq learn everything about your company, your products, business model etc. - your company is your unique context. Autonomous AI Agents: Deploy AI agents that not only react to queries but proactively analyze data to uncover opportunities, tailored specifically to your business context. Real-Time Insights: With the use of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technology, our platform delivers immediate, context-rich insights by dynamically accessing and analyzing connected databases and data warehouses. Integration with Existing Tools: Bianalytiq integrates seamlessly with popular tech stacks and communication platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams, making it incredibly user-friendly and reducing the switch cost between applications. Why I’m Here: Before investing significant time and money I want to validate the product first and do pre-sale before releasing the MVP. I’ve developed a landing page for Bianalytiq and would love your feedback on both the service itself and the effectiveness of the landing page. Are the features presented clearly? Does the platform address the pain points you might experience in data analysis and decision-making processes? Here’s the link to the landing page: https://bianalytiq.com/ I appreciate any feedback or questions you have! Whether it's about the UI/UX of the site, the technical aspects of the service, or even the business model, I’m all ears. Your input will be invaluable :) Thanks for checking it out! https://preview.redd.it/t1dvp2q05dzc1.png?width=798&format=png&auto=webp&s=c7365b418abfc4d4260d9a23305ed3398e83c87b

What I learn from my $200 MRR App I built 4 months ago
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ricky0603This week

What I learn from my $200 MRR App I built 4 months ago

4 month ago, I am just a 10-years experienced product manager without any software development experience. I have an $3K/month job, but I am so tired, I don’t like my life, don’t like my boss, don’t like my daily work, that make me feeling I already died however I am still living. I yearn for freedom and want to live each day the way I want to. So I quit my job, and become a Indie developer to build my own business, my own app, even my own life. I am so grateful for this time and experience, now my app reach $200 MRR, still very little compared to my previous salary, but I never regret. I have learned lots of things from this time and experience, more than I had in last 10 years. Here is the time-line of my App: &#x200B; Sep 2023: Launch first version to iOS App store Oct 2023: Release in-app-purchase features and have first subscriber, the revenue in October is $154 Nov 2023: Change from subscription to pay per use, and I did lots of marketing jobs in November, however, the revenue reduced to only $40. Dec 2023: Change back to subscription, and stop some invalid marketing jobs, only keep the ones that actually work. I almost did nothing in December, and the revenue come to $243. During this process, I have learned lots of things, there are some of them that I think could help you as well. Web or App My App is an iOS app that only can running on Apple’s device such like iPhone/iPad or Mac with Apple silicon. Many people ask me why my product is an iOS app not a website, because they don’t have any Apple device. It's true that promoting an app is much harder than promoting a website. However I am now very glad I made an App and not a website! If I make a website, I don't think it's possible to make $100 in the first month. My App is about keyword research, to help people find some ideas from search keyword, because every keyword people searched in Google are representing a real need of them, also can be used in SEO field. However there are a lot of website tools about keyword research, some of them are famous like Ahrefs, SEMrush… I have no intention of competing with them. Actually I don’t have any chance. While in app store, there are little apps about keyword research, each of them have terrible data and user experience, that means if my app has better data and experience that could be my chance. In fact, the App store brings me 20 organic installs a day that Google would never have been able to bring me if I had a website, at least for the first few months. Furthermore, Apple nearly did everything for developer, I don’t need to care about user login, payment and so on, Apple did everything, I just need to call their API, that save lots of time, if I build a website, I need to implement login and payment by myself, that would add some extra work. Not to mention I'd need to buy servers and domains, that would cost me a lot of money. Although Apple will take 30% of the revenue, I can live with that in the early stages because the most important thing for me is to get the product to market as soon as possible. Actually thought Apple’s SMB program, the take rate is 15% now. So Web or App is not important in the early stage, time is important, if people need my product, it's easy to make a website one. More Users or More Valuable Users In November, I notice some users would like use my app, and they were meet paywall, but they never subscribe. I provided 7 day free trail, but it seem that they don’t like it. So I decide to change subscription to pay per use. Because as a user, I don’t like subscription as well, pay per use seem like more friendly. So I change from subscription to pay per use. People can afford $9.99 to subscribe monthly for unlimited use or pay $1.99 for each data they want(First purchase is $0.99 then $1.99). I was expecting more user to pay, but it was the complete opposite! Some users who would have paid a higher subscription fee are switching to a lower priced single payment. Users are encountering paywalls more often, and each time they need to make a decision about whether or not to pay, which increases the probability that they will abandon payment. This resulted in a 75% decrease in revenue in November. In fact, the mostly of my revenue comes from a handful of long-cycle subscribers, such as annual subscription. Few bring in most of the revenue, that is the most important thing I learned. You don't need a lot of customers, you just need more valuable ones. That's why it's only right to design a mechanism to filter out high-value customers and focus on them, all the things you want do is just let more people into the filter, and from that point of view, subscription with free trial period is the best way, even if most people don't like it. The rule of 20/80 will always be there. The most important thing is always focus on the 20 percent things and people. Effort does not always guarantee rewards. Unless one engages in deep thinking, or most efforts are invalid. I have been working very hard to promote my product for a period of time. It’s about in November. I did a lot of job, such as write script to send message to my potential clients on Fiverr, post and write comments on others post on Reddit, find related questions and answer them on Quora, post and comments on Twitte, etc. During that period, I was exhausted every day, but the outcome did not meet my expectations. There is only little growth on App installation, even less revenue than before. That make me frustrated. I finally realized that If I need to put in a tremendous amount of effort just to make a little progress, there is must something wrong. So I stop 80% of promote work I have ever did, only keep app store search ad, which will bring a installation with less than $0.5 cost. Then I dive into long time and deeply thinking, I spent more time on reading books, investigate other product with great MRR, watch interviews with people who are already living the kind of life I aspire to live, for example, u/levelsio. These things have given me great inspiration, and my life has become easier. It seems that the life I anticipated when I resigned is getting closer. I also have a clearer understanding of my app. Meanwhile, MRR has been growing. This experience let me learn that effort does not always guarantee results. Many times, our efforts are just wishful thinking, they are invalid, do the right thing after deeply thinking is more important. What Next? My goal is reach $3K MRR, as same as my job payment, I will never stop to building things, and I will keep my currently lifestyle. I still don't know how to get more people to use my app, but levelsio's interviews give me some inspiration that I can verified something by manually instead of build a software. I plan to launch a trend analysis product based on the keyword data provided by my current app. I have always wanted to combine AI to build such a product, but I didn't know how to do it. Now I intend to manually complete it first and start software development once there are paying users. If you are interested to my App, you could try it. Gotrends

I made a Voice AI Automated Testing platform (because I hate making phone calls)
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LemaLogic_comThis week

I made a Voice AI Automated Testing platform (because I hate making phone calls)

As my first New Year’s resolution, I’m excited to officially launch my side project: Testzilla.ai. While designing my Voice AI systems using VAPI, RetellAI, Bland, etc., I quickly got tired of the "Update system, test call flows, repeat" cycle that went with it. The whole point of Voice AI (for me) was that I could get off the phone, not spend even more time on it. So I made some Voice AI agents to test my Voice AI system so I didn't have to keep doing it manually. I showed it to developers friends who got excited and wanted to use it themselves with their systems (and sent me "Take My Money" meme, always a good sign). After hearing this a bunch of times, I decided to make it a platform I could share and easily use on multiple projects, have a simple UI, and let me run tests from my desktop or mobile with a click—and not spend 5-30 minutes of awkward time talking to phonebots in a crowded office. Win. It also has the benefit of being a way for an AI Agency to PROVE to clients that their AI system is working properly, answering questions the right way, NOT answering questions the wrong way, and that any advanced functionality (lookups, appointments, etc.) works properly. Key Features: Multi-Project Management: Simplifies the QA process across a diverse project portfolio, ideal for agencies handling multiple clients. Custom Test Management: Easily create, organize, and track test cases tailored to your project. Run Test Batches: Group and execute test cases efficiently to keep your workflow smooth and organized. Actionable Insights: Get analysis and suggestions that help you fix issues early and improve your releases. Client-Friendly Reporting: Provides clear, detailed reports that make it easy to share progress and results with stakeholders. Developer Tools: Easily manage (receive, email, view, listen, notify) your Transcripts from other systems (VAPI, Retell, etc) without having to create Zapier or Make automations with the provided Webhook URL. More dev tools coming soon, let us know what would make your life easier! I’m launching today and would love to get feedback from this awesome community! If you’re into QA, software development, or just love testing tools, give it a look and let me know what you think. I'll add $20 in credits to your new account so you can try it out risk free, no credit cards required. Here’s the link: Testzilla.ai Looking forward to hearing your thoughts! Cheers, Brian Gallagher

[D] The Rants of an experienced engineer who glimpsed into AI Academia (Briefly)
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donkey_strom16001This week

[D] The Rants of an experienced engineer who glimpsed into AI Academia (Briefly)

Background I recently graduated with a master's degree and was fortunate/unfortunate to glimpse the whole "Academic" side of ML. I took a thesis track in my degree because as an immigrant it's harder to get into a good research lab without having authorship in a couple of good papers (Or so I delude myself ). I worked as a Full-stack SWE for a startup for 4+ years before coming to the US for a master’s degree focused on ML and AI. I did everything in those years. From project management to building fully polished S/W products to DevOps to even dabbled in ML. I did my Batchelor’s degree from a university whose name is not even worth mentioning. The university for my master’s degree is in the top 20 in the AI space. I didn't know much about ML and the curiosity drove me to university. Come to uni and I focused on learning ML and AI for one 1-1.5 years after which I found advisors for a thesis topic. This is when the fun starts. I had the most amazing advisors but the entire peer review system and the way we assess ML/Science is what ticked me off. This is where the rant begins. Rant 1:Acadmia follows a Gated Institutional Narrative Let's say you are a Ph.D. at the world's top AI institution working under the best prof. You have a way higher likelihood of you getting a good Postdoc at a huge research lab vs someone's from my poor country doing a Ph.D. with a not-so-well-known advisor having published not-so-well-known papers. I come from a developing nation and I see this many times here. In my country academics don't get funding as they do at colleges in the US. One of the reasons for this is that colleges don't have such huge endowments and many academics don't have wealthy research sponsors. Brand names and prestige carry massive weight to help get funding in US academic circles. This prestige/money percolates down to the students and the researchers who work there. Students in top colleges get a huge advantage and the circles of top researchers keep being from the same sets of institutions. I have nothing against top researchers from top institutions but due to the nature of citations and the way the money flows based on them, a vicious cycle is created where the best institutions keep getting better and the rest don't get as much of a notice. Rant 2: Peer Review without Code Review in ML/AI is shady I am a computer scientist and I was appalled when I heard that you don't need to do code reviews for research papers. As a computer scientist and someone who actually did shit tons of actual ML in the past year, I find it absolutely garbage that code reviews are not a part of this system. I am not saying every scientist who reads a paper should review code but at least one person should for any paper's code submission. At least in ML and AI space. This is basic. I don't get why people call themselves computer scientists if they don't want to read the fucking code. If you can't then make a grad student do it. But for the collective of science, we need this. The core problem lies in the fact that peer review is free. : There should be better solutions for this. We ended up creating Git and that changed so many lives. Academic Research needs something similar. Rant 3: My Idea is Novel Until I see Someone Else's Paper The volume of scientific research is growing exponentially. Information is being created faster than we can digest. We can't expect people to know everything and the amount of overlap in the AI/ML fields requires way better search engines than Google Scholar. The side effect of large volumes of research is that every paper is doing something "novel" making it harder to filter what the fuck was novel. I have had so many experiences where I coded up something and came to realize that someone else has done something symbolically similar and my work just seems like a small variant of that. That's what fucks with my head. Is what I did in Novel? What the fuck is Novel? Is stitching up a transformer to any problem with fancy embeddings and tidying it up as a research paper Novel? Is just making a transformer bigger Novel? Is some new RL algorithm tested with 5 seeds and some fancy fucking prior and some esoteric reasoning for its success Novel? Is using an over parameterized model to get 95% accuracy on 200 sample test set Novel? Is apply Self-supervised learning for some new dataset Novel? If I keep on listing questions on novelty, I can probably write a novel asking about what the fuck is "Novel". Rant 4: Citation Based Optimization Promotes Self Growth Over Collective Growth Whatever people may say about collaboration, Academia intrinsically doesn't promote the right incentive structures to harbor collaboration. Let me explain, When you write a paper, the position of your name matters. If you are just a Ph.D. student and a first author to a paper, it's great. If you are an nth author Not so great. Apparently, this is a very touchy thing for academics. And lots of egos can clash around numbering and ordering of names. I distinctly remember once attending some seminar in a lab and approaching a few students on research project ideas. The first thing that came out of the PhD student's mouth was the position in authorship. As an engineer who worked with teams in the past, this was never something I had thought about. Especially because I worked in industry, where it's always the group over the person. Academia is the reverse. Academia applauds the celebration of the individual's achievements. All of this is understandable but it's something I don't like. This makes PhDs stick to their lane. The way citations/research-focus calibrate the "hire-ability" and "completion of Ph.D. thesis" metrics, people are incentivized to think about themselves instead of thinking about collaborations for making something better. Conclusion A Ph.D. in its most idealistic sense for me is the pursuit of hard ideas(I am poetic that way). In a situation like now when you have to publish or perish and words on paper get passed off as science without even seeing the code that runs it, I am extremely discouraged to go down that route. All these rants are not to diss on scientists. I did them because "we" as a community need better ways to addressing some of these problems. P.S. Never expected so many people to express their opinions about this rant. U shouldn’t take this seriously. As many people have stated I am an outsider with tiny experience to give a full picture. I realize that my post as coming out as something which tries to dichotomize academia and industry. I am not trying to do that. I wanted to highlight some problems I saw for which there is no one person to blame. These issues are in my opinion a byproduct of the economics which created this system. Thank you for gold stranger.

[R] Analysis of 400+ ML competitions in 2024
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hcarlensThis week

[R] Analysis of 400+ ML competitions in 2024

I run mlcontests.com, a website that lists ML competitions from across multiple platforms - Kaggle, DrivenData, AIcrowd, Zindi, etc… I’ve just spent a few months looking through all the info I could find on last year’s competitions, as well as winning solutions.  I found over 400 competitions that happened last year, plus info on the #1 winning solution for 70 of those.  Some highlights: Kaggle is still the biggest platform by total prize money, and also has a much bigger user base than the other platforms - though there are well over a dozen other platforms worth keeping track of, with regular interesting competitions and meaningful prize money. An increase in competitions with $1m+ prize pools (ARC Prize, AI Mathematical Olympiad, Vesuvius Challenge, AI Cyber Challenge) compared to previous years. Python continues to be the language of choice among competition winners, with almost everyone using Python as their main language. One winner used Rust, two used R.  Convolutional neural nets continue to do well in computer vision competitions, and are still more common among competition winners than transformer-based vision models.  PyTorch is still used a lot more than TensorFlow, roughly 9:1. Didn’t find any competition winners implementing neural nets in JAX or other libraries.  There were a few competition winners using AutoML packages, which seem to be getting increasingly useful. Any claims of generalist autonomous grandmaster-level agents seem premature though.  In language/text/sequence-related competitions, quantisation was key for making use of limited resources effectively. Usually 4-, 5-, or 8-bit. LoRA/QLoRA was also used quite often, though not always.  Gradient-boosted decision trees continue to win a lot of tabular/time-series competitions. They’re often ensembled with deep learning models. No tabular/time-series pre-trained foundation models were used by winners in 2024, as far as I can tell.  Starting to see more uptake of Polars for dataframes, with 7 winners using Polars in 2024 (up from 3 in 2023) vs 58 using Pandas. All those who used Polars also still used Pandas in some parts of their code.  In terms of hardware, competition winners almost entirely used NVIDIA GPUs to train their models. Some trained on CPU-only, or used a TPU through Colab. No AMD GPUs. The NVIDIA A100 was the most commonly used GPU among winners. Two of the $1m+ prize pool competitions were won by teams using 8xH100 nodes for training. A lot of other GPUs too though: T4/P100 (through Kaggle Notebooks), or consumer GPUs like RTX 3090/4090/3080/3060. Some spent hundreds of dollars on cloud compute to train their solutions.  An emerging pattern: using generative models to create additional synthetic training data to augment the training data provided.  There’s way more detail in the full report, which you can read here (no paywall): https://mlcontests.com/state-of-machine-learning-competitions-2024?ref=mlcr Processing img xmm4ywg9h9le1... The full report also features: A deep dive into the ARC Prize and the AI Mathematical Olympiad An overview of winning solutions to NLP/sequence competitions A breakdown of Python packages used in winning solutions (e.g. relative popularity of various gradient-boosted tree libraries) If you’d like to support this research, I’d really appreciate it if you could share it with anyone else who might find it interesting. You can also check out my newly-launched online magazine, Jolt ML \- featuring news from top ML conferences as well as long-read articles (just one so far, more to come!).  Thanks to the competition winners who shared info on their solutions, and also to the competition platforms who shared high-level data on their competitions.

[N] How Stability AI’s Founder Tanked His Billion-Dollar Startup
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milaworldThis week

[N] How Stability AI’s Founder Tanked His Billion-Dollar Startup

forbes article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2024/03/29/how-stability-ais-founder-tanked-his-billion-dollar-startup/ archive no paywall: https://archive.is/snbeV How Stability AI’s Founder Tanked His Billion-Dollar Startup Mar 29, 2024 Stability AI founder Emad Mostaque took the stage last week at the Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, California to roaring applause and an introduction from an AI-generated Aristotle who announced him as “a modern Prometheus” with “the astuteness of Athena and the vision of Daedalus.” “Under his stewardship, AI becomes the Herculean force poised to vanquish the twin serpents of illness and ailment and extend the olive branch of longevity,” the faux Aristotle proclaimed. “I think that’s the best intro I’ve ever had,” Mostaque said. But behind Mostaque's hagiographic introduction lay a grim and fast metastasizing truth. Stability, once one of AI’s buzziest startups, was floundering. It had been running out of money for months and Mostaque had been unable to secure enough additional funding. It had defaulted on payments to Amazon whose cloud service undergirded Stability’s core offerings. The star research team behind its flagship text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion had tendered their resignations just three days before — as Forbes would first report — and other senior leaders had issued him an ultimatum: resign, or we walk too. Still, onstage before a massive audience of peers and acolytes, Mostaque talked a big game. “AI is jet planes for the mind,” he opined. “AI is our collective intelligence. It's the human Colossus.” He claimed a new, faster version of the Stable Diffusion image generator released earlier this month could generate “200 cats with hats per second.” But later, when he was asked about Stability’s financial model, Mostaque fumbled. “I can’t say that publicly,” he replied. “But it’s going well. We’re ahead of forecast.” Four days later, Mostaque stepped down as CEO of Stability, as Forbes first reported. In a post to X, the service formerly known as Twitter, he claimed he’d voluntarily abdicated his role to decentralize “the concentration of power in AI.” But sources told Forbes that was hardly the case. Behind the scenes, Mostaque had fought to maintain his position and control despite mounting pressure externally and internally to step down. Company documents and interviews with 32 current and former employees, investors, collaborators and industry observers suggest his abrupt exit was the result of poor business judgment and wild overspending that undermined confidence in his vision and leadership, and ultimately kneecapped the company. Mostaque, through his attorneys, declined to comment on record on a detailed list of questions about the reporting in this story. But in an email to Forbes earlier this week he broadly disputed the allegations. “Nobody tells you how hard it is to be a CEO and there are better CEOs than me to scale a business,” he said in a statement. “I am not sure anyone else would have been able to build and grow the research team to build the best and most widely used models out there and I’m very proud of the team there. I look forward to moving onto the next problem to handle and hopefully move the needle.” In an emailed statement, Christian Laforte and Shan Shan Wong, the interim co-CEOs who replaced Mostaque, said, "the company remains focused on commercializing its world leading technology” and providing it “to partners across the creative industries." After starting Stability in 2019, Mostaque built the company into an early AI juggernaut by seizing upon a promising research project that would become Stable Diffusion and funding it into a business reality. The ease with which the software generated detailed images from the simplest text prompts immediately captivated the public: 10 million people used it on any given day, the company told Forbes in early 2023. For some true believers, Mostaque was a crucial advocate for open-source AI development in a space dominated by the closed systems of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. But his startup’s rise to one of the buzziest in generative AI was in part built on a series of exaggerations and misleading claims, as Forbes first reported last year (Mostaque disputed some points at the time). And they continued after he raised $100 million at a $1 billion valuation just days after launching Stable Diffusion in 2022. His failure to deliver on an array of grand promises, like building bespoke AI models for nation states, and his decision to pour tens of millions into research without a sustainable business plan, eroded Stability’s foundations and jeopardized its future. "He was just giving shit away,” one former employee told Forbes. “That man legitimately wanted to transform the world. He actually wanted to train AI models for kids in Malawi. Was it practical? Absolutely not." By October 2023, Stability would have less than $4 million left in the bank, according to an internal memo prepared for a board meeting and reviewed by Forbes. And mounting debt, including months of overdue Amazon Web Services payments, had already left it in the red. To avoid legal penalties for skipping Americans staff’s payroll, the document explained, the London-based startup was considering delaying tax payments to the U.K. government. It was Stability’s armada of GPUs, the wildly powerful and equally expensive chips undergirding AI, that were so taxing the company’s finances. Hosted by AWS, they had long been one of Mostaque’s bragging points; he often touted them as one of the world’s 10 largest supercomputers. They were responsible for helping Stability’s researchers build and maintain one of the top AI image generators, as well as break important new ground on generative audio, video and 3D models. “Undeniably, Stability has continued to ship a lot of models,” said one former employee. “They may not have profited off of it, but the broader ecosystem benefitted in a huge, huge way.” But the costs associated with so much compute were now threatening to sink the company. According to an internal October financial forecast seen by Forbes, Stability was on track to spend $99 million on compute in 2023. It noted as well that Stability was “underpaying AWS bills for July (by $1M)” and “not planning to pay AWS at the end of October for August usage ($7M).” Then there were the September and October bills, plus $1 million owed to Google Cloud and $600,000 to GPU cloud data center CoreWeave. (Amazon, Google and CoreWeave declined to comment.) With an additional $54 million allocated to wages and operating expenses, Stability’s total projected costs for 2023 were $153 million. But according to its October financial report, its projected revenue for the calendar year was just $11 million. Stability was on track to lose more money per month than it made in an entire year. The company’s dire financial position had thoroughly soured Stability’s current investors, including Coatue, which had invested tens of millions in the company during its $101 million funding round in 2022. In the middle of 2023, Mostaque agreed to an independent audit after Coatue raised a series of concerns, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter. The outcome of the investigation is unclear. Coatue declined to comment. Within a week of an early October board meeting where Mostaque shared that financial forecast, Lightspeed Venture Partners, another major investor, sent a letter to the board urging them to sell the company. The distressing numbers had “severely undermined” the firm’s confidence in Mostaque’s ability to lead the company. “In particular, we are surprised and deeply concerned by a cash position just now disclosed to us that is inconsistent with prior discussions on this topic,” Lightspeed’s general counsel Brett Nissenberg wrote in the letter, a copy of which was viewed by Forbes. “Lightspeed believes that the company is not likely financeable on terms that would assure the company’s long term sound financial position.” (Lightspeed declined a request for comment.) The calls for a sale led Stability to quietly begin looking for a buyer. Bloomberg reported in November that Stability approached AI startups Cohere and Jasper to gauge their interest. Stability denied this, and Jasper CEO Timothy Young did the same when reached for comment by Forbes. A Cohere representative declined to comment. But one prominent AI company confirmed that Mostaque’s representatives had reached out to them to test the waters. Those talks did not advance because “the numbers didn’t add up,” this person, who declined to be named due to the confidential nature of the talks, told Forbes. Stability also tried to court Samsung as a buyer, going so far as to redecorate its office in advance of a planned meeting with the Korean electronics giant. (Samsung said that it invested in Stability in 2023 and that it does not comment on M&A discussions.) Coatue had been calling for Mostaque’s resignation for months, according to a source with direct knowledge. But it and other investors were unable to oust him because he was the company’s majority shareholder. When they tried a different tact by rallying other investors to offer him a juicy equity package to resign, Mostaque refused, said two sources. By October, Coatue and Lightspeed had had enough. Coatue left the board and Lightspeed resigned its observer seat. “Emad infuriated our initial investors so much it’s just making it impossible for us to raise more money under acceptable terms,” one current Stability executive told Forbes. The early months of 2024 saw Stability’s already precarious position eroding further still. Employees were quietly laid off. Three people in a position to know estimated that at least 10% of staff were cut. And cash reserves continued to dwindle. Mostaque mentioned a lifeline at the October board meeting: $95 million in tentative funding from new investors, pending due diligence. But in the end, only a fraction of it was wired, two sources say, much of it from Intel, which Forbes has learned invested $20 million, a fraction of what was reported. (Intel did not return a request for comment by publication time.) Two hours after Forbes broke the news of Mostaque’s plans to step down as CEO, Stability issued a press release confirming his resignation. Chief operating officer Wong and chief technology officer Laforte have taken over in the interim. Mostaque, who said on X that he still owns a majority of the company, also stepped down from the board, which has now initiated a search for a permanent CEO. There is a lot of work to be done to turn things around, and very little time in which to do it. Said the current Stability executive, “There’s still a possibility of a turnaround story, but the odds drop by the day.” In July of 2023, Mostaque still thought he could pull it off. Halfway through the month, he shared a fundraising plan with his lieutenants. It was wildly optimistic, detailing the raise of $500 million in cash and another $750 million in computing facilities from marquee investors like Nvidia, Google, Intel and the World Bank (Nvidia and Google declined comment. Intel did not respond. The World Bank said it did not invest in Stability). In a Slack message reviewed by Forbes, Mostaque said Google was “willing to move fast” and the round was “likely to be oversubscribed.” It wasn’t. Three people with direct knowledge of these fundraising efforts told Forbes that while there was some interest in Stability, talks often stalled when it came time to disclose financials. Two of them noted that earlier in the year, Mostaque had simply stopped engaging with VCs who asked for numbers. Only one firm invested around that time: actor Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures, which invested $35 million in the form of a convertible SAFE note during the second quarter, according to an internal document. (Sound Ventures did not respond to a request for comment.) And though he’d managed to score a meeting with Nvidia and its CEO Jensen Huang, it ended in disaster, according to two sources. “Under Jensen's microscopic questions, Emad just fell apart,” a source in position to know told Forbes. Huang quickly concluded Stability wasn’t ready for an investment from Nvidia, the sources said. Mostaque told Forbes in an email that he had not met with Huang since 2022, except to say “hello and what’s up a few times after.” His July 2023 message references a plan to raise $150 million from Nvidia. (Nvidia declined to comment.) After a June Forbes investigation citing more than 30 sources revealed Mostaque’s history of misleading claims, Mostaque struggled to raise funding, a Stability investor told Forbes. (Mostaque disputed the story at the time and called it "coordinated lies" in his email this week to Forbes). Increasingly, investors scrutinized his assertions and pressed for data. And Young, now the CEO of Jasper, turned down a verbal offer to be Stability’s president after reading the article, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter. The collapse of the talks aggravated the board and other executives, who had hoped Young would compensate for the sales and business management skills that Mostaque lacked, according to four people in a position to know. (Young declined to comment.) When Stability’s senior leadership convened in London for the CogX conference in September, the financing had still not closed. There, a group of executives confronted Mostaque asking questions about the company’s cash position and runway, according to three people with direct knowledge of the incident. They did not get the clarity they’d hoped for. By October, Mostaque had reduced his fundraising target by more than 80%. The months that followed saw a steady drumbeat of departures — general counsel Adam Avrunin, vice presidents Mike Melnicki, Ed Newton-Rex and Joe Penna, chief people officer Ozden Onder — culminating in the demoralizing March exit of Stable Diffusion’s primary developers Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, Patrick Esser and Dominik Lorenz. Rombach, who led the team, had been angling to leave for months, two sources said, first threatening to resign last summer because of the fundraising failures. Others left over concerns about cash flow, as well as liabilities — including what four people described as Mostaque’s lax approach to ensuring that Stability products could not be used to produce child sexual abuse imagery. “Stability AI is committed to preventing the misuse of AI and prohibits the use of our image models and services for unlawful activity, including attempts to edit or create CSAM,” Ella Irwin, senior vice president of integrity, said in a statement. Newton-Rex told Forbes he resigned because he disagreed with Stability’s position that training AI on copyrighted work without consent is fair use. Melnicki and Penna declined to comment. Avrunin and Onder could not be reached for comment. None of the researchers responded to requests for comment. The Stable Diffusion researchers’ departure as a cohort says a lot about the state of Stability AI. The company’s researchers were widely viewed as its crown jewels, their work subsidized with a firehose of pricey compute power that was even extended to people outside the company. Martino Russi, an artificial intelligence researcher, told Forbes that though he was never formally employed by Stability, the company provided him a “staggering” amount of compute between January and April 2023 to play around with developing an AI video generator that Stability might someday use. “It was Candy Land or Coney Island,” said Russi, who estimates that his experiment, which was ultimately shelved, cost the company $2.5 million. Stable Diffusion was simultaneously Stability’s marquee product and its existential cash crisis. One current employee described it to Forbes as “a giant vacuum that absorbed everything: money, compute, people.” While the software was widely used, with Mostaque claiming downloads reaching into the hundreds of millions, Stability struggled to translate that wild success into revenue. Mostaque knew it could be done — peers at Databricks, Elastic and MongoDB had all turned a free product into a lucrative business — he just couldn’t figure out how. His first attempt was Stability’s API, which allowed paying customers to integrate Stable Diffusion into their own products. In early 2023, a handful of small companies, like art generator app NightCafe and presentation software startup Tome, signed on, according to four people with knowledge of the deals. But Stability’s poor account management services soured many, and in a matter of months NightCafe and Tome canceled their contracts, three people said. NightCafe founder Angus Russell told Forbes that his company switched to a competitor which “offered much cheaper inference costs and a broader service.” Tome did not respond to a request for comment. Meanwhile, Mostaque’s efforts to court larger companies like Samsung and Snapchat were failing, according to five people familiar with the effort. Canva, which was already one of the heaviest users of open-sourced Stable Diffusion, had multiple discussions with Stability, which was angling for a contract it hoped would generate several millions in annual revenue. But the deal never materialized, four sources said. “These three companies wanted and needed us,” one former employee told Forbes. “They would have been the perfect customers.” (Samsung, Snap and Canva declined to comment.) “It’s not that there was not an appetite to pay Stability — there were tons of companies that would have that wanted to,” the former employee said. “There was a huge opportunity and demand, but just a resistance to execution.” Mostaque’s other big idea was to provide governments with bespoke national AI models that would invigorate their economies and citizenry. “Emad envisions a world where AI through 100 national models serves not as a tool of the few, but as a benefactor to all promising to confront great adversaries, cancer, autism, and the sands of time itself,” the AI avatar of Aristotle said in his intro at the conference. Mostaque told several prospective customers that he could deliver such models within 60 days — an untenable timeline, according to two people in position to know. Stability attempted to develop a model for the Singaporean government over the protestation of employees who questioned its technical feasibility, three sources familiar with the effort told Forbes. But it couldn’t pull it off and Singapore never became a customer. (The government of Singapore confirmed it did not enter into a deal with Stability, but declined to answer additional questions.) As Stability careened from one new business idea to another, resources were abruptly reallocated and researchers reassigned. The whiplash shifts in a largely siloed organization demoralized and infuriated employees. “There were ‘urgent’ things, ‘urgent urgent’ things and ‘most urgent,’” one former employee complained. “None of these things seem important if everything is important.” Another former Stability executive was far more pointed in their assessment. “Emad is the most disorganized leader I have ever worked with in my career,” this person told Forbes. “He has no vision, and changes directions every week, often based on what he sees on Twitter.” In a video interview posted shortly before this story was published, Mostaque explained his leadership style: “I'm particularly great at taking creatives, developers, researchers, others, and achieving their full potential in designing systems. But I should not be dealing with, you know, HR and operations and business development and other elements. There are far better people than me to do that.” By December 2023, Stability had partially abandoned its open-source roots and announced that any commercial use of Stable Diffusion would cost customers at least $20 per month (non-commercial and research use of Stable Diffusion would remain free). But privately, Stability was considering a potentially more lucrative source of revenue: reselling the compute it was leasing from providers like AWS, according to six people familiar with the effort. Though it was essentially GPU arbitrage, Stability framed the strategy to investors as a “managed services” offering. Its damning October financial report projected optimistically that such an offering would bring in $139 million in 2024 — 98% of its revenue. Multiple employees at the time told Forbes they feared reselling compute, even if the company called it “managed services,” would violate the terms of Stability’s contract with AWS. Amazon declined to comment. “The line internally was that we are not reselling compute,” one former employee said. “This was some of the dirtiest feeling stuff.” Stability also discussed reselling a cluster of Nvidia A100 chips, leased via CoreWeave, to the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, three sources said. “It was under the guise of managed services, but there wasn’t any management happening,” one of these people told Forbes. Andreessen Horowitz and CoreWeave declined to comment. Stability did not respond to questions about if it plans to continue this strategy now that Mostaque is out of the picture. Regardless, interim co-CEOs Wong and Laforte are on a tight timeline to clean up his mess. Board chairman Jim O’Shaughnessy said in a statement that he was confident the pair “will adeptly steer the company forward in developing and commercializing industry-leading generative AI products.” But burn continues to far outpace revenue. The Financial Times reported Friday that the company made $5.4 million of revenue in February, against $8 million in costs. Several sources said there are ongoing concerns about making payroll for the roughly 150 remaining employees. Leadership roles have gone vacant for months amid the disarray, leaving the company increasingly directionless. Meanwhile, a potentially catastrophic legal threat looms over the company: A trio of copyright infringement lawsuits brought by Getty Images and a group of artists in the U.S. and U.K., who claim Stability illegally used their art and photography to train the AI models powering Stable Diffusion. A London-based court has already rejected the company’s bid to throw out one of the lawsuits on the basis that none of its researchers were based in the U.K. And Stability’s claim that Getty’s Delaware lawsuit should be blocked because it's a U.K.-based company was rejected. (Stability did not respond to questions about the litigation.) AI-related copyright litigation “could go on for years,” according to Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University. He told Forbes that though plaintiffs suing AI firms face an uphill battle overcoming the existing legal precedent on copyright infringement, the quantity of arguments available to make are virtually inexhaustible. “Like in military theory, if there’s a gap in your lines, that’s where the enemy pours through — if any one of those arguments succeeds, it could completely change the generative AI environment,” he said. “In some sense, generative AI as an industry has to win everything.” Stability, which had more than $100 million in the bank just a year and a half ago, is in a deep hole. Not only does it need more funding, it needs a viable business model — or a buyer with the vision and chops to make it successful in a fast-moving and highly competitive sector. At an all hands meeting this past Monday, Stability’s new leaders detailed a path forward. One point of emphasis: a plan to better manage resources and expenses, according to one person in attendance. It’s a start, but Mostaque’s meddling has left them with little runway to execute. His resignation, though, has given some employees hope. “A few people are 100% going to reconsider leaving after today,” said one current employee. “And the weird gloomy aura of hearing Emad talking nonsense for an hour is gone.” Shortly before Mostaque resigned, one current Stability executive told Forbes that they were optimistic his departure could make Stability appealing enough to receive a small investment or sale to a friendly party. “There are companies that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars that have much less intrinsic value than Stability,” the person said. “A white knight may still appear.”

[D] I don't really trust papers out of "Top Labs" anymore
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[D] I don't really trust papers out of "Top Labs" anymore

I mean, I trust that the numbers they got are accurate and that they really did the work and got the results. I believe those. It's just that, take the recent "An Evolutionary Approach to Dynamic Introduction of Tasks in Large-scale Multitask Learning Systems" paper. It's 18 pages of talking through this pretty convoluted evolutionary and multitask learning algorithm, it's pretty interesting, solves a bunch of problems. But two notes. One, the big number they cite as the success metric is 99.43 on CIFAR-10, against a SotA of 99.40, so woop-de-fucking-doo in the grand scheme of things. Two, there's a chart towards the end of the paper that details how many TPU core-hours were used for just the training regimens that results in the final results. The sum total is 17,810 core-hours. Let's assume that for someone who doesn't work at Google, you'd have to use on-demand pricing of $3.22/hr. This means that these trained models cost $57,348. Strictly speaking, throwing enough compute at a general enough genetic algorithm will eventually produce arbitrarily good performance, so while you can absolutely read this paper and collect interesting ideas about how to use genetic algorithms to accomplish multitask learning by having each new task leverage learned weights from previous tasks by defining modifications to a subset of components of a pre-existing model, there's a meta-textual level on which this paper is just "Jeff Dean spent enough money to feed a family of four for half a decade to get a 0.03% improvement on CIFAR-10." OpenAI is far and away the worst offender here, but it seems like everyone's doing it. You throw a fuckton of compute and a light ganache of new ideas at an existing problem with existing data and existing benchmarks, and then if your numbers are infinitesimally higher than their numbers, you get to put a lil' sticker on your CV. Why should I trust that your ideas are even any good? I can't check them, I can't apply them to my own projects. Is this really what we're comfortable with as a community? A handful of corporations and the occasional university waving their dicks at everyone because they've got the compute to burn and we don't? There's a level at which I think there should be a new journal, exclusively for papers in which you can replicate their experimental results in under eight hours on a single consumer GPU.

[N] How Stability AI’s Founder Tanked His Billion-Dollar Startup
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[N] How Stability AI’s Founder Tanked His Billion-Dollar Startup

forbes article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2024/03/29/how-stability-ais-founder-tanked-his-billion-dollar-startup/ archive no paywall: https://archive.is/snbeV How Stability AI’s Founder Tanked His Billion-Dollar Startup Mar 29, 2024 Stability AI founder Emad Mostaque took the stage last week at the Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, California to roaring applause and an introduction from an AI-generated Aristotle who announced him as “a modern Prometheus” with “the astuteness of Athena and the vision of Daedalus.” “Under his stewardship, AI becomes the Herculean force poised to vanquish the twin serpents of illness and ailment and extend the olive branch of longevity,” the faux Aristotle proclaimed. “I think that’s the best intro I’ve ever had,” Mostaque said. But behind Mostaque's hagiographic introduction lay a grim and fast metastasizing truth. Stability, once one of AI’s buzziest startups, was floundering. It had been running out of money for months and Mostaque had been unable to secure enough additional funding. It had defaulted on payments to Amazon whose cloud service undergirded Stability’s core offerings. The star research team behind its flagship text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion had tendered their resignations just three days before — as Forbes would first report — and other senior leaders had issued him an ultimatum: resign, or we walk too. Still, onstage before a massive audience of peers and acolytes, Mostaque talked a big game. “AI is jet planes for the mind,” he opined. “AI is our collective intelligence. It's the human Colossus.” He claimed a new, faster version of the Stable Diffusion image generator released earlier this month could generate “200 cats with hats per second.” But later, when he was asked about Stability’s financial model, Mostaque fumbled. “I can’t say that publicly,” he replied. “But it’s going well. We’re ahead of forecast.” Four days later, Mostaque stepped down as CEO of Stability, as Forbes first reported. In a post to X, the service formerly known as Twitter, he claimed he’d voluntarily abdicated his role to decentralize “the concentration of power in AI.” But sources told Forbes that was hardly the case. Behind the scenes, Mostaque had fought to maintain his position and control despite mounting pressure externally and internally to step down. Company documents and interviews with 32 current and former employees, investors, collaborators and industry observers suggest his abrupt exit was the result of poor business judgment and wild overspending that undermined confidence in his vision and leadership, and ultimately kneecapped the company. Mostaque, through his attorneys, declined to comment on record on a detailed list of questions about the reporting in this story. But in an email to Forbes earlier this week he broadly disputed the allegations. “Nobody tells you how hard it is to be a CEO and there are better CEOs than me to scale a business,” he said in a statement. “I am not sure anyone else would have been able to build and grow the research team to build the best and most widely used models out there and I’m very proud of the team there. I look forward to moving onto the next problem to handle and hopefully move the needle.” In an emailed statement, Christian Laforte and Shan Shan Wong, the interim co-CEOs who replaced Mostaque, said, "the company remains focused on commercializing its world leading technology” and providing it “to partners across the creative industries." After starting Stability in 2019, Mostaque built the company into an early AI juggernaut by seizing upon a promising research project that would become Stable Diffusion and funding it into a business reality. The ease with which the software generated detailed images from the simplest text prompts immediately captivated the public: 10 million people used it on any given day, the company told Forbes in early 2023. For some true believers, Mostaque was a crucial advocate for open-source AI development in a space dominated by the closed systems of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. But his startup’s rise to one of the buzziest in generative AI was in part built on a series of exaggerations and misleading claims, as Forbes first reported last year (Mostaque disputed some points at the time). And they continued after he raised $100 million at a $1 billion valuation just days after launching Stable Diffusion in 2022. His failure to deliver on an array of grand promises, like building bespoke AI models for nation states, and his decision to pour tens of millions into research without a sustainable business plan, eroded Stability’s foundations and jeopardized its future. "He was just giving shit away,” one former employee told Forbes. “That man legitimately wanted to transform the world. He actually wanted to train AI models for kids in Malawi. Was it practical? Absolutely not." By October 2023, Stability would have less than $4 million left in the bank, according to an internal memo prepared for a board meeting and reviewed by Forbes. And mounting debt, including months of overdue Amazon Web Services payments, had already left it in the red. To avoid legal penalties for skipping Americans staff’s payroll, the document explained, the London-based startup was considering delaying tax payments to the U.K. government. It was Stability’s armada of GPUs, the wildly powerful and equally expensive chips undergirding AI, that were so taxing the company’s finances. Hosted by AWS, they had long been one of Mostaque’s bragging points; he often touted them as one of the world’s 10 largest supercomputers. They were responsible for helping Stability’s researchers build and maintain one of the top AI image generators, as well as break important new ground on generative audio, video and 3D models. “Undeniably, Stability has continued to ship a lot of models,” said one former employee. “They may not have profited off of it, but the broader ecosystem benefitted in a huge, huge way.” But the costs associated with so much compute were now threatening to sink the company. According to an internal October financial forecast seen by Forbes, Stability was on track to spend $99 million on compute in 2023. It noted as well that Stability was “underpaying AWS bills for July (by $1M)” and “not planning to pay AWS at the end of October for August usage ($7M).” Then there were the September and October bills, plus $1 million owed to Google Cloud and $600,000 to GPU cloud data center CoreWeave. (Amazon, Google and CoreWeave declined to comment.) With an additional $54 million allocated to wages and operating expenses, Stability’s total projected costs for 2023 were $153 million. But according to its October financial report, its projected revenue for the calendar year was just $11 million. Stability was on track to lose more money per month than it made in an entire year. The company’s dire financial position had thoroughly soured Stability’s current investors, including Coatue, which had invested tens of millions in the company during its $101 million funding round in 2022. In the middle of 2023, Mostaque agreed to an independent audit after Coatue raised a series of concerns, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter. The outcome of the investigation is unclear. Coatue declined to comment. Within a week of an early October board meeting where Mostaque shared that financial forecast, Lightspeed Venture Partners, another major investor, sent a letter to the board urging them to sell the company. The distressing numbers had “severely undermined” the firm’s confidence in Mostaque’s ability to lead the company. “In particular, we are surprised and deeply concerned by a cash position just now disclosed to us that is inconsistent with prior discussions on this topic,” Lightspeed’s general counsel Brett Nissenberg wrote in the letter, a copy of which was viewed by Forbes. “Lightspeed believes that the company is not likely financeable on terms that would assure the company’s long term sound financial position.” (Lightspeed declined a request for comment.) The calls for a sale led Stability to quietly begin looking for a buyer. Bloomberg reported in November that Stability approached AI startups Cohere and Jasper to gauge their interest. Stability denied this, and Jasper CEO Timothy Young did the same when reached for comment by Forbes. A Cohere representative declined to comment. But one prominent AI company confirmed that Mostaque’s representatives had reached out to them to test the waters. Those talks did not advance because “the numbers didn’t add up,” this person, who declined to be named due to the confidential nature of the talks, told Forbes. Stability also tried to court Samsung as a buyer, going so far as to redecorate its office in advance of a planned meeting with the Korean electronics giant. (Samsung said that it invested in Stability in 2023 and that it does not comment on M&A discussions.) Coatue had been calling for Mostaque’s resignation for months, according to a source with direct knowledge. But it and other investors were unable to oust him because he was the company’s majority shareholder. When they tried a different tact by rallying other investors to offer him a juicy equity package to resign, Mostaque refused, said two sources. By October, Coatue and Lightspeed had had enough. Coatue left the board and Lightspeed resigned its observer seat. “Emad infuriated our initial investors so much it’s just making it impossible for us to raise more money under acceptable terms,” one current Stability executive told Forbes. The early months of 2024 saw Stability’s already precarious position eroding further still. Employees were quietly laid off. Three people in a position to know estimated that at least 10% of staff were cut. And cash reserves continued to dwindle. Mostaque mentioned a lifeline at the October board meeting: $95 million in tentative funding from new investors, pending due diligence. But in the end, only a fraction of it was wired, two sources say, much of it from Intel, which Forbes has learned invested $20 million, a fraction of what was reported. (Intel did not return a request for comment by publication time.) Two hours after Forbes broke the news of Mostaque’s plans to step down as CEO, Stability issued a press release confirming his resignation. Chief operating officer Wong and chief technology officer Laforte have taken over in the interim. Mostaque, who said on X that he still owns a majority of the company, also stepped down from the board, which has now initiated a search for a permanent CEO. There is a lot of work to be done to turn things around, and very little time in which to do it. Said the current Stability executive, “There’s still a possibility of a turnaround story, but the odds drop by the day.” In July of 2023, Mostaque still thought he could pull it off. Halfway through the month, he shared a fundraising plan with his lieutenants. It was wildly optimistic, detailing the raise of $500 million in cash and another $750 million in computing facilities from marquee investors like Nvidia, Google, Intel and the World Bank (Nvidia and Google declined comment. Intel did not respond. The World Bank said it did not invest in Stability). In a Slack message reviewed by Forbes, Mostaque said Google was “willing to move fast” and the round was “likely to be oversubscribed.” It wasn’t. Three people with direct knowledge of these fundraising efforts told Forbes that while there was some interest in Stability, talks often stalled when it came time to disclose financials. Two of them noted that earlier in the year, Mostaque had simply stopped engaging with VCs who asked for numbers. Only one firm invested around that time: actor Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures, which invested $35 million in the form of a convertible SAFE note during the second quarter, according to an internal document. (Sound Ventures did not respond to a request for comment.) And though he’d managed to score a meeting with Nvidia and its CEO Jensen Huang, it ended in disaster, according to two sources. “Under Jensen's microscopic questions, Emad just fell apart,” a source in position to know told Forbes. Huang quickly concluded Stability wasn’t ready for an investment from Nvidia, the sources said. Mostaque told Forbes in an email that he had not met with Huang since 2022, except to say “hello and what’s up a few times after.” His July 2023 message references a plan to raise $150 million from Nvidia. (Nvidia declined to comment.) After a June Forbes investigation citing more than 30 sources revealed Mostaque’s history of misleading claims, Mostaque struggled to raise funding, a Stability investor told Forbes. (Mostaque disputed the story at the time and called it "coordinated lies" in his email this week to Forbes). Increasingly, investors scrutinized his assertions and pressed for data. And Young, now the CEO of Jasper, turned down a verbal offer to be Stability’s president after reading the article, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter. The collapse of the talks aggravated the board and other executives, who had hoped Young would compensate for the sales and business management skills that Mostaque lacked, according to four people in a position to know. (Young declined to comment.) When Stability’s senior leadership convened in London for the CogX conference in September, the financing had still not closed. There, a group of executives confronted Mostaque asking questions about the company’s cash position and runway, according to three people with direct knowledge of the incident. They did not get the clarity they’d hoped for. By October, Mostaque had reduced his fundraising target by more than 80%. The months that followed saw a steady drumbeat of departures — general counsel Adam Avrunin, vice presidents Mike Melnicki, Ed Newton-Rex and Joe Penna, chief people officer Ozden Onder — culminating in the demoralizing March exit of Stable Diffusion’s primary developers Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, Patrick Esser and Dominik Lorenz. Rombach, who led the team, had been angling to leave for months, two sources said, first threatening to resign last summer because of the fundraising failures. Others left over concerns about cash flow, as well as liabilities — including what four people described as Mostaque’s lax approach to ensuring that Stability products could not be used to produce child sexual abuse imagery. “Stability AI is committed to preventing the misuse of AI and prohibits the use of our image models and services for unlawful activity, including attempts to edit or create CSAM,” Ella Irwin, senior vice president of integrity, said in a statement. Newton-Rex told Forbes he resigned because he disagreed with Stability’s position that training AI on copyrighted work without consent is fair use. Melnicki and Penna declined to comment. Avrunin and Onder could not be reached for comment. None of the researchers responded to requests for comment. The Stable Diffusion researchers’ departure as a cohort says a lot about the state of Stability AI. The company’s researchers were widely viewed as its crown jewels, their work subsidized with a firehose of pricey compute power that was even extended to people outside the company. Martino Russi, an artificial intelligence researcher, told Forbes that though he was never formally employed by Stability, the company provided him a “staggering” amount of compute between January and April 2023 to play around with developing an AI video generator that Stability might someday use. “It was Candy Land or Coney Island,” said Russi, who estimates that his experiment, which was ultimately shelved, cost the company $2.5 million. Stable Diffusion was simultaneously Stability’s marquee product and its existential cash crisis. One current employee described it to Forbes as “a giant vacuum that absorbed everything: money, compute, people.” While the software was widely used, with Mostaque claiming downloads reaching into the hundreds of millions, Stability struggled to translate that wild success into revenue. Mostaque knew it could be done — peers at Databricks, Elastic and MongoDB had all turned a free product into a lucrative business — he just couldn’t figure out how. His first attempt was Stability’s API, which allowed paying customers to integrate Stable Diffusion into their own products. In early 2023, a handful of small companies, like art generator app NightCafe and presentation software startup Tome, signed on, according to four people with knowledge of the deals. But Stability’s poor account management services soured many, and in a matter of months NightCafe and Tome canceled their contracts, three people said. NightCafe founder Angus Russell told Forbes that his company switched to a competitor which “offered much cheaper inference costs and a broader service.” Tome did not respond to a request for comment. Meanwhile, Mostaque’s efforts to court larger companies like Samsung and Snapchat were failing, according to five people familiar with the effort. Canva, which was already one of the heaviest users of open-sourced Stable Diffusion, had multiple discussions with Stability, which was angling for a contract it hoped would generate several millions in annual revenue. But the deal never materialized, four sources said. “These three companies wanted and needed us,” one former employee told Forbes. “They would have been the perfect customers.” (Samsung, Snap and Canva declined to comment.) “It’s not that there was not an appetite to pay Stability — there were tons of companies that would have that wanted to,” the former employee said. “There was a huge opportunity and demand, but just a resistance to execution.” Mostaque’s other big idea was to provide governments with bespoke national AI models that would invigorate their economies and citizenry. “Emad envisions a world where AI through 100 national models serves not as a tool of the few, but as a benefactor to all promising to confront great adversaries, cancer, autism, and the sands of time itself,” the AI avatar of Aristotle said in his intro at the conference. Mostaque told several prospective customers that he could deliver such models within 60 days — an untenable timeline, according to two people in position to know. Stability attempted to develop a model for the Singaporean government over the protestation of employees who questioned its technical feasibility, three sources familiar with the effort told Forbes. But it couldn’t pull it off and Singapore never became a customer. (The government of Singapore confirmed it did not enter into a deal with Stability, but declined to answer additional questions.) As Stability careened from one new business idea to another, resources were abruptly reallocated and researchers reassigned. The whiplash shifts in a largely siloed organization demoralized and infuriated employees. “There were ‘urgent’ things, ‘urgent urgent’ things and ‘most urgent,’” one former employee complained. “None of these things seem important if everything is important.” Another former Stability executive was far more pointed in their assessment. “Emad is the most disorganized leader I have ever worked with in my career,” this person told Forbes. “He has no vision, and changes directions every week, often based on what he sees on Twitter.” In a video interview posted shortly before this story was published, Mostaque explained his leadership style: “I'm particularly great at taking creatives, developers, researchers, others, and achieving their full potential in designing systems. But I should not be dealing with, you know, HR and operations and business development and other elements. There are far better people than me to do that.” By December 2023, Stability had partially abandoned its open-source roots and announced that any commercial use of Stable Diffusion would cost customers at least $20 per month (non-commercial and research use of Stable Diffusion would remain free). But privately, Stability was considering a potentially more lucrative source of revenue: reselling the compute it was leasing from providers like AWS, according to six people familiar with the effort. Though it was essentially GPU arbitrage, Stability framed the strategy to investors as a “managed services” offering. Its damning October financial report projected optimistically that such an offering would bring in $139 million in 2024 — 98% of its revenue. Multiple employees at the time told Forbes they feared reselling compute, even if the company called it “managed services,” would violate the terms of Stability’s contract with AWS. Amazon declined to comment. “The line internally was that we are not reselling compute,” one former employee said. “This was some of the dirtiest feeling stuff.” Stability also discussed reselling a cluster of Nvidia A100 chips, leased via CoreWeave, to the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, three sources said. “It was under the guise of managed services, but there wasn’t any management happening,” one of these people told Forbes. Andreessen Horowitz and CoreWeave declined to comment. Stability did not respond to questions about if it plans to continue this strategy now that Mostaque is out of the picture. Regardless, interim co-CEOs Wong and Laforte are on a tight timeline to clean up his mess. Board chairman Jim O’Shaughnessy said in a statement that he was confident the pair “will adeptly steer the company forward in developing and commercializing industry-leading generative AI products.” But burn continues to far outpace revenue. The Financial Times reported Friday that the company made $5.4 million of revenue in February, against $8 million in costs. Several sources said there are ongoing concerns about making payroll for the roughly 150 remaining employees. Leadership roles have gone vacant for months amid the disarray, leaving the company increasingly directionless. Meanwhile, a potentially catastrophic legal threat looms over the company: A trio of copyright infringement lawsuits brought by Getty Images and a group of artists in the U.S. and U.K., who claim Stability illegally used their art and photography to train the AI models powering Stable Diffusion. A London-based court has already rejected the company’s bid to throw out one of the lawsuits on the basis that none of its researchers were based in the U.K. And Stability’s claim that Getty’s Delaware lawsuit should be blocked because it's a U.K.-based company was rejected. (Stability did not respond to questions about the litigation.) AI-related copyright litigation “could go on for years,” according to Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University. He told Forbes that though plaintiffs suing AI firms face an uphill battle overcoming the existing legal precedent on copyright infringement, the quantity of arguments available to make are virtually inexhaustible. “Like in military theory, if there’s a gap in your lines, that’s where the enemy pours through — if any one of those arguments succeeds, it could completely change the generative AI environment,” he said. “In some sense, generative AI as an industry has to win everything.” Stability, which had more than $100 million in the bank just a year and a half ago, is in a deep hole. Not only does it need more funding, it needs a viable business model — or a buyer with the vision and chops to make it successful in a fast-moving and highly competitive sector. At an all hands meeting this past Monday, Stability’s new leaders detailed a path forward. One point of emphasis: a plan to better manage resources and expenses, according to one person in attendance. It’s a start, but Mostaque’s meddling has left them with little runway to execute. His resignation, though, has given some employees hope. “A few people are 100% going to reconsider leaving after today,” said one current employee. “And the weird gloomy aura of hearing Emad talking nonsense for an hour is gone.” Shortly before Mostaque resigned, one current Stability executive told Forbes that they were optimistic his departure could make Stability appealing enough to receive a small investment or sale to a friendly party. “There are companies that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars that have much less intrinsic value than Stability,” the person said. “A white knight may still appear.”

[D] The current and future state of AI/ML is shockingly demoralizing with little hope of redemption
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[D] The current and future state of AI/ML is shockingly demoralizing with little hope of redemption

I recently encountered the PaLM (Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways) paper from Google Research and it opened up a can of worms of ideas I’ve felt I’ve intuitively had for a while, but have been unable to express – and I know I can’t be the only one. Sometimes I wonder what the original pioneers of AI – Turing, Neumann, McCarthy, etc. – would think if they could see the state of AI that we’ve gotten ourselves into. 67 authors, 83 pages, 540B parameters in a model, the internals of which no one can say they comprehend with a straight face, 6144 TPUs in a commercial lab that no one has access to, on a rig that no one can afford, trained on a volume of data that a human couldn’t process in a lifetime, 1 page on ethics with the same ideas that have been rehashed over and over elsewhere with no attempt at a solution – bias, racism, malicious use, etc. – for purposes that who asked for? When I started my career as an AI/ML research engineer 2016, I was most interested in two types of tasks – 1.) those that most humans could do but that would universally be considered tedious and non-scalable. I’m talking image classification, sentiment analysis, even document summarization, etc. 2.) tasks that humans lack the capacity to perform as well as computers for various reasons – forecasting, risk analysis, game playing, and so forth. I still love my career, and I try to only work on projects in these areas, but it’s getting harder and harder. This is because, somewhere along the way, it became popular and unquestionably acceptable to push AI into domains that were originally uniquely human, those areas that sit at the top of Maslows’s hierarchy of needs in terms of self-actualization – art, music, writing, singing, programming, and so forth. These areas of endeavor have negative logarithmic ability curves – the vast majority of people cannot do them well at all, about 10% can do them decently, and 1% or less can do them extraordinarily. The little discussed problem with AI-generation is that, without extreme deterrence, we will sacrifice human achievement at the top percentile in the name of lowering the bar for a larger volume of people, until the AI ability range is the norm. This is because relative to humans, AI is cheap, fast, and infinite, to the extent that investments in human achievement will be watered down at the societal, educational, and individual level with each passing year. And unlike AI gameplay which superseded humans decades ago, we won’t be able to just disqualify the machines and continue to play as if they didn’t exist. Almost everywhere I go, even this forum, I encounter almost universal deference given to current SOTA AI generation systems like GPT-3, CODEX, DALL-E, etc., with almost no one extending their implications to its logical conclusion, which is long-term convergence to the mean, to mediocrity, in the fields they claim to address or even enhance. If you’re an artist or writer and you’re using DALL-E or GPT-3 to “enhance” your work, or if you’re a programmer saying, “GitHub Co-Pilot makes me a better programmer?”, then how could you possibly know? You’ve disrupted and bypassed your own creative process, which is thoughts -> (optionally words) -> actions -> feedback -> repeat, and instead seeded your canvas with ideas from a machine, the provenance of which you can’t understand, nor can the machine reliably explain. And the more you do this, the more you make your creative processes dependent on said machine, until you must question whether or not you could work at the same level without it. When I was a college student, I often dabbled with weed, LSD, and mushrooms, and for a while, I thought the ideas I was having while under the influence were revolutionary and groundbreaking – that is until took it upon myself to actually start writing down those ideas and then reviewing them while sober, when I realized they weren’t that special at all. What I eventually determined is that, under the influence, it was impossible for me to accurately evaluate the drug-induced ideas I was having because the influencing agent the generates the ideas themselves was disrupting the same frame of reference that is responsible evaluating said ideas. This is the same principle of – if you took a pill and it made you stupider, would even know it? I believe that, especially over the long-term timeframe that crosses generations, there’s significant risk that current AI-generation developments produces a similar effect on humanity, and we mostly won’t even realize it has happened, much like a frog in boiling water. If you have children like I do, how can you be aware of the the current SOTA in these areas, project that 20 to 30 years, and then and tell them with a straight face that it is worth them pursuing their talent in art, writing, or music? How can you be honest and still say that widespread implementation of auto-correction hasn’t made you and others worse and worse at spelling over the years (a task that even I believe most would agree is tedious and worth automating). Furthermore, I’ve yet to set anyone discuss the train – generate – train - generate feedback loop that long-term application of AI-generation systems imply. The first generations of these models were trained on wide swaths of web data generated by humans, but if these systems are permitted to continually spit out content without restriction or verification, especially to the extent that it reduces or eliminates development and investment in human talent over the long term, then what happens to the 4th or 5th generation of models? Eventually we encounter this situation where the AI is being trained almost exclusively on AI-generated content, and therefore with each generation, it settles more and more into the mean and mediocrity with no way out using current methods. By the time that happens, what will we have lost in terms of the creative capacity of people, and will we be able to get it back? By relentlessly pursuing this direction so enthusiastically, I’m convinced that we as AI/ML developers, companies, and nations are past the point of no return, and it mostly comes down the investments in time and money that we’ve made, as well as a prisoner’s dilemma with our competitors. As a society though, this direction we’ve chosen for short-term gains will almost certainly make humanity worse off, mostly for those who are powerless to do anything about it – our children, our grandchildren, and generations to come. If you’re an AI researcher or a data scientist like myself, how do you turn things back for yourself when you’ve spent years on years building your career in this direction? You’re likely making near or north of $200k annually TC and have a family to support, and so it’s too late, no matter how you feel about the direction the field has gone. If you’re a company, how do you standby and let your competitors aggressively push their AutoML solutions into more and more markets without putting out your own? Moreover, if you’re a manager or thought leader in this field like Jeff Dean how do you justify to your own boss and your shareholders your team’s billions of dollars in AI investment while simultaneously balancing ethical concerns? You can’t – the only answer is bigger and bigger models, more and more applications, more and more data, and more and more automation, and then automating that even further. If you’re a country like the US, how do responsibly develop AI while your competitors like China single-mindedly push full steam ahead without an iota of ethical concern to replace you in numerous areas in global power dynamics? Once again, failing to compete would be pre-emptively admitting defeat. Even assuming that none of what I’ve described here happens to such an extent, how are so few people not taking this seriously and discounting this possibility? If everything I’m saying is fear-mongering and non-sense, then I’d be interested in hearing what you think human-AI co-existence looks like in 20 to 30 years and why it isn’t as demoralizing as I’ve made it out to be. &#x200B; EDIT: Day after posting this -- this post took off way more than I expected. Even if I received 20 - 25 comments, I would have considered that a success, but this went much further. Thank you to each one of you that has read this post, even more so if you left a comment, and triply so for those who gave awards! I've read almost every comment that has come in (even the troll ones), and am truly grateful for each one, including those in sharp disagreement. I've learned much more from this discussion with the sub than I could have imagined on this topic, from so many perspectives. While I will try to reply as many comments as I can, the sheer comment volume combined with limited free time between work and family unfortunately means that there are many that I likely won't be able to get to. That will invariably include some that I would love respond to under the assumption of infinite time, but I will do my best, even if the latency stretches into days. Thank you all once again!

[N] How Stability AI’s Founder Tanked His Billion-Dollar Startup
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[N] How Stability AI’s Founder Tanked His Billion-Dollar Startup

forbes article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2024/03/29/how-stability-ais-founder-tanked-his-billion-dollar-startup/ archive no paywall: https://archive.is/snbeV How Stability AI’s Founder Tanked His Billion-Dollar Startup Mar 29, 2024 Stability AI founder Emad Mostaque took the stage last week at the Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, California to roaring applause and an introduction from an AI-generated Aristotle who announced him as “a modern Prometheus” with “the astuteness of Athena and the vision of Daedalus.” “Under his stewardship, AI becomes the Herculean force poised to vanquish the twin serpents of illness and ailment and extend the olive branch of longevity,” the faux Aristotle proclaimed. “I think that’s the best intro I’ve ever had,” Mostaque said. But behind Mostaque's hagiographic introduction lay a grim and fast metastasizing truth. Stability, once one of AI’s buzziest startups, was floundering. It had been running out of money for months and Mostaque had been unable to secure enough additional funding. It had defaulted on payments to Amazon whose cloud service undergirded Stability’s core offerings. The star research team behind its flagship text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion had tendered their resignations just three days before — as Forbes would first report — and other senior leaders had issued him an ultimatum: resign, or we walk too. Still, onstage before a massive audience of peers and acolytes, Mostaque talked a big game. “AI is jet planes for the mind,” he opined. “AI is our collective intelligence. It's the human Colossus.” He claimed a new, faster version of the Stable Diffusion image generator released earlier this month could generate “200 cats with hats per second.” But later, when he was asked about Stability’s financial model, Mostaque fumbled. “I can’t say that publicly,” he replied. “But it’s going well. We’re ahead of forecast.” Four days later, Mostaque stepped down as CEO of Stability, as Forbes first reported. In a post to X, the service formerly known as Twitter, he claimed he’d voluntarily abdicated his role to decentralize “the concentration of power in AI.” But sources told Forbes that was hardly the case. Behind the scenes, Mostaque had fought to maintain his position and control despite mounting pressure externally and internally to step down. Company documents and interviews with 32 current and former employees, investors, collaborators and industry observers suggest his abrupt exit was the result of poor business judgment and wild overspending that undermined confidence in his vision and leadership, and ultimately kneecapped the company. Mostaque, through his attorneys, declined to comment on record on a detailed list of questions about the reporting in this story. But in an email to Forbes earlier this week he broadly disputed the allegations. “Nobody tells you how hard it is to be a CEO and there are better CEOs than me to scale a business,” he said in a statement. “I am not sure anyone else would have been able to build and grow the research team to build the best and most widely used models out there and I’m very proud of the team there. I look forward to moving onto the next problem to handle and hopefully move the needle.” In an emailed statement, Christian Laforte and Shan Shan Wong, the interim co-CEOs who replaced Mostaque, said, "the company remains focused on commercializing its world leading technology” and providing it “to partners across the creative industries." After starting Stability in 2019, Mostaque built the company into an early AI juggernaut by seizing upon a promising research project that would become Stable Diffusion and funding it into a business reality. The ease with which the software generated detailed images from the simplest text prompts immediately captivated the public: 10 million people used it on any given day, the company told Forbes in early 2023. For some true believers, Mostaque was a crucial advocate for open-source AI development in a space dominated by the closed systems of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. But his startup’s rise to one of the buzziest in generative AI was in part built on a series of exaggerations and misleading claims, as Forbes first reported last year (Mostaque disputed some points at the time). And they continued after he raised $100 million at a $1 billion valuation just days after launching Stable Diffusion in 2022. His failure to deliver on an array of grand promises, like building bespoke AI models for nation states, and his decision to pour tens of millions into research without a sustainable business plan, eroded Stability’s foundations and jeopardized its future. "He was just giving shit away,” one former employee told Forbes. “That man legitimately wanted to transform the world. He actually wanted to train AI models for kids in Malawi. Was it practical? Absolutely not." By October 2023, Stability would have less than $4 million left in the bank, according to an internal memo prepared for a board meeting and reviewed by Forbes. And mounting debt, including months of overdue Amazon Web Services payments, had already left it in the red. To avoid legal penalties for skipping Americans staff’s payroll, the document explained, the London-based startup was considering delaying tax payments to the U.K. government. It was Stability’s armada of GPUs, the wildly powerful and equally expensive chips undergirding AI, that were so taxing the company’s finances. Hosted by AWS, they had long been one of Mostaque’s bragging points; he often touted them as one of the world’s 10 largest supercomputers. They were responsible for helping Stability’s researchers build and maintain one of the top AI image generators, as well as break important new ground on generative audio, video and 3D models. “Undeniably, Stability has continued to ship a lot of models,” said one former employee. “They may not have profited off of it, but the broader ecosystem benefitted in a huge, huge way.” But the costs associated with so much compute were now threatening to sink the company. According to an internal October financial forecast seen by Forbes, Stability was on track to spend $99 million on compute in 2023. It noted as well that Stability was “underpaying AWS bills for July (by $1M)” and “not planning to pay AWS at the end of October for August usage ($7M).” Then there were the September and October bills, plus $1 million owed to Google Cloud and $600,000 to GPU cloud data center CoreWeave. (Amazon, Google and CoreWeave declined to comment.) With an additional $54 million allocated to wages and operating expenses, Stability’s total projected costs for 2023 were $153 million. But according to its October financial report, its projected revenue for the calendar year was just $11 million. Stability was on track to lose more money per month than it made in an entire year. The company’s dire financial position had thoroughly soured Stability’s current investors, including Coatue, which had invested tens of millions in the company during its $101 million funding round in 2022. In the middle of 2023, Mostaque agreed to an independent audit after Coatue raised a series of concerns, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter. The outcome of the investigation is unclear. Coatue declined to comment. Within a week of an early October board meeting where Mostaque shared that financial forecast, Lightspeed Venture Partners, another major investor, sent a letter to the board urging them to sell the company. The distressing numbers had “severely undermined” the firm’s confidence in Mostaque’s ability to lead the company. “In particular, we are surprised and deeply concerned by a cash position just now disclosed to us that is inconsistent with prior discussions on this topic,” Lightspeed’s general counsel Brett Nissenberg wrote in the letter, a copy of which was viewed by Forbes. “Lightspeed believes that the company is not likely financeable on terms that would assure the company’s long term sound financial position.” (Lightspeed declined a request for comment.) The calls for a sale led Stability to quietly begin looking for a buyer. Bloomberg reported in November that Stability approached AI startups Cohere and Jasper to gauge their interest. Stability denied this, and Jasper CEO Timothy Young did the same when reached for comment by Forbes. A Cohere representative declined to comment. But one prominent AI company confirmed that Mostaque’s representatives had reached out to them to test the waters. Those talks did not advance because “the numbers didn’t add up,” this person, who declined to be named due to the confidential nature of the talks, told Forbes. Stability also tried to court Samsung as a buyer, going so far as to redecorate its office in advance of a planned meeting with the Korean electronics giant. (Samsung said that it invested in Stability in 2023 and that it does not comment on M&A discussions.) Coatue had been calling for Mostaque’s resignation for months, according to a source with direct knowledge. But it and other investors were unable to oust him because he was the company’s majority shareholder. When they tried a different tact by rallying other investors to offer him a juicy equity package to resign, Mostaque refused, said two sources. By October, Coatue and Lightspeed had had enough. Coatue left the board and Lightspeed resigned its observer seat. “Emad infuriated our initial investors so much it’s just making it impossible for us to raise more money under acceptable terms,” one current Stability executive told Forbes. The early months of 2024 saw Stability’s already precarious position eroding further still. Employees were quietly laid off. Three people in a position to know estimated that at least 10% of staff were cut. And cash reserves continued to dwindle. Mostaque mentioned a lifeline at the October board meeting: $95 million in tentative funding from new investors, pending due diligence. But in the end, only a fraction of it was wired, two sources say, much of it from Intel, which Forbes has learned invested $20 million, a fraction of what was reported. (Intel did not return a request for comment by publication time.) Two hours after Forbes broke the news of Mostaque’s plans to step down as CEO, Stability issued a press release confirming his resignation. Chief operating officer Wong and chief technology officer Laforte have taken over in the interim. Mostaque, who said on X that he still owns a majority of the company, also stepped down from the board, which has now initiated a search for a permanent CEO. There is a lot of work to be done to turn things around, and very little time in which to do it. Said the current Stability executive, “There’s still a possibility of a turnaround story, but the odds drop by the day.” In July of 2023, Mostaque still thought he could pull it off. Halfway through the month, he shared a fundraising plan with his lieutenants. It was wildly optimistic, detailing the raise of $500 million in cash and another $750 million in computing facilities from marquee investors like Nvidia, Google, Intel and the World Bank (Nvidia and Google declined comment. Intel did not respond. The World Bank said it did not invest in Stability). In a Slack message reviewed by Forbes, Mostaque said Google was “willing to move fast” and the round was “likely to be oversubscribed.” It wasn’t. Three people with direct knowledge of these fundraising efforts told Forbes that while there was some interest in Stability, talks often stalled when it came time to disclose financials. Two of them noted that earlier in the year, Mostaque had simply stopped engaging with VCs who asked for numbers. Only one firm invested around that time: actor Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures, which invested $35 million in the form of a convertible SAFE note during the second quarter, according to an internal document. (Sound Ventures did not respond to a request for comment.) And though he’d managed to score a meeting with Nvidia and its CEO Jensen Huang, it ended in disaster, according to two sources. “Under Jensen's microscopic questions, Emad just fell apart,” a source in position to know told Forbes. Huang quickly concluded Stability wasn’t ready for an investment from Nvidia, the sources said. Mostaque told Forbes in an email that he had not met with Huang since 2022, except to say “hello and what’s up a few times after.” His July 2023 message references a plan to raise $150 million from Nvidia. (Nvidia declined to comment.) After a June Forbes investigation citing more than 30 sources revealed Mostaque’s history of misleading claims, Mostaque struggled to raise funding, a Stability investor told Forbes. (Mostaque disputed the story at the time and called it "coordinated lies" in his email this week to Forbes). Increasingly, investors scrutinized his assertions and pressed for data. And Young, now the CEO of Jasper, turned down a verbal offer to be Stability’s president after reading the article, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter. The collapse of the talks aggravated the board and other executives, who had hoped Young would compensate for the sales and business management skills that Mostaque lacked, according to four people in a position to know. (Young declined to comment.) When Stability’s senior leadership convened in London for the CogX conference in September, the financing had still not closed. There, a group of executives confronted Mostaque asking questions about the company’s cash position and runway, according to three people with direct knowledge of the incident. They did not get the clarity they’d hoped for. By October, Mostaque had reduced his fundraising target by more than 80%. The months that followed saw a steady drumbeat of departures — general counsel Adam Avrunin, vice presidents Mike Melnicki, Ed Newton-Rex and Joe Penna, chief people officer Ozden Onder — culminating in the demoralizing March exit of Stable Diffusion’s primary developers Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, Patrick Esser and Dominik Lorenz. Rombach, who led the team, had been angling to leave for months, two sources said, first threatening to resign last summer because of the fundraising failures. Others left over concerns about cash flow, as well as liabilities — including what four people described as Mostaque’s lax approach to ensuring that Stability products could not be used to produce child sexual abuse imagery. “Stability AI is committed to preventing the misuse of AI and prohibits the use of our image models and services for unlawful activity, including attempts to edit or create CSAM,” Ella Irwin, senior vice president of integrity, said in a statement. Newton-Rex told Forbes he resigned because he disagreed with Stability’s position that training AI on copyrighted work without consent is fair use. Melnicki and Penna declined to comment. Avrunin and Onder could not be reached for comment. None of the researchers responded to requests for comment. The Stable Diffusion researchers’ departure as a cohort says a lot about the state of Stability AI. The company’s researchers were widely viewed as its crown jewels, their work subsidized with a firehose of pricey compute power that was even extended to people outside the company. Martino Russi, an artificial intelligence researcher, told Forbes that though he was never formally employed by Stability, the company provided him a “staggering” amount of compute between January and April 2023 to play around with developing an AI video generator that Stability might someday use. “It was Candy Land or Coney Island,” said Russi, who estimates that his experiment, which was ultimately shelved, cost the company $2.5 million. Stable Diffusion was simultaneously Stability’s marquee product and its existential cash crisis. One current employee described it to Forbes as “a giant vacuum that absorbed everything: money, compute, people.” While the software was widely used, with Mostaque claiming downloads reaching into the hundreds of millions, Stability struggled to translate that wild success into revenue. Mostaque knew it could be done — peers at Databricks, Elastic and MongoDB had all turned a free product into a lucrative business — he just couldn’t figure out how. His first attempt was Stability’s API, which allowed paying customers to integrate Stable Diffusion into their own products. In early 2023, a handful of small companies, like art generator app NightCafe and presentation software startup Tome, signed on, according to four people with knowledge of the deals. But Stability’s poor account management services soured many, and in a matter of months NightCafe and Tome canceled their contracts, three people said. NightCafe founder Angus Russell told Forbes that his company switched to a competitor which “offered much cheaper inference costs and a broader service.” Tome did not respond to a request for comment. Meanwhile, Mostaque’s efforts to court larger companies like Samsung and Snapchat were failing, according to five people familiar with the effort. Canva, which was already one of the heaviest users of open-sourced Stable Diffusion, had multiple discussions with Stability, which was angling for a contract it hoped would generate several millions in annual revenue. But the deal never materialized, four sources said. “These three companies wanted and needed us,” one former employee told Forbes. “They would have been the perfect customers.” (Samsung, Snap and Canva declined to comment.) “It’s not that there was not an appetite to pay Stability — there were tons of companies that would have that wanted to,” the former employee said. “There was a huge opportunity and demand, but just a resistance to execution.” Mostaque’s other big idea was to provide governments with bespoke national AI models that would invigorate their economies and citizenry. “Emad envisions a world where AI through 100 national models serves not as a tool of the few, but as a benefactor to all promising to confront great adversaries, cancer, autism, and the sands of time itself,” the AI avatar of Aristotle said in his intro at the conference. Mostaque told several prospective customers that he could deliver such models within 60 days — an untenable timeline, according to two people in position to know. Stability attempted to develop a model for the Singaporean government over the protestation of employees who questioned its technical feasibility, three sources familiar with the effort told Forbes. But it couldn’t pull it off and Singapore never became a customer. (The government of Singapore confirmed it did not enter into a deal with Stability, but declined to answer additional questions.) As Stability careened from one new business idea to another, resources were abruptly reallocated and researchers reassigned. The whiplash shifts in a largely siloed organization demoralized and infuriated employees. “There were ‘urgent’ things, ‘urgent urgent’ things and ‘most urgent,’” one former employee complained. “None of these things seem important if everything is important.” Another former Stability executive was far more pointed in their assessment. “Emad is the most disorganized leader I have ever worked with in my career,” this person told Forbes. “He has no vision, and changes directions every week, often based on what he sees on Twitter.” In a video interview posted shortly before this story was published, Mostaque explained his leadership style: “I'm particularly great at taking creatives, developers, researchers, others, and achieving their full potential in designing systems. But I should not be dealing with, you know, HR and operations and business development and other elements. There are far better people than me to do that.” By December 2023, Stability had partially abandoned its open-source roots and announced that any commercial use of Stable Diffusion would cost customers at least $20 per month (non-commercial and research use of Stable Diffusion would remain free). But privately, Stability was considering a potentially more lucrative source of revenue: reselling the compute it was leasing from providers like AWS, according to six people familiar with the effort. Though it was essentially GPU arbitrage, Stability framed the strategy to investors as a “managed services” offering. Its damning October financial report projected optimistically that such an offering would bring in $139 million in 2024 — 98% of its revenue. Multiple employees at the time told Forbes they feared reselling compute, even if the company called it “managed services,” would violate the terms of Stability’s contract with AWS. Amazon declined to comment. “The line internally was that we are not reselling compute,” one former employee said. “This was some of the dirtiest feeling stuff.” Stability also discussed reselling a cluster of Nvidia A100 chips, leased via CoreWeave, to the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, three sources said. “It was under the guise of managed services, but there wasn’t any management happening,” one of these people told Forbes. Andreessen Horowitz and CoreWeave declined to comment. Stability did not respond to questions about if it plans to continue this strategy now that Mostaque is out of the picture. Regardless, interim co-CEOs Wong and Laforte are on a tight timeline to clean up his mess. Board chairman Jim O’Shaughnessy said in a statement that he was confident the pair “will adeptly steer the company forward in developing and commercializing industry-leading generative AI products.” But burn continues to far outpace revenue. The Financial Times reported Friday that the company made $5.4 million of revenue in February, against $8 million in costs. Several sources said there are ongoing concerns about making payroll for the roughly 150 remaining employees. Leadership roles have gone vacant for months amid the disarray, leaving the company increasingly directionless. Meanwhile, a potentially catastrophic legal threat looms over the company: A trio of copyright infringement lawsuits brought by Getty Images and a group of artists in the U.S. and U.K., who claim Stability illegally used their art and photography to train the AI models powering Stable Diffusion. A London-based court has already rejected the company’s bid to throw out one of the lawsuits on the basis that none of its researchers were based in the U.K. And Stability’s claim that Getty’s Delaware lawsuit should be blocked because it's a U.K.-based company was rejected. (Stability did not respond to questions about the litigation.) AI-related copyright litigation “could go on for years,” according to Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University. He told Forbes that though plaintiffs suing AI firms face an uphill battle overcoming the existing legal precedent on copyright infringement, the quantity of arguments available to make are virtually inexhaustible. “Like in military theory, if there’s a gap in your lines, that’s where the enemy pours through — if any one of those arguments succeeds, it could completely change the generative AI environment,” he said. “In some sense, generative AI as an industry has to win everything.” Stability, which had more than $100 million in the bank just a year and a half ago, is in a deep hole. Not only does it need more funding, it needs a viable business model — or a buyer with the vision and chops to make it successful in a fast-moving and highly competitive sector. At an all hands meeting this past Monday, Stability’s new leaders detailed a path forward. One point of emphasis: a plan to better manage resources and expenses, according to one person in attendance. It’s a start, but Mostaque’s meddling has left them with little runway to execute. His resignation, though, has given some employees hope. “A few people are 100% going to reconsider leaving after today,” said one current employee. “And the weird gloomy aura of hearing Emad talking nonsense for an hour is gone.” Shortly before Mostaque resigned, one current Stability executive told Forbes that they were optimistic his departure could make Stability appealing enough to receive a small investment or sale to a friendly party. “There are companies that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars that have much less intrinsic value than Stability,” the person said. “A white knight may still appear.”

looking for ML aficionado in London for great chats and maybe a startup
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MLstartupLondonThis week

looking for ML aficionado in London for great chats and maybe a startup

TL;DR? Here's the gist: Me: 3 startups under my belt. Started as a programmer, then trainer, then entrepreneur, now CTO & Board member for a leading customer insight company part of large bank. Large system and infrastructure specialist. Extensive & practical experience in raising funds and successfully managing both startup and established businesses. Fascinated by the power of data. Can't imagine myself spending the rest of my life being a cog in the machine. You: Machine learning specialist, programmer, analyst, understands how to navigate and crunch large datasets, from BI to predictive analytics. Interested in implementing applications from fraud detection to margin improvements through better clustering regardless of industry. Fascinated by the power of data. Can't imagine himself spending the rest of his or her life being a cog in the machine. The startup: The core idea it to build platforms and systems around the progressively larger datasets held by various sized companies, helping them solve big issues - cost reduction, profitability and reducing risk. I’m an infrastructure and software specialist and have access to 1) systems, 2) datasets 3) extensive practical in certain industry segments, namely web-scale companies and tier 1 retailers. This project is in the very early planning stages. I'm looking forward to discuss the form it could take with like-minded individuals but with complementary skills sets, namely: predictive analytics & AI as it applies to machine learning on large datasets. Want more specifics ideas? I have plenty of these, but I’m sure you do to, so let’s meet face to face and discuss them. Ultimately the goal is to crystallize on a specific concept, develop together a minimum viable product and get the company bootstrapped or angel-funded (something I also have plenty of experience with), all via a lean startup model. My philosophy on startups: Startups built in one’s free time often fail because they drag on, ending up as little more than side projects you can’t quite get rid of (due to co-founder guilt, or perhaps the little money they bring in every month). The core idea for this project is based on lean, that is, to launch a minimum viable product as early as possible. Getting feedback. Measuring results (important!). Pivot if it’s not working. This helps tremendously in staying motivated, limits the dreaded paralyzing fear of failure, and more importantly, keep the time from inception to first client/funding to a minimum. If it sounds interesting please message me and we can exchange contact details! Worst that can happen is we have a great chat!

Interview with Juergen Schmidhuber, renowned ‘Father Of Modern AI’, says his life’s work won't lead to dystopia.
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Interview with Juergen Schmidhuber, renowned ‘Father Of Modern AI’, says his life’s work won't lead to dystopia.

Schmidhuber interview expressing his views on the future of AI and AGI. Original source. I think the interview is of interest to r/MachineLearning, and presents an alternate view, compared to other influential leaders in AI. Juergen Schmidhuber, Renowned 'Father Of Modern AI,' Says His Life’s Work Won't Lead To Dystopia May 23, 2023. Contributed by Hessie Jones. Amid the growing concern about the impact of more advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technologies on society, there are many in the technology community who fear the implications of the advancements in Generative AI if they go unchecked. Dr. Juergen Schmidhuber, a renowned scientist, artificial intelligence researcher and widely regarded as one of the pioneers in the field, is more optimistic. He declares that many of those who suddenly warn against the dangers of AI are just seeking publicity, exploiting the media’s obsession with killer robots which has attracted more attention than “good AI” for healthcare etc. The potential to revolutionize various industries and improve our lives is clear, as are the equal dangers if bad actors leverage the technology for personal gain. Are we headed towards a dystopian future, or is there reason to be optimistic? I had a chance to sit down with Dr. Juergen Schmidhuber to understand his perspective on this seemingly fast-moving AI-train that will leap us into the future. As a teenager in the 1970s, Juergen Schmidhuber became fascinated with the idea of creating intelligent machines that could learn and improve on their own, becoming smarter than himself within his lifetime. This would ultimately lead to his groundbreaking work in the field of deep learning. In the 1980s, he studied computer science at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), where he earned his diploma in 1987. His thesis was on the ultimate self-improving machines that, not only, learn through some pre-wired human-designed learning algorithm, but also learn and improve the learning algorithm itself. Decades later, this became a hot topic. He also received his Ph.D. at TUM in 1991 for work that laid some of the foundations of modern AI. Schmidhuber is best known for his contributions to the development of recurrent neural networks (RNNs), the most powerful type of artificial neural network that can process sequential data such as speech and natural language. With his students Sepp Hochreiter, Felix Gers, Alex Graves, Daan Wierstra, and others, he published architectures and training algorithms for the long short-term memory (LSTM), a type of RNN that is widely used in natural language processing, speech recognition, video games, robotics, and other applications. LSTM has become the most cited neural network of the 20th century, and Business Week called it "arguably the most commercial AI achievement." Throughout his career, Schmidhuber has received various awards and accolades for his groundbreaking work. In 2013, he was awarded the Helmholtz Prize, which recognizes significant contributions to the field of machine learning. In 2016, he was awarded the IEEE Neural Network Pioneer Award for "pioneering contributions to deep learning and neural networks." The media have often called him the “father of modern AI,” because the most cited neural networks all build on his lab’s work. He is quick to point out, however, that AI history goes back centuries. Despite his many accomplishments, at the age of 60, he feels mounting time pressure towards building an Artificial General Intelligence within his lifetime and remains committed to pushing the boundaries of AI research and development. He is currently director of the KAUST AI Initiative, scientific director of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA, and co-founder and chief scientist of AI company NNAISENSE, whose motto is "AI∀" which is a math-inspired way of saying "AI For All." He continues to work on cutting-edge AI technologies and applications to improve human health and extend human lives and make lives easier for everyone. The following interview has been edited for clarity. Jones: Thank you Juergen for joining me. You have signed letters warning about AI weapons. But you didn't sign the recent publication, "Pause Gigantic AI Experiments: An Open Letter"? Is there a reason? Schmidhuber: Thank you Hessie. Glad to speak with you. I have realized that many of those who warn in public against the dangers of AI are just seeking publicity. I don't think the latest letter will have any significant impact because many AI researchers, companies, and governments will ignore it completely. The proposal frequently uses the word "we" and refers to "us," the humans. But as I have pointed out many times in the past, there is no "we" that everyone can identify with. Ask 10 different people, and you will hear 10 different opinions about what is "good." Some of those opinions will be completely incompatible with each other. Don't forget the enormous amount of conflict between the many people. The letter also says, "If such a pause cannot be quickly put in place, governments should intervene and impose a moratorium." The problem is that different governments have ALSO different opinions about what is good for them and for others. Great Power A will say, if we don't do it, Great Power B will, perhaps secretly, and gain an advantage over us. The same is true for Great Powers C and D. Jones: Everyone acknowledges this fear surrounding current generative AI technology. Moreover, the existential threat of this technology has been publicly acknowledged by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI himself, calling for AI regulation. From your perspective, is there an existential threat? Schmidhuber: It is true that AI can be weaponized, and I have no doubt that there will be all kinds of AI arms races, but AI does not introduce a new quality of existential threat. The threat coming from AI weapons seems to pale in comparison to the much older threat from nuclear hydrogen bombs that don’t need AI at all. We should be much more afraid of half-century-old tech in the form of H-bomb rockets. The Tsar Bomba of 1961 had almost 15 times more destructive power than all weapons of WW-II combined. Despite the dramatic nuclear disarmament since the 1980s, there are still more than enough nuclear warheads to wipe out human civilization within two hours, without any AI I’m much more worried about that old existential threat than the rather harmless AI weapons. Jones: I realize that while you compare AI to the threat of nuclear bombs, there is a current danger that a current technology can be put in the hands of humans and enable them to “eventually” exact further harms to individuals of group in a very precise way, like targeted drone attacks. You are giving people a toolset that they've never had before, enabling bad actors, as some have pointed out, to be able to do a lot more than previously because they didn't have this technology. Schmidhuber: Now, all that sounds horrible in principle, but our existing laws are sufficient to deal with these new types of weapons enabled by AI. If you kill someone with a gun, you will go to jail. Same if you kill someone with one of these drones. Law enforcement will get better at understanding new threats and new weapons and will respond with better technology to combat these threats. Enabling drones to target persons from a distance in a way that requires some tracking and some intelligence to perform, which has traditionally been performed by skilled humans, to me, it seems is just an improved version of a traditional weapon, like a gun, which is, you know, a little bit smarter than the old guns. But, in principle, all of that is not a new development. For many centuries, we have had the evolution of better weaponry and deadlier poisons and so on, and law enforcement has evolved their policies to react to these threats over time. So, it's not that we suddenly have a new quality of existential threat and it's much more worrisome than what we have had for about six decades. A large nuclear warhead doesn’t need fancy face recognition to kill an individual. No, it simply wipes out an entire city with ten million inhabitants. Jones: The existential threat that’s implied is the extent to which humans have control over this technology. We see some early cases of opportunism which, as you say, tends to get more media attention than positive breakthroughs. But you’re implying that this will all balance out? Schmidhuber: Historically, we have a long tradition of technological breakthroughs that led to advancements in weapons for the purpose of defense but also for protection. From sticks, to rocks, to axes to gunpowder to cannons to rockets… and now to drones… this has had a drastic influence on human history but what has been consistent throughout history is that those who are using technology to achieve their own ends are themselves, facing the same technology because the opposing side is learning to use it against them. And that's what has been repeated in thousands of years of human history and it will continue. I don't see the new AI arms race as something that is remotely as existential a threat as the good old nuclear warheads. You said something important, in that some people prefer to talk about the downsides rather than the benefits of this technology, but that's misleading, because 95% of all AI research and AI development is about making people happier and advancing human life and health. Jones: Let’s touch on some of those beneficial advances in AI research that have been able to radically change present day methods and achieve breakthroughs. Schmidhuber: All right! For example, eleven years ago, our team with my postdoc Dan Ciresan was the first to win a medical imaging competition through deep learning. We analyzed female breast cells with the objective to determine harmless cells vs. those in the pre-cancer stage. Typically, a trained oncologist needs a long time to make these determinations. Our team, who knew nothing about cancer, were able to train an artificial neural network, which was totally dumb in the beginning, on lots of this kind of data. It was able to outperform all the other methods. Today, this is being used not only for breast cancer, but also for radiology and detecting plaque in arteries, and many other things. Some of the neural networks that we have developed in the last 3 decades are now prevalent across thousands of healthcare applications, detecting Diabetes and Covid-19 and what not. This will eventually permeate across all healthcare. The good consequences of this type of AI are much more important than the click-bait new ways of conducting crimes with AI. Jones: Adoption is a product of reinforced outcomes. The massive scale of adoption either leads us to believe that people have been led astray, or conversely, technology is having a positive effect on people’s lives. Schmidhuber: The latter is the likely case. There's intense commercial pressure towards good AI rather than bad AI because companies want to sell you something, and you are going to buy only stuff you think is going to be good for you. So already just through this simple, commercial pressure, you have a tremendous bias towards good AI rather than bad AI. However, doomsday scenarios like in Schwarzenegger movies grab more attention than documentaries on AI that improve people’s lives. Jones: I would argue that people are drawn to good stories – narratives that contain an adversary and struggle, but in the end, have happy endings. And this is consistent with your comment on human nature and how history, despite its tendency for violence and destruction of humanity, somehow tends to correct itself. Let’s take the example of a technology, which you are aware – GANs – General Adversarial Networks, which today has been used in applications for fake news and disinformation. In actuality, the purpose in the invention of GANs was far from what it is used for today. Schmidhuber: Yes, the name GANs was created in 2014 but we had the basic principle already in the early 1990s. More than 30 years ago, I called it artificial curiosity. It's a very simple way of injecting creativity into a little two network system. This creative AI is not just trying to slavishly imitate humans. Rather, it’s inventing its own goals. Let me explain: You have two networks. One network is producing outputs that could be anything, any action. Then the second network is looking at these actions and it’s trying to predict the consequences of these actions. An action could move a robot, then something happens, and the other network is just trying to predict what will happen. Now we can implement artificial curiosity by reducing the prediction error of the second network, which, at the same time, is the reward of the first network. The first network wants to maximize its reward and so it will invent actions that will lead to situations that will surprise the second network, which it has not yet learned to predict well. In the case where the outputs are fake images, the first network will try to generate images that are good enough to fool the second network, which will attempt to predict the reaction of the environment: fake or real image, and it will try to become better at it. The first network will continue to also improve at generating images whose type the second network will not be able to predict. So, they fight each other. The 2nd network will continue to reduce its prediction error, while the 1st network will attempt to maximize it. Through this zero-sum game the first network gets better and better at producing these convincing fake outputs which look almost realistic. So, once you have an interesting set of images by Vincent Van Gogh, you can generate new images that leverage his style, without the original artist having ever produced the artwork himself. Jones: I see how the Van Gogh example can be applied in an education setting and there are countless examples of artists mimicking styles from famous painters but image generation from this instance that can happen within seconds is quite another feat. And you know this is how GANs has been used. What’s more prevalent today is a socialized enablement of generating images or information to intentionally fool people. It also surfaces new harms that deal with the threat to intellectual property and copyright, where laws have yet to account for. And from your perspective this was not the intention when the model was conceived. What was your motivation in your early conception of what is now GANs? Schmidhuber: My old motivation for GANs was actually very important and it was not to create deepfakes or fake news but to enable AIs to be curious and invent their own goals, to make them explore their environment and make them creative. Suppose you have a robot that executes one action, then something happens, then it executes another action, and so on, because it wants to achieve certain goals in the environment. For example, when the battery is low, this will trigger “pain” through hunger sensors, so it wants to go to the charging station, without running into obstacles, which will trigger other pain sensors. It will seek to minimize pain (encoded through numbers). Now the robot has a friend, the second network, which is a world model ––it’s a prediction machine that learns to predict the consequences of the robot’s actions. Once the robot has a good model of the world, it can use it for planning. It can be used as a simulation of the real world. And then it can determine what is a good action sequence. If the robot imagines this sequence of actions, the model will predict a lot of pain, which it wants to avoid. If it plays this alternative action sequence in its mental model of the world, then it will predict a rewarding situation where it’s going to sit on the charging station and its battery is going to load again. So, it'll prefer to execute the latter action sequence. In the beginning, however, the model of the world knows nothing, so how can we motivate the first network to generate experiments that lead to data that helps the world model learn something it didn’t already know? That’s what artificial curiosity is about. The dueling two network systems effectively explore uncharted environments by creating experiments so that over time the curious AI gets a better sense of how the environment works. This can be applied to all kinds of environments, and has medical applications. Jones: Let’s talk about the future. You have said, “Traditional humans won’t play a significant role in spreading intelligence across the universe.” Schmidhuber: Let’s first conceptually separate two types of AIs. The first type of AI are tools directed by humans. They are trained to do specific things like accurately detect diabetes or heart disease and prevent attacks before they happen. In these cases, the goal is coming from the human. More interesting AIs are setting their own goals. They are inventing their own experiments and learning from them. Their horizons expand and eventually they become more and more general problem solvers in the real world. They are not controlled by their parents, but much of what they learn is through self-invented experiments. A robot, for example, is rotating a toy, and as it is doing this, the video coming in through the camera eyes, changes over time and it begins to learn how this video changes and learns how the 3D nature of the toy generates certain videos if you rotate it a certain way, and eventually, how gravity works, and how the physics of the world works. Like a little scientist! And I have predicted for decades that future scaled-up versions of such AI scientists will want to further expand their horizons, and eventually go where most of the physical resources are, to build more and bigger AIs. And of course, almost all of these resources are far away from earth out there in space, which is hostile to humans but friendly to appropriately designed AI-controlled robots and self-replicating robot factories. So here we are not talking any longer about our tiny biosphere; no, we are talking about the much bigger rest of the universe. Within a few tens of billions of years, curious self-improving AIs will colonize the visible cosmos in a way that’s infeasible for humans. Those who don’t won’t have an impact. Sounds like science fiction, but since the 1970s I have been unable to see a plausible alternative to this scenario, except for a global catastrophe such as an all-out nuclear war that stops this development before it takes off. Jones: How long have these AIs, which can set their own goals — how long have they existed? To what extent can they be independent of human interaction? Schmidhuber: Neural networks like that have existed for over 30 years. My first simple adversarial neural network system of this kind is the one from 1990 described above. You don’t need a teacher there; it's just a little agent running around in the world and trying to invent new experiments that surprise its own prediction machine. Once it has figured out certain parts of the world, the agent will become bored and will move on to more exciting experiments. The simple 1990 systems I mentioned have certain limitations, but in the past three decades, we have also built more sophisticated systems that are setting their own goals and such systems I think will be essential for achieving true intelligence. If you are only imitating humans, you will never go beyond them. So, you really must give AIs the freedom to explore previously unexplored regions of the world in a way that no human is really predefining. Jones: Where is this being done today? Schmidhuber: Variants of neural network-based artificial curiosity are used today for agents that learn to play video games in a human-competitive way. We have also started to use them for automatic design of experiments in fields such as materials science. I bet many other fields will be affected by it: chemistry, biology, drug design, you name it. However, at least for now, these artificial scientists, as I like to call them, cannot yet compete with human scientists. I don’t think it’s going to stay this way but, at the moment, it’s still the case. Sure, AI has made a lot of progress. Since 1997, there have been superhuman chess players, and since 2011, through the DanNet of my team, there have been superhuman visual pattern recognizers. But there are other things where humans, at the moment at least, are much better, in particular, science itself. In the lab we have many first examples of self-directed artificial scientists, but they are not yet convincing enough to appear on the radar screen of the public space, which is currently much more fascinated with simpler systems that just imitate humans and write texts based on previously seen human-written documents. Jones: You speak of these numerous instances dating back 30 years of these lab experiments where these self-driven agents are deciding and learning and moving on once they’ve learned. And I assume that that rate of learning becomes even faster over time. What kind of timeframe are we talking about when this eventually is taken outside of the lab and embedded into society? Schmidhuber: This could still take months or even years :-) Anyway, in the not-too-distant future, we will probably see artificial scientists who are good at devising experiments that allow them to discover new, previously unknown physical laws. As always, we are going to profit from the old trend that has held at least since 1941: every decade compute is getting 100 times cheaper. Jones: How does this trend affect modern AI such as ChatGPT? Schmidhuber: Perhaps you know that all the recent famous AI applications such as ChatGPT and similar models are largely based on principles of artificial neural networks invented in the previous millennium. The main reason why they works so well now is the incredible acceleration of compute per dollar. ChatGPT is driven by a neural network called “Transformer” described in 2017 by Google. I am happy about that because a quarter century earlier in 1991 I had a particular Transformer variant which is now called the “Transformer with linearized self-attention”. Back then, not much could be done with it, because the compute cost was a million times higher than today. But today, one can train such models on half the internet and achieve much more interesting results. Jones: And for how long will this acceleration continue? Schmidhuber: There's no reason to believe that in the next 30 years, we won't have another factor of 1 million and that's going to be really significant. In the near future, for the first time we will have many not-so expensive devices that can compute as much as a human brain. The physical limits of computation, however, are much further out so even if the trend of a factor of 100 every decade continues, the physical limits (of 1051 elementary instructions per second and kilogram of matter) won’t be hit until, say, the mid-next century. Even in our current century, however, we’ll probably have many machines that compute more than all 10 billion human brains collectively and you can imagine, everything will change then! Jones: That is the big question. Is everything going to change? If so, what do you say to the next generation of leaders, currently coming out of college and university. So much of this change is already impacting how they study, how they will work, or how the future of work and livelihood is defined. What is their purpose and how do we change our systems so they will adapt to this new version of intelligence? Schmidhuber: For decades, people have asked me questions like that, because you know what I'm saying now, I have basically said since the 1970s, it’s just that today, people are paying more attention because, back then, they thought this was science fiction. They didn't think that I would ever come close to achieving my crazy life goal of building a machine that learns to become smarter than myself such that I can retire. But now many have changed their minds and think it's conceivable. And now I have two daughters, 23 and 25. People ask me: what do I tell them? They know that Daddy always said, “It seems likely that within your lifetimes, you will have new types of intelligence that are probably going to be superior in many ways, and probably all kinds of interesting ways.” How should they prepare for that? And I kept telling them the obvious: Learn how to learn new things! It's not like in the previous millennium where within 20 years someone learned to be a useful member of society, and then took a job for 40 years and performed in this job until she received her pension. Now things are changing much faster and we must learn continuously just to keep up. I also told my girls that no matter how smart AIs are going to get, learn at least the basics of math and physics, because that’s the essence of our universe, and anybody who understands this will have an advantage, and learn all kinds of new things more easily. I also told them that social skills will remain important, because most future jobs for humans will continue to involve interactions with other humans, but I couldn’t teach them anything about that; they know much more about social skills than I do. You touched on the big philosophical question about people’s purpose. Can this be answered without answering the even grander question: What’s the purpose of the entire universe? We don’t know. But what’s happening right now might be connected to the unknown answer. Don’t think of humans as the crown of creation. Instead view human civilization as part of a much grander scheme, an important step (but not the last one) on the path of the universe from very simple initial conditions towards more and more unfathomable complexity. Now it seems ready to take its next step, a step comparable to the invention of life itself over 3.5 billion years ago. Alas, don’t worry, in the end, all will be good! Jones: Let’s get back to this transformation happening right now with OpenAI. There are many questioning the efficacy and accuracy of ChatGPT, and are concerned its release has been premature. In light of the rampant adoption, educators have banned its use over concerns of plagiarism and how it stifles individual development. Should large language models like ChatGPT be used in school? Schmidhuber: When the calculator was first introduced, instructors forbade students from using it in school. Today, the consensus is that kids should learn the basic methods of arithmetic, but they should also learn to use the “artificial multipliers” aka calculators, even in exams, because laziness and efficiency is a hallmark of intelligence. Any intelligent being wants to minimize its efforts to achieve things. And that's the reason why we have tools, and why our kids are learning to use these tools. The first stone tools were invented maybe 3.5 million years ago; tools just have become more sophisticated over time. In fact, humans have changed in response to the properties of their tools. Our anatomical evolution was shaped by tools such as spears and fire. So, it's going to continue this way. And there is no permanent way of preventing large language models from being used in school. Jones: And when our children, your children graduate, what does their future work look like? Schmidhuber: A single human trying to predict details of how 10 billion people and their machines will evolve in the future is like a single neuron in my brain trying to predict what the entire brain and its tens of billions of neurons will do next year. 40 years ago, before the WWW was created at CERN in Switzerland, who would have predicted all those young people making money as YouTube video bloggers? Nevertheless, let’s make a few limited job-related observations. For a long time, people have thought that desktop jobs may require more intelligence than skills trade or handicraft professions. But now, it turns out that it's much easier to replace certain aspects of desktop jobs than replacing a carpenter, for example. Because everything that works well in AI is happening behind the screen currently, but not so much in the physical world. There are now artificial systems that can read lots of documents and then make really nice summaries of these documents. That is a desktop job. Or you give them a description of an illustration that you want to have for your article and pretty good illustrations are being generated that may need some minimal fine-tuning. But you know, all these desktop jobs are much easier to facilitate than the real tough jobs in the physical world. And it's interesting that the things people thought required intelligence, like playing chess, or writing or summarizing documents, are much easier for machines than they thought. But for things like playing football or soccer, there is no physical robot that can remotely compete with the abilities of a little boy with these skills. So, AI in the physical world, interestingly, is much harder than AI behind the screen in virtual worlds. And it's really exciting, in my opinion, to see that jobs such as plumbers are much more challenging than playing chess or writing another tabloid story. Jones: The way data has been collected in these large language models does not guarantee personal information has not been excluded. Current consent laws already are outdated when it comes to these large language models (LLM). The concern, rightly so, is increasing surveillance and loss of privacy. What is your view on this? Schmidhuber: As I have indicated earlier: are surveillance and loss of privacy inevitable consequences of increasingly complex societies? Super-organisms such as cities and states and companies consist of numerous people, just like people consist of numerous cells. These cells enjoy little privacy. They are constantly monitored by specialized "police cells" and "border guard cells": Are you a cancer cell? Are you an external intruder, a pathogen? Individual cells sacrifice their freedom for the benefits of being part of a multicellular organism. Similarly, for super-organisms such as nations. Over 5000 years ago, writing enabled recorded history and thus became its inaugural and most important invention. Its initial purpose, however, was to facilitate surveillance, to track citizens and their tax payments. The more complex a super-organism, the more comprehensive its collection of information about its constituents. 200 years ago, at least, the parish priest in each village knew everything about all the village people, even about those who did not confess, because they appeared in the confessions of others. Also, everyone soon knew about the stranger who had entered the village, because some occasionally peered out of the window, and what they saw got around. Such control mechanisms were temporarily lost through anonymization in rapidly growing cities but are now returning with the help of new surveillance devices such as smartphones as part of digital nervous systems that tell companies and governments a lot about billions of users. Cameras and drones etc. are becoming increasingly tinier and more ubiquitous. More effective recognition of faces and other detection technology are becoming cheaper and cheaper, and many will use it to identify others anywhere on earth; the big wide world will not offer any more privacy than the local village. Is this good or bad? Some nations may find it easier than others to justify more complex kinds of super-organisms at the expense of the privacy rights of their constituents. Jones: So, there is no way to stop or change this process of collection, or how it continuously informs decisions over time? How do you see governance and rules responding to this, especially amid Italy’s ban on ChatGPT following suspected user data breach and the more recent news about the Meta’s record $1.3billion fine in the company’s handling of user information? Schmidhuber: Data collection has benefits and drawbacks, such as the loss of privacy. How to balance those? I have argued for addressing this through data ownership in data markets. If it is true that data is the new oil, then it should have a price, just like oil. At the moment, the major surveillance platforms such as Meta do not offer users any money for their data and the transitive loss of privacy. In the future, however, we will likely see attempts at creating efficient data markets to figure out the data's true financial value through the interplay between supply and demand. Even some of the sensitive medical data should not be priced by governmental regulators but by patients (and healthy persons) who own it and who may sell or license parts thereof as micro-entrepreneurs in a healthcare data market. Following a previous interview, I gave for one of the largest re-insurance companies , let's look at the different participants in such a data market: patients, hospitals, data companies. (1) Patients with a rare form of cancer can offer more valuable data than patients with a very common form of cancer. (2) Hospitals and their machines are needed to extract the data, e.g., through magnet spin tomography, radiology, evaluations through human doctors, and so on. (3) Companies such as Siemens, Google or IBM would like to buy annotated data to make better artificial neural networks that learn to predict pathologies and diseases and the consequences of therapies. Now the market’s invisible hand will decide about the data’s price through the interplay between demand and supply. On the demand side, you will have several companies offering something for the data, maybe through an app on the smartphone (a bit like a stock market app). On the supply side, each patient in this market should be able to profit from high prices for rare valuable types of data. Likewise, competing data extractors such as hospitals will profit from gaining recognition and trust for extracting data well at a reasonable price. The market will make the whole system efficient through incentives for all who are doing a good job. Soon there will be a flourishing ecosystem of commercial data market advisors and what not, just like the ecosystem surrounding the traditional stock market. The value of the data won’t be determined by governments or ethics committees, but by those who own the data and decide by themselves which parts thereof they want to license to others under certain conditions. At first glance, a market-based system seems to be detrimental to the interest of certain monopolistic companies, as they would have to pay for the data - some would prefer free data and keep their monopoly. However, since every healthy and sick person in the market would suddenly have an incentive to collect and share their data under self-chosen anonymity conditions, there will soon be many more useful data to evaluate all kinds of treatments. On average, people will live longer and healthier, and many companies and the entire healthcare system will benefit. Jones: Finally, what is your view on open source versus the private companies like Google and OpenAI? Is there a danger to supporting these private companies’ large language models versus trying to keep these models open source and transparent, very much like what LAION is doing? Schmidhuber: I signed this open letter by LAION because I strongly favor the open-source movement. And I think it's also something that is going to challenge whatever big tech dominance there might be at the moment. Sure, the best models today are run by big companies with huge budgets for computers, but the exciting fact is that open-source models are not so far behind, some people say maybe six to eight months only. Of course, the private company models are all based on stuff that was created in academia, often in little labs without so much funding, which publish without patenting their results and open source their code and others take it and improved it. Big tech has profited tremendously from academia; their main achievement being that they have scaled up everything greatly, sometimes even failing to credit the original inventors. So, it's very interesting to see that as soon as some big company comes up with a new scaled-up model, lots of students out there are competing, or collaborating, with each other, trying to come up with equal or better performance on smaller networks and smaller machines. And since they are open sourcing, the next guy can have another great idea to improve it, so now there’s tremendous competition also for the big companies. Because of that, and since AI is still getting exponentially cheaper all the time, I don't believe that big tech companies will dominate in the long run. They find it very hard to compete with the enormous open-source movement. As long as you can encourage the open-source community, I think you shouldn't worry too much. Now, of course, you might say if everything is open source, then the bad actors also will more easily have access to these AI tools. And there's truth to that. But as always since the invention of controlled fire, it was good that knowledge about how technology works quickly became public such that everybody could use it. And then, against any bad actor, there's almost immediately a counter actor trying to nullify his efforts. You see, I still believe in our old motto "AI∀" or "AI For All." Jones: Thank you, Juergen for sharing your perspective on this amazing time in history. It’s clear that with new technology, the enormous potential can be matched by disparate and troubling risks which we’ve yet to solve, and even those we have yet to identify. If we are to dispel the fear of a sentient system for which we have no control, humans, alone need to take steps for more responsible development and collaboration to ensure AI technology is used to ultimately benefit society. Humanity will be judged by what we do next.

[N] TheSequence Scope: When it comes to machine learning, size matters: Microsoft's DeepSpeed framework, which can train a model with up to a trillion parameters
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[N] TheSequence Scope: When it comes to machine learning, size matters: Microsoft's DeepSpeed framework, which can train a model with up to a trillion parameters

Hi there! Offering to your attention the latest edition of a weekly ML-newsletter that focusing on three things: impactful ML research papers, cool ML tech solutions, and ML use cases supported by investors. Please, see it below. Reddit is a new thing for me, and I've been struggling a bit with it, so please don't judge me too harsh for this promotion. This weekly digest is free and I hope you'd find the format convenient for you. Your feedback is very appreciated, and please feel free to sign up if you like it. 📝 Editorial  The recent emergence of pre-trained language models and transformer architectures pushed the creation of larger and larger machine learning models. Google’s BERT presented attention mechanism and transformer architecture possibilities as the “next big thing” in ML, and the numbers seem surreal. OpenAI’s GPT-2 set a record by processing 1.5 billion parameters, followed by Microsoft’s Turing-NLG, which processed 17 billion parameters just to see the new GPT-3 processing an astonishing 175 billion parameters. To not feel complacent, just this week Microsoft announced a new release of its DeepSpeed framework (which powers Turing-NLG), which can train a model with up to a trillion parameters. That sounds insane but it really isn’t.   What we are seeing is a consequence of several factors. First, computation power and parallelization techniques have evolved to a point where it is relatively easy to train machine learning models in large clusters of machines. Second and most importantly, in the current state of machine learning, larger models have regularly outperformed smaller and more specialized models. Knowledge reusability methods like transfer learning are still in very nascent stages. As a result, it’s really hard to build small models that can operate in uncertain environments. Furthermore, as models like GPT-3 and Turing-NLG have shown, there is some unexplainable magic that happens after models go past a certain size. Many of the immediate machine learning problems might be solved by scaling the current generation of neural network architectures. Plain and simple, when it comes to machine learning, size matters.   We would love to hear your opinions about the debate between broader-larger vs. smaller and more specialized models.   Leave a comment Now, to the most important developments in the AI industry this week 🔎 ML Research GPT-3 Falls Short in Machine Comprehension Proposed by researchers from a few major American universities, a 57-task test to measure models’ ability to reason poses challenges even for sophisticated models like GPT-3 ->read more in the original paper Better Text Summarization OpenAI published a paper showing a reinforcement learning with human feedback technique that can surpass supervised models ->read more on OpenAI blog Reinforcement Learning with Offline Datasets Researchers from the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab published a paper unveiling a method that uses offline datasets to improve reinforcement learning models->read more on BAIR blog 🤖 Cool AI Tech Releases New Version of DeepSpeed Microsoft open-sourced a new version of DeepSpeed, an open-source library for parallelizable training that can scale up to models with 1 trillion parameters->read more on Microsoft Research blog 💸 Money in AI AI-powered customer experience management platform Sprinklr has raised $200 million (kudos to our subscribers from Sprinklr 👏). Sprinklr's “AI listening processing” solution allows companies to get structured and meaningful sentiments and insights from unstructured customer data that comes from public conversations on different websites and social platforms. Xometry, an on-demand industrial parts marketplace, raises $75 million in Series E funding. The company provides a digital way of creating the right combination of buyers and manufacturers. Another example of AI implementation into matching two sides for a deal. Real estate tech company Orchard raises $69 million in its recent funding round. Orchard aims to digitize the whole real estate market, by developing a solution that combines machine learning and rapid human assistance to smooth the search, match the right deal, and simplify buying and selling relationships. Cybersecurity startup Pcysys raised $25 million in its funding round. Pcysys’ platform, which doesn’t require installation or network reconfiguration, uses algorithms to scan and “ethically” attack enterprise networks. Robotics farming company Iron Ox raised $20 million in a funding round. The system of farming robots is still semi-autonomous, the company’s goal is to become fully autonomous.  Insurtech company Descartes Underwriting raised $18.5 million. The company applies AI and machine learning technologies to climate risk predicting and insurance underwriting. Legaltech startup ThoughtRiver raised $10 million in its Series A round. Its AI solution applied to contract pre-screening aims to boost operational efficiency. Medtech startup Skin Analytics raised $5.1 million in Series A funding. Skin Analytics has developed a clinically validated AI system that can identify not only the important skin cancers but also precancerous lesions that can be treated, as well as a range of lesions that are benign. Amazon, along with several government organizations and three other industry partners, helped fund the National Science Foundation, a high-priority AI research initiative. The amount of funding is not disclosed. The content of TheSequence is written by Jesus Rodriguez, one of the most-read contributors to KDNuggets and TDS. You can check his Medium here.

[N] Last Week in AI News Digest - Automated chemical synthesis, using heartbeats to detect deepfakes, and more!
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[N] Last Week in AI News Digest - Automated chemical synthesis, using heartbeats to detect deepfakes, and more!

Hi there, just sharing the latest edition of our AI news digest newsletter! We're just a couple of AI grad students doing this for fun, so hope the self promotion is not too annoying (also, welcome feedback). See it below, and feel free to subscribe. Mini Briefs Robotics, AI, and Cloud Computing Combine to Supercharge Chemical and Drug Synthesis IBM recently demoed a complex system for chemical testing and drug synthesis. The system has an AI component that predicts the results of chemical reactions, and a fully automated robotic experiment setup that runs chemical tests 24/7. Users can access the remote robotics lab online, and IBM can also install the system on-premise. With these tools working together, IBM is hoping to reduce typical drug discovery and verification time by half. AI researchers use heartbeat detection to identify deepfake videos Researchers from multiple groups are tackling the challenge of detecting deepfake videos by analyzing the apparent heartbeat of the people depicted in the video. This is possible, because a person’s blood flow changes their skin color ever so slightly, and this change is often detectable via a process called photoplethysmography (PPG). Because deepfakes are not currently optimizing to generate realisitic heartbeats, temporal or spatial anomalies in PPG signals allow resesarchers to detect deepfakes with a 97% accuracy. Advances & Business This AI Expert From Senegal Is Helping Showcase Africans In STEM \- Adji Bousso Dieng will be Princeton’s School of Engineering’s first Black female faculty. Google’s AI-powered flood alerts now cover all of India and parts of Bangladesh \- India, the world’s second most populated nation, sees more than 20% of the global flood-related fatalities each year as overrun riverbanks sweep tens of thousands of homes with them. Two years ago, Google volunteered to help. Finding magnetic eruptions in space with an AI assistant \- MMS look for explosive reconnection events as it flies through the magnetopause - the boundary region where Earth’s magnetic butts up against the solar wind that flows throughout the solar system. This know-it-all AI learns by reading the entire web nonstop \- Diffbot is building the biggest-ever knowledge graph by applying image recognition and natural-language processing to billions of web pages. Bosch and Ford will test autonomous parking in Detroit \- Ford, Bosch, and Dan Gilbert’s real estate firm Bedrock today detailed an autonomous parking pilot scheduled to launch in September at The Assembly, a mixed-used building in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood. Create your own moody quarantine music with Google’s AI \- Lo-Fi Player, the latest project out of Google Magenta, lets you mix tunes with the help of machine learning by interacting with a virtual room. Apple launches AI/ML residency program to attract niche experts \- As Apple’s artificial language and machine learning initiatives continue to expand, its interest in attracting talent has grown - a theme that’s barely under the surface of the company’s occasionally updated Machine Learning Research blog. Dusty Robotics CEO Tessa Lau Discusses Robotics Start-Ups and Autonomous Robots for Construction \- Tessa Lau is Founder/CEO at Dusty Robotics, whose mission is to increase construction industry productivity by introducing robotic automation on the jobsite. Concerns & Hype Google Offers to Help Others With the Tricky Ethics of AI \- Companies pay cloud computing providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google big money to avoid operating their own digital infrastructure. The Peace Dividends Of The Autonomous Vehicle Wars \- The rapid growth of the mobile market in the late 2000s and early 2010s led to a burst of technological progress. Ethics must be part of the development process’ \- The increasing use of AI (artificial intelligence) in the development of new medical technologies demands greater attention to ethical aspects. Analysis & Policy China’s new AI trade rules could hamper a TikTok sale \- TikTok’s attempt to sell itself and avert a possible US ban may run into some complications. The Wall Street Journal reports that China has unveiled new restrictions on AI technology exports that could affect TikTok. Podcast Check out our weekly podcast covering these stories! Website | RSS | iTunes | Spotify | YouTube

[D] Is the Covid-19 crisis the rock on which the ML hype wave finally crashes?
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[D] Is the Covid-19 crisis the rock on which the ML hype wave finally crashes?

People have been predicting the end of the ML Hype for a while, but it didn't seem to go away. Andrew Ng's "A.I. is the new electricity" statement looked like it was true, and the number of ML related stuff on resumes, job descriptions and software requirements, not to mention startups, seemed to keep increasing and increasing, and increasing.... Then came a virus, with a billion years of optimization and search efficiency baked into its RNA. Some considerations: Despite all the hype, production grade ML was still a challenge for most companies outside of the big tech shops and some talented startups. With the Covid-19 induced economic meltdown, most companies don't have the money or the resources to fund the projects required to take ML from PoC/Jupyter Notebook status to value generating production applications. Most of the startups that are building ML productionizing tools and platforms will run out of funds, clients, or both. Moreover, the current economic meltdown makes most historical data on business KPIs, Customer behavior, time series forecasting, etc...is no longer useful as training data. The only data sets that are still useful are those for "hard-core" ML problems like computer vision and NLP, for which completely automated APIs have been already developed and Auto-ML works pretty well, so no real ML talent is needed in deploying them. All of this tells me that Q2 2020 will mark the end of the ML and Deep Learning hype, and besides a likely multi-year economic depression in the U.S., we are also headed into another AI winter. I'm not happy about the ML hype dying, it has helped me a lot in my career, and I really really love Deep Learning from a purely conceptual point of view. But one needs to be realistic in such a job market, should we all start reframing our skill sets and our resumes? I'm kind of hoping somebody will prove my above reasoning wrong.

[D] AI regulation: a review of NTIA's "AI Accountability Policy" doc
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[D] AI regulation: a review of NTIA's "AI Accountability Policy" doc

How will governments respond to the rapid rise of AI? How can sensible regulation keep pace with AI technology? These questions interest many of us! One early US government response has come from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). Specifically, the NTIA published an "AI Accountability Policy Request for Comment" on April 11, 2023. I read the NTIA document carefully, and I'm sharing my observations here for others interested in AI regulation. You can, of course, read the original materials and form your own opinions. Moreover, you can share those opinions not only on this post, but also with the NTIA itself until June 12, 2023. As background, the NTIA (homepage, Wikipedia) consists of a few hundred people within the Department of Commerce. The official mission of the NTIA is "advising the President on telecommunications and information policy issues". Topics covered by NTIA include broadband internet access, spectrum management, internet health, and now artificial intelligence. I do not know whether the NTIA will ultimately drive thinking around AI regulation in the United States or they are just a spunky lot who got something on paper early. The NTIA document is not a specific policy proposal, but rather a thoughtful discussion of AI regulation, followed by a long list of questions on which the NTIA seeks input. This format seems appropriate right now, as we're all trying to make sense of a fast-changing world. The NTIA document leans heavily on two others: the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights from the White House Office of Science and Technology and the AI Risk Management Framework from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Without going into these two in depth, even tiny snippets convey their differing audiences and flavors: White House Blueprint: "You should be protected from safe and ineffective systems." NIST Framework: "Risk refers to the composite measure of an event’s probability of occurring and the magnitude or degree of the consequences of the corresponding event." Now, turning back to the NTIA document itself, I'll comment on three aspects (1) scope, (2) problems addressed, and (3) solutions contemplated. Scope is critical to understanding the NTIA document, and is probably worth keeping in mind in all near-term discussion of AI regulation. Over the past several years, at least two different technologies have been called "AI". The document mentions both, but the emphasis is NOT on the one you're probably thinking about. In more detail: A few years ago, regulators began scrutinizing "automated decisions systems", which passed as "AI" in those ancient times. An example would be an ML model used by a bank to decide whether or not you get a loan. That model might take in all sorts of information about you, combine it in mysterious ML ways, and reject your loan request. Then you might wonder, "Did that system effectively use my address and name to deduce that I am black and then reject my loan request on the basis of race?" There is some evidence of that happening, and this seems like an injustice. So perhaps such systems should be audited and certified so people know this won't happen. This is the focus of the document. These days, AI more commonly refers to open-ended systems that can engage on a wide range of topics and approximate human intelligence. The document briefly mentions generative AI models, large language models, ChatGPT, and "foundational models" (sic), but this is not the focus. The passing mentions may obscure this, unfortunately. In my opinion, these two notions of "AI" are radically different, and many of the differences matter from a regulatory perspective. Yet NTIA lumps both under a sweeping definition of an "AI system" as "an engineered or machine-based system that can, for a given set of objectives, generate outputs such as predictions, recommendations, or decisions influencing real or virtual environments." (Hmm, this includes my Magic 8-Ball…) Keep scope in mind as we turn to the next aspect: the problems under discussion. Now, NTIA's goal is to solicit input, so considering a wide range of potential problems associated with AI makes sense. Consistent with that, the document refers to democratic values, civil rights, civil liberties, and privacy. And citing the NIST doc, NTIA vaguely notes "a wide range of potential AI risks". Also, AI systems should be "valid and reliable, safe, secure and resilient, accountable and transparent, explainable and interpretable, privacy-enhanced, and fair with their harmful bias managed". And they should call their mothers \every\ week. (Okay, I made that one up.) A few comments on this formulation of the problem. First, these concerns feel more applicable to older-style AI. This includes automated decisions systems, like for a bank loan or for a prison parole recommendation. Sure, I believe such systems should operate in ways consistent with our consensus societal values, and further regulation may be needed to achieve that. But, hello! There's also another, newer class of AI that poses additional challenges. And I don't see those discussed in the NTIA document. Such challenges might include: People losing jobs because AI takes their work. Ensuring malicious people don't use AI tools to wreak havoc on the world. Sorting out intellectual property issues around AI to ensure both rapid progress in the field and respect for creators' rights. Ensuring laws appropriately assign culpability to humans when AIs cause harm. Planning for an incident analogous to the first internet worm, where an AI goes rogue, wreaks some havoc, and everyone is shocked (before it happens 28,385 more times). Bottom line: when I cntrl-F the doc for "robotic overlords", I get zero hits. ZERO. This is why I now believe scope is so important when considering efforts to regulate AI: are we talking about old-school AI or 2023-era AI or what? Because they are pretty different. The last aspect I'll address is the solutions contemplated. Again, NTIA's goal is to stimulate discussion, not propose something specific. Nevertheless, there is a strong push in one particular direction: unlike, "robotic overlord", the word "audit" appears more than 100 times along with many instances of "assessment" and "certification". On one hand, this approach makes sense. Suppose you want to ensure that a bank loan system is fair, that a social media platform isn't spreading misinformation, that a search engine is returning accurate results, etc. Then someone, somewhere has to assess or audit that system and look for problems. That audit might be done by the creator of the system or a third-party auditing agency. Such audits could be incentivized by mandates, prizes, or shiny gold stars. The government might help by fostering development of auditing tools and data. The NTIA is open to all such possibilities and seeks input on how to proceed. On the other hand, this seems like a tactic best suited to automated decision systems operated by financial institutions, government agencies, and the like. Such formal processes seem a poor fit for the current AI wave. For example: Auditing will take time and money. That's something a bank might pay for a system that will run for years. For something fine-tuned over the weekend at a startup or by some guy living in his mother's basement, that's probably not going to happen. Auditing a straightforward decision system seems far easier than assessing an open-ended AI. Beyond basic practicality, the AI could be taught to lie when it senses an audit. Also, auditing procedures (like the NTIA doc itself) will presumably be online, which means that AIs will read them and could potentially respond. Most current ML models fix parameters after training, but I think we'll soon see some models whose parameters evolve as they engage with the world. Auditing such a system that varies continuously over time seems especially difficult. Auditing a foundation model probably tells you little about derivative models. A sweet-hearted model can surely be made into monster with moderate additional training; you don't need to teach the model new cognitive skills, just repurpose existing ones to new ends. More generally, auditing doesn't address many of my concerns about AI regulation (see list above). For example, auditing sort of assumes a basically responsible actor (bank, government agency, big tech company), but AI could be misused by malicious people who, naturally, will not seek a responsible outside assessment. In any case, for both old-school and modern AI, auditing is only one line of defense, and that's not enough. You can audit until you're blue in the face, stuff will still get through, and AI systems will still cause some harm. So what's the next line of defense? For example, is our legal system ready to sensibly assign culpability to humans for AI-related incidents? In summary, the critical problem with the NTIA document is that it creates a largely false appearance of US government engagement with the new class of AI technology. As a result, people could wrongly believe that the US government is already responding to the rise of AI, and fail to advocate for actual, effective engagement. That said, the NTIA document does address important issues around a prominent technology sometimes (formerly?) called "AI". Even there, however, the proposed approach (auditing) seems like an overly-fragile, single line of defense.

[N] Last Week in AI News Digest - Automated chemical synthesis, using heartbeats to detect deepfakes, and more!
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regalalgorithmThis week

[N] Last Week in AI News Digest - Automated chemical synthesis, using heartbeats to detect deepfakes, and more!

Hi there, just sharing the latest edition of our AI news digest newsletter! We're just a couple of AI grad students doing this for fun, so hope the self promotion is not too annoying (also, welcome feedback). See it below, and feel free to subscribe. Mini Briefs Robotics, AI, and Cloud Computing Combine to Supercharge Chemical and Drug Synthesis IBM recently demoed a complex system for chemical testing and drug synthesis. The system has an AI component that predicts the results of chemical reactions, and a fully automated robotic experiment setup that runs chemical tests 24/7. Users can access the remote robotics lab online, and IBM can also install the system on-premise. With these tools working together, IBM is hoping to reduce typical drug discovery and verification time by half. AI researchers use heartbeat detection to identify deepfake videos Researchers from multiple groups are tackling the challenge of detecting deepfake videos by analyzing the apparent heartbeat of the people depicted in the video. This is possible, because a person’s blood flow changes their skin color ever so slightly, and this change is often detectable via a process called photoplethysmography (PPG). Because deepfakes are not currently optimizing to generate realisitic heartbeats, temporal or spatial anomalies in PPG signals allow resesarchers to detect deepfakes with a 97% accuracy. Advances & Business This AI Expert From Senegal Is Helping Showcase Africans In STEM \- Adji Bousso Dieng will be Princeton’s School of Engineering’s first Black female faculty. Google’s AI-powered flood alerts now cover all of India and parts of Bangladesh \- India, the world’s second most populated nation, sees more than 20% of the global flood-related fatalities each year as overrun riverbanks sweep tens of thousands of homes with them. Two years ago, Google volunteered to help. Finding magnetic eruptions in space with an AI assistant \- MMS look for explosive reconnection events as it flies through the magnetopause - the boundary region where Earth’s magnetic butts up against the solar wind that flows throughout the solar system. This know-it-all AI learns by reading the entire web nonstop \- Diffbot is building the biggest-ever knowledge graph by applying image recognition and natural-language processing to billions of web pages. Bosch and Ford will test autonomous parking in Detroit \- Ford, Bosch, and Dan Gilbert’s real estate firm Bedrock today detailed an autonomous parking pilot scheduled to launch in September at The Assembly, a mixed-used building in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood. Create your own moody quarantine music with Google’s AI \- Lo-Fi Player, the latest project out of Google Magenta, lets you mix tunes with the help of machine learning by interacting with a virtual room. Apple launches AI/ML residency program to attract niche experts \- As Apple’s artificial language and machine learning initiatives continue to expand, its interest in attracting talent has grown - a theme that’s barely under the surface of the company’s occasionally updated Machine Learning Research blog. Dusty Robotics CEO Tessa Lau Discusses Robotics Start-Ups and Autonomous Robots for Construction \- Tessa Lau is Founder/CEO at Dusty Robotics, whose mission is to increase construction industry productivity by introducing robotic automation on the jobsite. Concerns & Hype Google Offers to Help Others With the Tricky Ethics of AI \- Companies pay cloud computing providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google big money to avoid operating their own digital infrastructure. The Peace Dividends Of The Autonomous Vehicle Wars \- The rapid growth of the mobile market in the late 2000s and early 2010s led to a burst of technological progress. Ethics must be part of the development process’ \- The increasing use of AI (artificial intelligence) in the development of new medical technologies demands greater attention to ethical aspects. Analysis & Policy China’s new AI trade rules could hamper a TikTok sale \- TikTok’s attempt to sell itself and avert a possible US ban may run into some complications. The Wall Street Journal reports that China has unveiled new restrictions on AI technology exports that could affect TikTok. Podcast Check out our weekly podcast covering these stories! Website | RSS | iTunes | Spotify | YouTube

[P] I built an open SotA image tagging model to do what CLIP won't
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fpgaminerThis week

[P] I built an open SotA image tagging model to do what CLIP won't

I'm a hobbyist ML researcher and finally, after a year of work, built a state of the art machine vision model from scratch. It's ViT-B/16 based, 448x448x3 input, 91M parameters, trained for 660M samples, with multi-label classification as the target task, on over 5000 unique tags. All the big foundation vision models today were trained on heavily filtered datasets, greatly limiting the concepts they can represent, in line with arbitrary sets of rules for what is deemed "wholesome" by leading tech companies. Everything from innocuous to spicy is on the chopping block of those filters. And because CLIP pervades the industry, from StableDiffusion to LLaVA, so does OpenAI's sensibilities. My goal was to build a vision model for tagging images, mainly for labelling images for SD finetunes, but which wasn't as heavily filtered and handicapped as CLIP/BLIP/LLaVA. Something more inclusive, diverse, and sex positive. Starting from the wonderful work of SmilingWolf (https://github.com/SmilingWolf/SW-CV-ModelZoo) and the Danbooru2021 dataset, I iterated for a year on the model, training, and manually labeling a thousand images to help the model generalize beyond the danbooru domain. I'm releasing the first version of this model, dubbed JoyTag, today: https://github.com/fpgaminer/joytag It achieves a mean F1 score of 0.578 across all of its over 5000 tags and across both the anime/manga styled images of the original danbooru dataset, but also photographs and other mediums thanks to the auxiliary training data I provided to it. It was quite the struggle getting to this point, and I probably spent more time and money than any sane person should have. I learned a lot about dealing with datasets as large as danbooru2021, training models at scale, and how to keep yourself awake all night so your 8xA100 rental doesn't crash and blow all your money. In my manual testing outside of even the validation set, the model has generalized well to unseen images, so I'm quite happy with the results thus far. There's plenty more work to do expanding its dataset to improve that F1 score further, and roundout its weak points. With inclusivity and diversity being a major goal of this project, I'm disappointed by some of its remaining limitations (as documented in the GitHub README). But I'm already busy manually tagging more images using my model-augmented workflow. I'm happy to answer questions about the project, the training procedure, anything. All the training parameters are documented on GitHub, but there are so many little details that were hard won over the year. Like that damned loss multiplier. Ugh. Github: https://github.com/fpgaminer/joytag Model download: https://huggingface.co/fancyfeast/joytag/tree/main Demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/fancyfeast/joytag

Interview with Juergen Schmidhuber, renowned ‘Father Of Modern AI’, says his life’s work won't lead to dystopia.
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hardmaruThis week

Interview with Juergen Schmidhuber, renowned ‘Father Of Modern AI’, says his life’s work won't lead to dystopia.

Schmidhuber interview expressing his views on the future of AI and AGI. Original source. I think the interview is of interest to r/MachineLearning, and presents an alternate view, compared to other influential leaders in AI. Juergen Schmidhuber, Renowned 'Father Of Modern AI,' Says His Life’s Work Won't Lead To Dystopia May 23, 2023. Contributed by Hessie Jones. Amid the growing concern about the impact of more advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technologies on society, there are many in the technology community who fear the implications of the advancements in Generative AI if they go unchecked. Dr. Juergen Schmidhuber, a renowned scientist, artificial intelligence researcher and widely regarded as one of the pioneers in the field, is more optimistic. He declares that many of those who suddenly warn against the dangers of AI are just seeking publicity, exploiting the media’s obsession with killer robots which has attracted more attention than “good AI” for healthcare etc. The potential to revolutionize various industries and improve our lives is clear, as are the equal dangers if bad actors leverage the technology for personal gain. Are we headed towards a dystopian future, or is there reason to be optimistic? I had a chance to sit down with Dr. Juergen Schmidhuber to understand his perspective on this seemingly fast-moving AI-train that will leap us into the future. As a teenager in the 1970s, Juergen Schmidhuber became fascinated with the idea of creating intelligent machines that could learn and improve on their own, becoming smarter than himself within his lifetime. This would ultimately lead to his groundbreaking work in the field of deep learning. In the 1980s, he studied computer science at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), where he earned his diploma in 1987. His thesis was on the ultimate self-improving machines that, not only, learn through some pre-wired human-designed learning algorithm, but also learn and improve the learning algorithm itself. Decades later, this became a hot topic. He also received his Ph.D. at TUM in 1991 for work that laid some of the foundations of modern AI. Schmidhuber is best known for his contributions to the development of recurrent neural networks (RNNs), the most powerful type of artificial neural network that can process sequential data such as speech and natural language. With his students Sepp Hochreiter, Felix Gers, Alex Graves, Daan Wierstra, and others, he published architectures and training algorithms for the long short-term memory (LSTM), a type of RNN that is widely used in natural language processing, speech recognition, video games, robotics, and other applications. LSTM has become the most cited neural network of the 20th century, and Business Week called it "arguably the most commercial AI achievement." Throughout his career, Schmidhuber has received various awards and accolades for his groundbreaking work. In 2013, he was awarded the Helmholtz Prize, which recognizes significant contributions to the field of machine learning. In 2016, he was awarded the IEEE Neural Network Pioneer Award for "pioneering contributions to deep learning and neural networks." The media have often called him the “father of modern AI,” because the most cited neural networks all build on his lab’s work. He is quick to point out, however, that AI history goes back centuries. Despite his many accomplishments, at the age of 60, he feels mounting time pressure towards building an Artificial General Intelligence within his lifetime and remains committed to pushing the boundaries of AI research and development. He is currently director of the KAUST AI Initiative, scientific director of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA, and co-founder and chief scientist of AI company NNAISENSE, whose motto is "AI∀" which is a math-inspired way of saying "AI For All." He continues to work on cutting-edge AI technologies and applications to improve human health and extend human lives and make lives easier for everyone. The following interview has been edited for clarity. Jones: Thank you Juergen for joining me. You have signed letters warning about AI weapons. But you didn't sign the recent publication, "Pause Gigantic AI Experiments: An Open Letter"? Is there a reason? Schmidhuber: Thank you Hessie. Glad to speak with you. I have realized that many of those who warn in public against the dangers of AI are just seeking publicity. I don't think the latest letter will have any significant impact because many AI researchers, companies, and governments will ignore it completely. The proposal frequently uses the word "we" and refers to "us," the humans. But as I have pointed out many times in the past, there is no "we" that everyone can identify with. Ask 10 different people, and you will hear 10 different opinions about what is "good." Some of those opinions will be completely incompatible with each other. Don't forget the enormous amount of conflict between the many people. The letter also says, "If such a pause cannot be quickly put in place, governments should intervene and impose a moratorium." The problem is that different governments have ALSO different opinions about what is good for them and for others. Great Power A will say, if we don't do it, Great Power B will, perhaps secretly, and gain an advantage over us. The same is true for Great Powers C and D. Jones: Everyone acknowledges this fear surrounding current generative AI technology. Moreover, the existential threat of this technology has been publicly acknowledged by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI himself, calling for AI regulation. From your perspective, is there an existential threat? Schmidhuber: It is true that AI can be weaponized, and I have no doubt that there will be all kinds of AI arms races, but AI does not introduce a new quality of existential threat. The threat coming from AI weapons seems to pale in comparison to the much older threat from nuclear hydrogen bombs that don’t need AI at all. We should be much more afraid of half-century-old tech in the form of H-bomb rockets. The Tsar Bomba of 1961 had almost 15 times more destructive power than all weapons of WW-II combined. Despite the dramatic nuclear disarmament since the 1980s, there are still more than enough nuclear warheads to wipe out human civilization within two hours, without any AI I’m much more worried about that old existential threat than the rather harmless AI weapons. Jones: I realize that while you compare AI to the threat of nuclear bombs, there is a current danger that a current technology can be put in the hands of humans and enable them to “eventually” exact further harms to individuals of group in a very precise way, like targeted drone attacks. You are giving people a toolset that they've never had before, enabling bad actors, as some have pointed out, to be able to do a lot more than previously because they didn't have this technology. Schmidhuber: Now, all that sounds horrible in principle, but our existing laws are sufficient to deal with these new types of weapons enabled by AI. If you kill someone with a gun, you will go to jail. Same if you kill someone with one of these drones. Law enforcement will get better at understanding new threats and new weapons and will respond with better technology to combat these threats. Enabling drones to target persons from a distance in a way that requires some tracking and some intelligence to perform, which has traditionally been performed by skilled humans, to me, it seems is just an improved version of a traditional weapon, like a gun, which is, you know, a little bit smarter than the old guns. But, in principle, all of that is not a new development. For many centuries, we have had the evolution of better weaponry and deadlier poisons and so on, and law enforcement has evolved their policies to react to these threats over time. So, it's not that we suddenly have a new quality of existential threat and it's much more worrisome than what we have had for about six decades. A large nuclear warhead doesn’t need fancy face recognition to kill an individual. No, it simply wipes out an entire city with ten million inhabitants. Jones: The existential threat that’s implied is the extent to which humans have control over this technology. We see some early cases of opportunism which, as you say, tends to get more media attention than positive breakthroughs. But you’re implying that this will all balance out? Schmidhuber: Historically, we have a long tradition of technological breakthroughs that led to advancements in weapons for the purpose of defense but also for protection. From sticks, to rocks, to axes to gunpowder to cannons to rockets… and now to drones… this has had a drastic influence on human history but what has been consistent throughout history is that those who are using technology to achieve their own ends are themselves, facing the same technology because the opposing side is learning to use it against them. And that's what has been repeated in thousands of years of human history and it will continue. I don't see the new AI arms race as something that is remotely as existential a threat as the good old nuclear warheads. You said something important, in that some people prefer to talk about the downsides rather than the benefits of this technology, but that's misleading, because 95% of all AI research and AI development is about making people happier and advancing human life and health. Jones: Let’s touch on some of those beneficial advances in AI research that have been able to radically change present day methods and achieve breakthroughs. Schmidhuber: All right! For example, eleven years ago, our team with my postdoc Dan Ciresan was the first to win a medical imaging competition through deep learning. We analyzed female breast cells with the objective to determine harmless cells vs. those in the pre-cancer stage. Typically, a trained oncologist needs a long time to make these determinations. Our team, who knew nothing about cancer, were able to train an artificial neural network, which was totally dumb in the beginning, on lots of this kind of data. It was able to outperform all the other methods. Today, this is being used not only for breast cancer, but also for radiology and detecting plaque in arteries, and many other things. Some of the neural networks that we have developed in the last 3 decades are now prevalent across thousands of healthcare applications, detecting Diabetes and Covid-19 and what not. This will eventually permeate across all healthcare. The good consequences of this type of AI are much more important than the click-bait new ways of conducting crimes with AI. Jones: Adoption is a product of reinforced outcomes. The massive scale of adoption either leads us to believe that people have been led astray, or conversely, technology is having a positive effect on people’s lives. Schmidhuber: The latter is the likely case. There's intense commercial pressure towards good AI rather than bad AI because companies want to sell you something, and you are going to buy only stuff you think is going to be good for you. So already just through this simple, commercial pressure, you have a tremendous bias towards good AI rather than bad AI. However, doomsday scenarios like in Schwarzenegger movies grab more attention than documentaries on AI that improve people’s lives. Jones: I would argue that people are drawn to good stories – narratives that contain an adversary and struggle, but in the end, have happy endings. And this is consistent with your comment on human nature and how history, despite its tendency for violence and destruction of humanity, somehow tends to correct itself. Let’s take the example of a technology, which you are aware – GANs – General Adversarial Networks, which today has been used in applications for fake news and disinformation. In actuality, the purpose in the invention of GANs was far from what it is used for today. Schmidhuber: Yes, the name GANs was created in 2014 but we had the basic principle already in the early 1990s. More than 30 years ago, I called it artificial curiosity. It's a very simple way of injecting creativity into a little two network system. This creative AI is not just trying to slavishly imitate humans. Rather, it’s inventing its own goals. Let me explain: You have two networks. One network is producing outputs that could be anything, any action. Then the second network is looking at these actions and it’s trying to predict the consequences of these actions. An action could move a robot, then something happens, and the other network is just trying to predict what will happen. Now we can implement artificial curiosity by reducing the prediction error of the second network, which, at the same time, is the reward of the first network. The first network wants to maximize its reward and so it will invent actions that will lead to situations that will surprise the second network, which it has not yet learned to predict well. In the case where the outputs are fake images, the first network will try to generate images that are good enough to fool the second network, which will attempt to predict the reaction of the environment: fake or real image, and it will try to become better at it. The first network will continue to also improve at generating images whose type the second network will not be able to predict. So, they fight each other. The 2nd network will continue to reduce its prediction error, while the 1st network will attempt to maximize it. Through this zero-sum game the first network gets better and better at producing these convincing fake outputs which look almost realistic. So, once you have an interesting set of images by Vincent Van Gogh, you can generate new images that leverage his style, without the original artist having ever produced the artwork himself. Jones: I see how the Van Gogh example can be applied in an education setting and there are countless examples of artists mimicking styles from famous painters but image generation from this instance that can happen within seconds is quite another feat. And you know this is how GANs has been used. What’s more prevalent today is a socialized enablement of generating images or information to intentionally fool people. It also surfaces new harms that deal with the threat to intellectual property and copyright, where laws have yet to account for. And from your perspective this was not the intention when the model was conceived. What was your motivation in your early conception of what is now GANs? Schmidhuber: My old motivation for GANs was actually very important and it was not to create deepfakes or fake news but to enable AIs to be curious and invent their own goals, to make them explore their environment and make them creative. Suppose you have a robot that executes one action, then something happens, then it executes another action, and so on, because it wants to achieve certain goals in the environment. For example, when the battery is low, this will trigger “pain” through hunger sensors, so it wants to go to the charging station, without running into obstacles, which will trigger other pain sensors. It will seek to minimize pain (encoded through numbers). Now the robot has a friend, the second network, which is a world model ––it’s a prediction machine that learns to predict the consequences of the robot’s actions. Once the robot has a good model of the world, it can use it for planning. It can be used as a simulation of the real world. And then it can determine what is a good action sequence. If the robot imagines this sequence of actions, the model will predict a lot of pain, which it wants to avoid. If it plays this alternative action sequence in its mental model of the world, then it will predict a rewarding situation where it’s going to sit on the charging station and its battery is going to load again. So, it'll prefer to execute the latter action sequence. In the beginning, however, the model of the world knows nothing, so how can we motivate the first network to generate experiments that lead to data that helps the world model learn something it didn’t already know? That’s what artificial curiosity is about. The dueling two network systems effectively explore uncharted environments by creating experiments so that over time the curious AI gets a better sense of how the environment works. This can be applied to all kinds of environments, and has medical applications. Jones: Let’s talk about the future. You have said, “Traditional humans won’t play a significant role in spreading intelligence across the universe.” Schmidhuber: Let’s first conceptually separate two types of AIs. The first type of AI are tools directed by humans. They are trained to do specific things like accurately detect diabetes or heart disease and prevent attacks before they happen. In these cases, the goal is coming from the human. More interesting AIs are setting their own goals. They are inventing their own experiments and learning from them. Their horizons expand and eventually they become more and more general problem solvers in the real world. They are not controlled by their parents, but much of what they learn is through self-invented experiments. A robot, for example, is rotating a toy, and as it is doing this, the video coming in through the camera eyes, changes over time and it begins to learn how this video changes and learns how the 3D nature of the toy generates certain videos if you rotate it a certain way, and eventually, how gravity works, and how the physics of the world works. Like a little scientist! And I have predicted for decades that future scaled-up versions of such AI scientists will want to further expand their horizons, and eventually go where most of the physical resources are, to build more and bigger AIs. And of course, almost all of these resources are far away from earth out there in space, which is hostile to humans but friendly to appropriately designed AI-controlled robots and self-replicating robot factories. So here we are not talking any longer about our tiny biosphere; no, we are talking about the much bigger rest of the universe. Within a few tens of billions of years, curious self-improving AIs will colonize the visible cosmos in a way that’s infeasible for humans. Those who don’t won’t have an impact. Sounds like science fiction, but since the 1970s I have been unable to see a plausible alternative to this scenario, except for a global catastrophe such as an all-out nuclear war that stops this development before it takes off. Jones: How long have these AIs, which can set their own goals — how long have they existed? To what extent can they be independent of human interaction? Schmidhuber: Neural networks like that have existed for over 30 years. My first simple adversarial neural network system of this kind is the one from 1990 described above. You don’t need a teacher there; it's just a little agent running around in the world and trying to invent new experiments that surprise its own prediction machine. Once it has figured out certain parts of the world, the agent will become bored and will move on to more exciting experiments. The simple 1990 systems I mentioned have certain limitations, but in the past three decades, we have also built more sophisticated systems that are setting their own goals and such systems I think will be essential for achieving true intelligence. If you are only imitating humans, you will never go beyond them. So, you really must give AIs the freedom to explore previously unexplored regions of the world in a way that no human is really predefining. Jones: Where is this being done today? Schmidhuber: Variants of neural network-based artificial curiosity are used today for agents that learn to play video games in a human-competitive way. We have also started to use them for automatic design of experiments in fields such as materials science. I bet many other fields will be affected by it: chemistry, biology, drug design, you name it. However, at least for now, these artificial scientists, as I like to call them, cannot yet compete with human scientists. I don’t think it’s going to stay this way but, at the moment, it’s still the case. Sure, AI has made a lot of progress. Since 1997, there have been superhuman chess players, and since 2011, through the DanNet of my team, there have been superhuman visual pattern recognizers. But there are other things where humans, at the moment at least, are much better, in particular, science itself. In the lab we have many first examples of self-directed artificial scientists, but they are not yet convincing enough to appear on the radar screen of the public space, which is currently much more fascinated with simpler systems that just imitate humans and write texts based on previously seen human-written documents. Jones: You speak of these numerous instances dating back 30 years of these lab experiments where these self-driven agents are deciding and learning and moving on once they’ve learned. And I assume that that rate of learning becomes even faster over time. What kind of timeframe are we talking about when this eventually is taken outside of the lab and embedded into society? Schmidhuber: This could still take months or even years :-) Anyway, in the not-too-distant future, we will probably see artificial scientists who are good at devising experiments that allow them to discover new, previously unknown physical laws. As always, we are going to profit from the old trend that has held at least since 1941: every decade compute is getting 100 times cheaper. Jones: How does this trend affect modern AI such as ChatGPT? Schmidhuber: Perhaps you know that all the recent famous AI applications such as ChatGPT and similar models are largely based on principles of artificial neural networks invented in the previous millennium. The main reason why they works so well now is the incredible acceleration of compute per dollar. ChatGPT is driven by a neural network called “Transformer” described in 2017 by Google. I am happy about that because a quarter century earlier in 1991 I had a particular Transformer variant which is now called the “Transformer with linearized self-attention”. Back then, not much could be done with it, because the compute cost was a million times higher than today. But today, one can train such models on half the internet and achieve much more interesting results. Jones: And for how long will this acceleration continue? Schmidhuber: There's no reason to believe that in the next 30 years, we won't have another factor of 1 million and that's going to be really significant. In the near future, for the first time we will have many not-so expensive devices that can compute as much as a human brain. The physical limits of computation, however, are much further out so even if the trend of a factor of 100 every decade continues, the physical limits (of 1051 elementary instructions per second and kilogram of matter) won’t be hit until, say, the mid-next century. Even in our current century, however, we’ll probably have many machines that compute more than all 10 billion human brains collectively and you can imagine, everything will change then! Jones: That is the big question. Is everything going to change? If so, what do you say to the next generation of leaders, currently coming out of college and university. So much of this change is already impacting how they study, how they will work, or how the future of work and livelihood is defined. What is their purpose and how do we change our systems so they will adapt to this new version of intelligence? Schmidhuber: For decades, people have asked me questions like that, because you know what I'm saying now, I have basically said since the 1970s, it’s just that today, people are paying more attention because, back then, they thought this was science fiction. They didn't think that I would ever come close to achieving my crazy life goal of building a machine that learns to become smarter than myself such that I can retire. But now many have changed their minds and think it's conceivable. And now I have two daughters, 23 and 25. People ask me: what do I tell them? They know that Daddy always said, “It seems likely that within your lifetimes, you will have new types of intelligence that are probably going to be superior in many ways, and probably all kinds of interesting ways.” How should they prepare for that? And I kept telling them the obvious: Learn how to learn new things! It's not like in the previous millennium where within 20 years someone learned to be a useful member of society, and then took a job for 40 years and performed in this job until she received her pension. Now things are changing much faster and we must learn continuously just to keep up. I also told my girls that no matter how smart AIs are going to get, learn at least the basics of math and physics, because that’s the essence of our universe, and anybody who understands this will have an advantage, and learn all kinds of new things more easily. I also told them that social skills will remain important, because most future jobs for humans will continue to involve interactions with other humans, but I couldn’t teach them anything about that; they know much more about social skills than I do. You touched on the big philosophical question about people’s purpose. Can this be answered without answering the even grander question: What’s the purpose of the entire universe? We don’t know. But what’s happening right now might be connected to the unknown answer. Don’t think of humans as the crown of creation. Instead view human civilization as part of a much grander scheme, an important step (but not the last one) on the path of the universe from very simple initial conditions towards more and more unfathomable complexity. Now it seems ready to take its next step, a step comparable to the invention of life itself over 3.5 billion years ago. Alas, don’t worry, in the end, all will be good! Jones: Let’s get back to this transformation happening right now with OpenAI. There are many questioning the efficacy and accuracy of ChatGPT, and are concerned its release has been premature. In light of the rampant adoption, educators have banned its use over concerns of plagiarism and how it stifles individual development. Should large language models like ChatGPT be used in school? Schmidhuber: When the calculator was first introduced, instructors forbade students from using it in school. Today, the consensus is that kids should learn the basic methods of arithmetic, but they should also learn to use the “artificial multipliers” aka calculators, even in exams, because laziness and efficiency is a hallmark of intelligence. Any intelligent being wants to minimize its efforts to achieve things. And that's the reason why we have tools, and why our kids are learning to use these tools. The first stone tools were invented maybe 3.5 million years ago; tools just have become more sophisticated over time. In fact, humans have changed in response to the properties of their tools. Our anatomical evolution was shaped by tools such as spears and fire. So, it's going to continue this way. And there is no permanent way of preventing large language models from being used in school. Jones: And when our children, your children graduate, what does their future work look like? Schmidhuber: A single human trying to predict details of how 10 billion people and their machines will evolve in the future is like a single neuron in my brain trying to predict what the entire brain and its tens of billions of neurons will do next year. 40 years ago, before the WWW was created at CERN in Switzerland, who would have predicted all those young people making money as YouTube video bloggers? Nevertheless, let’s make a few limited job-related observations. For a long time, people have thought that desktop jobs may require more intelligence than skills trade or handicraft professions. But now, it turns out that it's much easier to replace certain aspects of desktop jobs than replacing a carpenter, for example. Because everything that works well in AI is happening behind the screen currently, but not so much in the physical world. There are now artificial systems that can read lots of documents and then make really nice summaries of these documents. That is a desktop job. Or you give them a description of an illustration that you want to have for your article and pretty good illustrations are being generated that may need some minimal fine-tuning. But you know, all these desktop jobs are much easier to facilitate than the real tough jobs in the physical world. And it's interesting that the things people thought required intelligence, like playing chess, or writing or summarizing documents, are much easier for machines than they thought. But for things like playing football or soccer, there is no physical robot that can remotely compete with the abilities of a little boy with these skills. So, AI in the physical world, interestingly, is much harder than AI behind the screen in virtual worlds. And it's really exciting, in my opinion, to see that jobs such as plumbers are much more challenging than playing chess or writing another tabloid story. Jones: The way data has been collected in these large language models does not guarantee personal information has not been excluded. Current consent laws already are outdated when it comes to these large language models (LLM). The concern, rightly so, is increasing surveillance and loss of privacy. What is your view on this? Schmidhuber: As I have indicated earlier: are surveillance and loss of privacy inevitable consequences of increasingly complex societies? Super-organisms such as cities and states and companies consist of numerous people, just like people consist of numerous cells. These cells enjoy little privacy. They are constantly monitored by specialized "police cells" and "border guard cells": Are you a cancer cell? Are you an external intruder, a pathogen? Individual cells sacrifice their freedom for the benefits of being part of a multicellular organism. Similarly, for super-organisms such as nations. Over 5000 years ago, writing enabled recorded history and thus became its inaugural and most important invention. Its initial purpose, however, was to facilitate surveillance, to track citizens and their tax payments. The more complex a super-organism, the more comprehensive its collection of information about its constituents. 200 years ago, at least, the parish priest in each village knew everything about all the village people, even about those who did not confess, because they appeared in the confessions of others. Also, everyone soon knew about the stranger who had entered the village, because some occasionally peered out of the window, and what they saw got around. Such control mechanisms were temporarily lost through anonymization in rapidly growing cities but are now returning with the help of new surveillance devices such as smartphones as part of digital nervous systems that tell companies and governments a lot about billions of users. Cameras and drones etc. are becoming increasingly tinier and more ubiquitous. More effective recognition of faces and other detection technology are becoming cheaper and cheaper, and many will use it to identify others anywhere on earth; the big wide world will not offer any more privacy than the local village. Is this good or bad? Some nations may find it easier than others to justify more complex kinds of super-organisms at the expense of the privacy rights of their constituents. Jones: So, there is no way to stop or change this process of collection, or how it continuously informs decisions over time? How do you see governance and rules responding to this, especially amid Italy’s ban on ChatGPT following suspected user data breach and the more recent news about the Meta’s record $1.3billion fine in the company’s handling of user information? Schmidhuber: Data collection has benefits and drawbacks, such as the loss of privacy. How to balance those? I have argued for addressing this through data ownership in data markets. If it is true that data is the new oil, then it should have a price, just like oil. At the moment, the major surveillance platforms such as Meta do not offer users any money for their data and the transitive loss of privacy. In the future, however, we will likely see attempts at creating efficient data markets to figure out the data's true financial value through the interplay between supply and demand. Even some of the sensitive medical data should not be priced by governmental regulators but by patients (and healthy persons) who own it and who may sell or license parts thereof as micro-entrepreneurs in a healthcare data market. Following a previous interview, I gave for one of the largest re-insurance companies , let's look at the different participants in such a data market: patients, hospitals, data companies. (1) Patients with a rare form of cancer can offer more valuable data than patients with a very common form of cancer. (2) Hospitals and their machines are needed to extract the data, e.g., through magnet spin tomography, radiology, evaluations through human doctors, and so on. (3) Companies such as Siemens, Google or IBM would like to buy annotated data to make better artificial neural networks that learn to predict pathologies and diseases and the consequences of therapies. Now the market’s invisible hand will decide about the data’s price through the interplay between demand and supply. On the demand side, you will have several companies offering something for the data, maybe through an app on the smartphone (a bit like a stock market app). On the supply side, each patient in this market should be able to profit from high prices for rare valuable types of data. Likewise, competing data extractors such as hospitals will profit from gaining recognition and trust for extracting data well at a reasonable price. The market will make the whole system efficient through incentives for all who are doing a good job. Soon there will be a flourishing ecosystem of commercial data market advisors and what not, just like the ecosystem surrounding the traditional stock market. The value of the data won’t be determined by governments or ethics committees, but by those who own the data and decide by themselves which parts thereof they want to license to others under certain conditions. At first glance, a market-based system seems to be detrimental to the interest of certain monopolistic companies, as they would have to pay for the data - some would prefer free data and keep their monopoly. However, since every healthy and sick person in the market would suddenly have an incentive to collect and share their data under self-chosen anonymity conditions, there will soon be many more useful data to evaluate all kinds of treatments. On average, people will live longer and healthier, and many companies and the entire healthcare system will benefit. Jones: Finally, what is your view on open source versus the private companies like Google and OpenAI? Is there a danger to supporting these private companies’ large language models versus trying to keep these models open source and transparent, very much like what LAION is doing? Schmidhuber: I signed this open letter by LAION because I strongly favor the open-source movement. And I think it's also something that is going to challenge whatever big tech dominance there might be at the moment. Sure, the best models today are run by big companies with huge budgets for computers, but the exciting fact is that open-source models are not so far behind, some people say maybe six to eight months only. Of course, the private company models are all based on stuff that was created in academia, often in little labs without so much funding, which publish without patenting their results and open source their code and others take it and improved it. Big tech has profited tremendously from academia; their main achievement being that they have scaled up everything greatly, sometimes even failing to credit the original inventors. So, it's very interesting to see that as soon as some big company comes up with a new scaled-up model, lots of students out there are competing, or collaborating, with each other, trying to come up with equal or better performance on smaller networks and smaller machines. And since they are open sourcing, the next guy can have another great idea to improve it, so now there’s tremendous competition also for the big companies. Because of that, and since AI is still getting exponentially cheaper all the time, I don't believe that big tech companies will dominate in the long run. They find it very hard to compete with the enormous open-source movement. As long as you can encourage the open-source community, I think you shouldn't worry too much. Now, of course, you might say if everything is open source, then the bad actors also will more easily have access to these AI tools. And there's truth to that. But as always since the invention of controlled fire, it was good that knowledge about how technology works quickly became public such that everybody could use it. And then, against any bad actor, there's almost immediately a counter actor trying to nullify his efforts. You see, I still believe in our old motto "AI∀" or "AI For All." Jones: Thank you, Juergen for sharing your perspective on this amazing time in history. It’s clear that with new technology, the enormous potential can be matched by disparate and troubling risks which we’ve yet to solve, and even those we have yet to identify. If we are to dispel the fear of a sentient system for which we have no control, humans, alone need to take steps for more responsible development and collaboration to ensure AI technology is used to ultimately benefit society. Humanity will be judged by what we do next.

[D] A Jobless Rant - ML is a Fool's Gold
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[D] A Jobless Rant - ML is a Fool's Gold

Aside from the clickbait title, I am earnestly looking for some advice and discussion from people who are actually employed. That being said, here's my gripe: I have been relentlessly inundated by the words "AI, ML, Big Data" throughout my undergrad from other CS majors, business and sales oriented people, media, and .ai type startups. It seems like everyone was peddling ML as the go to solution, the big money earner, and the future of the field. I've heard college freshman ask stuff like, "if I want to do CS, am I going to need to learn ML to be relevant" - if you're on this sub, I probably do not need to continue to elaborate on just how ridiculous the ML craze is. Every single university has opened up ML departments or programs and are pumping out ML graduates at an unprecedented rate. Surely, there'd be a job market to meet the incredible supply of graduates and cultural interest? Swept up in a mixture of genuine interest and hype, I decided to pursue computer vision. I majored in Math-CS at a top-10 CS university (based on at least one arbitrary ranking). I had three computer vision internships, two at startups, one at NASA JPL, in each doing non-trivial CV work; I (re)implemented and integrated CV systems from mixtures of recently published papers. I have a bunch of projects showing both CV and CS fundamentals (OS, networking, data structures, algorithms, etc) knowledge. I have taken graduate level ML coursework. I was accepted to Carnegie Mellon for an MS in Computer Vision, but I deferred to 2021 - all in all, I worked my ass off to try to simultaneously get a solid background in math AND computer science AND computer vision. That brings me to where I am now, which is unemployed and looking for jobs. Almost every single position I have seen requires a PhD and/or 5+ years of experience, and whatever I have applied for has ghosted me so far. The notion that ML is a high paying in-demand field seems to only be true if your name is Andrej Karpathy - and I'm only sort of joking. It seems like unless you have a PhD from one of the big 4 in CS and multiple publications in top tier journals you're out of luck, or at least vying for one of the few remaining positions at small companies. This seems normalized in ML, but this is not the case for quite literally every other subfield or even generalized CS positions. Getting a high paying job at a Big N company is possible as a new grad with just a bachelors and general SWE knowledge, and there are a plethora of positions elsewhere. Getting the equivalent with basically every specialization, whether operating systems, distributed systems, security, networking, etc, is also possible, and doesn't require 5 CVPR publications. TL;DR From my personal perspective, if you want to do ML because of career prospects, salaries, or job security, pick almost any other CS specialization. In ML, you'll find yourself working 2x as hard through difficult theory and math to find yourself competing with more applicants for fewer positions. I am absolutely complaining and would love to hear a more positive perspective, but in the meanwhile I'll be applying to jobs, working on more post-grad projects, and contemplating switching fields.

[N] Montreal-based Element AI sold for $230-million as founders saw value mostly wiped out
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[N] Montreal-based Element AI sold for $230-million as founders saw value mostly wiped out

According to Globe and Mail article: Element AI sold for $230-million as founders saw value mostly wiped out, document reveals Montreal startup Element AI Inc. was running out of money and options when it inked a deal last month to sell itself for US$230-milion to Silicon Valley software company ServiceNow Inc., a confidential document obtained by the Globe and Mail reveals. Materials sent to Element AI shareholders Friday reveal that while many of its institutional shareholders will make most if not all of their money back from backing two venture financings, employees will not fare nearly as well. Many have been terminated and had their stock options cancelled. Also losing out are co-founders Jean-François Gagné, the CEO, his wife Anne Martel, the chief administrative officer, chief science officer Nick Chapados and Yoshua Bengio, the University of Montreal professor known as a godfather of “deep learning,” the foundational science behind today’s AI revolution. Between them, they owned 8.8 million common shares, whose value has been wiped out with the takeover, which goes to a shareholder vote Dec 29 with enough investor support already locked up to pass before the takeover goes to a Canadian court to approve a plan of arrangement with ServiceNow. The quartet also owns preferred shares worth less than US$300,000 combined under the terms of the deal. The shareholder document, a management proxy circular, provides a rare look inside efforts by a highly hyped but deeply troubled startup as it struggled to secure financing at the same time as it was failing to live up to its early promises. The circular states the US$230-million purchase price is subject to some adjustments and expenses which could bring the final price down to US$195-million. The sale is a disappointing outcome for a company that burst onto the Canadian tech scene four years ago like few others, promising to deliver AI-powered operational improvements to a range of industries and anchor a thriving domestic AI sector. Element AI became the self-appointed representative of Canada’s AI sector, lobbying politicians and officials and landing numerous photo ops with them, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. It also secured $25-million in federal funding – $20-million of which was committed earlier this year and cancelled by the government with the ServiceNow takeover. Element AI invested heavily in hype and and earned international renown, largely due to its association with Dr. Bengio. It raised US$102-million in venture capital in 2017 just nine months after its founding, an unheard of amount for a new Canadian company, from international backers including Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp., Nvidia Corp., Tencent Holdings Ltd., Fidelity Investments, a Singaporean sovereign wealth fund and venture capital firms. Element AI went on a hiring spree to establish what the founders called “supercredibility,” recruiting top AI talent in Canada and abroad. It opened global offices, including a British operation that did pro bono work to deliver “AI for good,” and its ranks swelled to 500 people. But the swift hiring and attention-seeking were at odds with its success in actually building a software business. Element AI took two years to focus on product development after initially pursuing consulting gigs. It came into 2019 with a plan to bring several AI-based products to market, including a cybersecurity offering for financial institutions and a program to help port operators predict waiting times for truck drivers. It was also quietly shopping itself around. In December 2018, the company asked financial adviser Allen & Co LLC to find a potential buyer, in addition to pursuing a private placement, the circular reveals. But Element AI struggled to advance proofs-of-concept work to marketable products. Several client partnerships faltered in 2019 and 2020. Element did manage to reach terms for a US$151.4-million ($200-million) venture financing in September, 2019 led by the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec and backed by the Quebec government and consulting giant McKinsey and Co. However, the circular reveals the company only received the first tranche of the financing – roughly half of the amount – at the time, and that it had to meet unspecified conditions to get the rest. A fairness opinion by Deloitte commissioned as part of the sale process estimated Element AI’s enterprises value at just US$76-million around the time of the 2019 financing, shrinking to US$45-million this year. “However, the conditions precedent the closing of the second tranche … were not going to be met in a timely manner,” the circular reads. It states “new terms were proposed” for a round of financing that would give incoming investors ranking ahead of others and a cumulative dividend of 12 per cent on invested capital and impose “other operating and governance constraints and limitations on the company.” Management instead decided to pursue a sale, and Allen contacted prospective buyers in June. As talks narrowed this past summer to exclusive negotiations with ServiceNow, “the company’s liquidity was diminishing as sources of capital on acceptable terms were scarce,” the circular reads. By late November, it was generating revenue at an annualized rate of just $10-million to $12-million, Deloitte said. As part of the deal – which will see ServiceNow keep Element AI’s research scientists and patents and effectively abandon its business – the buyer has agreed to pay US$10-million to key employees and consultants including Mr. Gagne and Dr. Bengio as part of a retention plan. The Caisse and Quebec government will get US$35.45-million and US$11.8-million, respectively, roughly the amount they invested in the first tranche of the 2019 financing.

[N] How Stability AI’s Founder Tanked His Billion-Dollar Startup
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[N] How Stability AI’s Founder Tanked His Billion-Dollar Startup

forbes article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2024/03/29/how-stability-ais-founder-tanked-his-billion-dollar-startup/ archive no paywall: https://archive.is/snbeV How Stability AI’s Founder Tanked His Billion-Dollar Startup Mar 29, 2024 Stability AI founder Emad Mostaque took the stage last week at the Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, California to roaring applause and an introduction from an AI-generated Aristotle who announced him as “a modern Prometheus” with “the astuteness of Athena and the vision of Daedalus.” “Under his stewardship, AI becomes the Herculean force poised to vanquish the twin serpents of illness and ailment and extend the olive branch of longevity,” the faux Aristotle proclaimed. “I think that’s the best intro I’ve ever had,” Mostaque said. But behind Mostaque's hagiographic introduction lay a grim and fast metastasizing truth. Stability, once one of AI’s buzziest startups, was floundering. It had been running out of money for months and Mostaque had been unable to secure enough additional funding. It had defaulted on payments to Amazon whose cloud service undergirded Stability’s core offerings. The star research team behind its flagship text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion had tendered their resignations just three days before — as Forbes would first report — and other senior leaders had issued him an ultimatum: resign, or we walk too. Still, onstage before a massive audience of peers and acolytes, Mostaque talked a big game. “AI is jet planes for the mind,” he opined. “AI is our collective intelligence. It's the human Colossus.” He claimed a new, faster version of the Stable Diffusion image generator released earlier this month could generate “200 cats with hats per second.” But later, when he was asked about Stability’s financial model, Mostaque fumbled. “I can’t say that publicly,” he replied. “But it’s going well. We’re ahead of forecast.” Four days later, Mostaque stepped down as CEO of Stability, as Forbes first reported. In a post to X, the service formerly known as Twitter, he claimed he’d voluntarily abdicated his role to decentralize “the concentration of power in AI.” But sources told Forbes that was hardly the case. Behind the scenes, Mostaque had fought to maintain his position and control despite mounting pressure externally and internally to step down. Company documents and interviews with 32 current and former employees, investors, collaborators and industry observers suggest his abrupt exit was the result of poor business judgment and wild overspending that undermined confidence in his vision and leadership, and ultimately kneecapped the company. Mostaque, through his attorneys, declined to comment on record on a detailed list of questions about the reporting in this story. But in an email to Forbes earlier this week he broadly disputed the allegations. “Nobody tells you how hard it is to be a CEO and there are better CEOs than me to scale a business,” he said in a statement. “I am not sure anyone else would have been able to build and grow the research team to build the best and most widely used models out there and I’m very proud of the team there. I look forward to moving onto the next problem to handle and hopefully move the needle.” In an emailed statement, Christian Laforte and Shan Shan Wong, the interim co-CEOs who replaced Mostaque, said, "the company remains focused on commercializing its world leading technology” and providing it “to partners across the creative industries." After starting Stability in 2019, Mostaque built the company into an early AI juggernaut by seizing upon a promising research project that would become Stable Diffusion and funding it into a business reality. The ease with which the software generated detailed images from the simplest text prompts immediately captivated the public: 10 million people used it on any given day, the company told Forbes in early 2023. For some true believers, Mostaque was a crucial advocate for open-source AI development in a space dominated by the closed systems of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. But his startup’s rise to one of the buzziest in generative AI was in part built on a series of exaggerations and misleading claims, as Forbes first reported last year (Mostaque disputed some points at the time). And they continued after he raised $100 million at a $1 billion valuation just days after launching Stable Diffusion in 2022. His failure to deliver on an array of grand promises, like building bespoke AI models for nation states, and his decision to pour tens of millions into research without a sustainable business plan, eroded Stability’s foundations and jeopardized its future. "He was just giving shit away,” one former employee told Forbes. “That man legitimately wanted to transform the world. He actually wanted to train AI models for kids in Malawi. Was it practical? Absolutely not." By October 2023, Stability would have less than $4 million left in the bank, according to an internal memo prepared for a board meeting and reviewed by Forbes. And mounting debt, including months of overdue Amazon Web Services payments, had already left it in the red. To avoid legal penalties for skipping Americans staff’s payroll, the document explained, the London-based startup was considering delaying tax payments to the U.K. government. It was Stability’s armada of GPUs, the wildly powerful and equally expensive chips undergirding AI, that were so taxing the company’s finances. Hosted by AWS, they had long been one of Mostaque’s bragging points; he often touted them as one of the world’s 10 largest supercomputers. They were responsible for helping Stability’s researchers build and maintain one of the top AI image generators, as well as break important new ground on generative audio, video and 3D models. “Undeniably, Stability has continued to ship a lot of models,” said one former employee. “They may not have profited off of it, but the broader ecosystem benefitted in a huge, huge way.” But the costs associated with so much compute were now threatening to sink the company. According to an internal October financial forecast seen by Forbes, Stability was on track to spend $99 million on compute in 2023. It noted as well that Stability was “underpaying AWS bills for July (by $1M)” and “not planning to pay AWS at the end of October for August usage ($7M).” Then there were the September and October bills, plus $1 million owed to Google Cloud and $600,000 to GPU cloud data center CoreWeave. (Amazon, Google and CoreWeave declined to comment.) With an additional $54 million allocated to wages and operating expenses, Stability’s total projected costs for 2023 were $153 million. But according to its October financial report, its projected revenue for the calendar year was just $11 million. Stability was on track to lose more money per month than it made in an entire year. The company’s dire financial position had thoroughly soured Stability’s current investors, including Coatue, which had invested tens of millions in the company during its $101 million funding round in 2022. In the middle of 2023, Mostaque agreed to an independent audit after Coatue raised a series of concerns, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter. The outcome of the investigation is unclear. Coatue declined to comment. Within a week of an early October board meeting where Mostaque shared that financial forecast, Lightspeed Venture Partners, another major investor, sent a letter to the board urging them to sell the company. The distressing numbers had “severely undermined” the firm’s confidence in Mostaque’s ability to lead the company. “In particular, we are surprised and deeply concerned by a cash position just now disclosed to us that is inconsistent with prior discussions on this topic,” Lightspeed’s general counsel Brett Nissenberg wrote in the letter, a copy of which was viewed by Forbes. “Lightspeed believes that the company is not likely financeable on terms that would assure the company’s long term sound financial position.” (Lightspeed declined a request for comment.) The calls for a sale led Stability to quietly begin looking for a buyer. Bloomberg reported in November that Stability approached AI startups Cohere and Jasper to gauge their interest. Stability denied this, and Jasper CEO Timothy Young did the same when reached for comment by Forbes. A Cohere representative declined to comment. But one prominent AI company confirmed that Mostaque’s representatives had reached out to them to test the waters. Those talks did not advance because “the numbers didn’t add up,” this person, who declined to be named due to the confidential nature of the talks, told Forbes. Stability also tried to court Samsung as a buyer, going so far as to redecorate its office in advance of a planned meeting with the Korean electronics giant. (Samsung said that it invested in Stability in 2023 and that it does not comment on M&A discussions.) Coatue had been calling for Mostaque’s resignation for months, according to a source with direct knowledge. But it and other investors were unable to oust him because he was the company’s majority shareholder. When they tried a different tact by rallying other investors to offer him a juicy equity package to resign, Mostaque refused, said two sources. By October, Coatue and Lightspeed had had enough. Coatue left the board and Lightspeed resigned its observer seat. “Emad infuriated our initial investors so much it’s just making it impossible for us to raise more money under acceptable terms,” one current Stability executive told Forbes. The early months of 2024 saw Stability’s already precarious position eroding further still. Employees were quietly laid off. Three people in a position to know estimated that at least 10% of staff were cut. And cash reserves continued to dwindle. Mostaque mentioned a lifeline at the October board meeting: $95 million in tentative funding from new investors, pending due diligence. But in the end, only a fraction of it was wired, two sources say, much of it from Intel, which Forbes has learned invested $20 million, a fraction of what was reported. (Intel did not return a request for comment by publication time.) Two hours after Forbes broke the news of Mostaque’s plans to step down as CEO, Stability issued a press release confirming his resignation. Chief operating officer Wong and chief technology officer Laforte have taken over in the interim. Mostaque, who said on X that he still owns a majority of the company, also stepped down from the board, which has now initiated a search for a permanent CEO. There is a lot of work to be done to turn things around, and very little time in which to do it. Said the current Stability executive, “There’s still a possibility of a turnaround story, but the odds drop by the day.” In July of 2023, Mostaque still thought he could pull it off. Halfway through the month, he shared a fundraising plan with his lieutenants. It was wildly optimistic, detailing the raise of $500 million in cash and another $750 million in computing facilities from marquee investors like Nvidia, Google, Intel and the World Bank (Nvidia and Google declined comment. Intel did not respond. The World Bank said it did not invest in Stability). In a Slack message reviewed by Forbes, Mostaque said Google was “willing to move fast” and the round was “likely to be oversubscribed.” It wasn’t. Three people with direct knowledge of these fundraising efforts told Forbes that while there was some interest in Stability, talks often stalled when it came time to disclose financials. Two of them noted that earlier in the year, Mostaque had simply stopped engaging with VCs who asked for numbers. Only one firm invested around that time: actor Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures, which invested $35 million in the form of a convertible SAFE note during the second quarter, according to an internal document. (Sound Ventures did not respond to a request for comment.) And though he’d managed to score a meeting with Nvidia and its CEO Jensen Huang, it ended in disaster, according to two sources. “Under Jensen's microscopic questions, Emad just fell apart,” a source in position to know told Forbes. Huang quickly concluded Stability wasn’t ready for an investment from Nvidia, the sources said. Mostaque told Forbes in an email that he had not met with Huang since 2022, except to say “hello and what’s up a few times after.” His July 2023 message references a plan to raise $150 million from Nvidia. (Nvidia declined to comment.) After a June Forbes investigation citing more than 30 sources revealed Mostaque’s history of misleading claims, Mostaque struggled to raise funding, a Stability investor told Forbes. (Mostaque disputed the story at the time and called it "coordinated lies" in his email this week to Forbes). Increasingly, investors scrutinized his assertions and pressed for data. And Young, now the CEO of Jasper, turned down a verbal offer to be Stability’s president after reading the article, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter. The collapse of the talks aggravated the board and other executives, who had hoped Young would compensate for the sales and business management skills that Mostaque lacked, according to four people in a position to know. (Young declined to comment.) When Stability’s senior leadership convened in London for the CogX conference in September, the financing had still not closed. There, a group of executives confronted Mostaque asking questions about the company’s cash position and runway, according to three people with direct knowledge of the incident. They did not get the clarity they’d hoped for. By October, Mostaque had reduced his fundraising target by more than 80%. The months that followed saw a steady drumbeat of departures — general counsel Adam Avrunin, vice presidents Mike Melnicki, Ed Newton-Rex and Joe Penna, chief people officer Ozden Onder — culminating in the demoralizing March exit of Stable Diffusion’s primary developers Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, Patrick Esser and Dominik Lorenz. Rombach, who led the team, had been angling to leave for months, two sources said, first threatening to resign last summer because of the fundraising failures. Others left over concerns about cash flow, as well as liabilities — including what four people described as Mostaque’s lax approach to ensuring that Stability products could not be used to produce child sexual abuse imagery. “Stability AI is committed to preventing the misuse of AI and prohibits the use of our image models and services for unlawful activity, including attempts to edit or create CSAM,” Ella Irwin, senior vice president of integrity, said in a statement. Newton-Rex told Forbes he resigned because he disagreed with Stability’s position that training AI on copyrighted work without consent is fair use. Melnicki and Penna declined to comment. Avrunin and Onder could not be reached for comment. None of the researchers responded to requests for comment. The Stable Diffusion researchers’ departure as a cohort says a lot about the state of Stability AI. The company’s researchers were widely viewed as its crown jewels, their work subsidized with a firehose of pricey compute power that was even extended to people outside the company. Martino Russi, an artificial intelligence researcher, told Forbes that though he was never formally employed by Stability, the company provided him a “staggering” amount of compute between January and April 2023 to play around with developing an AI video generator that Stability might someday use. “It was Candy Land or Coney Island,” said Russi, who estimates that his experiment, which was ultimately shelved, cost the company $2.5 million. Stable Diffusion was simultaneously Stability’s marquee product and its existential cash crisis. One current employee described it to Forbes as “a giant vacuum that absorbed everything: money, compute, people.” While the software was widely used, with Mostaque claiming downloads reaching into the hundreds of millions, Stability struggled to translate that wild success into revenue. Mostaque knew it could be done — peers at Databricks, Elastic and MongoDB had all turned a free product into a lucrative business — he just couldn’t figure out how. His first attempt was Stability’s API, which allowed paying customers to integrate Stable Diffusion into their own products. In early 2023, a handful of small companies, like art generator app NightCafe and presentation software startup Tome, signed on, according to four people with knowledge of the deals. But Stability’s poor account management services soured many, and in a matter of months NightCafe and Tome canceled their contracts, three people said. NightCafe founder Angus Russell told Forbes that his company switched to a competitor which “offered much cheaper inference costs and a broader service.” Tome did not respond to a request for comment. Meanwhile, Mostaque’s efforts to court larger companies like Samsung and Snapchat were failing, according to five people familiar with the effort. Canva, which was already one of the heaviest users of open-sourced Stable Diffusion, had multiple discussions with Stability, which was angling for a contract it hoped would generate several millions in annual revenue. But the deal never materialized, four sources said. “These three companies wanted and needed us,” one former employee told Forbes. “They would have been the perfect customers.” (Samsung, Snap and Canva declined to comment.) “It’s not that there was not an appetite to pay Stability — there were tons of companies that would have that wanted to,” the former employee said. “There was a huge opportunity and demand, but just a resistance to execution.” Mostaque’s other big idea was to provide governments with bespoke national AI models that would invigorate their economies and citizenry. “Emad envisions a world where AI through 100 national models serves not as a tool of the few, but as a benefactor to all promising to confront great adversaries, cancer, autism, and the sands of time itself,” the AI avatar of Aristotle said in his intro at the conference. Mostaque told several prospective customers that he could deliver such models within 60 days — an untenable timeline, according to two people in position to know. Stability attempted to develop a model for the Singaporean government over the protestation of employees who questioned its technical feasibility, three sources familiar with the effort told Forbes. But it couldn’t pull it off and Singapore never became a customer. (The government of Singapore confirmed it did not enter into a deal with Stability, but declined to answer additional questions.) As Stability careened from one new business idea to another, resources were abruptly reallocated and researchers reassigned. The whiplash shifts in a largely siloed organization demoralized and infuriated employees. “There were ‘urgent’ things, ‘urgent urgent’ things and ‘most urgent,’” one former employee complained. “None of these things seem important if everything is important.” Another former Stability executive was far more pointed in their assessment. “Emad is the most disorganized leader I have ever worked with in my career,” this person told Forbes. “He has no vision, and changes directions every week, often based on what he sees on Twitter.” In a video interview posted shortly before this story was published, Mostaque explained his leadership style: “I'm particularly great at taking creatives, developers, researchers, others, and achieving their full potential in designing systems. But I should not be dealing with, you know, HR and operations and business development and other elements. There are far better people than me to do that.” By December 2023, Stability had partially abandoned its open-source roots and announced that any commercial use of Stable Diffusion would cost customers at least $20 per month (non-commercial and research use of Stable Diffusion would remain free). But privately, Stability was considering a potentially more lucrative source of revenue: reselling the compute it was leasing from providers like AWS, according to six people familiar with the effort. Though it was essentially GPU arbitrage, Stability framed the strategy to investors as a “managed services” offering. Its damning October financial report projected optimistically that such an offering would bring in $139 million in 2024 — 98% of its revenue. Multiple employees at the time told Forbes they feared reselling compute, even if the company called it “managed services,” would violate the terms of Stability’s contract with AWS. Amazon declined to comment. “The line internally was that we are not reselling compute,” one former employee said. “This was some of the dirtiest feeling stuff.” Stability also discussed reselling a cluster of Nvidia A100 chips, leased via CoreWeave, to the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, three sources said. “It was under the guise of managed services, but there wasn’t any management happening,” one of these people told Forbes. Andreessen Horowitz and CoreWeave declined to comment. Stability did not respond to questions about if it plans to continue this strategy now that Mostaque is out of the picture. Regardless, interim co-CEOs Wong and Laforte are on a tight timeline to clean up his mess. Board chairman Jim O’Shaughnessy said in a statement that he was confident the pair “will adeptly steer the company forward in developing and commercializing industry-leading generative AI products.” But burn continues to far outpace revenue. The Financial Times reported Friday that the company made $5.4 million of revenue in February, against $8 million in costs. Several sources said there are ongoing concerns about making payroll for the roughly 150 remaining employees. Leadership roles have gone vacant for months amid the disarray, leaving the company increasingly directionless. Meanwhile, a potentially catastrophic legal threat looms over the company: A trio of copyright infringement lawsuits brought by Getty Images and a group of artists in the U.S. and U.K., who claim Stability illegally used their art and photography to train the AI models powering Stable Diffusion. A London-based court has already rejected the company’s bid to throw out one of the lawsuits on the basis that none of its researchers were based in the U.K. And Stability’s claim that Getty’s Delaware lawsuit should be blocked because it's a U.K.-based company was rejected. (Stability did not respond to questions about the litigation.) AI-related copyright litigation “could go on for years,” according to Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University. He told Forbes that though plaintiffs suing AI firms face an uphill battle overcoming the existing legal precedent on copyright infringement, the quantity of arguments available to make are virtually inexhaustible. “Like in military theory, if there’s a gap in your lines, that’s where the enemy pours through — if any one of those arguments succeeds, it could completely change the generative AI environment,” he said. “In some sense, generative AI as an industry has to win everything.” Stability, which had more than $100 million in the bank just a year and a half ago, is in a deep hole. Not only does it need more funding, it needs a viable business model — or a buyer with the vision and chops to make it successful in a fast-moving and highly competitive sector. At an all hands meeting this past Monday, Stability’s new leaders detailed a path forward. One point of emphasis: a plan to better manage resources and expenses, according to one person in attendance. It’s a start, but Mostaque’s meddling has left them with little runway to execute. His resignation, though, has given some employees hope. “A few people are 100% going to reconsider leaving after today,” said one current employee. “And the weird gloomy aura of hearing Emad talking nonsense for an hour is gone.” Shortly before Mostaque resigned, one current Stability executive told Forbes that they were optimistic his departure could make Stability appealing enough to receive a small investment or sale to a friendly party. “There are companies that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars that have much less intrinsic value than Stability,” the person said. “A white knight may still appear.”

[N] Last Week in AI News Digest - Automated chemical synthesis, using heartbeats to detect deepfakes, and more!
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regalalgorithmThis week

[N] Last Week in AI News Digest - Automated chemical synthesis, using heartbeats to detect deepfakes, and more!

Hi there, just sharing the latest edition of our AI news digest newsletter! We're just a couple of AI grad students doing this for fun, so hope the self promotion is not too annoying (also, welcome feedback). See it below, and feel free to subscribe. Mini Briefs Robotics, AI, and Cloud Computing Combine to Supercharge Chemical and Drug Synthesis IBM recently demoed a complex system for chemical testing and drug synthesis. The system has an AI component that predicts the results of chemical reactions, and a fully automated robotic experiment setup that runs chemical tests 24/7. Users can access the remote robotics lab online, and IBM can also install the system on-premise. With these tools working together, IBM is hoping to reduce typical drug discovery and verification time by half. AI researchers use heartbeat detection to identify deepfake videos Researchers from multiple groups are tackling the challenge of detecting deepfake videos by analyzing the apparent heartbeat of the people depicted in the video. This is possible, because a person’s blood flow changes their skin color ever so slightly, and this change is often detectable via a process called photoplethysmography (PPG). Because deepfakes are not currently optimizing to generate realisitic heartbeats, temporal or spatial anomalies in PPG signals allow resesarchers to detect deepfakes with a 97% accuracy. Advances & Business This AI Expert From Senegal Is Helping Showcase Africans In STEM \- Adji Bousso Dieng will be Princeton’s School of Engineering’s first Black female faculty. Google’s AI-powered flood alerts now cover all of India and parts of Bangladesh \- India, the world’s second most populated nation, sees more than 20% of the global flood-related fatalities each year as overrun riverbanks sweep tens of thousands of homes with them. Two years ago, Google volunteered to help. Finding magnetic eruptions in space with an AI assistant \- MMS look for explosive reconnection events as it flies through the magnetopause - the boundary region where Earth’s magnetic butts up against the solar wind that flows throughout the solar system. This know-it-all AI learns by reading the entire web nonstop \- Diffbot is building the biggest-ever knowledge graph by applying image recognition and natural-language processing to billions of web pages. Bosch and Ford will test autonomous parking in Detroit \- Ford, Bosch, and Dan Gilbert’s real estate firm Bedrock today detailed an autonomous parking pilot scheduled to launch in September at The Assembly, a mixed-used building in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood. Create your own moody quarantine music with Google’s AI \- Lo-Fi Player, the latest project out of Google Magenta, lets you mix tunes with the help of machine learning by interacting with a virtual room. Apple launches AI/ML residency program to attract niche experts \- As Apple’s artificial language and machine learning initiatives continue to expand, its interest in attracting talent has grown - a theme that’s barely under the surface of the company’s occasionally updated Machine Learning Research blog. Dusty Robotics CEO Tessa Lau Discusses Robotics Start-Ups and Autonomous Robots for Construction \- Tessa Lau is Founder/CEO at Dusty Robotics, whose mission is to increase construction industry productivity by introducing robotic automation on the jobsite. Concerns & Hype Google Offers to Help Others With the Tricky Ethics of AI \- Companies pay cloud computing providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google big money to avoid operating their own digital infrastructure. The Peace Dividends Of The Autonomous Vehicle Wars \- The rapid growth of the mobile market in the late 2000s and early 2010s led to a burst of technological progress. Ethics must be part of the development process’ \- The increasing use of AI (artificial intelligence) in the development of new medical technologies demands greater attention to ethical aspects. Analysis & Policy China’s new AI trade rules could hamper a TikTok sale \- TikTok’s attempt to sell itself and avert a possible US ban may run into some complications. The Wall Street Journal reports that China has unveiled new restrictions on AI technology exports that could affect TikTok. Podcast Check out our weekly podcast covering these stories! Website | RSS | iTunes | Spotify | YouTube

12 months ago, I was unemployed. Last week my side hustle got acquired by a $500m fintech company
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wutangsamThis week

12 months ago, I was unemployed. Last week my side hustle got acquired by a $500m fintech company

I’ve learned so much over the years from this subreddit. I thought I’d return the favour and share some of my own learnings. In November 2020 my best friend and I had an idea. “What if we could find out which stocks the Internet is talking about?” This formed the origins of Ticker Nerd. 9 months later we sold Ticker Nerd to Finder (an Australian fintech company valued at around $500m). In this post, I am going to lay out how we got there. How we came up with the idea First off, like other posts have covered - you don’t NEED a revolutionary or original idea to build a business. There are tonnes of “boring” businesses making over 7 figures a year e.g. law firms, marketing agencies, real estate companies etc. If you’re looking for an exact formula to come up with a great business idea I’m sorry, but it doesn’t exist. Finding new business opportunities is more of an art than a science. Although, there are ways you can make it easier to find inspiration. Below are the same resources I use for inspiration. I rarely ever come up with ideas without first searching one of the resources below for inspiration: Starter Story Twitter Startup Ideas My First Million Trends by the Hustle Trends VC To show how you how messy, random and unpredictable it can be to find an idea - let me explain how my co-founder and I came up with the idea for Ticker Nerd: We discovered a new product on Twitter called Exploding Topics. It was a newsletter that uses a bunch of software and algorithms to find trends that are growing quickly before they hit the mainstream. I had recently listened to a podcast episode from My First Million where they spoke about Motley Fool making hundreds of millions from their investment newsletters. We asked ourselves what if we could build a SaaS platform similar to Exploding Topics but it focused on stocks? We built a quick landing page using Carrd + Gumroad that explained what our new idea will do and included a payment option to get early access for $49. We called it Exploding Stock (lol). We shared it around a bunch of Facebook groups and subreddits. We made $1,000 in pre-sales within a couple days. My co-founder and I can’t code so we had to find a developer to build our idea. We interviewed a bunch of potential candidates. Meanwhile, I was trawling through Wall Street Bets and found a bunch of free tools that did roughly what we wanted to build. Instead of building another SaaS tool that did the same thing as these free tools we decided to pivot from our original idea. Our new idea = a paid newsletter that sends a weekly report that summarises 2 of the best stocks that are growing in interest on the Internet. We emailed everyone who pre-ordered access, telling them about the change and offered a full refund if they wanted. tl;dr: We essentially combined two existing businesses (Exploding Topics and Motley Fool) and made it way better. We validated the idea by finding out if people will actually pay money for it BEFORE we decided to build it. The idea we started out with changed over time. How to work out if your idea will actually make money It’s easy to get hung up on designing the logo or choosing the perfect domain name for your new idea. At this stage none of that matters. The most important thing is working out if people will pay money for it. This is where validation comes in. We usually validate ideas using Carrd. It lets you build a simple one page site without having to code. The Ticker Nerd site was actually built using a Carrd template. Here’s how you can do it yourself (at a high level): Create a Carrd pro account (yes it's a $49 one off payment but you’ll get way more value out of it). Buy a cheap template and send it to your Carrd account. You can build your own template but this will save you a lot of time. Once the template reaches your Carrd account, duplicate it. Leave the original so it can be duplicated for other ideas. Jump onto Canva (free) and create a logo using the free logos provided. Import your logo. Add copy to the page that explains your idea. Use the AIDA formula. Sign up to Gumroad (free) and create a pre-sale campaign. Create a discounted lifetime subscription or version of the product. This will be used pre-sales. Add the copy from the site into the pre-sale campaign on Gumroad. Add a ‘widget’ to Carrd and connect it to Gumroad using the existing easy integration feature. Purchase a domain name. Connect it to Carrd. Test the site works. Share your website Now the site is ready you can start promoting it in various places to see how the market reacts. An easy method is to find relevant subreddits using Anvaka (Github tool) or Subreddit Stats. The Anvaka tool provides a spider map of all the connected subreddits that users are active in. The highlighted ones are most relevant. You can post a thread in these subreddits that offer value or can generate discussion. For example: ‘I’m creating a tool that can write all your copy, would anyone actually use this?’ ‘What does everything think of using AI to get our copy written faster?’ ‘It’s time to scratch my own itch, I’m creating a tool that writes marketing copy using GPT-3. What are the biggest problems you face writing marketing copy? I’ll build a solution for it’ Reddit is pretty brutal these days so make sure the post is genuine and only drop your link in the comments or in the post if it seems natural. If people are interested they’ll ask for the link. Another great place to post is r/entrepreuerridealong and r/business_ideas. These subreddits expect people to share their ideas and you’ll likely make some sales straight off the bat. I also suggest posting in some Facebook groups (related to your idea) as well just for good measure. Assess the results If people are paying you for early access you can assume that it’s worth building your idea. The beauty of posting your idea on Reddit or in Facebook groups is you’ll quickly learn why people love/hate your idea. This can help you decide how to tweak the idea or if you should drop it and move on to the next one. How we got our first 100 customers (for free) By validating Ticker Nerd using subreddits and Facebook groups this gave us our first paying customers. But we knew this wouldn’t be sustainable. We sat down and brainstormed every organic strategy we could use to get traction as quickly as possible. The winner: a Product Hunt launch. A successful Product Hunt launch isn’t easy. You need: Someone that has a solid reputation and audience to “hunt” your product (essentially an endorsement). An aged Product Hunt account - you can’t post any products if your account is less than a week old. To be following relevant Product Hunt members - since they get notified when you launch a new product if they’re following you. Relationships with other builders and makers on Product Hunt that also have a solid reputation and following. Although, if you can pull it off you can get your idea in front of tens of thousands of people actively looking for new products. Over the next few weeks, I worked with my co-founder on connecting with different founders, indie hackers and entrepreneurs mainly via Twitter. We explained to them our plans for the Product Hunt launch and managed to get a small army of people ready to upvote our product on launch day. We were both nervous on the day of the launch. We told ourselves to have zero expectations. The worst that could happen was no one signed up and we were in the same position as we’re in now. Luckily, within a couple of hours Ticker Nerd was on the homepage of Product Hunt and in the top 10. The results were instant. After 24 hours we had around 200 people enter their payment details to sign up for our free trial. These signups were equal to around $5,800 in monthly recurring revenue. \-- I hope this post was useful! Drop any questions you have below and I’ll do my best to respond :)

Tech founders -- you're being lied to
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SaskjimboThis week

Tech founders -- you're being lied to

I've been meaning to post this for a while. I saw a video recently that put me over the edge. You guys need to know what's up. Venture capitalists, angels, and accelerators all want you to build fast and fail faster. They want to you get your mvp buult in as little as a couple weeks. I'm a software dev and I own SaaS company. I'm here to tell you that you're being lied to. It's 2023. Unless some customer is about to drown because of their problem, they are not going to respect, or consider your trashy looking mvp. People these days expect a certain level of polish and professionalism when it comes to software before they give it more than 3s of their time. If your software took 80 hours to build, good chance that even customers from your target market will disregard it unless you're solving some insanely painful problem. And if you're using you're mvp for market research, people aren't going to talk to you if they believe that they spent more time getting dressed that morning than you put into your product. Build things that you can be proud of. Time boxing your first dev cycle into a few days or even weeks limits the scope of what you can build. I've spent more time than this figuring out a single api. Its this time boxing that leads 1000s of people to build the same shit. It's low quality work and exists in a super saturated market. And given the small scope of the product, the amount you'll be able to charge means the LTV of a customer will be lower than you CAC. Meaning your company will always lose money. The negative reception from your pre alpha product will have you think that people don't like you or your work. It's simply not the case. Few on this planet could produce something captivating in 100 hours. VCs tell you to ship your garbage MVP asap because of the following reason. They view every product that ships as a lotto ticket. If they like the look of it, they'll buy a ticket. And the more products there are and the shittier they are, it means a) they have more ticket numbers to select from and b) the cost of the ticket is a lot cheaper than it would otherwise be if the product was nice. VCs are not your friends and often, don't know how to build or market products. They are in it for the money and any advice they give to you or the community will be self serving. The indie community needs to wake up and realize that quality software built by a small team that people will pay for in this saturated market often takes months if not years to build. The idea of building a product and putting it in front of customers in 2 weeks is dumb. I've used some of these products and they are so limited in scope, broken and poorly designed that I don't give them anymore than a minute or two of my time. Note: validate your ideas before writing code. I'm not advocating spending a year writing software for an unproven market or problem. Yes, there are exceptions and stories of people shipping in no time and getting traction, but these are not the norm. Lastly, this philosophy is why you have and will continue to see a million products centered around AI. For those of you who aren't devs, Open AI made chatgpt accessible to developers and it's like 3 lines of code to ask it a question, get a response and save that response within your program. It's super low effort to integrate and that's why everyone will be building the same types of products with it. Tl;dr: Investors and gurus have agendas. Be logical about the level of effort required to build a software company and put forth only work that you're proud of. Being able to code doesn't give you a magical ability to create massive value with only a few weeks of work. You have to grind like pretty much every other successful business owner. I'll likely be banned for this, but fuck it. Ive got a sub where I'll share more insight and ban bullshit and idiotic posts with zero warning. It's not for everyone and I'll usually let you know pretty quick if our relationship isn't going to work. 6000 people and growing. r/cutthebull I'll write a post on that sub in the next few mins on how to guarentee accountability from top level management at your company.

If only someone told me this before my first startup
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johnrushxThis week

If only someone told me this before my first startup

If only someone told me this before my first startup: Validate idea first. I wasted a decade building stuff nobody needed. Incubators and VCs served to me as a validation, but I was so wrong. Kill my EGO. It’s not about me, but the user. I must want what the user wants, not what I want. My taste isn't important. The user has expectations, and I must fulfill them. Don’t chaise investors. Chase users, and then investors will be chasing me. I've never had more incoming interest from VC than now when I'm the least interested in them. Never hire managers. Only hire doers until PMF. So many people know how to manage people and so few can actually get sh\*t done barehand. Landing page is the least important thing in a startup. Pick a simple template, edit texts with a no-code website builder in less than an hour and that's it! At the early stage, I win traffic outside of my website, people are already interested, so don't make them search for the signup button among the texts! Focus on conversion optimization only when the traffic is consistent. Keep it to one page. Nobody gonna browse this website. Hire only fullstack devs. There is nothing less productive in this world than a team of developers for an early-stage product. One full stack dev building the whole product. That’s it. Chase global market from day 1. If the product and marketing are good, it will work on the global market too, if it’s bad, it won’t work on the local market too. So better go global from day 1, so that if it works, the upside is 100x bigger. I launched all startups for the Norwegian market, hoping we will scale to international at some point. I wish I launched to international from day 1 as I do now. The size of the market is 10000x bigger. I can validate and grow products in days, not in years as it used to be. Do SEO from day 2. As early as I can. I ignored this for 14 years. It’s my biggest regret. It takes just 5 minutes to get it done on my landing page. I go to Google Keyword Planner, enter a few keywords around my product, sort them by traffic, filter out high competition kws, pick the top 10, and place them natively on my home page and meta tags. Add one blog article every week. Either manually or by paying for an AI blogging tool. Sell features, before building them. Ask existing users if they want this feature. I run DMs with 10-20 users every day, where I chat about all my ideas and features I wanna add. I clearly see what resonates with me most and only go build those. If I don't have followers, try HN, Reddit, or just search on X for posts and ask it in the replies. People are helpful, they will reply if the question is easy to understand. Hire only people I would wanna hug. My cofounder, an old Danish man said this to me in 2015. And it was a big shift. I realized that if I don’t wanna hug the person, it means I dislike them on a chemical/animal level. Even if I can’t say why, but that’s the fact. Sooner or later, we would have a conflict and eventually break up. It takes up to 10 years to build a startup, make sure I do it with people I have this connection with. Invest all money into my startups and friends. Not crypt0, not stockmarket, not properties. I did some math, if I kept investing all my money into all my friends’ startups, that would be about 70 investments. 3 of them turned into unicorns eventually. Even 1 would have made the bank. Since 2022, I have invested all my money into my products, friends, and network. If I don't have friends who do startups, invest it in myself. Post on Twitter daily. I started posting here in March last year. It’s my primary source of new connections and growth. I could have started it earlier, I don't know why I didn't. Don’t work/partner with corporates. Corporations always seem like an amazing opportunity. They’re big and rich, they promise huge stuff, millions of users, etc. But every single time none of this happens. Because I talk to a regular employees there. They waste my time, destroy focus, shift priorities, and eventually bring in no users/money. Don’t get ever distracted by hype e.g. crypt0. I lost 1.5 years of my life this way. I met the worst people along the way. Fricks, scammers, thieves. Some of my close friends turned into thieves along the way, just because it was so common in that space. I wish this didn’t happen to me. I wish I was stronger and stayed on my mission. Don’t build consumer apps. Only b2b. Consumer apps are so hard, like a lottery. It’s just 0.00001% who make it big. The rest don’t. Even if I got many users, then there is a monetization challenge. I’ve spent 4 years in consumer apps and regret it. Don’t hold on bad project for too long, max 1 year. Some projects just don’t work. In most cases, it’s either the idea that’s so wrong that I can’t even pivot it or it’s a team that is good one by one but can’t make it as a team. Don’t drag this out for years. Tech conferences are a waste of time. They cost money, take energy, and time and I never really meet anyone there. Most people there are the “good” employees of corporations who were sent there as a perk for being loyal to the corporation. Very few fellow makers. Scrum is a Scam. For small teams and bootstrapped teams. If I had a team that had to be nagged every morning with questions as if they were children in kindergarten, then things would eventually fail. The only good stuff I managed to do happened with people who were grownups and could manage their stuff on their own. We would just do everything over chat as a sync on goals and plans. Outsource nothing at all until PMF. In a startup, almost everything needs to be done in a slightly different way, more creative, and more integrated into the vision. When outsourcing, the external members get no love and no case for the product. It’s just yet another assignment in their boring job. Instead of coming up with great ideas for my project they will be just focusing on ramping up their skills to get a promotion or a better job offer. Bootstrap. I spent way too much time raising money. I raised more than 10 times, preseed, seeded, and series A. But each time it was a 3-9 month project, meetings every week, and lots of destruction. I could afford to bootstrap, but I still went the VC-funded way, I don’t know why. To be honest, I didn’t know bootstrapping was a thing I could do or anyone does. It may take a decade. When I was 20, I was convinced it takes a few years to build and succeed with a startup. So I kept pushing my plans forward, to do it once I exited. Family, kids. I wish I married earlier. I wish I had kids earlier. No Free Tier. I'd launch a tool with a free tier, and it'd get sign-ups, but very few would convert. I'd treat free sign-ups as KPIs and run on it for years. I'd brag about signups and visitors. I'd even raise VC money with these stats. But eventually, I would fail to reach PMF. Because my main feedback would come from free users and the product turned into a perfect free product. Once I switched to "paid only" until I validated the product, things went really well. Free and paid users often need different products. Don't fall into this trap as I did. Being To Cheap. I always started by checking all competitors and setting the lowest price. I thought this would be one of the key advantages of my product. But no, I was wrong. The audience on $5 and $50 are totally different. $5: pain in the \*ss, never happy, never recommend me to a friend, leave in 4 months. $50: polite, give genuine feedback, happy, share with friends, become my big fan if I solve their request. I will fail. When I started my first startup. I thought if I did everything right, it would work out. But it turned out that almost every startup fails. I wish I knew that and I tried to fail faster, to get to the second iteration, then to the third, and keep going on, until I either find out nothing works or make it work. Use boilerplates. I wasted years of dev time and millions of VC money to pay for basic things. To build yet another sidebar, yet another dashboard, and payment integration... I had too much pride, I couldn't see myself taking someone else code as a basis for my product. I wanted it to be 100% mine, original, from scratch. Because my product seems special to me. Spend more time with Family & Friends. I missed the weddings of all my best friends and family. I was so busy. I thought if I didn't do it on time, the world would end. Looking back today, it was so wrong. I meet my friends and can't share those memories with them, which makes me very sad. I realized now, that spending 10% of my time with family and friends would practically make no negative impact on my startups. Build Products For Audiences I Love. I never thought of this. I'd often build products either for corporates, consumers, or for developers. It turns out I have no love for all 3. But I deeply love indie founders. Because they are risk-takers and partly kids in their hearts. Once I switched the focus to indie makers on my products, my level of joy increased by 100x for me. Ignore Badges and Awards I was chasing those awards just like everyone else. Going to ceremonies, signing up for events and stuff. I've won tons of awards, but none of those were eventually useful to my business. I better focused on my business and users. Write Every Single Day. When I was a kid, I loved writing stories. In school, they would give an assignment, and I'd often write a long story for it, however, the teacher would put an F on it. The reason was simple, I had an issue with the direction of the letters and the sequence of letters in the words. I still have it, it's just the Grammarly app helping me to correct these issues. So the teacher would fail my stories because almost every sentence had a spelling mistake that I couldn't even see. It made me think I'm made at writing. So I stopped, for 15 years. But I kept telling stories all these years. Recently I realized that in any group, the setup ends up turning into me telling stories to everyone. So I tried it all again, here on X 10 months ago. I love it, the process, the feedback from people. I write every day. I wish I had done it all these years. The End. \ this is an updated version of my post on the same topic from 2 months ago. I've edited some of the points and added 9 new ones.* \\ This is not advice, it's my self-reflection that might help you avoid same mistakes if you think those were mistakes

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

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.

Jinxed - $0 month after bragging about my first $10k month here. (PROGRESS UPDATE)
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swagamoneyThis week

Jinxed - $0 month after bragging about my first $10k month here. (PROGRESS UPDATE)

A month ago I made a post in this sub about my first $10k month. It went viral. And guess what - I didn't make another dollar since. Honestly, I shouldn't have made any money that first month also. Because I didn't have an offer. If you're familiar with Alex Hormozi you know that the offer is what makes or breaks a business. And I simply didn't have it. I managed to close my first clients just because I rode the AI hype train and managed to capture a couple of CEOs who were riding it too. Took whatever I could get for installment without thinking about the future. (It also helped that I wasn't bullshitting and had a legit enterprise-grade custom GPT framework ready). But that's not a business strategy at all. You can't base your business solely off hype. So the last month was dedicated to crafting a proper offer. No selling involved. Purely discovery chats with as many people as possible. The viral post helped because I connected with some badass people I wouldn't have reached otherwise. Even managed to add a new team member from Reddit. But most importantly, we now have the offer: Enterprise-grade AI assistant trained on your data for a fraction of the market cost. Basically a custom GPT for companies that want a secure assistant "trained" on their data but are not willing to spend millions on OpenAI's Custom Models or hundreds of thousands on Enterprise ChatGPT. (OpenAI's introduction of exclusive business GPTs for $2-3M is an incredibly good leverage for this offer). Also got rid of the big installment fee and switched to a $1k/month starting price for attractiveness and simplicity for companies (that covers their Azure fees also). The key offer points here are: Data security (as there are cheap, but not enterprise-grade tools like PDF.ai) Good price (as not all businesses can afford to pay 6 figure premiums for their data security) So the lesson here (I suppose) is that it's okay to take a step back sometimes. Reevaluate your direction. It's not worth sprinting when you're running in circles. P.S. finally made a website https://jongri.tech

Turning a Social Media Agency into $1.5 Million in Revenue
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FounderFolksThis week

Turning a Social Media Agency into $1.5 Million in Revenue

Steffie here from Founder Folks, with a recent interview I did with Jason Yormark from Socialistics. Here is his story how he started and grew his social media agency. Name: Jason Yormark Company: Socialistics Employee Size: 10 Revenue: $1,500,000/year Year Founded: 2018 Website: www.socialistics.com Technology Tools: ClickUp, Slack, KumoSpace, Google Workspace, Shift, Zapier, Klayvio, Zoom, Gusto, Calendly, Pipedrive Introduction: I am the founder of Socialistics (www.socialistics.com), a leading social media agency that helps businesses turn their social media efforts into real measurable results. I am a 20+ year marketing veteran whose prior work has included launching and managing social media efforts for Microsoft Advertising, Office for Mac, the Air Force, and Habitat for Humanity. I have been recognized as a top B2B social media influencer and thought leader on multiple lists and publications including Forbes, ranking #30 on their 2012 list. I've recently published the book Anti-Agency: A Realistic Path to a $1,000,000 Business, and host the Anti Agency podcast where I share stories of doing business differently. You can learn more about me at www.jasonyormark.com. The Inspiration To Become An Entrepreneur: I’ve been involved with social media marketing since 2007, and have pretty much carved my career out of that. It was a natural progression for me to transition into starting a social media agency. From Idea to Reality: For me realistically, I had to side hustle something long enough to build it up to a point that I could take the leap and risks going full time on my own. For these reasons, I built the company and brand on the side putting out content regularly, and taking on side hustle projects to build out my portfolio and reputation. This went on for about 18 months at which point I had reached the breaking point of my frustrations of working for someone else, and felt I was ready to take the leap since I had the wheels in motion. While balancing a full-time job, I made sure not to overdo it. My main focus was on building out the website/brand and putting out content regularly to gain some traction and work towards some search visibility. I only took on 1-2 clients at a time to make sure I could still meet their needs while balancing a full time job. Attracting Customers: Initially I tapped into my existing network to get my first few clients. Then it was a mix of trade shows, networking events, and throwing a bit of money at paid directories and paid media. This is really a long game. You have to plant seeds over time with people and nurture those relationships over time. A combination of being helpful, likable and a good resource for folks will position you to make asks in the future. If people respect and like you, it makes it much easier to approach for opportunities when the time comes. Overcoming Challenges in Starting the Business: Plenty. Learning when to say no, only hiring the very best, and ultimately the realization that owning a marketing agency is going to have hills and valleys no matter what you do. Costs and Revenue: My largest expense by FAR is personnel, comprising between 50-60% of the business’ expenses, and justifiably so. It’s a people business. Our revenue doubled from the years 2018 through 2021, and we’ve seen between 10-20% growth year over year. A Day in the Life: I’ve successfully removed myself from the day to day of the business and that’s by design. I have a tremendous team, and a rock start Director of Operations who runs the agency day to day. It frees me up to pursue other opportunities, and to mentor, speak and write more. It also allows me to evangelize the book I wrote detailing my journey to a $1M business titled: Anti-Agency: A Realistic Path To A $1,000,000 Business (www.antiagencybook.com). Staying Ahead in a Changing Landscape: You really have to stay on top of technology trends. AI is a huge impact on marketing these days, so making sure we are up to speed on that, and not abusing it or relying on it too much. You also have to embrace that technology and not hide the fact that it’s used. Non-marketers still don’t and can’t do the work regardless of how much AI can help, so we just need to be transparent and smart on how we integrate it, but the fact is, technology will never replace creativity. As an agency, it’s imperative that we operationally allow our account managers to have bandwidth to be creative for clients all the time. It’s how we keep clients and buck the trend of companies changing agencies every year or two. The Vision for Socialistics: Continuing to evolve to cater to our clients through learning, education, and staying on top of the latest tools and technologies. Attracting bigger and more exciting clients, and providing life changing employment opportunities.

The delicate balance of building an online community business
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matthewbarbyThis week

The delicate balance of building an online community business

Hey /r/Entrepreneur 👋 Just under two years ago I launched an online community business called Traffic Think Tank with two other co-founders, Nick Eubanks and Ian Howells. As a Traffic Think Tank customer you (currently) pay $119 a month to get access to our online community, which is run through Slack. The community is focused on helping you learn various aspects of marketing, with a particular focus on search engine optimization (SEO). Alongside access to the Slack community, we publish new educational video content from outside experts every week that all customers have access to. At the time of writing, Traffic Think Tank has around 650 members spanning across 17 of the 24 different global time zones. I was on a business trip over in Sydney recently, and during my time there I met up with some of our Australia-based community members. During dinner I was asked by several of them how the idea for Traffic Think Tank came about and what steps we took to validate that the idea was worth pursuing.  This is what I told them… How it all began It all started with a personal need. Nick, an already successful entrepreneur and owner of a marketing agency, had tested out an early version Traffic Think Tank in early 2017. He offered real-time consulting for around ten customers that he ran from Slack. He would publish some educational videos and offer his advice on projects that the members were running. The initial test went well, but it was tough to maintain on his own and he had to charge a fairly high price to make it worth his time. That’s when he spoke to me and Ian about turning this idea into something much bigger. Both Ian and I offered something slightly different to Nick. We’ve both spent time in senior positions at marketing agencies, but currently hold senior director positions in 2,000+ public employee companies (HubSpot and LendingTree). Alongside this, as a trio we could really ramp up the quality and quantity of content within the community, spread out the administrative workload and just generally have more resources to throw at getting this thing off the ground. Admittedly, Nick was much more optimistic about the potential of Traffic Think Tank – something I’m very thankful for now – whereas Ian and I were in the camp of “you’re out of your mind if you think hundreds of people are going to pay us to be a part of a Slack channel”. To validate the idea at scale, we decided that we’d get an initial MVP of the community up and running with a goal of reaching 100 paying customers in the first six months. If we achieved that, we’d validated that it was a viable business and we would continue to pursue it. If not, we’d kill it. We spent the next month building out the initial tech stack that enabled us to accept payments, do basic user management to the Slack channel, and get a one-page website up and running with information on what Traffic Think Tank was all about.  After this was ready, we doubled down on getting some initial content created for members – I mean, we couldn’t have people just land in an empty Slack channel, could we? We created around ten initial videos, 20 or so articles and then some long threads full of useful information within the Slack channel so that members would have some content to pour into right from the beginning.  Then, it was time to go live. The first 100 customers Fortunately, both Nick and I had built a somewhat substantial following in the SEO space over the previous 5-10 years, so we at least had a large email list to tap into (a total of around 40,000 people). We queued up some launch emails, set an initial price of $99 per month and pressed send. [\[LINK\] The launch email I sent to my subscribers announcing Traffic Think Tank](https://mailchi.mp/matthewbarby/future-of-marketing-1128181) What we didn’t expect was to sell all of the initial 100 membership spots in the first 72 hours. “Shit. What do we do now? Are we ready for this many people? Are we providing them with enough value? What if something breaks in our tech stack? What if they don’t like the content? What if everyone hates Slack?” All of these were thoughts running through my head. This brings me to the first great decision we made: we closed down new membership intake for 3 months so that we could focus completely on adding value to the first cohort of users. The right thing at the right time SEO is somewhat of a dark art to many people that are trying to learn about it for the first time. There’s hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of articles and videos online that talk about how to do SEO.  Some of it’s good advice; a lot of it is very bad advice.  Add to this that the barrier to entry of claiming to be an “expert” in SEO is practically non-existent and you have a recipe for disaster. This is why, for a long time, individuals involved in SEO have flocked in their masses to online communities for information and to bounce ideas off of others in the space. Forums like SEObook, Black Hat World, WickedFire, Inbound.org, /r/BigSEO, and many more have, at one time, been called home by many SEOs.  In recent times, these communities have either been closed down or just simply haven’t adapted to the changing needs of the community – one of those needs being real-time feedback on real-world problems.  The other big need that we all spotted and personally had was the ability to openly share the things that are working – and the things that aren’t – in SEO within a private forum. Not everyone wanted to share their secret sauce with the world. One of the main reasons we chose Slack as the platform to run our community on was the fact that it solved these two core needs. It gave the ability to communicate in real-time across multiple devices, and all of the information shared within it was outside of the public domain. The other problem that plagued a lot of these early communities was spam. Most of them were web-based forums that were free to access. That meant they became a breeding ground for people trying to either sell their services or promote their own content – neither of which is conducive to building a thriving community. This was our main motivation for charging a monthly fee to access Traffic Think Tank. We spent a lot of time thinking through pricing. It needed to be enough money that people would be motivated to really make use of their membership and act in a way that’s beneficial to the community, but not too much money that it became cost prohibitive to the people that would benefit from it the most. Considering that most of our members would typically spend between $200-800 per month on SEO software, $99 initially felt like the perfect balance. Growing pains The first three months of running the community went by without any major hiccups. Members were incredibly patient with us, gave us great feedback and were incredibly helpful and accommodating to other members. Messages were being posted every day, with Nick, Ian and myself seeding most of the engagement at this stage.  With everything going smoothly, we decided that it was time to open the doors to another intake of new members. At this point we’d accumulated a backlog of people on our waiting list, so we knew that simply opening our doors would result in another large intake. Adding more members to a community has a direct impact on the value that each member receives. For Traffic Think Tank in particular, the value for members comes from three areas: The ability to have your questions answered by me, Nick and Ian, as well as other members of the community. The access to a large library of exclusive content. The ability to build connections with the wider community. In the early stages of membership growth, there was a big emphasis on the first of those three points. We didn’t have an enormous content library, nor did we have a particularly large community of members, so a lot of the value came from getting a lot of one-to-one time with the community founders. [\[IMAGE\] Screenshot of engagement within the Traffic Think Tank Slack community](https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/qglossy,retimg,w_1322/https://www.matthewbarby.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Community-Engagement-in-Traffic-Think-Tank.png) The good thing about having 100 members was that it was just about feasible to give each and every member some one-to-one time within the month, which really helped us to deliver those moments of delight that the community needed early on. Two-and-a-half months after we launched Traffic Think Tank, we opened the doors to another 250 people, taking our total number of members to 350. This is where we experienced our first growing pains.  Our original members had become used to being able to drop us direct messages and expect an almost instant response, but this wasn’t feasible anymore. There were too many people, and we needed to create a shift in behavior. We needed more value to come from the community engaging with one another or we’d never be able to scale beyond this level. We started to really pay attention to engagement metrics; how many people were logging in every day, and of those, how many were actually posting messages within public channels.  We asked members that were logging in a lot but weren’t posting (the “lurkers”) why that was the case. We also asked the members that engaged in the community the most what motivated them to post regularly. We learned a lot from doing this. We found that the large majority of highly-engaged members had much more experience in SEO, whereas most of the “lurkers” were beginners. This meant that most of the information being shared in the community was very advanced, with a lot of feedback from the beginners in the group being that they “didn’t want to ask a stupid question”.  As managers of the community, we needed to facilitate conversations that catered to all of our members, not just those at a certain level of skill. To tackle this problem, we created a number of new channels that had a much deeper focus on beginner topics so novice members had a safe place to ask questions without judgment.  We also started running live video Q&As each month where we’d answer questions submitted by the community. This gave our members one-on-one time with me, Nick and Ian, but spread the value of these conversations across the whole community rather than them being hidden within private messages. As a result of these changes, we found that the more experienced members in the community were really enjoying sharing their knowledge with those with less experience. The number of replies within each question thread was really starting to increase, and the community started to shift away from just being a bunch of threads created by me, Nick and Ian to a thriving forum of diverse topics compiled by a diverse set of individuals. This is what we’d always wanted. A true community. It was starting to happen. [\[IMAGE\] Chart showing community engagement vs individual member value](https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/qglossy,retimg,w_1602/https://www.matthewbarby.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Community-Engagement-Balance-Graph.jpg) At the same time, we started to realize that we’ll eventually reach a tipping point where there’ll be too much content for us to manage and our members to engage with. When we reach this point, the community will be tough to follow and the quality of any given post will go down. Not only that, but the community will become increasingly difficult to moderate. We’re not there yet, but we recognize that this will come, and we’ll have to adjust our model again. Advocating advocacy As we started to feel more comfortable about the value that members were receiving, we made the decision to indefinitely open for new members. At the same time, we increased the price of membership (from $99 a month to $119) in a bid to strike the right balance between profitability as a business and to slow down the rate at which we were reaching the tipping point of community size. We also made the decision to repay all of our early adopters by grandfathering them in to the original pricing – and committing to always do this in the future. Despite the price increase, we saw a continued flow of new members come into the community. The craziest part about this was that we were doing practically no marketing activities to encourage new members– this was all coming from word of mouth. Our members were getting enough value from the community that they were recommending it to their friends, colleagues and business partners.  The scale at which this was happening really took us by surprise and it told us one thing very clearly: delivering more value to members resulted in more value being delivered to the business. This is a wonderful dynamic to have because it perfectly aligns the incentives on both sides. We’d said from the start that we wouldn’t sacrifice value to members for more revenue – this is something that all three of us felt very strongly about. First and foremost, we wanted to create a community that delivered value to its members and was run in a way that aligned with our values as people. If we could find a way to stimulate brand advocacy, while also tightening the bonds between all of our individual community members, we’d be boosting both customer retention and customer acquisition in the same motion. This became our next big focus. [\[TWEET\] Adam, one of our members wore his Traffic Think Tank t-shirt in the Sahara desert](https://twitter.com/AdamGSteele/status/1130892481099382784) We started with some simple things: We shipped out Traffic Think Tank branded T-shirts to all new members. We’d call out each of the individuals that would submit questions to our live Q&A sessions and thank them live on air. We set up a new channel that was dedicated to sharing a quick introduction to who you are, what you do and where you’re based for all new members. We’d created a jobs channel and a marketplace for selling, buying and trading services with other members. Our monthly “blind dates” calls were started where you’d be randomly grouped with 3-4 other community members so that you could hop on a call to get to know each other better. The Traffic Think Tank In Real Life (IRL)* channel was born, which enabled members to facilitate in-person meetups with each other. In particular, we saw that as members started to meet in person or via calls the community itself was feeling more and more like a family. It became much closer knit and some members started to build up a really positive reputation for being particularly helpful to other members, or for having really strong knowledge in a specific area. [\[TWEET\] Dinner with some of the Traffic Think Tank members in Brighton, UK](https://twitter.com/matthewbarby/status/1117175584080134149) Nick, Ian and I would go out of our way to try and meet with members in real life wherever we could. I was taken aback by how appreciative people were for us doing this, and it also served as an invaluable way to gain honest feedback from members. There was another trend that we’d observed that we didn’t really expect to happen. More and more members were doing business with each another. We’ve had people find new jobs through the community, sell businesses to other members, launch joint ventures together and bring members in as consultants to their business. This has probably been the most rewarding thing to watch, and it was clear that the deeper relationships that our members were forming were resulting in an increased level of trust to work with each other. We wanted to harness this and take it to a new level. This brought us to arguably the best decision we’ve made so far running Traffic Think Tank… we were going to run a big live event for our members. I have no idea what I’m doing It’s the first week of January 2019 and we’re less than three weeks away from Traffic Think Tank LIVE, our first ever in-person event hosting 150 people, most of which are Traffic Think Tank members. It's like an ongoing nightmare I can’t wake up from. That was Nick’s response in our private admin channel to myself and Ian when I asked if they were finding the run-up to the event as stressful as I was. I think that all three of us were riding on such a high from how the community was growing that we felt like we could do anything. Running an event? How hard can it be? Well, turns out it’s really hard. We had seven different speakers flying over from around the world to speak at the event, there was a pre- and after event party, and we’d planned a charity dinner where we would take ten attendees (picked at random via a raffle) out for a fancy meal. Oh, and Nick, Ian and I were hosting a live Q&A session on stage. It wasn’t until precisely 48 hours before the event that we’d realized we didn’t have any microphones, nor had a large amount of the swag we’d ordered arrived. Plus, a giant storm had hit Philly causing a TON of flight cancellations. Perfect. Just perfect. This was honestly the tip of the iceberg. We hadn’t thought about who was going to run the registration desk, who would be taking photos during the event and who would actually field questions from the audience while all three of us sat on stage for our live Q&A panel. Turns out that the answer to all of those questions were my wife, Laura, and Nick’s wife, Kelley. Thankfully, they were on hand to save our asses. The weeks running up to the event were honestly some of the most stressful of my life. We sold around 50% of our ticket allocation within the final two weeks before the event. All of the event organizers told us this would happen, but did we believe them? Hell no!  Imagine having two weeks until the big day and as it stood half of the room would be completely empty. I was ready to fly most of my extended family over just to make it look remotely busy. [\[IMAGE\] One of our speakers, Ryan Stewart, presenting at Traffic Think Tank LIVE](https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/qglossy,retimg,w_1920/https://www.matthewbarby.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Traffic-Think-Tank-LIVE-Ryan-Presenting.jpg) Thankfully, if all came together. We managed to acquire some microphones, the swag arrived on the morning of the event, all of our speakers were able to make it on time and the weather just about held up so that our entire allocation of ticket holders was able to make it to the event. We pooled together and I’m proud to say that the event was a huge success. While we made a substantial financial loss on the event itself, January saw a huge spike in new members, which more than recouped our losses. Not only that, but we got to hang out with a load of our members all day while they said really nice things about the thing we’d built. It was both exhausting and incredibly rewarding. Bring on Traffic Think Tank LIVE 2020! (This time we’re hiring an event manager...)   The road ahead Fast forward to today (August 2019) and Traffic Think Tank has over 650 members. The biggest challenges that we’re tackling right now include making sure the most interesting conversations and best content surfaces to the top of the community, making Slack more searchable (this is ultimately one of its flaws as a platform) and giving members a quicker way to find the exclusive content that we create. You’ll notice there’s a pretty clear theme here. In the past 30 days, 4,566 messages were posted in public channels inside Traffic Think Tank. If you add on any messages posted inside private direct messages, this number rises to 21,612. That’s a lot of messages. To solve these challenges and enable further scale in the future, we’ve invested a bunch of cash and our time into building out a full learning management system (LMS) that all members will get access to alongside the Slack community. The LMS will be a web-based portal that houses all of the video content we produce. It will also  provide an account admin section where users can update or change their billing information (they have to email us to do this right now, which isn’t ideal), a list of membership perks and discounts with our partners, and a list of links to some of the best threads within Slack – when clicked, these will drop you directly into Slack. [\[IMAGE\] Designs for the new learning management system (LMS)](https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/qglossy,retimg,w_2378/https://www.matthewbarby.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Traffic-Think-Tank-LMS.png) It’s not been easy, but we’re 95% of the way through this and I’m certain that it will have a hugely positive impact on the experience for our members. Alongside this we hired a community manager, Liz, who supports with any questions that our members have, coordinates with external experts to arrange webinars for the community, helps with new member onboarding, and has tightened up some of our processes around billing and general accounts admin. This was a great decision. Finally, we’ve started planning next year’s live event, which we plan to more than double in size to 350 attendees, and we decided to pick a slightly warmer location in Miami this time out. Stay tuned for me to have a complete meltdown 3 weeks from the event. Final thoughts When I look back on the journey we’ve had so far building Traffic Think Tank, there’s one very important piece to this puzzle that’s made all of this work that I’ve failed to mention so far: co-founder alignment. Building a community is a balancing act that relies heavily on those in charge being completely aligned. Nick, Ian and I completely trust each other and more importantly, are philosophically aligned on how we want to run and grow the community. If we didn’t have this, the friction between us could tear apart the entire community. Picking the right people to work with is important in any company, but when your business is literally about bringing people together, there’s no margin for error here.  While I’m sure there will be many more challenges ahead, knowing that we all trust each other to make decisions that fall in line with each of our core values makes these challenges dramatically easier to overcome. Finally, I’d like to thank all of our members for making the community what it is today – it’d be nothing without you and I promise that we’ll never take that for granted. &#x200B; I originally posted this on my blog here. Welcoming all of your thoughts, comments, questions and I'll do my best to answer them :)

7 free ways to find customers
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7 free ways to find customers

You do not need to burn thousands on paid ads to find customers. Most businesses think ads are the only way to get customers. They spend huge amounts on Google and Facebook ads with low conversion rates and end up desperate when the money runs out. Here are some FREE strategies that work way better: Be where your customers already hang out Monitor platforms like Reddit, LinkedIn, Facebook groups and other online communities where your target audience discusses their problems. Look for people actively seeking solutions you provide. The conversion rate is much higher because these are people already looking for what you sell. Create content that solves real problems Create blog posts, videos, or social content that addresses specific pain points your audience has. I started writing detailed guides about problems I knew my customers faced and they began finding me organically through search. Strategic partnerships with complementary businesses I connected with businesses that served the same customers but offered different products. We created joint social posts and shared each other's content at zero cost. This opened up their audience to me and vice versa. Get interviewed on podcasts This one surprised me. Many niche industry podcasts need guests constantly. I reached out offering specific topics I could speak on with value for their audience. This positioned me as an expert while reaching new potential customers. Build in public Sharing your journey building your product creates a following of interested people. I posted weekly updates on X about challenges and wins, which created a small but engaged community before we even launched. Leverage personal networks properly Not by spamming friends, but by asking for specific introductions to people who might genuinely benefit from what you offer. One quality introduction beats 100 cold emails. Create free tools or resources This is one of the most effective strategies. You can easily build these free tools using AI now. I built a simple calculator that helped people in my industry solve a common problem. It generated leads because users found it valuable and shared it. The most important thing I learned is that these methods actually produce higher quality customers. They come to you already understanding the value you provide, which means better conversion rates and longer customer relationships. It takes more patience than ads, but the ROI is significantly better in the long run. Plus, these strategies help you understand your customers better, which improves everything else in your business.

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

Thoughts on FasterCapital VC?
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Momof3rascalsThis week

Thoughts on FasterCapital VC?

TLDR: I pitched to FasterCapital and got an "offer". Trying to figure out if this is a legitimate opportunity or a waste of my time. I'm not familiar with VCs and hadn't considered actually getting an investor on board with my plan. I sent my pitch deck to FasterCapital, honestly not expecting a response. It was my first pitch deck and a complete long shot. I ended up getting a response, they asked me for clarification on a few things. Than I get this email about what they are offering here's the main part We specialize in warm introductions to angel investors, VCs, and HNWIs, ensuring you connect with the right investors through personalized recommendations—not ineffective mass email campaigns. Cold outreach, such as LinkedIn messages, rarely succeeds, as investors receive hundreds of such requests and disregard them. To raise money, you need a strong partner like ourselves who has a wide network and direct connection with those angel investors built throughout 10 years. You can see some of the reviews of the startups we have helped attached and reviews on independent sites. Based on our experience and the matching that we have done already on our own AI system and for raising $55M-$65M in 5 years, a suitable package in your case is $50k - $64k and the chances of raising money is %87 - %93, but you were accepted in the exceptional rising star offer, where you pay half of that amount as an advance which is $25k-$32k and the other half ONLY when we raise you the first $1M. Other startups in our standard offers pays double that amount. First, I don't understand all of it, except for the "where you pay half of that amount as an advance which is $25k-$32k" I am no where near being able to come close to that, mostly because if I had that much, I wouldn't apply to a VC. I responded and politely told her that was not something our company could financially do right now. Than this email Thanks for your kind reply. We are flexible on paying this amount into monthly installments. We offer money back guarantee if we didn't raise the capital in 6 months from signing. This is how much we are confident with our approach of warm introductions. Raising the first amount of money and getting the first investor onboard is the most challenging part. You need time to build trust and network of investors. You need to have a good partner to help you. Please note that the down payment is for raising at least $55M over five years as we are interested in long-term partnership to raise multiple rounds because we make money through the commission. Companies take only commission or success fee are doing cold introductions and mass emails and this approach has low chances of success when it comes to raising capital. It is about the chances of success. You can talk to these companies and ask them about their success rate. Mass emails campaign has zero chances of success.  We have helped more than 742 startups raise more than $2.2B. Our network includes 155,000 angel investors and more than 50K funding institutions (VCs, HNI, family offices..etc). We have been in this business for more than 10 years. We have more than 92% success rate in our program so far. So if you are familiar with VC, Is this an actual opportunity. I have a tendency to jump or dive head first into things. As much as I want to get excited because this would be the jumpstart to most of my goals and ambitions. I'm not familiar with VCs. I have bootstrapped all my ventures so far.

Follow Along as I Flip this Website - Case Study
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jshogren10This week

Follow Along as I Flip this Website - Case Study

I am starting a new case study where I will be documenting my attempt to flip a website that I just purchased from Flippa. However, unlike most case studies where people hide certain parts and details from the public I will instead be sharing everything. That means you will know the exact URL of the site that I purchased and I will share everything with you all as I progress.I know that case studies are lot more interesting and you can learn better when you can see real examples of what I am talking about. Enough of the chatting, let's jump straight into this new case study and I will explain what this is all about. Before you get into the case study I want to give you the option of reading this one my website where all of the images can be seen within the post and it is easier to read. I also want to say that I have nothing to sell you or anything close to it. So if you want to read it there you can do so here ##Introductory Video I have put together a video that talks about many of the things that I cover in this article. So if you would rather watch a video you can watch that here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE3SxtNnqts However, I go into more detail in the actual article FYI. Also, I plan on using Youtube very frequently in this case study so be on the lookout for new videos.There is going to be a video that will accompany every single case study post because I like having it being presented in two different mediums. ##The Website I Just Bought Around a week ago I made a new website purchase from Flippa and you can view the website's Flippa listing here - https://flippa.com/6439965-hvactraining101-com Screenshot of the Homepage - http://imgur.com/T6Iv1QN I paid $1,250 for the site and you will soon see that I got a really good deal. As you might be able to tell from the URL, this site is focused around training and education for becoming a HVAC technician. This is a lucrative niche to be in and Adsense pays very well. I do not have control of the site yet due to the transfer process not being completed. However, I am hoping within a few days everything will be finalized and I will take full control of the site. In the meantime, I figured it would be a good time to put together the introduction post for this new case study! ##Why I Bought this Website Now that you have a general idea of the website that I purchased, I now want to explain the reasoning behind the purchase. There are 3 major reasons for this purchase and I will explain each one of them below. GREAT Price As I mentioned earlier, I bought this website for $1,250. However, that doesn't mean a whole lot unless you know how much the site is making each month. Screenshot of the earnings for the last 12 months - http://imgur.com/NptxCHy Average Monthly Profits: 3 Month = $126 6 Month = $128 12 Month = $229.50 Let's use the 6 month average of $128/month as our baseline average. Since it is making on average $128/month and it was sold for $1,250 then that means I bought this site at a multiple of 9.76x! Most sites in today's market go for 20x-30x multiples. As you can see, I got a great deal on this site. Although the great price was the biggest reason for me buying this site there are other factors that persuaded me as well. You need to remember that just because you can get a website for a good price it doesn't mean it is a good deal. There are other factors that you need to look at as well. Extremely Under Optimized This site is currently being monetized mainly by Adsense and a very small amount from Quinstreet. From my experience with testing and optimizing Adsense layouts for my site in my Website Investing case study I know the common ad layouts that work best for maximizing Adsense revenue. With that being said, I can quickly determine if a website is being under optimized in terms of the ad layout. One of the first things I did when analyzing this site was examine the ad layout it was using. Screenshot of the website with the ad layout the previous owner was using - http://imgur.com/wqleLVA There is only ONE ad per page being used, that's it. Google allows up to 6 total ads to be used per page and you can imagine how much money is being left on the table because of this. I am estimating that I can probably double the earnings for the site practically overnight once I add more ads to the site. Adding more ads in combination with my favorite Adsense plugin, AmpedSense, I will be able to easily boost the earnings for this site quickly. It is also worth mentioning how lucrative this niche is and how much advertisers are willing to spend on a per click basis. The average CPC for the top keywords this site is currently ranking for in Google - http://imgur.com/ifxiy8B Look at those average CPC numbers, they are insanely high! I could be making up to $25 per click for some of those keywords, which is so absurd to me. Combine these extremely high CPC with the fact that the site currently only has one ad per page and you can start to understand just how under optimized this site truly is. I also plan on utilizing other ad networks such as Quinstreet and Campus Explorer more as well. These two networks are targeted at the education niche which works very well with my site. I will be testing to see if these convert better than normal Adsense ads. Goldmine of Untapped Keywords One of the biggest opportunities I see for growing this site is to target local keywords related to HVAC training. As of right now, the site has only scratched the surface when it comes to trying to rank for state/city keywords. Currently there are only two pages on the entire website which go after local keywords, those two pages target Texas and Florida HVAC search terms. These two pages are two of the more popular pages in terms of total amount of traffic. See the screenshot of the Google Analytics - http://imgur.com/NB0xJ4G Two out of the top five most popular pages for the entire website are focused on local search terms. However, these are the ONLY two pages that target local search terms on the whole site! There are 48 other states, although there may not be search volume for all states, and countless cities that are not being targeted. Why do I think this is such a good opportunity? For a few reasons: Local keywords are a lot easier to rank for in Google than more general keywords This site has been able to rank for two states successfully already and it proves it is possible Traffic going to these local pages is WAY more targeted and will convert at a much higher rate, which means more commissions for me There are so many more states and cities that get a good amount of searches that I can target To give you an idea of the type of keywords these local pages rank for, you can see the top keywords that the Florida page is ranking for in Google: Top ranking keywords for the Florida page - http://imgur.com/j7uKzl2 As you can see these keywords don't get a ton of searches each month, but ranking 1st for a keyword getting 90 searches a month is better than being ranked 10th for a keyword getting 1,000 searches a month. I have started to do some keyword research for other states and I am liking what I am finding so far. Keywords that I have found which I will be targeting with future articles - http://imgur.com/8CCCCWU I will go into more detail about my keyword research in future articles, but I wanted to give you an idea of what my strategy will be! I also wanted to share why I am super excited about the future potential to grow this site by targeting local keywords. ##Risks Yes, there are many good things about this website, but there are always risks involved no matter what the investment is. The same thing goes for this site. Below are some of the risks that I currently see. HTML Site This website is a HTML site and I will need to transfer it to Wordpress ASAP. I have been doing some research on this process and it shouldn't be too hard to get this over to Wordpress. In doing so it will make adding content, managing the back end and just about everything else easier. Also, I am hoping that when I transfer it to Wordpress that it will become more optimized for Google which will increase keyword rankings. Declining Earnings Looking at the last 12 months of earnings you will notice a drop off from last year till now. Earnings from the last 12 months - http://imgur.com/WsotZsj In May of 2015 it looks like the site earned right around $500, which is much higher than the $128 that it is earning now. However, the last 7 or so months have been consistent which is a good sign. Even though the earnings are much lower now then they were a year ago it is good to know that this site has the potential to earn $500/month because it has done it before. Slightly Declining Traffic In the last 12 months the site's traffic has declined, however, it looks like it is picking back up. Traffic from the last 12 months - http://imgur.com/aiYZW9W The decline is nothing serious, but there is a drop on traffic. Let's take a look at the complete history of this site's traffic so we can get a better idea of what is going on here: Complete traffic history - http://imgur.com/tYmboVn The above screenshot is from 2012 all the way up to right now. In the grand scheme of things you can see that the traffic is still doing well and it looks like it is on the upswing now. Those three risks mentioned above are the three biggest risks with this site at this point. It is always good to note the risks and do everything you can to prevent them from causing a problem. ##My Growth Strategy Whenever I purchase a new site I always create an outline or plan on how I will grow the site. Right now, I have some basic ideas on how I will grow this site, but as I go on I will continue to change and optimize my strategies to be more effective. Below I have outlined my current plans to grow: Add more Adsense Ads The very first thing I will do once I get control of the site is add more ads per page. I am predicting that by just adding a few more ads per page I will be able to more than likely double the earnings. I will touch on exactly how I will be optimizing the ad layouts in future posts. Test other Ad Networks I will be doing a lot of testing and experimenting when it comes to the ad networks. I plan on trying out Adsense, Media.net, Quinstreet, Campus Explorer and finding the combination of those 4 which produces the most revenue. The Adsense and Media.net ads will perform well on the more general pages while Quinstreet and Campus Explorer ads will be geared towards the local search terms. There will probably be other ad networks I will try out but these are the four which I will be using right away. If you are aware of any other ad networks out there which are geared towards the education niche please let me know in the comments below! Target Local Keywords with new Content I have already touched on this, but I will starting to produce content targeting these local keywords ASAP. The sooner I add the content to the site the sooner it will start to rank and bring in traffic. I will not be writing my own content and instead I will be outsourcing all of it via Upwork. I will show you all how I go about outsourcing content production and you can see my process for doing that. ##Goals for this Website My goal for the website is to have it valued at $10,000+ within 12 months. Let's break down this larger goal into smaller chunks which will make achieving it easier and more attainable. Earnings - $500/month To get the site valued at $10,000 the site will need to be making $500/month using a 20x monthly multiple. Right now, the site is making around $130/month so it has a ways to before it reaches the $500 a month mark. However, after doing some Adsense optimization I think we could push the earnings to around $300/month without much work. From there, it will come down to trying to bring in more traffic! Traffic - 5,000 Visitors per Month Why 5,000 visitors? Because that is how much traffic it is going to take to get to the $500/month goal. Let me explain how I came to this conclusion: The average RPM for this site is currently $50, which means for every 1,000 page views the site earns $50. After I optimize the Adsense layout for the site and add more ads per page I think I will be able to double the RPM to $100. Using the RPM of $100 the site will need to have 5,000 monthly visitors to earn $500. So 5,000 monthly visitors is the traffic goal I have set and aiming for! The site is currently getting around 3,000 visitors per month so I will need to add an extra 2,000 visitors to get to this goal. ##Want to Follow this Case Study? I will be using Youtube a lot in this case study so make sure to follow my Youtube channel here - www.youtube.com/c/joshshogren Other than that, I think that is going to bring us to the end of the introductory post for this new case study. I hope that you enjoyed reading and that you are excited to follow along! If you have any suggestions to make this case study better PLEASE let me know in the comment below. I want to make this case study the best one I have done yet. Talk to you all in the comment section.

12 months ago, I was unemployed. Last week my side hustle got acquired by a $500m fintech company
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wutangsamThis week

12 months ago, I was unemployed. Last week my side hustle got acquired by a $500m fintech company

I’ve learned so much over the years from this subreddit. I thought I’d return the favour and share some of my own learnings. In November 2020 my best friend and I had an idea. “What if we could find out which stocks the Internet is talking about?” This formed the origins of Ticker Nerd. 9 months later we sold Ticker Nerd to Finder (an Australian fintech company valued at around $500m). In this post, I am going to lay out how we got there. How we came up with the idea First off, like other posts have covered - you don’t NEED a revolutionary or original idea to build a business. There are tonnes of “boring” businesses making over 7 figures a year e.g. law firms, marketing agencies, real estate companies etc. If you’re looking for an exact formula to come up with a great business idea I’m sorry, but it doesn’t exist. Finding new business opportunities is more of an art than a science. Although, there are ways you can make it easier to find inspiration. Below are the same resources I use for inspiration. I rarely ever come up with ideas without first searching one of the resources below for inspiration: Starter Story Twitter Startup Ideas My First Million Trends by the Hustle Trends VC To show how you how messy, random and unpredictable it can be to find an idea - let me explain how my co-founder and I came up with the idea for Ticker Nerd: We discovered a new product on Twitter called Exploding Topics. It was a newsletter that uses a bunch of software and algorithms to find trends that are growing quickly before they hit the mainstream. I had recently listened to a podcast episode from My First Million where they spoke about Motley Fool making hundreds of millions from their investment newsletters. We asked ourselves what if we could build a SaaS platform similar to Exploding Topics but it focused on stocks? We built a quick landing page using Carrd + Gumroad that explained what our new idea will do and included a payment option to get early access for $49. We called it Exploding Stock (lol). We shared it around a bunch of Facebook groups and subreddits. We made $1,000 in pre-sales within a couple days. My co-founder and I can’t code so we had to find a developer to build our idea. We interviewed a bunch of potential candidates. Meanwhile, I was trawling through Wall Street Bets and found a bunch of free tools that did roughly what we wanted to build. Instead of building another SaaS tool that did the same thing as these free tools we decided to pivot from our original idea. Our new idea = a paid newsletter that sends a weekly report that summarises 2 of the best stocks that are growing in interest on the Internet. We emailed everyone who pre-ordered access, telling them about the change and offered a full refund if they wanted. tl;dr: We essentially combined two existing businesses (Exploding Topics and Motley Fool) and made it way better. We validated the idea by finding out if people will actually pay money for it BEFORE we decided to build it. The idea we started out with changed over time. How to work out if your idea will actually make money It’s easy to get hung up on designing the logo or choosing the perfect domain name for your new idea. At this stage none of that matters. The most important thing is working out if people will pay money for it. This is where validation comes in. We usually validate ideas using Carrd. It lets you build a simple one page site without having to code. The Ticker Nerd site was actually built using a Carrd template. Here’s how you can do it yourself (at a high level): Create a Carrd pro account (yes it's a $49 one off payment but you’ll get way more value out of it). Buy a cheap template and send it to your Carrd account. You can build your own template but this will save you a lot of time. Once the template reaches your Carrd account, duplicate it. Leave the original so it can be duplicated for other ideas. Jump onto Canva (free) and create a logo using the free logos provided. Import your logo. Add copy to the page that explains your idea. Use the AIDA formula. Sign up to Gumroad (free) and create a pre-sale campaign. Create a discounted lifetime subscription or version of the product. This will be used pre-sales. Add the copy from the site into the pre-sale campaign on Gumroad. Add a ‘widget’ to Carrd and connect it to Gumroad using the existing easy integration feature. Purchase a domain name. Connect it to Carrd. Test the site works. Share your website Now the site is ready you can start promoting it in various places to see how the market reacts. An easy method is to find relevant subreddits using Anvaka (Github tool) or Subreddit Stats. The Anvaka tool provides a spider map of all the connected subreddits that users are active in. The highlighted ones are most relevant. You can post a thread in these subreddits that offer value or can generate discussion. For example: ‘I’m creating a tool that can write all your copy, would anyone actually use this?’ ‘What does everything think of using AI to get our copy written faster?’ ‘It’s time to scratch my own itch, I’m creating a tool that writes marketing copy using GPT-3. What are the biggest problems you face writing marketing copy? I’ll build a solution for it’ Reddit is pretty brutal these days so make sure the post is genuine and only drop your link in the comments or in the post if it seems natural. If people are interested they’ll ask for the link. Another great place to post is r/entrepreuerridealong and r/business_ideas. These subreddits expect people to share their ideas and you’ll likely make some sales straight off the bat. I also suggest posting in some Facebook groups (related to your idea) as well just for good measure. Assess the results If people are paying you for early access you can assume that it’s worth building your idea. The beauty of posting your idea on Reddit or in Facebook groups is you’ll quickly learn why people love/hate your idea. This can help you decide how to tweak the idea or if you should drop it and move on to the next one. How we got our first 100 customers (for free) By validating Ticker Nerd using subreddits and Facebook groups this gave us our first paying customers. But we knew this wouldn’t be sustainable. We sat down and brainstormed every organic strategy we could use to get traction as quickly as possible. The winner: a Product Hunt launch. A successful Product Hunt launch isn’t easy. You need: Someone that has a solid reputation and audience to “hunt” your product (essentially an endorsement). An aged Product Hunt account - you can’t post any products if your account is less than a week old. To be following relevant Product Hunt members - since they get notified when you launch a new product if they’re following you. Relationships with other builders and makers on Product Hunt that also have a solid reputation and following. Although, if you can pull it off you can get your idea in front of tens of thousands of people actively looking for new products. Over the next few weeks, I worked with my co-founder on connecting with different founders, indie hackers and entrepreneurs mainly via Twitter. We explained to them our plans for the Product Hunt launch and managed to get a small army of people ready to upvote our product on launch day. We were both nervous on the day of the launch. We told ourselves to have zero expectations. The worst that could happen was no one signed up and we were in the same position as we’re in now. Luckily, within a couple of hours Ticker Nerd was on the homepage of Product Hunt and in the top 10. The results were instant. After 24 hours we had around 200 people enter their payment details to sign up for our free trial. These signups were equal to around $5,800 in monthly recurring revenue. \-- I hope this post was useful! Drop any questions you have below and I’ll do my best to respond :)

Started a content marketing agency 6 years ago - $0 to $5,974,324 (2023 update)
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mr_t_forhireThis week

Started a content marketing agency 6 years ago - $0 to $5,974,324 (2023 update)

Hey friends, My name is Tyler and for the past 6 years, I’ve been documenting my experience building a content marketing agency called Optimist. Year 1 - 0 to $500k ARR Year 2 - $500k to $1MM ARR Year 3 - $1MM ARR to $1.5MM(ish) ARR Year 4 - $3,333,686 Revenue Year 5 - $4,539,659 Revenue How Optimist Works First, an overview/recap of the Optimist business model: We operate as a “collective” of full time/professional freelancers Everyone aside from me is a contractor Entirely remote/distributed team Each freelancer earns $65-85/hour Clients pay us a flat monthly fee for full-service content marketing (research, strategy, writing, editing, design/photography, reporting and analytics, targeted linkbuilding, and more) We recently introduced hourly engagements for clients who fit our model but have some existing in-house support Packages range in price from $10-20k/mo We offer profit share to everyone on our core team as a way to give everyone ownership in the company In 2022, we posted $1,434,665 in revenue. It was our highest revenue year to date and brings our lifetime total to $5,974,324. Here’s our monthly revenue from January 2017 to December of 2022. But, like every year, it was a mix of ups and downs. Here’s my dispatch for 2023. — Running a business is like spilling a drink. It starts as a small and simple thing. But, if you don’t clean it up, the spill will spread and grow — taking up more space, seeping into every crack. There’s always something you could be doing. Marketing you could be working on. Pitches you could be making. Networking you could be doing. Client work you could help with. It can be all-consuming. And it will be — if you don’t clean up the spill. I realized this year that I had no containment for the spill that I created. Running an agency was spilling over into nearly every moment of my life. When I wasn’t working, I was thinking about work. When I wasn’t thinking about work, I was dreaming about it. Over the years, I’ve shared about a lot of my personal feelings and experience as an entrepreneur. And I also discussed my reckoning with the limitations of running the business we’ve built. My acceptance that it was an airplane but not a rocket. And my plan to try to compartmentalize the agency to make room in my life for other things — new business ideas, new revenue streams, and maybe some non-income-producing activity. 🤷 What I found in 2022 was that the business wasn’t quite ready for me to make that move. It was still sucking up too much of my time and attention. There were still too many gaps to fill and I was the one who was often filling them. So what do you do? Ultimately you have two choices on the table anytime you run a business and it’s not going the way you want it: Walk away Turn the ship — slowly For a huge number of reasons (personal, professional, financial, etc), walking away from Optimist was not really even an option or the right move for me. But it did feel like things needed to change. I needed to keep turning the ship to get it to the place where it fit into my life — instead of my life fitting around the business. This means 2022 was a year of transition for the agency. (Again?) Refocusing on Profit Some money is better than no money. Right? Oddly, this was one of the questions I found myself asking in 2022. Over the years, we’ve been fortunate to have many clients who have stuck with us a long time. In some cases, we’ve had clients work with us for 2, 3, or even 4 years. (That’s over half of our existence!) But, things have gotten more expensive — we’ve all felt it. We’ve had to increase pay to remain competitive for top talent. Software costs have gone up. It’s eaten into our margin. Because of our increasing costs and evolving scope, many of our best, most loyal clients were our least profitable. In fact, many were barely profitable — if at all. We’ve tried to combat that by increasing rates on new, incoming clients to reflect our new costs and try to make up for shrinking margin on long-term clients. But we didn’t have a good strategy in place for updating pricing for current clients. And it bit us in the ass. Subsidizing lower-profit, long-term clients with new, higher-margin clients ultimately didn’t work out. Our margins continued to dwindle and some months we were barely breaking even while posting six-figures of monthly revenue. 2022 was our highest revenue year but one of our least profitable. It only left one option. We had to raise rates on some of our long-term clients. But, of course, raising rates on a great, long-term client can be delicate. You’ve built a relationship with these people over the years and you’re setting yourself up for an ultimatum — are you more valuable to the client or is the client more valuable to you? Who will blink first? We offered all of these clients the opportunity to move to updated pricing. Unfortunately, some of them weren’t on board. Again, we had 2 options: Keep them at a low/no profit rate Let them churn It seems intuitive that having a low-profit client is better than having no client. But we’ve learned an important lesson many times over the years. Our business doesn’t scale infinitely and we can only handle so many clients at a time. That means that low-profit clients are actually costing us money in some cases. Say our average client generates $2,500 per month in profit — $30,000 per year. If one of our clients is only generating $500/mo in profit, working with them means missing out on bringing on a more profitable client (assuming our team is currently at capacity). Instead of $30,000/year, we’re only making $6,000. Keeping that client costs us $24,000. That’s called opportunity cost. So it’s clear: We had to let these clients churn. We decided to churn about 25% of our existing clients. On paper, the math made sense. And we had a pretty consistent flow of new opportunities coming our way. At the time, it felt like a no-brainer decision. And I felt confident that we could quickly replace these low-profit clients with higher-margin ones. I was wrong. Eating Shit Right after we initiated proactively churning some of our clients, other clients — ones we planned to keep — gave us notice that they were planning to end the engagement. Ouch. Fuck. We went from a 25% planned drop in revenue to a nearly 40% cliff staring us right in the face. Then things got even worse. Around Q3 of this year, talk of recession and layoffs really started to intensify. We work primarily with tech companies and startups. And these were the areas most heavily impacted by the economic news. Venture funding was drying up. Our leads started to slow down. This put us in a tough position. Looking back now, I think it’s clear that I made the wrong decision. We went about this process in the wrong way. The reality sinks in when you consider the imbalance between losing a client and gaining a client. It takes 30 days for someone to fire us. It’s a light switch. But it could take 1-3 months to qualify, close, and onboard a new client. We have lots of upfront work, research, and planning that goes into the process. We have to learn a new brand voice, tone, and style. It’s a marathon. So, for every client we “trade”, there’s a lapse in revenue and work. This means that, in retrospect, I would probably have made this transition using some kind of staggered schedule rather than a cut-and-dry approach. We could have gradually off-boarded clients when we had more definitive work to replace them. I was too confident. But that’s a lesson I had to learn the hard way. Rebuilding & Resetting Most of the voluntary and involuntary churn happened toward the end of 2022. So we’re still dealing with the fall out. Right now, it feels like a period of rebuilding. We didn’t quite lose 50% of our revenue, but we definitely saw a big hit heading into 2023. To be transparent: It sucks. It feels like a gigantic mistake that I made which set us back significantly from our previous high point. I acted rashly and it cost us a lot of money — at least on the surface. But I remind myself of the situation we were in previously. Nearly twice the revenue but struggling to maintain profitability. Would it have been better to try to slowly fix that situation and battle through months of loss or barely-break-even profits? Or was ripping off the bandaid the right move after all? I’m an optimist. (Heh, heh) Plus, I know that spiraling over past decisions won’t change them or help me move forward. So I’m choosing to look at this as an opportunity — to rebuild, reset, and refocus the company. I get to take all of the tough lessons I’ve learned over the last 6 years and apply them to build the company in a way that better aligns with our new and current goals. It’s not quite a fresh, clean start, but by parting ways with some of our oldest clients, we’ve eliminated some of the “debt” that’s accumulated over the years. We get a chance to fully realize the new positioning that we rolled out last year. Many of those long-term clients who churned had a scope of work or engagement structure that didn’t fit with our new positioning and focus. So, by losing them, we’re able to completely close up shop on the SOWs that no longer align with the future version of Optimist. Our smaller roster of clients is a better fit for that future. My job is to protect that positioning by ensuring that while we’re rebuilding our new roster of clients we don’t get desperate. We maintain the qualifications we set out for future clients and only take on work that fits. How’s that for seeing the upside? Some other upside from the situation is that we got an opportunity to ask for candid feedback from clients who were leaving. We asked for insight about their decision, what factors they considered, how they perceived us, and the value of our work. Some of the reasons clients left were obvious and possibly unavoidable. Things like budget cuts, insourcing, and uncertainty about the economy all played at least some part of these decisions. But, reading between the lines, where was one key insight that really struck me. It’s one of those, “oh, yeah — duh — I already knew that,” things that can be difficult to learn and easy to forget…. We’re in the Relationship Business (Plan Accordingly) For all of our focus on things like rankings, keywords, content, conversions, and a buffet of relevant metrics, it can be easy to lose the forest for the trees. Yes, the work itself matters. Yes, the outcomes — the metrics — matter. But sometimes the relationship matters more. When you’re running an agency, you can live or die by someone just liking you. Admittedly, this feels totally unfair. It opens up all kinds of dilemmas, frustration, opportunity for bias and prejudice, and other general messiness. But it’s the real world. If a client doesn’t enjoy working with us — even if for purely personal reasons — they could easily have the power to end of engagement, regardless of how well we did our actual job. We found some evidence of this in the offboarding conversations we had with clients. In some cases, we had clients who we had driven triple- and quadruple-digital growth. Our work was clearly moving the needle and generating positive ROI and we had the data to prove it. But they decided to “take things in another direction” regardless. And when we asked about why they made the decision, it was clear that it was more about the working relationship than anything we could have improved about the service itself. The inverse is also often true. Our best clients have lasting relationships with our team. The work is important — and they want results. But even if things aren’t quite going according to plan, they’re patient and quick to forgive. Those relationships feel solid — unshakeable. Many of these folks move onto new roles or new companies and quickly look for an opportunity to work with us again. On both sides, relationships are often more important than the work itself. We’ve already established that we’re not building a business that will scale in a massive way. Optimist will always be a small, boutique service firm. We don’t need 100 new leads per month We need a small, steady roster of clients who are a great fit for the work we do and the value we create. We want them to stick around. We want to be their long-term partner. I’m not built for churn-and-burn agency life. And neither is the business. When I look at things through this lens, I realize how much I can cut from our overall business strategy. We don’t need an ultra-sophisticated, multi-channel marketing strategy. We just need strong relationships — enough of them to make our business work. There are a few key things we can take away from this as a matter of business strategy: Put most of our effort into building and strengthening relationships with our existing clients Be intentional about establishing a strong relationship with new clients as part of onboarding Focus on relationships as the main driver of future business development Embracing Reality: Theory vs Practice Okay, so with the big learnings out the way, I want to pivot into another key lesson from 2022. It’s the importance of understanding theory vs practice — specifically when it comes to thinking about time, work, and life. It all started when I was considering how to best structure my days and weeks around running Optimist, my other ventures, and my life goals outside of work. Over the years, I’ve dabbled in many different ways to block time and find focus — to compartmentalize all of the things that are spinning and need my attention. As I mapped this out, I realized that I often tried to spread myself too thin throughout the week. Not just that I was trying to do too much but that I was spreading that work into too many small chunks rather than carving out time for focus. In theory, 5 hours is 5 hours. If you have 5 hours of work to get done, you just fit into your schedule whenever you have an open time slot. In reality, a single 5-hour block of work is 10x more productive and satisfying than 10, 30-minute blocks of work spread out across the week. In part, this is because of context switching. Turning your focus from one thing to another thing takes time. Achieving flow and focus takes time. And the more you jump from one project to another, the more time you “lose” to switching. This is insightful for me both in the context of work and planning my day, but also thinking about my life outside of Optimist. One of my personal goals is to put a finite limit on my work time and give myself more freedom. I can structure that in many different ways. Is it better to work 5 days a week but log off 1 hour early each day? Or should I try to fit more hours into each workday so I can take a full day off? Of course, it’s the latter. Both because of the cost of context switching and spreading work into more, smaller chunks — but also because of the remainder that I end up with when I’m done working. A single extra hour in my day probably means nothing. Maybe I can binge-watch one more episode of a new show or do a few extra chores around the house. But it doesn’t significantly improve my life or help me find greater balance. Most things I want to do outside of work can’t fit into a single extra hour. A full day off from work unlocks many more options. I can take the day to go hiking or biking. I can spend the day with my wife, planning or playing a game. Or I can push it up against the weekend and take a 3-day trip. It gives me more of the freedom and balance that I ultimately want. So this has become a guiding principle for how I structure my schedule. I want to: Minimize context switching Maximize focused time for work and for non-work The idea of embracing reality also bleeds into some of the shifts in business strategy that I mentioned above. In theory, any time spent on marketing will have a positive impact on the company. In reality, focusing more on relationships than blasting tweets into the ether is much more likely to drive the kind of growth and stability that we’re seeking. As I think about 2023, I think this is a recurring theme. It manifests in many ways. Companies are making budget cuts and tough decisions about focus and strategy. Most of us are looking for ways to rein in the excess and have greater impact with a bit less time and money. We can’t do everything. We can’t even do most things. So our #1 priority should be to understand the reality of our time and our effort to make the most of every moment (in both work and leisure). That means thinking deeply about our strengths and our limitations. Being practical, even if it feels like sacrifice. Update on Other Businesses Finally, I want to close up by sharing a bit about my ventures outside of Optimist. I shared last year how I planned to shift some of my (finite) time and attention to new ventures and opportunities. And, while I didn’t get to devote as much as I hoped to these new pursuits, they weren’t totally in vain. I made progress across the board on all of the items I laid out in my post. Here’s what happened: Juice: The first Optimist spin-out agency At the end of 2021, we launched our first new service business based on demand from Optimist clients. Focused entirely on building links for SEO, we called the agency Juice. Overall, we made strong progress toward turning this into a legitimate standalone business in 2022. Relying mostly on existing Optimist clients and a few word-of-mouth opportunities (no other marketing), we built a team and set up a decent workflow and operations. There’s still many kinks and challenges that we’re working through on this front. All told, Juice posted almost $100,000 in revenue in our first full year. Monetizing the community I started 2022 with a focus on figuring out how to monetize our free community, Top of the Funnel. Originally, my plan was to sell sponsorships as the main revenue driver. And that option is still on the table. But, this year, I pivoted to selling paid content and subscriptions. We launched a paid tier for content and SEO entrepreneurs where I share more of my lessons, workflows, and ideas for building and running a freelance or agency business. It’s gained some initial traction — we reached \~$1,000 MRR from paid subscriptions. In total, our community revenue for 2022 was about $2,500. In 2023, I’m hoping to turn this into a $30,000 - $50,000 revenue opportunity. Right now, we’re on track for \~$15,000. Agency partnerships and referrals In 2022, we also got more serious about referring leads to other agencies. Any opportunity that was not a fit for Optimist or we didn’t have capacity to take on, we’d try to connect with another partner. Transparently, we struggled to operationalize this as effectively as I would have liked. In part, this was driven by my lack of focus here. With the other challenges throughout the year, I wasn’t able to dedicate as much time as I’d like to setting goals and putting workflows into place. But it wasn’t a total bust. We referred out several dozen potential clients to partner agencies. Of those, a handful ended up converting into sales — and referral commission. In total, we generated about $10,000 in revenue from referrals. I still see this as a huge opportunity for us to unlock in 2023. Affiliate websites Lastly, I mentioned spending some time on my new and existing affiliate sites as another big business opportunity in 2022. This ultimately fell to the bottom of my list and didn’t get nearly the attention I wanted. But I did get a chance to spend a few weeks throughout the year building this income stream. For 2022, I generated just under $2,000 in revenue from affiliate content. My wife has graciously agreed to dedicate some of her time and talent to these projects. So, for 2023, I think this will become a bit of a family venture. I’m hoping to build a solid and consistent workflow, expand the team, and develop a more solid business strategy. Postscript — AI, SEO, OMG As I’m writing this, much of my world is in upheaval. If you’re not in this space (and/or have possibly been living under a rock), the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 has sparked an arms race between Google, Bing, OpenAI, and many other players. The short overview: AI is likely to fundamentally change the way internet search works. This has huge impact on almost all of the work that I do and the businesses that I run. Much of our focus is on SEO and understanding the current Google algorithm, how to generate traffic for clients, and how to drive traffic to our sites and projects. That may all change — very rapidly. This means we’re standing at a very interesting point in time. On the one hand, it’s scary as hell. There’s a non-zero chance that this will fundamentally shift — possibly upturn — our core business model at Optimist. It could dramatically change how we work and/or reduce demand for our core services. No bueno. But it’s also an opportunity (there’s the optimist in me, again). I certainly see a world where we can become leaders in this new frontier. We can pivot, adjust, and capitalize on a now-unknown version of SEO that’s focused on understanding and optimizing for AI-as-search. With that, we may also be able to help others — say, those in our community? — also navigate this tumultuous time. See? It’s an opportunity. I wish I had the answers right now. But, it’s still a time of uncertainty. I just know that there’s a lot of change happening and I want to be in front of it rather than trying to play catch up. Wish me luck. — Alright friends — that's my update for 2023! I’ve always appreciated sharing these updates with the Reddit community, getting feedback, being asked tough questions, and even battling it out with some of my haters (hey!! 👋) As usual, I’m going to pop in throughout the next few days to respond to comments or answer questions. Feel free to share thoughts, ideas, and brutal takedowns in the comments. If you're interested in following the Optimist journey and the other projects I'm working on in 2023, you can follow me on Twitter. Cheers, Tyler P.S. - If you're running or launching a freelance or agency business and looking for help figuring it out, please DM me. Our subscription community, Middle of the Funnel, was created to provide feedback, lessons, and resources for other entrepreneurs in this space.

AI search startup Perplexity could actually beat Google (disruption strategy lesson)
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finncmdbarThis week

AI search startup Perplexity could actually beat Google (disruption strategy lesson)

Everybody's talking about how AI changes everything and all the new business models and products that are now possible. But few talk about how AI legitimizes ideas that we'd previously laugh about. One of them: Disrupting Google. Bing, DuckDuckGo (privacy search), Ecosia (sustainable search), Neeva (subscription search)... none of them made a dent into Google. AI could change this. Most notably: Perplexity. Perplexity is an AI search unicorn founded by Aravind Srinivas. It's got a $20m ARR and $1b+ valuation at about 50 people—all in under 2 years. The product is basically if ChatGPT had a baby with Google: Perplexity aggregate search results for your query and tells you the results (with citations) in a concise answer. You never have to leave their interface to click elsewhere. I think it has a real chance: Its search results for informational queries are (imo) already better than Google's SEO optimized jungle. Plus, millions of people are subscribing (with real money) to a search engine. Of course, Google knows a thing or two about AI. What if Google just copies the product for their own search engine? To some degree, they've started to do this. But Google runs into a problem here: Their core business model is based on ads, which are inserted into search results. So the more search results you can show someone, the more money Google makes. If there's just one result (aka answer), then Google makes less money. This is a clear disincentive for Google to build these AI answers. CEO Aravind Srinivas talks about this in interviews: Google won't build everything Perplexity does because they rely on ads and AI-native search runs counter to their business model. Of course, disrupting Google requires a lot more than to convince a bunch of tech workers excited to try new tools. My mom probably doesn't even know there are other search engines besides Google—and crossing into the mainstream takes a long time. But if I think about how good Perplexity is in 2 years and with 50 people compared to a 26 year-old company with 180k people, I think the AI inflection point gives them a real chance. WDYT? If you want to read my full strategic breakdown, you can read it here: https://www.commandbar.com/blog/perplexity-vs-google/

AI Will Make You Extremely Rich or Kill Your Business in 2024
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AntsyNursery58This week

AI Will Make You Extremely Rich or Kill Your Business in 2024

Preface: I'm a solo-founder in the AI space and previously worked as an ML scientist; the new advancements in AI that I'm seeing are going to impact everyone here. It doesn't matter if you're just starting out, or a bootstrapped brick and mortar founder, or even a VC backed hard tech founder. Last year was when the seeds were laid, and this is the year we'll see them bloom. There will be an onslaught of advancements that take place that are borderline inconceivable due to the nature of exponential progress. This will change every single vertical. I'm making this post because I think AI execution strategy will make or break businesses. Dramatically. Over $50B was put into AI startups in 2023 alone. This figure excludes the hundreds of billions poured into AI from enterprises. So, let's follow the money: &#x200B; 1) AI enterprise software. There's a lot to unpack here and this is what I’m currently working on. AI enterprise software will encompass everything from hyper personalized email outbound to AI cold calls to AI that A/B tests ads on synthetic data to vertical specific software. The impact of the former is relatively self explanatory, so I'll focus on the latter. To illustrate vertical specific AI software, I'll use a simple example in the legal space. Lawyers typically have to comb through thousands of pages of documents. Now, using an LLM + a VDB, an AI can instantly answer all of those questions while surfacing the source and highlighting the specific answer in the contract/document. There are dozens of AI startups for this use case alone. This saves lawyers an immense amount of time and allows them to move faster. Firms that adopt this have a fundamental advantage over law firms that don't adopt this. This was 2023 technology. I'm seeing vertical AI software getting built by my friends in areas from construction, to real estate, to even niche areas like chimney manufacturing. This will exist everywhere. Now, this can be extrapolated much further to be applicable to systems that can do reports and even browse the Internet. This brings me to my next point. &#x200B; 2) AI information aggregation and spread. My gut tells me that this will have a crescendo moment in the future with hardware advancements (Rabbit, Tab, etc.). You won't have to google things because it will be surfaced to you. It's predictive in nature. The people who can get information the fastest will grow their business the fastest. This part is semi-speculative, but due to the nature of LLMs being so expensive to train, I have a strong feeling that large institutions will have access to the \fastest\ and \best\ models that can do this quicker than you and I can. This is why it's important to stay on top. &#x200B; 3) AI content generation This is relevant to running advertisements and any digital marketing aspect of your business. If you can rapidly make content faster than your competitors to put in social media, you will outpace your competitors rapidly. I think most folks are familiar with MidJourney, Stable diffusion, etc. but don't know how to use it. You can generate consistent models for a clothing brand or generate images of a product that you would normally need to hire a professional photographer to take. There's also elevenlabs which is relatively easy to use and can be used to make an MP3 clip as a narration for an ad; this is something I've already done. I'm also still shocked by how many people are unfamiliar with tools like Pika which can do video generation. You could imagine companies having fleets of digital influencers that they control or conjuring up the perfect ad for a specific demographic using a combination of all of the aforementioned tools. &#x200B; In summary, if you feel like I'm being hyperbolic or propagating science fiction fantasies, you're likely already behind. I truly recommend that everyone stays up to date on these advancements as much as possible. If your competitor comes across an AI tool that can increase their ROAS by 5x they can crush you. If your competitor uses a tool that increases the rate at which they receive and aggregate information by 200% (modest estimate) they will crush you. If your competitors have a tool that can reduce their employee size, then they will use it. They'll fire their employees to cut costs and reinvest the money back into their business. It will compound to the point where you're outpaced, and this isn't a level of innovation we've seen since the birth of the industrial revolution. Your customers can get stolen overnight, or you can steal your competition’s customers overnight. TL;DR: This is an opportunity for entrepreneurs to scale faster than they could have possibly imagined, but this also comes with the potential for your company to be obliterated. We've never seen advancements that can have this drastic of an impact this quickly. Adoption will happen fast, and first movers will have a disproportionate and compounding advantage. Watch guides, meet with startups, follow the news, and get rich.

I've been building stuff for years, I can build your idea
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Minute-Line2712This week

I've been building stuff for years, I can build your idea

If anyone is interested at all, I'm a college student whose been massively passionate for entrepreneur and business stuff for years and can build anything from a marketplace to a social network, a booking app, a live streaming app, AI app*, what not. I'm really flexible in general and I'm also very reasonable with pricing. I like this community so I'd like to work on something I enjoy... (indeed... get out of my tabs please). Im a little passionate in general let's say, and I build all the time for fun. But I need money. So I'm here. Viola! Since I'm a college student, and this is my first time ever offering my services as well, chances are I won't expect anything past $500. I might even do it for cheaper if it looks doable for me. If you're generous that's up to you (lol). I'm happy to share my work and live previews you can interact with before we start. And, I'm happy to build things before you pay, so you can see it literally working :) THE "NEGATIVE"/catch: There will be no code from scratch as we'd build using no-code (www.bubble.io) and implement code as needed. This means you will not have the source code ever (even if we wanted to) and if you ever want your own from scratch platform/app you will have to find someone/a team to do it from scratch, as there's no option to export source code out. If you plan to grow past 1 million users, you may consider migrating to something built from scratch at this point scaling wise (and you can't get your source code - so you'll have to pay an entire dev team separately. If you have an app, you'll need a website developed, and Android and iOS developers for the app). For an MVP however, I personally think it's a faster, easier and cheaper way to get things running without investing a lot. THE GOOD: No-code/low-code will be a thousand times more easy, cheap, and fast to maintain. And if you're a startup, chances are you WILL need to tweak things... possibly a lot (100s vs. 1,000s difference in my opinion..). We can still build almost anything and also turn it into a mobile app for iOS / Android, though I'm more comfortable with getting a web app up first and the main posting here. But it depends on the complexity so just ask. Maintenance is likely to end up FAR cheaper and you can even do it free yourself if you decided to learn (which you could totally do in some days, and master in some weeks/months fully). I can build and document everything to be as beginner friendly as possible for you to be able to maintain it yourself if you wanted to learn. Send me a message describing what you need if you're interested. I will give you an estimate on price, time, and can send you some live previews. If we agree, I will start to build before any down payments to a (reasonable) point!:)

How To Learn About AI Agents (A Road Map From Someone Who's Done It)
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laddermanUSThis week

How To Learn About AI Agents (A Road Map From Someone Who's Done It)

If you are a newb to AI Agents, welcome, I love newbies and this fledgling industry needs you! You've hear all about AI Agents and you want some of that action right?  You might even feel like this is a watershed moment in tech, remember how it felt when the internet became 'a thing'?  When apps were all the rage?  You missed that boat right?   Well you may have missed that boat, but I can promise you one thing..... THIS BOAT IS BIGGER !  So if you are reading this you are getting in just at the right time.  Let me answer some quick questions before we go much further: Q: Am I too late already to learn about AI agents? A: Heck no, you are literally getting in at the beginning, call yourself and 'early adopter' and pin a badge on your chest! Q: Don't I need a degree or a college education to learn this stuff?  I can only just about work out how my smart TV works! A: NO you do not.  Of course if you have a degree in a computer science area then it does help because you have covered all of the fundamentals in depth... However 100000% you do not need a degree or college education to learn AI Agents.  Q: Where the heck do I even start though?  Its like sooooooo confusing A: You start right here my friend, and yeh I know its confusing, but chill, im going to try and guide you as best i can. Q: Wait i can't code, I can barely write my name, can I still do this? A: The simple answer is YES you can. However it is great to learn some basics of python.  I say his because there are some fabulous nocode tools like n8n that allow you to build agents without having to learn how to code...... Having said that, at the very least understanding the basics is highly preferable. That being said, if you can't be bothered or are totally freaked about by looking at some code, the simple answer is YES YOU CAN DO THIS. Q: I got like no money, can I still learn? A: YES 100% absolutely.  There are free options to learn about AI agents and there are paid options to fast track you.  But defiantly you do not need to spend crap loads of cash on learning this.  So who am I anyway? (lets get some context)  I am an AI Engineer and I own and run my own AI Consultancy business where I design, build and deploy AI agents and AI automations.  I do also run a small academy where I teach this stuff, but I am not self promoting or posting links in this post because im not spamming this group.  If you want links send me a DM or something and I can forward them to you.  Alright so on to the good stuff, you're a newb, you've already read a 100 posts and are now totally confused and every day you consume about 26 hours of youtube videos on AI agents.....I get you, we've all been there.  So here is my 'Worth Its Weight In Gold' road map on what to do: \[1\]  First of all you need learn some fundamental concepts.  Whilst you can defiantly jump right in start building, I strongly recommend you learn some of the basics.  Like HOW to LLMs work, what is a system prompt, what is long term memory, what is Python, who the heck is this guy named Json that everyone goes on about?  Google is your old friend who used to know everything, but you've also got your new buddy who can help you if you want to learn for FREE.  Chat GPT is an awesome resource to create your own mini learning courses to understand the basics. Start with a prompt such as: "I want to learn about AI agents but this dude on reddit said I need to know the fundamentals to this ai tech, write for me a short course on Json so I can learn all about it. Im a beginner so keep the content easy for me to understand. I want to also learn some code so give me code samples and explain it like a 10 year old" If you want some actual structured course material on the fundamentals, like what the Terminal is and how to use it, and how LLMs work, just hit me, Im not going to spam this post with a hundred links. \[2\] Alright so let's assume you got some of the fundamentals down.  Now what? Well now you really have 2 options.  You either start to pick up some proper learning content (short courses) to deep dive further and really learn about agents or you can skip that sh\*t and start building!  Honestly my advice is to seek out some short courses on agents, Hugging Face have an awesome free course on agents and DeepLearningAI also have numerous free courses. Both are really excellent places to start.  If you want a proper list of these with links, let me know.  If you want to jump in because you already know it all, then learn the n8n platform!   And no im not a share holder and n8n are not paying me to say this.  I can code, im an AI Engineer and I use n8n sometimes.   N8N is a nocode platform that gives you a drag and drop interface to build automations and agents.  Its very versatile and you can self host it.  Its also reasonably easy to actually deploy a workflow in the cloud so it can be used by an actual paying customer.  Please understand that i literally get hate mail from devs and experienced AI enthusiasts for recommending no code platforms like n8n.  So im risking my mental wellbeing for you!!!    \[3\] Keep building!   ((WTF THAT'S IT?????))  Yep. the more you build the more you will learn.  Learn by doing my young Jedi learner.  I would call myself pretty experienced in building AI Agents, and I only know a tiny proportion of this tech.  But I learn but building projects and writing about AI Agents.  The more you build the more you will learn.  There are more intermediate courses you can take at this point as well if you really want to deep dive (I was forced to - send help) and I would recommend you do if you like short courses because if you want to do well then you do need to understand not just the underlying tech but also more advanced concepts like Vector Databases and how to implement long term memory.  Where to next? Well if you want to get some recommended links just DM me or leave a comment and I will DM you, as i said im not writing this with the intention of spamming the crap out of the group. So its up to you.  Im also happy to chew the fat if you wanna chat, so hit me up.  I can't always reply immediately because im in a weird time zone, but I promise I will reply if you have any questions. THE LAST WORD (Warning - Im going to motivate the crap out of you now) Please listen to me:  YOU CAN DO THIS.  I don't care what background you have, what education you have, what language you speak or what country you are from..... I believe in you and anyway can do this.  All you need is determination, some motivation to want to learn and a computer (last one is essential really, the other 2 are optional!) But seriously you can do it and its totally worth it.  You are getting in right at the beginning of the gold rush, and yeh I believe that.   AI Agents are going to be HUGE. I believe this will be the new internet gold rush.

Recently hit 6,600,000 monthly organic traffic for a B2C SaaS website. Here's the 40 tips that helped me make that happen.
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Recently hit 6,600,000 monthly organic traffic for a B2C SaaS website. Here's the 40 tips that helped me make that happen.

Hey guys! So as title says, we recently hit 6,600,000 monthly organic traffic / month for a B2C SaaS website (screenshot. Can't give name publicly, but can show testimonial to a mod). Here's 40 tips that "helped" me make this happen. If you get some value of the post, I write an SEO tip every other day on /r/seogrowth. There's around 10 more tips already up there other than the ones I mention here. If you want to give back for all my walls of text, I'd appreciate a sub <3 Also, there are a bunch of free stuff I mention in the article: content outline, writer guidelines, SEO checklist, and other stuff. Here's the Google Doc with all that! Tip #1. Take SEO With a Grain of Salt A lot of the SEO advice and best practices on the internet are based on 2 things: Personal experiences and case studies of companies that managed to make SEO work for them. Google or John Mueller (Google’s Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst). And, unfortunately, neither of these sources are always accurate. Personal SEO accounts are simply about what worked for specific companies. Sometimes, what worked for others, won’t work for you. For example, you might find a company that managed to rank with zero link-building because their website already had a very strong backlink profile. If you’re starting with a fresh website, chances are, you won’t be able to get the same results. At the same time, information from Google or John Mueller is also not 100% accurate. For example, they’ve said that guest posting is against Google’s guidelines and doesn’t work… But practically, guest posting is a very effective link-building strategy. So the takeaway is this: Take all information you read about SEO with a grain of salt. Analyze the information yourself, and make your conclusions. SEO Tip #2. SEO Takes Time You’ve already heard this one before, but considering how many people keep asking, thought I'd include this anyway. On average, it’s going to take you 6 months to 2 years to get SEO results, depending on the following factors: Your backlink profile. The more quality backlinks you have (or build), the faster you’ll rank. Age of your website. If your website is older (or you purchased an aged website), you can expect your content to rank faster. Amount of content published. The more quality content you publish on your website, the more “authoritative” it is in the eyes of Google, and thus more likely to rank faster. SEO work done on the website. If a lot of your pages are already ranking on Google (page 2-3), it’s easier to get them to page #1 than if you just published the content piece. Local VS global SEO. Ranking locally is (sometimes) easier and faster than ranking globally. That said, some marketing agencies can use “SEO takes time” as an excuse for not driving results. Well, fortunately, there is a way to track SEO results from month #2 - #3 of work. Simply check if your new content pieces/pages are getting more and more impressions on Google Search Console month-to-month. While your content won’t be driving traffic for a while after being published, they’ll still have a growing number of impressions from month #2 or #3 since publication. SEO Tip #3. SEO Might Not Be The Best Channel For You In theory, SEO sounds like the best marketing channel ever. You manage to rank on Google and your marketing seemingly goes on auto-pilot - you’re driving new leads every day from existing content without having to lift a finger… And yet, SEO is not for everyone. Avoid SEO as a marketing channel if: You’re just getting started with your business and need to start driving revenue tomorrow (and not in 1-2 years). If this is you, try Google ads, Facebook ads, or organic marketing. Your target audience is pretty small. If you’re selling enterprise B2B software and have around 2,000 prospects in total worldwide, then it’s simply easier to directly reach out to these prospects. Your product type is brand-new. If customers don’t know your product exists, they probably won’t be Googling it. SEO Tip #4. Traffic Can Be a Vanity Metric I've seen hundreds of websites that drive 6-7 digits of traffic but generate only 200-300 USD per month from those numbers. “What’s the deal?” You might be thinking. “How can you fail to monetize that much traffic?” Well, that brings us to today’s tip: traffic can be a vanity metric. See, not all traffic is created equal. Ranking for “hormone balance supplement” is a lot more valuable than ranking for “Madagascar character names.” The person Googling the first keyword is an adult ready to buy your product. Someone Googling the latter, on the other hand, is a child with zero purchasing power. So, when deciding on which keywords to pursue, always keep in mind the buyer intent behind and don’t go after rankings or traffic just because 6-digit traffic numbers look good. SEO Tip #5. Push Content Fast Whenever you publish a piece of content, you can expect it to rank within 6 months to a year (potentially less if you’re an authority in your niche). So, the faster you publish your content, the faster they’re going to age, and, as such, the faster they’ll rank on Google. On average, I recommend you publish a minimum of 10,000 words of content per month and 20,000 to 30,000 optimally. If you’re not doing link-building for your website, then I’d recommend pushing for even more content. Sometimes, content velocity can compensate for the lack of backlinks. SEO Tip #6. Use Backlink Data to Prioritize Content You might be tempted to go for that juicy, 6-digit traffic cornerstone keyword right from the get-go... But I'd recommend doing the opposite. More often than not, to rank for more competitive, cornerstone keywords, you’ll need to have a ton of supporting content, high-quality backlinks, website authority, and so on. Instead, it’s a lot more reasonable to first focus on the less competitive keywords and then, once you’ve covered those, move on to the rest. Now, as for how to check keyword competitiveness, here are 2 options: Use Mozbar to see the number of backlinks for top-ranking pages, as well as their Domain Authority (DA). If all the pages ranking on page #1 have <5 backlinks and DA of 20 - 40, it’s a good opportunity. Use SEMrush or Ahrefs to sort your keywords by difficulty, and focus on the less difficult keywords first. Now, that said, keep in mind that both of these metrics are third-party, and hence not always accurate. SEO Tip #7. Always Start With Competitive Analysis When doing keyword research, the easiest way to get started is via competitive analysis. Chances are, whatever niche you’re in, there’s a competitor that is doing great with SEO. So, instead of having to do all the work from scratch, run their website through SEMrush or Ahrefs and steal their keyword ideas. But don’t just stop there - once you’ve borrowed keyword ideas from all your competitors, run the seed keywords through a keyword research tool such as UberSuggest or SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool. This should give you dozens of new ideas that your competitors might’ve missed. Finally, don’t just stop at borrowing your competitor’s keyword ideas. You can also borrow some inspiration on: The types of graphics and images you can create to supplement your blog content. The tone and style you can use in your articles. The type of information you can include in specific content pieces. SEO Tip #8. Source a LOT of Writers Content writing is one of those professions that has a very low barrier to entry. Anyone can take a writing course, claim to be a writer, and create an UpWork account… This is why 99% of the writers you’ll have to apply for your gigs are going to be, well, horrible. As such, if you want to produce a lot of content on the reg, you’ll need to source a LOT of writers. Let’s do the math: If, by posting a job ad, you source 100 writers, you’ll see that only 5 of them are a good fit. Out of the 5 writers, 1 has a very high rate, so they drop out. Another doesn’t reply back to your communication, which leaves you with 3 writers. You get the 3 writers to do a trial task, and only one turns out to be a good fit for your team. Now, since the writer is freelance, the best they can do is 4 articles per month for a total of 5,000-words (which, for most niches, ain’t all that much). So, what we’re getting at here is, to hire quality writers, you should source a LOT of them. SEO Tip #9. Create a Process for Filtering Writers If you follow the previous tip, you'll end up with a huge database of hundreds of writers. This creates a whole new problem: You now have a database of 500+ writers waiting for you to sift through them and decide which ones are worth the hire. It would take you 2-3 days of intense work to go through all these writers and vet them yourself. Let’s be real - you don’t have time for that. Here’s what you can do instead: When sourcing writers, always get them to fill in a Google form (instead of DMing or emailing you). In this form, make sure to ask for 3 relevant written samples, a link to the writer’s portfolio page, and the writer’s rate per word. Create a SOP for evaluating writers. The criteria for evaluation should be: Level of English. Does the writer’s sample have any English mistakes? If so, they’re not a good fit. Quality of Samples. Are the samples long-form and engaging content or are they boring 500-word copy-pastes? Technical Knowledge. Has the writer written about a hard-to-explain topic before? Anyone can write about simple topics like traveling—you want to look for someone who knows how to research a new topic and explain it in a simple and easy-to-read way. If someone’s written about how to create a perfect cover letter, they can probably write about traveling, but the opposite isn’t true. Get your VA to evaluate the writer’s samples as per the criteria above and short-list writers that seem competent. If you sourced 500 writers, the end result of this process should be around 50 writers. You or your editor goes through the short-list of 50 writers and invites 5-10 for a (paid) trial task. The trial task is very important - you’ll sometimes find that the samples provided by the writer don’t match their writing level. SEO Tip #10. Use the Right Websites to Find Writers Not sure where to source your writers? Here are some ideas: ProBlogger \- Our #1 choice - a lot of quality writers frequent this website. LinkedIn \- You can headhunt content writers in specific locations. Upwork \- If you post a content gig, most writers are going to be awful. Instead, I recommend headhunting top writers instead. WeWorkRemotely \- Good if you’re looking to make a full-time remote hire. Facebook \- There are a ton of quality Facebook groups for writers. Some of our faves are Cult of Copy Job Board and Content Marketing Lounge. SEO Tip #11. Always Use Content Outlines When giving tasks to your writing team, you need to be very specific about the instructions you give them. Don’t just provide a keyword and tell them to “knock themselves out.” The writer isn’t a SEO expert; chances are, they’re going to mess it up big-time and talk about topics that aren’t related to the keyword you’re targeting. Instead, when giving tasks to writers, do it through content outlines. A content outline, in a nutshell, is a skeleton of the article they’re supposed to write. It includes information on: Target word count (aim for the same or 50% more the word count than that of the competition). Article title. Article structure (which sections should be mentioned and in what order). Related topics of keywords that need to be mentioned in the article. Content outline example in the URL in the post intro. SEO Tip #12. Focus on One Niche at a Time I used to work with this one client that had a SaaS consisting of a mixture of CRM, Accounting Software, and HRS. I had to pick whether we were going to focus on topics for one of these 3 niches or focus on all of them at the same time. I decided to do the former. Here’s why: When evaluating what to rank, Google considers the authority of your website. If you have 60 articles about accounting (most of which link to each other), you’re probably an authority in the niche and are more likely to get good rankings. If you have 20 sales, 20 HR, and 20 accounting articles, though, none of these categories are going to rank as well. It always makes more sense to first focus on a single niche (the one that generates the best ROI for your business), and then move on to the rest. This also makes it easier to hire writers - you hire writers specialized in accounting, instead of having to find writers who can pull off 3 unrelated topics. SEO Tip #13. Just Hire a VA Already It’s 2021 already guys—unless you have a virtual assistant, you’re missing out big-time. Since a lot of SEO tasks are very time-consuming, it really helps to have a VA around to take over. As long as you have solid SOPs in place, you can hire a virtual assistant, train them, and use them to free up your time. Some SEO tasks virtual assistants can help with are: Internal linking. Going through all your blog content and ensuring that they link to each other. Backlink prospecting. Going through hundreds of websites daily to find link opportunities. Uploading content on WordPress and ensuring that the content is optimized well for on-page SEO. SEO Tip #14. Use WordPress (And Make Your Life Easier) Not sure which CMS platform to use? 99% of the time, you’re better off with WordPress. It has a TON of plugins that will make your life easier. Want a drag & drop builder? Use Elementor. It’s cheap, efficient, extremely easy to learn, and comes jam-packed with different plugins and features. Wix, SiteGround, and similar drag & drops are pure meh. SEO Tip #15. Use These Nifty WordPress Plugins There are a lot of really cool WordPress plugins that can make your (SEO) life so much easier. Some of our favorites include: RankMath. A more slick alternative to YoastSEO. Useful for on-page SEO. Smush. App that helps you losslessly compress all images on your website, as well as enables lazy loading. WP Rocket. This plugin helps speed up your website pretty significantly. Elementor. Not a techie? This drag & drop plugin makes it significantly easier to manage your website. WP Forms. Very simple form builder. Akismet Spam Protection. Probably the most popular anti-spam WP plugin. Mammoth Docx. A plugin that uploads your content from a Google doc directly to WordPress. SEO Tip #16. No, Voice Search Is Still Not Relevant Voice search is not and will not be relevant (no matter what sensationalist articles might say). Sure, it does have its application (“Alexa, order me toilet paper please”), but it’s pretty niche and not relevant to most SEOs. After all, you wouldn’t use voice search for bigger purchases (“Alexa, order me a new laptop please”) or informational queries (“Alexa, teach me how to do accounting, thanks”). SEO Tip #17. SEO Is Obviously Not Dead I see these articles every year - “SEO is dead because I failed to make it work.” SEO is not dead and as long as there are people looking up for information/things online, it never will be. And no, SEO is not just for large corporations with huge budgets, either. Some niches are hypercompetitive and require a huge link-building budget (CBD, fitness, VPN, etc.), but they’re more of an exception instead of the rule. SEO Tip #18. Doing Local SEO? Focus on Service Pages If you’re doing local SEO, you’re better off focusing on local service pages than blog content. E.g. if you’re an accounting firm based in Boston, you can make a landing page about /accounting-firm-boston/, /tax-accounting-boston/, /cpa-boston/, and so on. Or alternatively, if you’re a personal injury law firm, you’d want to create pages like /car-accident-law-firm/, /truck-accident-law-firm/, /wrongful-death-law-firm/, and the like. Thing is, you don’t really need to rank on global search terms—you just won’t get leads from there. Even if you ranked on the term “financial accounting,” it wouldn’t really matter for your bottom line that much. SEO Tip #19. Engage With the SEO Community The SEO community is (for the most part) composed of extremely helpful and friendly people. There are a lot of online communities (including this sub) where you can ask for help, tips, case studies, and so on. Some of our faves are: This sub :) SEO Signals Lab (FB Group) Fat Graph Content Ops (FB Group) Proper SEO Group (FB Group) BigSEO Subreddit SEO Tip #20. Test Keywords Before Pursuing Them You can use Google ads to test how profitable any given keyword is before you start trying to rank for it. The process here is: Create a Google Ads account. Pick a keyword you want to test. Create a landing page that corresponds to the search intent behind the keyword. Allocate an appropriate budget. E.g. if you assume a conversion rate of 2%, you’d want to buy 100+ clicks. If the CPC is 2 USD, then the right budget would be 200 USD plus. Run the ads! If you don’t have the budget for this, you can still use the average CPC for the keyword to estimate how well it’s going to convert. If someone is willing to bid 10 USD to rank for a certain keyword, it means that the keyword is most probably generating pretty good revenue/conversions. SEO Tip #21. Test & Improve SEO Headlines Sometimes, you’ll see that you’re ranking in the top 3 positions for your search query, but you’re still not driving that much traffic. “What’s the deal?” you might be asking. Chances are, your headline is not clickable enough. Every 3-4 months, go through your Google Search Console and check for articles that are ranking well but not driving enough traffic. Then, create a Google sheet and include the following data: Targeted keyword Page link CTR (for the last 28 days) Date when you implemented the new title Old title New title New CTR (for the month after the CTR change was implemented) From then on, implement the new headline and track changes in the CTR. If you don’t reach your desired result, you can always test another headline. SEO Tip #22. Longer Content Isn’t Always Better Content You’ve probably heard that long-form content is where it’s at in 2021. Well, this isn’t always the case. Rather, this mostly depends on the keyword you’re targeting. If, for example, you’re targeting the keyword “how to tie a tie,” you don’t need a long-ass 5,000-word mega-guide. In such a case, the reader is looking for something that can be explained in 200-300 words and if your article fails to do this, the reader will bounce off and open a different page. On the other hand, if you’re targeting the keyword “how to write a CV,” you’ll need around 4,000 to 5,000 words to adequately explain the topic and, chances are, you won’t rank with less. SEO Tip #23. SEO is Not All About Written Content More often than not, when people talk about SEO they talk about written blog content creation. It’s very important not to forget, though, that blog content is not end-all-be-all for SEO. Certain keywords do significantly better with video content. For example, if the keyword is “how to do a deadlift,” video content is going to perform significantly better than blog content. Or, if the keyword is “CV template,” you’ll see that a big chunk of the rankings are images of the templates. So, the lesson here is, don’t laser-focus on written content—keep other content mediums in mind, too. SEO Tip #24. Write For Your Audience It’s very important that your content resonates well with your target audience. If, for example, you’re covering the keyword “skateboard tricks,” you can be very casual with your language. Heck, it’s even encouraged! Your readers are Googling the keyword in their free time and are most likely teens or in their early 20s. Meaning, you can use informal language, include pop culture references, and avoid complicated language. Now, on the other hand, if you’re writing about high-level investment advice, your audience probably consists of 40-something suit-and-ties. If you include Rick & Morty references in your article, you'll most likely lose credibility and the Googler, who will go to another website. Some of our best tips on writing for your audience include: Define your audience. Who’s the person you’re writing for? Are they reading the content at work or in their free time? Keep your reader’s level of knowledge in mind. If you’re covering an accounting 101 topic, you want to cover the topic’s basics, as the reader is probably a student. If you’re writing about high-level finance, though, you don’t have to teach the reader what a balance sheet is. More often than not, avoid complicated language. The best practice is to write on a 6th-grade level, as it’s understandable for anyone. Plus, no one wants to read Shakespeare when Googling info online (unless they’re looking for Shakespeare's work, of course). SEO Tip #25. Create Compelling Headlines Want to drive clicks to your articles? You’ll need compelling headlines. Compare the following headline: 101 Productivity Tips \[To Get Things Done in 2021\] With this one: Productivity Tips Guide Which one would you click? Data says it’s the first! To create clickable headlines, I recommend you include the following elements: Keyword. This one’s non-negotiable - you need to include the target keyword in the headline. Numbers. If Buzzfeed taught us anything, it’s that people like to click articles with numbers in their titles. Results. If I read your article, what’s going to be the end result? E.g. “X Resume tips (to land the job)”.* Year (If Relevant). Adding a year to your title shows that the article is recent (which is relevant for some specific topics). E.g. If the keyword is “Marketing Trends,” I want to know marketing trends in 2021, not in 2001. So, adding a year in the title makes the headline more clickable. SEO Tip #26. Make Your Content Visual How good your content looks matters, especially if you're in a competitive niche. Here are some tips on how to make your content as visual as possible: Aim for 2-4 sentences per paragraph. Avoid huge blocks of text. Apply a 60-65% content width to your blog pages. Pick a good-looking font. I’d recommend Montserrat, PT Sans, and Roboto. Alternatively, you can also check out your favorite blogs, see which fonts they’re using, and do the same. Use a reasonable font size. Most top blogs use font sizes ranging from 16 pt to 22 pt. Add images when possible. Avoid stock photos, though. No one wants to see random “office people smiling” scattered around your blog posts. Use content boxes to help convey information better. Content boxes example in the URL in the intro of the post. SEO Tip #27. Ditch the Skyscraper Technique Already Brian Dean’s skyscraper technique is awesome and all, but the following bit really got old: “Hey \[name\], I saw you wrote an article. I, too, wrote an article. Please link to you?” The theory here is, if your content is good, the person will be compelled to link to it. In practice, though, the person really, really doesn’t care. At the end of the day, there’s no real incentive for the person to link to your content. They have to take time out of their day to head over to their website, log in to WordPress, find the article you mentioned, and add a link... Just because some stranger on the internet asked them to. Here’s something that works much better: Instead of fake compliments, be very straightforward about what you can offer them in exchange for that link. Some things you can offer are: A free version of your SaaS. Free product delivered to their doorstep. Backlink exchange. A free backlink from your other website. Sharing their content to your social media following. Money. SEO Tip #28. Get the URL Slug Right for Seasonal Content If you want to rank on a seasonal keyword, there are 2 ways to do this. If you want your article to be evergreen (i.e. you update it every year with new information), then your URL should not contain the year. E.g. your URL would be /saas-trends/, and you simply update the article’s contents+headline each year to keep it timely. If you’re planning on publishing a new trends report annually, though, then you can add a year to the URL. E.g. /saas-trends-2020/ instead of /saas-trends/. SEO Tip #29. AI Content Tools Are a Mixed Bag Lots of people are talking about AI content tools these days. Usually, they’re either saying: “AI content tools are garbage and the output is horrible,” Or: “AI content tools are a game-changer!” So which one is it? The truth is somewhere in-between. In 2021, AI content writing tools are pretty bad. The output you’re going to get is far from something you can publish on your website. That said, some SEOs use such tools to get a very, very rough draft of the article written, and then they do intense surgery on it to make it usable. Should you use AI content writing tools? If you ask me, no - it’s easier to hire a proficient content writer than spend hours salvaging AI-written content. That said, I do believe that such tools are going to get much better years down the line. This one was, clearly, more of a personal opinion than a fact. I’d love to hear YOUR opinion on AI content tools! Are they a fad, or are they the future of content creation? Let me know in the comments. SEO Tip #30. Don’t Overdo it With SEO Tools There are a lot of SEO tools out there for pretty much any SEO function. Keyword research, link-building, on-page, outreach, technical SEO, you name it! If you were to buy most of these tools for your business, you’d easily spend 4-figures on SEO tools per month. Luckily, though, you don’t actually need most of them. At the end of the day, the only must-have SEO tools are: An SEO Suite (Paid). Basically SEMrush or Ahrefs. Both of these tools offer an insane number of features - backlink analysis, keyword research, and a ton of other stuff. Yes, 99 USD a month is expensive for a tool. But then again, if you value your time 20 USD/hour and this tool saves you 6 hours, it's obviously worth it, right? On-Page SEO Tool (Free). RankMath or Yoast. Basically, a tool that's going to help you optimize web pages or blog posts as per SEO best practices. Technical SEO Tool (Freemium). You can use ScreamingFrog to crawl your entire website and find technical SEO problems. There are probably other tools that also do this, but ScreamingFrog is the most popular option. The freemium version of the tool only crawls a limited number of pages (500 URLs, to be exact), so if your website is relatively big, you'll need to pay for the tool. Analytics (Free). Obviously, you'll need Google Analytics (to track website traffic) and Google Search Console (to track organic traffic, specifically) set up on your website. Optionally, you can also use Google Track Manager to better track how your website visitors interact with the site. MozBar (Free). Chrome toolbar that lets you simply track the number of backlinks on Google Search Queries, Domain Authority, and a bunch of other stuff. Website Speed Analysis (Free). You can use Google Page Speed Insights to track how fast your website loads, as well as how mobile-friendly it is. Outreach Tool (Paid). Tool for reaching out to prospects for link-building, guest posting, etc. There are about a dozen good options for this. Personally, I like to use Snov for this. Optimized GMB Profile (Free). Not a tool per se, but if you're a local business, you need to have a well-optimized Google My Business profile. Google Keyword Planner (Free). This gives you the most reliable search volume data of all the tools. So, when doing keyword research, grab the search volume from here. Tool for Storing Keyword Research (Free). You can use Google Sheets or AirTable to store your keyword research and, at the same time, use it as a content calendar. Hemingway App (Free). Helps keep your SEO content easy to read. Spots passive voice, complicated words, etc. Email Finder (Freemium). You can use a tool like Hunter to find the email address of basically anyone on the internet (for link-building or guest posting purposes). Most of the tools that don’t fit into these categories are 100% optional. SEO Tip #31. Hiring an SEO? Here’s How to Vet Them Unless you’re an SEO pro yourself, hiring one is going to be far from easy. There’s a reason there are so many “SEO experts” out there - for the layman, it’s very hard to differentiate between someone who knows their salt and a newbie who took an SEO course, like, last week. Here’s how you can vet both freelance and full-time SEOs: Ask for concrete traffic numbers. The SEO pro should give you the exact numbers on how they’ve grown a website in the past - “100% SEO growth in 1 year” doesn’t mean much if the growth is from 10 monthly traffic to 20. “1,000 to 30,000” traffic, on the other hand, is much better. Ask for client names. While some clients ask their SEOs to sign an NDA and not disclose their collaboration, most don’t. If an SEO can’t name a single client they’ve worked with in the past, that’s a red flag. Make sure they have the right experience. Global and local SEO have very different processes. Make sure that the SEO has experience with the type of SEO you need. Make sure you’re looking for the right candidate. SEO pros can be content writers, link-builders, web developers, or all of the above simultaneously. Make sure you understand which one you need before making the hire. If you’re looking for someone to oversee your content ops, you shouldn’t hire a technical SEO expert. Look for SEO pros in the right places. Conventional job boards are overrated. Post your job ads on SEO communities instead. E.g. this sub, bigseo, SEO Signals Facebook group, etc. SEO Tip #32. Blog Post Not Ranking? Follow This Checklist I wanted to format the post natively for Reddit, but it’s just SO much better on Notion. Tl;dr, the checklist covers every reason your post might not be ranking: Search intent mismatch. Inferior content. Lack of internal linking. Lack of backlinks. And the like. Checklist URL at the intro of the post. SEO Tip #33. Avoid BS Link-Building Tactics The only type of link-building that works is building proper, quality links from websites with a good backlink profile and decent organic traffic. Here’s what DOESN’T work: Blog comment links Forum spam links Drive-by Reddit comment/post links Web 2.0 links Fiverr “100 links for 10 bucks” bs If your “SEO agency” says they’re doing any of the above instead of actually trying to build you links from quality websites, you’re being scammed. SEO Tip #34. Know When to Use 301 and 302 Redirects When doing redirects, it’s very important to know the distinction between these two. 301 is a permanent page redirect and passes on link juice. If you’re killing off a page that has backlinks, it’s better to 301 it to your homepage so that you don’t lose the link juice. If you simply delete a page, it’s going to be a 404, and the backlink juice is lost forever. 302 is a temporary page redirect and doesn’t pass on link juice. If the redirect is temporary, you do a 302. E.g. you want to test how well a new page is going to perform w/ your audience. SEO Tip #35. Social Signals Matter (But Not How You Think) Social signals are NOT a ranking factor. And yet, they can help your content rank on Google’s front page. Wondering what the hell am I talking about? Here’s what’s up: As I said, social signals are not a ranking factor. It’s not something Google takes into consideration to decide whether your article should rank or not. That said, social signals CAN lead to your article ranking better. Let’s say your article goes viral and gets around 20k views within a week. A chunk of these viewers are going to forget your domain/link and they’re going to look up the topic on Google via your chosen keyword + your brand name. The amount of people looking for YOUR keyword and exclusively picking your result over others is going to make Google think that your content is satisfying search intent better than the rest, and thus, reward you with better ranking. SEO Tip #36. Run Remarketing Ads to Lift Organic Traffic Conversions Not satisfied with your conversion rates? You can use Facebook ads to help increase them. Facebook allows you to do something called “remarketing.” This means you can target anyone that visited a certain page (or multiple pages) on your website and serve them ads on Facebook. There are a TON of ways you can take advantage of this. For example, you can target anyone that landed on a high buyer intent page and serve them ads pitching your product or a special offer. Alternatively, you can target people who landed on an educational blog post and offer them something to drive them down the funnel. E.g. free e-book or white paper to teach them more about your product or service. SEO Tip #37. Doing Local SEO? Follow These Tips Local SEO is significantly different from global SEO. Here’s how the two differ (and what you need to do to drive local SEO results): You don’t need to publish content. For 95% of local businesses, you only want to rank for keywords related to your services/products, you don’t actually need to create educational content. You need to focus more on reviews and citation-building. One of Google Maps’ biggest ranking factors is the of reviews your business has. Encourage your customers to leave a review if they enjoyed your product/service through email or real-life communication. You need to create service pages for each location. As a local business, your #1 priority is to rank for keywords around your service. E.g. If you're a personal injury law firm, you want to optimize your homepage for “personal injury law firm” and then create separate pages for each service you provide, e.g. “car accident lawyer,” “motorcycle injury law firm,” etc. Focus on building citations. Being listed on business directories makes your business more trustworthy for Google. BrightLocal is a good service for this. You don’t need to focus as much on link-building. As local SEO is less competitive than global, you don’t have to focus nearly as much on building links. You can, in a lot of cases, rank with the right service pages and citations. SEO Tip #38. Stop Ignoring the Outreach Emails You’re Getting (And Use Them to Build Your Own Links) Got a ton of people emailing you asking for links? You might be tempted to just send them all straight to spam, and I don’t blame you. Outreach messages like “Hey Dr Jigsaw, your article is A+++ amazing! ...can I get a backlink?” can get hella annoying. That said, there IS a better way to deal with these emails: Reply and ask for a link back. Most of the time, people who send such outreach emails are also doing heavy guest posting. So, you can ask for a backlink from a 3rd-party website in exchange for you mentioning their link in your article. Win-win! SEO Tip #39. Doing Internal Linking for a Large Website? This’ll Help Internal linking can get super grueling once you have hundreds of articles on your website. Want to make the process easier? Do this: Pick an article you want to interlink on your website. For the sake of the example, let’s say it’s about “business process improvement.” Go on Google and look up variations of this keyword mentioned on your website. For example: Site:\[yourwebsite\] “improve business process” Site:\[yourwebsite\] “improve process” Site:\[yourwebsite\] “process improvement” The above queries will find you the EXACT articles where these keywords are mentioned. Then, all you have to do is go through them and include the links. SEO Tip #40. Got a Competitor Copying Your Content? File a DMCA Notice Fun fact - if your competitors are copying your website, you can file a DMCA notice with Google. That said, keep in mind that there are consequences for filing a fake notice.

I got fired due to automation — lessons learned. Two-month overview.
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WebsterPepsterThis week

I got fired due to automation — lessons learned. Two-month overview.

UPD: Guys, I'm not promoting myself as some of the redditors decided. That's why to deal with contradictions I'll do next things: make additional post with short review and description of the general tools and processes you could apply. help only those who have already written me. So I won't answer on new offers or DMs. As mentioned, damn robots have taken my job. PRE-HISTORY During Covid times, I found myself without my offline job, and since I was interested in marketing and SMM, I began searching for a job there. Completed free Google and Udemy courses and finally landed my first SMM manager position with a business owner. He had several projects so, finally, I started managing three Twitter accounts, two Facebook accs, two IGs, and one TikTok. I handled posting, content editing and responding routine, while freelancers usually took care of video creation for IG and TT. THE STORY ITSELF Things took a turn for the worse in April when my employer introduced ChatGPT and Midjourney, tools I was already using. The owner insisted on integrating them into the workflow, and my wages took a 20% hit. I thought I could roll with it, but it was just the beginning. By midsummer, the owner implemented second-layer AI tools like Visla, Pictory, and Woxo for video (bye freelancers, lol), as well as TweetHunter, Jasper, and Perplexity for content. Midjourney and Firefly joined for image generation. All together, my paycheck was slashed by 50%. Finally, at the end of October, my boss told me he automated stuff with Zapier, cutting costs that way. Additionally, he adopted MarketOwl, autoposting tool for Twitter, and SocialBee for Facebook. He stated that he didn’t need me, as by now he could manage the social media accounts himself. I feel so pissed then and even thought that there's no point in searching for similar jobs. HOW I SPENT TWO MONTHS Well, for the first two weeks, I did nothing but being miserable, drinking and staring at the wall. My gf said it's unbearable and threatened to leave if I not pull myself together. It was not the final push, but definitely made me rethink things. So I decided to learn more about the capabilities of these automation covers and eventually became an AI adviser for small businesses. It's ironic that now I sometimes earn money advising on how to optimize marketing, possibly contributing to other people's job loss. FINAL THOUGHTS I am fully aware of the instability of such a job and have invested my last savings in taking an online marketing course at Columbia to gain more marketing experience and got something more stable afterwards. Message for mods: I'm not promoting myself or anything mentioned here; just sharing the experience that someone might find helpful.

My boss taught me how to build a Failed business (15 lessons)
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aminekhThis week

My boss taught me how to build a Failed business (15 lessons)

I'm a senior software developer at a three-year-old startup that has been making $0 in revenue. I've been with this startup since its beginning, and it pays me $1200/month. My boss has broken the records of the number of stupid ideas and stupid features that he asked me to implement. He taught me (unintentionally) all the lessons I should NOT do to build a successful business. From bad product ideas, bad business decisions, not listening to your team, not building what target customers want, and falling in love with your bad product. The product we're working on is a desktop program that moves the cursor with your finger using the webcam (gesture recognition). Why in the world would anyone pay money to move the mouse cursor with his finger? No one knows. My boss watched Iron Man (the film) and saw how Tony Starks do gestures in front of his "advanced" computer and thought it was cool so he asked me to build this for him to sell it to enterprises (then pivoted the target customer to schools). Of course, no one bought this software. All the people he meets tell him it is cool but he never hears from them again. No one on the team, except my boss, thinks this software will succeed. He keeps adding irrelevant features to this software just because he "thinks" people will love it. We added 3D object visualizer, ChatGPT integration, and Quizzes. I suggested moving everything to the cloud and focusing only on improving the education industry by providing solutions that help teachers better prepare their lessons and understand where each student lacks by recording lessons, summarizing them for students, generating quizzes using AI, and analyzing the part that each student didn't understand. However, to do that, we need to forget the part of moving the cursor with fingers because it can be done only on Python, not NextJS. He simply replied, "NO, moving the cursor with fingers is COOL". So here are the lessons I learned from my boss to build a failed business: Never listen to your team. Always build what you think is good and never let anyone from your team say it's a bad idea. Fall in love with your business idea. Don't talk to customers. If no one bought your product, it's because they don't understand how cool it is. If a member of your team say it's a bad idea, ignore them, they don't understand how cool your idea is. Always hire interns because they're free labor and give them the most sensitive parts of the work like payments and databases. Make your business dependant on you. Don't let your team do their job the right way, give them orders to do it YOUR way. Hire experts to tell them what to do not to tell you what to do and how to do it. Never do marketing because people will steal your idea. Ask your team "What you think?" but ignore them. If your wife and children think your product is cool then it's cool. Start a business in an industry that you know nothing about but act like you know everything. If no one is buying your product, keep adding irrelevant features that no one asked for. \--- Edit: I didn't mention all the "stupid" ideas I built for him so here you go: Replacing Zoom, Teams, and Meet meetings with meetings in the metaverse. Target customer: Enterprises. An app that lets you scroll through social media without touching your mobile screen (using gesture recognition). We didn't build this because it's technically impossible to continuously use the phone camera outside your own app. He didn't believe me so asked his friend and told him the same thing. A software that controls the computer with gestures (moving cursor, single click, double click, ALT Tab...). Target customers: Enterprises Building a classroom in Decentraland (metaverse) to replace classes through Zoom and Teams He told me to build the startup website but to not make the home page the first page a user lands on when he opens the website. He wants to make the visitor lands on another "almost" empty page and if the user wants to go to the home page he should click on "Home" in the navbar.

Started a content marketing agency 8 years ago - $0 to $7,863,052 (2025 update)
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mr_t_forhireThis week

Started a content marketing agency 8 years ago - $0 to $7,863,052 (2025 update)

Hey friends, My name is Tyler and for the past 8 years, I’ve been documenting my experience building a content marketing agency called Optimist. Year 1 — 0 to $500k ARR Year 2 — $500k to $1MM ARR Year 3 — $1MM ARR to $1.5MM(ish) ARR Year 4 — $3,333,686 Revenue Year 5 — $4,539,659 Revenue Year 6 — $5,974,324 Revenue Year 7 - $6,815,503 Revenue (Edit: Seems like links are banned now. You can check my post history for all of my previous updates with lessons and learnings.) How Optimist Works First, an overview/recap of the Optimist business model: We operate as a “collective” of full time/professional freelancers Everyone aside from me is a contractor Entirely remote/distributed team We pay freelancers a flat fee for most work, working out to roughly $65-100/hour. Clients pay us a flat monthly fee for full-service content marketing (research, strategy, writing, editing, design/photography, reporting and analytics, targeted linkbuilding, and more)\ Packages range in price from \~$10-20k/mo \This is something we are revisiting now* The Financials In 2024, we posted $1,032,035.34 in revenue. This brings our lifetime revenue to $7,863,052. Here’s our monthly revenue from January 2017 to December of 2024. (Edit: Seems like I'm not allowed to link to the chart.) The good news: Revenue is up 23% YoY. EBITDA in Q4 trending up 1-2 points. We hosted our first retreat in 4 years, going to Ireland with about half the team. The bad news: Our revenue is still historically low. At $1MM for the year, we’re down about 33% from our previous years over $1.5MM. Revenue has been rocky. It doesn’t feel like we’ve really “recovered” from the bumps last year. The trend doesn’t really look great. Even though, anecdotally, it feels like we are moving in a good direction. EBITDA is still hovering at around 7%. Would love to get that closer to 20%. (For those who may ask: I’m calculating EBITDA after paying taxes and W2 portion of my income.) — Almost every year, my update starts the same way: This has been a year of growth and change. Both for my business—and me personally. 2024 was no different. I guess that tells you something about entrepreneurship. It’s a lot more like sailing a ship than driving a car. You’re constantly adapting, tides are shifting, and any blip of calm is usually just a moment before the next storm. As with past years, there’s a lot to unpack from the last 12 months. Here we go again. Everything is Burning In the last 2 years, everything has turned upside down in the world of content and SEO. Back in 2020, we made a big decision to re-position the agency. (See post history) We decided to narrow our focus to our most successful, profitable, and consistent segment of clients and re-work our entire operation to focus on serving them. We defined our ICP as: \~Series A ($10mm+ funding) with 6-12 months runway to scale organic as a channel Product-led company with “simple” sales cycle involving fewer stakeholders Demonstrable opportunity to use SEO to drive business growth Our services: Content focused on growing organic search (SEO) Full-service engagements that included research, planning, writing, design, reporting And our engagement structure: Engaged directly with an executive; ownership over strategy and day-to-day execution 1-2 points of contact or stakeholders Strategic partner that drives business growth (not a service vendor who makes content) Most importantly, we decided that we were no longer going to offer a broader range of content that we used to sell. That included everything from thought leadership content to case studies and ebooks. We doubled-down on “SEO content” for product-led SaaS companies. And this worked phenomenally for us. We started bringing on more clients than ever. We developed a lot of internal system and processes that helped us scale and take on more work than we’ve ever had and drive great outcomes for our ideal clients. But in 2023 and 2024, things started going awry. One big change, of course, was the rise of AI. Many companies and executives (and writers) feel that AI can write content just as well as an agency like ours. That made it a lot harder to sell a $10,000 per month engagement when they feel like the bulk of the work could be “done for free.” (Lots of thoughts on this if you want my opinions.) But it wasn’t just that. Google also started tinkering with their algorithm, introducing new features like AI Overviews, and generally changing the rules of the game. This created 3 big shifts in our world: The perceived value of content (especially “SEO content”) dropped dramatically in many people’s minds because of AI’s writing capabilities SEO became less predictable as a source of traffic and revenue It’s harder than ever for startups and smaller companies to rank for valuable keywords (let alone generate any meaningful traffic or revenue from them) The effect? The middle of the content market has hollowed out. People—like us—providing good, human-crafted content aimed on driving SEO growth saw a dramatic decline in demand. We felt it all year. Fewer and fewer leads. The leads we did see usually scoffed at our prices. They were indexing us against the cost of content mills and mass-produced AI articles. It was a time of soul-searching and looking for a way forward. I spent the first half of the year convinced that the only way to survive was to run toward the fire. We have to build our own AI workflows. We have to cut our rates internally. We have to get faster and cheaper to stay competitive with the agencies offering the same number of deliverables for a fraction of our rates. It’s the only way forward. But then I asked myself a question… Is this the game I actually want to play? As an entrepreneur, do I want to run a business where I’m competing mostly on price and efficiency rather than quality and value? Do I want to hop into a race toward cheaper and cheaper content? Do I want to help people chase a dwindling amount of organic traffic that’s shrinking in value? No. That’s not the game I want to play. That’s not a business I want to run. I don’t want to be in the content mill business. So I decided to turn the wheel—again. Repositioning Part II: Electric Boogaloo What do you do when the whole world shifts around you and the things that used to work aren’t working anymore? You pivot. You re-position the business and move in another direction. So that’s what we decided to do. Again. There was only one problem: I honestly wasn’t sure what opportunities existed in the content marketing industry outside of what we were already doing. We lived in a little echo chamber of startups and SEO. It felt like the whole market was on fire and I had fight through the smoke to find an escape hatch. So I started making calls. Good ol’ fashioned market research. I reached out to a few dozen marketing and content leaders at a bunch of different companies. I got on the phone and just asked lots of questions about their content programs, their goals, and their pain points. I wanted to understand what was happening in the market and how we could be valuable. And, luckily, this process really paid off. I learned a lot about the fragmentation happening across content and how views were shifting. I noticed key trends and how our old target market really wasn’t buying what we were selling. Startups and small companies are no longer willing to invest in an agency like ours. If they were doing content and SEO at all, they were focused entirely on using AI to scale output and minimize costs. VC money is still scarce and venture-backed companies are more focused on profitability than pure growth and raising another round. Larger companies (\~500+ employees) are doing more content than ever and drowning in content production. They want to focus on strategy but can barely tread water keeping up with content requests from sales, demand gen, the CEO, and everyone else. Many of the companies still investing in content are looking at channels and formats outside of SEO. Things like thought leadership, data reports, interview-driven content, and more. They see it as a way to stand out from the crowd of “bland SEO content.” Content needs are constantly in flux. They range from data reports and blog posts to product one-pagers. The idea of a fixed-scope retainer is a total mismatch for the needs of most companies. All of this led to the logical conclusion: We were talking to the wrong people about the wrong things\.\ Many companies came to one of two logical conclusions: SEO is a risky bet, so it’s gotta be a moonshot—super-low cost with a possibility for a big upside (i.e., use AI to crank out lots of content. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, then at least we aren’t out much money.) SEO is a risky bet, so we should diversify into other strategies and channels to drive growth (i.e., shift our budget from SEO and keyword-focused content to video, podcasts, thought leadership, social, etc) Unless we were going to lean into AI and dramatically cut our costs and rates, our old buyers weren’t interested. And the segment of the market that needs our help most are looking primarily for production support across a big range of content types. They’re not looking for a team to run a full-blown program focused entirely on SEO. So we had to go back to the drawing board. I’ve written before about our basic approach to repositioning the business. But, ultimately it comes down to identifying our unique strengths as a team and then connecting them to needs in the market. After reviewing the insights from my discussions and taking another hard look at our business and our strengths, I decided on a new direction: Move upmarket: Serve mid-size to enterprise businesses with \~500-5,000 employees instead of startups Focus on content that supports a broader range of business goals instead of solely on SEO and organic growth (e.g., sales, demand gen, brand, etc) Shift back to our broader playbook of content deliverables, including thought leadership, data studies, and more Focus on content execution and production to support an internally-directed content strategy across multiple functions In a way, it’s sort of a reverse-niche move. Rather than zooming in specifically on driving organic growth for startups, we want to be more of an end-to-end content production partner that solves issues of execution and operations for all kinds of content teams. It’s early days, but the response here has been promising. We’ve seen an uptick in leads through Q4. And more companies in our pipeline fit the new ICP. They’re bigger, often have more budget. (But they move more slowly). We should know by the end of the quarter if this maneuver is truly paying off. Hopefully, this will work out. Hopefully our research and strategy are right and we’ll find a soft landing serving a different type of client. If it doesn’t? Then it will be time to make some harder decisions. As I already mentioned, I’m not interested in the race to the bottom of AI content. And if that’s the only game left in town, then it might be time to think hard about a much bigger change. — To be done: Build new content playbooks for expanded deliverables Build new showcase page for expanded deliverables Retooling the Operation It’s easy to say we’re doing something new. It’s a lot harder to actually do it—and do it well. Beyond just changing our positioning, we have to do open-heart surgery on the entire content operation behind the scenes. We need to create new systems that work for a broader range of content types, formats, and goals. Here’s the first rub: All of our workflows are tooled specifically for SEO-focused content. Every template, worksheet, and process that we’ve built and scaled in the last 5 years assumes that the primary goal of every piece of content is SEO. Even something as simple as requiring a target keyword is a blocker in a world where we’re not entirely focused on SEO. This is relatively easy to fix, but it requires several key changes: Update content calendars to make keywords optional Update workflows to determine whether we need an optimization report for each deliverable Next, we need to break down the deliverables into parts rather than a single line item. In our old system, we would plan content as a single row in a Content Calendar spreadsheet. It was a really wide sheet with lots of fields where we’d define the dimensions of each individual article. This was very efficient and simple to follow. But every article had the same overall scope when it came to the workflow. In Asana (our project management tool), all of the steps in the creation were strung together in a single task. We would create a few basic templates for each client, and then each piece would flow through the same steps: Briefing Writing Editing Design etc. If we had anything that didn’t fit into the “standard” workflow, we’d just tag it in the calendar with an unofficial notation \[USING BRACKETS\]. It worked. But it wasn’t ideal. Now we need the steps to be more modular. Imagine, for example, a client asks us to create a mix of deliverables: 1 article with writing + design 1 content brief 1 long-form ebook with an interview + writing + design Each of these would require its own steps and its own workflow. We need to break down the work to accommodate for a wider variety of workflows and variables. This means we need to update the fields and structure of our calendar to accommodate for the new dimensions—while also keeping the planning process simple and manageable. This leads to the next challenge: The number of “products” that we’re offering could be almost infinite. Just looking at the example scope above, you can mix and match all of these different building blocks to create a huge variety of different types of work, each requiring its own workflow. This is part of the reason we pivoted away from this model to focus on a productized, SEO-focused content service back in 2020. Take something as simple as a case study. On the surface, it seems like one deliverable that can be easily scoped and priced, right? Well, unpack what goes into a case study: Is there already source material from the customer or do we need to conduct an interview? How long is it? Is it a short overview case study or a long-form narrative? Does it need images and graphics? How many? Each of these variables opens up 2-3 possibilities. And when you combine them, we end up with something like 10 possible permutations for this single type of deliverable. It gets a bit messy. But not only do we have to figure out how to scope and price all for all of these variables, we also have to figure out how to account for these variables in the execution. We have to specify—for every deliverable—what type it is, how long, which steps are involved and not involved, the timeline for delivery, and all of the other factors. We’re approaching infinite complexity, here. We have to figure out a system that allows for a high level of flexibility to serve the diverse needs of our clients but is also productized enough that we can build workflows, process, and templates to deliver the work. I’ve spent the last few months designing that system. Failed Attempt #1: Ultra-Productization In my first pass, I tried to make it as straight forward as possible. Just sit down, make a list of all of the possible deliverables we could provide and then assign them specific scopes and services. Want a case study? Okay that’ll include an interview, up to 2,000 words of content, and 5 custom graphics. It costs $X. But this solution quickly fell apart when we started testing it against real-world scenarios. What if the client provided the brief instead of us creating one? What if they didn’t want graphics? What if this particular case study really needs to be 3,000 words but all of the others should be 2,000? In order for this system to work, we’d need to individual scope and price all of these permutations of each productized service. Then we’d need to somehow keep track of all of these and make sure that we accurately scope, price, and deliver them across dozens of clients. It’s sort of like a restaurant handling food allergies by creating separate versions of every single dish to account for every individual type of allergy. Most restaurants have figured out that it makes way more sense to have a “standard” and an “allergy-free” version. Then you only need 2 options to cover 100% of the cases. Onto the next option. Failed Attempt #2: Deliverable-Agnostic Services Next, I sat down with my head of Ops, Katy, to try to map it out. We took a big step back and said: Why does the deliverable itself even matter? At the end of the day, what we’re selling is just a few types of work (research, writing, editing, design, etc) that can be packaged up in an infinite number of ways. Rather than try to define deliverables, shouldn’t we leave it open ended for maximum flexibility? From there, we decided to break down everything into ultra-modular building blocks. We started working on this super complex system of modular deliverables where we would have services like writing, design, editing, etc—plus a sliding scale for different scopes like the length of writing or the number of images. In theory, it would allow us to mix and match any combination of services to create custom deliverables for the client. In fact, we wanted the work to be deliverable-agnostic. That way we could mold it to fit any client’s needs and deliver any type of content, regardless of the format or goal. Want a 5,000-word case study with 15 custom graphics? That’ll be $X. Want a 2,000-word blog post with an interview and no visuals? $Y. Just want us to create 10 briefs, you handle the writing, and we do design? It’s $Z. Again, this feels like a reasonable solution. But it quickly spiraled out of amuck. (That’s an Office reference.) For this to work, we need to have incredibly precise scoping process for every single deliverable. Before we can begin work (or even quote a price), we need to know pretty much the exact word count of the final article, for example. In the real world? This almost never happens. The content is as long as the content needs to be. Clients rarely know if the blog post should be 2,000 words or 3,000 words. They just want good content. We have a general ballpark, but we can rarely dial it in within just 1,000 words until we’ve done enough research to create the brief. Plus, from a packaging and pricing perspective, it introduces all kind of weird scenarios where clients will owe exactly $10,321 for this ultra-specific combination of services. We were building an open system that could accommodate any and all types of potential deliverables. On the face that seems great because it makes us incredibly flexible. In reality, the ambiguity actually works against us. It makes it harder for us to communicate to clients clearly about what they’ll get, how much it will cost, and how long it will take. That, of course, also means that it hurts our client relationships. (This actually kind of goes back to my personal learnings, which I’ll mention in a bit. I tend to be a “let’s leave things vague so we don’t have to limit our options” kind of person. But I’m working on fixing this to be more precise, specific, and clear in everything that we do.) Dialing It In: Building a Closed System We were trying to build an open system. We need to build a closed system. We need to force clarity and get specific about what we do, what we don’t do, and how much it all costs. Then we need a system to expand on that closed system—add new types of deliverables, new content playbooks, and new workflows if and when the need arises. With that in mind, we can start by mapping out the key dimensions of any type of deliverable that we would ever want to deliver. These are the universal dimensions that determine the scope, workflow, and price of any deliverable—regardless of the specific type output. Dimensions are: Brief scope Writing + editing scope Design scope Interview scope Revision (rounds) Scope, essentially, just tells us how many words, graphics, interviews, etc are required for the content we’re creating. In our first crack at the system, we got super granular with these scopes. But to help force a more manageable system, we realized that we didn’t need tiny increments for most of this work. Instead, we just need boundaries—you pay $X for up to Y words. We still need some variability around the scope of these articles. Obviously, most clients won’t be willing to pay the same price for a 1,000-word article as a 10,000-word article. But we can be smarter about the realistic break points. We boiled it down to the most common ranges: (Up to) 250 words 1,000 words 3,000 words 6,000 words 10,000 words This gives us a much more manageable number of variables. But we still haven’t exactly closed the system. We need one final dimension: Deliverable type. This tells us what we’re actually building with these building blocks. This is how we’ll put a cap on the potentially infinite number of combinations we could offer. The deliverable type will define what the final product should look like (e.g., blog post, case study, ebook, etc). And it will also give us a way to put standards and expectations around different types of deliverables that we want to offer. Then we can expand on this list of deliverables to offer new services. In the mean time, only the deliverables that we have already defined are, “on the menu,” so to speak. If a client comes to us and asks for something like a podcast summary article (which we don’t currently offer), we’ll have to either say we can’t provide that work or create a new deliverable type and define the dimensions of that specific piece. But here’s the kicker: No matter the deliverable type, it has to still fit within the scopes we’ve already defined. And the pricing will be the same. This means that if you’re looking for our team to write up to 1,000 words of content, it costs the same amount—whether it’s a blog post, an ebook, a LinkedIn post, or anything else. Rather than trying to retool our entire system to offer this new podcast summary article deliverable, we’ll just create the new deliverable type, add it to the list of options, and it’s ready to sell with the pre-defined dimensions we’ve already identified. To do: Update onboarding workflow Update contracts and scope documents Dial in new briefing process Know Thyself For the last year, I’ve been going through personal therapy. (Huge shout out to my wife, Laura, for her support and encouragement throughout the process.) It’s taught me a lot about myself and my tendencies. It’s helped me find some of my weaknesses and think about how I can improve as a person, as a partner, and as an entrepreneur. And it’s forced me to face a lot of hard truths. For example, consider some of the critical decisions I’ve made for my business: Unconventional freelance “collective” model No formal management structure Open-ended retainers with near-infinite flexibility General contracts without defined scope “Take it or leave it” approach to sales and marketing Over the years, I’ve talked about almost everything on this list as a huge advantage. I saw these things as a reflection of how I wanted to do things differently and better than other companies. But now, I see them more as a reflection of my fears and insecurities. Why did I design my business like this? Why do I want so much “flexibility” and why do I want things left open-ended rather than clearly defined? One reason that could clearly explain it: I’m avoidant. If you’re not steeped in the world of therapy, this basically means that my fight or flight response gets turned all the way to “flight.” If I’m unhappy or uncomfortable, my gut reaction is usually to withdraw from the situation. I see commitment and specificity as a prelude to future conflict. And I avoid conflict whenever possible. So I built my business to minimize it. If I don’t have a specific schedule of work that I’m accountable for delivering, then we can fudge the numbers a bit and hope they even out in the end. If I don’t set a specific standard for the length of an article, then I don’t have to let the client know when their request exceeds that limit. Conflict….avoided? Now, that’s not to say that everything I’ve built was wrong or bad. There is a lot of value in having flexibility in your business. For example, I would say that our flexible retainers are, overall, an advantage. Clients have changing needs. Having flexibility to quickly adapt to those needs can be a huge value add. And not everything can be clearly defined upfront (at least not without a massive amount of time and work just to decide how long to write an article). Overly-rigid structures and processes can be just as problematic as loosey-goosey ones. But, on the whole, I realized that my avoidant tendencies and laissez faire approach to management have left a vacuum in many areas. The places where I avoided specificity were often the places where there was the most confusion, uncertainty, and frustration from the team and from clients. People simply didn’t know what to expect or what was expected of them. Ironically, this often creates the conflict I’m trying to avoid. For example, if I don’t give feedback to people on my team, then they feel uneasy about their work. Or they make assumptions about expectations that don’t match what I’m actually expecting. Then the client might get upset, I might get upset, and our team members may be upset. Conflict definitely not avoided. This happens on the client side, too. If we don’t define a specific timeline when something will be delivered, the client might expect it sooner than we can deliver—creating frustration when we don’t meet their expectation. This conflict actually would have been avoided if we set clearer expectations upfront. But we didn’t do that. I didn’t do that. So it’s time to step up and close the gaps. Stepping Up and Closing the Gaps If I’m going to address these gaps and create more clarity and stability, I have to step up. Both personally and professionally. I have to actually face the fear and uncertainty that drives me to be avoidant. And then apply that to my business in meaningful ways that aren’t cop-out ways of kinda-sorta providing structure without really doing it. I’ve gotta be all in. This means: Fill the gaps where I rely on other people to do things that aren’t really their job but I haven’t put someone in place to do it Set and maintain expectations about our internal work processes, policies, and standards Define clear boundaries on things like roles, timelines, budgets, and scopes Now, this isn’t going to happen overnight. And just because I say that I need to step up to close these gaps doesn’t mean that I need to be the one who’s responsible for them (at least not forever). It just means that, as the business leader, I need to make sure the gaps get filled—by me or by someone else who has been specifically charged with owning that part of the operation. So, this is probably my #1 focus over the coming quarter. And it starts by identifying the gaps that exist. Then, step into those gaps myself, pay someone else to fill that role, or figure out how to eliminate the gap another way. This means going all the way back to the most basic decisions in our business. One of the foundational things about Optimist is being a “different kind” of agency. I always wanted to build something that solved for the bureaucracy, hierarchy, and siloed structure of agencies. If a client has feedback, they should be able to talk directly to the person doing the work rather than going through 3 layers of account management and creative directors. So I tried to be clever. I tried to design all kinds of systems and processes that eliminated these middle rungs. (In retrospect, what I was actually doing was designing a system that played into my avoidant tendencies and made it easy to abdicate responsibility for lots of things.) Since we didn’t want to create hierarchy, we never implemented things like Junior and Senior roles. We never hired someone to manage or direct the individual creatives. We didn’t have Directors or VPs. (Hell, we barely had a project manager for the first several years of existence.) This aversion to hierarchy aligned with our values around elevating ownership and collective contribution. I still believe in the value a flat structure. But a flat structure doesn’t eliminate the complexity of a growing business. No one to review writers and give them 1:1 feedback? I guess I’ll just have to do that….when I have some spare time. No Content Director? Okay, well someone needs to manage our content playbooks and roll out new ones. Just add it to my task list. Our flat structure didn’t eliminate the need for these roles. It just eliminated the people to do them. All of those unfilled roles ultimately fell back on me or our ops person, Katy. Of course, this isn’t the first time we’ve recognized this. We’ve known there were growing holes in our business as it’s gotten bigger and more complex. Over the years, we’ve experimented with different ways to solve for it. The Old Solution: Distributed Ops One system we designed was a “distributed ops” framework. Basically, we had one person who was the head of ops (at the time, we considered anything that was non-client-facing to be “ops”). They’d plan and organize all of the various things that needed to happen around Optimist. Then they’d assign out the work to whoever was able to help. We had a whole system for tying this into the our profit share and even gave people “Partner” status based on their contributions to ops. It worked—kinda. One big downfall is that all of the tasks and projects were ad hoc. People would pick up jobs, but they didn’t have much context or expertise to apply. So the output often varied. Since we were trying to maintain a flat structure, there was minimal oversight or management of the work. In other words, we didn’t always get the best results. But, more importantly, we still didn’t close all of the gaps entirely. Because everything was an ad-hoc list of tasks and projects, we never really had the “big picture” view of everything that needed to be done across the business. This also meant we rarely had clarity on what was important, what was trivial, and what was critical. We need a better system. Stop Reinventing the Wheel (And Create a Damn Org Chart) It’s time to get serious about filling the gaps in our business. It can’t be a half-fix or an ad hoc set of projects and tasks. We need clarity on the roles that need to be filled and then fill them. The first step here is to create an org chart. A real one. Map out all of the jobs that need to be done for Optimist to be successful besides just writers and designers. Roles like: Content director Design director SEO manager Reporting Finance Account management Business development Sales Marketing Project management It feels a bit laughable listing all of these roles. Because most are either empty or have my name attached to them. And that’s the problem. I can’t do everything. And all of the empty roles are gaps in our structure—places where people aren’t getting the direction, feedback, or guidance they need to do their best work. Or where things just aren’t being done consistently. Content director, for example, should be responsible for steering the output of our content strategists, writers, and editors. They’re not micromanaging every deliverable. But they give feedback, set overall policy, and help our team identify opportunities to get better. Right now we don’t have anyone in that role. Which means it’s my job—when I have time. Looking at the org chart (a real org chart that I actually built to help with this), it’s plain as day how many roles look like this. Even if we aren’t going to implement a traditional agency structure and a strict hierarchy, we still need to address these gaps. And the only way for that to happen is face the reality and then create a plan to close the gaps. Now that we have a list of theoretical roles, we need to clearly define the responsibilities and boundaries of those roles to make sure they cover everything that actually needs to happen. Then we can begin the process of delegating, assigning, hiring, and otherwise addressing each one. So that’s what I need to do. To be done: Create job descriptions for all of the roles we need to fill Hire Biz Dev role Hire Account Lead role(s) Hire Head of Content Playing Offense As we move into Q1 of 2025 and I reflect on the tumultuous few years we’ve had, one thought keeps running through my head. We need to play offense. Most of the last 1-2 years was reacting to changes that were happening around us. Trying to make sense and chart a new path forward. Reeling. But what I really want—as a person and as an entrepreneur—is to be proactive. I want to think and plan ahead. Figure out where we want to go before we’re forced to change course by something that’s out of our control. So my overarching focus for Q1 is playing offense. Thinking longer term. Getting ahead of the daily deluge and creating space to be more proactive, innovative, and forward thinking. To do: Pilot new content formats Audit and update our own content strategy Improve feedback workflows Build out long-term roadmap for 1-2 years for Optimist Final Note on Follow-Through and Cadence In my reflection this year, one of the things I’ve realized is how helpful these posts are for me. I process by writing. So I actually end up making a lot of decisions and seeing things more clearly each time I sit down to reflect and write my yearly recap. It also gives me a space to hold myself accountable for the things I said I would do. So, I’m doing two things a bit differently from here on out. First: I’m identifying clear action items that I’m holding myself accountable for getting done in the next 3 months (listed in the above sections). In each future update, I’ll do an accounting of what I got done and what wasn’t finished (and why). Second: I’m going to start writing shorter quarterly updates. This will gives me more chances each year to reflect, process, and make decisions. Plus it gives me a shorter feedback loop for the action items that I identified above. (See—playing offense.) — Okay friends, enemies, and frenemies. This is my first update for 2025. Glad to share with y’all. And thanks to everyone who’s read, commented, reached out, and shared their own experiences over the years. We are all the accumulation of our connections and our experiences. As always, I will pop in to respond to comments and answer questions. Feel free to share your thoughts, questions, and general disdain down below. Cheers, Tyler

I run an AI automation agency (AAA). My honest overview and review of this new business model
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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 just sold my startup for $200,000 after 11 months. AMA
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jeannenThis week

I just sold my startup for $200,000 after 11 months. AMA

Last August, I was looking for a startup idea I could grow and made a MVP in a week then launched it. I received the $200,000 wire from the buyer a couple of days ago I found tons of useful info online for free, so I hope this can be my way of giving back :) Here is some background: Idea I got the idea when trying to write a tweet using Google Doc's transcription tool, which was terrible. I was pretty sure I wasn't the only one too lazy to type, I made my own solution using AI to transcribe and reformat voice notes into any kind of content. I called it Talknotes, mainly because it was the only domain available lol Validation: My rule is to only reinvest what the project generates. After listing on startup directories and posting on Twitter, I generated $700 in 10 days. It wasn't much, but enough to show interest and keep me motivated. I added user-requested features, but the launch effect wore off, and daily revenues dropped to $0 after a few weeks. I almost gave up, but friends encouraged me to continue. In October, I launched on ProductHunt and it blew up. It became Product of the Day and reached $1500 MRR thanks to media coverage. I initially built everything using vanilla JS/CSS/HTML + Node for backend. But it's pretty limited for apps with lots of interactivity so, I rebuilt the app using Nuxt.js to make it easier to ship new features. Then, I launched ads on Facebook and I implemented a feedback loop: Get new users Learn about them through onboarding Make more ads based on onboarding data This doubled MRR in about 2 months. Burnout and Sale: In May, I had a bad burnout after emergency bug fixes. This made it hard to work on the app after. At this point MRR was around $7000 and total revenues around $70,0000 I listed it on Acquire.com for $200,000, a very good price for the buyer considering revenues and growth. I could've gotten $300,000 with buyer financing or earn-outs, but I wanted cash, $200,000 today is better than $300,000 in a year. Everything was smooth until we tried using Escrow, which almost fucked up the deal (details here). Long story short, had to threaten them to make a sponsored post on Twitter explaining what they did + legal action. They sent the refund the very next day, and we completed the transfer directly. Now, this isn't an overnight success. It's the result of 7 years of grind. I launched over 40 projects since I started, and most of them failed. I often worked 100 hours per week, and I rarely go out or meet many people. It's not for everyone, but I'm fine with it With the profit from the app + sale, and other projects, I have close to 1/3 of a million dollar. I could retire in Asia if I wanted Just mind blowing to think I wrote funny characters in a code editor and sold it for the price of a house lol Edit 1: A few people got confused. I said it's 7 years of grind and most of my projects failed, not that I was not making money. I also said I OFTEN worked 100h/week, not every week :) Since I learned to code 2 years ago I've made close to $400k from my app's profit + exit (this one + another one for $65k last year). And before that I was making money as a marketing freelancer. Also, I dropped after high-school, so, I had to learn everything from scratch, it takes time! Edit 2: Lots of people asked how/where I learned to code in 2 months. I wrote a blog/journal about it back then with links to resources, you can find it here if you're interested

B2B Marketers: What’s Your #1 Tip for Selling SaaS to Other Businesses? (Building a Tool for Shopify SEO)
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iammanmanthemanThis week

B2B Marketers: What’s Your #1 Tip for Selling SaaS to Other Businesses? (Building a Tool for Shopify SEO)

Hi everyone! I’m part of a team building an AI-powered SEO tool specifically for Shopify stores (think automated technical fixes, predictive keyword optimization, etc.). We’re in the early stages and want to learn from seasoned B2B marketers: We’re struggling with: How to position a technical SaaS product to non-technical Shopify merchants. Cutting through the noise in a crowded SEO tools market. Building trust quickly with time-strapped business owners. Questions for B2B Marketing Pros: What’s the biggest mistake you made when marketing a SaaS product to businesses? What’s one underrated tactic that’s worked wonders for B2B lead gen? How do you prove ROI to skeptical buyers? (Especially for something abstract like SEO.) What’s your go-to channel for cold outreach that doesn’t feel spammy? What’s a hidden psychological trigger that works in B2B sales? What’s the best way to leverage case studies/testimonials when you’re just starting out? What’s one thing most founders waste money on in B2B marketing? For Those Who’ve Sold to Shopify Merchants: What’s their biggest pain point when evaluating tools? What type of content (webinars, blogs, demos) convinces them to buy? The Deal: We’ll compile all advice into a guide and credit contributors. If you're willing to have a virtual coffee chat, please reach out to us, we are always willing to listen to your wisdom!

10 Side Projects in 10 Years: Lessons from Failures and a $700 Exit
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TheValueProviderThis week

10 Side Projects in 10 Years: Lessons from Failures and a $700 Exit

Hey folks, I'm sharing my journey so far in case it can help others. Entrepreneurship can sometimes be demotivating. In my case, I've always been involved in side projects and what I've realized is that every time you crash a project, the next one makes it a bit further. So this is a long-term game and consistency ends up paying off The $1 Android Game (2015, age 18) What Happened: 500 downloads, 1€ in ad revenue Ugly UI, performance issues Key Lessons: Don’t be afraid of launching. Delaying for “perfection” is often a sign that you fear being ignored. I was trying to perfect every aspect of the game. In reality, I was delaying the launch because I feared no one would download the app. Commit to the project or kill it. At some point, this project was no longer fun (it was just about fixing device responsiveness). Most importantly, I wasn't learning anything new so I moved to smth else. The Forex Bot Regret (2016, age 19) What Happened: Lost months identifying inexistent chart patterns Created a Trading bot that was never profitable Key Lessons: Day trading’s real winners are usually brokers. There are plenty of guys selling a bot or systems that are not making money trading, why would they sell a “money-printing machine” otherwise... Develop an unfair advantage. With these projects, I developed a strong coding foundation that gave me an edge when dealing with non-technical business people. Invest countless hours to create a skills gap between you and others, one that becomes increasingly difficult for them to close (coding, public speaking, networking, etc.) The $700 Instagram Exit (2018, age 21) What Happened: Grew a motivational account to 60k followers Sold it for $700 90% of followers were in low-income countries (hard to monetize) Key Lessons: Follower quality > quantity. I focused on growth and ended up with an audience I couldn’t truly define. If brands don’t see value, you won’t generate revenue. Also, if you do not know who you are creating content for, you'll end up demotivated and stop posting. Great 3rd party product + domain authority = Affiliate marketing works. In this case, I could easily promote an IG growing service because my 50k+ followers conveyed trust. Most importantly, the service I was promoting worked amazingly. The Illegal Amazon Review Marketplace (2020, age 23) What Happened: Sellers were reimbursing buyers for positive reviews Built a WordPress marketplace to facilitate “free products for reviews” Realized it violated Amazon’s terms Key Lessons: Check for “red flags” when doing idea assessment. There will always be red and orange flags. It’s about learning to differentiate between them (e.g. illegality, 100% dependence on a platform, etc.) If there’s competition, it’s good, if they are making money it’s even better. I was thrilled when I saw no competition for my “unique idea”. Later, I discovered the obvious reason. Copying a “Proven” Business Model (2020, age 23) What Happened: Tried recreating an Instagram “comment for comment” growth tool Instagram changed the algorithm and killed the growth strategy that the product used. Key Lessons: Do not build a business that depends 100% on another business, it is too risky. Mr. Musk can increase Twitter on API pricing to $42,000 monthly without notice and Tik Tok can be banned in the US. Due to the IG algorithm change, we had built a product that was not useful, and worse, now we had no idea how to grow an IG account. Consider future project synergies before selling. I regret having sold the 60k follower IG account since it could have saved me a lot of time when convincing users to try the service. NFT Marathon Medals (2021, age 24) What Happened: Created NFT race medals Sold 20 for 5€ each, but spent 95% of meetings explaining “what is an NFT?” Key Lessons: Market timing is crucial. As with every new technology, it is only useful as long as society is ready to adopt it. No matter how promising the tech is in the eyes of SV, society will end up dictating its success (blockchain, AI, etc). In this case, the runner community was not ready to adopt blockchain (it is not even prepared today). Race organizers did not know what they were selling, and runners did not know what they were buying. The 30-day rule in Fanatical Prospecting. Do not stop prospecting. I did prospecting and closed deals 3 months after the outbound efforts. Then I was busy executing the projects and had no clients once the projects were finished. AI Portal & Co-Founder Misalignment (2023, age 26) What Happened: Built a portal for SMEs to find AI use cases Co-founders disagreed on vision and execution Platform still gets \~1 new user/day Key Lessons: Define roles and equity clearly. Our biggest strength ended up killing us. Both founders had strong strategic skills and we were constantly arguing about decisions. NextJS + Vercel + Supabase: Great stack to create a SaaS MVP. (but do not use AI with frameworks unless you know how they work conceptually) SEO is king. One of our users creates a use case on “Changing Song Lyrics with AI.” Not being our target use case, it brings 90% of our traffic. Building an AI Tool & Getting Ghosted (2024, age 27) What Happened: SEO agency wanted to automate rewriting product descriptions Built it in 3 weeks, but the client vanished Key Lessons: Validate manually first. Don’t code a full-blown solution for a problem you haven’t tested in real-world workflows. I kept rewriting code only to throw it away. Jumping straight into building a solution ended up costing more time than it saved. Use templates, no-code, and open-source for prototyping. In my case, using a Next.js template saved me about four weeks of development only to hit the same dead end, but much faster. Fall in love with your ICP or walk away. I realized I didn’t enjoy working with SEO agencies. Looking back, I should have been honest with myself and admitted that I wasn’t motivated enough by this type of customer. Ignoring Code Perfection Doubled Traffic (2025, age 28) What Happened: Partnered with an ex-colleague to build an AI agents directory Focused on content & marketing, not endless bug fixes Traffic soared organically Key Lessons: Measure the impact of your actions and double down on what works. We set up an analytics system with PostHog and found wild imbalances (e.g. 1 post about frameworks outperformed 20 promotional posts). You have to start somewhere. For us, the AI agents directory is much more than just a standalone site, it's a strategic project that will allow us to discover new products, gain domain authority, and boost other projects. It builds the path for bigger opportunities. Less coding, more traction. Every day I have to fight against myself not to code “indispensable features”. Surprisingly, the directory keeps gaining consistent traffic despite being far from perfect Quitting My Job & Looking Ahead (2025, age 28) What Happened: Left full-time work to go all-in Plan to build vertical AI agents that handle entire business workflows (support, marketing, sales) Key Lessons: Bet on yourself. The opportunity cost of staying in my full-time job outweighed the benefits. It might be your case too I hope this post helps anyone struggling with their project and inspires those considering quitting their full-time job to take the leap with confidence.

Seeking co-founder to build LinkedIn’s biggest rival(curated version)
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ItzdreeThis week

Seeking co-founder to build LinkedIn’s biggest rival(curated version)

How do you connect with likeminded people? You see the polished wins everywhere, but what about the messy drafts , the awkward pitches and the moments you’re not sure you’ve got it right? Problem: The whole idea of founding and starting a business can be super intimidating for some people, specially those who don’t know any founders personally, those who don’t have a large network, those who don’t have rich parents with large networks, those not inserted in an entrepreneurial culture like in the US for example (which is my case). Sometimes all you need is the right support network, and too see others do what you want, to know that it’s possible! Everyone has an “ultimate guide” to make 7 figures or build a business on YouTube but NO ONE shoes you the HOW, just the results… I’ve tried joining founder communities, LinkedIn ,Reddit … you name it. Most of these founder communities are inaccessible for regular people and often ask for you to have an already existing business with a min ARR… or their simply geography based and if you’re not in a certain area you can’t really participate… As of LinkedIn… full of empty AI generated posts about how some random dude raised $10m in 7 days. Okay Jonathan, but what about the HOW?? How did you write your first pitch? How many rejection calls did you get? What is an MVP? There simply isn’t a platform out there to document your founding journey and find inspiration within a community of people who are doing the same as you. What better way to feel motivated then to see someone actually document their process? Solution: I’m working on building a social media platform for aspiring/founders to connect through the RAW, UNFILTERED process of turning ideas into reality in REAL time. It’s all gonna be around the “building in public “ concept and content creation. Picture an instagram/tiktok profile where instead of seeing someone’s dog you see them documenting their founding process—from the moment they had the idea, to the moment they launched, you’re going to see the successes, the fails, the rejected calls, all documented through actual content and not some AI generated LinkedIn post. Imagine if you wanted to learn about how Steve Jobs started Apple , you could simply go through his profile on this app—exactly. To make sure all interactions are meaningful people would have to apply. It’s a truly curated community, with REAL people, building REAL things in REAL time, and not just tell us the story of how they did it… Audience: I’m targeting people who have a burning desire of building a business and early stage founders starting their founder journeys, that don’t have a support network and simply don’t know where to start. People who are tired of watching 30 min “ultimate guides “ on how to make it on YouTube from “business gurus” selling courses. People who haven’t reached the min ARR required to join an “exclusive “ founder a community. People who can’t simply just move to the US to get into the “exclusive” YC combinator. People who want to connect with real people building real things and not anonymous people on Reddit, or LinkedIn influencers again trying to promote their services. I believe in the idea because I’m also part of my audience. Have always wanted to start my own thing just never knew how to and where to find a community of likeminded people . I don’t know any founders myself, I come from a non-entrepreneurial society and I’d pay good money to access a community of REAL passionate founders building REAL things, in REAL time. This would be my first ever business, and I want to share my journey building it and hopefully inspire others to just start so I’ve created a mailing list to keep anyone interested in the project updated on my fails , learnings and successes. I’m not worried about “making it” but just “starting” and hopefully reach the right audience and inspire anyone to start whatever they have marinating in their thoughts. If you’re a founder struggling with staying consistent or an aspiring founder with an insane desire of starting and don’t know how to start, I’d love to get your feedback on what’s stopping you, your challenges starting out and what you’d find useful in such platform. And finally would this be something that interests you?? PS: casually looking for a technical co-founder

Where Do I Find Like-Minded, Unorthodox Co-founders? [Tech]
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madscholarThis week

Where Do I Find Like-Minded, Unorthodox Co-founders? [Tech]

After more than 20 years in the tech industry I'm pretty fed up. I've been at it non-stop, so the burnout was building up for a while. Eventually, it's gotten so bad that it was no longer a question whether I need to take a break; I knew that I had to, for the sake of myself and loved ones. A few months ago I quit my well-paying, mid-level mgmt job to have some much-needed respite. I can't say that I've fully recovered, but I'm doing a bit better, so I'm starting to think about what's next. That said, the thoughts of going back into the rat race fill me with dread and anxiety. I've had an interesting career - I spent most of it in startups doing various roles from an SWE to a VP Eng, including having my own startup adventures for a couple of years. The last 4.5 years of my career have been in one of the fastest growing tech companies - it was a great learning experience, but also incredibly stressful, toxic and demoralizing. It's clear to me that I'm not cut out for the corporate world -- the ethos contradicts with my personality and beliefs -- but it's not just. I've accumulated "emotional scars" from practically every place I worked at and it made me loathe the industry to the degree that if I ever have another startup, it'd have to be by my own -- unorthodox -- ideals, even if it means a premature death due to lack of funding. I was young, stupid and overly confident when I had my first startup. I tried to do it "by the book" and dance to the tune of investors. While my startup failed for other, unrelated reasons, it gave me an opportunity to peak behind the curtain, experience the power dynamics, and get a better understanding to how the game is played - VCs and other person of interest have popularized the misconception that if a company doesn't scale, it would stagnate and eventually regress and die. This is nonsense. This narrative was created because it would make the capitalist pigs obsolete - they need companies to go through the entire alphabet before forcing them to sell or IPO. The sad reality is that the most entrepreneurs still believe in this paradigm and fall into the VC's honeypot traps. It's true that many businesses cannot bootstrap or scale without VC money, but it's equally true that far too many companies pivot/scale prematurely (and enshitify their product in the process) due to external pressures fueled by pure greed. This has a top-bottom effect - enshitification doesn't only effect users, but it also heavily effects the processes and structrures of companies, which can explain why the average tenure in tech is only \~2 years. I think that we live in an age where self-starting startups are more feasible than ever. It's not just the rise of AI and automation, but also the plethora of tools, services, and open-source projects that are available to all for free. On the one hand, this is fantastic, but on the other, the low barrier-to-entry creates oversaturation of companies which makes research & discovery incredibly hard - it is overwhelming to keep up with the pace and distill the signal from the noise, and there's a LOT of noise - there's not enough metaphorical real-estate for the graveyard of startups that will be defunct in the very near future. I'd like to experiment with startups again, but I don't want to navigate through this complex mine field all by myself - I want to find a like-minded co-founder who shares the same ideals as I do. It goes without saying that being on the same page isn't enough - I also want someone who's experienced, intelligent, creative, productive, well-rounded, etc. At the moment, I don't have anyone in my professional network who has/wants what it takes. I can look into startup bootcamps/accelerators like YC et al., and sure enough, I'll find talented individuals, but it'd be a mismatch from the get-go. For shits and giggles, this is (very roughly) how I envision the ideal company: Excellent work life balance: the goal is not to make a quick exit, become filthy rich, and turn into a self-absorbed asshole bragging about how they got so succesful. The goal is to generate a steady revenue stream while not succumbing to social norms that encourage greed. The entire purpose is to reach humble financial indepedence while maintaining a stress-free (as one possibly can) work environment. QOL should always be considered before ARR. Bootstraping: no external money. Not now, not later. No quid pro quo. No shady professionals or advisors. Company makes it or dies trying. Finances: very conservative to begin with - the idea is to play it safe and build a long fucking runaway before hiring. Spend every penny mindfully and frugally. Growth shouldn't be too quick & reckless. The business will be extremely efficient in spending. The only exception to the rule is crucial infrastructure and wages to hire top talent and keep salaries competitive and fair. Hiring: fully remote. Global presence, where applicable. Headcount will be limited to the absolute bare minimum. The goal is to run with a skeleton crew of the best generalists out there - bright, self-sufficient, highly motivated, autodidact, and creative individuals. Hiring the right people is everything and should be the company's top priority. Compensation & Perks: transperent and fair, incentivizing exceptional performance with revenue sharing bonuses. The rest is your typical best-in-class perks: top tier health/dental/vision insurance, generous PTO with mandatory required minimum, parental leave, mental wellness, etc. Process: processes will be extremely efficient, automated to the max, documented, unbloated, and data-driven through and through. Internal knowledge & data metrics will be accessible and transparent to all. Employees get full autonomy of their respective areas and are fully in charge of how they spend their days as long as they have agreed-upon, coherent, measurable metrics of success. Meetings will be reduced to the absolute minimum and would have to be justified and actionable - the ideal is that most communications will be done in written form, while face-to-face will be reserved for presentations/socializing. I like the Kaizen philosophy to continuously improve and optimize processes. Product: As previously stated, "data-driven through and through". Mindful approach to understand cost/benefit. Deliberate and measured atomic improvements to avoid feature creep and slow down the inevitable entropy. Most importantly, client input should be treated with the utmost attention but should never be the main driver for the product roadmap. This is a very controversial take, but sometimes it's better to lose a paying customer than to cave to their distracting/unreasonable/time-consuming demands. People Culture: ironicaly, this would be what most companies claim to have, but for realsies. Collaborative, open, blameless environment. People are treated like actual grown ups with flat structure, full autonomy, and unwavering trust. Socializing and bonding is highly encourged, but never required. Creativity and ingenuity is highly valued - people are encouraged to work on side projects one day of the week. Values: I can write a lot about it, but it really boils down to being kind and humble. We all know what happened with "don't be evil". It's incredibly hard to retain values over time, esp. when there are opposing views within a company. I don't know how to solve it, but I believe that there should be some (tried and true) internal checks & balances from the get go to ensure things are on track. I never mentioned what this hypothetical startup does. Sure, there's another very relevant layer of domain experience fit, but this mindset allows one to be a bit more fluid because the goal is not to disrupt an industry or "make the world a better place"; it's to see work for what it truly is - a mean to an end. It's far more important for me to align with a co-founder on these topics than on an actual idea or technical details. Pivoting and rebranding are so common that many VCs outweigh the make up and chemistry of the founding team (and their ability to execute) over the feasibility of their ideas.  To wrap this long-winded post, I'm not naive or disillusioned - utopias aren't real and profitable companies who operate at a 70-80% rate of what I propose are the real unicorns, but despite them being a tiny minority, I think they are the real forward thinkers of the industry. I might be wrong, but I hope that I'm right and that more and more startups will opt towards long-term sustainability over the promise of short-term gains because the status quo really stinks for most people. What do you folks think? Does anyone relate? Where can I find others like me? P.S I thought about starting a blog writing about these topics in length (everything that is wrong with tech & what can be done to improve it), but I have the Impostor Syndrom and I'm too self-conscious about how I come off. If you somehow enjoyed reading through that and would love to hear more of my thoughts and experiences in greater detail, please let me know. P.P.S If you have a company that is close to what I'm describing and you're hiring, let me know!

Why the value of writing code and other digital services is going to zero
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BalloonWheelieThis week

Why the value of writing code and other digital services is going to zero

I must preface this with a trigger warning because I make some statements in this post that might be upsetting to some. This post discusses my experience building in the new era of entrepreneurship, which is one where the founder is the center of the universe, and the consultants, overpriced SaaS, and corporate swamp creatures are replaced by single-user custom software, bots, and self-hosted automations. If you work in the legacy economy, I really don't intend to stress you out or say things you are doing are quickly becoming irrelevant, but I must share the reality of how I am operating, because I would like to hear from others who are doing the same, or desire to do the same. I am currently operating with the belief that AI-powered tools are going to make 1-person million dollar businesses much more common. Building anything digital is becoming extremely easy, cheap, and quick to implement. The value of code and digital tools is approaching zero, or at most 5% of what it currently is. Right now, the most powerful AI tools are aimed at developers, so folks who have some technical and business ability basically have nothing holding them back aside from the speed of their brain right now. I happen to be a part of the cohort, and am building like there is no tomorrow, but I don't believe this cohort is actually all that big. The next hurdle to unlock the new era of entrepreneurship is empowering every entrepreneur to build at the same pace that is currently locked behind having technical ability. This cohort is huge (millions, if the number of people in this sub is any indication). This post is aimed at them (you?). If you are part of this cohort, what is holding you back from launching a new product for near-zero cost? What is too complicated, too expensive, too unknown for you to be able to build your new/current business at maximum speed? I look forward to seeing the replies, I hope some insights shared can help the community, and be a catalyst for more tools to enable non-technical founders to launch. I will now share some of how I am testing, launching, and selling as a one-man-show. This will be a little bit technical, but if the output of any layer of my stack is something you want, please comment because maybe someone will build a cheap way of accessing it without needing to manage the code yourself. \#1 BOTS I cannot overstate how much leverage bots have created for me. I run all of my bots locally and interface with with via Telegram. Bots do things like: \- watch social media pages, forums, subreddits, etc related to my customers and notify me of what is going on, and suggest SEO blog posts that could be published to capture traffic related to the topic. with a single message, my bot will generate a blog post, send it to me for review, apply edits i suggest, and then publish it live, all from within telegram \- pay attention to all my key metrics/analytics, and attempt to find insights/corrolations (ex. there is a lot of traffic on this page, blog post, video, etc. here's why, and how we can take advantage of it to drive business goals) \- repurposing content. i have dozens of social media profiles that are 100% run by bots, they are all related to my customer niches and will do things like post news, snippets from my blogs, interact with human creators in the niche, etc. this builds my audience automatically which I can then advertise to/try to convert into paying customers, since they are interested in the things my bot is posting and become followers, it's like automated qualified lead gen 24/7 across every social platform and every niche I care about. you may be thinking by now that this post is made by a bot, but you will have to trust me that this is 100% hand-written by my sleep-deprived brain. let's continue: \#2 replacing every SaaS with a shitty version of it designed for what i need out of it it's absurd that we pay ten's of dollars per seat per month for basic digital functions like chat (slack), CRM (active camppaign, sales force, hubspot, etc), email stuff (mailchip, etc), link sharing (linktree, etc), website builders (wix, squarespace, etc), etc. all of these SaaS tools are overpriced and overbuilt. I believe many of them are going to be caught in the innovators dilemma and will go to 0. I don't use any of these anymore, I build and self-host my own shitty version of each of them that does only what i need out of the tool. for example, my CRM doesn't have a fancy drag and drop email builder and 10000 3rd party plugins, because i dont need any of that shit I just need to segment and communicate with my customers. if i need more features, i can generate them on the fly. \#3 working alone I have worked with cofounders in the past, raised money from investors, hired consultants, burned money and time, suffered sleepless nights from stress caused by other people not delivering, trying to convince others they are wrong, or they are pushing the company off a cliff, waste waste waste. no more of that. In the new age of entrepreneurship, the BUILDER (you and I) are the ones creating the value, and AI empowers us to do it alone. this might seem daunting, but there is no business problem that can't be solved with a detailed discussion sesh with chatgpt, no facts that can't be found with perplexity, and no task that can't be automated with claude. there is no need for anymore swamp creatures. you are the start and the end point, you don't need to rely on anyone else for anything. this may sound ignorant, but this is the conclusion I have come to believe, and it continues to be proven every day my businesses progress with me being the only human involved. This is getting quite long so I'll cut it here. I look forward to hearing about how you are operating in this new era and hopefully getting inspired/learning some new ideas to add to my current stack.

I Watched My Startup Slowly Dying Over Two Years: Mistakes and Lessons Learned
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Personal-Expression3This week

I Watched My Startup Slowly Dying Over Two Years: Mistakes and Lessons Learned

If you are tired of reading successful stories, you may want to listen to my almost failure story. Last year in April, I went full-time on my startup. Nearly two years later, I’ve seen my product gradually dying. I want to share some of the key mistakes I made and the lessons I’ve taken from them so you don't have to go through them. Some mistakes were very obvious in hindsight; others, I’m still not sure if they were mistakes or just bad luck. I’d love to hear your thoughts and advice as well. Background I built an English-learning app, with both web and mobile versions. The idea came from recognizing how expensive it is to hire an English tutor in most countries, especially for practicing speaking skills. With the rise of AI, I saw an opportunity in the education space. My target market was Japan, though I later added support for multiple languages and picked up some users from Indonesia and some Latin American countries too. Most of my users came from influencer marketing on Twitter. The MVP for the web version launched in Japan and got great feedback. People were reposting it on Twitter, and growth was at its peak in the first few weeks. After verifying the requirement with the MVP, I decided to focus on the mobile app to boost user retention, but for various reasons, the mobile version didn’t launch until December 2023— 8 months after the web version. Most of this year has been spent iterating on the mobile app, but it didn’t make much of an impact in the end. Key Events and Lessons Learned Here are some takeaways: Find co-founders as committed as you are I started with two co-founders—both were tech people and working Part-Time. After the web version launched, one dropped out due to family issues. Unfortunately, we didn’t set clear rules for equity allocation, so even after leaving, they still retained part of the equity. The other co-founder also effectively dropped out this year, contributing only minor fixes here and there. So If you’re starting a company with co-founders, make sure they’re as committed as you are. Otherwise, you might be better off going solo. I ended up teaching myself programming with AI tools, starting with Flutter and eventually handling both front-end and back-end work using Windsurf. With dev tools getting more advanced, being a solo developer is becoming a more viable option. Also, have crystal-clear rules for equity—especially around what happens if someone leaves. Outsourcing Pitfalls Outsourcing development was one of my biggest mistakes. I initially hired a former colleague from India to build the app. He dragged the project on for two months with endless excuses, and the final output was unusable. Then I hired a company, but they didn’t have enough skilled Flutter developers. The company’s owner scrambled to find people, which led to rushed work and poor-quality code which took a lot of time revising myself. Outsourcing is a minefield. If you must do it, break the project into small tasks, set clear milestones, and review progress frequently. Catching issues early can save you time and money. Otherwise, you’re often better off learning the tools yourself—modern dev tools are surprisingly beginner-friendly. Trust, but Verify I have a bad habit of trusting people too easily. I don’t like spending time double-checking things, so I tend to assume people will do what they say they’ll do. This mindset is dangerous in a startup. For example, if I had set up milestones and regularly verified the progress of my first outsourced project, I would’ve realized something was wrong within two weeks instead of two months. That would’ve saved me a lot of time and frustration. Like what I mentioned above, set up systems to verify their work—milestones, deliverables, etc.—to minimize risk. Avoid red ocean if you are small My team was tiny (or non-existent, depending on how you see it), with no technical edge. Yet, I chose to enter Japan’s English-learning market, which is incredibly competitive. It’s a red ocean, dominated by big players who’ve been in the game for years. Initially, my product’s AI-powered speaking practice and automatic grammar correction stood out, but within months, competitors rolled out similar features. Looking back, I should’ve gone all-in on marketing during the initial hype and focused on rapidly launching the mobile app. But hindsight is 20/20. 'Understanding your user' helps but what if it's not what you want? I thought I was pretty good at collecting user feedback. I added feedback buttons everywhere in the app and made changes based on what users said. But most of these changes were incremental improvements—not the kind of big updates that spark excitement. Also, my primary users were from Japan and Indonesia, but I’m neither Japanese nor Indonesian. That made it hard to connect with users on social media in an authentic way. And in my opinion, AI translations can only go so far—they lack the human touch and cultural nuance that builds trust. But honestly I'm not sure if the thought is correct to assume that they will not get touched if they recognize you are a foreigner...... Many of my Japanese users were working professionals preparing for the TOEIC exam. I didn’t design any features specifically for that; instead, I aimed to build a general-purpose English-learning tool since I dream to expand it to other markets someday. While there’s nothing wrong with this idealistic approach, it didn’t give users enough reasons to pay for the app. Should You Go Full-Time? From what I read, a lot of successful indie developers started part-time, building traction before quitting their jobs. But for me, I jumped straight into full-time mode, which worked for my lifestyle but might’ve hurt my productivity. I value work-life balance and refused to sacrifice everything for the startup. The reason I chose to leave the corp is I want to escape the 996 toxic working environment in China's internet companies. So even during my most stressful periods, I made time to watch TV with my partner and take weekends off. Anyways, if you’re also building something or thinking about starting a business, I hope my story helps. If I have other thoughts later, I will add them too. Appreciate any advice.

AI Will Make You Extremely Rich or Kill Your Business in 2024
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AntsyNursery58This week

AI Will Make You Extremely Rich or Kill Your Business in 2024

Preface: I'm a solo-founder in the AI space and previously worked as an ML scientist; the new advancements in AI that I'm seeing are going to impact everyone here. It doesn't matter if you're just starting out, or a bootstrapped brick and mortar founder, or even a VC backed hard tech founder. Last year was when the seeds were laid, and this is the year we'll see them bloom. There will be an onslaught of advancements that take place that are borderline inconceivable due to the nature of exponential progress. This will change every single vertical. I'm making this post because I think AI execution strategy will make or break businesses. Dramatically. Over $50B was put into AI startups in 2023 alone. This figure excludes the hundreds of billions poured into AI from enterprises. So, let's follow the money: &#x200B; 1) AI enterprise software. There's a lot to unpack here and this is what I’m currently working on. AI enterprise software will encompass everything from hyper personalized email outbound to AI cold calls to AI that A/B tests ads on synthetic data to vertical specific software. The impact of the former is relatively self explanatory, so I'll focus on the latter. To illustrate vertical specific AI software, I'll use a simple example in the legal space. Lawyers typically have to comb through thousands of pages of documents. Now, using an LLM + a VDB, an AI can instantly answer all of those questions while surfacing the source and highlighting the specific answer in the contract/document. There are dozens of AI startups for this use case alone. This saves lawyers an immense amount of time and allows them to move faster. Firms that adopt this have a fundamental advantage over law firms that don't adopt this. This was 2023 technology. I'm seeing vertical AI software getting built by my friends in areas from construction, to real estate, to even niche areas like chimney manufacturing. This will exist everywhere. Now, this can be extrapolated much further to be applicable to systems that can do reports and even browse the Internet. This brings me to my next point. &#x200B; 2) AI information aggregation and spread. My gut tells me that this will have a crescendo moment in the future with hardware advancements (Rabbit, Tab, etc.). You won't have to google things because it will be surfaced to you. It's predictive in nature. The people who can get information the fastest will grow their business the fastest. This part is semi-speculative, but due to the nature of LLMs being so expensive to train, I have a strong feeling that large institutions will have access to the \fastest\ and \best\ models that can do this quicker than you and I can. This is why it's important to stay on top. &#x200B; 3) AI content generation This is relevant to running advertisements and any digital marketing aspect of your business. If you can rapidly make content faster than your competitors to put in social media, you will outpace your competitors rapidly. I think most folks are familiar with MidJourney, Stable diffusion, etc. but don't know how to use it. You can generate consistent models for a clothing brand or generate images of a product that you would normally need to hire a professional photographer to take. There's also elevenlabs which is relatively easy to use and can be used to make an MP3 clip as a narration for an ad; this is something I've already done. I'm also still shocked by how many people are unfamiliar with tools like Pika which can do video generation. You could imagine companies having fleets of digital influencers that they control or conjuring up the perfect ad for a specific demographic using a combination of all of the aforementioned tools. &#x200B; In summary, if you feel like I'm being hyperbolic or propagating science fiction fantasies, you're likely already behind. I truly recommend that everyone stays up to date on these advancements as much as possible. If your competitor comes across an AI tool that can increase their ROAS by 5x they can crush you. If your competitor uses a tool that increases the rate at which they receive and aggregate information by 200% (modest estimate) they will crush you. If your competitors have a tool that can reduce their employee size, then they will use it. They'll fire their employees to cut costs and reinvest the money back into their business. It will compound to the point where you're outpaced, and this isn't a level of innovation we've seen since the birth of the industrial revolution. Your customers can get stolen overnight, or you can steal your competition’s customers overnight. TL;DR: This is an opportunity for entrepreneurs to scale faster than they could have possibly imagined, but this also comes with the potential for your company to be obliterated. We've never seen advancements that can have this drastic of an impact this quickly. Adoption will happen fast, and first movers will have a disproportionate and compounding advantage. Watch guides, meet with startups, follow the news, and get rich.

I sold my AI tool for $35,000
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marclouvThis week

I sold my AI tool for $35,000

Hey Entrepreneurs, Marc here. Last month I wrote here about how sold a habit tracker for $10,000 in October. Earlier this month, I got $35,000 in my bank account after selling a landing page maker with AI. Here's the story: &#x200B; April 2023: Just like everyone, I get massive FOMO with AI. I played with GPT and decided to build a landing page generator with AI: Input text and the AI prefills a template with copy and AI-generated images. I'm working on it with a good friend of mine named Martin. May: The product is called LandingAI. It's an MVP but we launched and made \~$8,000. Unfortunately, Martin and I had different visions for the project so we forked. &#x200B; June: LandingAI is the name of a big corp (bummer) so I rebranded it to MakeLanding. I ditch 90% of the code because users want a very different product: So here I am, building an entire website builder powered with AI... &#x200B; July: I launched again, but made a BIG mistake: I swapped the one-time payment for a monthly subscription and got $20 MRR for 15k visitors... If you can avoid subscriptions, do it New pricing means new positioning—users compared the app to Framer & Webflow August: I removed the subscription and sales came back: \~$7,000 in 3 months. But I realized this was going nowhere... September: I don't use the product The market is gigantic and crowded As a solopreneur, nothing is more important for me than building cool stuff for people I care about. And I didn't really care about this big market so... October: I called my friend Dan and he said: SELL. He was right. I bought my shares of LandingAI from Martin and listed MakeLanding on Acquire: Asking $38,000 for $14,000 TTM (3x profit) Within hours, I received dozens of NDAs and a buyer started the process 🤯 After a few weeks of NDA, LOI, Escrow, etc. the buyer sent the money but... Only a fraction of the transaction. Then he ghosted me. So I canceled the transition. Back to Acquire... Luckily, in 24 hours I got another buyer! &#x200B; November: Within weeks, the money was in my bank account. The buyer and I never called, just a few messages. It's mind-blowing. &#x200B; My takeaways: Don't build AI products just because Don't go on a massive market you don't care Sell if you don't know how to grow the product It's my 3rd acquisition this year. I love the freedom of build, sell, repeat.

How I went from $27 to $3K as a solopreneur still in a 9-5
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jottrledThis week

How I went from $27 to $3K as a solopreneur still in a 9-5

My journey started back in November 2023. I was scrolling through Twitter and YouTube and saw a word that I had never come across before. Solopreneur. The word caught my eye. Mainly because I was pretty sure I knew what it meant even though it's not a word you'll find in the dictionary. I liked what it was describing. A solo entrepreneur. A one man business. It completely resonated with me. As a software engineer by trade I'm used to working alone, especially since the pandemic hit and we were forced to work remotely. See, I always wanted to ditch the 9-5 thing but thought that was too big and too scary for a single person to do. Surely you would need a lot of money to get started, right? Surely you would need investors? The whole concept seemed impossible to me. That was until I found all the success stories. I became obsessed with the concept of solopreneurship. As I went further down the rabbit hole I found people like Justin Welsh, Kieran Drew and Marc Louvion to name a few. All of whom have one person businesses making huge money every year. So I thought, if they can do it, why can't I? People like this have cleared the pathway for those looking to escape the 9-5 grind. I decided 2024 would be the year I try this out. My main goal for the year? Build a one man business, earn my first $ online and learn a sh\*t ton along the way. My main goal in general? Build my business to $100K per year, quit my 9-5 and live with freedom. From December 2023 to February 2024 I began brainstorming ideas. I was like a lost puppy looking for his ball. How on earth did people find good ideas? I began writing everything and anything that came to mind down in my notes app on my phone. By February I would have approximately 70 ideas. Each as weird and whacky as the other. I was skeptical though. If I went through all the trouble of building a product for one of these ideas how would I know if anyone would even be interested in using it? I got scared and took a break for a week. All these ideas seemed too big and the chance that they would take off into the atmosphere was slim (in my mind anyways). I was learning more and more about solopreneurship as the weeks went on so I decided to build a product centered around everything I was learning about. The idea was simple. Enter a business idea and use AI to give the user details about how to market it, who their target customers were, what to write on their landing page, etc. All for a measly $27 per use. I quickly built it and launched on March 3rd 2024. I posted about it on Indie Hackers, Reddit and Hacker News. I was so excited about the prospect of earning my first internet $! Surely everyone wanted to use my product! Nope...all I got was crickets. I was quickly brought back down to earth. That was until 5 days later. I looked at my phone and had a new Stripe notification! Cha-ching! My first internet $. What a feeling! That was goal number 1 complete. It would be another 6 days before I would get my second sale...and then another 15 days to get my third. It was an emotional rollercoaster. I went from feeling like quitting the 9-5 was actually possible to thinking that maybe the ups and downs aren't worth it. On one hand I had made my first internet dollar so I should my ecstatic, and don't get me wrong, I was but I wanted more. More validation that I could do this long term. By May I was starting to give up on the product. I had learned so much in the past few months about marketing, SEO, building an audience, etc. and I wanted to build something that I thought could have more success so I focused on one critical thing that I had learned about. What was it? Building a product that had SEO potential. A product that I knew hundreds of people were looking for. See this was my thinking - If I could find a keyword that people were searching for on Google hundreds/thousands of times every month and it was easy to rank high on search engines then I would go all in (in SEO land this equates to a Keyword that has a Keyword Difficulty of = 500). I began researching and found that the keyword "micro saas ideas" was being searched for around 600 times each month. Micro Saas was something that really interested me. It was perfect for solopreneurs. Small software products that 1 person could build. What's not to like if you're in the game of software and solopreneurship? Researching keywords like this became like a game for me. I was hooked. I was doing it every day, finding gems that were being searched for hundreds and thousands of times every month that still had potential. That's when I came up with my next product idea. I decided to create a database of Micro Saas Ideas all with this sort of SEO potential. See if you can build a product that you know people are looking for then that's all the validation you need. So I put this theory to the test. I created a database of Micro Saas Ideas with SEO Potential and launched it in June 2024. This time it was different. I made $700 in the first week of launching. A large contrast to my previous failed attempt at becoming the worlds greatest solopreneur. Since launch I have grown the product to $3K and I couldn't be happier. I know what you're saying, $3K isn't a lot. But it's validation. It's validation that I can earn $ online. Validation that I can grow a business and it gives me hope that one day I'll be able to quit that 9-5 grind. My plan is to keep growing the business. I expect there to be a few challenges up ahead but I'll tackle them as I go and learn from the failures and successes. I have a newsletter where I share Micro Saas Ideas with SEO potential every week which I'll leave below in the first comment. Feel free to come along for the ride. If not I hope this post brings you some value If you're thinking about starting as a solopreneur, stop thinking and start doing, you won't regret it.

Detailed Guide - How I've Been Self Employed for 2 Years Selling Posters
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tommo278This week

Detailed Guide - How I've Been Self Employed for 2 Years Selling Posters

Hey everyone, bit of context before you read through this. I have been selling POD posters full time for over 2 years now. My next venture is that I have started my own Print on Demand company for posters, PrintShrimp. As one way of creating customers for our service, we are teaching people for free how to also sell posters. Here is a guide I have written on how to sell posters on Etsy. Feel free to have a read through and then check out PrintShrimp, hopefully can help some of you guys out (and get us some more customers!) All of this is also available in video format on our website too, if you prefer to learn that way. Thanks guys! And as some people asked in other subs, no this isn't written with AI 😅 This took a couple of weeks to put together! Through this guide, we will teach you everything you need to know about starting to sell posters and generate some income. We will also show you why PrintShrimp is the best POD supplier for all of your poster needs. Trust me, you won’t need much convincing.  So, why are posters the best product to sell? Also, just thought I’d quickly answer the question - why posters? If you’ve been researching Print on Demand you’ve probably come across the infinite options of t-shirts, mugs, hats, phone cases, and more. All of these are viable options, however we think posters are the perfect place to start. You can always expand into other areas further down the line! So a brief summary of why posters are the perfect product for Print on Demand: \-They are very easy to design! Posters are a very easy shape to deal with - can’t go wrong with a rectangle. This makes designing products very easy. \-Similarly to this, what you see is what you get with a poster. You can literally see your finished product as you design it in either canva or photoshop. With T-Shirts for example, you have to make your design, and then place it on a t-shirt. Then you have to coordinate with your printers the size you would like the design on the tshirt and many other variables like that. There is no messing about with posters - what you see is what you get. \-The same high quality, everywhere. With other products, if you want to reap the benefits of a printing in various countries, you need to ensure each of your global suppliers stocks the same t-shirts, is able to print in the same way, carries the same sizes etc. Again with posters you avoid all of this hassle- your products will come out the same, no matter which of our global locations are used. \-They have a very favorable profit margin. As you will see later, the cost price of posters is very low. And people are prepared to pay quite a lot for a decent bit of wall art! I have tried out other products, and the profit margin combined with the order quantity of posters makes them my most profitable product, every single time. Using PrintShrimp, you can be sure to enjoy profits of anywhere between £6 - £40 pure profit per sale.  \-They are one of the easiest to print white label. This makes them perfect for Print on Demand. Your posters are simply put in a tube, and off they go. There are no extras you need to faff around with, compared to the extra elements other products come with, such as clothing labels on t-shirts.  Picking your poster niche So, you are ready to start selling posters. Great! Now, the blessing and curse with selling posters is that there are infinite possibilities regarding what you can sell. So, it can easily be quite overwhelming at first.  The first thing I would recommend doing is having a look at what others are selling. Etsy is a wonderful place for this (and will likely be a key part of your poster selling journey). So, log on to Etsy and simply type in ‘poster’ in the search bar. Get ready to write a massive list of the broad categories and type of posters that people are selling.  If you do not have more than 50 categories written down by the end, you are doing something wrong. There are seriously an infinite amount of posters! For example, here are some popular ones to get you started: Star sign posters, Kitchen posters, World map posters, Custom Dog Portrait posters, Music posters, Movie posters, Fine art posters, Skiing posters, Girl Power posters and Football posters.  Now, you have a huge list of potential products to sell. What next? There are a few important things you need to bear in mind when picking your niche: \-Does this interest me?  Don’t make the mistake of going down a niche that didn’t actually interest you just because it would probably be a money maker. Before you know it, what can be a very fun process of making designs can become incredibly \\\monotonous, and feel like a chore\\\. You need to bear in mind that you will be spending a lot of time creating designs - if it is something you are interested in you are much less likely to get burnt out! As well, \\\creativity will flow\\\ far better if it is something you are interested in, which at the end of the day will lead to better designs that are more likely to be purchased by customers.  \-Is this within my design range? Don’t let this put you off too much. We will go through how to get started on design later on in this guide. However, it is important to note that the plain truth of it is that some niches and designs are a hell of a lot more complicated than others. For example, quote posters can essentially be designed by anyone when you learn about how to put nice fonts together in a good color scheme. On the other hand, some posters you see may have been designed with complex illustrations in a program like Illustrator. To start with, it may be better to pick a niche that seems a bit more simple to get into, as you can always expand your range with other stores further down the line. A good way of evaluating the design complexity is by identifying if this poster is \\\a lot of elements put together\\\ or is \\\a lot of elements created by the designer themselves\\\\\.\\ Design can in a lot of cases be like a jigsaw - putting colours, shapes and text together to create an image. This will be a lot easier to start with and can be learnt by anyone, compared to complex drawings and illustrations.  \-Is this niche subject to copyright issues? Time to delve deep into good old copyright. Now, when you go through Etsy, you will without a doubt see hundreds of sellers selling music album posters, car posters, movie posters and more. Obviously, these posters contain the property of musicians, companies and more and are therefore copyrighted. The annoying thing is - these are \\\a complete cash cow.\\\ If you go down the music poster route, I will honestly be surprised if you \\don’t\\ make thousands. However it is only a matter of time before the copyright strikes start rolling in and you eventually get banned from Etsy.  So I would highly recommend \\\not making this mistake\\\. Etsy is an incredible platform for selling posters, and it is a hell of a lot easier to make sales on there compared to advertising your own website. And, you \\\only get one chance on Etsy.\\\ Once you have been banned once, you are not allowed to sign up again (and they do ID checks - so you won’t be able to rejoin again under your own name).  So, don’t be shortsighted when it comes to entering Print on Demand. If you keep your designs legitimate, they will last you a lifetime and you will then later be able to crosspost them to other platforms, again without the worry of ever getting shut down.  So, how do I actually design posters? Now you have an idea of what kind of posters you want to be making, it’s time to get creative and make some designs! Photoshop (and the creative cloud in general) is probably the best for this. However, when starting out it can be a scary investment (it costs about £30 a month unless you can get a student rate!).  So, while Photoshop is preferable in the long term, when starting out you can learn the ropes of design and get going with Canva. This can be great at the start as they have a load of templates that you can use to get used to designing and experimenting (while it might be tempting to slightly modify these and sell them - this will be quite saturated on places like Etsy so we would recommend doing something new).  What size format should I use? The best design format to start with is arguably the A sizes - as all the A sizes (A5, A4, A3, A2, A1, A0) are scalable. This means that you can make all of your designs in one size, for example A3, and these designs will be ready to fit to all other A sizes. For example, if you design an A3 poster and someone orders A1, you can just upload this A3 file to PrintShrimp and it will be ready to print. There is a wide range of other sizes you should consider offering on your shop, especially as these sizes are very popular with the American market. They have a wide range of popular options, which unfortunately aren’t all scalable with each other. This does mean that you will therefore have to make some slight modifications to your design in order to be able to offer them in American sizing, in a few different aspect ratios. What you can do however is design all of your products in UK sizing, and simply redesign to fit American sizing once you have had an order. Essentially: design in UK sizing, but list in both UK and US sizing. Then when you get a non-A size order, you can quickly redesign it on demand. This means that you don’t have to make a few different versions of each poster when first designing, and can simply do a quick redesign for US sizing when you need to. Below is PrintShrimps standard size offering. We can also offer any custom sizing too, so please get in touch if you are looking for anything else. With these sizes, your poster orders will be dispatched domestically in whatever country your customer orders from. Our recommendations for starting design One thing that will not be featured in this guide is a written out explanation or guide on how to design. Honestly, I can’t think of a more boring, or frankly worse, way to learn design. When it comes to getting started, experimenting is your best friend! Just have a play around and see what you can do. It is a really fun thing to get started with, and the satisfaction of when a poster design comes together is like no other. A good way to start is honestly by straight up copying a poster you see for sale online. And we don’t mean copying to sell! But just trying to replicate other designs is a great way to get a feel for it and what you can do. We really think you will be surprised at how easy it is to pull together a lot of designs that at first can appear quite complicated! Your best friend throughout this whole process will be google. At the start you will not really know how to do anything - but learning how to look into things you want to know about design is all part of the process. At first, it can be quite hard to even know how to search for what you are trying to do, but this will come with time (we promise). Learning how to google is a skill that you will learn throughout this process.  Above all, what we think is most important is this golden rule: take inspiration but do not steal. You want to be selling similar products in your niche, but not copies. You need to see what is selling in your niche and get ideas from that, but if you make designs too similar to ones already available, you won’t have much luck. At the end of the day, if two very similar posters are for sale and one shop has 1000 reviews and your newer one has 2, which one is the customer going to buy? You need to make yours offer something different and stand out enough to attract customers. Etsy SEO and maximizing your sales You may have noticed in this guide we have mentioned Etsy quite a few times! That is because we think it is hands down the best place to start selling posters. Why? Etsy is a go to place for many looking to decorate their homes and also to buy gifts. It might be tempting to start selling with your own website straight away, however we recommend Etsy as it brings the customers to you. For example, say you start selling Bathroom Posters. It is going to be a hell of a lot easier to convert sales when you already have customers being shown your page after searching ‘bathroom decor’, compared to advertising your own website. This is especially true as it can be hard to identify your ideal target audience to then advertise to via Meta (Facebook/Instagram) for example. Websites are a great avenue to explore eventually like I now have, but we recommend starting with Etsy and going from there. What costs do I need to be aware of? So, setting up an Etsy sellers account is currently costs £15. The only other upfront cost you will have is the cost of listing a product - this is 20 cents per listing. From then on, every time you make a sale you will be charged a transaction fee of 6.5%, a small payment processing fee, plus another 20 cents for a renewed listing fee. It normally works out to about 10% of each order, a small price to pay for all the benefits Etsy brings. No matter what platform you sell on, you will be faced with some form of transaction fee. Etsy is actually quite reasonable especially as they do not charge you to use their platform on a monthly basis.  What do I need to get selling? Getting your shop looking pretty \-Think of a shop name and design (now you are a professional designer) a logo \-Design a banner for the top of your shop \-Add in some about me info/shop announcement \-I recommend running a sale wherein orders of 3+ items get a 20% of discount. Another big benefit of PrintShrimp is that you receive large discounts when ordering multiple posters. This is great for attracting buyers and larger orders.  Making your products look attractive That is the bulk of the ‘decor’ you will need to do. Next up is placing your posters in mock ups! As you may notice on Etsy, most shops show their posters framed and hanging on walls. These are 99% of the time not real photos, but digital mock ups. This is where Photoshop comes in really handy, as you can automate this process through a plug in called Bulk Mock Up. If you don’t have photoshop, you can do this on Canva, you will just have to do it manually which can be rather time consuming.  Now, where can you get the actual Mock Ups? One platform we highly recommend for design in general is platforms like Envato Elements. These are design marketplaces where you have access to millions of design resources that you are fully licensed to use!  Titles, tags, and descriptions  Now for the slightly more nitty gritty part. You could have the world's most amazing looking poster, however, if you do not get the Etsy SEO right, no one is going to see it! We will take you through creating a new Etsy listing field by field so you can know how to best list your products.  The key to Etsy listing optimisation is to maximise. Literally cram in as many key words as you possibly can! Before you start this process, create a word map of anything you can think of relating to your listing. And come at this from the point of view of, if I was looking for a poster like mine, what would I search? Titles \-Here you are blessed with 140 characters to title your listing. Essentially, start off with a concise way of properly describing your poster. And then afterwards, add in as many key words as you can! Here is an example of the title of a well selling Skiing poster: Les Arcs Skiing Poster, Les Arcs Print, Les Alpes, France Ski Poster, Skiing Poster, Snowboarding Poster, Ski Resort Poster Holiday, French This is 139 characters out of 140 - you should try and maximise this as much as possible! As you can see, this crams in a lot of key words and search terms both related to Skiing as a whole, the poster category, and then the specifics of the poster itself (Les Arcs resort in France). Bear in mind that if you are listing a lot of listings that are of the same theme, you won’t have to spend time creating an entirely new title. For example if your next poster was of a ski resort in Italy, you can copy this one over and just swap out the specifics. For example change “France ski poster” to “Italy ski poster”, change “Les Arcs” to “The Dolomites”, etc.  Description \-Same logic applies for descriptions - try and cram in as many key words as you can! Here is an example for a Formula One poster: George Russell, Mercedes Formula One Poster  - item specific keywords Bright, modern and vibrant poster to liven up your home.  - Describes the style of the poster All posters are printed on high quality, museum grade 200gsm poster paper. Suitable for framing and frames. - Shows the quality of the print. Mentions frames whilst showing it comes unframed Experience the thrill of the racetrack with this stunning Formula One poster. Printed on high-quality paper, this racing car wall art print features a dynamic image of a Formula One car in action, perfect for adding a touch of speed and excitement to any motorsports room or man cave. Whether you're a die-hard fan or simply appreciate the adrenaline of high-speed racing, this poster is sure to impress. Available in a range of sizes, it makes a great addition to your home or office, or as a gift for a fellow Formula One enthusiast. Each poster is carefully packaged to ensure safe delivery, so you can enjoy your new piece of art as soon as possible. - A nice bit of text really highlighting a lot of key words such as gift, motorsports, racetrack etc.  You could go further with this too, by adding in extra things related to the poster such as ‘Perfect gift for a Mercedes F1 fan’ etc.  Tags Now, these are actually probably the most important part of your listing! You get 13 tags (20 character limit for each) and there are essentially search terms that will match your listing with what customers search for when shopping.  You really need to maximize these - whilst Title and Description play a part, these are the main things that will bring buyers to your listing. Once again, it is important to think about what customers are likely to be searching when looking for a poster similar to yours. Life hack alert! You can actually see what tags other sellers are using. All you need to do is go to a listing similar to yours that is selling well, scroll down and you can actually see them listed out at the bottom of the page! Here is an example of what this may look like: So, go through a few listings of competitors and make notes on common denominators that you can integrate into your listing. As you can see here, this seller uses tags such as ‘Birthday Gift’ and ‘Poster Print’. When you first start out, you may be better off swapping these out for more listing specific tags. This seller has been on Etsy for a few years however and has 15,000+ sales, so are more likely to see success from these tags.  If it’s not clear why, think about it this way. If you searched ‘poster print’ on Etsy today, there will be 10s of thousands of results. However, if you searched ‘Russell Mercedes Poster’, you will (as of writing) get 336 results. Etsy is far more likely to push your product to the top of the latter tag, against 300 other listings, rather than the top of ‘Poster Print’ where it is incredibly competitive. It is only when you are a more successful shop pulling in a high quantity of orders that these larger and more generic tags will work for you, as Etsy has more trust in your shop and will be more likely to push you to the front.  SKUs \-One important thing you need to do is add SKUs to all of your products! This is worth doing at the start as it will make your life so much easier when it comes to making sales and using PrintShrimp further down the line. What is an SKU? It is a ‘stock keeping unit’, and is essentially just a product identifier. Your SKUs need to match your file name that you upload to PrintShrimp. For example, if you made a poster about the eiffel tower, you can literally name the SKU eiffel-tower. There is no need to complicate things! As long as your file name (as in the image name of your poster on your computer) matches your SKU, you will be good to go.  \-It may be more beneficial to set up a system with unique identifiers, to make organising your files a lot easier further down the line. Say you get to 1000 posters eventually, you’ll want to be able to quickly search a code, and also ensure every SKU is always unique, so you won’t run into accidentally using the same SKU twice further down the line. For example, you can set it up so at the start of each file name, you have \[unique id\]\[info\], so your files will look like -  A1eiffeltower A2france And further down the line: A99aperolspritz B1potatoart This not only removes the potential issue of duplicating SKUs accidentally (for example if you made a few posters of the same subject), but also keeps your files well organised. If you need to find a file, you can search your files according to the code, so just by searching ‘a1’ for example, rather than having to trawl through a load of different files until you find the correct one. \-If your poster has variations, for example color variations, you can set a different SKU for each variation. Just click the little box when setting up variations that says ‘SKUs vary for each (variation)’. So if you have a poster available either in a white or black background, you can name each file, and therefore each SKU, a1eiffel-tower-black and a1eiffel-tower-white for example. \-The same goes for different sizes. As different American sizes have different aspect ratios, as mentioned above you may have to reformat some posters if you get a sale for one of these sizes. You can then add in the SKU to your listing once you have reformatted your poster. So for example if you sell a 16x20” version of the eiffel tower poster, you can name this file eiffel-tower-white-1620. Whilst this involves a little bit of set up, the time it saves you overall is massive!  Variations and Prices \-So, when selling posters there is a huge variety of sizes that you can offer, as mentioned previously. Non-negotiable is that you should be offering A5-A1. These will likely be your main sellers! Especially in the UK. It is also a good idea to offer inch sizing to appeal to a global audience (as bear in mind with PrintShrimp you will be able to print in multiple countries around the world!).  Below is a recommended pricing structure of what to charge on Etsy. Feel free to mess around with these! You may notice on Etsy that many shops charge a whole lot more for sizes such as A1, 24x36” etc. In my experience I prefer charging a lower rate to attract more sales, but there is validity in going for a lower amount of sales with higher profits. As mentioned above, you can also offer different variations on items - for example different colour schemes on posters. This is always a decent idea (if it suits the design) as it provides the customer with more options, which might help to convert the sale. You can always add this in later however if you want to keep it simple while you start! Setting up shipping profiles Etsy makes it very easy to set up different shipping rates for different countries. However, luckily with PrintShrimp you can offer free shipping to the majority of the major countries that are active on Etsy!  Using PrintShrimp means that your production costs are low enough in each domestic market to justify this. If you look on Etsy you can see there are many shops that post internationally to countries such as the US or Australia. Therefore, they often charge £8-10 in postage, and have a delivery time of 1-2 weeks. This really limits their customer base to their domestic market.  Using PrintShrimp avoids this and means you can offer free shipping (as we absorb the shipping cost in our prices) to the major markets of the UK, Australia, and USA (Europe coming soon!).  We also offer a 1 day processing time, unlike many POD poster suppliers. This means you can set your Etsy processing time to just one day, which combined with our quick shipping, means you will be one of the quickest on Etsy at sending out orders. This is obviously very attractive for customers, who are often very impatient with wanting their orders!  Getting the sales and extra tips \-Don’t list an insane amount of listings when you first get started. Etsy will be like ‘hang on a second’ if a brand new shop suddenly has 200 items in the first week. Warm up your account, and take things slow as you get going. We recommend 5 a day for the first week or so, and then you can start uploading more. You don’t want Etsy to flag your account for suspicious bot-like activity when you first get going.  \-It is very easy to copy listings when creating a new one. Simply select an old listing and press copy, and then you can just change the listing specific details to create a new one, rather than having to start from scratch. It can feel like a bit of a ball-ache setting up your first ever listing, but from then on you can just copy it over and just change the specifics.  \-Try and organize your listings into sections! This really helps the customer journey. Sometimes a customer will click onto your shop after seeing one of your listings, so it really helps if they can easily navigate your shop for what they are looking for. So, you now have a fully fledged Etsy shop. Well done! Time to start making £3,000 a month straight away right? Not quite. Please bear in mind, patience is key when starting out. If you started doing this because you are £10,000 in debt to the Albanian mafia and need to pay it off next week, you have come into this in the wrong frame of mind. If you have however started this to slowly build up a side hustle which hopefully one day become your full time gig, then winner winner chicken dinner.  Starting out on Etsy isn’t always easy. It takes time for your shop to build up trust! As I’ve said before, a buyer is far more likely to purchase from a shop with 1000s of reviews, than a brand new one with 0. But before you know it, you can become one of these shops! One thing you can do at the very start is to encourage your friends and family to buy your posters! This is a slightly naughty way of getting a few sales at the start, of course followed by a few glowing 5\* reviews. It really helps to give your shop this little boost at the start, so if this is something you can do then I recommend it.  Okay, so once you have a fully fledged shop with a decent amount of listings, you might be expecting the sales to start rolling in. And, if you are lucky, they indeed might. However, in my experience, you need to give your listings a little boost. So let us introduce you to: The wonderful world of Etsy ads Ads!! Oh no, that means money!! We imagine some of you more risk averse people are saying to yourself right now. And yes, it indeed does. But more often than not unfortunately you do have to spend money to make money.  Fortunately, in my experience anyway, Etsy ads do tend to work. This does however only apply if your products are actually good however, so if you’re back here after paying for ads for 2 months and are losing money at the same rate as your motivation, maybe go back to the start of this guide and pick another niche.  When you first start out, there are two main strategies.  Number 1: The Safer Option So, with PrintShrimp, you will essentially be making a minimum of £6 profit per order. With this in mind, I normally start a new shop with a safer strategy of advertising my products with a budget of $3-5 dollars a day. This then means that at the start, you only need to make 1 sale to break even, and anything above that is pure profit! This might not seem like the most dazzling proposition right now, but again please bear in mind that growth will be slow at the start. This means that you can gradually grow your shop, and therefore the trust that customers have in your shop, over time with a very small risk of ever actually losing money. Number 2: The Billy Big Balls Option If you were yawning while reading the first option, then this strategy may be for you. This will be better suited to those of you that are a bit more risk prone, and it also helps if you have a bit more cash to invest at the start. Through this strategy, you can essentially pay your way to the top of Etsy's rankings. For this, you’ll probably be looking at spending $20 a day on ads. So, this can really add up quickly and is definitely the riskier option. In my experience, the level of sales with this may not always match up to your spend every day. You may find that some days you rake in about 10 sales, and other days only one. But what this does mean is that as your listings get seen and purchased more, they will begin to rank higher in Etsy’s organic search rankings, at a much quicker rate than option one. This is the beauty of Etsy’s ads. You can pay to boost your products, but then results from this paid promotion feed into the organic ranking of your products. So you may find that you can splash the cash for a while at the start in order to race to the top, and then drop your ad spending later on when your products are already ranking well.  Sending your poster orders So, you’ve now done the hard bit. You have a running Etsy store, and essentially all you need to now on a daily basis is send out your orders and reply to customer messages! This is where it really becomes passive income.  \-Check out the PrintShrimp order portal. Simply sign up, and you can place individual orders through there. \-Bulk upload: We have an option to bulk upload your Esty orders via csv.  Seriously, when you are up and running with your first store, it is really as easy as that.  Once you have your first Etsy store up and running, you can think about expanding. There are many ways to expand your income. You can set up other Etsy stores, as long as the type of posters you are selling varies. You can look into setting up your own Shopify stores, and advertise them through Facebook, Instagram etc. Through this guide, we will teach you everything you need to know about starting to sell posters and generate some income. We will also show you why PrintShrimp is the best POD supplier for all of your poster needs. Trust me, you won’t need much convincing.

Changing Careers, changing products? Age 38, Direction needed, investment advice too.
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Salad-BanditThis week

Changing Careers, changing products? Age 38, Direction needed, investment advice too.

Hello, At one point in my life I had a set plan that I had been following in which to design a life that fit my values, but during 2020 the viability was called into question and I have been on bad footing, unable to find stability, since. Though I currently have stable housing without roommate, and enough in savings for a year without any income and three more years in a mutual fund. The question I need help with is about utilizing approximately $40,000 that I would like to invest into a new or existing business venture, or possibly start investing my own hand in selecting stocks. To give context about the parameters of concepts that pertain to me, back in 2005 I graduated highschool and immediately was an entrepreneur, started a sports clothing company, was selling WoW bot accounts, ghillie suits on ebay, and graphic design commissions, and I was proficient in MX Flash. Although the first part of my life plan to start farming three years before 2012 for what I thought would be a peak oil economic collapse, and while watching 2008 unfold, along with my career in MX Flash falling flat, I started farming 2009. From that point I spent a total of 15 years farming, the majority of that was for my own LLC, where I was situated with leases on million dollar properties as Ag tax write off, on an elite island outside a major city, serving local high price wholesale, mainly salad mix and mushrooms, because they are fast turn around. That was truly the best 20s I could have asked for, working mainly for myself, very healthy and was putting away $10-20k in savings/investments per year, plus was earning about $3-5k more per year, while living in a cargo trailer on dirt cheap leases. But it all came to a slow end starting in 2020 when I lost all of my wholesale overnight, and my retail exploded, which burnt me out to the point I couldnt walk, as the sole worker in my LLC. So I do not fully trust the volatility of the wholesale food industry, from a small grower’s perspective, since i don't own land. SO now I am trying to figure out a way forward, because I can always farm in the future, and have taught myself hydroponics, and flat packed farm equipment, so my business is very agile and now I can grow in parking lots closer to the city for more sales opportunities, but I am not sure that is what I want to do in this current moment, because tech is exploding, and we have never had so much information available to us, it's a shame not to spend a moment in life to discover what new opportunities might be out there. I was laid off twice last year, so I've been out of work the past four months, doing thriftstore routes twice a week while making about $500+/wk, really just trying to understand what people still buy and break even, while I continue to study 3d design blender, as well as 2d digital art in the hopes that I can reconnect with my tech art past, because that is what I told myself when I was 18, that I would put off art and computers until I was past 30 and needed to do less with my body. But over the past three years, the better I get at digital art, the better Ai has been getting too. I have some mentors who might give me work and a foot in the door, but most of them are laid off, and scrounging for work if they are not on their own funded indie project. I've thought about continuing to learn 3d modeling despite Ai, and despite seeing Flash, computer program I was proficient in get removed from existence before I could really earn my money back. I assume there will always be a need for Ai models to get cleaned up, mapped and rigged, especially with AR technology coming to consumers soon, but more over it would help if I decided to go to a community college to do CNC certificates, so I can have that as a backup job on CAD at a machining warehouse and do my farm and digital art on the side, but CNC mechanics don't make a crazy amount of money and have a boss. BUT I am an inventor, and have two inventions so far, plus my ultimate goal is to one day have automated hydroponic greenhouses, using all CNC+3d printed parts to create a low time investment agriculture income, with Ai monitored greenhouse, seed to salad product that i can sell to other people, which would tie into my desire to teach people about farming too, as well as do something I enjoy, but it is not a proven concept yet. Anyways if you've read this far I appreciate it, I ultimately would like 3rd party feedback about how I should spend my $40k surplus cash. I originally had it saved and accessible in case I was going to lease land and start my full farm business again from scratch, but I think using the equipment and space I have, and exploring non-perishable products is a smart move for me right now. Should I invest in inventory of products to arbitrage online? Should I invest in the top index funds? Should I buy Silver? Should I invest in inventory of a new product line? Should I spend some money insuring and equipment for a landscaping company? I want to future proof myself the best I can as Ai unfolds, I am pretty set with an income for the rest of my life as long as I can grow food and sell it, but there are currently so many changing opportunities, I want to cast out my net and see what works with my temperment. I’ve thought about getting into cyber security, or maybe be an electrician, or less staple jobs like Landscape Architech (can use art/modeling) and CNC engineer/modeler, but honestly I prefer to make a product and sell it without client service related interaction, and particularly no boss. Thank you for reading

Why the value of writing code and other digital services is going to zero
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BalloonWheelieThis week

Why the value of writing code and other digital services is going to zero

I must preface this with a trigger warning because I make some statements in this post that might be upsetting to some. This post discusses my experience building in the new era of entrepreneurship, which is one where the founder is the center of the universe, and the consultants, overpriced SaaS, and corporate swamp creatures are replaced by single-user custom software, bots, and self-hosted automations. If you work in the legacy economy, I really don't intend to stress you out or say things you are doing are quickly becoming irrelevant, but I must share the reality of how I am operating, because I would like to hear from others who are doing the same, or desire to do the same. I am currently operating with the belief that AI-powered tools are going to make 1-person million dollar businesses much more common. Building anything digital is becoming extremely easy, cheap, and quick to implement. The value of code and digital tools is approaching zero, or at most 5% of what it currently is. Right now, the most powerful AI tools are aimed at developers, so folks who have some technical and business ability basically have nothing holding them back aside from the speed of their brain right now. I happen to be a part of the cohort, and am building like there is no tomorrow, but I don't believe this cohort is actually all that big. The next hurdle to unlock the new era of entrepreneurship is empowering every entrepreneur to build at the same pace that is currently locked behind having technical ability. This cohort is huge (millions, if the number of people in this sub is any indication). This post is aimed at them (you?). If you are part of this cohort, what is holding you back from launching a new product for near-zero cost? What is too complicated, too expensive, too unknown for you to be able to build your new/current business at maximum speed? I look forward to seeing the replies, I hope some insights shared can help the community, and be a catalyst for more tools to enable non-technical founders to launch. I will now share some of how I am testing, launching, and selling as a one-man-show. This will be a little bit technical, but if the output of any layer of my stack is something you want, please comment because maybe someone will build a cheap way of accessing it without needing to manage the code yourself. \#1 BOTS I cannot overstate how much leverage bots have created for me. I run all of my bots locally and interface with with via Telegram. Bots do things like: \- watch social media pages, forums, subreddits, etc related to my customers and notify me of what is going on, and suggest SEO blog posts that could be published to capture traffic related to the topic. with a single message, my bot will generate a blog post, send it to me for review, apply edits i suggest, and then publish it live, all from within telegram \- pay attention to all my key metrics/analytics, and attempt to find insights/corrolations (ex. there is a lot of traffic on this page, blog post, video, etc. here's why, and how we can take advantage of it to drive business goals) \- repurposing content. i have dozens of social media profiles that are 100% run by bots, they are all related to my customer niches and will do things like post news, snippets from my blogs, interact with human creators in the niche, etc. this builds my audience automatically which I can then advertise to/try to convert into paying customers, since they are interested in the things my bot is posting and become followers, it's like automated qualified lead gen 24/7 across every social platform and every niche I care about. you may be thinking by now that this post is made by a bot, but you will have to trust me that this is 100% hand-written by my sleep-deprived brain. let's continue: \#2 replacing every SaaS with a shitty version of it designed for what i need out of it it's absurd that we pay ten's of dollars per seat per month for basic digital functions like chat (slack), CRM (active camppaign, sales force, hubspot, etc), email stuff (mailchip, etc), link sharing (linktree, etc), website builders (wix, squarespace, etc), etc. all of these SaaS tools are overpriced and overbuilt. I believe many of them are going to be caught in the innovators dilemma and will go to 0. I don't use any of these anymore, I build and self-host my own shitty version of each of them that does only what i need out of the tool. for example, my CRM doesn't have a fancy drag and drop email builder and 10000 3rd party plugins, because i dont need any of that shit I just need to segment and communicate with my customers. if i need more features, i can generate them on the fly. \#3 working alone I have worked with cofounders in the past, raised money from investors, hired consultants, burned money and time, suffered sleepless nights from stress caused by other people not delivering, trying to convince others they are wrong, or they are pushing the company off a cliff, waste waste waste. no more of that. In the new age of entrepreneurship, the BUILDER (you and I) are the ones creating the value, and AI empowers us to do it alone. this might seem daunting, but there is no business problem that can't be solved with a detailed discussion sesh with chatgpt, no facts that can't be found with perplexity, and no task that can't be automated with claude. there is no need for anymore swamp creatures. you are the start and the end point, you don't need to rely on anyone else for anything. this may sound ignorant, but this is the conclusion I have come to believe, and it continues to be proven every day my businesses progress with me being the only human involved. This is getting quite long so I'll cut it here. I look forward to hearing about how you are operating in this new era and hopefully getting inspired/learning some new ideas to add to my current stack.

AI Content Campaign Got 4M impressions, Thousands of Website Views, Hundreds of Customers for About $100 — This is the future of marketing
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adamkstinsonThis week

AI Content Campaign Got 4M impressions, Thousands of Website Views, Hundreds of Customers for About $100 — This is the future of marketing

Alright. So, a few months ago I tested a marketing strategy for a client that I’ve sense dedicated my life to developing on. The Idea was to take the clients Pillar content (their YouTube videos) and use AI to rewrite the content for all the viable earned media channels (mainly Reddit). The campaign itself was moderately successful. To be specific, after one month it became their 2nd cheapest customer acquisition cost (behind their organic YouTube content). But there is a lot to be done to improve the concept. I will say, having been in growth marketing for a decade, I felt like I had hit something big with the concept. I’m going to detail how I built that AI system, and what worked well and what didn’t here. Hopefully you guys will let me know what you think and whether or not there is something here to keep working on. DEFINING THE GOAL Like any good startup, their marketing budget was minimal. They wanted to see results, fast and cheap. Usually, marketers like me hate to be in this situation because getting results usually either takes time or it takes money. But you can get results fast and cheap if you focus on an earned media strategy - basically getting featured in other people’s publication. The thing is these strategies are pretty hard to scale or grow over time. That was a problem for future me though. I looked through their analytics and saw they were getting referral traffic from Reddit - it was their 5th or 6th largest source of traffic - and they weren’t doing any marketing on the platform. It was all digital word of mouth there. It kind of clicked for me there, that Reddit might be the place to start laying the ground work. So with these considerations in mind the goal became pretty clear: Create content for relevant niche communities on Reddit with the intent of essentially increasing brand awareness. Use an AI system to repurpose their YouTube videos to keep the cost of producing unique content for each subreddit really low. THE HIGH-LEVEL STRATEGY I knew that there are huge amounts of potential customers on Reddit (About 12M people in all the relevant communities combined) AND that most marketers have a really tough time with the platform. I also knew that any earned media strategy, Reddit or not, means Click Through Rates on our content would be extremely low. A lot of people see this as a Reddit specific problem because you can’t self-promote on the platform, but really you have to keep self-promotion to a minimum with any and all earned media. This basically meant we had to get a lot of impressions to make up for it. The thing about Reddit is if your post absolutely crushes it, it can get millions of views. But crushing it is very specific to what the expectations are of that particular subreddit. So we needed to make content that was specifically written for that Subreddit. With that I was able to essentially design how this campaign would work: We would put together a list of channels (specifically subreddits to start) that we wanted to create content for. For each channel, we would write a content guideline that details out how to write great content for this subreddit. These assets would be stored in an AirTable base, along with the transcripts of the YouTube videos that were the base of our content. We would write and optimize different AI Prompts that generated different kinds of posts (discussion starters about a stock, 4-5 paragraph stock analysis, Stock update and what it means, etc…) We would build an automation that took the YouTube transcripts, ran each prompt on it, and then edited each result to match the channel writing guidelines. And then we would find a very contextual way to leave a breadcrumb back to the client. Always as part of the story of the content. At least, this is how I originally thought things would go. CHOOSING THE RIGHT SUBREDDITS Picking the right communities was vital. Here’s the basic rubric we used to pick and prioritize them: • Relevance: We needed communities interested in stock analysis, personal finance, or investing. • Subreddit Size vs. Engagement: Large subreddits offer more potential impressions but can be less focused. Smaller subreddits often have higher engagement rates. • Content Feasibility: We had to ensure we could consistently create high-value posts for each chosen subreddit. We started with about 40 possibilities, then narrowed it down to four or five that consistently delivered upvotes and user signups. CREATING CHANNEL-SPECIFIC GUIDES By the end, creating channel specific writing guidelines looked like a genius decision. Here’s how we approached it and used AI to get it done quickly: Grabbed Top Posts: We filtered the subreddit’s top posts (change filter to “Top” and then “All Time”) of all time to see the kinds of content that performed best Compiled The Relevant Posts: We took the most relevant posts to what we were trying to do and put them all on one document (basically created one document per subreddit that just had the top 10 posts in that subreddit). Had AI Create Writing Guideline Based On Posts: For each channel, we fed the document with the 10 posts with the instructions “Create a writing guideline for this subreddit based on these high performing posts. I had to do some editing on each guideline but this worked pretty well and saved a lot of time. Each subreddit got a custom guideline, and we put these inside the “Channels” table of the AirTable base we were developing with these assets. BUILDING THE AI PROMPTS THAT GENERATED CONTENT Alright this is probably the most important section so I’ll be detailed. Essentially, we took all the assets we developed up until this point, and used them to create unique posts for each channel. This mean each AI prompt was about 2,000 words of context and produced about a 500-word draft. There was a table in our AirTable where we stored the prompts, as I alluded to earlier. And these were basically the instructions for each prompt. More specifically, they detailed out our expectations for the post. In other words, there were different kinds of posts that performed well on each channel. For example, you can write a post that’s a list of resources (5 tools we used to…), or a how to guide (How we built…), etc.. Those weren’t the specific ones we used, but just wanted to really explain what I meant there. That actual automation that generated the content worked as follows: New source content (YouTube video transcript) was added to the Source Content table. This triggered the Automation. The automation grabbed all the prompts in the prompt table. For each prompt in the prompt table, we sent a prompt to OpenAI (gpt-4o) that contained first the prompt and also the source content. Then, for each channel that content prompt could be used on, we sent another prompt to OpenAI that revised the result of the first prompt based on the specific channel guidelines. The output of that prompt was added to the Content table in AirTable. To be clear, our AirTable had 4 tables: Content Channels Prompts Source Content The Source Content, Prompts, and Channel Guidelines were all used in the prompt that generated content. And the output was put in the Content table. Each time the automation ran, the Source Content was turned into about 20 unique posts, each one a specific post type generated for a specific channel. In other words, we were create a ton of content. EDITING & REFINING CONTENT The AI drafts were never perfect. Getting them Reddit-ready took editing and revising The main things I had to go in and edit for were: • Tone Adjustments: We removed excessively cliche language. The AI would say silly things like “Hello fellow redditors!” which sound stupid. • Fact-Checking: Financial data can be tricky. We discovered AI often confused figures, so we fact check all stock related metrics. Probably something like 30-40% error rate here. Because the draft generation was automated, that made the editing and getting publish ready the human bottleneck. In other words, after creating the system I spent basically all my time reviewing the content. There were small things I could do to make this more efficient, but not too much. The bigger the model we used, the less editing the content needed. THE “BREADCRUMB” PROMOTION STRATEGY No where in my prompt to the AI did I mention that we were doing any marketing. I just wanted the AI to focus on creating content that would do well on the channel. So in the editing process I had to find a way to promote the client. I called it a breadcrumb strategy once and that stuck. Basically, the idea was to never overtly promote anything. Instead find a way to leave a breadcrumb that leads back to the client, and let the really interested people follow the trail. Note: this is supposed to be how we do all content marketing. Some examples of how we did this were: Shared Visuals with a Subtle Watermark: Because our client’s product offered stock data, we’d often include a chart or graph showing a company’s financial metric with the client’s branding in the corner. Added Supporting Data from Client’s Website: If we mentioned something like a company’s cash flow statement, we could link to that company’s cash flow statement on the client’s website. It worked only because there was a lot of data on the client’s website that wasn’t gated. These tactics were really specific to the client. Which is should be. For other companies I would rethink what tactics I use here. THE RESULTS I’m pretty happy with the results • Impressions: – Early on posts averaged \~30,000 apiece, but after about a month of optimization, we hit \~70,000 impressions average. Over about two months, we reached 4 million total impressions. • Signups: – In their signups process there was one of those “Where did you find us?” questions and the amount of people who put Reddit jumped into the few hundred a month. Precise tracking of this is impossible. • Cost Efficiency (This is based on what I charged, and not the actual cost of running the campaign which is about $100/mo): – CPM (cost per thousand impressions) was about $0.08, which is far better than most paid channels. – Cost per free user: \~$8-10. After about a 10% conversion rate to a paid plan, our cost per paying user was $80–$100—well below the client’s previous $300–$400. HIGHLIGHTS: WHAT WORKED Subreddit-Specific Content: – Tailoring each post’s format and length to the audience norms boosted engagement. Worked out really well. 1 post got over 1M views alone. We regularly had posts that had hundreds of thousands. Breadcrumbs: – We never had anyone call us out for promoting. And really we weren’t. Our first priority was writing content that would crush on that subreddit. Using the Founder’s Existing Material: – The YouTube transcripts grounded the AI’s content in content we already made. This was really why we were able to produce so much content. CHALLENGES: WHAT DIDN’T WORK AI is still off: – Maybe it’s expecting too much, but still I wish the AI had done a better job. I editing a lot of content. Human oversight was critical. Scheduling all the content was a pain: – Recently I automated this pretty well. But at first I was scheduling everything manually and scheduling a hundred or so posts was a hassle. Getting Data and Analytics: – Not only did we have not very good traffic data, but the data from reddit had to be collected manually. Will probably automate this in the future. COST & TIME INVESTMENT Setup: The setup originally took me a couple weeks. I’ve since figured out how to do much faster (about 1 week). AirTable Setup here was easy and the tools costs $24/mo so not bad. ChatGPT costs were pretty cheap. Less than $75 per month. I’ve sense switched to using o1 which is much more expensive but saves me a lot of editing time Human Editing: Because this is the human part of the process and everything else was automated it mean by default all my time was spent editing content. Still this was a lot better than creating content from scratch probably by a factor of 5 or 10. The main expense was paying an editor (or using your own time) to refine posts. Worth it? Yes even with the editing time I was able to generate way more content that I would have otherwise. LESSONS & ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAYS Reddit as a Growth Channel: – If you genuinely respect each subreddit’s culture, you can achieve massive reach on a tight budget. AI + Human Collaboration: – AI excels at first drafts, but human expertise is non-negotiable for polishing and ensuring factual integrity. Soft Promotion Wins: – The “breadcrumb” approach paid off. It might feel like too light a touch, but is crucial for Reddit communities. Create once, repurpose as many times as possible: – If you have blog posts, videos, podcasts, or transcripts, feed them into AI to keep your message accurate and brand-consistent. CONCLUSION & NEXT STEPS If you try a similar approach: • Begin with smaller tests in a few niches to learn what resonates. • Create a clear “channel guide” for each community. • Carefully fact-check AI-generated posts. • Keep brand mentions low-key until you’ve established credibility.

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

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 Automation Agency, the Future for Solopreneurs?
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MoneyPizza1231This week

AI Automation Agency, the Future for Solopreneurs?

I want to take a moment to discuss AI automation agencies. If they are any good for new entrepreneurs. Or on the flip side what is wrong with them. &#x200B; Normally when you see something promising to make you thousands of dollars, for very little work, you run the other way. But you see I am not most people, and I love stuff like this. So, when I saw, AI Automation Agencies (AAA) promising to make me thousands of dollars, I ran straight down that rabbit hole. With no hesitation… It was a new term and idea, that I had already played around with. Due to the inherent nature of businesses and AI at the time. It was 100% an opportunity with a potential market down the line. What is an AI Automation Agency? On the surface, an AAA is using AI to automate and augment business processes. With a combination of using no code AI tools, AI LLMs, and simple automation process tools (Zapier). The whole premise of the AAA is to help companies reduce expenses and increase profits. Whether that is through improving business processes or cutting out easy-to-replace jobs. AAAs are all about optimizing your business (The best way to think about it). Run through a quick scenario with me: Say you are a simple e-commerce store, selling your favorite product. I show up, as an AAA, promising to automate your customer service platform. I can build you a fully automated customer service chatbot, and help you answer specific customer questions with AI. With the promises of a faster, more efficient, and more effective customer service platform. Being able to perform 80% of your current team’s work. Would you take the offer? It is a no-brainer, right? That is the premise behind this business model. Make businesses more effective. Which in turn makes them more profitable. A win-win for everyone. Take a look at some of the products an AAA might sell. Robotic Process Automation: Automating repetitive tasks in a business. AI- Power Analytics: Helping businesses understand and act on insights in their data. Sentiment Analysis: Analyzing how customers think and feel about products and markets. Customer Service: AI chatbots for customer questions. Productivity: Help augment processes with AI to cut down on time. Any process in a business that you fully understand you can augment and or automate with AI. And guess what? It is an open market but for good reason… Too Good to be True? The reason that this new business model is wide open is quite funny. No business cares about AI right now. Businesses are too focused to worry about AI and its upsides. Focused on the day-to-day operations, and not worried about AI. Make a few cold calls, and see how many leads you get… At the moment the offer does not resonate with potential clients. Meaning you need to have a massive advertising budget to get any leads. Because no one cares or sees any benefit, they will just brush you off. Which becomes an endless cycle of paid ads, and constant cold calling, just to find any business. So why is this model even popular? The gurus…that’s why. They have the budget for ads and get clients from their videos. Effectively throwing money at the problem. At least until it works. Do not get me wrong, AI automation is going to change businesses. But not right now. The whole growth of this business model is being pushed by influencers and gurus. People that can afford the cost of the startup. Telling others that it is a feasible one-person business. That anyone with no money can do, with a few simple steps. And that is just not the case. This has been a trend for any new profitable and “easy” business model. The gurus get there first, promote the model, show how simple it is, and rope everyone in. Eventually up selling a course on how to do it, or maybe even a community. You’ve seen it with ChatGPT, Facebook ads, SMMA, and so much more. It is a constant cycle that you need to be aware of. The End Result Good news, there is an alternative. It is using a combination of SMMA and AAA. Gathering leads using SMMA. Creating a great offer for your niche. And selling them on the service you can provide through marketing. Then once they are sold, you upsell them on AI automation. Easy to start, low cost, and super effective. Although unproven. It makes complete sense why it would work. It is beginner friendly, with plenty of SMMA tutorials online. With low barriers to entry. Making it a very inciting opportunity. AAA is going to be the future of business. It is a million-dollar opportunity for anyone. But with most startups, it takes skills and capital. With a façade of being easy to operate and start, pushed by gurus. More entrepreneur hopefuls find themselves debating starting an AAA. And guess what, it isn’t a good idea… Do your research to understand the market you want to enter, and how your business is going to operate. And don’t fall for get-rich-quick schemes. Ps. Check out this video if you want to learn more…

Only 2 months of cash in the Bank for my business but was able to save it with the help of AI.
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CALLIRDAN90This week

Only 2 months of cash in the Bank for my business but was able to save it with the help of AI.

Hi there! I’m excited to share something very personal with you. We needed to book at least 2 appointments per day in the next 60 days, or my business would fail. We were already trying two acquisition channels, LinkedIn and email. The problem with these channels was that the positive response rate was very low in both. So I decided to focus on LinkedIn and get the attention of the lead by sending videos directly to them via LinkedIn messages. (You can send videos to your connections on LinkedIn if you use your cell phone.) This wasn’t new, but I added a small twist to get the lead’s attention. All the covers of the videos had a picture of me holding a sign with the person’s name and an interesting phrase. This showed some okay results, but the rest of the video was not personalized. Only the picture on the cover was. I even developed a Chrome extension for this because I thought this would be the answer and that I would book tons of appointments.  But after more trial and outreach, my leads responded, telling me that because the video itself wasn’t personalized for them, they felt like I didn’t put enough effort in, so they would not book a call with me. So after investing time and effort into my “new bright idea” and getting developers to make the Chrome extension, I was back to square one with no results. A few weeks went by, and after researching online, I found an online course from a guy who promised to teach me how to book 30+ appointments per month, guaranteed (at the time, I was making 2 or 3 appointments per week, maximum). He promised that I would only pay if he actually booked appointments for me and even offered to give me money if his course didn’t work for me. I never paid attention to internet gurus, but the offer was actually not bad, so I looked into this guy’s website. I found out he had hundreds of reviews from people who had taken his course and were talking amazing things about it. The more I read, the more excited I got. I booked a call that day and talked to a salesperson. The call was very short, and he promised I would get at least 2 appointments per day, easily. He seemed a bit cocky and told me that I just needed to trust him and the 100+ reviews from people who had taken the course. He didn’t share details, a proposal, or anything. I asked the price, and he told me it was close to $10k. (Not kidding, this was the price.) Then he told me that I would make the money back in no time with the clients I would get following his course, and that if it didn’t work, he would give me the money back. But I needed to follow everything the course said for at least 6 months. I had never paid $10k for anything in my life; it was extremely expensive for me. Also, my salary from my business was not in dollars but in a currency that was worth much less than the dollar. I continued to research more and more, but no other course was close to the number of reviews and promises that this guy had. I got desperate and told myself that I would bet everything on this course. If it worked for so many others, surely it would work for me. I got a loan from the bank and paid for the course. You might read this and think it was the most stupid thing ever, but the reality is that after 2 months in the course (I did the course as fast as I could), I learned a lot. The course was not bad; it was very extensive—probably more than 200 hours or so—and they taught a lot of things. I don’t think it was worth $10k for me, but I can see how for other people it might be worth that. Now, to the question you’re all thinking: did it get me the 2 appointments I needed per day? The answer is no. Here’s the thing: most of the techniques they taught were innovative and disruptive, but the focus was always on personalization, and they didn’t teach any way to automate the personalization. (I think, at the time they made the course, the tools didn’t exist yet.) So they taught how to do everything manually, and it took a lot—a lot of time and effort. And most annoyingly: an incredible amount of time doing operational things. I did get 2 appointments on some days, but it wasn’t consistent, and I didn’t have the time to spend 14 hours a day doing everything manually or the money to hire someone to do this for me. (I needed to also spend time delivering our service to our current clients; otherwise, they would leave.) I told them this, and they were very reasonable. After some negotiation, they gave me part of the money back. (To be fair, there was a lot of value in the course, so asking for the full $10k back would have been excessive because, in the end, it really taught me a lot of things I didn’t know.) So in the end, I spent $10k and 200+ hours on an online course, spent time and effort developing a Chrome extension, and was still not able to hit the meetings I needed. Money in the business was running out, and I needed to do something fast, or I was doomed. After investing time and effort in tools, research, and spending $10k and over 200 hours on a course that didn’t deliver the consistent results I needed, I was at a crossroads. My businesses were running out of money, and I knew I needed to find a solution quickly, or everything I had worked for would collapse. It was during this time of desperation that I started exploring other options. One night, while scrolling through the internet, I stumbled upon a 2024 article about how AI was being used to revolutionize various industries. It wasn’t directly related to appointment booking, but it sparked an idea in my mind. What if I could use AI to automate the personalization process that I had learned in the course? It seemed like a long shot, but I had nothing to lose. I started researching AI tools and technologies—YouTube videos, podcasts, pretty much everything related to AI—desperate to find something that could help me scale my outreach without investing too much time, while still maintaining the personalization that was so important. After a lot of trial and error, I found a few tools that showed promise. All of these tools were extremely new. Some of them had just launched the versions I needed just weeks ago. I can say I researched and tested more than 50 AI startups, experimenting with them, testing different approaches, checking prices (the problem was that most of them were cheap but became very expensive when applying the volume I needed to get results), and gradually refining my process. It wasn’t an overnight success, but for the first time, I felt like I was onto something that could truly work. The idea of combining AI personalization with volume was something new, and it gave me hope that I could finally book the meetings I needed without burning out. One day, I sent a video of myself talking—completely AI-generated—to my family chat group and waited for their response. None of them noticed it wasn’t actually me. At that moment, I said to myself: “Okay, I am ready to test this in the real world and see if it works.” Like everything in life, focus is key. As I mentioned earlier, we were already trying outbound strategies on LinkedIn and email, but I decided to narrow my focus to LinkedIn and specifically to video outreach. My goal was to stand out from the crowd, where most people were using text or sending generic videos. I knew that if my videos were 100% personalized, it would make a strong impression on my leads. I focused on two key metrics during my tests: Time spent on manual personalized outreach vs. AI-generated personalized outreach. Positive reply rate for non-personalized manual outreach vs. AI-generated personalized outreach. I ran a test using a sample of 50 one-minute videos sent to 50 leads, and here are the results: Time Spent to Make the Videos: Manual Process: It took me up to 10 hours to create and send 50 personalized videos. This included looking good on camera, brushing my hair, choosing appropriate clothing, ensuring proper lighting, not messing up the script, using a camera holder, recharging the phone, pausing to drink water, avoiding external sounds, being in an appropriate room, downloading the videos, deleting the videos that were not good, and sending the final ones. On average, it took me at least 12.5 minutes per one-minute video. AI Process: With AI, it took me just 32 seconds to create the exact same one-minute personalized video—without saying a word or recording a second of footage. In total, I could make and send the same 50 personalized videos in just 27 minutes. Result: The AI process was 24 times faster. Completely crazy! Positive Reply Rate: Non-Personalized Script (Manual): Using a good script without personalization (no name, job title, city, company, etc.) resulted in a positive reply rate of 4-6% on LinkedIn, including follow-ups. Personalized Script (AI): Using the same script but adding personalized details like the lead's name, company, city, and job title resulted in a positive reply rate of 15-20%, including follow-ups. Result: AI personalization led to 3x (three times) more replies. The best part was the responses. Almost everyone who replied thanked me for taking the time to research them, congratulated me on my speech, and appreciated the personalization and eloquence of my message.  These metrics were a complete breakthrough for me. I researched online to see if anyone else had done something similar, but I couldn’t find anything close. After achieving these metrics, booking the two appointments I desperately needed became easy. In fact, in the last 10 weeks, I’ve been able to consistently book 3-4 appointments per day. This success allowed me to train someone in my company to handle the process, freeing me up to focus on other aspects of the business and ultimately saving it. With the AI appointment machine we built, I even have free time now—time that I’ve been using to develop a methodology and tech tools that I now teach to others. I named the methodology Clip2Lead as a reference to the first Chrome extension I developed that didn’t work but ended up being the first step toward everything that followed. I’ve condensed everything I learned and throughout my experiences into a simple and short FREE training where I cover the entire AI appointment booking process. This includes how to find leads, create scripts, set up follow-up sequences, generate AI videos, clone your voice, compare non-AI metrics with AI metrics, and even navigate AI safety controls. I also offer Chrome extensions that helped me automate the process even further, so you can spend your time closing deals or focusing on other acquisition channels, while your AI machine for booking appointments runs with minimal effort from you. If you’re interested please get in touch with me and thank you for taking the time to read my personal story.

ChatGPT, Claude.ai and Perplexity for my Youtube Business
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ImpossibleBell4759This week

ChatGPT, Claude.ai and Perplexity for my Youtube Business

I use ChatGPT, Claude. ai and Perplexity for my Youtube Software Review Businesses. I run OVER 20 Youtube Faceless Software Review channels, and those AI tools basically help me with ideas, titles and descriptions. I like how simple is it to use those AI tools and crank out ideas, titles and descriptions in less than 20 minutes. ChatGPT, Claude. ai and Perplexity save me so much time. Managing all those Youtube channels is an all day event. I also save time by not editing and not scripting my videos. I do software reviews and I crank out 3 videos per hour. I can use software to automate some of the videos, but they don't get the same effect, so I do every video with original content. I'm thinking about using Elevenlabs. com so I can have access to hundreds of voices that I can use for my videos. I like their "Speech to Speech" technology. The only problem with Elevenlabs is that I have to do some editing to make it work... and I hate editing. I rather just record my video and upload it to Youtube. I might have to skip on Elevenlabs and the editing, because I need to crank out at least 20 videos per day. It seems like a lot but I focus on 12 hours a day and 3 videos per hour. 12 hours times 3 videos= 36 videos per day. But I only need 20 videos in the 12 hours, so I know I can meet my quota for the day. I'm looking at 20 videos per day times roughly 30 days is 600 videos per month. My goal is to finish the year with at least $100,000 in "CASH" after taxes, paying rent, buying food and having all my bills paid. So, I need to make $273.97 per day times 365 days= $100,000. The most I've made was off 1 video with only 600 views and I made over $3,300. I wasn't even monetized by Youtube. I made all that money from software commissions alone. I don't care about being monetized by Youtube what so ever. With Youtube monetized payouts you need millions of views to make money, with software commissions ranging from 20%- 40% I don't need Youtube revenue. I've broken my Youtube business plan down into bite sized pieces so that I know I can achieve my Goals. CHEERS!

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

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
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Positive-Bison5023This week

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.

Looking for Social Media Marketing Partner(s) for High-Potential AI App Business
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Altruistic-Flan-8222This week

Looking for Social Media Marketing Partner(s) for High-Potential AI App Business

Hello everyone! I am Mak, and I'm a software engineer and AI developer with a few years of experience. I'm pretty young like the most of you and have an amazing idea. I'm sure that some of you have heard of Rizz, Plug, Wigman and similar apps. Those are simple AI apps that generate pickup lines for people, and I worked as an AI developer for one of the above. I got this business idea after analyzing more about this industry and realizing that these apps make TONS of money—like the one I worked for, which is making about $50k per WEEK using my AI solutions. That's crazy. The point is that I took a pause from working as a software engineer for clients and researched how to do the same thing. It took me a few months to actually understand everything about this business model, and Rizz apps are just one example of this type of business. There is one 17 yo guy I found who made "Cal AI" I guess, basically a simple AI app that analyzes your meal and provides info like calories, etc. I also created AI solutions for a guy who made an AI app that analyzes your face, provides Sigma analytics, and suggests how to improve your face, etc. So the point is that there are tons of AI app ideas that you can create for this industry. And the important fact is that the AI market is growing. Some important AI analytics say that in 2024, there were 1.5B AI app downloads, and mobile AI app consumer spending was $1.8B. That's huge. So, what am I looking for? I need someone, hopefully from the US, or someone who knows how to post social media content for US users, to help me out with my business idea. I'm self-funded and have already spent a lot on important requirements and equipment, which is why I need someone interested in revenue sharing. We can come up with a deal such as capped/tiered revenue share, profit share, deferred model, etc. We could discuss this privately since everyone has different experience levels and thoughts about this. Also, since I'm talking about experience, you don't need huge experience at all. You can be 16-25 years old just like me and only have marketing skills. However, to make it easier for those who don't have marketing skills, I am planning to create code that will automatically generate content for you, and all you need to do is post the content. But this is only for posting content without creating it and is for interested people from the US since I need US customers. However, if you have marketing skills and an idea for getting organic US views, please let's talk. Short info about my app: It is an AI app like the previous examples, which doesn’t yet exist. There is pretty big potential for app growth (60% of Americans could use this app), and it should be pretty easy to market. Good niche, good idea and overall solid market for this app idea. TL;DR I need someone interested in marketing my AI app in exchange for revenue share. No huge experience is needed. I would prefer someone from the US. If you are interested, feel free to contact me here on Reddit via private messages or below. We can talk here, on Discord, LinkedIn, or anywhere you prefer. Thanks once again!

ChatGPT, Claude.ai and Perplexity for my Youtube Business
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ImpossibleBell4759This week

ChatGPT, Claude.ai and Perplexity for my Youtube Business

I use ChatGPT, Claude. ai and Perplexity for my Youtube Software Review Businesses. I run OVER 20 Youtube Faceless Software Review channels, and those AI tools basically help me with ideas, titles and descriptions. I like how simple is it to use those AI tools and crank out ideas, titles and descriptions in less than 20 minutes. ChatGPT, Claude. ai and Perplexity save me so much time. Managing all those Youtube channels is an all day event. I also save time by not editing and not scripting my videos. I do software reviews and I crank out 3 videos per hour. I can use software to automate some of the videos, but they don't get the same effect, so I do every video with original content. I'm thinking about using Elevenlabs. com so I can have access to hundreds of voices that I can use for my videos. I like their "Speech to Speech" technology. The only problem with Elevenlabs is that I have to do some editing to make it work... and I hate editing. I rather just record my video and upload it to Youtube. I might have to skip on Elevenlabs and the editing, because I need to crank out at least 20 videos per day. It seems like a lot but I focus on 12 hours a day and 3 videos per hour. 12 hours times 3 videos= 36 videos per day. But I only need 20 videos in the 12 hours, so I know I can meet my quota for the day. I'm looking at 20 videos per day times roughly 30 days is 600 videos per month. My goal is to finish the year with at least $100,000 in "CASH" after taxes, paying rent, buying food and having all my bills paid. So, I need to make $273.97 per day times 365 days= $100,000. The most I've made was off 1 video with only 600 views and I made over $3,300. I wasn't even monetized by Youtube. I made all that money from software commissions alone. I don't care about being monetized by Youtube what so ever. With Youtube monetized payouts you need millions of views to make money, with software commissions ranging from 20%- 40% I don't need Youtube revenue. I've broken my Youtube business plan down into bite sized pieces so that I know I can achieve my Goals. CHEERS!

How I went from $27 to $3K as a solopreneur still in a 9-5
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jottrledThis week

How I went from $27 to $3K as a solopreneur still in a 9-5

My journey started back in November 2023. I was scrolling through Twitter and YouTube and saw a word that I had never come across before. Solopreneur. The word caught my eye. Mainly because I was pretty sure I knew what it meant even though it's not a word you'll find in the dictionary. I liked what it was describing. A solo entrepreneur. A one man business. It completely resonated with me. As a software engineer by trade I'm used to working alone, especially since the pandemic hit and we were forced to work remotely. See, I always wanted to ditch the 9-5 thing but thought that was too big and too scary for a single person to do. Surely you would need a lot of money to get started, right? Surely you would need investors? The whole concept seemed impossible to me. That was until I found all the success stories. I became obsessed with the concept of solopreneurship. As I went further down the rabbit hole I found people like Justin Welsh, Kieran Drew and Marc Louvion to name a few. All of whom have one person businesses making huge money every year. So I thought, if they can do it, why can't I? People like this have cleared the pathway for those looking to escape the 9-5 grind. I decided 2024 would be the year I try this out. My main goal for the year? Build a one man business, earn my first $ online and learn a sh\*t ton along the way. My main goal in general? Build my business to $100K per year, quit my 9-5 and live with freedom. From December 2023 to February 2024 I began brainstorming ideas. I was like a lost puppy looking for his ball. How on earth did people find good ideas? I began writing everything and anything that came to mind down in my notes app on my phone. By February I would have approximately 70 ideas. Each as weird and whacky as the other. I was skeptical though. If I went through all the trouble of building a product for one of these ideas how would I know if anyone would even be interested in using it? I got scared and took a break for a week. All these ideas seemed too big and the chance that they would take off into the atmosphere was slim (in my mind anyways). I was learning more and more about solopreneurship as the weeks went on so I decided to build a product centered around everything I was learning about. The idea was simple. Enter a business idea and use AI to give the user details about how to market it, who their target customers were, what to write on their landing page, etc. All for a measly $27 per use. I quickly built it and launched on March 3rd 2024. I posted about it on Indie Hackers, Reddit and Hacker News. I was so excited about the prospect of earning my first internet $! Surely everyone wanted to use my product! Nope...all I got was crickets. I was quickly brought back down to earth. That was until 5 days later. I looked at my phone and had a new Stripe notification! Cha-ching! My first internet $. What a feeling! That was goal number 1 complete. It would be another 6 days before I would get my second sale...and then another 15 days to get my third. It was an emotional rollercoaster. I went from feeling like quitting the 9-5 was actually possible to thinking that maybe the ups and downs aren't worth it. On one hand I had made my first internet dollar so I should my ecstatic, and don't get me wrong, I was but I wanted more. More validation that I could do this long term. By May I was starting to give up on the product. I had learned so much in the past few months about marketing, SEO, building an audience, etc. and I wanted to build something that I thought could have more success so I focused on one critical thing that I had learned about. What was it? Building a product that had SEO potential. A product that I knew hundreds of people were looking for. See this was my thinking - If I could find a keyword that people were searching for on Google hundreds/thousands of times every month and it was easy to rank high on search engines then I would go all in (in SEO land this equates to a Keyword that has a Keyword Difficulty of = 500). I began researching and found that the keyword "micro saas ideas" was being searched for around 600 times each month. Micro Saas was something that really interested me. It was perfect for solopreneurs. Small software products that 1 person could build. What's not to like if you're in the game of software and solopreneurship? Researching keywords like this became like a game for me. I was hooked. I was doing it every day, finding gems that were being searched for hundreds and thousands of times every month that still had potential. That's when I came up with my next product idea. I decided to create a database of Micro Saas Ideas all with this sort of SEO potential. See if you can build a product that you know people are looking for then that's all the validation you need. So I put this theory to the test. I created a database of Micro Saas Ideas with SEO Potential and launched it in June 2024. This time it was different. I made $700 in the first week of launching. A large contrast to my previous failed attempt at becoming the worlds greatest solopreneur. Since launch I have grown the product to $3K and I couldn't be happier. I know what you're saying, $3K isn't a lot. But it's validation. It's validation that I can earn $ online. Validation that I can grow a business and it gives me hope that one day I'll be able to quit that 9-5 grind. My plan is to keep growing the business. I expect there to be a few challenges up ahead but I'll tackle them as I go and learn from the failures and successes. I have a newsletter where I share Micro Saas Ideas with SEO potential every week which I'll leave below in the first comment. Feel free to come along for the ride. If not I hope this post brings you some value If you're thinking about starting as a solopreneur, stop thinking and start doing, you won't regret it.

I’m building a “DesignPickle” for all things Funnels. Would love your feedback...
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Gluteous_MaximusThis week

I’m building a “DesignPickle” for all things Funnels. Would love your feedback...

Hey Entrepreneurs, Early next year I’m rolling out a productized service business along the lines of Design Pickle, but instead of design assets, we create on-demand marketing assets: Things like landing pages, lead magnets, email campaigns, etc. This is NOT an agency with client engagements, etc.  It is an on-demand, menu-item style fulfillment platform where we do a few predefined things really, really well, and as much as possible try to reduce the complexity (and required customer inputs) so that creating your next killer Funnel is as easy as ordering dinner on Skip the Dishes. Below I’ve laid out our current thinking (we’re still distilling this into a deck), just so you have the full context.  And at the end, I pose 5 feedback questions. So if this “deck” seems interesting to you, then I’d love to get your feedback at the end 🙂 Thanks! And here goes... \--- The current elevator pitch:  We will research your business, your market and your competitors to develop a killer Lead Magnet, Landing Page, Ad Creatives and a 30-Day Email Drip campaign designed to turn your traffic into a rabid, lifelong buyer tribe (that you can email for years... like having your own, on-demand cash printer).  The overall thesis:  While AI is getting continually better at creating things like one-off graphics, article content, and so on - we do not think it can deeply understand market psychology, what keeps your customers up at night, or the underlying emotions that drive purchase decisions at the individual level, for your specific offer(s). Moreover, it’s also this psychological aspect of marketing where most businesses simply do not have the talent, resources or frankly the experience to create high-performing funnels themselves, regardless of how much "automation" they might have at their fingertips. And that’s because this is where you need to know who your customer really is, and what they’re actually buying (hint: not your features). Few marketers focus on these fundamentals, let alone understand the selling process. This is also why tools like ClickFunnels, HighLevel, LeadPages, etc. while very helpful, can only help with the logistics of selling. It’s still on each business to figure out how to actually tell their story, capture demand, and sell effectively. This is why a productized service that nails market research, competitor analysis & world-class copywriting that can actually turn cold traffic into lifelong customers is going to be a no-brainer for a business that’s currently struggling to actually get a steady flow of online sales. This is not something we see AI replacing effectively, any time soon. Current gaps & unknowns:  At a top level, I’m not overly worried about validation or viability; there are several existing competitors, and obviously the automation platforms have substantial customer bases (ClickFunnels etc). There will be a certain cohort that will want experts to do the actual thinking for them, storytelling, etc. Even if it’s a relatively small cohort, given the CLTV of a service like this, it still makes for a decent sized business. But where I’m less confident is in who our ideal customer actually is... Yes, basically every direct-response internet business needs an effective funnel that can sell. Whether you’re an Enterprise SaaS platform or a solopreneur launching your first $39 ebook, you will benefit from a killer funnel. As a “DesignPickle” type service though, here’s the challenges I see with each core customer category... B2B SaaS: While sales decisions are still emotional, it’s more about account-based considerations; people usually aren’t spending their own money, so it’s more about not looking stupid vs. gaining some benefit. Harder to systemize. Very high stakes. Consumer / SMB SaaS: While I think in general these are ideal customers, there will be resistance to leaning in hard on personality (and personal brand); founders usually want to sell at some point, so if they become the face of the platform, then boosting performance with a high-personality funnel might ironically make it a harder business to sell. SaaS founders are also generally very technical and stereotypically avoid marketing like the plague. Ecommerce: Most DTC brands think of funnels as an extension of their FB ad campaigns; few see their customers as a long-term audience that can become a significant asset. However, certain lifestyle / luxury brands might differ. Online Courses / Coaches: Of all the customer profiles, this group probably has the most appreciation for the effectiveness of marketing psychology, copywriting, etc. and would get the value prop quickly. The problem is that most won’t have the budget or traction to outsource asset creation. This is the “poorest” segment of the market. Service Businesses: Agencies, consultancies, and so on would greatly benefit from having a strong personal brand + storytelling premise (funnel). However, they’re also the worst offenders when it comes to never practicing what they preach / do for others. Client work soaks up all their resources. Local & Brick/Mortar: Generally speaking most local businesses are going to have smaller audiences (email lists under 2K subs), where funnel ops might have limited value long-term due to a lack of scale. And for larger B&M brands with franchises across various locations, you get into stakeholder friction; messaging usually gets watered down to basic corporate-speak as a result. Now, to be clear, I still see a ton of opportunity in each of those main customer categories as well, but I like to be clear-eyed about the overall resistance each niche will have - mainly because this helps to refine messaging to an ideal customer profile within them. In this case though, so far, nothing’s really jumping out at me as a clear “winner” at a category level. So far, what I’m thinking is our ICP might be situational / conditional. For example: A business has a funnel / is invested in the process, but it’s not working yet A business sees their competitor killing it with a funnel, and they’re ultra motivated to do it even better A business has one funnel that’s working awesome, and everything else they try sucks (so they can’t scale / expand) Etc. Basically, our most ideal customer might be ANY type of business who gets it, who’s tried to do this themselves, and now needs the pros to come in and fix things. \--- This is where your feedback would be incredibly valuable... First, if you’ve made it all the way down to this point - thanks for enduring my rambling mess above! But I did think the context might be helpful. Based on our overall biz plan & go-to-market considerations discussed above, if you run a business (or work with one) that might benefit from something like this, I’d love to ask a few questions... What is the nature of your business? (What do you sell)? What do you find hardest about selling to your online audience? Have you built a funnel in the past / are you running one currently? If not, what’s stopping you from building a high-performing funnel? If you had a “magic marketing lamp” where a genie could create ONE amazing marketing asset for you (eg. a killer landing page, video ad, launch strategy, etc), but you could only use it ONCE, what would you have the genie do for you? Please reply below as a comment, or DM me if you’d prefer to keep answers anonymous.  Thanks so much And again, apologies for the novel... Cheers

This founder was about to shut down his startup and open a restaurant. He pivoted the business and grew it to $45m ARR in 12 months. What else have you seen grow that fast?
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CountryPitifulThis week

This founder was about to shut down his startup and open a restaurant. He pivoted the business and grew it to $45m ARR in 12 months. What else have you seen grow that fast?

I heard that Jasper scaled to $45m ARR in 12 months...with a team of 8. For context, they are one of the fastest-growing companies ever. Grew from $0 to $45m ARR in 12 months (then raised $125m at a $1.5b valuation). As a fellow founder, their story is really inspiring to me (curious about what others think): In December 2020, Dave Rogenmoser and his co-founders were on the brink of shutting down their business. They'd spent 3+ years building a conversion optimization software called Proof...and it was flatlining. A few weeks prior they had to make the painful decision to let go of half their team. Competition and churn had completely eroded growth. Things were painful. 8 years of work left them with a string of startups that never quite made it: 2 failed software businesses (couldn't make money*) A SMB marketing agency (maxed out at $25k/mo*) An online course company (hard to get big*) The Pivot: In January 2021, they had an idea to use Chat GPT-3, the generative AI model released 6 months earlier, to write high-converting Facebook ads. Within 30 days, they launched the business. With the skeleton crew remaining from the last startup, they scaled the business to $45m ARR and 70,000+ customers without hiring a single new person. Soon after, they raised $125m at a $1.5b valuation. Dave Rogenmoser, CEO at Jasper, had some great one-liners in a few podcasts I listened to on the business. Here are some of his learnings: Right Skill, Wrong Vehicle: He spent 8 years building marketing businesses which gave this team the knowledge and confidence to spend $1m/mo on sales and marketing to scale the business to $45m ARR in year 1. Launch Fast & Iterate Quickly: The team agreed that if the business didn't work in 30 days, they'd shut it down. Dave says, "If you have been working on a problem for more than 18 months and haven't found Product market fit (PMF), odds are you won't...Make the hard pivot."* Ride A Big Wave: Generative AI technology is a new technology that is changing the way we work. But it's not just text. It's images, voice, etc. Identify new customer segments (e.g., Municipalities, Banks, Lawyers, etc.), learn their problems, and apply this novel technology to solve them. What other businesses have you seen scale like this? I've never seen a SaaS business grow that fast. I meet interesting founders 2x per week and share the learnings here.

This founder was about to shut down his business and open a restaurant. He pivoted the business and grew it to $45m ARR in 12 months. What other businesses can scale like this?
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CountryPitifulThis week

This founder was about to shut down his business and open a restaurant. He pivoted the business and grew it to $45m ARR in 12 months. What other businesses can scale like this?

I heard that Jasper scaled to $45m ARR in 12 months...with a team of 8. For context, they are one of the fastest-growing companies ever. Grew from $0 to $45m ARR in 12 months (then raised $125m at a $1.5b valuation). As a fellow founder, their story is really inspiring to me (curious about what others think): In December 2020, Dave Rogenmoser and his co-founders were on the brink of shutting down their business. They'd spent 3+ years building a conversion optimization software called Proof...and it was flatlining. A few weeks prior they had to make the painful decision to let go of half their team. Competition and churn had completely eroded growth. Things were painful. 8 years of work left them with a string of startups that never quite made it: 2 failed software businesses (couldn't make money*) A SMB marketing agency (maxed out at $25k/mo*) An online course company (hard to get big*) The Pivot: In January 2021, they had an idea to use Chat GPT-3, the generative AI model released 6 months earlier, to write high-converting Facebook ads. Within 30 days, they launched the business. With the skeleton crew remaining from the last startup, they scaled the business to $45m ARR and 70,000+ customers without hiring a single new person. Soon after, they raised $125m at a $1.5b valuation. Dave Rogenmoser, CEO at Jasper, had some great one-liners in a few podcasts I listened to on the business. Here are some of his learnings: Right Skill, Wrong Vehicle: He spent 8 years building marketing businesses which gave this team the knowledge and confidence to spend $1m/mo on sales and marketing to scale the business to $45m ARR in year 1. Launch Fast & Iterate Quickly: The team agreed that if the business didn't work in 30 days, they'd shut it down. Dave says, "If you have been working on a problem for more than 18 months and haven't found Product market fit (PMF), odds are you won't...Make the hard pivot."* Ride A Big Wave: Generative AI technology is a new technology that is changing the way we work. But it's not just text. It's images, voice, etc. Identify new customer segments (e.g., Municipalities, Banks, Lawyers, etc.), learn their problems, and apply this novel technology to solve them. What other businesses have you seen scale like this? I've never seen a SaaS business grow that fast. I meet interesting founders 2x per week and share the learnings here.

Best AI tools to help company productivity?
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Significant_Stable_7This week

Best AI tools to help company productivity?

Hey guys! I recently did a big restructuring of my production company and moving away from smaller businesses ad’s and moving up to working with larger marketing agencies. My partner and I are brainstorming ways to automate or at least improve certain parts of our business as we also start to expand our team & to improve ease of labour as our turn around times tend to have to be pretty quick. The main things we’re looking to improve is in: • Sales/out reach strategy: we are constantly reaching out to new agencies in different parts of the world. I am already used to manually making a plan for each company we reach out to but it can be very time consuming. I don’t know if there is even a tool that could help with this haha. Even if it helps with pointers! • Organizing/visualizing spreadsheets: we deal with spreadsheets on what we spend per production and how we distribute our total budget per department. If there is anyway to ease the workflow for our managers and on top of that also allow us to expand easier without having to look for someone who is very efficient on excel or spending more time and money on the training. • Scheduling: We already have so much to organize day per day, im not sure if there is any tool or ai system that could help in regards to scheduling meetings, organizing priorities or even just deadlines for certain projects. Example: we need to schedule everything from pre production deadlines (meetings with talent, agency, and crew) production deadlines, & post production deadlines. I’m sure there is other small things I am missing but those are the three main things! There is just so many things i saw on the internet that are “ai powered” or “ai improved workflow” that all claim are the best or some just use chat gpt so its essentially all the same thing. I thought id ask on here to see if anyone has actually tried and could recommend some ai tools out there! Cheers,

The 15 Best (Free to Use) AI Tools for Creating Websites, Presentations, Graphics, UIs, Photos, and more
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Tapedulema919This week

The 15 Best (Free to Use) AI Tools for Creating Websites, Presentations, Graphics, UIs, Photos, and more

While we wait for ChatGPT to roll out its own official image input+output tool, I wanted to put together a list of the best AI design tools I've seen so far. Obviously text-based tasks like writing and coding get the bulk of the attention, but I wanted to see how it’s being used in design and more visual tasks. From UI and full-on website design, to graphics and photo generation, there are a ton of interesting and free tools coming out that are worth trying and using as inspiration for your own projects. These tools cover a bunch of different use cases and can hopefully help some of you, whether you’re a professional designer looking to automate parts of your work or just someone who wants to find ways to speed up the design work for your business/side projects. All of them are free to try, but most have some kind of paid plan or limit on the number of free generations. Fair enough given it costs money to run the models, but I've tried to include notes on any that don't have permanent free plans. Let me know if you know of any tools I’ve missed so I can add them to the list! I’ve grouped them by categories, to make it easier to see what each tool is capable of, then given a bit more detail under each specific tool. AI Website, Graphic and UI Generators: Framer: Describe the website you want, and Framer will create it for you. Edit and instantly publish your site from their platform. Ironically my favorite thing about Framer isn’t its AI tool. Its real advantage is its website editor which is the best I’ve seen on any platform (and usable for free). It’s like Figma if Figma let you publish directly to the web. Microsoft Designer: Generates designs based on user input for social media posts, logos, and business graphics. It’s free to use with a Microsoft account, and fairly impressive if not always consistent. If you pay a lot or spend a ton of time on design/social media content, Designer is definitely worth checking out. UIzard: Transforms text and images into design mockups, wireframes, and full user interfaces. It’s an ambitious concept, but very cool. While Framer was better for generating websites from text prompts, UIZard offers something none of the others did: taking a sketch drawing and turning it into a UI and/or wireframing. Visualizations, Graphics and Illustrations: Taskade: AI powered productivity tool to visualize your notes, projects, and tasks. Taskade lets you easily generate mind maps and other visualizations of your work, and makes use of AI in a bunch of cool ways. For example, you can generate a mind map to help you brainstorm and then ask it to expand on a certain point or even research it for you with the internet. Bing Image Creator: Generate images from natural text descriptions, powered by DALL-E. Whether you’re looking for blog illustrations, images for your site’s pages or any other purpose, it’s worth trying. AutoDraw: Autodraw is a Google Project that lets you draw something freehand with your cursor, and AutoDraw uses AI to transform it into a refined image with icons and predrawn designs, all for free in your browser. AI Presentations and Slides: Plus AI for Google Slides: AI generated slides and full-on presentations, all within Google Slides. I liked how Plus AI worked within Google Slides and made it easy to make changes to the presentation (as lets be real, no AI tool is going to generate exactly* the content and formatting you need for a serious presentation). SlidesGo: Generate slides with illustrations, images, and icons chosen by AI. SlidesGo also has their own editor to let you edit and refine the AI generated presentation. Tome: Tell Tome what you want to say to your audience, and it will create a presentation that effectively communicates it clearly and effectively. Tome actually goes beyond just presentations and has a few cool formats worth checking out that I could see being useful for salespeople and anyone who needs to pitch an idea or product at work or to clients. Product Photography: These are all fairly similar so I’ve kept the descriptions short, but it’s genuinely a pretty useful category if you run any kind of business or side hustle that needs product photos. These photos establish the professionalism of your store/brand, and all the ones I tried had genuinely impressive results that seemed much better than what I could do myself. Pebblely: AI image generator for product images in various styles and settings. 40 free images, paid after that. Booth.ai: Generates professional-quality product photos using AI, focused on furniture, fashion, and packaged goods. Stylized.ai: Generates product photos integrated into ecommerce platforms like Shopify. Miscellaneous Tools: Fronty: Converts uploaded images or drawings into HTML and CSS code using AI. It’s a bit clunky, but a cool concept nonetheless. LetsEnhance: Uses AI to enhance the resolution of images and photographs. Generally works pretty well from my experience, and gives you 10 free credits with signup. Unfortunately beyond that it is a paid product. Remove.bg: Specializes in recognizing and removing image backgrounds effectively. Doesn’t promise much, but it does the job and doesn’t require you to sign up. TL;DR/Overall favorites: These are the ones I've found the most use for in my day-to-day work. Framer: responsive website design with a full-featured editor to edit and publish your site all in one place. Free + paid plans. Taskade: visualize and automate your workflows, projects, mind maps, and more with AI powered templates. Free + paid plans. Microsoft Designer: generate social media and other marketing graphics with AI. Free to use. Plus AI: plugin for Google Slides to generate slide content, designs, and make tweaks with AI. Free + paid plans. Pebblely: professional-quality product photos in various settings and backgrounds, free to generate up to 40 images* (through you can always sign up for another account…)

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

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 to increase the sales of my book
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danonino80This week

How to increase the sales of my book

In just 3 months, it generated over $100 in revenue. I wanted to share my journey for two reasons: to potentially assist others in self-publishing their own books and to receive feedback to enhance my marketing strategy. I envision that there are others facing similar challenges. Let's dive into the financials, time spent, Key takeaways and the Challenges to address behind this product. Finances First, let's take a look at the financial overview. 💳 Expenses 🔹 E-book creation: · Book cover: $ 0. I used Adobe Express with 30 days of free trial. · ChatGPT: 20 $ a month. I leveraged AI to generate the chapters of the book, ensuring that no critical topics were overlooked during the content creation process and to refine the English, as it's not my native language. I also used to help me with copywriting of the web. If anyone is interested, I can share my Python code for outlining the chapters calling the API, but you can also directly ask chatgpt. · Kindle KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing): order author copies: 10 $. 🔹 Web creation: Domain: I got a com) / .org /.net domain for just 1 $ the first year. Carrd.co subscription: 19 $ (1 year) 🔹 Marketing: Promoted post on reddit: $30 Paid ads with google ads: $30 💰 Revenue 🔸 Sales: $102 💸 Net Profit: \~- $ 18 I initially thought the sales for this e-book would be quite modest, maybe only 3 or 4 books. However, the fact that I've sold more than that so far is a pleasant surprise. Even though the overall numbers may still be considered "peanuts" in the grand scheme of book sales, it suggests there could be more demand for content on digital asset custody than I had originally anticipated. This is a good learning experience, and I'll look to refine my marketing approach to see if I can reach a wider audience interested in this topic 🔹 Time Spent Next, let's review the time invested. 📖 Writing the e-book: 40 hours 🌍 Website + Stripe integration: 10 hours 📣 Creating promotional content: 10 hours ⏱️ Additional marketing efforts: 5 hours Total time spent: 65 hours As you can see, I dedicated more time to writing the e-book itself than to marketing and distribution. I spent relevant time to marketing because I though that a successful product launch requires a robust marketing effort. Many e-book authors overlook this crucial aspect! I utilized three sales channels: · Amazon: I found that there were no books specifically about digital asset custody, resulting in strong positioning in Amazon searches. Additionally, my book immediately secured the top position in Google searches for "digital asset custody book." However, despite achieving 50% of sales in the UK, I have not received any reviews globally. Sales distribution for this channel: 20% physical book, 80% ebook. · Twitter: Daniel\_ZZ80. With only 46 followers, the performance on this platform has not been optimal. I am beginning to write posts related to digital assets to increase visibility. · Gumroad: Lockeyyy.gumroad.com. I offered a discounted version of the ebook, but have not yet made any sales through this channel. Key takeaways: · The process of creating this e-book was extremely fulfilling, and while it has garnered overwhelmingly positive feedback from friends and colleagues (not considered as sales), it has yet to receive any Amazon reviews ☹. · Kindle KDP proved to be ideal for a rapid go-to-market strategy. · AI is an excellent tool for generating ideas and providing access to global audiences with perfect grammar. Otherwise, I would need to hire a translator, which can be very expensive. · Despite offering a full 30-day money-back guarantee, leading me to believe that the quality of the content is indeed good. · I have gained valuable insights for future technical books. · Although the current financial balance may be negative, I anticipate reaching the break-even point within one month, and this has now become a passive income stream. However, I recognize the need to regularly update the content due to the rapidly changing nature of this field. Challenges to address: · Is the timing for launching this book appropriate? In other words, is the world of digital asset custody a trendy and interesting topic for the audience? · What is causing the lack of sales through Gumroad? · Should I seek assistance as my marketing efforts have not yielded results? · Why are there no reviews on Amazon? · Why are sales primarily concentrated in the EU with only one sale in the US, which is my main target market? Feedback is appreciated. If you're interested in learning more about my approach, feel free to send me a direct message. A bit about my background: After dedicating my entire career to the banking industry, I explored various side projects. As an IT professional, I have now transitioned into the digital asset realm. After three years of intensive study, I recently published my first book on digital asset custody. I hope you found this post informative. Cheers! P.S.: I'm currently in the process of launching two more books using this system. 😊

Hear me out, you are annoying
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someone-shoot-meThis week

Hear me out, you are annoying

I am a full stack web developer capable of realizing most of the people’s ideas here. Few things to mention out: Developers are not Google itself. You can’t randomly tell them to implement AI, blockchain, NFT, stocks etc. cus developers are not wizards. Stuff like that requires knowledge, quite a lot of it, and if you want someone to spend shit ton of time implementing smtn, you better prepare to pay for it, cus that knowledge is valuable. Most of the time it requires whole teams to do the work you imagined. If someone came to me and told me yeah, I want a copy of upwork. Sure bud, and where are the other 50 developers? (there are exceptions here but still, people are talking whole platforms while I am the only dev there, mate imma need a whole year for this one) be ready to pay. Sure, your idea is cool, but I can’t wait another 2 years untill it starts making money, plus if it’s fully online business, why would i want to share 50/50 with you? No one is dumb enough to do 3 months od work for free just to share 50/50 in best case, with someone who “had an idea”, I could delete the files any second I want to it’s my code! No one is doing big projects for free, be ready to pay and know the value of other’s work. Otherwise have fun scrolling through indian freelancers! At least try to manage something! I am right now looking for projects that I could join, who needs a web dev and all of them are like okay do the work, don’t expect any money cus we aee starting with no money at all and we won’t bother any investors cus you aee the dumb enough developer do male our business for 25% share

Unbiased opinion - Ideas
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SnooPears4795This week

Unbiased opinion - Ideas

Hi, I’m currently looking to set up along site my full time job. I’m working away so have spare time mid week evenings to get cracking! If anyone has any other ideas which would link up with my interests please let me know. Note: I set up an airconditioning company which didn’t go to plan as I was just not passionate enough to chase sales/grow the company. Details Capital: I could invest upto 1k a month would prefer less Location: would prefer remote but the below ideas are all possible from my hotel room. Strengths: work well under pressure, technical minded, problem solving Weaknesses: can be lazy if not passionate, organisation, confidence Interests: Music, guitars, tech, coding, beer, motorbikes Experience: 12 years in railway electrical roles, coding bootcamp Ideas Idea: Guitar Electronics (pedals) Pros: cheap to start Enjoy building Creative Design work Cool field Cons: Time consuming Not much profit Scalability Competition is cheap Idea: Project management app/document selection Pros: Experienced in field Relatively quick if excel based Could charge subscription Contacts in industry Expensive if app based Make once sell multiple Remote Small overheads Cons: Not as fun as others learn new language? Limited market Other competition already good (apps) Idea: YouTube - mysteries, interesting topics Pros: Free to startup Enjoy researching Build community leading to other online projects Can voice over/AI No need to have cam Improve confidence Cons: Returns will take a while Get better at video editing Overcome speaking No overheads (have equipment) Time/money slow at start Idea: Railway Electrical Book/Course Pros: Throughly experienced Small market Niche - good money if can get sales Have to learn course software Contacts in field Create once Cons: Not as passionate as other ideas Amount of interest (possibly get other fields electricians involved?) Expensive to make?

Legal Skim: "We make it easy for anyone to read legal contracts"
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CerealEntreThis week

Legal Skim: "We make it easy for anyone to read legal contracts"

The Problem Nobody has the time to read contracts, so nobody reads them Lawyers cost to much money to simply "review" a contract for you The Solution An AI Software solution that reads your contract for you* and then highlights the important clauses to read, and shares helpful insights into what the "legal jargon" definitions are This would be a product built for "the everyman" Not for legal teams, but for your everyday, average Joe. I imagine the review highlights would be color-coded, with pastel and "happy feel" colors This would be for two reasons: To make it easy to read and immediately know what's important or unimportant To provide a comforting feeling to the stress of reading a contract that you don't understand I imagine the colors using the "Green, Yellow, Red" system Green colors mean mean there's no concern. If you skip this, no biggie Yellow colors mean you might want to take a closer look Red means if you skip this, you'll likely get screwed Slogan "We make it easy for anyone to read legal contracts" Competitor Analysis Ontra.com "The complete solution for negotiating and managing routine contracts." It looks like this is mostly for actual legal teams, not for consumers Delino.io "Delino’s automated contract review platform empowers you to manage the inherent risk in business contracts, so you can accelerate growth." This also looks like it's mostly actual legal teams, not for consumers LegalZoom.com This is a standard "Lawyer Review", not a software solution &#x200B; If you vote "This already exists", feel free to comment what company so I can add them to the competitor analysis 🙏 View Poll

Is SaaS Done?
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Competitive_Salad709This week

Is SaaS Done?

Other day I was talking to one of the leaders in Office, He said "SAAS IS DY!NG THANKS TO AI". I found this fascinating & started digging on this, I was already part of communities like Build in Public, NoCode Builders & Others. I think he was right. I saw a significant raise in the AI Tools, what other call it 'AI Wrapper Startups' I explored many tools, then I realise why don't we capitalise this opportunity. I found out it is the marketers who needs to be aware of these & if you don't embrace these tools you will end up losing to someone with minimum experience with marketing but good hands on experience with the tools. If these tools keep up the same phase then you have both challenges & opportunities which I've listed it down in the post pros & cons. I think we need to embrace these tools are else we will be left behind. All these things are about marketers but what about the people who want to become solopreneurs or people like Pieter Levels who just want to create something useful get money either by selling or running multiple projects at once. Whatever I've studied & learnt. I came up with something called "The SaaS Marketing Innovation Cycle". The SaaS Marketing Innovation Cycle : Will have six easy steps. Empowering with No-code : Decide what is the problem you are planing to solve & understand which is No-code tool can help you with solution. Some tools will have steep learning curve, become expert on those tools. Integrate Automation AI : This is very crucial for your tool & make sure you have build a tool which will integrates easily with most of the platforms. Build Custom Solution : Right now the whole industry of Micro SaaS stands on building custom solutions, catering your audience is the best way to go for it. Launching MVPs : Because you have no-code tools it is easier to deploy MVPs than ever before & you can build multiple tools at once. Adapt & Grow : This is about the business take feedback from customer add new feature remove few yada yada. Leverage the Growth : Here it is important you have learn to build communities out these tools. if you come up with any new ideas there is always a group of people, who will be able adapt & give you the feedback to improve. Conclusion : Either build something or adapt something quicker when that has built. What do you think Folks ??

From Setbacks to $20K Profit: My AI Influencer Earnings Breakdown (Jan 2025) 💰
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benfromwhereThis week

From Setbacks to $20K Profit: My AI Influencer Earnings Breakdown (Jan 2025) 💰

(Monthly income breakdown is in the end) 📌 Introduction Hey everyone! 👋 Before I dive into this month’s breakdown, I just want to be upfront—English isn’t my first language, so I’ve used ChatGPT to refine this post for better readability. That said, everything here is 100% real—my personal experiences, struggles, and earnings as someone running a full-time AI influencer business. Since I get a lot of DMs asking about my AI models, here are their Instagram links: 📷 Emma – https://www.instagram.com/emmalauireal 📷 Jade – https://www.instagram.com/jadelaui (jadecasual is the second account) Also, if you’ve been wondering about the community I run, where I teach others how to build AI influencers from scratch, here’s the link (I got approval from mods for this link): 🔗 AI Winners Now, let’s get into what happened this month. 🚀 \------- First, a huge thank you! 🎉 Three months ago, I shared my journey of building an AI influencer business, and I was blown away by the response. That post got 263K+ views and was shared over 2.7K times—way more than I ever expected. If you’re new here or want to check out the full story of how I started, you can read it here: 🔗 Click Here (Reddit link) \------- 🔹 What I Did in January After the holiday rush in December, I knew January would be a slow month—people had already spent most of their money at the end of the year. So instead of pushing harder on monetization, I shifted my focus to tech development and optimization. Flux Character Loras: I spent a lot of time refining and testing different Flux-based character Loras for my models. This is still a work in progress, but the goal is to improve long-term consistency and make my workflow even more efficient. NSFW Content Expansion: On Emma’s side, I expanded her content library using a real model body double, making her content look more organic and natural. Jade, however, remains 100% AI-generated, keeping her workflow entirely digital. Social Media Wipeout (Thanks, VA 🙃): I had handed off both Twitter accounts to a virtual assistant to help with engagement and DMs. Big mistake. He ended up spamming DMs, which got both accounts banned—Emma (80K followers) and Jade (20K followers). 🤦‍♂️ Right now, I’m rebuilding Emma’s account from scratch and taking a much more cautious approach. Jade’s account is still offline for now. New Platform: Threads – I hadn’t touched Threads before, but since engagement on Instagram can be unpredictable, I decided to start accounts for both models. So far, they’re performing well, and I’ll continue experimenting. Launched AI Winners Community: After getting flooded with DMs (both here and on Instagram), I realized there was a massive demand for structured learning around AI influencers. So, I launched AI Winners, a paid community where I break down everything I’ve learned. It’s still early, but I see it turning into a solid, long-term community. Investment & Acquisition Talks: I’m still evaluating potential investors and acquisition offers for my AI models. There’s growing interest in buying or investing in Emma & Jade, so I’ve been having conversations to explore different options. Overall, January was about tech, rebuilding, and long-term planning—not immediate revenue. But that’s what keeps this business sustainable. 🚀 \------- ⚠️ Biggest Challenges This Month Lost Both Twitter Accounts (Massive Traffic Hit) 🚨 The biggest blow this month was losing my models’ Twitter accounts. Twitter was responsible for about 40% of my total traffic, meaning both free and paid subs took a direct hit. While Emma’s revenue took a slight dip, Jade’s income dropped significantly—partly due to the account loss and partly because January is naturally slow. (Full revenue breakdown at the end of the post.) Jade’s Instagram Tanked (Possible Shadow Ban?) 🤔 Jade’s Instagram completely lost momentum in early January. Engagement and reach dropped by over 80%, and I still haven’t figured out why. It feels like a shadow ban, but I have no clear confirmation. To counter this, I launched a second backup account, and things are starting to recover. \------- 🚀 Potential Improvements & What’s Next Locking in a Stable Workflow 🔄 Right now, Emma & Jade’s workflow is still evolving, but I’m aiming to fully stabilize it. As I’m writing this, content is generating on my second monitor—a sign that I’m close to achieving full automation without compromising quality. Boosting Jade’s Fanvue Revenue 💰 Jade’s income took a hit this month, and it’s 100% a traffic issue. The solution? More content, more reach. I’ll be increasing social media output to drive consistent traffic back to Fanvue and restore her earnings. Patreon is Done. All Focus on Fanvue 🚫 I shut down both Emma & Jade’s Patreon accounts. The goal is not to split revenue—I want everything funneled into Fanvue for higher engagement and bigger paydays. \------- 💰 January 2025 Earnings Breakdown Despite January being one of the slowest months for online creators, Emma and Jade still brought in over $29K in revenue, with a net profit exceeding $20K after all expenses. Emma Laui generated $20,206.77, with around $6,000 in expenses (chatter payments, NSFW designer fees, and other operational costs). Jade Laui earned $8,939.05, with $2,000 in expenses. Considering Twitter account losses, Instagram setbacks, and the usual January spending slump, this is still a solid outcome. The focus now is on scaling traffic and maximizing Fanvue revenue heading into February. 🚀🔥 That’s the full breakdown for January! If you have questions, feel free to drop a comment, and I’ll answer when I can. Happy to help, just like others helped me when I was starting out! 🚀🔥

How to increase the sales of my book
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danonino80This week

How to increase the sales of my book

In just 3 months, it generated over $100 in revenue. I wanted to share my journey for two reasons: to potentially assist others in self-publishing their own books and to receive feedback to enhance my marketing strategy. I envision that there are others facing similar challenges. Let's dive into the financials, time spent, Key takeaways and the Challenges to address behind this product. Finances First, let's take a look at the financial overview. 💳 Expenses 🔹 E-book creation: · Book cover: $ 0. I used Adobe Express with 30 days of free trial. · ChatGPT: 20 $ a month. I leveraged AI to generate the chapters of the book, ensuring that no critical topics were overlooked during the content creation process and to refine the English, as it's not my native language. I also used to help me with copywriting of the web. If anyone is interested, I can share my Python code for outlining the chapters calling the API, but you can also directly ask chatgpt. · Kindle KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing): order author copies: 10 $. 🔹 Web creation: Domain: I got a com) / .org /.net domain for just 1 $ the first year. Carrd.co subscription: 19 $ (1 year) 🔹 Marketing: Promoted post on reddit: $30 Paid ads with google ads: $30 💰 Revenue 🔸 Sales: $102 💸 Net Profit: \~- $ 18 I initially thought the sales for this e-book would be quite modest, maybe only 3 or 4 books. However, the fact that I've sold more than that so far is a pleasant surprise. Even though the overall numbers may still be considered "peanuts" in the grand scheme of book sales, it suggests there could be more demand for content on digital asset custody than I had originally anticipated. This is a good learning experience, and I'll look to refine my marketing approach to see if I can reach a wider audience interested in this topic 🔹 Time Spent Next, let's review the time invested. 📖 Writing the e-book: 40 hours 🌍 Website + Stripe integration: 10 hours 📣 Creating promotional content: 10 hours ⏱️ Additional marketing efforts: 5 hours Total time spent: 65 hours As you can see, I dedicated more time to writing the e-book itself than to marketing and distribution. I spent relevant time to marketing because I though that a successful product launch requires a robust marketing effort. Many e-book authors overlook this crucial aspect! I utilized three sales channels: · Amazon: I found that there were no books specifically about digital asset custody, resulting in strong positioning in Amazon searches. Additionally, my book immediately secured the top position in Google searches for "digital asset custody book." However, despite achieving 50% of sales in the UK, I have not received any reviews globally. Sales distribution for this channel: 20% physical book, 80% ebook. · Twitter: Daniel\_ZZ80. With only 46 followers, the performance on this platform has not been optimal. I am beginning to write posts related to digital assets to increase visibility. · Gumroad: Lockeyyy.gumroad.com. I offered a discounted version of the ebook, but have not yet made any sales through this channel. Key takeaways: · The process of creating this e-book was extremely fulfilling, and while it has garnered overwhelmingly positive feedback from friends and colleagues (not considered as sales), it has yet to receive any Amazon reviews ☹. · Kindle KDP proved to be ideal for a rapid go-to-market strategy. · AI is an excellent tool for generating ideas and providing access to global audiences with perfect grammar. Otherwise, I would need to hire a translator, which can be very expensive. · Despite offering a full 30-day money-back guarantee, leading me to believe that the quality of the content is indeed good. · I have gained valuable insights for future technical books. · Although the current financial balance may be negative, I anticipate reaching the break-even point within one month, and this has now become a passive income stream. However, I recognize the need to regularly update the content due to the rapidly changing nature of this field. Challenges to address: · Is the timing for launching this book appropriate? In other words, is the world of digital asset custody a trendy and interesting topic for the audience? · What is causing the lack of sales through Gumroad? · Should I seek assistance as my marketing efforts have not yielded results? · Why are there no reviews on Amazon? · Why are sales primarily concentrated in the EU with only one sale in the US, which is my main target market? Feedback is appreciated. If you're interested in learning more about my approach, feel free to send me a direct message. A bit about my background: After dedicating my entire career to the banking industry, I explored various side projects. As an IT professional, I have now transitioned into the digital asset realm. After three years of intensive study, I recently published my first book on digital asset custody. I hope you found this post informative. Cheers! P.S.: I'm currently in the process of launching two more books using this system. 😊

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

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\ &#x200B;

Hear me out, you are annoying
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someone-shoot-meThis week

Hear me out, you are annoying

I am a full stack web developer capable of realizing most of the people’s ideas here. Few things to mention out: Developers are not Google itself. You can’t randomly tell them to implement AI, blockchain, NFT, stocks etc. cus developers are not wizards. Stuff like that requires knowledge, quite a lot of it, and if you want someone to spend shit ton of time implementing smtn, you better prepare to pay for it, cus that knowledge is valuable. Most of the time it requires whole teams to do the work you imagined. If someone came to me and told me yeah, I want a copy of upwork. Sure bud, and where are the other 50 developers? (there are exceptions here but still, people are talking whole platforms while I am the only dev there, mate imma need a whole year for this one) be ready to pay. Sure, your idea is cool, but I can’t wait another 2 years untill it starts making money, plus if it’s fully online business, why would i want to share 50/50 with you? No one is dumb enough to do 3 months od work for free just to share 50/50 in best case, with someone who “had an idea”, I could delete the files any second I want to it’s my code! No one is doing big projects for free, be ready to pay and know the value of other’s work. Otherwise have fun scrolling through indian freelancers! At least try to manage something! I am right now looking for projects that I could join, who needs a web dev and all of them are like okay do the work, don’t expect any money cus we aee starting with no money at all and we won’t bother any investors cus you aee the dumb enough developer do male our business for 25% share

What role will tech play in sustainability for businesses?
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brycetychsenThis week

What role will tech play in sustainability for businesses?

Have you ever wanted to know how technology is shifting the business sector towards a greener future? Well, wonder no more! In this post, we'll explore the stupendous ways technology is exerting a pivotal role in promoting sustainability within businesses. Smart Energy Management Solutions Gone are the days of wasting energy and money on ineffective practices. With the advent of smart energy management systems, businesses can now optimize their energy usage in real-time. From smart thermostats to AI-powered energy analytics, these solutions help reduce carbon footprints while saving on utility bills. It's a win-win situation for both the environment and the bottom line! Renewable Energy Integration Due to advancements in technology, businesses can now easily integrate solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources into their operations. Not only does this reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but it also shields businesses from the volatility of traditional energy markets. Supply Chain Transparency Ever wondered where your products come from and how they're made? With blockchain technology, businesses can now provide unprecedented transparency throughout their supply chains. From sourcing raw materials to manufacturing processes, consumers can trace the journey of products, ensuring ethical and sustainable practices every step of the way. Data-Driven Sustainability Strategies In the age of big data, knowledge is power, especially when it comes to sustainability. By harnessing the power of data analytics, businesses can identify areas for improvement and implement targeted sustainability strategies. Whether it's optimizing transportation routes or minimizing waste generation, data-driven insights enable businesses to make smarter, greener decisions. Who knew numbers could be so eco-friendly? Eco-Friendly Innovation Last but not least, technology is driving innovation in eco-friendly products and services. From biodegradable packaging to electric vehicles, businesses are constantly pushing the boundaries of sustainability. By embracing these innovations, companies not only reduce their environmental impact but also appeal to eco-conscious consumers. That is it for now, people! From energy management to supply chain transparency, technology is paving the way for a more sustainable future in business. Let's continue to embrace these innovations and work together towards a greener tomorrow.

How to get that big idea for your next business? Use trends!
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IRemember123This week

How to get that big idea for your next business? Use trends!

Hello entrepreneurs and aspiring business owners, I am Mikael and I want to share a post about how to spot business ideas. If you're wondering who the owl is, it's Agent O, my sidekick (please bear with him... or me, if you can). Let's get on to it. So, there are basically two ways of getting ideas for your new business: Find a service, product or experience that's already working. Identify and ride a trend. 🦉 : Third, have a rich relative pass you their business and sip margaritas by the sea while scrolling Reddit for the rest of your life! 🕵️ : Refrain yourself, I just got started ffs, I don't want to get banned! So, what are trends? Trends are patterns of adoption of a product, service or experience by people who want to satisfy a common need. Cool, huh? How trends start Trends emerge and evolve as temporary or permanent solutions to human needs. All products, services and experiences are the expression of human needs manifested through a perceived lack, which we humans interpret as problems. Let me make this more clear. Humans have needs: from basic (food, shelter, safety) to advanced (community, knowledge) to evolved (self actualization, spirituality) and everything in between. Don’t see this as a hierarchy, as it’s usually depicted with Maslow’s pyramid. See it as cycles with different degrees of impact on humans that vary in time and intensity. 🦉 : WHAT!?? 🕵️ : Hear me out… How Trends Affect Society Human needs are physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual. Every day we feel the impact of those needs with different degrees of required fulfillment. You can’t go on without air for more than a few minutes. You can’t live without food and water for more than a few days. So, when it comes to the needs of the body, these have a shorter timeframe in which they need to be addressed. 🦉 : Ahh, I see what you did there… \\🕵️ \\: Thanks! But you can also live with an unfulfilled need for love or friends for a long time. You can live with a decaying health as well. And you also can live your entire life without finding out if there is a God or not. Humans perceive needs as something they lack within, which in turn is expressed as a problem on the outside. I lack food or water, this will create a problem for my survival. So I need to find food and water in my environment. This lack creates a behavior seeking a product, service or experience to fulfill that need. Makes sense? 🦉 : I just went out and got me a “Mice à la Forest” dinner! 🕵️: Bon appétit! See, Agent O fulfilled a bodily need. That’s what animals do, as they’re driven by instinct and are governed by natural laws (survive, reproduce, sleep, repeat). Humans are driven by more complex needs, as our intellect and emotions allow us to override those basic primary instincts. Why Trends Are Important What an entrepreneur does is to shift the perspective: instead of seeing a lack, he/she sees an opportunity by asking the question: how can I fulfill this need? Or, even better put: how can I help people by solving their problem? That’s the first step to solving a problem: asking a question. That is why the best products are actually problems solved by entrepreneurs who work to solve their own need for a product, service or experience. They then provide it to other people for a cost. Easy, right? That’s what entrepreneurship is: solving a problem. The bigger the problem, the bigger the impact. The bigger the impact, the higher the revenue. It’s easier to understand trends now, isn’t it? You can see that trends are nothing more than the initial adoption of a product, service or experience by a group of people who are looking for a solution to their common need. 🦉 : Did you get that from a book? 🕵️ : You snore when you sleep… ¯\\(\ツ)/\¯ 🦉 : $@#&\*! Hooman! Needs are the foundation on which the modern world is built. Once you understand needs, you fundamentally change your perception of problems into opportunities. This mental shift is the entrepreneurial mindset: where others see problems, you see solutions. Where Do Trends Start So, to recap: human needs are translated into problems. Founders understand the root of the problem (the need) and create products, services, experiences as solutions to those needs. They offer the solution to the public through startups and companies, which belong to a specific niche in a particular industry. 🦉 : Aaah, so that’s why it’s called venture capital? 🕵️ : Yeah, because you’re venturing into a new endeavor to let people know about your solution to their (and ideally your) problem. 🦉 : So if you use ads to market your venture, it’s an adventure? 🕵️ : I see what you did there… If the need behind the adoption is strong and real enough, that trend will translate into a niche within an industry. If the adoption isn’t driven by strong fundamental needs, it will turn into a fad and disappear from the perception of the public, no matter how much marketing money is thrown at it. This happens because the solution (product/service/experience) to the need didn’t create the physical, intellectual or emotional response required to create a recurring behavior around it. Remember this: Problem (why) -> Behavior (how) -> Solution (what) Understand this: there are multiple types of trends. There are product or service trends. There are industry driven trends. There are tendency driven trends, like the emergence of a new paradigm that improves a lot of industries (yes, I’m looking at you, AI). Where Do Trends Come From So now you can see that trends are patterns of adoption related to a specific human need that is addressed through one or multiple products or services. This is a bottom up direction coming from evolution. Multiple trends in different industries also emerge from a theme, which is a bigger vision of a human effort to address a high level problem. This is a top down direction, coming from implementation (by governments, different organizations or other interested parties with the power to influence changes at mass level). Conclusion Now you have a better understanding of trends by looking at them through the lens of human needs. Also, you might also understand time better because you realize that human needs have different degrees of impact in time and intensity. So you now see that trends don’t only relate to individuals, but also to groups of people, from the smallest community to countries and even global needs. That is the reason you’ll sometimes hear some say that time is a flat circle: because clothes change, but humans are quite the same. Needs don’t change a lot in time, just the way we address and solve them. Here’s an interesting game for you: take a look at some behaviors in your life. Which of them are driven by a bodily need, which by an intellectual or emotional one? Which ones are completely automated and you had no idea you were doing? How are these behaviors controlling parts of your life that you were unaware of until now? If you made it this far, thank you for taking the time to read this. I hope you enjoyed it, found it useful and entertaining. Ofc, I value your opinion and welcome it in the comments. Thank you!

Looking for a co-founder for a B2B AI startup. I have a development team and funds for at least a year of operations.
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cheech123456This week

Looking for a co-founder for a B2B AI startup. I have a development team and funds for at least a year of operations.

Hello, As the title said I'm looking for a co-founder. I built with my team a few ventures that generate revenues but I don't believe that any of them has a future. I have 15 years of experience in Software Engineering and AI. Worked in various industries, but always in data-driven applications. I spent the last 3 years as an entrepreneur and raised successfully money from VCs. &#x200B; A few preconceptions I have: \- B2C is extremely hard. Very quickly you realize that you need to spend all your resources on marketing. \- B2B is extremely hard - but for different reasons. Sales cycles take months. If you want to reach serious buyers and decision-makers, you need to have an amazing network. Even then, companies will prioritize 90% of the time to do things internally rather than paying for anything. \- I hate when people say that "ideas are garbage", and I think that execution is overhyped. Execution is a matter of finding the right people, and paying them (I am confident to say that I can guarantee good execution). Ideas are not garbage, ideas need validation, and garbage "entrepreneurs" are too lazy to validate anything. &#x200B; Your ideal profile: \- You have a great idea, something that has been brewing for some time but you lack resources or technical experience to execute by yourself. \- You have domain expertise, experience, and a network. If we build an MVP in 3 months, you can get 20 interviews with industry people to validate the solution. Once the MVP is built you can put it in front of another 40 people. \- You are a product person. \- You can do efficient sales calls. (Bonus: You are a sales person) If you are an ideal profile, please reach out.

Need help with the growth I couldn't handle
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luxendaryThis week

Need help with the growth I couldn't handle

Calling all innovators, dreamers, and disruptors! &#x200B; We're pioneering a new frontier in the world of manufacturing with our vision: "Text to Product". I'm seeking individuals passionate about AI, manufacturing, efficiency and automation. While we can't promise immediate financial rewards, we're offering equity in a venture that's setting out to redefine the way things are made and sold. If the prospect of revolutionizing the future of humanity excites you, we'd love to hear from you. &#x200B; &#x200B; P.S. I realized that I can't always use "brute force" for solving problems, so seeking "the right connections" (seasoned entrepreneurs, advisors). Here's the TLDR version of my story: Started a company with ex-boss, bought him out, grinded for 2 years, found a way to 1000x the orders.* Went full speed for a month, got overwhelmed, barely kept up with half the demand (with that production process).* Focused on this one "platform", shipped hundreds of thousands of units in one holiday season.* Next quarter "the platform" returned about 85% of products as "overstock", demanded money back, made legal threats.* I told them that I will go to court and they stopped bothering me.* Then Covid + Nasty divorce which made me put a pause to regroup.* 2 years later, with 2x the production capacity and after relocating to a friendlier state (from NYC to MIA) I'm ready to relaunch (with a clear head, knowledge of fast growth and what to avoid).*

How to get that big idea for your next business? Use trends!
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IRemember123This week

How to get that big idea for your next business? Use trends!

Hello entrepreneurs and aspiring business owners, I am Mikael and I want to share a post about how to spot business ideas. If you're wondering who the owl is, it's Agent O, my sidekick (please bear with him... or me, if you can). Let's get on to it. So, there are basically two ways of getting ideas for your new business: Find a service, product or experience that's already working. Identify and ride a trend. 🦉 : Third, have a rich relative pass you their business and sip margaritas by the sea while scrolling Reddit for the rest of your life! 🕵️ : Refrain yourself, I just got started ffs, I don't want to get banned! So, what are trends? Trends are patterns of adoption of a product, service or experience by people who want to satisfy a common need. Cool, huh? How trends start Trends emerge and evolve as temporary or permanent solutions to human needs. All products, services and experiences are the expression of human needs manifested through a perceived lack, which we humans interpret as problems. Let me make this more clear. Humans have needs: from basic (food, shelter, safety) to advanced (community, knowledge) to evolved (self actualization, spirituality) and everything in between. Don’t see this as a hierarchy, as it’s usually depicted with Maslow’s pyramid. See it as cycles with different degrees of impact on humans that vary in time and intensity. 🦉 : WHAT!?? 🕵️ : Hear me out… How Trends Affect Society Human needs are physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual. Every day we feel the impact of those needs with different degrees of required fulfillment. You can’t go on without air for more than a few minutes. You can’t live without food and water for more than a few days. So, when it comes to the needs of the body, these have a shorter timeframe in which they need to be addressed. 🦉 : Ahh, I see what you did there… \\🕵️ \\: Thanks! But you can also live with an unfulfilled need for love or friends for a long time. You can live with a decaying health as well. And you also can live your entire life without finding out if there is a God or not. Humans perceive needs as something they lack within, which in turn is expressed as a problem on the outside. I lack food or water, this will create a problem for my survival. So I need to find food and water in my environment. This lack creates a behavior seeking a product, service or experience to fulfill that need. Makes sense? 🦉 : I just went out and got me a “Mice à la Forest” dinner! 🕵️: Bon appétit! See, Agent O fulfilled a bodily need. That’s what animals do, as they’re driven by instinct and are governed by natural laws (survive, reproduce, sleep, repeat). Humans are driven by more complex needs, as our intellect and emotions allow us to override those basic primary instincts. Why Trends Are Important What an entrepreneur does is to shift the perspective: instead of seeing a lack, he/she sees an opportunity by asking the question: how can I fulfill this need? Or, even better put: how can I help people by solving their problem? That’s the first step to solving a problem: asking a question. That is why the best products are actually problems solved by entrepreneurs who work to solve their own need for a product, service or experience. They then provide it to other people for a cost. Easy, right? That’s what entrepreneurship is: solving a problem. The bigger the problem, the bigger the impact. The bigger the impact, the higher the revenue. It’s easier to understand trends now, isn’t it? You can see that trends are nothing more than the initial adoption of a product, service or experience by a group of people who are looking for a solution to their common need. 🦉 : Did you get that from a book? 🕵️ : You snore when you sleep… ¯\\(\ツ)/\¯ 🦉 : $@#&\*! Hooman! Needs are the foundation on which the modern world is built. Once you understand needs, you fundamentally change your perception of problems into opportunities. This mental shift is the entrepreneurial mindset: where others see problems, you see solutions. Where Do Trends Start So, to recap: human needs are translated into problems. Founders understand the root of the problem (the need) and create products, services, experiences as solutions to those needs. They offer the solution to the public through startups and companies, which belong to a specific niche in a particular industry. 🦉 : Aaah, so that’s why it’s called venture capital? 🕵️ : Yeah, because you’re venturing into a new endeavor to let people know about your solution to their (and ideally your) problem. 🦉 : So if you use ads to market your venture, it’s an adventure? 🕵️ : I see what you did there… If the need behind the adoption is strong and real enough, that trend will translate into a niche within an industry. If the adoption isn’t driven by strong fundamental needs, it will turn into a fad and disappear from the perception of the public, no matter how much marketing money is thrown at it. This happens because the solution (product/service/experience) to the need didn’t create the physical, intellectual or emotional response required to create a recurring behavior around it. Remember this: Problem (why) -> Behavior (how) -> Solution (what) Understand this: there are multiple types of trends. There are product or service trends. There are industry driven trends. There are tendency driven trends, like the emergence of a new paradigm that improves a lot of industries (yes, I’m looking at you, AI). Where Do Trends Come From So now you can see that trends are patterns of adoption related to a specific human need that is addressed through one or multiple products or services. This is a bottom up direction coming from evolution. Multiple trends in different industries also emerge from a theme, which is a bigger vision of a human effort to address a high level problem. This is a top down direction, coming from implementation (by governments, different organizations or other interested parties with the power to influence changes at mass level). Conclusion Now you have a better understanding of trends by looking at them through the lens of human needs. Also, you might also understand time better because you realize that human needs have different degrees of impact in time and intensity. So you now see that trends don’t only relate to individuals, but also to groups of people, from the smallest community to countries and even global needs. That is the reason you’ll sometimes hear some say that time is a flat circle: because clothes change, but humans are quite the same. Needs don’t change a lot in time, just the way we address and solve them. Here’s an interesting game for you: take a look at some behaviors in your life. Which of them are driven by a bodily need, which by an intellectual or emotional one? Which ones are completely automated and you had no idea you were doing? How are these behaviors controlling parts of your life that you were unaware of until now? If you made it this far, thank you for taking the time to read this. I hope you enjoyed it, found it useful and entertaining. Ofc, I value your opinion and welcome it in the comments. Thank you!

🛒7 Strategies to Increase Retail Store Footfall post-COVID | Ultimate Blueprint & Guide 📈
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bnk3r_This week

🛒7 Strategies to Increase Retail Store Footfall post-COVID | Ultimate Blueprint & Guide 📈

Hello fellow marketers/entrepreneurs! Covid has had a gobsmacking effect on all retail promotions and marketing efforts. For people with retail businesses that thrive on footfall, it has been an uphill battle, but markets of the world are slowly resuming action. Knowing the footfall to your retail store can help you decide how many products you need to stock, which days of the week are best for promotions, and what type of promotional offers work well. The pandemic has drastically impacted customer behavior and customer loyalty is plunging. People prefer shopping online to brick-and-mortar purchases, and consumers are limiting their spending on a range of items - investing only in essentials is the norm now (McKinsey). We found some companies like Target having programs like Cartwheel that offer 5% to 50% off specific items when customers shop in-store to increase foot traffic. Strategies like these ultimately add up, an ICSC report cites that 69% of customers who went to collect their orders eventually bought additional items. I've put together a detailed list of 7 strategies to boost footfall to stores post COVID, I hope they come in handy! Abide by COVID-19 Protocols for a Safer Environment Be well-informed of the COVID-19 protocols. Don't implement this merely under the government norms, instead take extra measures to show customers that you care! Have an automated entrance Deploy hygiene counters Fix thermal sensors in the entrance Have an isolation space for those showing symptoms of the coronavirus To see more check this link for the entire list! Run Catchy In-Store Promotions Discounts are a perfect way to attract new customers and retain existing ones. When you want to increase customer traffic in a brick-and-mortar store, give customers an offer that only works inside the store. Surprise your consumers with free samples of your products. This would allow them to try some new brands and products. If you’d want to reduce your excess stock post the quarantine time, try running a multi-buy campaign. Digital Signages - Enhance In-store Shopping Experience Digital signage is a type of advertising that uses a video screen to display marketing messages. They can be used for attracting customers, conveying information, and promoting merchandise. Retail outlets in malls that have fashion sections can display the latest trends on their screens so customers know what’s new. This helps them pick out something they might like quickly. Some restaurants showcase menus on screens while others even project live cooking shows! These displays help with menu navigation too; helping a diner decide between chicken tikka masala or steak tartare by showing pictures of both dishes at once. Leverage Beacon Notification to Attract Customers to Your Store The beacon technology is a way to implement a tracking system indoors. A beacon is an inaudible signal that can be tracked and act as the trigger for other events like sending notifications about deals, discounts, or new products. Beacon technology helps with driving footfalls by giving customers an indoor mapping experience of your store's inventory. This ensures they always know where they are going and what’s around them. The navigation reminds them of their proximity to items on display so there’s never any confusion over whether something is nearby or farther off. Train your Salespeople to Become the Shopper's Friend Educating your salespersons on how to be consumers’ friends is important. They should be knowledgeable about what products are popular and in-demand so that they can help the customers find exactly what they want while at the same time giving guidance on how to save money by telling them where discounts and deals can be found. Reconceptualize Checkout Counters Customers abandon their purchases because of long lines at the checkout. With the pandemic out there, this could be one of the reasons why the retail foot traffic is diminishing. Include contactless payments that can be automated or replace your existing POS setup. Encourage BOPIS (Buy Online Pick-up In-store) To implement BOPIS for your retail store, you need to have a centralized platform that allows you to manage orders, sales, and customers. This helps you to deliver a personalized customer experience. In combination with BOPIS, another way to promote footfall into the store and drive sales in retail is by bringing your website in-store. And this will be a good move if you have multiple stores and not all the stock in one place. This is because, when you know how to calculate footfall in retail it can help you with many retail metrics like: How to plan your store for peak footfall times? How much stock you need in the store and how often you'll need to restock it? What products are selling well on an hourly basis? This is so crucial information for retailers that will help inform decisions about where to place certain items or which ones may be more popular than others etc. When stores should have promotions (if they want), discounts, and raise weekend sales? We've put together an elaborate, research-based White Paper that covers these segments: How have pandemics catalyzed technological innovations Customer sentiment and behavior during COVID-19 An omnichannel customer engagement strategy to drive sales in retail and footfall The ultimate roadmap to increase retail footfalls How to build the perfect loyalty program to turn foot traffic into brand ambassadors? You can find the same over here, hope my team's effort comes in handy to some of y'all that could improve your store visits, cheers!

Critique my business ideas
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FocusOutrageous9685This week

Critique my business ideas

So I have some business ideas that I would like to confront to you in order to have feedback. The point is to give me your completely honest opinion and try to find some potential problems. 1 - Digital marketing automation for green ecommerce stores Marketing has always been a problem for everyone in business more particularly for niche businesses. It's tough for them because people who will buy their product are generally harder to find. Also these products are way more expensive than other so it may be clever for them to focus more on marketing. Since the green and sustainable industry is growing at a very fast rate such as AI, I would like to hear your opinion on the idea of automating marketing for these type of businesses. 2 - AI Mental Health platform The mental health issues will gain more and more importance in the future. We now live in a world that isn't as safe as before and with the rise of social media we can predict that mental health issues will be more frequent especially for young people. PH, Instagram, Tiktok all of these are just bad for everyone and so an AI mental health plateform where people can chat with AI, discuss in anonymous forums and use integrated tools to reduce screen time and manage addiction I think would be a good idea. I haven't really thought about how to make money but as I write I was thinking about either a freemium model or integrate products from stores and kind of get affiliation, getting money when people buy the product. 3 - A car enthusiast website Everyday around 5000 millionaires are created so obviously the high end car industry is growing at a fairly fast rate. My idea would be to create a network where people would pay to ride in a supercar. There would be a map where people would look for cars in their area and chat with the owner basically. 4 - Marketing agency for real estate agents This is self explanatory. Common pain points include managing client communication, nurturing leads, following up on inquiries, and staying top-of-mind with potential buyers and sellers. Effective email automation can help with sending personalized follow-ups, reminders, newsletters, and market updates. It would be a subscription based business basically.

Looking For Tech-Savvy Business Partner
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DesignedItThis week

Looking For Tech-Savvy Business Partner

Hi! I'm looking for a business partner to help with one of my product lines or we could create a new product line together. I would like the product to be a digital asset where we can sell it on another website, where the other website brings customers to our product so we don't have to market it at first. Our short-term goal will be to publish a product one month after connecting and then make $1 by the following month. Our 4-month goal will be to generate $2,500 - $7,500 in passive income per year for one product line. I'm not trying to make a lot of money right away, but am looking to setup enough passive income so we can both retire early in a few years. For this year, I wrote down 100's of ideas, tried 30 ideas, have 14 ideas that work, and have only 6 ideas that would be profitable. So I'll bring with me only the best of the best ideas. I'm all about efficiency and doing things in bulk to maximize profit and decrease time spent, using AI to generate text/images/audio but adding on that manual touch to make all digital products high-quality and 5 stars, and using software like Python to automate repetitive processes to create digital products. My main skillset: running a business, project management, creating design and technical documentation, marketing, hiring, budgeting, business analysis, graphic design, software development, app development, web design/development, AI development, databases, data engineering, cloud/Azure, data analysis, and reporting. I know many other skills too and can pick up and learn a new business or technical skill pretty quickly. I also have a friend who's in IT/security/networking/servers if we need to bring him in. A clone of myself would be perfect to connect with, but working with anyone with a different skillset would open up the digital product possibilities. I might put tech-savvy at the top of the list so you could figure out how to create new digital products, while business-savvy might be #2, Other skills might be specific to individual products. If you're interested in working together, then feel free to post below or message me!

From Setbacks to $20K Profit: My AI Influencer Earnings Breakdown (Jan 2025) 💰
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benfromwhereThis week

From Setbacks to $20K Profit: My AI Influencer Earnings Breakdown (Jan 2025) 💰

(Monthly income breakdown is in the end) 📌 Introduction Hey everyone! 👋 Before I dive into this month’s breakdown, I just want to be upfront—English isn’t my first language, so I’ve used ChatGPT to refine this post for better readability. That said, everything here is 100% real—my personal experiences, struggles, and earnings as someone running a full-time AI influencer business. Since I get a lot of DMs asking about my AI models, here are their Instagram links: 📷 Emma – https://www.instagram.com/emmalauireal 📷 Jade – https://www.instagram.com/jadelaui (jadecasual is the second account) Also, if you’ve been wondering about the community I run, where I teach others how to build AI influencers from scratch, here’s the link (I got approval from mods for this link): 🔗 AI Winners Now, let’s get into what happened this month. 🚀 \------- First, a huge thank you! 🎉 Three months ago, I shared my journey of building an AI influencer business, and I was blown away by the response. That post got 263K+ views and was shared over 2.7K times—way more than I ever expected. If you’re new here or want to check out the full story of how I started, you can read it here: 🔗 Click Here (Reddit link) \------- 🔹 What I Did in January After the holiday rush in December, I knew January would be a slow month—people had already spent most of their money at the end of the year. So instead of pushing harder on monetization, I shifted my focus to tech development and optimization. Flux Character Loras: I spent a lot of time refining and testing different Flux-based character Loras for my models. This is still a work in progress, but the goal is to improve long-term consistency and make my workflow even more efficient. NSFW Content Expansion: On Emma’s side, I expanded her content library using a real model body double, making her content look more organic and natural. Jade, however, remains 100% AI-generated, keeping her workflow entirely digital. Social Media Wipeout (Thanks, VA 🙃): I had handed off both Twitter accounts to a virtual assistant to help with engagement and DMs. Big mistake. He ended up spamming DMs, which got both accounts banned—Emma (80K followers) and Jade (20K followers). 🤦‍♂️ Right now, I’m rebuilding Emma’s account from scratch and taking a much more cautious approach. Jade’s account is still offline for now. New Platform: Threads – I hadn’t touched Threads before, but since engagement on Instagram can be unpredictable, I decided to start accounts for both models. So far, they’re performing well, and I’ll continue experimenting. Launched AI Winners Community: After getting flooded with DMs (both here and on Instagram), I realized there was a massive demand for structured learning around AI influencers. So, I launched AI Winners, a paid community where I break down everything I’ve learned. It’s still early, but I see it turning into a solid, long-term community. Investment & Acquisition Talks: I’m still evaluating potential investors and acquisition offers for my AI models. There’s growing interest in buying or investing in Emma & Jade, so I’ve been having conversations to explore different options. Overall, January was about tech, rebuilding, and long-term planning—not immediate revenue. But that’s what keeps this business sustainable. 🚀 \------- ⚠️ Biggest Challenges This Month Lost Both Twitter Accounts (Massive Traffic Hit) 🚨 The biggest blow this month was losing my models’ Twitter accounts. Twitter was responsible for about 40% of my total traffic, meaning both free and paid subs took a direct hit. While Emma’s revenue took a slight dip, Jade’s income dropped significantly—partly due to the account loss and partly because January is naturally slow. (Full revenue breakdown at the end of the post.) Jade’s Instagram Tanked (Possible Shadow Ban?) 🤔 Jade’s Instagram completely lost momentum in early January. Engagement and reach dropped by over 80%, and I still haven’t figured out why. It feels like a shadow ban, but I have no clear confirmation. To counter this, I launched a second backup account, and things are starting to recover. \------- 🚀 Potential Improvements & What’s Next Locking in a Stable Workflow 🔄 Right now, Emma & Jade’s workflow is still evolving, but I’m aiming to fully stabilize it. As I’m writing this, content is generating on my second monitor—a sign that I’m close to achieving full automation without compromising quality. Boosting Jade’s Fanvue Revenue 💰 Jade’s income took a hit this month, and it’s 100% a traffic issue. The solution? More content, more reach. I’ll be increasing social media output to drive consistent traffic back to Fanvue and restore her earnings. Patreon is Done. All Focus on Fanvue 🚫 I shut down both Emma & Jade’s Patreon accounts. The goal is not to split revenue—I want everything funneled into Fanvue for higher engagement and bigger paydays. \------- 💰 January 2025 Earnings Breakdown Despite January being one of the slowest months for online creators, Emma and Jade still brought in over $29K in revenue, with a net profit exceeding $20K after all expenses. Emma Laui generated $20,206.77, with around $6,000 in expenses (chatter payments, NSFW designer fees, and other operational costs). Jade Laui earned $8,939.05, with $2,000 in expenses. Considering Twitter account losses, Instagram setbacks, and the usual January spending slump, this is still a solid outcome. The focus now is on scaling traffic and maximizing Fanvue revenue heading into February. 🚀🔥 That’s the full breakdown for January! If you have questions, feel free to drop a comment, and I’ll answer when I can. Happy to help, just like others helped me when I was starting out! 🚀🔥

Looking For Tech-Savvy Business Partner
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DesignedItThis week

Looking For Tech-Savvy Business Partner

Hi! I'm looking for a business partner to help with one of my product lines or we could create a new product line together. I would like the product to be a digital asset where we can sell it on another website, where the other website brings customers to our product so we don't have to market it at first. Our short-term goal will be to publish a product one month after connecting and then make $1 by the following month. Our 4-month goal will be to generate $2,500 - $7,500 in passive income per year for one product line. I'm not trying to make a lot of money right away, but am looking to setup enough passive income so we can both retire early in a few years. For this year, I wrote down 100's of ideas, tried 30 ideas, have 14 ideas that work, and have only 6 ideas that would be profitable. So I'll bring with me only the best of the best ideas. I'm all about efficiency and doing things in bulk to maximize profit and decrease time spent, using AI to generate text/images/audio but adding on that manual touch to make all digital products high-quality and 5 stars, and using software like Python to automate repetitive processes to create digital products. My main skillset: running a business, project management, creating design and technical documentation, marketing, hiring, budgeting, business analysis, graphic design, software development, app development, web design/development, AI development, databases, data engineering, cloud/Azure, data analysis, and reporting. I know many other skills too and can pick up and learn a new business or technical skill pretty quickly. I also have a friend who's in IT/security/networking/servers if we need to bring him in. A clone of myself would be perfect to connect with, but working with anyone with a different skillset would open up the digital product possibilities. I might put tech-savvy at the top of the list so you could figure out how to create new digital products, while business-savvy might be #2, Other skills might be specific to individual products. If you're interested in working together, then feel free to post below or message me!

Is SaaS Done?
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Competitive_Salad709This week

Is SaaS Done?

Other day I was talking to one of the leaders in Office, He said "SAAS IS DY!NG THANKS TO AI". I found this fascinating & started digging on this, I was already part of communities like Build in Public, NoCode Builders & Others. I think he was right. I saw a significant raise in the AI Tools, what other call it 'AI Wrapper Startups' I explored many tools, then I realise why don't we capitalise this opportunity. I found out it is the marketers who needs to be aware of these & if you don't embrace these tools you will end up losing to someone with minimum experience with marketing but good hands on experience with the tools. If these tools keep up the same phase then you have both challenges & opportunities which I've listed it down in the post pros & cons. I think we need to embrace these tools are else we will be left behind. All these things are about marketers but what about the people who want to become solopreneurs or people like Pieter Levels who just want to create something useful get money either by selling or running multiple projects at once. Whatever I've studied & learnt. I came up with something called "The SaaS Marketing Innovation Cycle". The SaaS Marketing Innovation Cycle : Will have six easy steps. Empowering with No-code : Decide what is the problem you are planing to solve & understand which is No-code tool can help you with solution. Some tools will have steep learning curve, become expert on those tools. Integrate Automation AI : This is very crucial for your tool & make sure you have build a tool which will integrates easily with most of the platforms. Build Custom Solution : Right now the whole industry of Micro SaaS stands on building custom solutions, catering your audience is the best way to go for it. Launching MVPs : Because you have no-code tools it is easier to deploy MVPs than ever before & you can build multiple tools at once. Adapt & Grow : This is about the business take feedback from customer add new feature remove few yada yada. Leverage the Growth : Here it is important you have learn to build communities out these tools. if you come up with any new ideas there is always a group of people, who will be able adapt & give you the feedback to improve. Conclusion : Either build something or adapt something quicker when that has built. What do you think Folks ??

Made 60k mrr for a business by just lead nurturing. Need suggestions and validation.
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Alarmed-Argument-605This week

Made 60k mrr for a business by just lead nurturing. Need suggestions and validation.

Apart from the story I need a suggestion and validation here. It's a bit long, skip to tl;dr if you couldn't handle length. A few days ago, I saw a person on Reddit sharing his struggles that, Even after generating a lot of leads from ads of Meta and Google (even with lowest cpc cpa cpl), he was not able to convert them into sales. Out of curiosity I dm'ed him with all fancy services that I offer and expressed that as a agency I would work with him for monthly recurring fee. He suggested for one time consulting fee, I agreed. It was literally a eye opener for me. This guy is in coaching business offering courses for people. His niche was too vague. Courses were on mindset coaching, confidence and public speaking coaching, right attitude coaching, manifestation coaching and all crap shits related to this. At first I thought he was not getting sales because who will pay for all this craps. I openly discussed with him that he has to change what he offers because, if I saw this ad I wouldn't buy this for sure. He then showed me how much money people offering similar service are making . I was literally taken back. He was part of a influencer group (the main guy who encourages these guys to start coaching business, looks like some mlm shit) where people post their succes stories. Literally lot of guys were making above 150k and 200k per month. Even with very basic landing page and average offer They are still winning. Here's where it gets interesting. I tried to clone everything that the top people in this industry are doing in marketing from end to end.( like the same landing page, bonus offers around 50k, exclusive community, free 1 on 1 calls for twice a month).Nothing worked for a month and later surprisingly even the sales started dropping a bit more. I got really confused here. So to do a discovery I went and purchased the competitor course and Man I was literally taken back. Like he has automated everything from end to end. You click the ad, see vsl, you have to fill a form and join a free Skool community where he gives away free stuffs and post success stories of people who took the course. Now every part of this journey you will get a follow up mail and follow up sms. Like after filling the form. after that now if you join and don't purchase the course you will be pampered with email and sms filled with success stories. For sure anybody will be tempted to buy the course. Here is the key take away. He was able to make more sales because he was very successful in nurturing the leads with follow ups after follow ups. Even after you purchased his course he is making passive income from 1 on calls and bonus live webinars. So follow ups will be for 1 on 1 calls and webinars after the course is over. Core point is our guy even after spending 2 to 3k per month on ads was not able to bring huge sales like competitors because he failed the nuture them. Even after making the same offers and the same patterns of marketing as competitors, the sales declined because people thought this is some spam that everyone is doing because the template of the ads was very professional and similar. suprising one is people fall for basic templates thinking it's a underrated one. so what we did here is we integrated a few softwares into one and set up all same webinars, automated email and sms follow ups, ad managers for stats, launched him a free LMS platform where without any additional fees so he can uploaded unlimited courses, skool like community and add product's like Shopify ( he was selling few merchandise with his brand name on) where he can add unlimited products with connection to all payment gateway, integrated with crm with unlimited contacts, workflow and lead nurturing with calender syncing for 1 on 1 calls. But these are a bit old school, what we did was even better. integrated a conversational ai with all of his sales platforms and gave a nocode automation builder with ai for the workflow. we also set him up with a ai voice agent that's automatically calls and markets for his course and also replies for queries when called. we also set up him a dedicated afflitate manager portal with automated commissions. Though he didn't cross 100k Mark, He did a great number after this. He was struggling with 6k sales, now he has reached somewhere mid of 45k to 50k mrr. Max he hit was 61.8k. I see this a big difference.So one small thing, nurturing the lead can bring you immense sales. To set up all of this it costs around 1.2k monthly for me with all the bills. ( I know there are few free for Individual user platforms out there, but It gets very costly when you switch to their premium plans. with heavy volumes you would require more than premium they offer.) I offered him like 3k per month to work as a agency for him who takes care of all these stuffs. He declined and offered for one time set up fee stating that he will pay 1.2k directly. The one time fee was also a bit low, though I agreed since this was a learning for me. what happened next after that is, he referred me to a few other people in the same niche. But the problem is they are not interested in spending 1 to 2 k in bills for software. They requested that if, will I be able to provide the saas alone for less than 500 dollars with one time set up fee. I haven't responded yet since I have to take an enterprise plan for all the software used and pay full advance price for billings. Then to break even that I have to make minimum 50 or odd users for that. let's grantly say 100 users with all other future costs. So here's what I'm planning to do. I'm planning to offer this as saas for let's say 239 dollars per month. with may or may not one time set up fee. ( I checked the entire internet, there is no single person offering at this price point for unlimited. Also one can easily start their marketing agency with this.) The suggestion and validation that I need here is 1.are you going through the same struggles or faced these struggles? would you be interested to buy at 239 dollars per month? let's say you're from a different niche, Did the features I told were okay for you or you need something specific for your industry that you will be interested in buying? please answer in comments and if you will purchase for this price let me know in comments/dms. I will take that into account and if the response rate is above 100 queries, then will integrate this and sell for that price. (ps: If you see this post on similar subs, please bear cause I'm trying to get suggestions from different POV) tl;dr - lead nurturing can massively boost sales *I made a software integration for a client for a 1.2k per month billing and here I want to know if more than 100 people are interested so that I will make this into my own saas and sell it for like a cheap price of 239 dollars per month TIA.

From Setbacks to $20K Profit: My AI Influencer Earnings Breakdown (Jan 2025) 💰
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benfromwhereThis week

From Setbacks to $20K Profit: My AI Influencer Earnings Breakdown (Jan 2025) 💰

(Monthly income breakdown is in the end) 📌 Introduction Hey everyone! 👋 Before I dive into this month’s breakdown, I just want to be upfront—English isn’t my first language, so I’ve used ChatGPT to refine this post for better readability. That said, everything here is 100% real—my personal experiences, struggles, and earnings as someone running a full-time AI influencer business. Since I get a lot of DMs asking about my AI models, here are their Instagram links: 📷 Emma – https://www.instagram.com/emmalauireal 📷 Jade – https://www.instagram.com/jadelaui (jadecasual is the second account) Also, if you’ve been wondering about the community I run, where I teach others how to build AI influencers from scratch, here’s the link (I got approval from mods for this link): 🔗 AI Winners Now, let’s get into what happened this month. 🚀 \------- First, a huge thank you! 🎉 Three months ago, I shared my journey of building an AI influencer business, and I was blown away by the response. That post got 263K+ views and was shared over 2.7K times—way more than I ever expected. If you’re new here or want to check out the full story of how I started, you can read it here: 🔗 Click Here (Reddit link) \------- 🔹 What I Did in January After the holiday rush in December, I knew January would be a slow month—people had already spent most of their money at the end of the year. So instead of pushing harder on monetization, I shifted my focus to tech development and optimization. Flux Character Loras: I spent a lot of time refining and testing different Flux-based character Loras for my models. This is still a work in progress, but the goal is to improve long-term consistency and make my workflow even more efficient. NSFW Content Expansion: On Emma’s side, I expanded her content library using a real model body double, making her content look more organic and natural. Jade, however, remains 100% AI-generated, keeping her workflow entirely digital. Social Media Wipeout (Thanks, VA 🙃): I had handed off both Twitter accounts to a virtual assistant to help with engagement and DMs. Big mistake. He ended up spamming DMs, which got both accounts banned—Emma (80K followers) and Jade (20K followers). 🤦‍♂️ Right now, I’m rebuilding Emma’s account from scratch and taking a much more cautious approach. Jade’s account is still offline for now. New Platform: Threads – I hadn’t touched Threads before, but since engagement on Instagram can be unpredictable, I decided to start accounts for both models. So far, they’re performing well, and I’ll continue experimenting. Launched AI Winners Community: After getting flooded with DMs (both here and on Instagram), I realized there was a massive demand for structured learning around AI influencers. So, I launched AI Winners, a paid community where I break down everything I’ve learned. It’s still early, but I see it turning into a solid, long-term community. Investment & Acquisition Talks: I’m still evaluating potential investors and acquisition offers for my AI models. There’s growing interest in buying or investing in Emma & Jade, so I’ve been having conversations to explore different options. Overall, January was about tech, rebuilding, and long-term planning—not immediate revenue. But that’s what keeps this business sustainable. 🚀 \------- ⚠️ Biggest Challenges This Month Lost Both Twitter Accounts (Massive Traffic Hit) 🚨 The biggest blow this month was losing my models’ Twitter accounts. Twitter was responsible for about 40% of my total traffic, meaning both free and paid subs took a direct hit. While Emma’s revenue took a slight dip, Jade’s income dropped significantly—partly due to the account loss and partly because January is naturally slow. (Full revenue breakdown at the end of the post.) Jade’s Instagram Tanked (Possible Shadow Ban?) 🤔 Jade’s Instagram completely lost momentum in early January. Engagement and reach dropped by over 80%, and I still haven’t figured out why. It feels like a shadow ban, but I have no clear confirmation. To counter this, I launched a second backup account, and things are starting to recover. \------- 🚀 Potential Improvements & What’s Next Locking in a Stable Workflow 🔄 Right now, Emma & Jade’s workflow is still evolving, but I’m aiming to fully stabilize it. As I’m writing this, content is generating on my second monitor—a sign that I’m close to achieving full automation without compromising quality. Boosting Jade’s Fanvue Revenue 💰 Jade’s income took a hit this month, and it’s 100% a traffic issue. The solution? More content, more reach. I’ll be increasing social media output to drive consistent traffic back to Fanvue and restore her earnings. Patreon is Done. All Focus on Fanvue 🚫 I shut down both Emma & Jade’s Patreon accounts. The goal is not to split revenue—I want everything funneled into Fanvue for higher engagement and bigger paydays. \------- 💰 January 2025 Earnings Breakdown Despite January being one of the slowest months for online creators, Emma and Jade still brought in over $29K in revenue, with a net profit exceeding $20K after all expenses. Emma Laui generated $20,206.77, with around $6,000 in expenses (chatter payments, NSFW designer fees, and other operational costs). Jade Laui earned $8,939.05, with $2,000 in expenses. Considering Twitter account losses, Instagram setbacks, and the usual January spending slump, this is still a solid outcome. The focus now is on scaling traffic and maximizing Fanvue revenue heading into February. 🚀🔥 That’s the full breakdown for January! If you have questions, feel free to drop a comment, and I’ll answer when I can. Happy to help, just like others helped me when I was starting out! 🚀🔥

From Setbacks to $20K Profit: My AI Influencer Earnings Breakdown (Jan 2025) 💰
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benfromwhereThis week

From Setbacks to $20K Profit: My AI Influencer Earnings Breakdown (Jan 2025) 💰

(Monthly income breakdown is in the end) 📌 Introduction Hey everyone! 👋 Before I dive into this month’s breakdown, I just want to be upfront—English isn’t my first language, so I’ve used ChatGPT to refine this post for better readability. That said, everything here is 100% real—my personal experiences, struggles, and earnings as someone running a full-time AI influencer business. Since I get a lot of DMs asking about my AI models, here are their Instagram links: 📷 Emma – https://www.instagram.com/emmalauireal 📷 Jade – https://www.instagram.com/jadelaui (jadecasual is the second account) Also, if you’ve been wondering about the community I run, where I teach others how to build AI influencers from scratch, here’s the link (I got approval from mods for this link): 🔗 AI Winners Now, let’s get into what happened this month. 🚀 \------- First, a huge thank you! 🎉 Three months ago, I shared my journey of building an AI influencer business, and I was blown away by the response. That post got 263K+ views and was shared over 2.7K times—way more than I ever expected. If you’re new here or want to check out the full story of how I started, you can read it here: 🔗 Click Here (Reddit link) \------- 🔹 What I Did in January After the holiday rush in December, I knew January would be a slow month—people had already spent most of their money at the end of the year. So instead of pushing harder on monetization, I shifted my focus to tech development and optimization. Flux Character Loras: I spent a lot of time refining and testing different Flux-based character Loras for my models. This is still a work in progress, but the goal is to improve long-term consistency and make my workflow even more efficient. NSFW Content Expansion: On Emma’s side, I expanded her content library using a real model body double, making her content look more organic and natural. Jade, however, remains 100% AI-generated, keeping her workflow entirely digital. Social Media Wipeout (Thanks, VA 🙃): I had handed off both Twitter accounts to a virtual assistant to help with engagement and DMs. Big mistake. He ended up spamming DMs, which got both accounts banned—Emma (80K followers) and Jade (20K followers). 🤦‍♂️ Right now, I’m rebuilding Emma’s account from scratch and taking a much more cautious approach. Jade’s account is still offline for now. New Platform: Threads – I hadn’t touched Threads before, but since engagement on Instagram can be unpredictable, I decided to start accounts for both models. So far, they’re performing well, and I’ll continue experimenting. Launched AI Winners Community: After getting flooded with DMs (both here and on Instagram), I realized there was a massive demand for structured learning around AI influencers. So, I launched AI Winners, a paid community where I break down everything I’ve learned. It’s still early, but I see it turning into a solid, long-term community. Investment & Acquisition Talks: I’m still evaluating potential investors and acquisition offers for my AI models. There’s growing interest in buying or investing in Emma & Jade, so I’ve been having conversations to explore different options. Overall, January was about tech, rebuilding, and long-term planning—not immediate revenue. But that’s what keeps this business sustainable. 🚀 \------- ⚠️ Biggest Challenges This Month Lost Both Twitter Accounts (Massive Traffic Hit) 🚨 The biggest blow this month was losing my models’ Twitter accounts. Twitter was responsible for about 40% of my total traffic, meaning both free and paid subs took a direct hit. While Emma’s revenue took a slight dip, Jade’s income dropped significantly—partly due to the account loss and partly because January is naturally slow. (Full revenue breakdown at the end of the post.) Jade’s Instagram Tanked (Possible Shadow Ban?) 🤔 Jade’s Instagram completely lost momentum in early January. Engagement and reach dropped by over 80%, and I still haven’t figured out why. It feels like a shadow ban, but I have no clear confirmation. To counter this, I launched a second backup account, and things are starting to recover. \------- 🚀 Potential Improvements & What’s Next Locking in a Stable Workflow 🔄 Right now, Emma & Jade’s workflow is still evolving, but I’m aiming to fully stabilize it. As I’m writing this, content is generating on my second monitor—a sign that I’m close to achieving full automation without compromising quality. Boosting Jade’s Fanvue Revenue 💰 Jade’s income took a hit this month, and it’s 100% a traffic issue. The solution? More content, more reach. I’ll be increasing social media output to drive consistent traffic back to Fanvue and restore her earnings. Patreon is Done. All Focus on Fanvue 🚫 I shut down both Emma & Jade’s Patreon accounts. The goal is not to split revenue—I want everything funneled into Fanvue for higher engagement and bigger paydays. \------- 💰 January 2025 Earnings Breakdown Despite January being one of the slowest months for online creators, Emma and Jade still brought in over $29K in revenue, with a net profit exceeding $20K after all expenses. Emma Laui generated $20,206.77, with around $6,000 in expenses (chatter payments, NSFW designer fees, and other operational costs). Jade Laui earned $8,939.05, with $2,000 in expenses. Considering Twitter account losses, Instagram setbacks, and the usual January spending slump, this is still a solid outcome. The focus now is on scaling traffic and maximizing Fanvue revenue heading into February. 🚀🔥 That’s the full breakdown for January! If you have questions, feel free to drop a comment, and I’ll answer when I can. Happy to help, just like others helped me when I was starting out! 🚀🔥

AI Interns for Small Businesses: Who Will Lead the Market?
reddit
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OstrichGrand8119This week

AI Interns for Small Businesses: Who Will Lead the Market?

I've been working on making my own AI tools (https://openai.com/blog/introducing-gpts), kind of like building a team but without the big costs. It's like having a bunch of helpful interns, but they're all computer programs. This got me thinking a lot about small businesses like ours. Building My Own AI Team on a Budget Making these AI tools felt like creating my own team. It's really cheap compared to hiring real people, and these AI interns can do lots of different jobs. This is a big deal for folks like us who don't have lots of money to spend. Spotting What's Missing for Small Businesses While playing around with this AI stuff, I noticed there are things missing that small businesses really need. There's a big chance here to make something that fills these gaps, a tool made just for small businesses. The Big Question: Competing with Big Companies But here's the tricky part. Big companies like OpenAI are making their own AI stuff, like the GPT Store and GPT Enterprise. This makes me wonder if it's a good idea to make a new product that's kind of the same but more focused on what small businesses need. The Big Choice: Special Tools vs. Big Company Tools We're at a crossroads about what's better: Special Tools: Making something that's just right for small businesses could be really useful and fit our needs better. Big Company Tools: But, big companies have more stuff to offer and are already well-known. I Want to Hear From You If you run a small business or like tech stuff, what do you think? Would you like a special AI tool made for small businesses, or would you rather use the big ones from famous companies? How do you think the future looks for AI help in small businesses with all these changes? https://preview.redd.it/9pks3r65rg7c1.jpg?width=1460&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d767d2352f5e57e3303974f0b951a0176a0745c3

Critique my business ideas
reddit
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Human Vibe Score0.5
FocusOutrageous9685This week

Critique my business ideas

So I have some business ideas that I would like to confront to you in order to have feedback. The point is to give me your completely honest opinion and try to find some potential problems. 1 - Digital marketing automation for green ecommerce stores Marketing has always been a problem for everyone in business more particularly for niche businesses. It's tough for them because people who will buy their product are generally harder to find. Also these products are way more expensive than other so it may be clever for them to focus more on marketing. Since the green and sustainable industry is growing at a very fast rate such as AI, I would like to hear your opinion on the idea of automating marketing for these type of businesses. 2 - AI Mental Health platform The mental health issues will gain more and more importance in the future. We now live in a world that isn't as safe as before and with the rise of social media we can predict that mental health issues will be more frequent especially for young people. PH, Instagram, Tiktok all of these are just bad for everyone and so an AI mental health plateform where people can chat with AI, discuss in anonymous forums and use integrated tools to reduce screen time and manage addiction I think would be a good idea. I haven't really thought about how to make money but as I write I was thinking about either a freemium model or integrate products from stores and kind of get affiliation, getting money when people buy the product. 3 - A car enthusiast website Everyday around 5000 millionaires are created so obviously the high end car industry is growing at a fairly fast rate. My idea would be to create a network where people would pay to ride in a supercar. There would be a map where people would look for cars in their area and chat with the owner basically. 4 - Marketing agency for real estate agents This is self explanatory. Common pain points include managing client communication, nurturing leads, following up on inquiries, and staying top-of-mind with potential buyers and sellers. Effective email automation can help with sending personalized follow-ups, reminders, newsletters, and market updates. It would be a subscription based business basically.

SaaS, Agency, or job?
reddit
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Human Vibe Score0.818
SlowageAIThis week

SaaS, Agency, or job?

Recently, I was fired, and since I have some savings, I decided it’s finally time to start my own venture. After a couple of weeks of research and trying to figure out what I should do, here are my thoughts and some questions at the end. I’d appreciate any feedback or opinions. It’s not that I expect to wake up a multimillionaire, but I see how people make money without working the typical 9-5. Some of the worst examples are on YouTube—those agency, OFM, dropshipping hustle bros. I know it’s naive to believe all of it because they’re just selling courses, but some of them do seem to have built impressive income streams. Anyway, let’s dive into two categories and compare. Agency (providing services, development, consultation): I’ll talk about AI automation because of my background in ML Engineering and Generative AI, but this could apply to any other agency niche. It seems like a good business idea for someone who knows generative AI and can do some impressive things with LLMs, agents, etc. I even started working on it—built a website—but I stopped when I couldn’t define exactly what services to offer. I could do heavy backend tasks with infrastructure, like real machine learning and AI with fine-tuning, but I couldn’t find any examples of agencies doing this. Almost 100% of them are doing simple automations with tools like Zapier or Make. When it comes to business owners, it’s really hard to find clients in general. After reading Reddit threads, articles, and watching videos, it seems like nearly everyone struggles with client acquisition. For a one-person agency offering more complex services like real ML, it would likely be even harder to find clients, compared to big outsourcing companies with sales teams. Even without focusing on the client challenge, which is obvious in any business, looking at what successful agency owners earn, it’s usually around $100k–$200k a year. I’m not talking about the high end, just regular people. I got this information from reading, and a simple example is from interviews with people who claim to make $10k/month. But many others in these communities struggle to even reach that point. It seems like this is a difficult target for most people. SaaS: This area seems more straightforward, and with my background, it feels like a good fit. However, from reading different sources, I’ve found stories like, “It took me six months to get my first client,” or “I worked on a simple SaaS for nine months and just reached my first $1k.” There are also warnings not to believe those who claim to make $10k/month easily, and many people report struggling to grow after getting their first 10 clients. So, it’s clear to me that even with good tech skills, you’re not going to make massive amounts of money overnight, which I understand. However, with so many people becoming startup founders and indie hackers, many seem to struggle despite thinking it’s the way to go. I know both paths can potentially skyrocket, but here’s where I need help: Am I wrong about agencies? Am I wrong about SaaS? The toughest question for me: I don’t want to go back to a 9-5 job, even if I could earn $300k a year. Even if my own business takes more time and I earn less in the first few years, I still believe it will be more profitable long term, and I will be happier. So, should I pursue an agency, SaaS, or a traditional job?

Is SaaS Done?
reddit
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Competitive_Salad709This week

Is SaaS Done?

Other day I was talking to one of the leaders in Office, He said "SAAS IS DY!NG THANKS TO AI". I found this fascinating & started digging on this, I was already part of communities like Build in Public, NoCode Builders & Others. I think he was right. I saw a significant raise in the AI Tools, what other call it 'AI Wrapper Startups' I explored many tools, then I realise why don't we capitalise this opportunity. I found out it is the marketers who needs to be aware of these & if you don't embrace these tools you will end up losing to someone with minimum experience with marketing but good hands on experience with the tools. If these tools keep up the same phase then you have both challenges & opportunities which I've listed it down in the post pros & cons. I think we need to embrace these tools are else we will be left behind. All these things are about marketers but what about the people who want to become solopreneurs or people like Pieter Levels who just want to create something useful get money either by selling or running multiple projects at once. Whatever I've studied & learnt. I came up with something called "The SaaS Marketing Innovation Cycle". The SaaS Marketing Innovation Cycle : Will have six easy steps. Empowering with No-code : Decide what is the problem you are planing to solve & understand which is No-code tool can help you with solution. Some tools will have steep learning curve, become expert on those tools. Integrate Automation AI : This is very crucial for your tool & make sure you have build a tool which will integrates easily with most of the platforms. Build Custom Solution : Right now the whole industry of Micro SaaS stands on building custom solutions, catering your audience is the best way to go for it. Launching MVPs : Because you have no-code tools it is easier to deploy MVPs than ever before & you can build multiple tools at once. Adapt & Grow : This is about the business take feedback from customer add new feature remove few yada yada. Leverage the Growth : Here it is important you have learn to build communities out these tools. if you come up with any new ideas there is always a group of people, who will be able adapt & give you the feedback to improve. Conclusion : Either build something or adapt something quicker when that has built. What do you think Folks ??

I single-handedly built the world’s best AI investing platform. Here’s NexusTrade’s 2024 year in review
reddit
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No-Definition-2886This week

I single-handedly built the world’s best AI investing platform. Here’s NexusTrade’s 2024 year in review

I copy-pasted the content of this article to save you a click! I’ve been developing an AI investing platform for 4 years, and I’m blown away by all of the new features I’ve gotten done! Here’s my project’s 2024 year in review —- When someone asks me what is the best way to learn how to trade and invest, I have an unbiased answer – NexusTrade.io. I started NexusTrade to empower everybody, including beginners and non-technical investors, to learn how to make smarter investing decisions. NexusTrade is the best way for a new investor to learn algorithmic trading and financial research, and I’m not the only person to think so. Just this year alone, user growth has skyrocketed from 1,703 users to 14,319 users. This is driven by new features, better research tools, and the launch of algorithmic trading. Here’s NexusTrade’s 2024 year in review, a semi-complete list of the features I’ve launched. Summarizing this year in review TL;DR: I implemented a variety of new features to enhance NexusTrade’s algorithmic trading and financial research capabilities. This includes: Cryptocurrency support Enhanced financial research, like the AI-Powered Stock Screener Unique watchlists and daily market summaries Live-trading with Alpaca. Next year, I plan to implement features to make NexusTrade more tailored for each user’s experience, and launch several unique features including copy trading and fully automated algorithmic trading. Feature-by-feature: What have I done so far in 2024? Algorithmic Cryptocurrency Trading Picture: Algorithmic Cryptocurrency Trading I kicked off the year by adding cryptocurrency support to NexusTrade. Users can now research, design, and implement automated strategies for popular cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Ethereum. AI-Powered Stock Screener and research capabilities Picture: AI-Powered Stock Screener In tandem with cryptocurrency support, I made a huge update to Aurora, the AI Assistant in NexusTrade, by implementing a natural language stock screener. This screener makes it easy to find fundamentally strong stocks. Throughout the year, I’ve made several enhancements to it. Over time, I’ve made the screener faster, more accurate, and expanded its capabilities. Using fundamental indicators within trading strategies Picture: Using fundamental indicators Doing financial research for companies isn’t enough; we also need a way to integrate this type of research into trading strategies. Thus, I’ve expanded the NexusTrade indicators, and made it possible to create strategies using metrics like revenue, net income, free cash flow, and P/E ratio. Stock watchlists with tailored, automated daily emails Picture: Stock watchlists In addition, I didn’t want the research you may have done for a stock (or list of stocks) to be forgotten. Thus, I created the most useful watchlist page of any investing platform. This watchlist makes it easy to keep track of your favorite stocks, track them over time, and even receive curated, daily emails about them. Enhanced user profile page, Google sign-ins, and two-factor authentication Picture: Enhanced user profile Keeping in theme with adding new pages to NexusTrade, many pages, such as the profile page, got a huge revamp. The new profile page is cleaner, easier to use, and allows you to secure your account more effectively, for example, by using two-factor authentication. GPT-Reports: an AI-generated analysis of every stock in the market Picture: GPT-Reports I created GPT-Stock Reports, an AI-Generated analysis of every stock in the market. This report was generated by taking each company’s earnings data and asking GPT to analyze the stock and give it a rating. Manual and semi-automated algorithmic trading with Alpaca Picture: Manual and semi-automated trading Finally, I’ve fully launched the Alpaca integration, and enabled users to execute real trades directly in the NexusTrade app! This integration has transformed NexusTrade from a financial research app into a real, algorithmic trading platform for retail investors. Concluding Thoughts When I say that NexusTrade is the best platform for traders and investors to make more money in the stock market, you may naively think that I’m biased. I created the app, and the rose-tinted glasses is bound to make every red flag look like a regular flag, right? Wrong. NexusTrade is objectively a completely new way for investors to approach financial markets. The fact that the app is so expansive is nothing short of miraculous.

ChatGPT Full Course For 2025 | ChatGPT Tutorial For Beginnners | ChatGPT Course | Simplilearn
youtube
LLM Vibe Score0.369
Human Vibe Score0.26
SimplilearnMar 28, 2025

ChatGPT Full Course For 2025 | ChatGPT Tutorial For Beginnners | ChatGPT Course | Simplilearn

🔥Purdue - Applied Generative AI Specialization - https://www.simplilearn.com/applied-ai-course?utmcampaign=C4lBsBlloL0&utmmedium=Lives&utm_source=Youtube 🔥Professional Certificate Program in Generative AI and Machine Learning - IITG (India Only) - https://www.simplilearn.com/iitg-generative-ai-machine-learning-program?utmcampaign=C4lBsBlloL0&utmmedium=Lives&utm_source=Youtube 🔥Advanced Executive Program In Applied Generative AI - https://www.simplilearn.com/applied-generative-ai-course?utmcampaign=C4lBsBlloL0&utmmedium=Lives&utm_source=Youtube This ChatGPT Full Course 2025 by Simplilearn provides a comprehensive learning journey, starting with an introduction to ChatGPT and Generative AI, followed by insights into AI job opportunities and a comparison between ChatGPT 4.0 and 4.0 Turbo. The tutorial covers prompt engineering techniques, machine learning fundamentals, and running Llama models privately. Learners will explore ChatGPT-powered application development, its role in programming, and Excel automation. The course also dives into blogging, PowerPoint automation, customer support, and finance applications. Advanced topics like RAG vs. Prompt Tuning, prompt injection, and LangChain are included, along with discussions on OpenAI's latest innovations, including Sora and Strawberry. By the end, participants will gain a strong understanding of ChatGPT’s capabilities and monetization strategies. 🚀 Following are the topics covered in the ChatGPT Full Course 2025: 00:00:00 - Introduction to ChatGPT Full Course 2025 00:09:26 - What is ChatGPT 00:10:11 - What is Gen AI 00:26:29 - How to get Job in AI 00:27:06 - ChatGPT 40 vs ChatGPT 4 01:03:14 - Chatgpt analyse 02:13:57 - Prompt Engineering Tutorial 03:10:34 - What is Machine Learning 04:07:06 - Machine Learning Tutorial 04:08:13 - Run Lama Privately 04:23:50 - Search GPT 04:25:31 - Build App Using ChatGPT 06:31:11 - ChatGPT for Programming 06:46:08 - Prompt Formulae Chatgpt 07:58:38 - Automate Excel using Chatgpt 08:00:06 - Blogging with ChatGpt 08:27:25 - Powerpoint using Chatgpt 08:28:31 - Rag Vs Prompt Tuning 09:37:43 - Chatgpt for Customer Support 11:11:06 - ChatGPT for finance 11:17:38 - Prompt injection 11:18:38 - How to Earn Money using ChatGPT 11:41:46 - Open AI Strawberry 11:52:42 - Openai sora 11:54:57 - Langchain 12:22:19 - Open ai chatgpt o1 model ✅ Subscribe to our Channel to learn more about the top Technologies: https://bit.ly/2VT4WtH ⏩ Check out the Artificial Intelligence training videos: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEiEAq2VkUULa5aOQmO_al2VVmhC-eqeI #gpt #chatgpt #chatgptforbeginners #chatgptcourse #genai #generativeai #artificialintelligence #ai #machinelearning #llm #simplilearn #2025 ➡️ About Professional Certificate Program in Generative AI and Machine Learning Dive into the future of AI with our Generative AI & Machine Learning course, in collaboration with E&ICT Academy, IIT Guwahati. Learn tools like ChatGPT, OpenAI, Hugging Face, Python, and more. Join masterclasses led by IITG faculty, engage in hands-on projects, and earn Executive Alumni Status. Key Features: ✅ Program completion certificate from E&ICT Academy, IIT Guwahati ✅ Curriculum delivered in live virtual classes by seasoned industry experts ✅ Exposure to the latest AI advancements, such as generative AI, LLMs, and prompt engineering ✅ Interactive live-virtual masterclasses delivered by esteemed IIT Guwahati faculty ✅ Opportunity to earn an 'Executive Alumni Status' from E&ICT Academy, IIT Guwahati ✅ Eligibility for a campus immersion program organized at IIT Guwahati ✅ Exclusive hackathons and “ask-me-anything” sessions by IBM ✅ Certificates for IBM courses and industry masterclasses by IBM experts ✅ Practical learning through 25+ hands-on projects and 3 industry-oriented capstone projects ✅ Access to a wide array of AI tools such as ChatGPT, Hugging Face, DALL-E 2, Midjourney and more ✅ Simplilearn's JobAssist helps you get noticed by top hiring companies Skills Covered: ✅ Generative AI ✅ Prompt Engineering ✅ Chatbot Development ✅ Supervised and Unsupervised Learning ✅ Model Training and Optimization ✅ Model Evaluation and Validation ✅ Ensemble Methods ✅ Deep Learning ✅ Natural Language Processing ✅ Computer Vision ✅ Reinforcement Learning ✅ Machine Learning Algorithms ✅ Speech Recognition ✅ Statistics Learning Path: ✅ Program Induction ✅ Programming Fundamentals ✅ Python for Data Science (IBM) ✅ Applied Data Science with Python ✅ Machine Learning ✅ Deep Learning with TensorFlow (IBM) ✅ Deep Learning Specialization ✅ Essentials of Generative AI, Prompt Engineering & ChatGPT ✅ Advanced Generative AI ✅ Capstone Electives: ✅ ADL & Computer Vision ✅ NLP and Speech Recognition ✅ Reinforcement Learning ✅ Academic Masterclass ✅ Industry Masterclass 👉 Learn More At: https://www.simplilearn.com/iitg-generative-ai-machine-learning-program?utmcampaign=C4lBsBlloL0&utmmedium=Lives&utm_source=Youtube

AITreasureBox
github
LLM Vibe Score0.447
Human Vibe Score0.1014145151561518
superiorluMar 28, 2025

AITreasureBox

AI TreasureBox English | 中文 Collect practical AI repos, tools, websites, papers and tutorials on AI. Translated from ChatGPT, picture from Midjourney. Catalog Repos Tools Websites Report&Paper Tutorials Repos updated repos and stars every 2 hours and re-ranking automatically. | No. | Repos | Description | | ----:|:-----------------------------------------|:------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 1|🔥codecrafters-io/build-your-own-x !2025-03-28364681428|Master programming by recreating your favorite technologies from scratch.| | 2|sindresorhus/awesome !2025-03-28353614145|😎 Awesome lists about all kinds of interesting topics| | 3|public-apis/public-apis !2025-03-28334299125|A collective list of free APIs| | 4|kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap !2025-03-2831269540|Interactive roadmaps, guides and other educational content to help developers grow in their careers.| | 5|vinta/awesome-python !2025-03-28238581114|A curated list of awesome Python frameworks, libraries, software and resources| | 6|practical-tutorials/project-based-learning !2025-03-28222661124|Curated list of project-based tutorials| | 7|tensorflow/tensorflow !2025-03-281888714|An Open Source Machine Learning Framework for Everyone| | 8|Significant-Gravitas/AutoGPT !2025-03-2817391338|An experimental open-source attempt to make GPT-4 fully autonomous.| | 9|jackfrued/Python-100-Days !2025-03-2816305141|Python - 100天从新手到大师| | 10|AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui !2025-03-2815011553|Stable Diffusion web UI| | 11|huggingface/transformers !2025-03-2814207850|🤗 Transformers: State-of-the-art Machine Learning for Pytorch, TensorFlow, and JAX.| | 12|ollama/ollama !2025-03-28135166151|Get up and running with Llama 2, Mistral, Gemma, and other large language models.| | 13|f/awesome-chatgpt-prompts !2025-03-2812212738 |This repo includes ChatGPT prompt curation to use ChatGPT better.| | 14|justjavac/free-programming-books-zhCN !2025-03-2811316119|📚 免费的计算机编程类中文书籍,欢迎投稿| | 15|krahets/hello-algo !2025-03-2811107930|《Hello 算法》:动画图解、一键运行的数据结构与算法教程。支持 Python, Java, C++, C, C#, JS, Go, Swift, Rust, Ruby, Kotlin, TS, Dart 代码。简体版和繁体版同步更新,English version ongoing| | 16|yt-dlp/yt-dlp !2025-03-28105801114|A feature-rich command-line audio/video downloader| | 17|langchain-ai/langchain !2025-03-2810449479|⚡ Building applications with LLMs through composability ⚡| | 18|goldbergyoni/nodebestpractices !2025-03-281021629|✅ The Node.js best practices list (July 2024)| | 19|puppeteer/puppeteer !2025-03-289018212|JavaScript API for Chrome and Firefox| | 20|pytorch/pytorch !2025-03-288833938|Tensors and Dynamic neural networks in Python with strong GPU acceleration| | 21|neovim/neovim !2025-03-288781482|Vim-fork focused on extensibility and usability| | 22|🔥🔥langgenius/dify !2025-03-2887342639 |One API for plugins and datasets, one interface for prompt engineering and visual operation, all for creating powerful AI applications.| | 23|mtdvio/every-programmer-should-know !2025-03-28867069|A collection of (mostly) technical things every software developer should know about| | 24|open-webui/open-webui !2025-03-2886025159|User-friendly WebUI for LLMs (Formerly Ollama WebUI)| | 25|ChatGPTNextWeb/NextChat !2025-03-288231521|✨ Light and Fast AI Assistant. Support: Web | | 26|supabase/supabase !2025-03-287990956|The open source Firebase alternative.| | 27|openai/whisper !2025-03-287905542|Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision| | 28|home-assistant/core !2025-03-287773219|🏡 Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first.| | 29|tensorflow/models !2025-03-28774694|Models and examples built with TensorFlow| | 30| ggerganov/llama.cpp !2025-03-287731836 | Port of Facebook's LLaMA model in C/C++ | | 31|3b1b/manim !2025-03-287641918|Animation engine for explanatory math videos| | 32|microsoft/generative-ai-for-beginners !2025-03-287623860|12 Lessons, Get Started Building with Generative AI 🔗 https://microsoft.github.io/generative-ai-for-beginners/| | 33|nomic-ai/gpt4all !2025-03-28729285 |gpt4all: an ecosystem of open-source chatbots trained on a massive collection of clean assistant data including code, stories and dialogue| | 34|comfyanonymous/ComfyUI !2025-03-2872635111|The most powerful and modular diffusion model GUI, api and backend with a graph/nodes interface.| | 35|bregman-arie/devops-exercises !2025-03-2872225209|Linux, Jenkins, AWS, SRE, Prometheus, Docker, Python, Ansible, Git, Kubernetes, Terraform, OpenStack, SQL, NoSQL, Azure, GCP, DNS, Elastic, Network, Virtualization. DevOps Interview Questions| | 36|elastic/elasticsearch !2025-03-28721419|Free and Open, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine| | 37|🔥n8n-io/n8n !2025-03-2872093495|Free and source-available fair-code licensed workflow automation tool. Easily automate tasks across different services.| | 38|fighting41love/funNLP !2025-03-287200422|The Most Powerful NLP-Weapon Arsenal| | 39|hoppscotch/hoppscotch !2025-03-287060134|Open source API development ecosystem - https://hoppscotch.io (open-source alternative to Postman, Insomnia)| | 40|abi/screenshot-to-code !2025-03-286932817|Drop in a screenshot and convert it to clean HTML/Tailwind/JS code| | 41|binary-husky/gptacademic !2025-03-28680374|Academic Optimization of GPT| | 42|d2l-ai/d2l-zh !2025-03-286774142|Targeting Chinese readers, functional and open for discussion. The Chinese and English versions are used for teaching in over 400 universities across more than 60 countries| | 43|josephmisiti/awesome-machine-learning !2025-03-286739215|A curated list of awesome Machine Learning frameworks, libraries and software.| | 44|grafana/grafana !2025-03-286725414|The open and composable observability and data visualization platform. Visualize metrics, logs, and traces from multiple sources like Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, Postgres and many more.| | 45|python/cpython !2025-03-286602218|The Python programming language| | 46|apache/superset !2025-03-286519020|Apache Superset is a Data Visualization and Data Exploration Platform| | 47|xtekky/gpt4free !2025-03-28639391 |decentralizing the Ai Industry, free gpt-4/3.5 scripts through several reverse engineered API's ( poe.com, phind.com, chat.openai.com etc...)| | 48|sherlock-project/sherlock !2025-03-286332536|Hunt down social media accounts by username across social networks| | 49|twitter/the-algorithm !2025-03-28630586 |Source code for Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm| | 50|keras-team/keras !2025-03-28627835|Deep Learning for humans| | 51|openai/openai-cookbook !2025-03-28625136 |Examples and guides for using the OpenAI API| | 52|immich-app/immich !2025-03-286238670|High performance self-hosted photo and video management solution.| | 53|AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy !2025-03-286173528|Bring projects, wikis, and teams together with AI. AppFlowy is an AI collaborative workspace where you achieve more without losing control of your data. The best open source alternative to Notion.| | 54|scikit-learn/scikit-learn !2025-03-286158212|scikit-learn: machine learning in Python| | 55|binhnguyennus/awesome-scalability !2025-03-286117021|The Patterns of Scalable, Reliable, and Performant Large-Scale Systems| | 56|labmlai/annotateddeeplearningpaperimplementations !2025-03-285951726|🧑‍🏫 59 Implementations/tutorials of deep learning papers with side-by-side notes 📝; including transformers (original, xl, switch, feedback, vit, ...), optimizers (adam, adabelief, ...), gans(cyclegan, stylegan2, ...), 🎮 reinforcement learning (ppo, dqn), capsnet, distillation, ... 🧠| | 57|OpenInterpreter/open-interpreter !2025-03-285894710|A natural language interface for computers| | 58|lobehub/lobe-chat !2025-03-285832054|🤖 Lobe Chat - an open-source, extensible (Function Calling), high-performance chatbot framework. It supports one-click free deployment of your private ChatGPT/LLM web application.| | 59|meta-llama/llama !2025-03-28579536|Inference code for Llama models| | 60|nuxt/nuxt !2025-03-28566437|The Intuitive Vue Framework.| | 61|imartinez/privateGPT !2025-03-28555192|Interact with your documents using the power of GPT, 100% privately, no data leaks| | 62|Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF !2025-03-285500846|#1 Locally hosted web application that allows you to perform various operations on PDF files| | 63|PlexPt/awesome-chatgpt-prompts-zh !2025-03-285459720|ChatGPT Chinese Training Guide. Guidelines for various scenarios. Learn how to make it listen to you| | 64|dair-ai/Prompt-Engineering-Guide !2025-03-285451025 |🐙 Guides, papers, lecture, notebooks and resources for prompt engineering| | 65|ageitgey/facerecognition !2025-03-28544382|The world's simplest facial recognition api for Python and the command line| | 66|CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice-Cloning !2025-03-285384814|Clone a voice in 5 seconds to generate arbitrary speech in real-time| | 67|geekan/MetaGPT !2025-03-285375376|The Multi-Agent Meta Programming Framework: Given one line Requirement, return PRD, Design, Tasks, Repo | | 68|gpt-engineer-org/gpt-engineer !2025-03-285367419|Specify what you want it to build, the AI asks for clarification, and then builds it.| | 69|lencx/ChatGPT !2025-03-2853653-3|🔮 ChatGPT Desktop Application (Mac, Windows and Linux)| | 70|deepfakes/faceswap !2025-03-28535672|Deepfakes Software For All| | 71|langflow-ai/langflow !2025-03-285319584|Langflow is a low-code app builder for RAG and multi-agent AI applications. It’s Python-based and agnostic to any model, API, or database.| | 72|commaai/openpilot !2025-03-28529759|openpilot is an operating system for robotics. Currently, it upgrades the driver assistance system on 275+ supported cars.| | 73|clash-verge-rev/clash-verge-rev !2025-03-2852848124|Continuation of Clash Verge - A Clash Meta GUI based on Tauri (Windows, MacOS, Linux)| | 74|All-Hands-AI/OpenHands !2025-03-285150675|🙌 OpenHands: Code Less, Make More| | 75|xai-org/grok-1 !2025-03-28502504|Grok open release| | 76|meilisearch/meilisearch !2025-03-284999122|A lightning-fast search API that fits effortlessly into your apps, websites, and workflow| | 77|🔥browser-use/browser-use !2025-03-2849910294|Make websites accessible for AI agents| | 78|jgthms/bulma !2025-03-28496783|Modern CSS framework based on Flexbox| | 79|facebookresearch/segment-anything !2025-03-284947116|The repository provides code for running inference with the SegmentAnything Model (SAM), links for downloading the trained model checkpoints, and example notebooks that show how to use the model.| |!green-up-arrow.svg 80|hacksider/Deep-Live-Cam !2025-03-2848612146|real time face swap and one-click video deepfake with only a single image (uncensored)| |!red-down-arrow 81|mlabonne/llm-course !2025-03-284860934|Course with a roadmap and notebooks to get into Large Language Models (LLMs).| | 82|PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR !2025-03-284785530|Awesome multilingual OCR toolkits based on PaddlePaddle (practical ultra lightweight OCR system, support 80+ languages recognition, provide data annotation and synthesis tools, support training and deployment among server, mobile, embedded and IoT devices)| | 83|alist-org/alist !2025-03-284732618|🗂️A file list/WebDAV program that supports multiple storages, powered by Gin and Solidjs. / 一个支持多存储的文件列表/WebDAV程序,使用 Gin 和 Solidjs。| | 84|infiniflow/ragflow !2025-03-2847027129|RAGFlow is an open-source RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) engine based on deep document understanding.| | 85|Avik-Jain/100-Days-Of-ML-Code !2025-03-284679312|100 Days of ML Coding| | 86|v2ray/v2ray-core !2025-03-28458706|A platform for building proxies to bypass network restrictions.| | 87|hiyouga/LLaMA-Factory !2025-03-284555881|Easy-to-use LLM fine-tuning framework (LLaMA, BLOOM, Mistral, Baichuan, Qwen, ChatGLM)| | 88|Asabeneh/30-Days-Of-Python !2025-03-284544930|30 days of Python programming challenge is a step-by-step guide to learn the Python programming language in 30 days. This challenge may take more than100 days, follow your own pace. These videos may help too: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7PNRuno1rzYPb1xLa4yktw| | 89|type-challenges/type-challenges !2025-03-284488511|Collection of TypeScript type challenges with online judge| | 90|lllyasviel/Fooocus !2025-03-284402716|Focus on prompting and generating| | 91|RVC-Boss/GPT-SoVITS !2025-03-284327738|1 min voice data can also be used to train a good TTS model! (few shot voice cloning)| | 92|rasbt/LLMs-from-scratch !2025-03-284320667|Implementing a ChatGPT-like LLM from scratch, step by step| | 93|oobabooga/text-generation-webui !2025-03-284302012 |A gradio web UI for running Large Language Models like LLaMA, llama.cpp, GPT-J, OPT, and GALACTICA.| | 94|vllm-project/vllm !2025-03-2842982102|A high-throughput and memory-efficient inference and serving engine for LLMs| | 95|dani-garcia/vaultwarden !2025-03-284297121|Unofficial Bitwarden compatible server written in Rust, formerly known as bitwarden_rs| | 96|microsoft/autogen !2025-03-284233049|Enable Next-Gen Large Language Model Applications. Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/pAbnFJrkgZ| | 97|jeecgboot/JeecgBoot !2025-03-284205920|🔥「企业级低代码平台」前后端分离架构SpringBoot 2.x/3.x,SpringCloud,Ant Design&Vue3,Mybatis,Shiro,JWT。强大的代码生成器让前后端代码一键生成,无需写任何代码! 引领新的开发模式OnlineCoding->代码生成->手工MERGE,帮助Java项目解决70%重复工作,让开发更关注业务,既能快速提高效率,帮助公司节省成本,同时又不失灵活性。| | 98|Mintplex-Labs/anything-llm !2025-03-284186955|A full-stack application that turns any documents into an intelligent chatbot with a sleek UI and easier way to manage your workspaces.| | 99|THUDM/ChatGLM-6B !2025-03-28410192 |ChatGLM-6B: An Open Bilingual Dialogue Language Model| | 100|hpcaitech/ColossalAI !2025-03-28406902|Making large AI models cheaper, faster and more accessible| | 101|Stability-AI/stablediffusion !2025-03-28406337|High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models| | 102|mingrammer/diagrams !2025-03-28405063|🎨 Diagram as Code for prototyping cloud system architectures| | 103|Kong/kong !2025-03-28404616|🦍 The Cloud-Native API Gateway and AI Gateway.| | 104|getsentry/sentry !2025-03-284040913|Developer-first error tracking and performance monitoring| | 105| karpathy/nanoGPT !2025-03-284034613 |The simplest, fastest repository for training/finetuning medium-sized GPTs| | 106|fastlane/fastlane !2025-03-2840014-1|🚀 The easiest way to automate building and releasing your iOS and Android apps| | 107|psf/black !2025-03-28399765|The uncompromising Python code formatter| | 108|OpenBB-finance/OpenBBTerminal !2025-03-283972074 |Investment Research for Everyone, Anywhere.| | 109|2dust/v2rayNG !2025-03-283943415|A V2Ray client for Android, support Xray core and v2fly core| | 110|apache/airflow !2025-03-283937314|Apache Airflow - A platform to programmatically author, schedule, and monitor workflows| | 111|KRTirtho/spotube !2025-03-283902746|🎧 Open source Spotify client that doesn't require Premium nor uses Electron! Available for both desktop & mobile!| | 112|coqui-ai/TTS !2025-03-283889719 |🐸💬 - a deep learning toolkit for Text-to-Speech, battle-tested in research and production| | 113|ggerganov/whisper.cpp !2025-03-283882116|Port of OpenAI's Whisper model in C/C++| | 114|ultralytics/ultralytics !2025-03-283866951|NEW - YOLOv8 🚀 in PyTorch > ONNX > OpenVINO > CoreML > TFLite| | 115|typst/typst !2025-03-283863914|A new markup-based typesetting system that is powerful and easy to learn.| | 116|streamlit/streamlit !2025-03-283845828|Streamlit — A faster way to build and share data apps.| | 117|LC044/WeChatMsg !2025-03-283836931|提取微信聊天记录,将其导出成HTML、Word、Excel文档永久保存,对聊天记录进行分析生成年度聊天报告,用聊天数据训练专属于个人的AI聊天助手| | 118|lm-sys/FastChat !2025-03-283822112 |An open platform for training, serving, and evaluating large languages. Release repo for Vicuna and FastChat-T5.| | 119|NaiboWang/EasySpider !2025-03-283819013|A visual no-code/code-free web crawler/spider易采集:一个可视化浏览器自动化测试/数据采集/爬虫软件,可以无代码图形化的设计和执行爬虫任务。别名:ServiceWrapper面向Web应用的智能化服务封装系统。| | 120|microsoft/DeepSpeed !2025-03-283765816 |A deep learning optimization library that makes distributed training and inference easy, efficient, and effective| | 121|QuivrHQ/quivr !2025-03-28376067|Your GenAI Second Brain 🧠 A personal productivity assistant (RAG) ⚡️🤖 Chat with your docs (PDF, CSV, ...) & apps using Langchain, GPT 3.5 / 4 turbo, Private, Anthropic, VertexAI, Ollama, LLMs, that you can share with users ! Local & Private alternative to OpenAI GPTs & ChatGPT powered by retrieval-augmented generation.| | 122|freqtrade/freqtrade !2025-03-283757817 |Free, open source crypto trading bot| | 123|suno-ai/bark !2025-03-28373178 |🔊 Text-Prompted Generative Audio Model| | 124|🔥cline/cline !2025-03-2837307282|Autonomous coding agent right in your IDE, capable of creating/editing files, executing commands, and more with your permission every step of the way.| | 125|LAION-AI/Open-Assistant !2025-03-28372712 |OpenAssistant is a chat-based assistant that understands tasks, can interact with third-party systems, and retrieve information dynamically to do so.| | 126|penpot/penpot !2025-03-283716217|Penpot: The open-source design tool for design and code collaboration| | 127|gradio-app/gradio !2025-03-283713320|Build and share delightful machine learning apps, all in Python. 🌟 Star to support our work!| | 128|FlowiseAI/Flowise !2025-03-283667135 |Drag & drop UI to build your customized LLM flow using LangchainJS| | 129|SimplifyJobs/Summer2025-Internships !2025-03-28366506|Collection of Summer 2025 tech internships!| | 130|TencentARC/GFPGAN !2025-03-28365027 |GFPGAN aims at developing Practical Algorithms for Real-world Face Restoration.| | 131|ray-project/ray !2025-03-283626819|Ray is a unified framework for scaling AI and Python applications. Ray consists of a core distributed runtime and a toolkit of libraries (Ray AIR) for accelerating ML workloads.| | 132|babysor/MockingBird !2025-03-28360498|🚀AI拟声: 5秒内克隆您的声音并生成任意语音内容 Clone a voice in 5 seconds to generate arbitrary speech in real-time| | 133|unslothai/unsloth !2025-03-283603691|5X faster 50% less memory LLM finetuning| | 134|zhayujie/chatgpt-on-wechat !2025-03-283600124 |Wechat robot based on ChatGPT, which uses OpenAI api and itchat library| | 135|upscayl/upscayl !2025-03-283599824|🆙 Upscayl - Free and Open Source AI Image Upscaler for Linux, MacOS and Windows built with Linux-First philosophy.| | 136|freeCodeCamp/devdocs !2025-03-28359738|API Documentation Browser| | 137|XingangPan/DragGAN !2025-03-28359043 |Code for DragGAN (SIGGRAPH 2023)| | 138|2noise/ChatTTS !2025-03-283543922|ChatTTS is a generative speech model for daily dialogue.| | 139|google-research/google-research !2025-03-28352207 |Google Research| | 140|karanpratapsingh/system-design !2025-03-28351003|Learn how to design systems at scale and prepare for system design interviews| | 141|lapce/lapce !2025-03-28350855|Lightning-fast and Powerful Code Editor written in Rust| | 142| microsoft/TaskMatrix !2025-03-2834500-3 | Talking, Drawing and Editing with Visual Foundation Models| | 143|chatchat-space/Langchain-Chatchat !2025-03-283442020|Langchain-Chatchat (formerly langchain-ChatGLM), local knowledge based LLM (like ChatGLM) QA app with langchain| | 144|unclecode/crawl4ai !2025-03-283434163|🔥🕷️ Crawl4AI: Open-source LLM Friendly Web Crawler & Scrapper| | 145|Bin-Huang/chatbox !2025-03-283374733 |A desktop app for GPT-4 / GPT-3.5 (OpenAI API) that supports Windows, Mac & Linux| | 146|milvus-io/milvus !2025-03-283366525 |A cloud-native vector database, storage for next generation AI applications| | 147|mendableai/firecrawl !2025-03-2833297128|🔥 Turn entire websites into LLM-ready markdown| | 148|pola-rs/polars !2025-03-283269320|Fast multi-threaded, hybrid-out-of-core query engine focussing on DataFrame front-ends| | 149|Pythagora-io/gpt-pilot !2025-03-28325321|PoC for a scalable dev tool that writes entire apps from scratch while the developer oversees the implementation| | 150|hashicorp/vault !2025-03-28320797|A tool for secrets management, encryption as a service, and privileged access management| | 151|shardeum/shardeum !2025-03-28319580|Shardeum is an EVM based autoscaling blockchain| | 152|Chanzhaoyu/chatgpt-web !2025-03-28319242 |A demonstration website built with Express and Vue3 called ChatGPT| | 153|lllyasviel/ControlNet !2025-03-283186413 |Let us control diffusion models!| | 154|google/jax !2025-03-28317727|Composable transformations of Python+NumPy programs: differentiate, vectorize, JIT to GPU/TPU, and more| | 155|facebookresearch/detectron2 !2025-03-28315987|Detectron2 is a platform for object detection, segmentation and other visual recognition tasks.| | 156|myshell-ai/OpenVoice !2025-03-28315233|Instant voice cloning by MyShell| | 157|TheAlgorithms/C-Plus-Plus !2025-03-283151411|Collection of various algorithms in mathematics, machine learning, computer science and physics implemented in C++ for educational purposes.| | 158|hiroi-sora/Umi-OCR !2025-03-283138129|OCR图片转文字识别软件,完全离线。截屏/批量导入图片,支持多国语言、合并段落、竖排文字。可排除水印区域,提取干净的文本。基于 PaddleOCR 。| | 159|mudler/LocalAI !2025-03-283127815|🤖 The free, Open Source OpenAI alternative. Self-hosted, community-driven and local-first. Drop-in replacement for OpenAI running on consumer-grade hardware. No GPU required. Runs gguf, transformers, diffusers and many more models architectures. It allows to generate Text, Audio, Video, Images. Also with voice cloning capabilities.| | 160|facebookresearch/fairseq !2025-03-28312124 |Facebook AI Research Sequence-to-Sequence Toolkit written in Python.| | 161|alibaba/nacos !2025-03-28310559|an easy-to-use dynamic service discovery, configuration and service management platform for building cloud native applications.| | 162|yunjey/pytorch-tutorial !2025-03-28310326|PyTorch Tutorial for Deep Learning Researchers| | 163|v2fly/v2ray-core !2025-03-28307448|A platform for building proxies to bypass network restrictions.| | 164|mckaywrigley/chatbot-ui !2025-03-283067714|The open-source AI chat interface for everyone.| | 165|TabbyML/tabby !2025-03-28305949 |Self-hosted AI coding assistant| | 166|deepseek-ai/awesome-deepseek-integration !2025-03-283053193|| | 167|danielmiessler/fabric !2025-03-283028914|fabric is an open-source framework for augmenting humans using AI.| | 168|xinntao/Real-ESRGAN !2025-03-283026623 |Real-ESRGAN aims at developing Practical Algorithms for General Image/Video Restoration.| | 169|paul-gauthier/aider !2025-03-283014642|aider is GPT powered coding in your terminal| | 170|tatsu-lab/stanfordalpaca !2025-03-28299022 |Code and documentation to train Stanford's Alpaca models, and generate the data.| | 171|DataTalksClub/data-engineering-zoomcamp !2025-03-282971817|Free Data Engineering course!| | 172|HeyPuter/puter !2025-03-282967014|🌐 The Internet OS! Free, Open-Source, and Self-Hostable.| | 173|mli/paper-reading !2025-03-282962314|Classic Deep Learning and In-Depth Reading of New Papers Paragraph by Paragraph| | 174|linexjlin/GPTs !2025-03-28295568|leaked prompts of GPTs| | 175|s0md3v/roop !2025-03-28295286 |one-click deepfake (face swap)| | 176|JushBJJ/Mr.-Ranedeer-AI-Tutor !2025-03-2829465-1 |A GPT-4 AI Tutor Prompt for customizable personalized learning experiences.| | 177|opendatalab/MinerU !2025-03-282927074|A one-stop, open-source, high-quality data extraction tool, supports PDF/webpage/e-book extraction.一站式开源高质量数据提取工具,支持PDF/网页/多格式电子书提取。| | 178|mouredev/Hello-Python !2025-03-282920720|Curso para aprender el lenguaje de programación Python desde cero y para principiantes. 75 clases, 37 horas en vídeo, código, proyectos y grupo de chat. Fundamentos, frontend, backend, testing, IA...| | 179|Lightning-AI/pytorch-lightning !2025-03-28292039|Pretrain, finetune and deploy AI models on multiple GPUs, TPUs with zero code changes.| | 180|crewAIInc/crewAI !2025-03-282919344|Framework for orchestrating role-playing, autonomous AI agents. By fostering collaborative intelligence, CrewAI empowers agents to work together seamlessly, tackling complex tasks.| | 181|facebook/folly !2025-03-282916612|An open-source C++ library developed and used at Facebook.| | 182|google-ai-edge/mediapipe !2025-03-28291519|Cross-platform, customizable ML solutions for live and streaming media.| | 183| getcursor/cursor !2025-03-282892025 | An editor made for programming with AI| | 184|chatanywhere/GPTAPIfree !2025-03-282856424|Free ChatGPT API Key, Free ChatGPT API, supports GPT-4 API (free), ChatGPT offers a free domestic forwarding API that allows direct connections without the need for a proxy. It can be used in conjunction with software/plugins like ChatBox, significantly reducing interface usage costs. Enjoy unlimited and unrestricted chatting within China| | 185|meta-llama/llama3 !2025-03-28285552|The official Meta Llama 3 GitHub site| | 186|tinygrad/tinygrad !2025-03-282845811|You like pytorch? You like micrograd? You love tinygrad! ❤️| | 187|google-research/tuningplaybook !2025-03-282841514|A playbook for systematically maximizing the performance of deep learning models.| | 188|huggingface/diffusers !2025-03-282830222|🤗 Diffusers: State-of-the-art diffusion models for image and audio generation in PyTorch and FLAX.| | 189|tokio-rs/tokio !2025-03-28282408|A runtime for writing reliable asynchronous applications with Rust. Provides I/O, networking, scheduling, timers, ...| | 190|RVC-Project/Retrieval-based-Voice-Conversion-WebUI !2025-03-282823817|Voice data !2025-03-282822612|Jan is an open source alternative to ChatGPT that runs 100% offline on your computer| | 192|openai/CLIP !2025-03-282814720|CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining), Predict the most relevant text snippet given an image| | 193|🔥khoj-ai/khoj !2025-03-2828112313|Your AI second brain. A copilot to get answers to your questions, whether they be from your own notes or from the internet. Use powerful, online (e.g gpt4) or private, local (e.g mistral) LLMs. Self-host locally or use our web app. Access from Obsidian, Emacs, Desktop app, Web or Whatsapp.| | 194| acheong08/ChatGPT !2025-03-2828054-2 | Reverse engineered ChatGPT API | | 195|iperov/DeepFaceLive !2025-03-28279345 |Real-time face swap for PC streaming or video calls| | 196|eugeneyan/applied-ml !2025-03-28278471|📚 Papers & tech blogs by companies sharing their work on data science & machine learning in production.| | 197|XTLS/Xray-core !2025-03-282778213|Xray, Penetrates Everything. Also the best v2ray-core, with XTLS support. Fully compatible configuration.| | 198|feder-cr/JobsApplierAIAgent !2025-03-282776410|AutoJobsApplierAI_Agent aims to easy job hunt process by automating the job application process. Utilizing artificial intelligence, it enables users to apply for multiple jobs in an automated and personalized way.| | 199|mindsdb/mindsdb !2025-03-282750631|The platform for customizing AI from enterprise data| | 200|DataExpert-io/data-engineer-handbook !2025-03-282721611|This is a repo with links to everything you'd ever want to learn about data engineering| | 201|exo-explore/exo !2025-03-282721633|Run your own AI cluster at home with everyday devices 📱💻 🖥️⌚| | 202|taichi-dev/taichi !2025-03-2826926-1|Productive, portable, and performant GPU programming in Python.| | 203|mem0ai/mem0 !2025-03-282689134|The memory layer for Personalized AI| | 204|svc-develop-team/so-vits-svc !2025-03-28268096 |SoftVC VITS Singing Voice Conversion| | 205|OpenBMB/ChatDev !2025-03-28265624|Create Customized Software using Natural Language Idea (through Multi-Agent Collaboration)| | 206|roboflow/supervision !2025-03-282632010|We write your reusable computer vision tools. 💜| | 207|drawdb-io/drawdb !2025-03-282626913|Free, simple, and intuitive online database design tool and SQL generator.| | 208|karpathy/llm.c !2025-03-28261633|LLM training in simple, raw C/CUDA| | 209|airbnb/lottie-ios !2025-03-28261431|An iOS library to natively render After Effects vector animations| | 210|openai/openai-python !2025-03-282607713|The OpenAI Python library provides convenient access to the OpenAI API from applications written in the Python language.| | 211|academic/awesome-datascience !2025-03-28259876|📝 An awesome Data Science repository to learn and apply for real world problems.| | 212|harry0703/MoneyPrinterTurbo !2025-03-282576618|Generate short videos with one click using a large model| | 213|gabime/spdlog !2025-03-282571511|Fast C++ logging library.| | 214|ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF !2025-03-2825674217|OCRmyPDF adds an OCR text layer to scanned PDF files, allowing them to be searched| | 215|Vision-CAIR/MiniGPT-4 !2025-03-28256170 |Enhancing Vision-language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models| | 216|Stability-AI/generative-models !2025-03-28255936|Generative Models by Stability AI| | 217|DS4SD/docling !2025-03-282555662|Get your docs ready for gen AI| | 218|PostHog/posthog !2025-03-282533227|🦔 PostHog provides open-source product analytics, session recording, feature flagging and A/B testing that you can self-host.| | 219|nrwl/nx !2025-03-282509612|Smart Monorepos · Fast CI| | 220|continuedev/continue !2025-03-282500737|⏩ the open-source copilot chat for software development—bring the power of ChatGPT to VS Code| | 221|opentofu/opentofu !2025-03-28247968|OpenTofu lets you declaratively manage your cloud infrastructure.| | 222|invoke-ai/InvokeAI !2025-03-28247293|InvokeAI is a leading creative engine for Stable Diffusion models, empowering professionals, artists, and enthusiasts to generate and create visual media using the latest AI-driven technologies. The solution offers an industry leading WebUI, supports terminal use through a CLI, and serves as the foundation for multiple commercial products.| | 223|deepinsight/insightface !2025-03-282471615 |State-of-the-art 2D and 3D Face Analysis Project| | 224|apache/flink !2025-03-28246865|Apache Flink| | 225|ComposioHQ/composio !2025-03-28246436|Composio equips agents with well-crafted tools empowering them to tackle complex tasks| | 226|Genesis-Embodied-AI/Genesis !2025-03-282458314|A generative world for general-purpose robotics & embodied AI learning.| | 227|stretchr/testify !2025-03-28243184|A toolkit with common assertions and mocks that plays nicely with the standard library| | 228| yetone/openai-translator !2025-03-28242921 | Browser extension and cross-platform desktop application for translation based on ChatGPT API | | 229|frappe/erpnext !2025-03-282425211|Free and Open Source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)| | 230|songquanpeng/one-api !2025-03-282410034|OpenAI 接口管理 & 分发系统,支持 Azure、Anthropic Claude、Google PaLM 2 & Gemini、智谱 ChatGLM、百度文心一言、讯飞星火认知、阿里通义千问、360 智脑以及腾讯混元,可用于二次分发管理 key,仅单可执行文件,已打包好 Docker 镜像,一键部署,开箱即用. OpenAI key management & redistribution system, using a single API for all LLMs, and features an English UI.| | 231| microsoft/JARVIS !2025-03-28240604 | a system to connect LLMs with ML community | | 232|google/flatbuffers !2025-03-28239965|FlatBuffers: Memory Efficient Serialization Library| | 233|microsoft/graphrag !2025-03-282398928|A modular graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system| | 234|rancher/rancher !2025-03-28239675|Complete container management platform| | 235|bazelbuild/bazel !2025-03-282384618|a fast, scalable, multi-language and extensible build system| | 236|modularml/mojo !2025-03-28238236 |The Mojo Programming Language| | 237|danny-avila/LibreChat !2025-03-282378753|Enhanced ChatGPT Clone: Features OpenAI, GPT-4 Vision, Bing, Anthropic, OpenRouter, Google Gemini, AI model switching, message search, langchain, DALL-E-3, ChatGPT Plugins, OpenAI Functions, Secure Multi-User System, Presets, completely open-source for self-hosting. More features in development| |!green-up-arrow.svg 238|🔥🔥🔥Shubhamsaboo/awesome-llm-apps !2025-03-28237391211|Collection of awesome LLM apps with RAG using OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and opensource models.| |!red-down-arrow 239|microsoft/semantic-kernel !2025-03-282373611|Integrate cutting-edge LLM technology quickly and easily into your apps| |!red-down-arrow 240|TheAlgorithms/Rust !2025-03-28236995|All Algorithms implemented in Rust| | 241|stanford-oval/storm !2025-03-28236326|An LLM-powered knowledge curation system that researches a topic and generates a full-length report with citations.| | 242|openai/gpt-2 !2025-03-28232483|Code for the paper "Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners"| | 243|labring/FastGPT !2025-03-282319445|A platform that uses the OpenAI API to quickly build an AI knowledge base, supporting many-to-many relationships.| | 244|pathwaycom/llm-app !2025-03-2822928-10|Ready-to-run cloud templates for RAG, AI pipelines, and enterprise search with live data. 🐳Docker-friendly.⚡Always in sync with Sharepoint, Google Drive, S3, Kafka, PostgreSQL, real-time data APIs, and more.| | 245|warpdotdev/Warp !2025-03-282286825|Warp is a modern, Rust-based terminal with AI built in so you and your team can build great software, faster.| | 246|🔥agno-agi/agno !2025-03-2822833298|Agno is a lightweight library for building Multimodal Agents. It exposes LLMs as a unified API and gives them superpowers like memory, knowledge, tools and reasoning.| | 247|qdrant/qdrant !2025-03-282275214 |Qdrant - Vector Database for the next generation of AI applications. Also available in the cloud https://cloud.qdrant.io/| | 248|ashishpatel26/500-AI-Machine-learning-Deep-learning-Computer-vision-NLP-Projects-with-code !2025-03-282271815|500 AI Machine learning Deep learning Computer vision NLP Projects with code| | 249|stanfordnlp/dspy !2025-03-282268321|Stanford DSPy: The framework for programming—not prompting—foundation models| | 250|PaddlePaddle/Paddle !2025-03-28226246|PArallel Distributed Deep LEarning: Machine Learning Framework from Industrial Practice (『飞桨』核心框架,深度学习&机器学习高性能单机、分布式训练和跨平台部署)| | 251|zulip/zulip !2025-03-28225464|Zulip server and web application. Open-source team chat that helps teams stay productive and focused.| | 252|Hannibal046/Awesome-LLM !2025-03-282240721|Awesome-LLM: a curated list of Large Language Model| | 253|facefusion/facefusion !2025-03-282218812|Next generation face swapper and enhancer| | 254|Mozilla-Ocho/llamafile !2025-03-28220624|Distribute and run LLMs with a single file.| | 255|yuliskov/SmartTube !2025-03-282201614|SmartTube - an advanced player for set-top boxes and tvs running Android OS| | 256|haotian-liu/LLaVA !2025-03-282201316 |Large Language-and-Vision Assistant built towards multimodal GPT-4 level capabilities.| | 257|ashishps1/awesome-system-design-resources !2025-03-282189367|This repository contains System Design resources which are useful while preparing for interviews and learning Distributed Systems| | 258|Cinnamon/kotaemon !2025-03-28218248|An open-source RAG-based tool for chatting with your documents.| | 259|CodePhiliaX/Chat2DB !2025-03-282179757|🔥🔥🔥AI-driven database tool and SQL client, The hottest GUI client, supporting MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, DB2, SQL Server, DB2, SQLite, H2, ClickHouse, and more.| | 260|blakeblackshear/frigate !2025-03-282177113|NVR with realtime local object detection for IP cameras| | 261|facebookresearch/audiocraft !2025-03-28217111|Audiocraft is a library for audio processing and generation with deep learning. It features the state-of-the-art EnCodec audio compressor / tokenizer, along with MusicGen, a simple and controllable music generation LM with textual and melodic conditioning.| | 262|karpathy/minGPT !2025-03-28216567|A minimal PyTorch re-implementation of the OpenAI GPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer) training| | 263|grpc/grpc-go !2025-03-282159510|The Go language implementation of gRPC. HTTP/2 based RPC| | 264|HumanSignal/label-studio !2025-03-282137618|Label Studio is a multi-type data labeling and annotation tool with standardized output format| | 265|yoheinakajima/babyagi !2025-03-28212764 |uses OpenAI and Pinecone APIs to create, prioritize, and execute tasks, This is a pared-down version of the original Task-Driven Autonomous Agent| | 266|deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-Coder !2025-03-282118210|DeepSeek Coder: Let the Code Write Itself| | 267|BuilderIO/gpt-crawler !2025-03-282118010|Crawl a site to generate knowledge files to create your own custom GPT from a URL| | 268| openai/chatgpt-retrieval-plugin !2025-03-2821152-1 | Plugins are chat extensions designed specifically for language models like ChatGPT, enabling them to access up-to-date information, run computations, or interact with third-party services in response to a user's request.| | 269|microsoft/OmniParser !2025-03-282113123|A simple screen parsing tool towards pure vision based GUI agent| | 270|black-forest-labs/flux !2025-03-282107219|Official inference repo for FLUX.1 models| | 271|ItzCrazyKns/Perplexica !2025-03-282099154|Perplexica is an AI-powered search engine. It is an Open source alternative to Perplexity AI| | 272|microsoft/unilm !2025-03-28209876|Large-scale Self-supervised Pre-training Across Tasks, Languages, and Modalities| | 273|Sanster/lama-cleaner !2025-03-282077614|Image inpainting tool powered by SOTA AI Model. Remove any unwanted object, defect, people from your pictures or erase and replace(powered by stable diffusion) any thing on your pictures.| | 274|assafelovic/gpt-researcher !2025-03-282057222|GPT based autonomous agent that does online comprehensive research on any given topic| | 275|PromtEngineer/localGPT !2025-03-28204230 |Chat with your documents on your local device using GPT models. No data leaves your device and 100% private.| | 276|elastic/kibana !2025-03-28203482|Your window into the Elastic Stack| | 277|fishaudio/fish-speech !2025-03-282033222|Brand new TTS solution| | 278|mlc-ai/mlc-llm !2025-03-282028110 |Enable everyone to develop, optimize and deploy AI models natively on everyone's devices.| | 279|deepset-ai/haystack !2025-03-282005320|🔍 Haystack is an open source NLP framework to interact with your data using Transformer models and LLMs (GPT-4, ChatGPT and alike). Haystack offers production-ready tools to quickly build complex question answering, semantic search, text generation applications, and more.| | 280|tree-sitter/tree-sitter !2025-03-28200487|An incremental parsing system for programming tools| | 281|Anjok07/ultimatevocalremovergui !2025-03-281999811|GUI for a Vocal Remover that uses Deep Neural Networks.| | 282|guidance-ai/guidance !2025-03-28199622|A guidance language for controlling large language models.| | 283|ml-explore/mlx !2025-03-28199619|MLX: An array framework for Apple silicon| | 284|mlflow/mlflow !2025-03-281995314|Open source platform for the machine learning lifecycle| | 285|ml-tooling/best-of-ml-python !2025-03-28198631|🏆 A ranked list of awesome machine learning Python libraries. Updated weekly.| | 286|BerriAI/litellm !2025-03-281981862|Call all LLM APIs using the OpenAI format. Use Bedrock, Azure, OpenAI, Cohere, Anthropic, Ollama, Sagemaker, HuggingFace, Replicate (100+ LLMs)| | 287|LazyVim/LazyVim !2025-03-281981320|Neovim config for the lazy| | 288|wez/wezterm !2025-03-281976018|A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer written by @wez and implemented in Rust| | 289|valkey-io/valkey !2025-03-281970416|A flexible distributed key-value datastore that supports both caching and beyond caching workloads.| | 290|LiLittleCat/awesome-free-chatgpt !2025-03-28196185|🆓免费的 ChatGPT 镜像网站列表,持续更新。List of free ChatGPT mirror sites, continuously updated.| | 291|Byaidu/PDFMathTranslate !2025-03-281947645|PDF scientific paper translation with preserved formats - 基于 AI 完整保留排版的 PDF 文档全文双语翻译,支持 Google/DeepL/Ollama/OpenAI 等服务,提供 CLI/GUI/Docker| | 292|openai/swarm !2025-03-281947111|Educational framework exploring ergonomic, lightweight multi-agent orchestration. Managed by OpenAI Solution team.| | 293|HqWu-HITCS/Awesome-Chinese-LLM !2025-03-281921423|Organizing smaller, cost-effective, privately deployable open-source Chinese language models, including related datasets and tutorials| | 294|stitionai/devika !2025-03-28190903|Devika is an Agentic AI Software Engineer that can understand high-level human instructions, break them down into steps, research relevant information, and write code to achieve the given objective. Devika aims to be a competitive open-source alternative to Devin by Cognition AI.| | 295|OpenBMB/MiniCPM-o !2025-03-28190887|MiniCPM-o 2.6: A GPT-4o Level MLLM for Vision, Speech and Multimodal Live Streaming on Your Phone| | 296|samber/lo !2025-03-281904815|💥 A Lodash-style Go library based on Go 1.18+ Generics (map, filter, contains, find...)| | 297|chroma-core/chroma !2025-03-281895221 |the AI-native open-source embedding database| | 298|DarkFlippers/unleashed-firmware !2025-03-28189278|Flipper Zero Unleashed Firmware| | 299|brave/brave-browser !2025-03-281892710|Brave browser for Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, Windows.| | 300| tloen/alpaca-lora !2025-03-28188641 | Instruct-tune LLaMA on consumer hardware| | 301|VinciGit00/Scrapegraph-ai !2025-03-281884618|Python scraper based on AI| | 302|gitroomhq/postiz-app !2025-03-281879110|📨 Schedule social posts, measure them, exchange with other members and get a lot of help from AI 🚀| | 303|PrefectHQ/prefect !2025-03-281878715|Prefect is a workflow orchestration tool empowering developers to build, observe, and react to data pipelines| | 304|ymcui/Chinese-LLaMA-Alpaca !2025-03-28187723 |Chinese LLaMA & Alpaca LLMs| | 305|kenjihiranabe/The-Art-of-Linear-Algebra !2025-03-28187335|Graphic notes on Gilbert Strang's "Linear Algebra for Everyone"| | 306|joonspk-research/generativeagents !2025-03-28187288|Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior| | 307|renovatebot/renovate !2025-03-28186820|Universal dependency update tool that fits into your workflows.| | 308|gventuri/pandas-ai !2025-03-28186109 |Pandas AI is a Python library that integrates generative artificial intelligence capabilities into Pandas, making dataframes conversational| | 309|thingsboard/thingsboard !2025-03-28185184|Open-source IoT Platform - Device management, data collection, processing and visualization.| | 310|ente-io/ente !2025-03-28184722|Fully open source, End to End Encrypted alternative to Google Photos and Apple Photos| | 311|serengil/deepface !2025-03-281840113|A Lightweight Face Recognition and Facial Attribute Analysis (Age, Gender, Emotion and Race) Library for Python| | 312|Raphire/Win11Debloat !2025-03-281840132|A simple, easy to use PowerShell script to remove pre-installed apps from windows, disable telemetry, remove Bing from windows search as well as perform various other changes to declutter and improve your windows experience. This script works for both windows 10 and windows 11.| | 313|Avaiga/taipy !2025-03-28179235|Turns Data and AI algorithms into production-ready web applications in no time.| | 314|microsoft/qlib !2025-03-281784231|Qlib is an AI-oriented quantitative investment platform that aims to realize the potential, empower research, and create value using AI technologies in quantitative investment, from exploring ideas to implementing productions. Qlib supports diverse machine learning modeling paradigms. including supervised learning, market dynamics modeling, and RL.| | 315|CopilotKit/CopilotKit !2025-03-281778571|Build in-app AI chatbots 🤖, and AI-powered Textareas ✨, into react web apps.| | 316|QwenLM/Qwen-7B !2025-03-281766017|The official repo of Qwen-7B (通义千问-7B) chat & pretrained large language model proposed by Alibaba Cloud.| | 317|w-okada/voice-changer !2025-03-28176078 |リアルタイムボイスチェンジャー Realtime Voice Changer| | 318|rlabbe/Kalman-and-Bayesian-Filters-in-Python !2025-03-281756011|Kalman Filter book using Jupyter Notebook. Focuses on building intuition and experience, not formal proofs. Includes Kalman filters,extended Kalman filters, unscented Kalman filters, particle filters, and more. All exercises include solutions.| | 319|Mikubill/sd-webui-controlnet !2025-03-28174794 |WebUI extension for ControlNet| | 320|jingyaogong/minimind !2025-03-2817380116|「大模型」3小时完全从0训练26M的小参数GPT,个人显卡即可推理训练!| | 321|apify/crawlee !2025-03-28172696|Crawlee—A web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js to build reliable crawlers. In JavaScript and TypeScript. Extract data for AI, LLMs, RAG, or GPTs. Download HTML, PDF, JPG, PNG, and other files from websites. Works with Puppeteer, Playwright, Cheerio, JSDOM, and raw HTTP. Both headful and headless mode. With proxy rotation.| | 322|apple/ml-stable-diffusion !2025-03-28172395|Stable Diffusion with Core ML on Apple Silicon| | 323| transitive-bullshit/chatgpt-api !2025-03-28172095 | Node.js client for the official ChatGPT API. | | 324|teableio/teable !2025-03-281719222|✨ The Next Gen Airtable Alternative: No-Code Postgres| | 325| xx025/carrot !2025-03-28170900 | Free ChatGPT Site List | | 326|microsoft/LightGBM !2025-03-28170723|A fast, distributed, high-performance gradient boosting (GBT, GBDT, GBRT, GBM or MART) framework based on decision tree algorithms, used for ranking, classification and many other machine learning tasks.| | 327|VikParuchuri/surya !2025-03-28169827|Accurate line-level text detection and recognition (OCR) in any language| | 328|deepseek-ai/Janus !2025-03-281692825|Janus-Series: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation Models| | 329|ardalis/CleanArchitecture !2025-03-28168823|Clean Architecture Solution Template: A starting point for Clean Architecture with ASP.NET Core| | 330|neondatabase/neon !2025-03-28166466|Neon: Serverless Postgres. We separated storage and compute to offer autoscaling, code-like database branching, and scale to zero.| | 331|kestra-io/kestra !2025-03-281661313|⚡ Workflow Automation Platform. Orchestrate & Schedule code in any language, run anywhere, 500+ plugins. Alternative to Zapier, Rundeck, Camunda, Airflow...| | 332|Dao-AILab/flash-attention !2025-03-281659720|Fast and memory-efficient exact attention| | 333|RPCS3/rpcs3 !2025-03-281655712|PS3 emulator/debugger| | 334|meta-llama/llama-recipes !2025-03-28165486|Scripts for fine-tuning Llama2 with composable FSDP & PEFT methods to cover single/multi-node GPUs. Supports default & custom datasets for applications such as summarization & question answering. Supporting a number of candid inference solutions such as HF TGI, VLLM for local or cloud deployment.Demo apps to showcase Llama2 for WhatsApp & Messenger| | 335|emilwallner/Screenshot-to-code !2025-03-28165180|A neural network that transforms a design mock-up into a static website.| | 336|datawhalechina/llm-cookbook !2025-03-281650922|面向开发者的 LLM 入门教程,吴恩达大模型系列课程中文版| | 337|e2b-dev/awesome-ai-agents !2025-03-281643923|A list of AI autonomous agents| | 338|QwenLM/Qwen2.5 !2025-03-281641114|Qwen2.5 is the large language model series developed by Qwen team, Alibaba Cloud.| | 339|dair-ai/ML-YouTube-Courses !2025-03-28164114|📺 Discover the latest machine learning / AI courses on YouTube.| | 340|pybind/pybind11 !2025-03-28163620|Seamless operability between C++11 and Python| | 341|graphdeco-inria/gaussian-splatting !2025-03-281627116|Original reference implementation of "3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering"| | 342|meta-llama/codellama !2025-03-28162531|Inference code for CodeLlama models| | 343|TransformerOptimus/SuperAGI !2025-03-28161292 | SuperAGI - A dev-first open source autonomous AI agent framework. Enabling developers to build, manage & run useful autonomous agents quickly and reliably.| | 344|microsoft/onnxruntime !2025-03-28161169|ONNX Runtime: cross-platform, high-performance ML inferencing and training accelerator| | 345|IDEA-Research/Grounded-Segment-Anything !2025-03-281601411 |Marrying Grounding DINO with Segment Anything & Stable Diffusion & BLIP - Automatically Detect, Segment and Generate Anything with Image and Text Inputs| | 346|ddbourgin/numpy-ml !2025-03-28160054|Machine learning, in numpy| | 347|eosphoros-ai/DB-GPT !2025-03-281585225|Revolutionizing Database Interactions with Private LLM Technology| | 348|Stability-AI/StableLM !2025-03-28158310 |Stability AI Language Models| | 349|openai/evals !2025-03-28157935 |Evals is a framework for evaluating LLMs and LLM systems, and an open-source registry of benchmarks.| | 350|THUDM/ChatGLM2-6B !2025-03-28157500|ChatGLM2-6B: An Open Bilingual Chat LLM | | 351|sunner/ChatALL !2025-03-28156761 |Concurrently chat with ChatGPT, Bing Chat, Bard, Alpaca, Vincuna, Claude, ChatGLM, MOSS, iFlytek Spark, ERNIE and more, discover the best answers| | 352|abseil/abseil-cpp !2025-03-28156656|Abseil Common Libraries (C++)| | 353|NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules !2025-03-28156531|NVIDIA Linux open GPU kernel module source| | 354|letta-ai/letta !2025-03-281563718|Letta (formerly MemGPT) is a framework for creating LLM services with memory.| | 355|typescript-eslint/typescript-eslint !2025-03-28156211|✨ Monorepo for all the tooling which enables ESLint to support TypeScript| | 356|umijs/umi !2025-03-28156211|A framework in react community ✨| | 357|AI4Finance-Foundation/FinGPT !2025-03-281561215|Data-Centric FinGPT. Open-source for open finance! Revolutionize 🔥 We'll soon release the trained model.| | 358|amplication/amplication !2025-03-28156022|🔥🔥🔥 The Only Production-Ready AI-Powered Backend Code Generation| | 359|KindXiaoming/pykan !2025-03-28155477|Kolmogorov Arnold Networks| | 360|arc53/DocsGPT !2025-03-28154900|GPT-powered chat for documentation, chat with your documents| | 361|influxdata/telegraf !2025-03-28154502|Agent for collecting, processing, aggregating, and writing metrics, logs, and other arbitrary data.| | 362|microsoft/Bringing-Old-Photos-Back-to-Life !2025-03-28154084|Bringing Old Photo Back to Life (CVPR 2020 oral)| | 363|GaiZhenbiao/ChuanhuChatGPT !2025-03-2815394-2|GUI for ChatGPT API and many LLMs. Supports agents, file-based QA, GPT finetuning and query with web search. All with a neat UI.| | 364|Zeyi-Lin/HivisionIDPhotos !2025-03-281529710|⚡️HivisionIDPhotos: a lightweight and efficient AI ID photos tools. 一个轻量级的AI证件照制作算法。| | 365| mayooear/gpt4-pdf-chatbot-langchain !2025-03-281529518 | GPT4 & LangChain Chatbot for large PDF docs | | 366|1Panel-dev/MaxKB !2025-03-2815277148|? Based on LLM large language model knowledge base Q&A system. Ready to use out of the box, supports quick integration into third-party business systems. Officially produced by 1Panel| | 367|ai16z/eliza !2025-03-281526811|Conversational Agent for Twitter and Discord| | 368|apache/arrow !2025-03-28151684|Apache Arrow is a multi-language toolbox for accelerated data interchange and in-memory processing| | 369|princeton-nlp/SWE-agent !2025-03-281516119|SWE-agent: Agent Computer Interfaces Enable Software Engineering Language Models| | 370|mlc-ai/web-llm !2025-03-281509311 |Bringing large-language models and chat to web browsers. Everything runs inside the browser with no server support.| | 371|guillaumekln/faster-whisper !2025-03-281507117 |Faster Whisper transcription with CTranslate2| | 372|overleaf/overleaf !2025-03-28150316|A web-based collaborative LaTeX editor| | 373|triton-lang/triton !2025-03-28150169|Development repository for the Triton language and compiler| | 374|soxoj/maigret !2025-03-281500410|🕵️‍♂️ Collect a dossier on a person by username from thousands of sites| | 375|alibaba/lowcode-engine !2025-03-28149841|An enterprise-class low-code technology stack with scale-out design / 一套面向扩展设计的企业级低代码技术体系| | 376|espressif/esp-idf !2025-03-28148545|Espressif IoT Development Framework. Official development framework for Espressif SoCs.| | 377|pgvector/pgvector !2025-03-281484913|Open-source vector similarity search for Postgres| | 378|datawhalechina/leedl-tutorial !2025-03-28148246|《李宏毅深度学习教程》(李宏毅老师推荐👍),PDF下载地址:https://github.com/datawhalechina/leedl-tutorial/releases| | 379|xcanwin/KeepChatGPT !2025-03-28147972 |Using ChatGPT is more efficient and smoother, perfectly solving ChatGPT network errors. No longer do you need to frequently refresh the webpage, saving over 10 unnecessary steps| | 380|m-bain/whisperX !2025-03-281471313|WhisperX: Automatic Speech Recognition with Word-level Timestamps (& Diarization)| | 381|HumanAIGC/AnimateAnyone !2025-03-2814706-1|Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animation| |!green-up-arrow.svg 382|naklecha/llama3-from-scratch !2025-03-281469024|llama3 implementation one matrix multiplication at a time| |!red-down-arrow 383| fauxpilot/fauxpilot !2025-03-28146871 | An open-source GitHub Copilot server | | 384|LlamaFamily/Llama-Chinese !2025-03-28145111|Llama Chinese Community, the best Chinese Llama large model, fully open source and commercially available| | 385|BradyFU/Awesome-Multimodal-Large-Language-Models !2025-03-281450121|Latest Papers and Datasets on Multimodal Large Language Models| | 386|vanna-ai/vanna !2025-03-281449819|🤖 Chat with your SQL database 📊. Accurate Text-to-SQL Generation via LLMs using RAG 🔄.| | 387|bleedline/aimoneyhunter !2025-03-28144845|AI Side Hustle Money Mega Collection: Teaching You How to Utilize AI for Various Side Projects to Earn Extra Income.| | 388|stefan-jansen/machine-learning-for-trading !2025-03-28144629|Code for Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading, 2nd edition.| | 389|state-spaces/mamba !2025-03-28144139|Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces| | 390|vercel/ai-chatbot !2025-03-281434614|A full-featured, hackable Next.js AI chatbot built by Vercel| | 391|steven-tey/novel !2025-03-281428410|Notion-style WYSIWYG editor with AI-powered autocompletions| | 392|unifyai/ivy !2025-03-281409348|Unified AI| | 393|chidiwilliams/buzz !2025-03-281402411 |Buzz transcribes and translates audio offline on your personal computer. Powered by OpenAI's Whisper.| | 394|lukas-blecher/LaTeX-OCR !2025-03-28139769|pix2tex: Using a ViT to convert images of equations into LaTeX code.| | 395|openai/tiktoken !2025-03-28139599|tiktoken is a fast BPE tokeniser for use with OpenAI's models.| | 396|nocobase/nocobase !2025-03-281391522|NocoBase is a scalability-first, open-source no-code/low-code platform for building business applications and enterprise solutions.| | 397|neonbjb/tortoise-tts !2025-03-28139010 |A multi-voice TTS system trained with an emphasis on quality| | 398|yamadashy/repomix !2025-03-281382036|📦 Repomix (formerly Repopack) is a powerful tool that packs your entire repository into a single, AI-friendly file. Perfect for when you need to feed your codebase to Large Language Models (LLMs) or other AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini.| | 399|adobe/react-spectrum !2025-03-28136766|A collection of libraries and tools that help you build adaptive, accessible, and robust user experiences.| | 400|THUDM/ChatGLM3 !2025-03-28136684|ChatGLM3 series: Open Bilingual Chat LLMs | | 401|NVIDIA/NeMo !2025-03-28134837|A scalable generative AI framework built for researchers and developers working on Large Language Models, Multimodal, and Speech AI (Automatic Speech Recognition and Text-to-Speech)| | 402|BlinkDL/RWKV-LM !2025-03-28134346 |RWKV is an RNN with transformer-level LLM performance. It can be directly trained like a GPT (parallelizable). So it combines the best of RNN and transformer - great performance, fast inference, saves VRAM, fast training, "infinite" ctx_len, and free sentence embedding.| | 403| fuergaosi233/wechat-chatgpt !2025-03-28133330 | Use ChatGPT On Wechat via wechaty | | 404|udecode/plate !2025-03-28133325|A rich-text editor powered by AI| | 405|xenova/transformers.js !2025-03-281331219|State-of-the-art Machine Learning for the web. Run 🤗 Transformers directly in your browser, with no need for a server!| | 406|stas00/ml-engineering !2025-03-281325615|Machine Learning Engineering Guides and Tools| | 407| wong2/chatgpt-google-extension !2025-03-2813241-1 | A browser extension that enhances search engines with ChatGPT, this repos will not be updated from 2023-02-20| | 408|mrdbourke/pytorch-deep-learning !2025-03-281317520|Materials for the Learn PyTorch for Deep Learning: Zero to Mastery course.| | 409|Koenkk/zigbee2mqtt !2025-03-28131544|Zigbee 🐝 to MQTT bridge 🌉, get rid of your proprietary Zigbee bridges 🔨| | 410|vercel-labs/ai !2025-03-281298528|Build AI-powered applications with React, Svelte, and Vue| | 411|netease-youdao/QAnything !2025-03-28129318|Question and Answer based on Anything.| | 412|huggingface/trl !2025-03-281289622|Train transformer language models with reinforcement learning.| | 413|microsoft/BitNet !2025-03-28128503|Official inference framework for 1-bit LLMs| | 414|mediar-ai/screenpipe !2025-03-281283915|24/7 local AI screen & mic recording. Build AI apps that have the full context. Works with Ollama. Alternative to Rewind.ai. Open. Secure. You own your data. Rust.| | 415|Skyvern-AI/skyvern !2025-03-281277612|Automate browser-based workflows with LLMs and Computer Vision| | 416|pytube/pytube !2025-03-28126591|A lightweight, dependency-free Python library (and command-line utility) for downloading YouTube Videos.| | 417|official-stockfish/Stockfish !2025-03-28126574|UCI chess engine| | 418|sgl-project/sglang !2025-03-281260143|SGLang is a structured generation language designed for large language models (LLMs). It makes your interaction with LLMs faster and more controllable.| | 419|plasma-umass/scalene !2025-03-28125535|Scalene: a high-performance, high-precision CPU, GPU, and memory profiler for Python with AI-powered optimization proposals| | 420|danswer-ai/danswer !2025-03-28125503|Ask Questions in natural language and get Answers backed by private sources. Connects to tools like Slack, GitHub, Confluence, etc.| | 421|OpenTalker/SadTalker !2025-03-28125226|[CVPR 2023] SadTalker:Learning Realistic 3D Motion Coefficients for Stylized Audio-Driven Single Image Talking Face Animation| | 422|facebookresearch/AnimatedDrawings !2025-03-28123693 |Code to accompany "A Method for Animating Children's Drawings of the Human Figure"| | 423|activepieces/activepieces !2025-03-28123609|Your friendliest open source all-in-one automation tool ✨ Workflow automation tool 100+ integration / Enterprise automation tool / Zapier Alternative| | 424|ggerganov/ggml !2025-03-28121992 |Tensor library for machine learning| | 425|bytebase/bytebase !2025-03-28121694|World's most advanced database DevOps and CI/CD for Developer, DBA and Platform Engineering teams. The GitLab/GitHub for database DevOps.| | 426| willwulfken/MidJourney-Styles-and-Keywords-Reference !2025-03-28120971 | A reference containing Styles and Keywords that you can use with MidJourney AI| | 427|Huanshere/VideoLingo !2025-03-281207013|Netflix-level subtitle cutting, translation, alignment, and even dubbing - one-click fully automated AI video subtitle team | | 428|OpenLMLab/MOSS !2025-03-28120330 |An open-source tool-augmented conversational language model from Fudan University| | 429|llmware-ai/llmware !2025-03-281200727|Providing enterprise-grade LLM-based development framework, tools, and fine-tuned models.| | 430|PKU-YuanGroup/Open-Sora-Plan !2025-03-28119362|This project aim to reproduce Sora (Open AI T2V model), but we only have limited resource. We deeply wish the all open source community can contribute to this project.| | 431|ShishirPatil/gorilla !2025-03-28119332 |Gorilla: An API store for LLMs| | 432|NVIDIA/Megatron-LM !2025-03-281192716|Ongoing research training transformer models at scale| | 433|illacloud/illa-builder !2025-03-28119192|Create AI-Driven Apps like Assembling Blocks| | 434|marimo-team/marimo !2025-03-281191521|A reactive notebook for Python — run reproducible experiments, execute as a script, deploy as an app, and version with git.| | 435|smol-ai/developer !2025-03-28119111 | With 100k context windows on the way, it's now feasible for every dev to have their own smol developer| | 436|Lightning-AI/litgpt !2025-03-28118878|Pretrain, finetune, deploy 20+ LLMs on your own data. Uses state-of-the-art techniques: flash attention, FSDP, 4-bit, LoRA, and more.| | 437|openai/shap-e !2025-03-28118474 |Generate 3D objects conditioned on text or images| | 438|eugeneyan/open-llms !2025-03-28118451 |A list of open LLMs available for commercial use.| | 439|andrewyng/aisuite !2025-03-28118124|Simple, unified interface to multiple Generative AI providers| | 440|hajimehoshi/ebiten !2025-03-28117816|Ebitengine - A dead simple 2D game engine for Go| | 441|kgrzybek/modular-monolith-with-ddd !2025-03-28117493|Full Modular Monolith application with Domain-Driven Design approach.| | 442|h2oai/h2ogpt !2025-03-2811736-1 |Come join the movement to make the world's best open source GPT led by H2O.ai - 100% private chat and document search, no data leaks, Apache 2.0| | 443|owainlewis/awesome-artificial-intelligence !2025-03-28117332|A curated list of Artificial Intelligence (AI) courses, books, video lectures and papers.| | 444|DataTalksClub/mlops-zoomcamp !2025-03-28116643|Free MLOps course from DataTalks.Club| | 445|Rudrabha/Wav2Lip !2025-03-281163410|This repository contains the codes of "A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In the Wild", published at ACM Multimedia 2020.| | 446|aishwaryanr/awesome-generative-ai-guide !2025-03-281152810|A one stop repository for generative AI research updates, interview resources, notebooks and much more!| | 447|karpathy/micrograd !2025-03-28115146|A tiny scalar-valued autograd engine and a neural net library on top of it with PyTorch-like API| | 448|InstantID/InstantID !2025-03-28115111|InstantID : Zero-shot Identity-Preserving Generation in Seconds 🔥| | 449|facebookresearch/seamlesscommunication !2025-03-28114434|Foundational Models for State-of-the-Art Speech and Text Translation| | 450|anthropics/anthropic-cookbook !2025-03-281140112|A collection of notebooks/recipes showcasing some fun and effective ways of using Claude.| | 451|mastra-ai/mastra !2025-03-281139240|the TypeScript AI agent framework| | 452|NVIDIA/TensorRT !2025-03-28113864|NVIDIA® TensorRT™ is an SDK for high-performance deep learning inference on NVIDIA GPUs. This repository contains the open source components of TensorRT.| | 453|plandex-ai/plandex !2025-03-28113645|An AI coding engine for complex tasks| | 454|RUCAIBox/LLMSurvey !2025-03-28112735 |A collection of papers and resources related to Large Language Models.| | 455|kubeshark/kubeshark !2025-03-28112711|The API traffic analyzer for Kubernetes providing real-time K8s protocol-level visibility, capturing and monitoring all traffic and payloads going in, out and across containers, pods, nodes and clusters. Inspired by Wireshark, purposely built for Kubernetes| | 456|electric-sql/pglite !2025-03-28112617|Lightweight Postgres packaged as WASM into a TypeScript library for the browser, Node.js, Bun and Deno from https://electric-sql.com| | 457|lightaime/camel !2025-03-281124441 |🐫 CAMEL: Communicative Agents for “Mind” Exploration of Large Scale Language Model Society| | 458|huggingface/lerobot !2025-03-281120184|🤗 LeRobot: State-of-the-art Machine Learning for Real-World Robotics in Pytorch| | 459|normal-computing/outlines !2025-03-28111657|Generative Model Programming| | 460|libretro/RetroArch !2025-03-28110701|Cross-platform, sophisticated frontend for the libretro API. Licensed GPLv3.| | 461|THUDM/CogVideo !2025-03-28110599|Text-to-video generation: CogVideoX (2024) and CogVideo (ICLR 2023)| | 462|bentoml/OpenLLM !2025-03-28110495|An open platform for operating large language models (LLMs) in production. Fine-tune, serve, deploy, and monitor any LLMs with ease.| | 463|vosen/ZLUDA !2025-03-28110429|CUDA on AMD GPUs| | 464|dair-ai/ML-Papers-of-the-Week !2025-03-28110304 |🔥Highlighting the top ML papers every week.| | 465|WordPress/gutenberg !2025-03-28110212|The Block Editor project for WordPress and beyond. Plugin is available from the official repository.| | 466|microsoft/data-formulator !2025-03-281099827|🪄 Create rich visualizations with AI| | 467|LibreTranslate/LibreTranslate !2025-03-28109887|Free and Open Source Machine Translation API. Self-hosted, offline capable and easy to setup.| | 468|block/goose !2025-03-281097737|an open-source, extensible AI agent that goes beyond code suggestions - install, execute, edit, and test with any LLM| | 469|getumbrel/llama-gpt !2025-03-28109553|A self-hosted, offline, ChatGPT-like chatbot. Powered by Llama 2. 100% private, with no data leaving your device.| | 470|HigherOrderCO/HVM !2025-03-28109182|A massively parallel, optimal functional runtime in Rust| | 471|databrickslabs/dolly !2025-03-2810812-3 | A large language model trained on the Databricks Machine Learning Platform| | 472|srush/GPU-Puzzles !2025-03-28108014|Solve puzzles. Learn CUDA.| | 473|Z3Prover/z3 !2025-03-28107952|The Z3 Theorem Prover| | 474|UFund-Me/Qbot !2025-03-281079313 |Qbot is an AI-oriented quantitative investment platform, which aims to realize the potential, empower AI technologies in quantitative investment| | 475|langchain-ai/langgraph !2025-03-281077336|| | 476|lz4/lz4 !2025-03-28107647|Extremely Fast Compression algorithm| | 477|magic-research/magic-animate !2025-03-28107160|MagicAnimate: Temporally Consistent Human Image Animation using Diffusion Model| | 478|PaperMC/Paper !2025-03-281071410|The most widely used, high performance Minecraft server that aims to fix gameplay and mechanics inconsistencies| | 479|getomni-ai/zerox !2025-03-281071015|Zero shot pdf OCR with gpt-4o-mini| |!green-up-arrow.svg 480|🔥NirDiamant/GenAIAgents !2025-03-2810693318|This repository provides tutorials and implementations for various Generative AI Agent techniques, from basic to advanced. It serves as a comprehensive guide for building intelligent, interactive AI systems.| |!red-down-arrow 481|Unstructured-IO/unstructured !2025-03-28106889|Open source libraries and APIs to build custom preprocessing pipelines for labeling, training, or production machine learning pipelines.| | 482|apache/thrift !2025-03-28106610|Apache Thrift| | 483| TheR1D/shellgpt !2025-03-28106097 | A command-line productivity tool powered by ChatGPT, will help you accomplish your tasks faster and more efficiently | | 484|TheRamU/Fay !2025-03-281060312 |Fay is a complete open source project that includes Fay controller and numeral models, which can be used in different applications such as virtual hosts, live promotion, numeral human interaction and so on| | 485|zyronon/douyin !2025-03-28105566|Vue3 + Pinia + Vite5 仿抖音,Vue 在移动端的最佳实践 . Imitate TikTok ,Vue Best practices on Mobile| | 486|THU-MIG/yolov10 !2025-03-28105485|YOLOv10: Real-Time End-to-End Object Detection| | 487|idootop/mi-gpt !2025-03-281052522|? Transform XiaoAi speaker into a personal voice assistant with ChatGPT and DouBao integration.| | 488|SakanaAI/AI-Scientist !2025-03-281051310|The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery 🧑‍🔬| | 489|szimek/sharedrop !2025-03-28105101|Easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC - inspired by Apple AirDrop| | 490|salesforce/LAVIS !2025-03-28103942 |LAVIS - A One-stop Library for Language-Vision Intelligence| | 491|aws/amazon-sagemaker-examples !2025-03-28103654|Example 📓 Jupyter notebooks that demonstrate how to build, train, and deploy machine learning models using 🧠 Amazon SageMaker.| | 492|artidoro/qlora !2025-03-28103402 |QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs| | 493|lllyasviel/stable-diffusion-webui-forge !2025-03-281029314| a platform on top of Stable Diffusion WebUI (based on Gradio) to make development easier, optimize resource management, and speed up inference| | 494|NielsRogge/Transformers-Tutorials !2025-03-28102487|This repository contains demos I made with the Transformers library by HuggingFace.| | 495|kedro-org/kedro !2025-03-28102371|Kedro is a toolbox for production-ready data science. It uses software engineering best practices to help you create data engineering and data science pipelines that are reproducible, maintainable, and modular.| | 496| chathub-dev/chathub !2025-03-28102301 | All-in-one chatbot client | | 497|microsoft/promptflow !2025-03-28101612|Build high-quality LLM apps - from prototyping, testing to production deployment and monitoring.| | 498|mistralai/mistral-src !2025-03-28101372|Reference implementation of Mistral AI 7B v0.1 model.| | 499|burn-rs/burn !2025-03-28101183|Burn - A Flexible and Comprehensive Deep Learning Framework in Rust| | 500|AIGC-Audio/AudioGPT !2025-03-28101150 |AudioGPT: Understanding and Generating Speech, Music, Sound, and Talking Head| | 501|facebookresearch/dinov2 !2025-03-281011210 |PyTorch code and models for the DINOv2 self-supervised learning method.| | 502|RockChinQ/LangBot !2025-03-281008455|😎丰富生态、🧩支持扩展、🦄多模态 - 大模型原生即时通信机器人平台 🤖 | | 503|78/xiaozhi-esp32 !2025-03-281008180|Build your own AI friend| | 504|cumulo-autumn/StreamDiffusion !2025-03-28100761|StreamDiffusion: A Pipeline-Level Solution for Real-Time Interactive Generation| | 505|DataTalksClub/machine-learning-zoomcamp !2025-03-28100664|The code from the Machine Learning Bookcamp book and a free course based on the book| | 506|nerfstudio-project/nerfstudio !2025-03-28100343|A collaboration friendly studio for NeRFs| | 507|cupy/cupy !2025-03-28100344|NumPy & SciPy for GPU| | 508|NVIDIA/TensorRT-LLM !2025-03-281000823|TensorRT-LLM provides users with an easy-to-use Python API to define Large Language Models (LLMs) and build TensorRT engines that contain state-of-the-art optimizations to perform inference efficiently on NVIDIA GPUs. TensorRT-LLM also contains components to create Python and C++ runtimes that execute those TensorRT engines.| | 509|wasp-lang/open-saas !2025-03-2899665|A free, open-source SaaS app starter for React & Node.js with superpowers. Production-ready. Community-driven.| | 510|huggingface/text-generation-inference !2025-03-2899383|Large Language Model Text Generation Inference| | 511|jxnl/instructor !2025-03-2899224|structured outputs for llms| | 512|GoogleCloudPlatform/generative-ai !2025-03-2899086|Sample code and notebooks for Generative AI on Google Cloud| | 513|manticoresoftware/manticoresearch !2025-03-2898799|Easy to use open source fast database for search | | 514|langfuse/langfuse !2025-03-28985134|🪢 Open source LLM engineering platform. Observability, metrics, evals, prompt management, testing, prompt playground, datasets, LLM evaluations -- 🍊YC W23 🤖 integrate via Typescript, Python / Decorators, OpenAI, Langchain, LlamaIndex, Litellm, Instructor, Mistral, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Vertex| | 515|keephq/keep !2025-03-2897949|The open-source alert management and AIOps platform| | 516|sashabaranov/go-openai !2025-03-2897843|OpenAI ChatGPT, GPT-3, GPT-4, DALL·E, Whisper API wrapper for Go| | 517|autowarefoundation/autoware !2025-03-2897766|Autoware - the world's leading open-source software project for autonomous driving| | 518|anthropics/courses !2025-03-2897269|Anthropic's educational courses| | 519|popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop !2025-03-2896853|Popcorn Time is a multi-platform, free software BitTorrent client that includes an integrated media player ( Windows / Mac / Linux ) A Butter-Project Fork| | 520|getmaxun/maxun !2025-03-28968515|🔥 Open-source no-code web data extraction platform. Turn websites to APIs and spreadsheets with no-code robots in minutes! [In Beta]| | 521|wandb/wandb !2025-03-2896763|🔥 A tool for visualizing and tracking your machine learning experiments. This repo contains the CLI and Python API.| | 522|karpathy/minbpe !2025-03-2895353|Minimal, clean, code for the Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) algorithm commonly used in LLM tokenization.| | 523|bigscience-workshop/petals !2025-03-2895142|🌸 Run large language models at home, BitTorrent-style. Fine-tuning and inference up to 10x faster than offloading| | 524|OthersideAI/self-operating-computer !2025-03-2894931|A framework to enable multimodal models to operate a computer.| | 525|mshumer/gpt-prompt-engineer !2025-03-2894911|| | 526| BloopAI/bloop !2025-03-2894710 | A fast code search engine written in Rust| | 527|BlinkDL/ChatRWKV !2025-03-289467-1 |ChatRWKV is like ChatGPT but powered by RWKV (100% RNN) language model, and open source.| | 528|timlrx/tailwind-nextjs-starter-blog !2025-03-2894677|This is a Next.js, Tailwind CSS blogging starter template. Comes out of the box configured with the latest technologies to make technical writing a breeze. Easily configurable and customizable. Perfect as a replacement to existing Jekyll and Hugo individual blogs.| | 529|google/benchmark !2025-03-2893634|A microbenchmark support library| | 530|facebookresearch/nougat !2025-03-2893603|Implementation of Nougat Neural Optical Understanding for Academic Documents| | 531|modelscope/facechain !2025-03-2893536|FaceChain is a deep-learning toolchain for generating your Digital-Twin.| | 532|DrewThomasson/ebook2audiobook !2025-03-2893388|Convert ebooks to audiobooks with chapters and metadata using dynamic AI models and voice cloning. Supports 1,107+ languages!| | 533|RayTracing/raytracing.github.io !2025-03-2893035|Main Web Site (Online Books)| | 534|QwenLM/Qwen2.5-VL !2025-03-28930249|Qwen2.5-VL is the multimodal large language model series developed by Qwen team, Alibaba Cloud.| | 535|WongKinYiu/yolov9 !2025-03-2892201|Implementation of paper - YOLOv9: Learning What You Want to Learn Using Programmable Gradient Information| | 536|alibaba-damo-academy/FunASR !2025-03-28920222|A Fundamental End-to-End Speech Recognition Toolkit and Open Source SOTA Pretrained Models.| | 537|Visualize-ML/Book4Power-of-Matrix !2025-03-2891931|Book4 'Power of Matrix' | | 538|dice2o/BingGPT !2025-03-289185-1 |Desktop application of new Bing's AI-powered chat (Windows, macOS and Linux)| | 539|browserbase/stagehand !2025-03-28917621|An AI web browsing framework focused on simplicity and extensibility.| | 540|FlagOpen/FlagEmbedding !2025-03-28914111|Dense Retrieval and Retrieval-augmented LLMs| | 541|Const-me/Whisper !2025-03-2890979|High-performance GPGPU inference of OpenAI's Whisper automatic speech recognition (ASR) model| | 542|lucidrains/denoising-diffusion-pytorch !2025-03-2890942|Implementation of Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model in Pytorch| | 543|Chainlit/chainlit !2025-03-28904422|Build Conversational AI in minutes ⚡️| | 544|togethercomputer/OpenChatKit !2025-03-2890160 |OpenChatKit provides a powerful, open-source base to create both specialized and general purpose chatbots for various applications| | 545|Stability-AI/StableStudio !2025-03-2889631 |Community interface for generative AI| | 546|voicepaw/so-vits-svc-fork !2025-03-2889482 |so-vits-svc fork with realtime support, improved interface and more features.| | 547|pymc-devs/pymc !2025-03-2889413|Bayesian Modeling and Probabilistic Programming in Python| | 548|espnet/espnet !2025-03-2889302|End-to-End Speech Processing Toolkit| | 549|kedacore/keda !2025-03-2888991|KEDA is a Kubernetes-based Event Driven Autoscaling component. It provides event driven scale for any container running in Kubernetes| | 550|open-mmlab/Amphion !2025-03-28886911|Amphion (/æmˈfaɪən/) is a toolkit for Audio, Music, and Speech Generation. Its purpose is to support reproducible research and help junior researchers and engineers get started in the field of audio, music, and speech generation research and development.| | 551|gorse-io/gorse !2025-03-2888451|Gorse open source recommender system engine| | 552|adams549659584/go-proxy-bingai !2025-03-288768-1 |A Microsoft New Bing demo site built with Vue3 and Go, providing a consistent UI experience, supporting ChatGPT prompts, and accessible within China| | 553|open-mmlab/mmsegmentation !2025-03-2887513|OpenMMLab Semantic Segmentation Toolbox and Benchmark.| | 554|bytedance/monolith !2025-03-2887223|ByteDance's Recommendation System| | 555|LouisShark/chatgptsystemprompt !2025-03-2887216|store all agent's system prompt| | 556|brexhq/prompt-engineering !2025-03-2887080 |Tips and tricks for working with Large Language Models like OpenAI's GPT-4.| | 557|erincatto/box2d !2025-03-2886841|Box2D is a 2D physics engine for games| | 558|🔥microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners !2025-03-288669323|10 Lessons to Get Started Building AI Agents| | 559|nashsu/FreeAskInternet !2025-03-2886102|FreeAskInternet is a completely free, private and locally running search aggregator & answer generate using LLM, without GPU needed. The user can ask a question and the system will make a multi engine search and combine the search result to the ChatGPT3.5 LLM and generate the answer based on search results.| | 560|goldmansachs/gs-quant !2025-03-2885981|Python toolkit for quantitative finance| | 561|srbhr/Resume-Matcher !2025-03-2885800|Open Source Free ATS Tool to compare Resumes with Job Descriptions and create a score to rank them.| | 562|facebookresearch/ImageBind !2025-03-2885681 |ImageBind One Embedding Space to Bind Them All| | 563|ashawkey/stable-dreamfusion !2025-03-2885481 |A pytorch implementation of text-to-3D dreamfusion, powered by stable diffusion.| | 564|meetecho/janus-gateway !2025-03-2885232|Janus WebRTC Server| | 565|google/magika !2025-03-2885003|Detect file content types with deep learning| | 566|huggingface/chat-ui !2025-03-2884871 |Open source codebase powering the HuggingChat app| | 567|EleutherAI/lm-evaluation-harness !2025-03-28843012|A framework for few-shot evaluation of autoregressive language models.| | 568|jina-ai/reader !2025-03-2884089|Convert any URL to an LLM-friendly input with a simple prefix https://r.jina.ai/| | 569|microsoft/TypeChat !2025-03-288406-1|TypeChat is a library that makes it easy to build natural language interfaces using types.| | 570|thuml/Time-Series-Library !2025-03-28839715|A Library for Advanced Deep Time Series Models.| | 571|OptimalScale/LMFlow !2025-03-2883882|An Extensible Toolkit for Finetuning and Inference of Large Foundation Models. Large Model for All.| | 572|baptisteArno/typebot.io !2025-03-2883845|💬 Typebot is a powerful chatbot builder that you can self-host.| | 573|jzhang38/TinyLlama !2025-03-2883504|The TinyLlama project is an open endeavor to pretrain a 1.1B Llama model on 3 trillion tokens.| | 574|fishaudio/Bert-VITS2 !2025-03-2883472|vits2 backbone with multilingual-bert| | 575|OpenBMB/XAgent !2025-03-2882683|An Autonomous LLM Agent for Complex Task Solving| | 576|Acly/krita-ai-diffusion !2025-03-2882387|Streamlined interface for generating images with AI in Krita. Inpaint and outpaint with optional text prompt, no tweaking required.| | 577|jasonppy/VoiceCraft !2025-03-2882151|Zero-Shot Speech Editing and Text-to-Speech in the Wild| | 578|SJTU-IPADS/PowerInfer !2025-03-2881693|High-speed Large Language Model Serving on PCs with Consumer-grade GPUs| | 579|modelscope/DiffSynth-Studio !2025-03-28814713|Enjoy the magic of Diffusion models!| | 580|o3de/o3de !2025-03-2881443|Open 3D Engine (O3DE) is an Apache 2.0-licensed multi-platform 3D engine that enables developers and content creators to build AAA games, cinema-quality 3D worlds, and high-fidelity simulations without any fees or commercial obligations.| | 581|zmh-program/chatnio !2025-03-2881325|🚀 Next Generation AI One-Stop Internationalization Solution. 🚀 下一代 AI 一站式 B/C 端解决方案,支持 OpenAI,Midjourney,Claude,讯飞星火,Stable Diffusion,DALL·E,ChatGLM,通义千问,腾讯混元,360 智脑,百川 AI,火山方舟,新必应,Gemini,Moonshot 等模型,支持对话分享,自定义预设,云端同步,模型市场,支持弹性计费和订阅计划模式,支持图片解析,支持联网搜索,支持模型缓存,丰富美观的后台管理与仪表盘数据统计。| | 582|leptonai/searchwithlepton !2025-03-2880632|Building a quick conversation-based search demo with Lepton AI.| | 583|sebastianstarke/AI4Animation !2025-03-2880620|Bringing Characters to Life with Computer Brains in Unity| | 584|wangrongding/wechat-bot !2025-03-2880528|🤖一个基于 WeChaty 结合 DeepSeek / ChatGPT / Kimi / 讯飞等Ai服务实现的微信机器人 ,可以用来帮助你自动回复微信消息,或者管理微信群/好友,检测僵尸粉等...| | 585|openvinotoolkit/openvino !2025-03-2880528|OpenVINO™ is an open-source toolkit for optimizing and deploying AI inference| | 586|steven2358/awesome-generative-ai !2025-03-28802610|A curated list of modern Generative Artificial Intelligence projects and services| | 587|adam-maj/tiny-gpu !2025-03-2880234|A minimal GPU design in Verilog to learn how GPUs work from the ground up| | 588| anse-app/chatgpt-demo !2025-03-2880180 | A demo repo based on OpenAI API (gpt-3.5-turbo) | | 589| acheong08/EdgeGPT !2025-03-288015-1 |Reverse engineered API of Microsoft's Bing Chat | | 590|ai-collection/ai-collection !2025-03-2879994 |The Generative AI Landscape - A Collection of Awesome Generative AI Applications| | 591|GreyDGL/PentestGPT !2025-03-2879953 |A GPT-empowered penetration testing tool| | 592|delta-io/delta !2025-03-2879112|An open-source storage framework that enables building a Lakehouse architecture with compute engines including Spark, PrestoDB, Flink, Trino, and Hive and APIs| | 593|dataelement/bisheng !2025-03-2879085|Bisheng is an open LLM devops platform for next generation AI applications.| | 594|e2b-dev/e2b !2025-03-2878447 |Vercel for AI agents. We help developers to build, deploy, and monitor AI agents. Focusing on specialized AI agents that build software for you - your personal software developers.| | 595|01-ai/Yi !2025-03-2878311|A series of large language models trained from scratch by developers @01-ai| | 596|Plachtaa/VALL-E-X !2025-03-287830-1|An open source implementation of Microsoft's VALL-E X zero-shot TTS model. The demo is available at https://plachtaa.github.io| | 597|abhishekkrthakur/approachingalmost !2025-03-2878204|Approaching (Almost) Any Machine Learning Problem| | 598|pydantic/pydantic-ai !2025-03-28781041|Agent Framework / shim to use Pydantic with LLMs| | 599|rany2/edge-tts !2025-03-2877901|Use Microsoft Edge's online text-to-speech service from Python WITHOUT needing Microsoft Edge or Windows or an API key| | 600|CASIA-IVA-Lab/FastSAM !2025-03-2877881|Fast Segment Anything| | 601|netease-youdao/EmotiVoice !2025-03-2877817|EmotiVoice 😊: a Multi-Voice and Prompt-Controlled TTS Engine| | 602|lllyasviel/IC-Light !2025-03-2877804|More relighting!| | 603|kroma-network/tachyon !2025-03-287774-1|Modular ZK(Zero Knowledge) backend accelerated by GPU| | 604|deep-floyd/IF !2025-03-2877731 |A novel state-of-the-art open-source text-to-image model with a high degree of photorealism and language understanding| | 605|oumi-ai/oumi !2025-03-2877705|Everything you need to build state-of-the-art foundation models, end-to-end.| | 606|reorproject/reor !2025-03-2877681|AI note-taking app that runs models locally.| | 607|lightpanda-io/browser !2025-03-28775813|Lightpanda: the headless browser designed for AI and automation| | 608|xiangsx/gpt4free-ts !2025-03-287755-1|Providing a free OpenAI GPT-4 API ! This is a replication project for the typescript version of xtekky/gpt4free| | 609|IDEA-Research/GroundingDINO !2025-03-28773311|Official implementation of the paper "Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection"| | 610|bunkerity/bunkerweb !2025-03-2877326|🛡️ Make your web services secure by default !| | 611|vikhyat/moondream !2025-03-2877057|tiny vision language model| | 612|firmai/financial-machine-learning !2025-03-287703-1|A curated list of practical financial machine learning tools and applications.| | 613|n8n-io/self-hosted-ai-starter-kit !2025-03-28765121|The Self-hosted AI Starter Kit is an open-source template that quickly sets up a local AI environment. Curated by n8n, it provides essential tools for creating secure, self-hosted AI workflows.| | 614|intel-analytics/ipex-llm !2025-03-2876507|Accelerate local LLM inference and finetuning (LLaMA, Mistral, ChatGLM, Qwen, Baichuan, Mixtral, Gemma, etc.) on Intel CPU and GPU (e.g., local PC with iGPU, discrete GPU such as Arc, Flex and Max). A PyTorch LLM library that seamlessly integrates with llama.cpp, HuggingFace, LangChain, LlamaIndex, DeepSpeed, vLLM, FastChat, ModelScope, etc.| | 615|jrouwe/JoltPhysics !2025-03-28764510|A multi core friendly rigid body physics and collision detection library. Written in C++. Suitable for games and VR applications. Used by Horizon Forbidden West.| | 616|THUDM/CodeGeeX2 !2025-03-2876270|CodeGeeX2: A More Powerful Multilingual Code Generation Model| | 617|meta-llama/llama-stack !2025-03-2875866|Composable building blocks to build Llama Apps| | 618|sweepai/sweep !2025-03-287530-1|Sweep is an AI junior developer| | 619|lllyasviel/Omost !2025-03-2875301|Your image is almost there!| | 620|ahmedbahaaeldin/From-0-to-Research-Scientist-resources-guide !2025-03-2875050|Detailed and tailored guide for undergraduate students or anybody want to dig deep into the field of AI with solid foundation.| | 621|dair-ai/ML-Papers-Explained !2025-03-2875050|Explanation to key concepts in ML| | 622|zaidmukaddam/scira !2025-03-28750110|Scira (Formerly MiniPerplx) is a minimalistic AI-powered search engine that helps you find information on the internet. Powered by Vercel AI SDK! Search with models like Grok 2.0.| | 623|Portkey-AI/gateway !2025-03-28749416|A Blazing Fast AI Gateway. Route to 100+ LLMs with 1 fast & friendly API.| | 624|web-infra-dev/midscene !2025-03-28748729|An AI-powered automation SDK can control the page, perform assertions, and extract data in JSON format using natural language.| | 625|zilliztech/GPTCache !2025-03-2874801 |GPTCache is a library for creating semantic cache to store responses from LLM queries.| | 626|niedev/RTranslator !2025-03-2874742|RTranslator is the world's first open source real-time translation app.| |!green-up-arrow.svg 627|roboflow/notebooks !2025-03-2874666|Examples and tutorials on using SOTA computer vision models and techniques. Learn everything from old-school ResNet, through YOLO and object-detection transformers like DETR, to the latest models like Grounding DINO and SAM.| |!red-down-arrow 628|openlm-research/openllama !2025-03-2874652|OpenLLaMA, a permissively licensed open source reproduction of Meta AI’s LLaMA 7B trained on the RedPajama dataset| | 629|LiheYoung/Depth-Anything !2025-03-2874155|Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data| | 630|enso-org/enso !2025-03-2874040|Hybrid visual and textual functional programming.| | 631|bigcode-project/starcoder !2025-03-287401-1 |Home of StarCoder: fine-tuning & inference!| | 632|git-ecosystem/git-credential-manager !2025-03-2873975|Secure, cross-platform Git credential storage with authentication to GitHub, Azure Repos, and other popular Git hosting services.| | 633|OpenGVLab/InternVL !2025-03-2873634|[CVPR 2024 Oral] InternVL Family: A Pioneering Open-Source Alternative to GPT-4V. 接近GPT-4V表现的可商用开源模型| | 634|WooooDyy/LLM-Agent-Paper-List !2025-03-2873551|The paper list of the 86-page paper "The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Survey" by Zhiheng Xi et al.| | 635|lencx/Noi !2025-03-2873157|🦄 AI + Tools + Plugins + Community| | 636|udlbook/udlbook !2025-03-2873075|Understanding Deep Learning - Simon J.D. Prince| | 637|OpenBMB/MiniCPM !2025-03-2872841|MiniCPM-2B: An end-side LLM outperforms Llama2-13B.| | 638|jaywalnut310/vits !2025-03-2872815 |VITS: Conditional Variational Autoencoder with Adversarial Learning for End-to-End Text-to-Speech| | 639|xorbitsai/inference !2025-03-28727528|Replace OpenAI GPT with another LLM in your app by changing a single line of code. Xinference gives you the freedom to use any LLM you need. With Xinference, you're empowered to run inference with any open-source language models, speech recognition models, and multimodal models, whether in the cloud, on-premises, or even on your laptop.| | 640|PWhiddy/PokemonRedExperiments !2025-03-2872492|Playing Pokemon Red with Reinforcement Learning| | 641|Canner/WrenAI !2025-03-28723213|🤖 Open-source AI Agent that empowers data-driven teams to chat with their data to generate Text-to-SQL, charts, spreadsheets, reports, and BI. 📈📊📋🧑‍💻| | 642|miurla/morphic !2025-03-2872258|An AI-powered answer engine with a generative UI| | 643|ml-explore/mlx-examples !2025-03-2872168|Examples in the MLX framework| | 644|PKU-YuanGroup/ChatLaw !2025-03-2872010|Chinese Legal Large Model| | 645|NVIDIA/cutlass !2025-03-2871883|CUDA Templates for Linear Algebra Subroutines| | 646|FoundationVision/VAR !2025-03-28717444|[GPT beats diffusion🔥] [scaling laws in visual generation📈] Official impl. of "Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Prediction"| | 647|ymcui/Chinese-LLaMA-Alpaca-2 !2025-03-2871561|Chinese LLaMA-2 & Alpaca-2 LLMs| | 648|nadermx/backgroundremover !2025-03-2871514 |Background Remover lets you Remove Background from images and video using AI with a simple command line interface that is free and open source.| | 649|onuratakan/gpt-computer-assistant !2025-03-28714514|gpt-4o for windows, macos and ubuntu| | 650|graviraja/MLOps-Basics !2025-03-2871326|| | 651|Future-House/paper-qa !2025-03-287118-1|High accuracy RAG for answering questions from scientific documents with citations| | 652|open-mmlab/mmagic !2025-03-2871102 |OpenMMLab Multimodal Advanced, Generative, and Intelligent Creation Toolbox| | 653|bhaskatripathi/pdfGPT !2025-03-2870941 |PDF GPT allows you to chat with the contents of your PDF file by using GPT capabilities. The only open source solution to turn your pdf files in a chatbot!| | 654|ollama/ollama-python !2025-03-28709117|Ollama Python library| | 655|facebookresearch/DiT !2025-03-2870376|Official PyTorch Implementation of "Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers"| | 656|geekyutao/Inpaint-Anything !2025-03-2870262 |Inpaint anything using Segment Anything and inpainting models.| | 657|AbdullahAlfaraj/Auto-Photoshop-StableDiffusion-Plugin !2025-03-2870160 |A user-friendly plug-in that makes it easy to generate stable diffusion images inside Photoshop using Automatic1111-sd-webui as a backend.| | 658|apple/corenet !2025-03-2869990|CoreNet: A library for training deep neural networks| | 659|openstatusHQ/openstatus !2025-03-2869926|🏓 The open-source synthetic monitoring platform 🏓| | 660|weaviate/Verba !2025-03-2869772|Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) chatbot powered by Weaviate| | 661|meshery/meshery !2025-03-2869630|Meshery, the cloud native manager| | 662|OpenTalker/video-retalking !2025-03-2869530|[SIGGRAPH Asia 2022] VideoReTalking: Audio-based Lip Synchronization for Talking Head Video Editing In the Wild| | 663|digitalinnovationone/dio-lab-open-source !2025-03-28689013|Repositório do lab "Contribuindo em um Projeto Open Source no GitHub" da Digital Innovation One.| | 664|jianchang512/ChatTTS-ui !2025-03-2868842|一个简单的本地网页界面,直接使用ChatTTS将文字合成为语音,同时支持对外提供API接口。| | 665|patchy631/ai-engineering-hub !2025-03-28686434|In-depth tutorials on LLMs, RAGs and real-world AI agent applications.| | 666|gunnarmorling/1brc !2025-03-2868512|1️⃣🐝🏎️ The One Billion Row Challenge -- A fun exploration of how quickly 1B rows from a text file can be aggregated with Java| | 667|Azure-Samples/azure-search-openai-demo !2025-03-2868482 |A sample app for the Retrieval-Augmented Generation pattern running in Azure, using Azure Cognitive Search for retrieval and Azure OpenAI large language models to power ChatGPT-style and Q&A experiences.| | 668|mit-han-lab/streaming-llm !2025-03-2868382|Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinks| | 669|InternLM/InternLM !2025-03-2868352|InternLM has open-sourced a 7 billion parameter base model, a chat model tailored for practical scenarios and the training system.| | 670|dependency-check/DependencyCheck !2025-03-2868191|OWASP dependency-check is a software composition analysis utility that detects publicly disclosed vulnerabilities in application dependencies.| | 671|Soulter/AstrBot !2025-03-28678643|✨易上手的多平台 LLM 聊天机器人及开发框架✨。支持 QQ、QQ频道、Telegram、微信平台(Gewechat, 企业微信)、内置 Web Chat,OpenAI GPT、DeepSeek、Ollama、Llama、GLM、Gemini、OneAPI、LLMTuner,支持 LLM Agent 插件开发,可视化面板。一键部署。支持 Dify 工作流、代码执行器、Whisper 语音转文字。| | 672|react-native-webview/react-native-webview !2025-03-2867792|React Native Cross-Platform WebView| | 673|modelscope/agentscope !2025-03-28676916|Start building LLM-empowered multi-agent applications in an easier way.| | 674|mylxsw/aidea !2025-03-2867381|AIdea is a versatile app that supports GPT and domestic large language models,also supports "Stable Diffusion" text-to-image generation, image-to-image generation, SDXL 1.0, super-resolution, and image colorization| | 675|langchain-ai/ollama-deep-researcher !2025-03-28668635|Fully local web research and report writing assistant| | 676|threestudio-project/threestudio !2025-03-2866653|A unified framework for 3D content generation.| | 677|gaomingqi/Track-Anything !2025-03-2866631 |A flexible and interactive tool for video object tracking and segmentation, based on Segment Anything, XMem, and E2FGVI.| | 678|spdustin/ChatGPT-AutoExpert !2025-03-2866570|🚀🧠💬 Supercharged Custom Instructions for ChatGPT (non-coding) and ChatGPT Advanced Data Analysis (coding).| | 679|HariSekhon/DevOps-Bash-tools !2025-03-2866463|1000+ DevOps Bash Scripts - AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD, APIs, SQL, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Hive, Impala, Kafka, Hadoop, Jenkins, GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, Azure DevOps, TeamCity, Spotify, MP3, LDAP, Code/Build Linting, pkg mgmt for Linux, Mac, Python, Perl, Ruby, NodeJS, Golang, Advanced dotfiles: .bashrc, .vimrc, .gitconfig, .screenrc, tmux..| | 680|modelscope/swift !2025-03-28661530|ms-swift: Use PEFT or Full-parameter to finetune 200+ LLMs or 15+ MLLMs| | 681|langchain-ai/opengpts !2025-03-2866080|This is an open source effort to create a similar experience to OpenAI's GPTs and Assistants API| | 682| yihong0618/xiaogpt !2025-03-2865131 | Play ChatGPT with xiaomi ai speaker | | 683| civitai/civitai !2025-03-2865111 | Build a platform where people can share their stable diffusion models | | 684|KoljaB/RealtimeSTT !2025-03-28649513|A robust, efficient, low-latency speech-to-text library with advanced voice activity detection, wake word activation and instant transcription.| | 685|qunash/chatgpt-advanced !2025-03-2864910 | A browser extension that augments your ChatGPT prompts with web results.| | 686|Licoy/ChatGPT-Midjourney !2025-03-2864850|🎨 Own your own ChatGPT+Midjourney web service with one click| | 687|friuns2/BlackFriday-GPTs-Prompts !2025-03-2864744|List of free GPTs that doesn't require plus subscription| | 688|PixarAnimationStudios/OpenUSD !2025-03-2864700|Universal Scene Description| | 689|linyiLYi/street-fighter-ai !2025-03-2864630 |This is an AI agent for Street Fighter II Champion Edition.| | 690|run-llama/rags !2025-03-2864380|Build ChatGPT over your data, all with natural language| | 691|frdel/agent-zero !2025-03-2864154|Agent Zero AI framework| | 692|microsoft/DeepSpeedExamples !2025-03-2863911 |Example models using DeepSpeed| | 693|k8sgpt-ai/k8sgpt !2025-03-2863882|Giving Kubernetes Superpowers to everyone| | 694|open-metadata/OpenMetadata !2025-03-2863514|OpenMetadata is a unified platform for discovery, observability, and governance powered by a central metadata repository, in-depth lineage, and seamless team collaboration.| | 695|google/gemma.cpp !2025-03-2863163|lightweight, standalone C++ inference engine for Google's Gemma models.| | 696|RayVentura/ShortGPT !2025-03-286314-1|🚀🎬 ShortGPT - An experimental AI framework for automated short/video content creation. Enables creators to rapidly produce, manage, and deliver content using AI and automation.| | 697|openai/consistencymodels !2025-03-2862940 |Official repo for consistency models.| | 698|yangjianxin1/Firefly !2025-03-2862924|Firefly: Chinese conversational large language model (full-scale fine-tuning + QLoRA), supporting fine-tuning of Llma2, Llama, Baichuan, InternLM, Ziya, Bloom, and other large models| | 699|enricoros/big-AGI !2025-03-2862665|Generative AI suite powered by state-of-the-art models and providing advanced AI/AGI functions. It features AI personas, AGI functions, multi-model chats, text-to-image, voice, response streaming, code highlighting and execution, PDF import, presets for developers, much more. Deploy on-prem or in the cloud.| | 700|aptos-labs/aptos-core !2025-03-2862633|Aptos is a layer 1 blockchain built to support the widespread use of blockchain through better technology and user experience.| | 701|wenda-LLM/wenda !2025-03-286262-1 |Wenda: An LLM invocation platform. Its objective is to achieve efficient content generation tailored to specific environments while considering the limited computing resources of individuals and small businesses, as well as knowledge security and privacy concerns| | 702|Project-MONAI/MONAI !2025-03-2862603|AI Toolkit for Healthcare Imaging| | 703|HVision-NKU/StoryDiffusion !2025-03-2862470|Create Magic Story!| | 704|deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-LLM !2025-03-2862463|DeepSeek LLM: Let there be answers| | 705|Tohrusky/Final2x !2025-03-2862393|2^x Image Super-Resolution| | 706|OpenSPG/KAG !2025-03-28619611|KAG is a logical form-guided reasoning and retrieval framework based on OpenSPG engine and LLMs. It is used to build logical reasoning and factual Q&A solutions for professional domain knowledge bases. It can effectively overcome the shortcomings of the traditional RAG vector similarity calculation model.| | 707|Moonvy/OpenPromptStudio !2025-03-2861861 |AIGC Hint Word Visualization Editor| | 708|levihsu/OOTDiffusion !2025-03-2861761|Official implementation of OOTDiffusion| | 709|tmc/langchaingo !2025-03-2861729|LangChain for Go, the easiest way to write LLM-based programs in Go| | 710|vladmandic/automatic !2025-03-2861374|SD.Next: Advanced Implementation of Stable Diffusion and other Diffusion-based generative image models| | 711|clovaai/donut !2025-03-2861231 |Official Implementation of OCR-free Document Understanding Transformer (Donut) and Synthetic Document Generator (SynthDoG), ECCV 2022| | 712|Shaunwei/RealChar !2025-03-286121-1|🎙️🤖Create, Customize and Talk to your AI Character/Companion in Realtime(All in One Codebase!). Have a natural seamless conversation with AI everywhere(mobile, web and terminal) using LLM OpenAI GPT3.5/4, Anthropic Claude2, Chroma Vector DB, Whisper Speech2Text, ElevenLabs Text2Speech🎙️🤖| | 713|microsoft/TinyTroupe !2025-03-2861142|LLM-powered multiagent persona simulation for imagination enhancement and business insights.| | 714| rustformers/llm !2025-03-2861010 | Run inference for Large Language Models on CPU, with Rust| | 715|firebase/firebase-ios-sdk !2025-03-2860950|Firebase SDK for Apple App Development| | 716|vespa-engine/vespa !2025-03-2860824|The open big data serving engine. https://vespa.ai| | 717|n4ze3m/page-assist !2025-03-28607610|Use your locally running AI models to assist you in your web browsing| | 718|Dooy/chatgpt-web-midjourney-proxy !2025-03-2860646|chatgpt web, midjourney, gpts,tts, whisper 一套ui全搞定| | 719|ethereum-optimism/optimism !2025-03-2860213|Optimism is Ethereum, scaled.| | 720|sczhou/ProPainter !2025-03-2859971|[ICCV 2023] ProPainter: Improving Propagation and Transformer for Video Inpainting| | 721|MineDojo/Voyager !2025-03-2859951 |An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models| | 722|lavague-ai/LaVague !2025-03-2859800|Automate automation with Large Action Model framework| | 723|SevaSk/ecoute !2025-03-2859770 |Ecoute is a live transcription tool that provides real-time transcripts for both the user's microphone input (You) and the user's speakers output (Speaker) in a textbox. It also generates a suggested response using OpenAI's GPT-3.5 for the user to say based on the live transcription of the conversation.| | 724|google/mesop !2025-03-2859661|| | 725|pengxiao-song/LaWGPT !2025-03-2859542 |Repo for LaWGPT, Chinese-Llama tuned with Chinese Legal knowledge| | 726|fr0gger/Awesome-GPT-Agents !2025-03-2859434|A curated list of GPT agents for cybersecurity| | 727|google-deepmind/graphcast !2025-03-2859412|| | 728|comet-ml/opik !2025-03-28594126|Open-source end-to-end LLM Development Platform| | 729|SciPhi-AI/R2R !2025-03-28594033|A framework for rapid development and deployment of production-ready RAG systems| | 730|SkalskiP/courses !2025-03-2859272 |This repository is a curated collection of links to various courses and resources about Artificial Intelligence (AI)| | 731|QuivrHQ/MegaParse !2025-03-2859122|File Parser optimised for LLM Ingestion with no loss 🧠 Parse PDFs, Docx, PPTx in a format that is ideal for LLMs.| | 732|pytorch-labs/gpt-fast !2025-03-2858971|Simple and efficient pytorch-native transformer text generation in !2025-03-2858886|Curated list of chatgpt prompts from the top-rated GPTs in the GPTs Store. Prompt Engineering, prompt attack & prompt protect. Advanced Prompt Engineering papers.| | 734|nilsherzig/LLocalSearch !2025-03-2858852|LLocalSearch is a completely locally running search aggregator using LLM Agents. The user can ask a question and the system will use a chain of LLMs to find the answer. The user can see the progress of the agents and the final answer. No OpenAI or Google API keys are needed.| | 735|kuafuai/DevOpsGPT !2025-03-285874-2|Multi agent system for AI-driven software development. Convert natural language requirements into working software. Supports any development language and extends the existing base code.| | 736|myshell-ai/MeloTTS !2025-03-2858486|High-quality multi-lingual text-to-speech library by MyShell.ai. Support English, Spanish, French, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.| | 737|OpenGVLab/LLaMA-Adapter !2025-03-2858421 |Fine-tuning LLaMA to follow Instructions within 1 Hour and 1.2M Parameters| | 738|volcengine/verl !2025-03-28582563|veRL: Volcano Engine Reinforcement Learning for LLM| | 739|a16z-infra/companion-app !2025-03-2858171|AI companions with memory: a lightweight stack to create and host your own AI companions| | 740|HumanAIGC/OutfitAnyone !2025-03-285816-1|Outfit Anyone: Ultra-high quality virtual try-on for Any Clothing and Any Person| | 741|josStorer/RWKV-Runner !2025-03-2857472|A RWKV management and startup tool, full automation, only 8MB. And provides an interface compatible with the OpenAI API. RWKV is a large language model that is fully open source and available for commercial use.| | 742|648540858/wvp-GB28181-pro !2025-03-2857414|WEB VIDEO PLATFORM是一个基于GB28181-2016标准实现的网络视频平台,支持NAT穿透,支持海康、大华、宇视等品牌的IPC、NVR、DVR接入。支持国标级联,支持rtsp/rtmp等视频流转发到国标平台,支持rtsp/rtmp等推流转发到国标平台。| | 743|ToonCrafter/ToonCrafter !2025-03-2857345|a research paper for generative cartoon interpolation| | 744|PawanOsman/ChatGPT !2025-03-2857191|OpenAI API Free Reverse Proxy| | 745|apache/hudi !2025-03-2857091|Upserts, Deletes And Incremental Processing on Big Data.| | 746| nsarrazin/serge !2025-03-2857081 | A web interface for chatting with Alpaca through llama.cpp. Fully dockerized, with an easy to use API| | 747|homanp/superagent !2025-03-2857021|🥷 Superagent - Build, deploy, and manage LLM-powered agents| | 748|ramonvc/freegpt-webui !2025-03-2856910|GPT 3.5/4 with a Chat Web UI. No API key is required.| | 749|baichuan-inc/baichuan-7B !2025-03-2856901|A large-scale 7B pretraining language model developed by BaiChuan-Inc.| | 750|Azure/azure-sdk-for-net !2025-03-2856792|This repository is for active development of the Azure SDK for .NET. For consumers of the SDK we recommend visiting our public developer docs at https://learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/azure/ or our versioned developer docs at https://azure.github.io/azure-sdk-for-net.| | 751|mnotgod96/AppAgent !2025-03-2856643|AppAgent: Multimodal Agents as Smartphone Users, an LLM-based multimodal agent framework designed to operate smartphone apps.| | 752|microsoft/TaskWeaver !2025-03-2856243|A code-first agent framework for seamlessly planning and executing data analytics tasks.| | 753| yetone/bob-plugin-openai-translator !2025-03-285600-1 | A Bob Plugin base ChatGPT API | | 754|PrefectHQ/marvin !2025-03-2855840 |A batteries-included library for building AI-powered software| | 755|microsoft/promptbase !2025-03-2855832|All things prompt engineering| | 756|fullstackhero/dotnet-starter-kit !2025-03-2855560|Production Grade Cloud-Ready .NET 8 Starter Kit (Web API + Blazor Client) with Multitenancy Support, and Clean/Modular Architecture that saves roughly 200+ Development Hours! All Batteries Included.| | 757|deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-Coder-V2 !2025-03-2855435|DeepSeek-Coder-V2: Breaking the Barrier of Closed-Source Models in Code Intelligence| | 758|aiwaves-cn/agents !2025-03-2855391|An Open-source Framework for Autonomous Language Agents| | 759|microsoft/Mastering-GitHub-Copilot-for-Paired-Programming !2025-03-2855158|A 6 Lesson course teaching everything you need to know about harnessing GitHub Copilot and an AI Paired Programing resource.| | 760|allenai/OLMo !2025-03-2854506|Modeling, training, eval, and inference code for OLMo| | 761|apify/crawlee-python !2025-03-2854493|Crawlee—A web scraping and browser automation library for Python to build reliable crawlers. Extract data for AI, LLMs, RAG, or GPTs. Download HTML, PDF, JPG, PNG, and other files from websites. Works with BeautifulSoup, Playwright, and raw HTTP. Both headful and headless mode. With proxy rotation.| | 762|k2-fsa/sherpa-onnx !2025-03-28541520|Speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and speaker recongition using next-gen Kaldi with onnxruntime without Internet connection. Support embedded systems, Android, iOS, Raspberry Pi, RISC-V, x86_64 servers, websocket server/client, C/C++, Python, Kotlin, C#, Go, NodeJS, Java, Swift| | 763|TEN-framework/TEN-Agent !2025-03-28541411|TEN Agent is a realtime conversational AI agent powered by TEN. It seamlessly integrates the OpenAI Realtime API, RTC capabilities, and advanced features like weather updates, web search, computer vision, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).| | 764|google/gemmapytorch !2025-03-2854010|The official PyTorch implementation of Google's Gemma models| | 765|snakers4/silero-vad !2025-03-2853858|Silero VAD: pre-trained enterprise-grade Voice Activity Detector| | 766|livekit/agents !2025-03-2853836|Build real-time multimodal AI applications 🤖🎙️📹| | 767|pipecat-ai/pipecat !2025-03-28537811|Open Source framework for voice and multimodal conversational AI| | 768|EricLBuehler/mistral.rs !2025-03-28536324|Blazingly fast LLM inference.| | 769|asg017/sqlite-vec !2025-03-28535810|Work-in-progress vector search SQLite extension that runs anywhere.| | 770|albertan017/LLM4Decompile !2025-03-2853563|Reverse Engineering: Decompiling Binary Code with Large Language Models| | 771|Permify/permify !2025-03-2853235|An open-source authorization as a service inspired by Google Zanzibar, designed to build and manage fine-grained and scalable authorization systems for any application.| | 772|imoneoi/openchat !2025-03-2853171|OpenChat: Advancing Open-source Language Models with Imperfect Data| | 773|mosaicml/composer !2025-03-2853140|Train neural networks up to 7x faster| | 774|dsdanielpark/Bard-API !2025-03-285277-1 |The python package that returns a response of Google Bard through API.| | 775|lxfater/inpaint-web !2025-03-2852552|A free and open-source inpainting & image-upscaling tool powered by webgpu and wasm on the browser。| | 776|leanprover/lean4 !2025-03-2852441|Lean 4 programming language and theorem prover| | 777|AILab-CVC/YOLO-World !2025-03-2852415|Real-Time Open-Vocabulary Object Detection| | 778|openchatai/OpenChat !2025-03-2852260 |Run and create custom ChatGPT-like bots with OpenChat, embed and share these bots anywhere, the open-source chatbot console.| | 779|mufeedvh/code2prompt !2025-03-28519414|A CLI tool to convert your codebase into a single LLM prompt with source tree, prompt templating, and token counting.| | 780|biobootloader/wolverine !2025-03-2851700 |Automatically repair python scripts through GPT-4 to give them regenerative abilities.| | 781|huggingface/parler-tts !2025-03-2851671|Inference and training library for high-quality TTS models.| | 782|Akegarasu/lora-scripts !2025-03-2851308 |LoRA training scripts use kohya-ss's trainer, for diffusion model.| | 783|openchatai/OpenCopilot !2025-03-285128-3|🤖 🔥 Let your users chat with your product features and execute things by text - open source Shopify sidekick| | 784|e2b-dev/fragments !2025-03-2851228|Open-source Next.js template for building apps that are fully generated by AI. By E2B.| | 785|microsoft/SynapseML !2025-03-2851132|Simple and Distributed Machine Learning| | 786|aigc-apps/sd-webui-EasyPhoto !2025-03-285108-1|📷 EasyPhoto | | 787|ChaoningZhang/MobileSAM !2025-03-2850944|This is the official code for Faster Segment Anything (MobileSAM) project that makes SAM lightweight| | 788|huggingface/alignment-handbook !2025-03-2850932|Robust recipes for to align language models with human and AI preferences| | 789|alpkeskin/mosint !2025-03-2850920|An automated e-mail OSINT tool| | 790|TaskingAI/TaskingAI !2025-03-2850891|The open source platform for AI-native application development.| | 791|lipku/metahuman-stream !2025-03-28507615|Real time interactive streaming digital human| | 792|OpenInterpreter/01 !2025-03-2850530|The open-source language model computer| | 793|open-compass/opencompass !2025-03-28505111|OpenCompass is an LLM evaluation platform, supporting a wide range of models (InternLM2,GPT-4,LLaMa2, Qwen,GLM, Claude, etc) over 100+ datasets.| | 794|xxlong0/Wonder3D !2025-03-2850491|A cross-domain diffusion model for 3D reconstruction from a single image| | 795|pytorch/torchtune !2025-03-2850342|A Native-PyTorch Library for LLM Fine-tuning| | 796|SuperDuperDB/superduperdb !2025-03-2850192|🔮 SuperDuperDB: Bring AI to your database: Integrate, train and manage any AI models and APIs directly with your database and your data.| | 797|WhiskeySockets/Baileys !2025-03-2850057|Lightweight full-featured typescript/javascript WhatsApp Web API| | 798| mpociot/chatgpt-vscode !2025-03-2849890 | A VSCode extension that allows you to use ChatGPT | | 799|OpenGVLab/DragGAN !2025-03-2849880|Unofficial Implementation of DragGAN - "Drag Your GAN: Interactive Point-based Manipulation on the Generative Image Manifold" (DragGAN 全功能实现,在线Demo,本地部署试用,代码、模型已全部开源,支持Windows, macOS, Linux)| | 800|microsoft/LLMLingua !2025-03-2849824|To speed up LLMs' inference and enhance LLM's perceive of key information, compress the prompt and KV-Cache, which achieves up to 20x compression with minimal performance loss.| | 801|Zipstack/unstract !2025-03-2849745|No-code LLM Platform to launch APIs and ETL Pipelines to structure unstructured documents| | 802|OpenBMB/ToolBench !2025-03-2849621|An open platform for training, serving, and evaluating large language model for tool learning.| | 803|Fanghua-Yu/SUPIR !2025-03-2849593|SUPIR aims at developing Practical Algorithms for Photo-Realistic Image Restoration In the Wild| | 804|GaiaNet-AI/gaianet-node !2025-03-2849360|Install and run your own AI agent service| | 805|qodo-ai/qodo-cover !2025-03-284922-1|Qodo-Cover: An AI-Powered Tool for Automated Test Generation and Code Coverage Enhancement! 💻🤖🧪🐞| | 806|Zejun-Yang/AniPortrait !2025-03-2849042|AniPortrait: Audio-Driven Synthesis of Photorealistic Portrait Animation| | 807|lvwzhen/law-cn-ai !2025-03-2848901 |⚖️ AI Legal Assistant| | 808|developersdigest/llm-answer-engine !2025-03-2848740|Build a Perplexity-Inspired Answer Engine Using Next.js, Groq, Mixtral, Langchain, OpenAI, Brave & Serper| | 809|Plachtaa/VITS-fast-fine-tuning !2025-03-2848640|This repo is a pipeline of VITS finetuning for fast speaker adaptation TTS, and many-to-many voice conversion| | 810|espeak-ng/espeak-ng !2025-03-2848601|eSpeak NG is an open source speech synthesizer that supports more than hundred languages and accents.| | 811|ant-research/CoDeF !2025-03-2848581|[CVPR'24 Highlight] Official PyTorch implementation of CoDeF: Content Deformation Fields for Temporally Consistent Video Processing| | 812|deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V2 !2025-03-2848512|| | 813|XRPLF/rippled !2025-03-2848210|Decentralized cryptocurrency blockchain daemon implementing the XRP Ledger protocol in C++| | 814|AutoMQ/automq !2025-03-28478721|AutoMQ is a cloud-first alternative to Kafka by decoupling durability to S3 and EBS. 10x cost-effective. Autoscale in seconds. Single-digit ms latency.| | 815|AILab-CVC/VideoCrafter !2025-03-2847800|VideoCrafter1: Open Diffusion Models for High-Quality Video Generation| | 816|nautechsystems/nautilustrader !2025-03-2847702|A high-performance algorithmic trading platform and event-driven backtester| | 817|kyegomez/swarms !2025-03-2847563|The Enterprise-Grade Production-Ready Multi-Agent Orchestration Framework Join our Community: https://discord.com/servers/agora-999382051935506503| | 818|Deci-AI/super-gradients !2025-03-2847310 |Easily train or fine-tune SOTA computer vision models with one open source training library. The home of Yolo-NAS.| | 819|QwenLM/Qwen2.5-Coder !2025-03-2847236|Qwen2.5-Coder is the code version of Qwen2.5, the large language model series developed by Qwen team, Alibaba Cloud.| | 820|SCIR-HI/Huatuo-Llama-Med-Chinese !2025-03-2847191 |Repo for HuaTuo (华驼), Llama-7B tuned with Chinese medical knowledge| | 821|togethercomputer/RedPajama-Data !2025-03-2846841 |code for preparing large datasets for training large language models| | 822|mishushakov/llm-scraper !2025-03-2846704|Turn any webpage into structured data using LLMs| | 823|1rgs/jsonformer !2025-03-2846663 |A Bulletproof Way to Generate Structured JSON from Language Models| | 824|anti-work/shortest !2025-03-2846565|QA via natural language AI tests| | 825|dnhkng/GlaDOS !2025-03-2846510|This is the Personality Core for GLaDOS, the first steps towards a real-life implementation of the AI from the Portal series by Valve.| | 826|Nukem9/dlssg-to-fsr3 !2025-03-2846380|Adds AMD FSR3 Frame Generation to games by replacing Nvidia DLSS-G Frame Generation (nvngx_dlssg).| | 827|BuilderIO/ai-shell !2025-03-2846373 |A CLI that converts natural language to shell commands.| | 828|facebookincubator/AITemplate !2025-03-2846220 |AITemplate is a Python framework which renders neural network into high performance CUDA/HIP C++ code. Specialized for FP16 TensorCore (NVIDIA GPU) and MatrixCore (AMD GPU) inference.| | 829|terraform-aws-modules/terraform-aws-eks !2025-03-2846030|Terraform module to create AWS Elastic Kubernetes (EKS) resources 🇺🇦| | 830|timescale/pgai !2025-03-2845915|A suite of tools to develop RAG, semantic search, and other AI applications more easily with PostgreSQL| | 831|awslabs/multi-agent-orchestrator !2025-03-2845788|Flexible and powerful framework for managing multiple AI agents and handling complex conversations| | 832|sanchit-gandhi/whisper-jax !2025-03-2845771 |Optimised JAX code for OpenAI's Whisper Model, largely built on the Hugging Face Transformers Whisper implementation| | 833|NVIDIA/NeMo-Guardrails !2025-03-2845755|NeMo Guardrails is an open-source toolkit for easily adding programmable guardrails to LLM-based conversational systems.| | 834|PathOfBuildingCommunity/PathOfBuilding !2025-03-2845480|Offline build planner for Path of Exile.| | 835|UX-Decoder/Segment-Everything-Everywhere-All-At-Once !2025-03-2845412 |Official implementation of the paper "Segment Everything Everywhere All at Once"| | 836|build-trust/ockam !2025-03-2845171|Orchestrate end-to-end encryption, cryptographic identities, mutual authentication, and authorization policies between distributed applications – at massive scale.| | 837|google-research/timesfm !2025-03-2845135|TimesFM (Time Series Foundation Model) is a pretrained time-series foundation model developed by Google Research for time-series forecasting.| | 838|luosiallen/latent-consistency-model !2025-03-2844842|Latent Consistency Models: Synthesizing High-Resolution Images with Few-Step Inference| | 839|NVlabs/neuralangelo !2025-03-2844740|Official implementation of "Neuralangelo: High-Fidelity Neural Surface Reconstruction" (CVPR 2023)| | 840|kyegomez/tree-of-thoughts !2025-03-2844720 |Plug in and Play Implementation of Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models that Elevates Model Reasoning by atleast 70%| | 841|sjvasquez/handwriting-synthesis !2025-03-2844720 |Handwriting Synthesis with RNNs ✏️| | 842| madawei2699/myGPTReader !2025-03-2844420 | A slack bot that can read any webpage, ebook or document and summarize it with chatGPT | | 843|OpenBMB/AgentVerse !2025-03-2844413|🤖 AgentVerse 🪐 provides a flexible framework that simplifies the process of building custom multi-agent environments for large language models (LLMs).| | 844|argmaxinc/WhisperKit !2025-03-2844395|Swift native speech recognition on-device for iOS and macOS applications.| | 845|landing-ai/vision-agent !2025-03-2844346|Vision agent| | 846|InternLM/xtuner !2025-03-2844273|An efficient, flexible and full-featured toolkit for fine-tuning large models (InternLM, Llama, Baichuan, Qwen, ChatGLM)| | 847|google-deepmind/alphageometry !2025-03-284421-1|Solving Olympiad Geometry without Human Demonstrations| | 848|ostris/ai-toolkit !2025-03-2844093|Various AI scripts. Mostly Stable Diffusion stuff.| | 849|LLM-Red-Team/kimi-free-api !2025-03-2844004|🚀 KIMI AI 长文本大模型白嫖服务,支持高速流式输出、联网搜索、长文档解读、图像解析、多轮对话,零配置部署,多路token支持,自动清理会话痕迹。| | 850|argilla-io/argilla !2025-03-2843991|Argilla is a collaboration platform for AI engineers and domain experts that require high-quality outputs, full data ownership, and overall efficiency.| | 851|spring-projects/spring-ai !2025-03-28438419|An Application Framework for AI Engineering| | 852|alibaba-damo-academy/FunClip !2025-03-2843555|Open-source, accurate and easy-to-use video clipping tool, LLM based AI clipping intergrated | | 853|yisol/IDM-VTON !2025-03-2843541|IDM-VTON : Improving Diffusion Models for Authentic Virtual Try-on in the Wild| | 854|fchollet/ARC-AGI !2025-03-2843368|The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus| | 855|MahmoudAshraf97/whisper-diarization !2025-03-2843064|Automatic Speech Recognition with Speaker Diarization based on OpenAI Whisper| | 856|Speykious/cve-rs !2025-03-2843047|Blazingly 🔥 fast 🚀 memory vulnerabilities, written in 100% safe Rust. 🦀| | 857|Blealtan/efficient-kan !2025-03-2842770|An efficient pure-PyTorch implementation of Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN).| | 858|smol-ai/GodMode !2025-03-284249-1|AI Chat Browser: Fast, Full webapp access to ChatGPT / Claude / Bard / Bing / Llama2! I use this 20 times a day.| | 859|openai/plugins-quickstart !2025-03-284235-4 |Get a ChatGPT plugin up and running in under 5 minutes!| | 860|Doriandarko/maestro !2025-03-2842260|A framework for Claude Opus to intelligently orchestrate subagents.| | 861|philz1337x/clarity-upscaler !2025-03-2842204|Clarity-Upscaler: Reimagined image upscaling for everyone| | 862|facebookresearch/co-tracker !2025-03-2842142|CoTracker is a model for tracking any point (pixel) on a video.| | 863|xlang-ai/OpenAgents !2025-03-2842031|OpenAgents: An Open Platform for Language Agents in the Wild| | 864|alibaba/higress !2025-03-28419514|🤖 AI Gateway | | 865|ray-project/llm-numbers !2025-03-2841920 |Numbers every LLM developer should know| | 866|fudan-generative-vision/champ !2025-03-2841820|Champ: Controllable and Consistent Human Image Animation with 3D Parametric Guidance| | 867|NVIDIA/garak !2025-03-2841795|the LLM vulnerability scanner| | 868|leetcode-mafia/cheetah !2025-03-2841740 |Whisper & GPT-based app for passing remote SWE interviews| | 869|ragapp/ragapp !2025-03-2841710|The easiest way to use Agentic RAG in any enterprise| | 870|collabora/WhisperSpeech !2025-03-2841692|An Open Source text-to-speech system built by inverting Whisper.| | 871|Facico/Chinese-Vicuna !2025-03-2841520 |Chinese-Vicuna: A Chinese Instruction-following LLaMA-based Model| | 872|openai/grok !2025-03-2841381|| | 873|CrazyBoyM/llama3-Chinese-chat !2025-03-2841361|Llama3 Chinese Repository with modified versions, and training and deployment resources| | 874|luban-agi/Awesome-AIGC-Tutorials !2025-03-2841301|Curated tutorials and resources for Large Language Models, AI Painting, and more.| | 875|damo-vilab/AnyDoor !2025-03-2841192|Official implementations for paper: Anydoor: zero-shot object-level image customization| | 876|raspberrypi/pico-sdk !2025-03-2841072|| | 877|mshumer/gpt-llm-trainer !2025-03-284097-1|| | 878|metavoiceio/metavoice-src !2025-03-284076-1|AI for human-level speech intelligence| | 879|intelowlproject/IntelOwl !2025-03-2840763|IntelOwl: manage your Threat Intelligence at scale| | 880|a16z-infra/ai-getting-started !2025-03-2840682|A Javascript AI getting started stack for weekend projects, including image/text models, vector stores, auth, and deployment configs| | 881|MarkFzp/mobile-aloha !2025-03-2840641|Mobile ALOHA: Learning Bimanual Mobile Manipulation with Low-Cost Whole-Body Teleoperation| | 882| keijiro/AICommand !2025-03-2840380 | ChatGPT integration with Unity Editor | | 883|Tencent/HunyuanDiT !2025-03-2840214|Hunyuan-DiT : A Powerful Multi-Resolution Diffusion Transformer with Fine-Grained Chinese Understanding| | 884|hengyoush/kyanos !2025-03-2840061|Visualize the time packets spend in the kernel, watch & analyze in command line.| | 885|agiresearch/AIOS !2025-03-2840045|AIOS: LLM Agent Operating System| | 886|truefoundry/cognita !2025-03-2839773|RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) Framework for building modular, open source applications for production by TrueFoundry| | 887|X-PLUG/MobileAgent !2025-03-2839557|Mobile-Agent: Autonomous Multi-Modal Mobile Device Agent with Visual Perception| | 888|jackMort/ChatGPT.nvim !2025-03-2839231|ChatGPT Neovim Plugin: Effortless Natural Language Generation with OpenAI's ChatGPT API| | 889|microsoft/RD-Agent !2025-03-28388422|Research and development (R&D) is crucial for the enhancement of industrial productivity, especially in the AI era, where the core aspects of R&D are mainly focused on data and models. We are committed to automate these high-value generic R&D processes through our open source R&D automation tool RD-Agent, which let AI drive data-driven AI.| | 890|Significant-Gravitas/Auto-GPT-Plugins !2025-03-283882-1 |Plugins for Auto-GPT| | 891|apple/ml-mgie !2025-03-2838770|| | 892|OpenDriveLab/UniAD !2025-03-2838727|[CVPR 2023 Best Paper] Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving| | 893|llSourcell/DoctorGPT !2025-03-2838640|DoctorGPT is an LLM that can pass the US Medical Licensing Exam. It works offline, it's cross-platform, & your health data stays private.| | 894|FlagAI-Open/FlagAI !2025-03-2838601|FlagAI (Fast LArge-scale General AI models) is a fast, easy-to-use and extensible toolkit for large-scale model.| | 895|krishnaik06/Roadmap-To-Learn-Generative-AI-In-2024 !2025-03-2838513|Roadmap To Learn Generative AI In 2024| | 896|SysCV/sam-hq !2025-03-2838491|Segment Anything in High Quality| | 897|google/security-research !2025-03-2838420|This project hosts security advisories and their accompanying proof-of-concepts related to research conducted at Google which impact non-Google owned code.| | 898|shroominic/codeinterpreter-api !2025-03-2838330|Open source implementation of the ChatGPT Code Interpreter 👾| | 899|Yonom/assistant-ui !2025-03-2838308|React Components for AI Chat 💬 🚀| | 900|nucleuscloud/neosync !2025-03-2838262|Open source data anonymization and synthetic data orchestration for developers. Create high fidelity synthetic data and sync it across your environments.| | 901|ravenscroftj/turbopilot !2025-03-2838230 |Turbopilot is an open source large-language-model based code completion engine that runs locally on CPU| | 902|NVlabs/Sana !2025-03-28380810|SANA: Efficient High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Linear Diffusion Transformer| | 903|huggingface/distil-whisper !2025-03-2838061|Distilled variant of Whisper for speech recognition. 6x faster, 50% smaller, within 1% word error rate.| | 904|Codium-ai/AlphaCodium !2025-03-2837971|code generation tool that surpasses most human competitors in CodeContests| | 905|fixie-ai/ultravox !2025-03-2837710|A fast multimodal LLM for real-time voice| | 906|unit-mesh/auto-dev !2025-03-28375715|🧙‍AutoDev: The AI-powered coding wizard with multilingual support 🌐, auto code generation 🏗️, and a helpful bug-slaying assistant 🐞! Customizable prompts 🎨 and a magic Auto Dev/Testing/Document/Agent feature 🧪 included! 🚀| | 907|Marker-Inc-Korea/AutoRAG !2025-03-2837432|AutoML tool for RAG| | 908|deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-VL !2025-03-283734-1|DeepSeek-VL: Towards Real-World Vision-Language Understanding| | 909|hiyouga/ChatGLM-Efficient-Tuning !2025-03-283692-1|Fine-tuning ChatGLM-6B with PEFT | | 910| Yue-Yang/ChatGPT-Siri !2025-03-2836921 | Shortcuts for Siri using ChatGPT API gpt-3.5-turbo model | | 911|0hq/WebGPT !2025-03-2836901 |Run GPT model on the browser with WebGPU. An implementation of GPT inference in less than ~2000 lines of vanilla Javascript.| | 912|cvg/LightGlue !2025-03-2836903|LightGlue: Local Feature Matching at Light Speed (ICCV 2023)| | 913|deanxv/coze-discord-proxy !2025-03-2836791|代理Discord-Bot对话Coze-Bot,实现API形式请求GPT4对话模型/微调模型| | 914|MervinPraison/PraisonAI !2025-03-2836764|PraisonAI application combines AutoGen and CrewAI or similar frameworks into a low-code solution for building and managing multi-agent LLM systems, focusing on simplicity, customisation, and efficient human-agent collaboration.| | 915|Ironclad/rivet !2025-03-2836345 |The open-source visual AI programming environment and TypeScript library| | 916|BasedHardware/OpenGlass !2025-03-2835851|Turn any glasses into AI-powered smart glasses| | 917|ricklamers/gpt-code-ui !2025-03-2835840 |An open source implementation of OpenAI's ChatGPT Code interpreter| | 918|whoiskatrin/chart-gpt !2025-03-2835830 |AI tool to build charts based on text input| | 919|github/CopilotForXcode !2025-03-2835788|Xcode extension for GitHub Copilot| | 920|hemansnation/God-Level-Data-Science-ML-Full-Stack !2025-03-2835570 |A collection of scientific methods, processes, algorithms, and systems to build stories & models. This roadmap contains 16 Chapters, whether you are a fresher in the field or an experienced professional who wants to transition into Data Science & AI| | 921|pytorch/torchchat !2025-03-2835461|Run PyTorch LLMs locally on servers, desktop and mobile| | 922| Kent0n-Li/ChatDoctor !2025-03-2835451 | A Medical Chat Model Fine-tuned on LLaMA Model using Medical Domain Knowledge | | 923|xtekky/chatgpt-clone !2025-03-283519-1 |ChatGPT interface with better UI| | 924|jupyterlab/jupyter-ai !2025-03-2835120|A generative AI extension for JupyterLab| | 925|pytorch/torchtitan !2025-03-2835064|A native PyTorch Library for large model training| | 926|minimaxir/simpleaichat !2025-03-2835031|Python package for easily interfacing with chat apps, with robust features and minimal code complexity.| | 927|srush/Tensor-Puzzles !2025-03-2834930|Solve puzzles. Improve your pytorch.| | 928|Helicone/helicone !2025-03-2834918|🧊 Open source LLM-Observability Platform for Developers. One-line integration for monitoring, metrics, evals, agent tracing, prompt management, playground, etc. Supports OpenAI SDK, Vercel AI SDK, Anthropic SDK, LiteLLM, LLamaIndex, LangChain, and more. 🍓 YC W23| | 929|run-llama/llama-hub !2025-03-2834740|A library of data loaders for LLMs made by the community -- to be used with LlamaIndex and/or LangChain| | 930|NExT-GPT/NExT-GPT !2025-03-2834700|Code and models for NExT-GPT: Any-to-Any Multimodal Large Language Model| | 931|souzatharsis/podcastfy !2025-03-2834661|An Open Source Python alternative to NotebookLM's podcast feature: Transforming Multimodal Content into Captivating Multilingual Audio Conversations with GenAI| | 932|Dataherald/dataherald !2025-03-2834450|Interact with your SQL database, Natural Language to SQL using LLMs| | 933|iryna-kondr/scikit-llm !2025-03-2834350 |Seamlessly integrate powerful language models like ChatGPT into scikit-learn for enhanced text analysis tasks.| | 934|Netflix/maestro !2025-03-2834230|Maestro: Netflix’s Workflow Orchestrator| | 935|CanadaHonk/porffor !2025-03-2833560|A from-scratch experimental AOT JS engine, written in JS| | 936|hustvl/Vim !2025-03-2833323|Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model| | 937|pashpashpash/vault-ai !2025-03-2833250 |OP Vault ChatGPT: Give ChatGPT long-term memory using the OP Stack (OpenAI + Pinecone Vector Database). Upload your own custom knowledge base files (PDF, txt, etc) using a simple React frontend.| | 938|tencentmusic/supersonic !2025-03-28330611|SuperSonic is the next-generation BI platform that integrates Chat BI (powered by LLM) and Headless BI (powered by semantic layer) paradigms.| | 939|billmei/every-chatgpt-gui !2025-03-2832981|Every front-end GUI client for ChatGPT| | 940|microsoft/torchgeo !2025-03-2832772|TorchGeo: datasets, samplers, transforms, and pre-trained models for geospatial data| | 941|LLMBook-zh/LLMBook-zh.github.io !2025-03-28326110|《大语言模型》作者:赵鑫,李军毅,周昆,唐天一,文继荣| | 942|dvlab-research/MiniGemini !2025-03-2832601|Official implementation for Mini-Gemini| | 943|rashadphz/farfalle !2025-03-2832460|🔍 AI search engine - self-host with local or cloud LLMs| | 944|Luodian/Otter !2025-03-2832450|🦦 Otter, a multi-modal model based on OpenFlamingo (open-sourced version of DeepMind's Flamingo), trained on MIMIC-IT and showcasing improved instruction-following and in-context learning ability.| | 945|AprilNEA/ChatGPT-Admin-Web !2025-03-2832370 | ChatGPT WebUI with user management and admin dashboard system| | 946|MarkFzp/act-plus-plus !2025-03-2832365|Imitation Learning algorithms with Co-traing for Mobile ALOHA: ACT, Diffusion Policy, VINN| | 947|ethen8181/machine-learning !2025-03-2832310|🌎 machine learning tutorials (mainly in Python3)| | 948|opengeos/segment-geospatial !2025-03-2832312 |A Python package for segmenting geospatial data with the Segment Anything Model (SAM)| | 949|iusztinpaul/hands-on-llms !2025-03-283225-2|🦖 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻 about 𝗟𝗟𝗠𝘀, 𝗟𝗟𝗠𝗢𝗽𝘀, and 𝘃𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿 𝗗𝗕𝘀 for free by designing, training, and deploying a real-time financial advisor LLM system ~ 𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘤𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘥𝘦 + 𝘷𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘰 & 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘢𝘭𝘴| | 950|ToTheBeginning/PuLID !2025-03-2832221|Official code for PuLID: Pure and Lightning ID Customization via Contrastive Alignment| | 951|neo4j-labs/llm-graph-builder !2025-03-2832164|Neo4j graph construction from unstructured data using LLMs| | 952|OpenGVLab/InternGPT !2025-03-2832150 |InternGPT (iGPT) is an open source demo platform where you can easily showcase your AI models. Now it supports DragGAN, ChatGPT, ImageBind, multimodal chat like GPT-4, SAM, interactive image editing, etc. Try it at igpt.opengvlab.com (支持DragGAN、ChatGPT、ImageBind、SAM的在线Demo系统)| | 953|PKU-YuanGroup/Video-LLaVA !2025-03-2832060 |Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection| | 954|DataTalksClub/llm-zoomcamp !2025-03-2832030|LLM Zoomcamp - a free online course about building an AI bot that can answer questions about your knowledge base| | 955|gptscript-ai/gptscript !2025-03-2832010|Natural Language Programming| |!green-up-arrow.svg 956|isaac-sim/IsaacLab !2025-03-28320113|Unified framework for robot learning built on NVIDIA Isaac Sim| |!red-down-arrow 957|ai-boost/Awesome-GPTs !2025-03-2832003|Curated list of awesome GPTs 👍.| | 958|huggingface/safetensors !2025-03-2831901|Simple, safe way to store and distribute tensors| | 959|linyiLYi/bilibot !2025-03-2831771|A local chatbot fine-tuned by bilibili user comments.| | 960| project-baize/baize-chatbot !2025-03-283168-1 | Let ChatGPT teach your own chatbot in hours with a single GPU! | | 961|Azure-Samples/cognitive-services-speech-sdk !2025-03-2831280|Sample code for the Microsoft Cognitive Services Speech SDK| | 962|microsoft/Phi-3CookBook !2025-03-2831231|This is a Phi-3 book for getting started with Phi-3. Phi-3, a family of open AI models developed by Microsoft. Phi-3 models are the most capable and cost-effective small language models (SLMs) available, outperforming models of the same size and next size up across a variety of language, reasoning, coding, and math benchmarks.| | 963|neuralmagic/deepsparse !2025-03-2831180|Sparsity-aware deep learning inference runtime for CPUs| | 964|sugarforever/chat-ollama !2025-03-2831000|ChatOllama is an open source chatbot based on LLMs. It supports a wide range of language models, and knowledge base management.| | 965|amazon-science/chronos-forecasting !2025-03-2830974|Chronos: Pretrained (Language) Models for Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting| | 966|damo-vilab/i2vgen-xl !2025-03-2830902|Official repo for VGen: a holistic video generation ecosystem for video generation building on diffusion models| | 967|google-deepmind/gemma !2025-03-2830733|Open weights LLM from Google DeepMind.| | 968|iree-org/iree !2025-03-2830733|A retargetable MLIR-based machine learning compiler and runtime toolkit.| | 969|NVlabs/VILA !2025-03-2830724|VILA - a multi-image visual language model with training, inference and evaluation recipe, deployable from cloud to edge (Jetson Orin and laptops)| | 970|microsoft/torchscale !2025-03-2830661|Foundation Architecture for (M)LLMs| | 971|openai/openai-realtime-console !2025-03-2830656|React app for inspecting, building and debugging with the Realtime API| | 972|daveshap/OpenAIAgentSwarm !2025-03-2830610|HAAS = Hierarchical Autonomous Agent Swarm - "Resistance is futile!"| | 973|microsoft/PromptWizard !2025-03-2830555|Task-Aware Agent-driven Prompt Optimization Framework| | 974|CVI-SZU/Linly !2025-03-2830490 |Chinese-LLaMA basic model; ChatFlow Chinese conversation model; NLP pre-training/command fine-tuning dataset| | 975|cohere-ai/cohere-toolkit !2025-03-2830130|Toolkit is a collection of prebuilt components enabling users to quickly build and deploy RAG applications.| | 976|adamcohenhillel/ADeus !2025-03-2830131|An open source AI wearable device that captures what you say and hear in the real world and then transcribes and stores it on your own server. You can then chat with Adeus using the app, and it will have all the right context about what you want to talk about - a truly personalized, personal AI.| | 977|Lightning-AI/LitServe !2025-03-2830132|Lightning-fast serving engine for AI models. Flexible. Easy. Enterprise-scale.| | 978|potpie-ai/potpie !2025-03-2829973|Prompt-To-Agent : Create custom engineering agents for your codebase| | 979|ant-design/x !2025-03-28299529|Craft AI-driven interfaces effortlessly 🤖| | 980|meta-llama/PurpleLlama !2025-03-2829832|Set of tools to assess and improve LLM security.| | 981|williamyang1991/RerenderAVideo !2025-03-2829800|[SIGGRAPH Asia 2023] Rerender A Video: Zero-Shot Text-Guided Video-to-Video Translation| | 982|baichuan-inc/Baichuan-13B !2025-03-2829790|A 13B large language model developed by Baichuan Intelligent Technology| | 983|Stability-AI/stable-audio-tools !2025-03-2829761|Generative models for conditional audio generation| | 984|li-plus/chatglm.cpp !2025-03-2829720|C++ implementation of ChatGLM-6B & ChatGLM2-6B & ChatGLM3 & more LLMs| | 985|NVIDIA/GenerativeAIExamples !2025-03-2829546|Generative AI reference workflows optimized for accelerated infrastructure and microservice architecture.| | 986|Josh-XT/AGiXT !2025-03-2829521 |AGiXT is a dynamic AI Automation Platform that seamlessly orchestrates instruction management and complex task execution across diverse AI providers. Combining adaptive memory, smart features, and a versatile plugin system, AGiXT delivers efficient and comprehensive AI solutions.| | 987|MrForExample/ComfyUI-3D-Pack !2025-03-2829515|An extensive node suite that enables ComfyUI to process 3D inputs (Mesh & UV Texture, etc) using cutting edge algorithms (3DGS, NeRF, etc.)| | 988|olimorris/codecompanion.nvim !2025-03-28295111|✨ AI-powered coding, seamlessly in Neovim. Supports Anthropic, Copilot, Gemini, Ollama, OpenAI and xAI LLMs| | 989|salesforce/CodeT5 !2025-03-282940-1 |Home of CodeT5: Open Code LLMs for Code Understanding and Generation| | 990|facebookresearch/ijepa !2025-03-2829391|Official codebase for I-JEPA, the Image-based Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture. First outlined in the CVPR paper, "Self-supervised learning from images with a joint-embedding predictive architecture."| | 991|eureka-research/Eureka !2025-03-2829351|Official Repository for "Eureka: Human-Level Reward Design via Coding Large Language Models"| | 992|NVIDIA/trt-llm-rag-windows !2025-03-282934-1|A developer reference project for creating Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) chatbots on Windows using TensorRT-LLM| | 993|gmpetrov/databerry !2025-03-282930-1|The no-code platform for building custom LLM Agents| | 994|AI4Finance-Foundation/FinRobot !2025-03-28291946|FinRobot: An Open-Source AI Agent Platform for Financial Applications using LLMs 🚀 🚀 🚀| | 995|nus-apr/auto-code-rover !2025-03-2829013|A project structure aware autonomous software engineer aiming for autonomous program improvement| | 996|deepseek-ai/DreamCraft3D !2025-03-2828921|[ICLR 2024] Official implementation of DreamCraft3D: Hierarchical 3D Generation with Bootstrapped Diffusion Prior| | 997|mlabonne/llm-datasets !2025-03-2828848|High-quality datasets, tools, and concepts for LLM fine-tuning.| | 998|facebookresearch/jepa !2025-03-2828712|PyTorch code and models for V-JEPA self-supervised learning from video.| | 999|facebookresearch/habitat-sim !2025-03-2828604|A flexible, high-performance 3D simulator for Embodied AI research.| | 1000|xenova/whisper-web !2025-03-2828581|ML-powered speech recognition directly in your browser| | 1001|cvlab-columbia/zero123 !2025-03-2828530|Zero-1-to-3: Zero-shot One Image to 3D Object: https://zero123.cs.columbia.edu/| | 1002|yuruotong1/autoMate !2025-03-28285121|Like Manus, Computer Use Agent(CUA) and Omniparser, we are computer-using agents.AI-driven local automation assistant that uses natural language to make computers work by themselves| | 1003|muellerberndt/mini-agi !2025-03-282845-1 |A minimal generic autonomous agent based on GPT3.5/4. Can analyze stock prices, perform network security tests, create art, and order pizza.| | 1004|allenai/open-instruct !2025-03-2828432|| | 1005|CodingChallengesFYI/SharedSolutions !2025-03-2828360|Publicly shared solutions to Coding Challenges| | 1006|hegelai/prompttools !2025-03-2828220|Open-source tools for prompt testing and experimentation, with support for both LLMs (e.g. OpenAI, LLaMA) and vector databases (e.g. Chroma, Weaviate).| | 1007|mazzzystar/Queryable !2025-03-2828222|Run CLIP on iPhone to Search Photos.| | 1008|Doubiiu/DynamiCrafter !2025-03-2828173|DynamiCrafter: Animating Open-domain Images with Video Diffusion Priors| | 1009|SamurAIGPT/privateGPT !2025-03-282805-1 |An app to interact privately with your documents using the power of GPT, 100% privately, no data leaks| | 1010|facebookresearch/Pearl !2025-03-2827951|A Production-ready Reinforcement Learning AI Agent Library brought by the Applied Reinforcement Learning team at Meta.| | 1011|intuitem/ciso-assistant-community !2025-03-2827954|CISO Assistant is a one-stop-shop for GRC, covering Risk, AppSec and Audit Management and supporting +70 frameworks worldwide with auto-mapping: NIST CSF, ISO 27001, SOC2, CIS, PCI DSS, NIS2, CMMC, PSPF, GDPR, HIPAA, Essential Eight, NYDFS-500, DORA, NIST AI RMF, 800-53, 800-171, CyFun, CJIS, AirCyber, NCSC, ECC, SCF and so much more| | 1012|facebookresearch/audio2photoreal !2025-03-2827840|Code and dataset for photorealistic Codec Avatars driven from audio| | 1013|Azure/azure-rest-api-specs !2025-03-2827770|The source for REST API specifications for Microsoft Azure.| | 1014|SCUTlihaoyu/open-chat-video-editor !2025-03-2827690 |Open source short video automatic generation tool| | 1015|Alpha-VLLM/LLaMA2-Accessory !2025-03-2827642|An Open-source Toolkit for LLM Development| | 1016|johnma2006/mamba-minimal !2025-03-2827601|Simple, minimal implementation of the Mamba SSM in one file of PyTorch.| | 1017|nerfstudio-project/gsplat !2025-03-2827576|CUDA accelerated rasterization of gaussian splatting| | 1018|Physical-Intelligence/openpi !2025-03-28274617|| | 1019|leptonai/leptonai !2025-03-2827246|A Pythonic framework to simplify AI service building| |!green-up-arrow.svg 1020|joanrod/star-vector !2025-03-28271149|StarVector is a foundation model for SVG generation that transforms vectorization into a code generation task. Using a vision-language modeling architecture, StarVector processes both visual and textual inputs to produce high-quality SVG code with remarkable precision.| |!red-down-arrow 1021|jqnatividad/qsv !2025-03-2827092|CSVs sliced, diced & analyzed.| | 1022|FranxYao/chain-of-thought-hub !2025-03-2826991|Benchmarking large language models' complex reasoning ability with chain-of-thought prompting| | 1023|princeton-nlp/SWE-bench !2025-03-2826965|[ICLR 2024] SWE-Bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-world Github Issues?| | 1024|elastic/otel-profiling-agent !2025-03-2826930|The production-scale datacenter profiler| | 1025|src-d/hercules !2025-03-2826900|Gaining advanced insights from Git repository history.| | 1026|lanqian528/chat2api !2025-03-2826695|A service that can convert ChatGPT on the web to OpenAI API format.| | 1027|ishan0102/vimGPT !2025-03-2826681|Browse the web with GPT-4V and Vimium| | 1028|TMElyralab/MuseV !2025-03-2826650|MuseV: Infinite-length and High Fidelity Virtual Human Video Generation with Visual Conditioned Parallel Denoising| | 1029|georgia-tech-db/eva !2025-03-2826600 |AI-Relational Database System | | 1030|kubernetes-sigs/controller-runtime !2025-03-2826590|Repo for the controller-runtime subproject of kubebuilder (sig-apimachinery)| | 1031|gptlink/gptlink !2025-03-2826550 |Build your own free commercial ChatGPT environment in 10 minutes. The setup is simple and includes features such as user management, orders, tasks, and payments| | 1032|pytorch/executorch !2025-03-2826534|On-device AI across mobile, embedded and edge for PyTorch| | 1033|NVIDIA/nv-ingest !2025-03-2826290|NVIDIA Ingest is an early access set of microservices for parsing hundreds of thousands of complex, messy unstructured PDFs and other enterprise documents into metadata and text to embed into retrieval systems.| | 1034|SuperTux/supertux !2025-03-2826081|SuperTux source code| | 1035|abi/secret-llama !2025-03-2826050|Fully private LLM chatbot that runs entirely with a browser with no server needed. Supports Mistral and LLama 3.| | 1036|liou666/polyglot !2025-03-2825841 |Desktop AI Language Practice Application| | 1037|janhq/nitro !2025-03-2825821|A fast, lightweight, embeddable inference engine to supercharge your apps with local AI. OpenAI-compatible API| | 1038|deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-Math !2025-03-2825825|DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models| | 1039|anthropics/prompt-eng-interactive-tutorial !2025-03-2825781|Anthropic's Interactive Prompt Engineering Tutorial| | 1040|microsoft/promptbench !2025-03-2825741|A unified evaluation framework for large language models| | 1041|baaivision/Painter !2025-03-2825580 |Painter & SegGPT Series: Vision Foundation Models from BAAI| | 1042|OpenPipe/OpenPipe !2025-03-2825581|Turn expensive prompts into cheap fine-tuned models| | 1043|TracecatHQ/tracecat !2025-03-2825531|😼 The AI-native, open source alternative to Tines / Splunk SOAR.| | 1044|JoshuaC215/agent-service-toolkit !2025-03-2825528|Full toolkit for running an AI agent service built with LangGraph, FastAPI and Streamlit| | 1045|databricks/dbrx !2025-03-2825460|Code examples and resources for DBRX, a large language model developed by Databricks| | 1046|lamini-ai/lamini !2025-03-2825271 |Official repo for Lamini's data generator for generating instructions to train instruction-following LLMs| | 1047|mshumer/gpt-author !2025-03-282510-1|| | 1048|TMElyralab/MusePose !2025-03-2824971|MusePose: a Pose-Driven Image-to-Video Framework for Virtual Human Generation| | 1049|Kludex/fastapi-tips !2025-03-2824974|FastAPI Tips by The FastAPI Expert!| | 1050|openai/simple-evals !2025-03-2824813|| | 1051|iterative/datachain !2025-03-2824732|AI-data warehouse to enrich, transform and analyze data from cloud storages| | 1052|girafe-ai/ml-course !2025-03-2824703|Open Machine Learning course| | 1053|kevmo314/magic-copy !2025-03-2824620 |Magic Copy is a Chrome extension that uses Meta's Segment Anything Model to extract a foreground object from an image and copy it to the clipboard.| | 1054|Eladlev/AutoPrompt !2025-03-2824432|A framework for prompt tuning using Intent-based Prompt Calibration| | 1055|OpenBMB/CPM-Bee !2025-03-282434-1 |A bilingual large-scale model with trillions of parameters| | 1056|IDEA-Research/T-Rex !2025-03-2824310|T-Rex2: Towards Generic Object Detection via Text-Visual Prompt Synergy| | 1057|microsoft/genaiscript !2025-03-2824202|Automatable GenAI Scripting| | 1058|paulpierre/RasaGPT !2025-03-2824090 |💬 RasaGPT is the first headless LLM chatbot platform built on top of Rasa and Langchain. Built w/ Rasa, FastAPI, Langchain, LlamaIndex, SQLModel, pgvector, ngrok, telegram| | 1059|ashishpatel26/LLM-Finetuning !2025-03-2823911|LLM Finetuning with peft| | 1060|SoraWebui/SoraWebui !2025-03-2823570|SoraWebui is an open-source Sora web client, enabling users to easily create videos from text with OpenAI's Sora model.| | 1061|6drf21e/ChatTTScolab !2025-03-2823491|🚀 一键部署(含离线整合包)!基于 ChatTTS ,支持音色抽卡、长音频生成和分角色朗读。简单易用,无需复杂安装。| | 1062|Azure/PyRIT !2025-03-2823343|The Python Risk Identification Tool for generative AI (PyRIT) is an open access automation framework to empower security professionals and machine learning engineers to proactively find risks in their generative AI systems.| | 1063|tencent-ailab/V-Express !2025-03-2823201|V-Express aims to generate a talking head video under the control of a reference image, an audio, and a sequence of V-Kps images.| | 1064|THUDM/CogVLM2 !2025-03-2823170|GPT4V-level open-source multi-modal model based on Llama3-8B| | 1065|dvmazur/mixtral-offloading !2025-03-2823001|Run Mixtral-8x7B models in Colab or consumer desktops| | 1066|semanser/codel !2025-03-2822950|✨ Fully autonomous AI Agent that can perform complicated tasks and projects using terminal, browser, and editor.| | 1067|mshumer/gpt-investor !2025-03-2822590|| | 1068|aixcoder-plugin/aiXcoder-7B !2025-03-2822550|official repository of aiXcoder-7B Code Large Language Model| | 1069|Azure-Samples/graphrag-accelerator !2025-03-2822503|One-click deploy of a Knowledge Graph powered RAG (GraphRAG) in Azure| | 1070|emcf/engshell !2025-03-2821830 |An English-language shell for any OS, powered by LLMs| | 1071|hncboy/chatgpt-web-java !2025-03-2821771|ChatGPT project developed in Java, based on Spring Boot 3 and JDK 17, supports both AccessToken and ApiKey modes| | 1072|openai/consistencydecoder !2025-03-2821692|Consistency Distilled Diff VAE| | 1073|Alpha-VLLM/Lumina-T2X !2025-03-2821681|Lumina-T2X is a unified framework for Text to Any Modality Generation| | 1074|bghira/SimpleTuner !2025-03-2821612|A general fine-tuning kit geared toward Stable Diffusion 2.1, Stable Diffusion 3, DeepFloyd, and SDXL.| | 1075|JiauZhang/DragGAN !2025-03-2821530 |Implementation of DragGAN: Interactive Point-based Manipulation on the Generative Image Manifold| | 1076|cgpotts/cs224u !2025-03-2821390|Code for Stanford CS224u| | 1077|PKU-YuanGroup/MoE-LLaVA !2025-03-2821300|Mixture-of-Experts for Large Vision-Language Models| | 1078|darrenburns/elia !2025-03-2820831|A snappy, keyboard-centric terminal user interface for interacting with large language models. Chat with ChatGPT, Claude, Llama 3, Phi 3, Mistral, Gemma and more.| | 1079|ageerle/ruoyi-ai !2025-03-28207898|RuoYi AI 是一个全栈式 AI 开发平台,旨在帮助开发者快速构建和部署个性化的 AI 应用。| | 1080|NVIDIA/gpu-operator !2025-03-2820510|NVIDIA GPU Operator creates/configures/manages GPUs atop Kubernetes| | 1081|BAAI-Agents/Cradle !2025-03-2820481|The Cradle framework is a first attempt at General Computer Control (GCC). Cradle supports agents to ace any computer task by enabling strong reasoning abilities, self-improvment, and skill curation, in a standardized general environment with minimal requirements.| | 1082|microsoft/aici !2025-03-2820080|AICI: Prompts as (Wasm) Programs| | 1083|PRIS-CV/DemoFusion !2025-03-2820040|Let us democratise high-resolution generation! (arXiv 2023)| | 1084|apple/axlearn !2025-03-2820012|An Extensible Deep Learning Library| | 1085|naver/mast3r !2025-03-2819685|Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R| | 1086|liltom-eth/llama2-webui !2025-03-281958-1|Run Llama 2 locally with gradio UI on GPU or CPU from anywhere (Linux/Windows/Mac). Supporting Llama-2-7B/13B/70B with 8-bit, 4-bit. Supporting GPU inference (6 GB VRAM) and CPU inference.| | 1087|GaParmar/img2img-turbo !2025-03-2819582|One-step image-to-image with Stable Diffusion turbo: sketch2image, day2night, and more| | 1088|Niek/chatgpt-web !2025-03-2819560|ChatGPT web interface using the OpenAI API| | 1089|huggingface/cookbook !2025-03-2819421|Open-source AI cookbook| | 1090|pytorch/ao !2025-03-2819241|PyTorch native quantization and sparsity for training and inference| | 1091|emcie-co/parlant !2025-03-2819053|The behavior guidance framework for customer-facing LLM agents| | 1092|ymcui/Chinese-LLaMA-Alpaca-3 !2025-03-2818980|中文羊驼大模型三期项目 (Chinese Llama-3 LLMs) developed from Meta Llama 3| | 1093|Nutlope/notesGPT !2025-03-2818811|Record voice notes & transcribe, summarize, and get tasks| | 1094|InstantStyle/InstantStyle !2025-03-2818791|InstantStyle: Free Lunch towards Style-Preserving in Text-to-Image Generation 🔥| | 1095|idaholab/moose !2025-03-2818771|Multiphysics Object Oriented Simulation Environment| | 1096|The-OpenROAD-Project/OpenROAD !2025-03-2818351|OpenROAD's unified application implementing an RTL-to-GDS Flow. Documentation at https://openroad.readthedocs.io/en/latest/| | 1097|alibaba/spring-ai-alibaba !2025-03-281831121|Agentic AI Framework for Java Developers| | 1098|ytongbai/LVM !2025-03-2817990|Sequential Modeling Enables Scalable Learning for Large Vision Models| | 1099|microsoft/sample-app-aoai-chatGPT !2025-03-2817981|[PREVIEW] Sample code for a simple web chat experience targeting chatGPT through AOAI.| | 1100|AI-Citizen/SolidGPT !2025-03-2817830|Chat everything with your code repository, ask repository level code questions, and discuss your requirements. AI Scan and learning your code repository, provide you code repository level answer🧱 🧱| | 1101|YangLing0818/RPG-DiffusionMaster !2025-03-2817784|Mastering Text-to-Image Diffusion: Recaptioning, Planning, and Generating with Multimodal LLMs (PRG)| | 1102|kyegomez/BitNet !2025-03-2817710|Implementation of "BitNet: Scaling 1-bit Transformers for Large Language Models" in pytorch| | 1103|eloialonso/diamond !2025-03-2817671|DIAMOND (DIffusion As a Model Of eNvironment Dreams) is a reinforcement learning agent trained in a diffusion world model.| | 1104|flowdriveai/flowpilot !2025-03-2817250|flow-pilot is an openpilot based driver assistance system that runs on linux, windows and android powered machines.| | 1105|xlang-ai/OSWorld !2025-03-2817200|OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environments| | 1106|linyiLYi/snake-ai !2025-03-2817031|An AI agent that beats the classic game "Snake".| | 1107|baaivision/Emu !2025-03-2816991|Emu Series: Generative Multimodal Models from BAAI| | 1108|kevmo314/scuda !2025-03-2816870|SCUDA is a GPU over IP bridge allowing GPUs on remote machines to be attached to CPU-only machines.| | 1109|SharifiZarchi/IntroductiontoMachineLearning !2025-03-2816701|دوره‌ی مقدمه‌ای بر یادگیری ماشین، برای دانشجویان| | 1110|google/maxtext !2025-03-2816670|A simple, performant and scalable Jax LLM!| | 1111|ml-explore/mlx-swift-examples !2025-03-2816471|Examples using MLX Swift| | 1112|unitreerobotics/unitreerlgym !2025-03-2816256|| | 1113|collabora/WhisperFusion !2025-03-2815901|WhisperFusion builds upon the capabilities of WhisperLive and WhisperSpeech to provide a seamless conversations with an AI.| | 1114|lichao-sun/Mora !2025-03-2815520|Mora: More like Sora for Generalist Video Generation| | 1115|GoogleCloudPlatform/localllm !2025-03-2815370|Run LLMs locally on Cloud Workstations| | 1116|TencentARC/BrushNet !2025-03-2815330|The official implementation of paper "BrushNet: A Plug-and-Play Image Inpainting Model with Decomposed Dual-Branch Diffusion"| | 1117|ai-christianson/RA.Aid !2025-03-2815288|Develop software autonomously.| | 1118|stephansturges/WALDO !2025-03-2815170|Whereabouts Ascertainment for Low-lying Detectable Objects. The SOTA in FOSS AI for drones!| | 1119|skills/copilot-codespaces-vscode !2025-03-2815112|Develop with AI-powered code suggestions using GitHub Copilot and VS Code| | 1120|andrewnguonly/Lumos !2025-03-2814920|A RAG LLM co-pilot for browsing the web, powered by local LLMs| | 1121|TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor !2025-03-2814811|NewPipe's core library for extracting data from streaming sites| | 1122|mhamilton723/FeatUp !2025-03-2814770|Official code for "FeatUp: A Model-Agnostic Frameworkfor Features at Any Resolution" ICLR 2024| | 1123|AnswerDotAI/fsdpqlora !2025-03-2814671|Training LLMs with QLoRA + FSDP| | 1124|jgravelle/AutoGroq !2025-03-2814330|| | 1125|OpenGenerativeAI/llm-colosseum !2025-03-2814130|Benchmark LLMs by fighting in Street Fighter 3! The new way to evaluate the quality of an LLM| | 1126|microsoft/vscode-ai-toolkit !2025-03-2814000|| | 1127|McGill-NLP/webllama !2025-03-2813930|Llama-3 agents that can browse the web by following instructions and talking to you| | 1128|lucidrains/self-rewarding-lm-pytorch !2025-03-2813760|Implementation of the training framework proposed in Self-Rewarding Language Model, from MetaAI| | 1129|ishaan1013/sandbox !2025-03-2813650|A cloud-based code editing environment with an AI copilot and real-time collaboration.| | 1130|goatcorp/Dalamud !2025-03-2813275|FFXIV plugin framework and API| | 1131|Lightning-AI/lightning-thunder !2025-03-2813151|Make PyTorch models Lightning fast! Thunder is a source to source compiler for PyTorch. It enables using different hardware executors at once.| | 1132|PKU-YuanGroup/MagicTime !2025-03-2813052|MagicTime: Time-lapse Video Generation Models as Metamorphic Simulators| | 1133|SakanaAI/evolutionary-model-merge !2025-03-2813000|Official repository of Evolutionary Optimization of Model Merging Recipes| | 1134|a-real-ai/pywinassistant !2025-03-2812950|The first open source Large Action Model generalist Artificial Narrow Intelligence that controls completely human user interfaces by only using natural language. PyWinAssistant utilizes Visualization-of-Thought Elicits Spatial Reasoning in Large Language Models.| | 1135|TraceMachina/nativelink !2025-03-2812630|NativeLink is an open source high-performance build cache and remote execution server, compatible with Bazel, Buck2, Reclient, and other RBE-compatible build systems. It offers drastically faster builds, reduced test flakiness, and significant infrastructure cost savings.| | 1136|MLSysOps/MLE-agent !2025-03-2812500|🤖 MLE-Agent: Your intelligent companion for seamless AI engineering and research. 🔍 Integrate with arxiv and paper with code to provide better code/research plans 🧰 OpenAI, Ollama, etc supported. 🎆 Code RAG| | 1137|wpilibsuite/allwpilib !2025-03-2811610|Official Repository of WPILibJ and WPILibC| | 1138|elfvingralf/macOSpilot-ai-assistant !2025-03-2811470|Voice + Vision powered AI assistant that answers questions about any application, in context and in audio.| | 1139|langchain-ai/langchain-extract !2025-03-2811210|🦜⛏️ Did you say you like data?| | 1140|FoundationVision/GLEE !2025-03-2811120|【CVPR2024】GLEE: General Object Foundation Model for Images and Videos at Scale| | 1141|Profluent-AI/OpenCRISPR !2025-03-2810990|AI-generated gene editing systems| | 1142|zju3dv/EasyVolcap !2025-03-2810821|[SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 (Technical Communications)] EasyVolcap: Accelerating Neural Volumetric Video Research| | 1143|PaddlePaddle/PaddleHelix !2025-03-2810560|Bio-Computing Platform Featuring Large-Scale Representation Learning and Multi-Task Deep Learning “螺旋桨”生物计算工具集| | 1144|myshell-ai/JetMoE !2025-03-289800|Reaching LLaMA2 Performance with 0.1M Dollars| | 1145|likejazz/llama3.np !2025-03-289770|llama3.np is pure NumPy implementation for Llama 3 model.| | 1146|mustafaaljadery/gemma-2B-10M !2025-03-289500|Gemma 2B with 10M context length using Infini-attention.| | 1147|HITsz-TMG/FilmAgent !2025-03-289382|Resources of our paper "FilmAgent: A Multi-Agent Framework for End-to-End Film Automation in Virtual 3D Spaces". New versions in the making!| | 1148|aws-samples/amazon-bedrock-samples !2025-03-289362|This repository contains examples for customers to get started using the Amazon Bedrock Service. This contains examples for all available foundational models| | 1149|Akkudoktor-EOS/EOS !2025-03-2893154|This repository features an Energy Optimization System (EOS) that optimizes energy distribution, usage for batteries, heat pumps& household devices. It includes predictive models for electricity prices (planned), load forecasting& dynamic optimization to maximize energy efficiency & minimize costs. Founder Dr. Andreas Schmitz (YouTube @akkudoktor)| Tip: | symbol| rule | | :----| :---- | |🔥 | 256 1k| |!green-up-arrow.svg !red-down-arrow | ranking up / down| |⭐ | on trending page today| [Back to Top] Tools | No. | Tool | Description | | ----:|:----------------------------------------------- |:------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | 1 | ChatGPT | A sibling model to InstructGPT, which is trained to follow instructions in a prompt and provide a detailed response | | 2 | DALL·E 2 | Create original, realistic images and art from a text description | | 3 | Murf AI | AI enabled, real people's voices| | 4 | Midjourney | An independent research lab that produces an artificial intelligence program under the same name that creates images from textual descriptions, used in Discord | 5 | Make-A-Video | Make-A-Video is a state-of-the-art AI system that generates videos from text | | 6 | Creative Reality™ Studio by D-ID| Use generative AI to create future-facing videos| | 7 | chat.D-ID| The First App Enabling Face-to-Face Conversations with ChatGPT| | 8 | Notion AI| Access the limitless power of AI, right inside Notion. Work faster. Write better. Think bigger. | | 9 | Runway| Text to Video with Gen-2 | | 10 | Resemble AI| Resemble’s AI voice generator lets you create human–like voice overs in seconds | | 11 | Cursor| Write, edit, and chat about your code with a powerful AI | | 12 | Hugging Face| Build, train and deploy state of the art models powered by the reference open source in machine learning | | 13 | Claude | A next-generation AI assistant for your tasks, no matter the scale | | 14 | Poe| Poe lets you ask questions, get instant answers, and have back-and-forth conversations with AI. Gives access to GPT-4, gpt-3.5-turbo, Claude from Anthropic, and a variety of other bots| [Back to Top] Websites | No. | WebSite |Description | | ----:|:------------------------------------------ |:---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | 1 | OpenAI | An artificial intelligence research lab | | 2 | Bard | Base Google's LaMDA chatbots and pull from internet | | 3 | ERNIE Bot | Baidu’s new generation knowledge-enhanced large language model is a new member of the Wenxin large model family | | 4 | DALL·E 2 | An AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language | | 5 | Whisper | A general-purpose speech recognition model | | 6| CivitAI| A platform that makes it easy for people to share and discover resources for creating AI art| | 7|D-ID| D-ID’s Generative AI enables users to transform any picture or video into extraordinary experiences| | 8| Nvidia eDiff-I| Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Ensemble of Expert Denoisers | | 9| Stability AI| The world's leading open source generative AI company which opened source Stable Diffusion | | 10| Meta AI| Whether it be research, product or infrastructure development, we’re driven to innovate responsibly with AI to benefit the world | | 11| ANTHROPIC| AI research and products that put safety at the frontier | [Back to Top] Reports&Papers | No. | Report&Paper | Description | |:---- |:-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |:---------------------------------------------------- | | 1 | GPT-4 Technical Report | GPT-4 Technical Report | | 2 | mli/paper-reading | Deep learning classics and new papers are read carefully paragraph by paragraph. | | 3 | labmlai/annotateddeeplearningpaperimplementations| A collection of simple PyTorch implementations of neural networks and related algorithms, which are documented with explanations | | 4 | Visual ChatGPT: Talking, Drawing and Editing with Visual Foundation Models | Talking, Drawing and Editing with Visual Foundation Models | | 5 | OpenAI Research | The latest research report and papers from OpenAI | | 6 | Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data|Meta's Text-to-Video Generation| | 7 | eDiff-I: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Ensemble of Expert Denoisers| Nvidia eDiff-I - New generation of generative AI content creation tool | | 8 | Training an Assistant-style Chatbot with Large Scale Data Distillation from GPT-3.5-Turbo | 2023 GPT4All Technical Report | | 9 | Segment Anything| Meta Segment Anything | | 10 | LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models| LLaMA: a collection of foundation language models ranging from 7B to 65B parameters| | 11 | papers-we-love/papers-we-love |Papers from the computer science community to read and discuss| | 12 | CVPR 2023 papers |The most exciting and influential CVPR 2023 papers| [Back to Top] Tutorials | No. | Tutorial | Description| |:---- |:---------------------------------------------------------------- | --- | | 1 | Coursera - Machine Learning | The Machine Learning Specialization Course taught by Dr. Andrew Ng| | 2 | microsoft/ML-For-Beginners | 12 weeks, 26 lessons, 52 quizzes, classic Machine Learning for all| | 3 | ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers | This short course taught by Isa Fulford (OpenAI) and Andrew Ng (DeepLearning.AI) will teach how to use a large language model (LLM) to quickly build new and powerful applications | | 4 | Dive into Deep Learning |Targeting Chinese readers, functional and open for discussion. The Chinese and English versions are used for teaching in over 400 universities across more than 60 countries | | 5 | AI Expert Roadmap | Roadmap to becoming an Artificial Intelligence Expert in 2022 | | 6 | Computer Science courses |List of Computer Science courses with video lectures| | 7 | Machine Learning with Python | Machine Learning with Python Certification on freeCodeCamp| | 8 | Building Systems with the ChatGPT API | This short course taught by Isa Fulford (OpenAI) and Andrew Ng (DeepLearning.AI), you will learn how to automate complex workflows using chain calls to a large language model| | 9 | LangChain for LLM Application Development | This short course taught by Harrison Chase (Co-Founder and CEO at LangChain) and Andrew Ng. you will gain essential skills in expanding the use cases and capabilities of language models in application development using the LangChain framework| | 10 | How Diffusion Models Work | This short course taught by Sharon Zhou (CEO, Co-founder, Lamini). you will gain a deep familiarity with the diffusion process and the models which carry it out. More than simply pulling in a pre-built model or using an API, this course will teach you to build a diffusion model from scratch| | 11 | Free Programming Books For AI |📚 Freely available programming books for AI | | 12 | microsoft/AI-For-Beginners |12 Weeks, 24 Lessons, AI for All!| | 13 | hemansnation/God-Level-Data-Science-ML-Full-Stack |A collection of scientific methods, processes, algorithms, and systems to build stories & models. This roadmap contains 16 Chapters, whether you are a fresher in the field or an experienced professional who wants to transition into Data Science & AI| | 14 | datawhalechina/prompt-engineering-for-developers |Chinese version of Andrew Ng's Big Model Series Courses, including "Prompt Engineering", "Building System", and "LangChain"| | 15 | ossu/computer-science |🎓 Path to a free self-taught education in Computer Science!| | 16 | microsoft/Data-Science-For-Beginners | 10 Weeks, 20 Lessons, Data Science for All! | |17 |jwasham/coding-interview-university !2023-09-29268215336 |A complete computer science study plan to become a software engineer.| [Back to Top] Thanks If this project has been helpful to you in any way, please give it a ⭐️ by clicking on the star.

AI-Scalpel-Trading-Bot
github
LLM Vibe Score0.491
Human Vibe Score0.09890315835809398
hackobiMar 28, 2025

AI-Scalpel-Trading-Bot

AI-Scalpel-Trading-Bot Disclaimer This software is for educational purposes only. Do not risk money which you are afraid to lose. USE THE SOFTWARE AT YOUR OWN RISK. THE AUTHORS AND ALL AFFILIATES ASSUME NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR TRADING RESULTS. Always start by running a trading bot in Dry-run and do not engage money before you understand how it works and what profit/loss you should expect. This is an implementation of freqtrade where different machine learning implementations will be tested. Freqtrade is a free and open source crypto trading bot written in Python. It is designed to support all major exchanges and be controlled via Telegram. It contains backtesting, plotting and money management tools as well as strategy optimization by machine learning. !freqtrade Exchange marketplaces supported [X] Bittrex [X] Binance (*Note for binance users) [ ] 113 others to tests. (Some of them might not work) Documentation Documentation. Features [x] Based on Python 3.6+: For botting on any operating system - Windows, macOS and Linux. [x] Persistence: Persistence is achieved through sqlite. [x] Dry-run: Run the bot without playing money. [x] Backtesting: Run a simulation of your buy/sell strategy. [x] Strategy Optimization by machine learning: Use machine learning to optimize your buy/sell strategy parameters with real exchange data. [x] Edge position sizing Calculate your win rate, risk reward ratio, the best stoploss and adjust your position size before taking a position for each specific market. Learn more. [x] Whitelist crypto-currencies: Select which crypto-currency you want to trade or use dynamic whitelists. [x] Blacklist crypto-currencies: Select which crypto-currency you want to avoid. [x] Manageable via Telegram: Manage the bot with Telegram. [x] Display profit/loss in fiat: Display your profit/loss in 33 fiat. [x] Daily summary of profit/loss: Provide a daily summary of your profit/loss. [x] Performance status report: Provide a performance status of your current trades. Quick start Freqtrade provides a Linux/macOS script to install all dependencies and help you to configure the bot. Other installations. Basic Usage Bot commands Telegram RPC commands Telegram is not mandatory. However, this is a great way to control your bot. More details on our documentation /start: Starts the trader /stop: Stops the trader /status [table]: Lists all open trades /count: Displays number of open trades /profit: Lists cumulative profit from all finished trades /forcesell |all: Instantly sells the given trade (Ignoring minimum_roi). /performance: Show performance of each finished trade grouped by pair /balance: Show account balance per currency /daily : Shows profit or loss per day, over the last n days /help: Show help message /version: Show version Development branches The project is currently setup in two main branches: develop - This branch has often new features, but might also cause breaking changes. master - This branch contains the latest stable release. The bot 'should' be stable on this branch, and is generally well tested. feat/* - These are feature branches, which are being worked on heavily. Please don't use these unless you want to test a specific feature. A note on Binance For Binance, please add "BNB/" to your blacklist to avoid issues. Accounts having BNB accounts use this to pay for fees - if your first trade happens to be on BNB, further trades will consume this position and make the initial BNB order unsellable as the expected amount is not there anymore. Support Help / Slack For any questions not covered by the documentation or for further information about the bot, I encourage you to join freqtrade's slack channel. Click here to join Slack channel. Bugs / Issues If you discover a bug in the bot, please search their issue tracker first. If it hasn't been reported, please create a new issue and ensure you follow the template guide so that our team can assist you as quickly as possible. Feature Requests Have you a great idea to improve the bot you want to share? Please, first search if this feature was not already discussed. If it hasn't been requested, please create a new request and ensure you follow the template guide so that it does not get lost in the bug reports. Pull Requests Feel like the bot is missing a feature? Keep em pull requests coming! Please read the Contributing document to understand the requirements before sending pull-requests. Coding is not a neccessity to contribute - maybe start with improving our documentation? Issues labeled good first issue can be good first contributions, and will help get you familiar with the codebase. Note before starting any major new feature work, please open an issue describing what you are planning to do or talk to the team on Slack. This will ensure that interested parties can give valuable feedback on the feature, and let others know that you are working on it. Important: Always create your PR against the develop branch, not master. Requirements Uptodate clock The clock must be accurate, syncronized to a NTP server very frequently to avoid problems with communication to the exchanges. Min hardware required To run this bot we recommend you a cloud instance with a minimum of: Minimal (advised) system requirements: 2GB RAM, 1GB disk space, 2vCPU Software requirements Python 3.6.x pip git TA-Lib virtualenv (Recommended) Docker (Recommended)

Vibe Coding FULL Course + WIN MacBook Pro, PlayStation 5 🔥
youtube
LLM Vibe Score0.309
Human Vibe Score0.49
Ishan SharmaMar 27, 2025

Vibe Coding FULL Course + WIN MacBook Pro, PlayStation 5 🔥

I’m organising a UI Hackathon with Outlier that you can participate in: https://bit.ly/uihacks25?utmsource=youtube&utmmedium=paid&pod=coders You simply have to pick a prompt from the ideas list and build a great functional UI on it. Like we built the https://peachpup.vercel.app/ app today in this video with vibe coding. And you can submit your app on this Typeform link: https://form.typeform.com/to/Hljx9wab?utmsource=youtube&utmmedium=paid&pod=coders The top 3 prizes include M4 MacBook Pro, PlayStation 5, and Rayban Meta Glasses. And the top 1% coders will get a chance to work part-time and make up to $27 per hour if you’re in India or $50 per hour anywhere else in the world. You will be judged on the UI you create and how functional it is. The deadline for the submission is Sunday, 30th March I'm sure you must have heard about the word “vibe coding”. Vibe coding is the most practical way to learn coding in today's time. You can build apps and products by just describing your idea in text, and the AI will produce code and do everything on its own. This is really important for a software developer to learn to get to the product quickly and test out your knowledge about coding. In this video, I explain how you can build real apps using tools like Cursor, Replit, Lovable, 10x faster. This can help you become a top-tier developer by developing any application you want in seconds. Watch the video till the end, and don't miss out on the hackathon. 📸 Instagram: https://bit.ly/ishansharma7390ig Join MarkitUpX Discord Server: https://discord.gg/fwSpTje4rh CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Introduction 01:19 - What is Vibe Coding? 02:36 - Tools to get started with Vibe Coding 03:30 - CHECK OUT THIS HACKATHON 08:10 - Building from Scratch 10:54 - Deciding on the Idea 13:09 - Getting Started 18:15 - Step-by-Step Tutorial 01:12:48 - Deploying 01:20:46 - Conclusion 😁 About Me: https://bit.ly/aboutishansharma 📱 Twitter: https://bit.ly/ishansharma7390twt 📝 LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/ishansharma7390li 🌟 Please leave a LIKE ❤️ and SUBSCRIBE for more AMAZING content! 🌟 3 Books You Should Read 📈Psychology of Money: https://amzn.to/30wx4bW 👀Subtle Art of Not Giving a F: https://amzn.to/30zwWbP 💼Rework: https://amzn.to/3ALsAuz Tech I use every day 💻MacBook Air M1: https://amzn.to/2YWKPjG 📺LG 29' Ultrawide Monitor: https://amzn.to/3aG0p5p 🎥Sony ZV1: https://amzn.to/3ANqgDb 🎙Blue Yeti Mic: https://amzn.to/2YYbiNN ⽴Tripod Stand: https://amzn.to/3mVUiQc 🔅Ring Light: https://amzn.to/2YQlzLJ 🎧Marshall Major II Headphone: https://amzn.to/3lLhTDQ 🖱Logitech mouse: https://amzn.to/3p8edOC 💺Green Soul Chair: https://amzn.to/3mWIxZP ✨ Tags ✨ coding,coding hackathon,vibe coding,vibe coding explained,how to use replit,how to use cursor,how to build app on replit,lovable,web development,app development,build with ai,no code ai tools,artificial intelligence,cursor ai tutorial,andrej karpathy,coding hackathon 2025,ai coding hackathon,frontend ui hackathon,claude,how to build app without coding,build app with cursor ai,build app with no code,best no code app builder,BUILD Apps in Minutes w/ Cursor ✨ Hashtags ✨ #vibecoding #coding #artificialintelligence

He makes $750 a day 'Vibe Coding' Apps (using Replit, ChatGPT, Upwork)
youtube
LLM Vibe Score0.379
Human Vibe Score0.77
Greg IsenbergMar 21, 2025

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

Coding Is OVER!🤯 Replit AI Agent Builds Apps In Minutes! Vibe Coding Explained
youtube
LLM Vibe Score0.422
Human Vibe Score0.9
Ishan SharmaFeb 22, 2025

Coding Is OVER!🤯 Replit AI Agent Builds Apps In Minutes! Vibe Coding Explained

Check out the apps I built: 📚 Learning App: https://learn-flash-master-ishanclips7390.replit.app/ 💪 Fitness Tracker: https://fitness-companion-ishanclips7390.replit.app/ 💰 Finance Tracker: https://mindful-spendings.lovable.app/ In this video, I'll show you 2 powerful and completely free AI tools that will help you build professional applications without any coding knowledge! Instead of spending hours writing complex code, you can now simply describe what you want to build, while AI takes care of the technical stuff. This new approach, called "Vibe Coding," is a great way to bring your ideas to life. Watch the full tutorial to learn how easily you can start building your own apps today. CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Introduction 01:17 - Replit: AI Tool 1 01:45 - Creating a Learning App 07:56 - Lovable: AI Tool 2 08:14 - Creating a Finance Tracker 10:58 - More Examples 12:47 - Conclusion 📸 Instagram: https://bit.ly/ishansharma7390ig Join MarkitUpX Discord Server: https://discord.gg/fwSpTje4rh 😁 About Me: https://bit.ly/aboutishansharma 📱 Twitter: https://bit.ly/ishansharma7390twt 📝 LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/ishansharma7390li 🌟 Please leave a LIKE ❤️ and SUBSCRIBE for more AMAZING content! 🌟 3 Books You Should Read 📈Psychology of Money: https://amzn.to/30wx4bW 👀Subtle Art of Not Giving a F: https://amzn.to/30zwWbP 💼Rework: https://amzn.to/3ALsAuz Tech I use every day 💻MacBook Air M1: https://amzn.to/2YWKPjG 📺LG 29' Ultrawide Monitor: https://amzn.to/3aG0p5p 🎥Sony ZV1: https://amzn.to/3ANqgDb 🎙Blue Yeti Mic: https://amzn.to/2YYbiNN ⽴Tripod Stand: https://amzn.to/3mVUiQc 🔅Ring Light: https://amzn.to/2YQlzLJ 🎧Marshall Major II Headphone: https://amzn.to/3lLhTDQ 🖱Logitech mouse: https://amzn.to/3p8edOC 💺Green Soul Chair: https://amzn.to/3mWIxZP ✨ Tags ✨ ishan sharma,ai agents,ai agents explained,ai agents 2025,ai assistant,ai agents tutorial,ai agents full guide,ai agent,ai,artificial intelligence,ai agents use cases,replit ai agent,lovable ai tutorial,replit ai tutorial,build app with ai,build app without coding,ai website builder,coding with AI,lovable,lovable tutorial,web development,replit ai agent tutorial,vibe coding,vibe coding tutorial,vibe coding ai,no code app builder,no code, Coding Is OVER! Replit AI Agent Builds Apps In Minutes! Vibe Coding Explained ✨ Hashtags ✨ #ai #aitools #coding

How I'd Use AI in 2025 (If I Could Start Over)
youtube
LLM Vibe Score0.415
Human Vibe Score0.86
Ishan SharmaFeb 12, 2025

How I'd Use AI in 2025 (If I Could Start Over)

Check out the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Courses by Simplilearn: https://bit.ly/Ishan-AIML With tools like Gemini, DeepSeek, Perplexity, NotebookLM, and many others that are exploding in 2025, it's becoming insanely easier to get things done faster and better. It would be a very long and tiring video if I started talking about every single AI tool on the rise. However, a better option is to talk about how you can actually use these AI tools in your work to achieve maximum output in the shortest period. And that's what you'll be learning today through this video. I've shared a complete step-by-step guide that will give you a better understanding of using AI, resources, and tools to help you get started. This is the perfect time to experiment and experience where AI can actually help us. 📸 Instagram: https://bit.ly/ishansharma7390ig Join MarkitUpX Discord Server: https://discord.gg/fwSpTje4rh CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Introduction 02:00 - Step 1 05:36 - Step 2 07:15 - Step 3 09:42 - Conclusion 😁 About Me: https://bit.ly/aboutishansharma 📱 Twitter: https://bit.ly/ishansharma7390twt 📝 LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/ishansharma7390li 🌟 Please leave a LIKE ❤️ and SUBSCRIBE for more AMAZING content! 🌟 3 Books You Should Read 📈Psychology of Money: https://amzn.to/30wx4bW 👀Subtle Art of Not Giving a F: https://amzn.to/30zwWbP 💼Rework: https://amzn.to/3ALsAuz Tech I use every day 💻MacBook Air M1: https://amzn.to/2YWKPjG 📺LG 29' Ultrawide Monitor: https://amzn.to/3aG0p5p 🎥Sony ZV1: https://amzn.to/3ANqgDb 🎙Blue Yeti Mic: https://amzn.to/2YYbiNN ⽴Tripod Stand: https://amzn.to/3mVUiQc 🔅Ring Light: https://amzn.to/2YQlzLJ 🎧Marshall Major II Headphone: https://amzn.to/3lLhTDQ 🖱Logitech mouse: https://amzn.to/3p8edOC 💺Green Soul Chair: https://amzn.to/3mWIxZP ✨ Tags ✨ ishan sharma,ai,ml,artificial intelligence,machine learning,ai engineering,ai career,ai ml jobs,machine learning jobs,machine learning career,how to become ai ml engineer,how to become ai engineer,developer,development,ai developer,ml developer,how to be an ai dev,how to become an ai engineer,ai developer roadmap,ai engineer roadmap,ai developer course,ai developer guide,ai for beginners,how to learn ai,free courses,ai courses,ml courses ✨ Hashtags ✨ #ai #artificialintelligence #aitools

15 EASY Business Ideas to GET RICH with AI Agents in 2025
youtube
LLM Vibe Score0.432
Human Vibe Score0.73
Ishan SharmaFeb 3, 2025

15 EASY Business Ideas to GET RICH with AI Agents in 2025

Check out the AI Income Ideas Guide by HubSpot Today: https://clickhubspot.com/6rig In 2025, so many companies want to automate their work and they are looking for tools that can help them with that. Imagine earning your first thousand dollars just by helping a business automate its repetitive tasks with AI agents. In this video, I’ve shared 15 business ideas that you can start using AI agents and help companies in different aspects and earn money doing that! You don't need years of technical skills to master this - you just need to understand how to solve real problems with AI. And right now, there's so much opportunity because most people are not even aware of this. Watch the video till the end and take notes 📸 Instagram: https://bit.ly/ishansharma7390ig Join MarkitUpX Discord Server: https://discord.gg/fwSpTje4rh CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Introduction 00:49 - Business Idea 1 01:53 - Business Idea 2 03:02 - Business Idea 3 04:40 - Business Idea 4 05:31 - Business Idea 5 06:05 - Business Idea 6 07:38 - Business Idea 7 09:00 - Business Idea 8 10:18 - Business Idea 9 10:52 - Business Idea 10 12:07 - Business Idea 11 13:45 - Business Idea 12 15:55 - Business Idea 13 16:52 - Business Idea 14 17:38 - Business Idea 15 18:42 - Conclusion 😁 About Me: https://bit.ly/aboutishansharma 📱 Twitter: https://bit.ly/ishansharma7390twt 📝 LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/ishansharma7390li 🌟 Please leave a LIKE ❤️ and SUBSCRIBE for more AMAZING content! 🌟 3 Books You Should Read 📈Psychology of Money: https://amzn.to/30wx4bW 👀Subtle Art of Not Giving a F: https://amzn.to/30zwWbP 💼Rework: https://amzn.to/3ALsAuz Tech I use every day 💻MacBook Air M1: https://amzn.to/2YWKPjG 📺LG 29' Ultrawide Monitor: https://amzn.to/3aG0p5p 🎥Sony ZV1: https://amzn.to/3ANqgDb 🎙Blue Yeti Mic: https://amzn.to/2YYbiNN ⽴Tripod Stand: https://amzn.to/3mVUiQc 🔅Ring Light: https://amzn.to/2YQlzLJ 🎧Marshall Major II Headphone: https://amzn.to/3lLhTDQ 🖱Logitech mouse: https://amzn.to/3p8edOC 💺Green Soul Chair: https://amzn.to/3mWIxZP ✨ Tags ✨ ishan sharma,ai agents,ai agents explained,ai agents 2025,ai assistant,get rich with ai agents,make money ai agents,make money online,earn money online,ai agents tutorial,ai agent,ai,ai tools,make money with ai,make money with ai tools,artificial intelligence,deepseek r1,ai agents use cases,ai agents projects,business ideas with low investment,zero investment business ideas,business ideas for students,business ideas for beginners,best business ideas,how to start a business,online business ideas,startup business ideas,ai business ideas,business ideas using ai ✨ Hashtags ✨ #ai #artificialintelligence #businessideas

Mastering-AI-for-Entrepreneurs-9-Free-Courses
github
LLM Vibe Score0.203
Human Vibe Score0
Softtechhub1Feb 1, 2025

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
github
LLM Vibe Score0.236
Human Vibe Score0.009333333333333334
bogdanmosicaJan 23, 2025

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! 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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. 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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. CreatorKit - A.I. video creator for marketers [](https://creatorkit.com/) Create videos with just one click, using our A.I. video editor purpose built for marketers. Create scroll stopping videos, Instagram stories, Ads, Reels, and TikTok videos. Pixar in a Box | Computing | Khan Academy [](https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/pixar) 3D Video Motions Plask - AI Motion Capture and 3D Animation Tool [](https://plask.ai/) Plask is an all-in-one browser-based AI motion capture tool and animation editor that anybody can use, from motion designers to every day content creators. Captions Captions [](https://www.getcaptions.app/) Say hello to Captions, the only camera and editing app that automatically transcribes, captions and clips your talking videos for you. Stock videos Pexels [](https://www.pexels.com/) Pixabay [](https://pixabay.com/) Mixkit - Awesome free assets for your next video project [](https://mixkit.co/) Download Free Stock Video Footage, Stock Music & Premiere Pro Templates for your next video editing project. All assets can be downloaded for free! Free Stock Video Footage HD 4K Download Royalty-Free Clips [](https://www.videvo.net/) Download free stock video footage with over 300,000 video clips in 4K and HD. We also offer a wide selection of music and sound effect files with over 180,000 clips available. Click here to download royalty-free licensing videos, motion graphics, music and sound effects from Videvo today. Free Stock Video Footage HD Royalty-Free Videos Download [](https://mazwai.com/) Download free stock video footage with clips available in HD. Click here to download royalty-free licensing videos from Mazwai now. Royalty Free Stock Video Footage Clips | Vidsplay.com [](https://www.vidsplay.com/) Royalty Free Stock Video Footage Clips Free Stock Video Footage, Royalty Free Videos for Download [](https://coverr.co/) Download royalty free (for personal and commercial use), unique and beautiful video footage for your website or any project. No attribution required. Stock Photos Beautiful Free Images & Pictures | Unsplash [](https://unsplash.com/) Beautiful, free images and photos that you can download and use for any project. Better than any royalty free or stock photos. When we share, everyone wins - Creative Commons [](https://creativecommons.org/) Creative Commons licenses are 20! Honoring 20 years of open sharing using CC licenses, join us in 2022 to celebrate Better Sharing — advancing universal access to knowledge and culture, and fostering creativity, innovation, and collaboration. Help us reach our goal of raising $15 million for a future of Better Sharing.  20 Years of Better … Read More "When we share, everyone wins" Food Pictures • Foodiesfeed • Free Food Photos [](https://www.foodiesfeed.com/) Download 2000+ food pictures ⋆ The best free food photos for commercial use ⋆ CC0 license Free Stock Photos and Images for Websites & Commercial Use [](https://burst.shopify.com/) Browse thousands of beautiful copyright-free images. All our pictures are free to download for personal and commercial use, no attribution required. EyeEm | Authentic Stock Photography and Royalty-Free Images [](https://www.eyeem.com/) Explore high-quality, royalty-free stock photos for commercial use. License individual images or save money with our flexible subscription and image pack plans. picjumbo: Free Stock Photos [](https://picjumbo.com/) Free stock photos and images for your projects and websites.️ Beautiful 100% free high-resolution stock images with no watermark. Free Stock Photos, Images, and Vectors [](https://www.stockvault.net/) 139.738 free stock photos, textures, backgrounds and graphics for your next project. No attribution required. Free Stock Photos, PNGs, Templates & Mockups | rawpixel [](https://www.rawpixel.com/) Free images, PNGs, stickers, backgrounds, wallpapers, graphic templates and PSD mockups. All safe to use with commercial licenses. Free Commercial Stock Photos & Royalty Free Images | PikWizard [](https://pikwizard.com/) Free images, videos & free stock photos. Unlimited downloads ✓ Royalty-free Images ✓Copyright-free for commercial use ✓ No Attribution Required Design Bundles [](https://designbundles.net/) Stock music Royalty Free Music for video creators | Epidemic Sound [](https://www.epidemicsound.com/) Download premium Royalty free Music and SFX! Our free trial gives you access to over 35,000 tracks and 90,000 sound effects for video, streaming and more! Royalty-Free Music & SFX for Video Creators | Artlist [](https://artlist.io/) Explore the ultimate royalty-free music & sound effects catalogs for unlimited use in YouTube videos, social media & films created by inspiring indie artists worldwide. The go-to music licensing choice for all creators Royalty Free Audio Tracks - Envato Elements [](https://elements.envato.com/audio) Download Royalty Free Stock Audio Tracks for your next project from Envato Elements. Premium, High Quality handpicked Audio files ideal for any genre. License popular music for videos • Lickd [](https://lickd.co/) The only place you can license popular music for videos. Access 1M+ mainstream tracks, plus high-quality stock music for content creators NCS (NoCopyrightSounds) - free music for content creators [](https://ncs.io/) NCS is a Record Label dedicated to giving a platform to the next generation of Artists in electronic music, representing genres from house to dubstep via trap, drum & bass, electro pop and more. Search Engine Optimization Keyword Tool For Monthly Search Volume, CPC & Competition [](https://keywordseverywhere.com/) Keywords Everywhere is a browser add-on for Chrome & Firefox that shows search volume, CPC & competition on multiple websites. Semrush - Online Marketing Can Be Easy [](https://www.semrush.com/) Turn the algorithm into a friend. Make your business visible online with 55+ tools for SEO, PPC, content, social media, competitive research, and more. DuckDuckGo — Privacy, simplified. [](https://duckduckgo.com/) The Internet privacy company that empowers you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online, without any tradeoffs. SEO Software for 360° Analysis of Your Website [](https://seranking.com/) Leading SEO software for business owners, agencies, and SEO specialists. Track your rankings, monitor competitors, spot technical errors, and more. Skyrocket your organic traffic with Surfer [](https://surferseo.com/) Use Surfer to research, write, optimize, and audit! Everything you need to create a comprehensive content strategy that yields real results is right here. Ahrefs - SEO Tools & Resources To Grow Your Search Traffic [](https://ahrefs.com/) You don't have to be an SEO pro to rank higher and get more traffic. Join Ahrefs – we're a powerful but easy to learn SEO toolset with a passionate community. Neon Tools [](https://neontools.io/) Google Index Search [](https://lumpysoft.com/) Google Index Search SEO Backlink Checker & Link Building Toolset | Majestic.com [](https://majestic.com/) Develop backlink strategies with our Link Intelligence data, build the strongest SEO backlink campaigns to drive organic traffic and boost your rankings today. PageOptimizer Pro [](https://pageoptimizer.pro/) Plans Services SEO Consulting Learn SEO About Blog POP SEO Community Podcast Support POP On Page Workshops With Kyle Roof POP Chrome Extension Guide Tutorial Videos Frequently Asked Questions Best Practices Login Cancel Anytime Plans Services SEO Consulting Learn SEO About Blog POP SEO Community Podcast Support POP On Page… Keyword Chef - Keywords for Publishers [](https://keywordchef.com/) Rank Insanely Fast for Keywords Your Competition Can’t Find “Every long-tail keyword I find ends up ranking within a day” – Dane Eyerly, Owner at TextGoods.com Keyword Chef automatically finds and filters keywords for you. Real-time SERP analysis lets you find keywords nearly guaranteed to rank. Try for free → Let’s face it, most keyword tools ... Read more Notifier - Social Listening for Social Media and More! [](https://notifier.so/) Track keywords. Market your product for free. Drive the conversation. Easy. Free Trial. No obligation ever. Simple. Fast. Trusted by Top Companies. Free Keyword Research Tool from Wordtracker [](https://www.wordtracker.com/) The best FREE alternative to the Keyword Planner. Use Wordtracker to reveal 1000s of profitable longtail keywords with up to 10,000 results per search Blog Posts The 60 Hottest Front-end Tools of 2021 | CSS-Tricks - CSS-Tricks [](https://css-tricks.com/hottest-front-end-tools-in-2021/) A complete list of the most popular front-end tools in 2021, according to the Web Tools Weekly newsletter. See which resources made the list. Resume ResumeGlow - AI Powered Resume Builder [](https://resumeglow.com/) Get hired fast with a resume that grabs attention. Designed by a team of HR experts and typographers. Customizable templates with more than a million possible Create Your Job-winning Resume - (Free) Resume maker · Resume.io [](https://resume.io/) Free online resume maker, allows you to create a perfect Resume or Cover Letter in 5 minutes. See how easy it is to write a professional resume - apply for jobs today! Rezi - The Leading AI-Powered Free Resume Builder [](https://www.rezi.ai/) Rezi’s award-winning AI-powered resume builder is trusted by hundreds of thousands of job seekers. Create your perfect resume in minutes with Rezi. Create a Perfect Resume | Free Resume Builder | Resumaker.ai [](https://resumaker.ai/) Create your professional resume with this online resume maker. Choose a designer-made template and grab any employer attention in seconds. Trusted AI Resume Maker Helps You Get Hired Fast [](https://skillroads.com/) Reach a 96.4% success rate in the job hunt race with the best resume creator. Our innovative technologies and 24/7 support help you to become a perfect candidate for any job. Do not lose your chance to become the One. Kickresume | Best Online Resume & Cover Letter Builder [](https://www.kickresume.com/) Create your best resume yet. Online resume and cover letter builder used by 1,300,000 job seekers worldwide. Professional templates approved by recruiters. ResumeMaker.Online | Create a Professional Resume for Free [](https://www.resumemaker.online/) Save time with the easiest-to-use Resume Maker Online. Create an effective resume in just minutes and land your dream job. No Sign-up required, start now! Interviews Interview Warmup - Grow with Google [](https://grow.google/certificates/interview-warmup/) A quick way to prepare for your next interview. Practice key questions, get insights about your answers, and get more comfortable interviewing. No code website builder Carrd - Simple, free, fully responsive one-page sites for pretty much anything [](https://carrd.co/) A free platform for building simple, fully responsive one-page sites for pretty much anything. Webflow: Create a custom website | No-code website builder [](https://webflow.com/) Create professional, custom websites in a completely visual canvas with no code. Learn how to create a website by trying Webflow for free! Google Sites: Sign-in [](https://sites.google.com/) FlutterFlow - Build beautiful, modern apps incredibly fast! [](https://flutterflow.io/) FlutterFlow lets you build apps incredibly fast in your browser. Build fully functional apps with Firebase integration, API support, animations, and more. Export your code or even easier deploy directly to the app stores! Free Website Builder: Build a Free Website or Online Store | Weebly [](https://www.weebly.com/) Weebly’s free website builder makes it easy to create a website, blog, or online store. Find customizable templates, domains, and easy-to-use tools for any type of business website. Glide • No Code App Builder • Nocode Application Development [](https://www.glideapps.com/) Create the apps your business needs, without coding, waiting or overpaying. Get started for free and build an app today Adalo - Build Your Own No Code App [](https://www.adalo.com/) Adalo makes creating apps as easy as putting together a slide deck. Turn your idea into a real native app — no code needed! Siter.io - The collaborative web design tool, no-code website builder [](https://siter.io/) Siter.io is a visual website builder for designers. Prototype, design, and create responsive websites in the browser. Work together with your team in one place. Elementor: #1 Free WordPress Website Builder | Elementor.com [](https://elementor.com/) Elementor is the platform web creators choose to build professional WordPress websites, grow their skills, and build their business. Start for free today! No code app builder | Bravo Studio [](https://www.bravostudio.app/) Your no-code mobile app builder for iOS and Android. Create MVP’s, validate ideas and publish on App Store and Google Play Store. Home [](https://typedream.com/) The simplest way to build a website with no-code, as easy as writing on Notion. Try Typedream for free and upgrade for custom domains, collaborators, and unlimited pages. Free Website Builder | Create a Free Website | Wix.com [](https://www.wix.com/) Create a website with Wix’s robust website builder. With 900+ strategically designed templates and advanced SEO and marketing tools, build your brand online today. Free responsive Emails & Landing Pages drag-and-drop Editor | BEE [](https://beefree.io/) Free responsive emails and landing pages editor. With BEE drag-and-drop builders embedded in many software applications you can start designing now! Home [](https://typedream.com/) The simplest way to build a website with no-code, as easy as writing on Notion. Try Typedream for free and upgrade for custom domains, collaborators, and unlimited pages. Ownit Connected Checkout [](https://www.ownit.co/) Ownit Connected Checkout Bookmark.com | No-code Website Builder to Start Your Business [](https://www.bookmark.com/) Our AI powered platform ensures your business is future proof. Try Bookmark for free. The best way to build web apps without code | Bubble [](https://bubble.io/) Bubble introduces a new way to build software. It’s a no-code tool that lets you build SaaS platforms, marketplaces and CRMs without code. Bubble hosts all web apps on its cloud platform. Responsive Web Design | Website Creation | Editor X [](https://www.editorx.com/) Experience the future of website design with responsive layouts, CSS precision and smooth drag and drop. Create a Website for Free. Tilda Website Builder [](https://tilda.cc/) Create a website, online store, landing page with Tilda intuitive website builder. Build your site from hundreds of pre-designed templates and publish it today. No code required. No-code headless commerce and websites | Unstack Inc. [](https://www.unstack.com/) Deploy high performance eCommerce storefronts and websites without the engineering overhead using Unstack's no-code CMS Best Drag-and-Drop Website Builder | Jemi [](https://jemi.so/) The modern website builder for creatives, entrepreneurs, and dreamers. Build a beautiful link in bio site, portfolio, or landing page in minutes. No-code website builder that works like Notion [](https://popsy.co/) Create a beautiful no-code website in minutes. Popsy works just like Notion but is built from the ground up for building websites. Choose a free template. Edit content just like in Notion. Customize styles without code. Free Notion icons and illustrations. Unbounce - The Landing Page Builder & Platform [](https://unbounce.com/) Grow your relevance, leads, and sales with Unbounce. 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YT_Emerging_Technologies_Introduction_to_AI
github
LLM Vibe Score0.461
Human Vibe Score0.039054583141409485
zusmaniJan 17, 2025

YT_Emerging_Technologies_Introduction_to_AI

YouTube Channel: Emerging Technologies Playlist: Introduction to AI Instructor: Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani Dear Students, I have uploaded all relevant material here for your quick access and learning. I hope you will find it beneficiary Yours Truly, Zeeshan =========================================== Video title: Resources Books to Order: Artificial Intelligence by Zeeshan Usmani - https://gufhtugu.com/artificial-intelligence Artificial Intelligence by Baqir Naqvi - https://gufhtugu.com/masnoi-zahanat/ Recommended Books • Gödel, Escher, Bach : An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter A classic, poetic, philosophical defense of AI. • Machines Who Think by Pamela McCorduck. A good review of early AI history. • Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind by Hans P. Moravec Somewhat hyped book by a CMU robotics researcher. • Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us by Rodney Allen Brooks Reasonably decent book by MIT's leading robotics researcher. • Wired for War by Peter Warren Singer Reviews growing use of robots and unmanned vehicles in warfare. • Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer That Defeated the World Chess Champion by Feng-Hsiung Hsu Autobiographical book on the development of a history making game-playing system. Interesting personal story of the hard engineering work that went into the system, with a few interesting facts on the technical aspects. • The Age of Spiritual Machines : When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil A recent view by an AI entrepreneur that has content if you ignore all the hype and overly-optimistic trust that Moore's law will magically solve all of the major problems. • Hal's Legacy : 2001's Computer As Dream and Reality An interesting collection of edited articles written to celebrate the fictional birthday of a famous intelligent computer who's true birthday must unfortunately be delayed, pending AI's inevitable progress. • The Sciences of the Artificial by Herbert Simon AI as science by one of its founders. • Models of My Life by Herbert Simon. An autobiography of one of AI's founders who's intellectual contributions also include fundamental contributions to economics (for which he won the Nobel prize), cognitive psychology, and computer science (such as co-inventing the linked list in the 1950's). • Alan Turing: The Enigma by Alan Hodges. A biography of one of the founders of CS and originator of the Turing test. Also a testimony to the tragic implications of homophobia. • The Emperor's New Mind : Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics and Shadows of the Mind : A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness and The Large, the Small and the Human Mind by Roger Penrose A completely bogus argument against AI by a hopelessly Platonic mathematician. The last book contains an appended article by Stephen Hawking (a colleague of Penrose's) who of course doesn't buy his bogus argument. • The Mind's New Science : A History of the Cognitive Revolution by Howard Gardner A nice history of the development of cognitive science. • How the Mind Works , The Language Instinct , and Words and Rules : The Ingredients of Language by Steven Pinker Fun reading on lots of interesting issues in modern Cognitive Science and Linguistics if you don't take his exaggerated beliefs in nativism and evolutionary psychology too seriously. • Bots : The Origin of New Species by Andrew Leonard A light, somewhat hyped book on on Internet agents, chatterbots, etc. with a few funny stories. • Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty by Morris Kline A very nice book on the failed enterprise of using logic to build a firm foundation for infallible mathematics and the role of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem in the philosophy of mathematics. • Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel by Rebecca Goldstein An interesting biography of Kurt Gödel. Too bad he was such a Platonist that, unlike Turing, he did not understand the true implications of his own theorems (interesting author connection: Goldstein is Pinker's wife). Links: • AAAI AI Topics Basic info on AI from the American Association for Artificial Intelligence: http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/html/welcome.html • Loebner Prize for limited Turing test: http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html • IBM's Deep Blue Page: http://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/ • Robocup: Robotic Soccer Competition: http://www.robocup.org/ • NY Times Article on Proof of the Robbins Theorem: http://www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/1210math.html • NY Times article on Bayes Nets at Microsoft Research: http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/07/biztech/articles/17lab.html =========================================== Video title: Numbers Infinity Video Link - •https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlXHwMgS06c https://www.cbs.com/shows/numb3rs/ http://numb3rs.wolfram.com/ =========================================== Video title: 20 Hours Rule and Assisgnemnt Assignment - https://www.urdufake2020.cicling.org/ =========================================== Video title: Assignments – P1 Mostly Human - https://money.cnn.com/mostly-human =========================================== Video title: Assignments – P2 Assignment – 2 - https://replika.ai/ Assignment – 3 – Teachable Machines https://teachablemachine.withgoogle.com/ Assignment – 4 – Tensor Flow Playground https://playground.tensorflow.org Assignment – 5 – GPT-3 Paper (175B Parameters) https://debuild.co/ Assignment – 6 - Image GPT-3 https://openai.com/blog/image-gpt/ =========================================== Video title: Create your own Deep Fake 1.https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1mGg_fmvhTpvkPkclw2yKkhALVzmawfvT?usp=sharing 2.https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1wW1bxRV2S7Ce8gc3VDTzMQABE3-WCc_Y?usp=sharing •go into you gdrive > find cloned folder and ensure that this folder must have: vox-adv-cpk.pth.tar & vox-cpk.pth.tar failes •Aliaksandr Siarohin : https://github.com/AliaksandrSiarohin/first-order-model

DO THIS To Get RICH With AI in 2025
youtube
LLM Vibe Score0.358
Human Vibe Score0.31
Ishan SharmaJan 12, 2025

DO THIS To Get RICH With AI in 2025

Ishan Sharma: DO THIS To Get RICH With AI in 2025 How AI is CHANGING the Startup World! 🤯 Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, predicts how one person could build a billion dollar startup, only using AI tools and software. It is crazy to think that the next billion dollar company might just be yours or mine with our AI toolset. This is a glimpse from the podcast where me and Saheli discussed freelancing, how to master personal branding as a beginner, how to talk with clients and much more. 📸 Instagram: https://bit.ly/ishansharma7390ig Join MarkitUpX Discord Server: https://discord.gg/fwSpTje4rh 😁 About Me: https://bit.ly/aboutishansharma 📱 Twitter: https://bit.ly/ishansharma7390twt 📝 LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/ishansharma7390li 🌟 Please leave a LIKE ❤️ and SUBSCRIBE for more AMAZING content! 🌟 3 Books You Should Read 📈Psychology of Money: https://amzn.to/30wx4bW 👀Subtle Art of Not Giving a F: https://amzn.to/30zwWbP 💼Rework: https://amzn.to/3ALsAuz Tech I use every day 💻MacBook Air M1: https://amzn.to/2YWKPjG 📺LG 29' Ultrawide Monitor: https://amzn.to/3aG0p5p 🎥Sony ZV1: https://amzn.to/3ANqgDb 🎙Blue Yeti Mic: https://amzn.to/2YYbiNN ⽴Tripod Stand: https://amzn.to/3mVUiQc 🔅Ring Light: https://amzn.to/2YQlzLJ 🎧Marshall Major II Headphone: https://amzn.to/3lLhTDQ 🖱Logitech mouse: https://amzn.to/3p8edOC 💺Green Soul Chair: https://amzn.to/3mWIxZP ✨ Tags ✨ ishan sharma,DO THIS To Get RICH With AI in 2025,ai agent,ai agents,low investment business ideas,business ideas with low investment,zero investment business ideas,best business ideas 2024,business ideas for students,business ideas for beginners,best business ideas,how to start a business,online business ideas,new business ideas 2024,startup business ideas,money,ai business ideas,business ideas using ai,ai,artificial intelligence,chatgpt,bard,gemini,google ✨ Hashtags ✨ #business #businessideas #ai

How I Code Profitable Apps SOLO (no wasted time / beginner friendly / with AI)
youtube
LLM Vibe Score0.444
Human Vibe Score0.91
Edmund YongDec 27, 2024

How I Code Profitable Apps SOLO (no wasted time / beginner friendly / with AI)

Check out Scrimba – my preferred platform for learning to code (get an extra 20% off Pro with my links): AI Engineer Path: https://scrimba.com/the-ai-engineer-path-c02v?via=edmundyong Frontend Developer Career Path: https://scrimba.com/the-frontend-developer-career-path-c0j?via=edmundyong All Courses: https://scrimba.com/courses?via=edmundyong ===== Join Startup Club - A community for solo makers: https://discord.gg/YFPJQRBTrA Mobbin - A library of design inspiration for your apps: https://mobbin.com/?via=edmund Try my Startup (Easy Folders): https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/chatgpt-folders-search-pr/gdocioajfidpnaejbgmbnkflgmppibfe?utm_source=youtube Socials: https://www.instagram.com/e.yongg/ https://www.twitter.com/edmund_io/ ===== Wishing all you happy holidays 🎄🎅 Sharing a general roadmap on how I approach coding apps that earn money. Resources used in this video (let me know if I am missing any): https://roadmap.sh/ https://dev.to/rowsanali/do-you-have-shiny-object-syndrome-as-a-dev-4ld7 https://longform.asmartbear.com/slc/ https://www.getbeamer.com/blog/customer-feedback-management-startups https://x.com/namyakhann/status/1863525098529194293 https://x.com/namyakhann/status/1861816326496399830 ===== 00:00 - Intro 00:46 - The mindset you need to adopt 01:23 - Setting clear goals (seriously) 02:51 - The building phase 05:34 - The marketing phase 06:25 - The iterating phase ===== #SeoulVlog #dayinthelife #korean #koreanvlog #startups #SeoulLife #indiehackers #DigitalNomad #softwareengineer #softwaredeveloper #codingvlog #solotravel #solopreneur #startupvlog

FORGET ChatGPT, This AI TOOL is a GAMECHANGER 🔥
youtube
LLM Vibe Score0.299
Human Vibe Score0.32
Ishan SharmaOct 19, 2024

FORGET ChatGPT, This AI TOOL is a GAMECHANGER 🔥

Ishan Sharma: FORGET ChatGPT, This AI TOOL is a GAMECHANGER 🔥 Google just dropped NotebookLM and it is changing everything. I was using ChatGPT so far for research and learning, but NotebookLM has stolen the charm. NotebookLM lets you convert PDFs, YouTube videos, or Websites into Audio Podcasts This is a 2 person conversational podcast about the topic And Trust me, it sounds too good to be AI generated. It's powered by Google's latest Gemini 1.5 model. But that’s not all! You can add multiple sources in a notebook And also get a summary, table of contents, study guide And MORE in seconds! THIS is a game changer for learners, researchers, and creators! Helping you skyrocket your productivity. It's also great for school students and college students to learn anything faster. Try it out on notebooklm.google.com 📸 Instagram: https://bit.ly/ishansharma7390ig Join MarkitUpX Discord Server: https://discord.gg/fwSpTje4rh Timestamps 😁 About Me: https://bit.ly/aboutishansharma 📱 Twitter: https://bit.ly/ishansharma7390twt 📝 LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/ishansharma7390li 🌟 Please leave a LIKE ❤️ and SUBSCRIBE for more AMAZING content! 🌟 3 Books You Should Read 📈Psychology of Money: https://amzn.to/30wx4bW 👀Subtle Art of Not Giving a F: https://amzn.to/30zwWbP 💼Rework: https://amzn.to/3ALsAuz Tech I use every day 💻MacBook Air M1: https://amzn.to/2YWKPjG 📺LG 29' Ultrawide Monitor: https://amzn.to/3aG0p5p 🎥Sony ZV1: https://amzn.to/3ANqgDb 🎙Blue Yeti Mic: https://amzn.to/2YYbiNN ⽴Tripod Stand: https://amzn.to/3mVUiQc 🔅Ring Light: https://amzn.to/2YQlzLJ 🎧Marshall Major II Headphone: https://amzn.to/3lLhTDQ 🖱Logitech mouse: https://amzn.to/3p8edOC 💺Green Soul Chair: https://amzn.to/3mWIxZP ✨ Tags ✨ ishan sharma,FORGET ChatGPT This AI TOOL is a GAMECHANGER,chatgpt,gpt-4o,chatgpt 4o,gpt4o,openai,gpt 4,openai sora,microsoft openai,artificial intelligence,ai,chatbot,gpt-4,chatgpt-4,new gpt ai model,chatgpt vision,chatgpt chatbot,chatgpt4o,new ai,chat gpt,chatgpt 4,gpt update,chat gpt 4o,google notebooklm,google notebook,google notebook app,google notebooklm tool,google keep,google ai,google app ai,google notes app,google notes ai ✨ Hashtags ✨ #google #chatgpt #ai

Top 7 AI Certifications That Pay Incredibly Well Right Now
youtube
LLM Vibe Score0.416
Human Vibe Score0.75
SuperHumans LifeOct 13, 2024

Top 7 AI Certifications That Pay Incredibly Well Right Now

The right certifications can make a huge difference to how much money you can charge for freelance jobs. These certifications help you both land jobs, start a new side hustle or even turn it into a full time business because they give you the knowledge and credentials needed for you to do a great job and make clients happy. 🐝 Join our FREE AI Business Trailblazers Hive Community at https://www.skool.com/ai-trailblazers-hive-7394/about?ref=ff40ab4ff9184e7ca2d1971501f578df. Get cold outreach templates, in-depth tutorials, and live Q&As to help you launch and scale your AI side hustle. Like and subscribe for more videos like this if you've enjoyed the content. ALL GOOGLE CERTIFICATIONS THAT MATTER TO MAKE MONEY (START FREE) ⭐ Google Data Analytics Certificate: imp.i384100.net/xkRyXv ⭐ Google Digital Marketing Certificate: https://imp.i384100.net/JzWJoE ⭐ Google IT Support Certificate: https://imp.i384100.net/g14D5A ⭐ Google Project Management Certificate: https://imp.i384100.net/oqBzJO ⭐ Google UX Design Certificate: https://imp.i384100.net/B01xky ⭐ Google Ads for Beginners: https://imp.i384100.net/PyWxeQ ⭐ Introduction to Generative AI: https://imp.i384100.net/eKbz3z ⭐ Google Cybersecurity Certificate: https://imp.i384100.net/3eLQ2B ⭐ Google Google Advanced Data Analytics Certificate: https://imp.i384100.net/Y90eXR ⭐ Google IT Automation with Python Certificate https://imp.i384100.net/9grkmy ⭐ Google Business Intelligence Certificate: https://imp.i384100.net/eKbz3j ⭐ Google Crash Course on Python: https://imp.i384100.net/DKJoYd 👉 Freelancer Freedom Blueprint: https://superhumans.life/ffb-flow-landing-simple/ The start to finish step by step playbook to start making money online from scratch. 👉The Dream Job Challenge: https://superhumans.life/dream-career-landing-flow/ The best ways I know to get clear on what skills you can monetize and make money doing what you love. 👉 Create an Irresistible Profile - https://superhumans.life/irresistible-profile-flow-landing/ The ultimate strategies to create a perfect profile that attracts clients. 👉 Get a list with 99 validated remote job sites: https://superhumans.life/99-validated-remote-jobs-sites-flow-landing-2/ Start applying and earning money today. 👉 Get the 99 Ingenious Midjourney & ChatGPT Prompts for Digital Wall Art: https://superhumans.life/product/99-digital-art-etsy-shop-prompts/ Perfect if you want to start an Etsy shop to make money and don't have products to stand out. 🌐 MY WEBSITE: https://bit.ly/3KTY9sc with resources on how to get work from home online jobs that you can do remotely and how to get started as a freelancer. ✅ FREE Freelancing Masterclass - Step by step guide to get online work from home jobs ✅ https://www.superhumans.life/10xmasterclass ✅ Review your Upwork profile with my cheat sheet. DOWNLOAD HERE for FREE: https://www.superhumans.life/upworkchecklist/ OTHER MONEY MAKING VIDEOS: ►► This Simple Way to Make Money Copy Pasting Google News Will Blow Your Mind (Legit): https://youtu.be/mRJ2gmT69wo ►► Top Tier Google Certifications to Make $100,000+ Online (Start Free on Coursera): https://youtu.be/DOb_02gmdvM ►► Make $660/Day with Free Google Generative AI Certificates: https://youtu.be/0GjK1rvuI1Q ►► Make $100k+ working from home with FREE Google Certification trainings: https://youtu.be/K0pQvnYzjv8 ►► Make $917 / Day with Google News and AI posting Faceless Videos (Beginner friendly): https://youtu.be/mRJ2gmT69wo ►► Make Money Online as a Data Analyst with FREE Google Certifications & Training: https://youtu.be/j62iI6i47Yc ►► Make $100,000 / Year with Google Trainings (for High Paying Careers): https://youtu.be/t0GvneBaUjs ►► I Tried Making $800 in 4 Hours with Google Maps (To See If It Works): https://youtu.be/A0xA5vyDgzA ►► Make $550 a Day with These FREE Google Project Management Courses: https://youtu.be/S-lNEQ95bAU ►► How to Use ChatGPT to Find a High Paying Remote Job in Less Than 1 Hour: https://youtu.be/m3MwM6I0hBc OUTSTANDING RESOURCES TO HELP YOUR IMPROVE YOUR SKILLS AND EARN MORE: ►► Skillshare - Learn skills you can actually make money from: https://skillshare.eqcm.net/EKA34X ►► Resume.io - Largest resume builders serving 20 million customers worldwide: https://resumeio.sjv.io/baQEnB ►► Career.io - All-in-one career management platform: https://careerio.sjv.io/OrEjPA ►► Steppit - Easily build and sell immersive online courses with the help of AI: https://steppit.pxf.io/R5Eke7 ►► Placeit - Create designs, mockups, logos & more in just seconds: https://1.envato.market/WqE1V3

How To Start A Business Using Only AI
youtube
LLM Vibe Score0.362
Human Vibe Score0.56
Learn With ShopifySep 2, 2024

How To Start A Business Using Only AI

How to Use AI to Start a Business in 2024. ► Shopify Free Trial https://utm.io/uhpKC ► YouTube takes on TikTok Shop with expanded Shopify partnership https://youtube.com/shorts/XdzbDOak9BI?si=eNUZL8AgZK6f0XJg Unlock Your Entrepreneurial Potential with AI! Ever dreamed of starting a business but felt overwhelmed by the complexity? AI is here to revolutionize the way we work! In this video, we'll guide you through the exciting process of launching your own venture using artificial intelligence. Discover how to: Identify profitable niche ideas using AI-powered market research tools Create compelling content with AI-driven writing assistants Design stunning visuals effortlessly using AI design platforms Build and manage your online store without technical expertise Expand your reach by easily adding your products to social media networks like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting out, this video will equip you with the knowledge and tools to turn your business dreams into reality. Get ready to harness the power of AI and embark on a successful entrepreneurial journey! –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Watch More Learn with Shopify Video Tutorials: ► How to Connect Your Shopify Store To Your YouTube Channel https://youtu.be/ymD5M8w-drk?si=tLt52iNd0VKrL5eW ► YouTube Shopping Tutorial: The Best Way To Sell Your Shopify Products on YouTube LIVE https://youtu.be/AUtEP7LTNeg?si=imvS2pUTsLvhcZmT ► How To Create Beautiful Presentations With AI https://youtu.be/BZ_ObFC7NVA ► What is Shopify Magic and Shopify Sidekick? (And How To Use It) https://youtu.be/Y7Rlr5gxPp4 ► Prompt Engineering Tutorial Part 1: An Introduction to AI Prompting https://youtu.be/zBaa8Ct2C-k?si=ZshSj72IdgpGrAN5 ► Prompt Engineering Tutorial Part 2: Text-to-Text https://youtu.be/ZlQHPt86h6s ► Prompt Engineering Tutorial Part 3: Text-to-Image https://youtu.be/6RAStep_3OI ► Prompt Engineering Tutorial Part 4: Text to Video https://youtu.be/QgjL0fNTwHc ► How to Sell on Instagram https://youtu.be/cqmUWuA2w2U –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 🔔 Subscribe to @learnwithshopify for more productivity tutorials and tips for entrepreneurs of all stages. Here's what we'll cover in this video: 0:00 Intro 0:48 Idea generation using AI 2:20 How to market research using AI 3:14 Naming your business using AI 4:44 AI Logo Generator 6:10 AI Product Creation 9:48 How to upload products to your website 12:15 How to list your items on Instagram 13:06 How to list your items on YouTube 13:40 How to list your items on TikTok 14:04 Marketing using AI 15:30 Legalization –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 📈 Related Videos: 20 Mobile AI Apps https://youtu.be/OSAFKU8FL44 TikTok Marketing Tutorial (Organic Strategy) https://youtu.be/SeWNUUEtZOY TikTok Marketing Tutorial (Paid Ads) https://youtu.be/RIy9ZN3B5CA Reddit for Business Tutorial https://youtu.be/FcYtZg1uGMA LinkedIn Ads Tutorial https://youtu.be/WMKldiJ8mEw 🔗 Useful Resources: ► 64 Best Small Business Ideas To Start in 2024 https://utm.io/uhpKB ► Free Shopify Business Course https://utm.io/uhpKE ► Join our Shopify community https://utm.io/uhpKC –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– -- TOOLS & RESOURCES – ► Sign Up To Shopify Today https://utm.io/uhpKC ► Shopify Masters Podcast @shopifymasters ► Shopify Podcast https://utm.io/uhlvZ ► 10 Amazing AI Tools For Your Business In 2024 https://youtu.be/TKAO1ykK994 ► 10 ChatGPT Tips & Tricks https://youtu.be/88tVeKj0-7k ► How to make money with Instagram Reels https://youtu.be/U831lmASZRY ► The OFFICIAL Shopify Tutorial - The COMPLETE GUIDE https://youtu.be/ferhOYx1NMo –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– #Shopify #aitools #businesscoaching #businessideas

11 Make.com Automations You NEED To Start Using Every Day (steal these)
youtube
LLM Vibe Score0.437
Human Vibe Score0.76
Jono CatliffAug 30, 2024

11 Make.com Automations You NEED To Start Using Every Day (steal these)

🌍 COMMUNITY https://www.skool.com/automatable/about 📝 BLUEPRINTS • New leads automation → https://youtu.be/RGHKaXLPrTk • Automate contracts/invoices → https://youtu.be/hle_HtchLz8 • Automate recruitment → https://youtu.be/_xYJMW5yeUk • Automate lead web scraping & AI lead magnets → https://youtu.be/LLKI_cV7XI4 • Automate AI blog posts → https://youtu.be/FmXt26JY24I • Automate AI social media posting → https://youtu.be/97U8kFkzjYQ • Automate accounting → https://youtu.be/QBuGQaLNFfc • Automate scraping viral content ideas → https://youtu.be/5Wi7fqJwh6s • Automate project management → https://youtu.be/nyoiFHzH1Hw • Automate analytics → https://youtu.be/dRLHT_B-uKg 📚 SUMMARY In this video we walk through the 11 best Make.com automations I use on a daily basis (and you should too). These automations literally changed my life. I went from working 14 hours per day on my business to ultimately replacing my job. There's obviously more to it than just 11, but this is a great start 📺 RELATED VIDEOS • Full crash course on Make.com → https://youtu.be/hinLebdX8aM • Full crash course on Apify & web scraping →https://youtu.be/pKgup8tsPv8 • How I made 507K last year with Bark.com → https://youtu.be/oCaGVACutdE • How I generate 1,000+ blog posts instantly → https://youtu.be/FmXt26JY24I • How I scraped 10,000+ leads & sent lead magnets → https://youtu.be/qwsB72PhM3E 🎯 1:1 CONSULTING Book a time → https://jonocatliff.com/consultation 🚀 AUTOMATION AGENCY Get help with your business → https://www.automatable.co 🔗 LINKS (some of these make me money - thanks in advance!) • Apify → https://jonocatliff.com/apify • Zapier → https://jonocatliff.com/zapier • PandaDoc → https://jonocatliff.com/pandadoc • Make.com → https://jonocatliff.com/make • Go High Level → https://jonocatliff.com/gohighlevel 👋 ABOUT ME Hey everyone, my name is Jono. I run a 7-figure service business that offers DJ, photo, video services (#1 largest in Canada), and spent years figuring out how to automate every part of it (and hired the roles that I couldn't). Conservatively, I used to work 80+ hours per week, before sunrise till long after sunset; missing gatherings, family events and everything in between. Through automation though, I was able to replace my job. My goal is to help share what worked for me, in a dream of helping others find true success with their passion. Please subscribe, like and comment below if you have any questions! Thank you 😊 ⌛ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 1:12 New leads automation 2:50 Automate contracts/invoices 5:12 Automate accounting 7:31 Automate recruitment 9:23 Automate lead web scraping & AI lead magnets 11:42 Automate AI blog posts 13:58 Automate AI social media posting 14:48 Automate scraping viral content ideas 15:44 Automate project management 16:55 Automate analytics 19:01 Automate your database #make #automation #workflowautomation #workflow #automationmastery

How To Service Your First AI Automation Agency Client In 2024 (Make.com)
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LLM Vibe Score0.368
Human Vibe Score0.48
Nick SaraevAug 13, 2024

How To Service Your First AI Automation Agency Client In 2024 (Make.com)

GET THE FREE GAMMA + TEMPLATES HERE 🙏 https://gamma.app/docs/How-to-Successfully-Service-Your-First-Automation-Client-in-2024-3xpyq1tyhppm1jv JOIN MY AUTOMATION COMMUNITY & GET YOUR FIRST CUSTOMER, GUARANTEED 👑 https://www.skool.com/makerschool/about SUMMARY ⤵️ Complete guide on servicing your first AI automation agency client in 2024. I run you through the workflow from end-to-end, including pre-project, kickoff, onboarding, progress updates, delivery emails, and upsells. WHAT TO WATCH NEXT 🍿 How I Hit $25K/Mo Selling Automation: https://youtube.com/watch?v=T7qAiuWDwLw My $21K/Mo Make.com Proposal System: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UVLeX600irk Generate Content Automatically With AI: https://youtube.com/watch?v=P2Y_DVW1TSQ MY SOFTWARE, TOOLS, & DEALS (some of these give me kickbacks—thank you!) 🚀 INSTANTLY: https://link.nicksaraev.com/instantly-short 📧 ANYMAIL FINDER: https://link.nicksaraev.com/amf-short 👻 PHANTOMBUSTER: https://link.nicksaraev.com/pb-short ✅ CLICKUP: https://link.nicksaraev.com/clickup-short 📈 RIZE: https://link.nicksaraev.com/rize-short (use promo code NICK for addn 25% off) WHAT TO WATCH NEXT 🍿 HOW I HIT $25K/MO SELLING AUTOMATION: https://youtube.com/watch?v=T7qAiuWDwLw MY $21K/MO MAKE.COM PROPOSAL SYSTEM: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UVLeX600irk GENERATE CONTENT AUTOMATICALLY WITH AI: https://youtube.com/watch?v=P2Y_DVW1TSQ FOLLOW ME ✍🏻 My content writing agency: https://1secondcopy.com 🦾 My automation agency: https://leftclick.ai 🕊️ My Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/nicksaraev 🤙 My blog (followed by the founder of HubSpot!): https://nicksaraev.com WHY ME? If this is your first watch—hi, I’m Nick! TLDR: I spent five years building automated businesses with Make.com (most notably 1SecondCopy, a content company that hit 7 figures). Today a lot of people talk about automation, but I’ve noticed that very few have practical, real world success making money with it. So this channel is me chiming in and showing you what real systems that make real revenue look like! Hopefully I can help you improve your business, and in doing so, the rest of your life :-) Please like, subscribe, and leave me a comment if you have a specific request! Thanks. Timestamps 0:00 Introduction to Servicing Your Automation Client 0:39 The Importance of Client Retention 2:03 Understanding Your Role as a Service Provider 2:54 The Significance of Client Acquisition Time 8:06 Setting Expectations with the Client 14:53 Implementing a Structured Onboarding Process 16:11 Testing the Flow of the Project 18:18 Delivering Progress Updates to Clients 19:13 Utilizing Templates for Project Efficiency 22:32 Utilizing Project Update and Delivery Templates 25:46 Enhancing Client Relationships with Delivery Templates 28:12 Importance of Service in Service Provider Role

AI-Chatbot-Using-Mixtral-8x7B-PGVector-Llama-Index-With-Websockets-For-SaaS
github
LLM Vibe Score0.328
Human Vibe Score0.0056
quamernasimJul 15, 2024

AI-Chatbot-Using-Mixtral-8x7B-PGVector-Llama-Index-With-Websockets-For-SaaS

Steps to Building an AI Chatbot Using Mixtral 8x7B for SaaS Entrepreneurs An AI based chatbot built for SaaS Entrepreneurs Introduction This is a step-by-step guide to building an AI chatbot using Mixtral 8x7B for SaaS Entrepreneurs. The guide is designed to help you understand the process of building an AI chatbot and how it can be used to improve your business. What is Mixtral 8x7B? Mixtral 8x7B is LLM released by Mistral AI. It is a powerful LLM that has performed well on a variety of language tasks. It is a Mixure of Experts Model. It has outperformed GPT-3 on a variety of language tasks. It is a powerful tool for building AI chatbots. Why Build an AI Chatbot? AI chatbots are becoming increasingly popular in the business world. They can be used to automate customer service, answer questions, and provide information to customers. They can also be used to improve the user experience on your website or app. Building an AI chatbot can help you save time and money, and improve the overall customer experience. How to Build an AI Chatbot Using Mixtral 8x7B Building an AI chatbot using Mixtral 8x7B is a relatively simple process. Here are the steps you need to follow: Step 1: Collect Data Step 2: Index The Data using Llama-Index Step 3: Store The Indexed Data in a Database (In our case, we will use PGVector) Step 4: Get the LLM and Embedding Model from Hugging Face Step 5: Load the indexed data from the database Step 6: Set up a query engine using llama-index Step 7: Combine all the above steps to build an AI chatbot Step 8: Finallly, integrate the chatbot with WebSockets Step 9: Test the chatbot How to Use the AI Chatbot Once you have built the AI chatbot, you can use it to automate customer service, answer questions, and provide information to customers. You can also use it to improve the user experience on your website or app. The possibilities are endless! app.py that contains the websockets code to integrate the chatbot with your website or app. To run the chatbot, you can use the following command: To test the chatbot, you can use the following command: Conclusion Building an AI chatbot using Mixtral 8x7B is a relatively simple process. It can help you save time and money, and improve the overall customer experience. References https://medium.com/@vivekpatil647/timeline-of-chatbots-f3baf14c05e6 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.11401v4.pdf https://www.e2enetworks.com/ https://docs.llamaindex.ai/en/stable/index.html https://mistral.ai/news/mixtral-of-experts/ https://huggingface.co/ https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.07597.pdf https://huggingface.co/blog/ray-rag

How to Start an AI Business in 2025 - STEP BY STEP
youtube
LLM Vibe Score0.45
Human Vibe Score0.72
Liam OttleyMar 3, 2024

How to Start an AI Business in 2025 - STEP BY STEP

📚 Join the #1 community for AI entrepreneurs and connect with 100,000+ members: https://bit.ly/3uRIRB3 📈 We help industry experts, entrepreneurs & developers build and scale their AI Agency: https://b.link/9kmmllts 🤝 Need AI Solutions Built? Work with me: https://b.link/qv62vqy6 ⚒️ Build AI Agents Without Coding: https://agentivehub.com/ 🚀 Apply to Join My Team at Morningside AI: https://tally.so/r/wbYr52 NOTE ON AI LIAM: AI Liam has been shut down and replaced with a free course that is updated frequently on my Free Skool community. At Morningside we no longer had the bandwidth to continue updating AI Liam with the features and info it needed, so have opted for a free course instead: https://bit.ly/3uRIRB3 I also do weekly Q&As so you can ask me questions directly! I'll see you inside, Liam 💪🏼 Learn How to Start an Online AI Business as a Beginner in 2024 with my complete, step by step guide. Making money with AI and making money with ChatGPT are huge opportunities in the online business space, but knowing whether to start an AI education business, AI Automation Agency, AI consulting business, AI SaaS or become an AI freelancer can be difficult as a beginner. If you're interested in becoming an AI entrepreneur in 2024 and starting your own AI business, this video is the one for you! I cover five different types of AI business ideas that you can start to make money online with AI, and how to get started with each. Other Resources/Links Mentioned 🔗 GPTs Complete Guide: https://youtu.be/Hh2zqaf0Fvg?si=oq5Emaf-co3nXzID Prompt Engineering Beginners Guide: https://youtu.be/ydjRYmM19DY?si=adwasE8fULHzcUYh Prompt Engineering Advanced Guide: https://youtu.be/-XivIt5oSw?si=dmhA1doWEjPI5ni Custom Tooling w/ Relevance AI: https://youtu.be/_sNGuQz-LyY?si=AJAnexuw9kDU30fF Dave's Channel (FOR AI FREELANCERS): https://www.youtube.com/@daveebbelaar Timestamps: 0:00 - Intro 3:06 - Why Listen to Me? 6:43 - Chapter 1: Is AI Business Right For You? 7:30 - Is Entrepreneurship Right For You? 11:01 - Do I Need to be a Developer? 12:01 - How Much Time do I Need to Invest? 13:57 - Why Start an AI Business? 19:58 - Chapter 2: 5 Types of AI Businesses 20:32 - AI Business #1 25:17 - AI Business #2 30:33 - AI Business #3 36:37 - AI Business #4 39:27 - AI Business #5 41:34 - How AI Businesses Are Connected 52:52 - Chapter 3: AI Business Core Skills 53:21 - Skill #1 59:52 - Skill #2 1:10:25 - Skill #3 1:22:41 - Skill #4 1:24:50 - Skill #5 1:27:49 - Skill #6 1:29:18 - Chapter 4: Step-by-Step Launch Guide

22 AI Business Ideas for 2024 (backed by data)
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LLM Vibe Score0.368
Human Vibe Score0.48
Liam OttleyJan 23, 2024

22 AI Business Ideas for 2024 (backed by data)

📚 Join the #1 community for AI entrepreneurs and connect with 100,000+ members: https://bit.ly/3uRIRB3 📈 We help industry experts, entrepreneurs & developers build and scale their AI Agency: https://bit.ly/skoolmain 🤝 Need AI Solutions Built? Work with me: https://b.link/qv62vqy6 ⚒️ Build AI Agents Without Coding: https://agentivehub.com/ 🚀 Apply to Join My Team at Morningside AI: https://tally.so/r/wbYr52 In this video I share 22 AI Business Ideas for 2024 based off recent community successes and my own AI Agency lead flow. If you want to know how to start an AI Automation Agency as a beginner, starting with one of the offers mentioned in this video is a great way to get started on the right foot. Knowing how to make money with AI in 2024 is a lot easier when you have something to start selling! Community Members (Please Support!) 🫂 Samin Yasar: https://www.youtube.com/@SaminYasar_ https://aianswer.us Brendan Jowett: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzIsviqoJc-VcWqF5Pp8iLw https://inflate.agency Connor Davis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daviscon/ https://www.outboxsolutions.com.au/ Other Resources/Links Mentioned 🔗 GPTs Complete Guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hh2zqaf0Fvg&t=1332s&ab_channel=LiamOttley AI Persona Guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOr3don1X-E&ab_channel=LiamOttley Bland AI: https://www.bland.ai/ Timestamps: 0:00 - Intro 1:52 - Community Solutions 2:34 - Community Solution #1 3:36 - Community Solution #2 5:11 - Community Solution #3 8:24 - GPT Solutions 8:52 - GPT Solution #1 10:25 - GPT Solution #2 11:48 - GPT Solution #3 12:24 - GPT Solution #4 12:52 - GPT Solution #5 14:25 - GPT Solution #6 15:40 - AI Agents 16:10 - AI Agent #1 17:26 - AI Agent #2 19:07 - AI Agent #3 20:00 - AI Agent #4 20:19 - AI Agent #5 21:28 - AI Pipelines 22:47 - AI Pipeline Idea #1 23:56 - AI Pipeline Idea #2 25:05 - AI Pipeline Idea #3 25:34 - AI Pipeline Idea #4 26:50 - AI Calling Systems 28:39 - AI Calling System #1 29:34 - AI Calling System #2 29:59 - AI Calling System #3 30:20 - AI Calling System #4 31:04 - Bonus Idea

10 Amazing AI Tools For Your Business You Won't Believe Exist!
youtube
LLM Vibe Score0.38
Human Vibe Score0.55
Learn With ShopifyJan 1, 2024

10 Amazing AI Tools For Your Business You Won't Believe Exist!

10 Amazing AI Tools For Your Business In 2024. FREE Shopify Trial ► https://utm.io/uggJb ► TikTok Marketing Tutorial https://youtu.be/SeWNUUEtZOY ► Prompt Engineering Tutorial Part 1: A Beginner's Guide to AI Prompting https://youtu.be/zBaa8Ct2C-k ► Prompt Engineering Tutorial Part 2: Text-to-Text: https://youtu.be/ZlQHPt86h6s ► Prompt Engineering Tutorial Part 3: https://youtu.be/6RAStep_3OI ► Prompt Engineering Tutorial Part 4: https://youtu.be/QgjL0fNTwHc –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– If you’re a content creator, business owner, or just a regular person trying make work or life easier, you’re gonna love these AI tools. And if you want to find out how AI copied my voice exactly at the beginning of this video then wait for tool number 7 to find out. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– -- TOOLS & RESOURCES – ► The Complete DROPSHIPPING FOR BEGINNERS GUIDE (How-To Tutorial, Trending Products & More!) https://utm.io/ugf9v ► 10 Best Ways To Make Money On Shopify in 2024 (Not just dropshipping!) https://utm.io/ugf9w ► The Complete ChatGPT for Business Guide 🤖 https://utm.io/ugf9x ► 10 ChatGPT Plugins https://utm.io/ugf9y ► Sign Up To Shopify Today https://utm.io/ugfyG ► Pinterest Ads Tutorial for BEGINNERS (Quick & Easy Step-by-Step Guide) https://utm.io/ugf9z ► AI For Business Playlist https://utm.io/ugf9A ► How to build a Shopify Store https://utm.io/ugf9B –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– #shopifytutorialforbeginners #shopify #aitools #ai

Learn AI in Just 3 HOURS 🚀| ChatGPT & Generative AI | Ishan Sharma #shorts
youtube
LLM Vibe Score0.318
Human Vibe Score0.31
Ishan SharmaNov 3, 2023

Learn AI in Just 3 HOURS 🚀| ChatGPT & Generative AI | Ishan Sharma #shorts

BEST FREE AI Course For EVERYONE 🚀| Ishan Sharma 📸 Instagram: https://bit.ly/ishansharma7390ig Join MarkitUpX Discord Server: https://discord.gg/fwSpTje4rh 😁 About Me: https://bit.ly/aboutishansharma 📱 Twitter: https://bit.ly/ishansharma7390twt 📝 LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/ishansharma7390li 🌟 Please leave a LIKE ❤️ and SUBSCRIBE for more AMAZING content! 🌟 3 Books You Should Read 📈Psychology of Money: https://amzn.to/30wx4bW 👀Subtle Art of Not Giving a F: https://amzn.to/30zwWbP 💼Rework: https://amzn.to/3ALsAuz Tech I use every day 💻MacBook Air M1: https://amzn.to/2YWKPjG 📺LG 29' Ultrawide Monitor: https://amzn.to/3aG0p5p 🎥Sony ZV1: https://amzn.to/3ANqgDb 🎙Blue Yeti Mic: https://amzn.to/2YYbiNN ⽴Tripod Stand: https://amzn.to/3mVUiQc 🔅Ring Light: https://amzn.to/2YQlzLJ 🎧Marshall Major II Headphone: https://amzn.to/3lLhTDQ 🖱Logitech mouse: https://amzn.to/3p8edOC 💺Green Soul Chair: https://amzn.to/3mWIxZP ✨ Tags ✨ ishan sharma,artificial intelligence,Artificial Intelligence Tutorial for Beginners,artificial intelligence course for beginners,what is artificial intelligence,artificial intelligence for beginners,ai developer,ai course,coding,programming,machine learning,data science,developer,development,coding courses,learn to code,ai for beginners,chatgpt,google bard,free google course,free courses,ai engineer,aiml,best,ai,ai courses,BEST FREE AI Course For EVERYONE ✨ Hashtags ✨ #ai #artificialintelligence #course

How to use Copy.ai | Best AI writing software for small business (Copy.ai tutorial)
youtube
LLM Vibe Score0.377
Human Vibe Score0.53
Stewart GauldMay 26, 2023

How to use Copy.ai | Best AI writing software for small business (Copy.ai tutorial)

In this AI writing software tutorial, I share how to use Copy AI to save your business time and money in 2023. AI writing software or AI writing assistance is growing at an exponential rate. One of the most popular AI tools that leverage Open AI is Copy AI. Rather than spending hours manually creating written content for blogs, social media, emails, reports and more, you can leverage the support of AI. AI allows you to create unique and personalised content in minutes. With the support of Copy AI, you can multiply the speed of your writing activities and process. 👉 Get started with Copy AI here (My favourite AI writer) ➜ https://www.copy.ai/?via=stewart-gauld *(This Copy AI link is an affiliate link, which means we will get a commission if you upgrade to a paid plan (with no extra cost to you) through this link, and this helps support our channel so we thank you in advance!) ► Looking for a simple, understandable and actionable road map for setting up your small business online? Start here and get our all-in-one small business playbook 📚: 👉 https://godigitalnow.store/products/go-digital-now-the-ultimate-small-business-playbook-ebook ► Here are some relevant resources to help you in your business journey with AI: Check out our top 6 AI writing software here: https://stewartgauld.com/best-ai-writing-software/ Read my complete Copy AI review article here: https://stewartgauld.com/copy-ai-review/ Learn how to use ChatGPT for business here: https://youtu.be/d8RnjRshcE8 Read about my top 11 AI tools for small businesses: https://stewartgauld.com/best-ai-tools/ ► Today we navigate through the below chapters for this Copy AI tutorial: 0:00 Intro 01:37 Getting started 02:36 Copy AI pricing 03:22 Copy AI dashboard 03:58 Templates 04:36 Chat by Copy AI 04:59 Prompt ideas and templates 06:08 Content editor 06:58 How to create a blog with AI 10:06 Optimize with chat AI 10:57 Copy AI tools 11:38 Managing projects 12:04 How to use templates 13:34 Outro ► Are you interested in joining our small business community? Join us to receive actionable tips, tutorials and tools to grow your small business online (Subscribe to our email list) or join our exclusive community here: https://mailchi.mp/71ac3fcdbfdf/stewart-gauld Let me know if you found this Copy AI tutorial helpful. Also, if you require any help or support, make sure to get in touch with us today. Thanks for watching and enjoy! #AI #AIwritingsoftware #copyai

Start An AI T-Shirt Business Side Hustle FULL STRATEGY
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LLM Vibe Score0.391
Human Vibe Score0.61
Wholesale TedApr 10, 2023

Start An AI T-Shirt Business Side Hustle FULL STRATEGY

Learn how to use Midjourney to create amazing AI art to sell onto t-shirts for a profit! ► Get my FREE $10,000 Print On Demand ebook: https://wholesaleted.com/4-step ► Get my Automated Ecom course + AI Art training: https://theecommclubhouse.com ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER - PLEASE READ: 🙏 All content on my channel is my personal opinion. I am NOT a lawyer, accountant or financial advisor. I do not have any professional licenses. My opinions are not a replacement for the guidance of a professionally trained and licensed individual. Some links in the description may be affiliate links. This means that I may get a commission if you click on the link and purchase something. Using those links are optional but they are always appreciated. Thank you 🙏 ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ WATCH MY MOST POPULAR VIDEOS: ►► How I Make $1,000/Day From 5 Sources Of Income: https://youtu.be/jCqIGxA5S-k ►► How To Start An Etsy Print On Demand Store For Free: https://youtu.be/7ZlZFPBWC74 ►► The REAL Reason I Became A Millionaire: https://youtu.be/70itsEHS-EM ►► Best Side Hustles To Start With No Money: https://youtu.be/fQTsmtXBkew RECOMMENDED WATCHING - Having Realistic Expectations In Business: ►► https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjNYIrpZp6BhzPiUJUUrpfIaFTlcZKF5n ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ WHOLESALE TED AFFILIATE LINKS A lot of people have requested that I posted my affiliate links so that they can register through them as a thank-you for my free tutorial content on YouTube. Thank you so much for your support! If you would like to use my affiliate links, I would greatly appreciate it as it enables me to keep making YouTube videos for free: ►► Get A FREE Trial To Shopify: https://wholesaleted.com/go/free-shopify-trial ►► Get My Favorite Graphic Design App Canva: https://wholesaleted.com/go/canva ►► Get The Etsy Research App Alura: https://wholesaleted.com/go/alura ►► Use Printify's Print On Demand App Like I Do: https://wholesaleted.com/go/printify ►► Use Printful's Print On Demand App Like I Do: https://wholesaleted.com/go/printful ►► Get My Favorite Lifestyle Photos On Placeit: https://wholesaleted.com/go/placeit Please note: an affiliate link tracks whether you click on the link, and register and/or make a purchase. If you do, I may get a commission. Using affiliate links is optional but again, it enables me to keep making my YouTube tutorial content free & I greatly appreciate the support, thank you! ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA! ►► Follow Sarah on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sarahchrisp ►► Follow Sarah's Adventures on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sarahchrispy/ ►► Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wholesaleted/ ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ VIDEO CHAPTERS: 0:00 - The Easiest Way To Make Money From AI T-Shirt Designs 3:16 - How To Open & Use Midjourney 3:54 - The Best Midjourney Settings For Generating T-Shirt Images 5:43 - How To Prompt & Generate T-Shirt Images With Midjourney 8:16 - The Fast Way To Fix Image Glitches 9:00 - How To Make The Image Background Transparent 9:33 - Use AI To Upscale Your AI Art Into High Resolution 10:27 - Turn Your AI Art Into T-Shirts To Sell For A Profit ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ WHY SUBSCRIBE TO WHOLESALE TED? Hey there I am Sarah (aka Ted). My goal is to help new entrepreneurs grow & scale a business that is right for THEM! Yes - the business that is right for THEM. Because I believe that time is the most valuable thing we have, and that we should spend it doing things that we love: and what I love may be different to what you love. Which is why on this channel I share: Examples & case studies of businesses that I enjoy (such as Print On Demand ecommerce businesses) and sharing my tips & strategies I've learned along the way. Examples & case studies of other businesses that entrepreneurs love running (even if I personally wouldn't find it fun myself!) Plus a sprinkle of entrepreneurial motivation thrown in too! I hope my actionable content can help you: whether you're running your own online business, or are in the process of building one, and want some tactical advice to help you along the way. If that is you, subscribe today! 🔥

OpenAI GPT-4: THE SECRET PROMPT You Need To Know 🤐 #shorts
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LLM Vibe Score0.326
Human Vibe Score0.36
Ishan SharmaApr 2, 2023

OpenAI GPT-4: THE SECRET PROMPT You Need To Know 🤐 #shorts

OpenAI GPT-4: THE SECRET PROMPT You Need To Know 🤐 #shorts 📸 Instagram: https://bit.ly/ishansharma7390ig Join MarkitUpX Discord Server: https://discord.gg/fwSpTje4rh 😁 About Me: https://bit.ly/aboutishansharma 📱 Twitter: https://bit.ly/ishansharma7390twt 📝 LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/ishansharma7390li 🌟 Please leave a LIKE ❤️ and SUBSCRIBE for more AMAZING content! 🌟 3 Books You Should Read 📈Psychology of Money: https://amzn.to/30wx4bW 👀Subtle Art of Not Giving a F: https://amzn.to/30zwWbP 💼Rework: https://amzn.to/3ALsAuz Tech I use every day 💻MacBook Air M1: https://amzn.to/2YWKPjG 📺LG 29' Ultrawide Monitor: https://amzn.to/3aG0p5p 🎥Sony ZV1: https://amzn.to/3ANqgDb 🎙Blue Yeti Mic: https://amzn.to/2YYbiNN ⽴Tripod Stand: https://amzn.to/3mVUiQc 🔅Ring Light: https://amzn.to/2YQlzLJ 🎧Marshall Major II Headphone: https://amzn.to/3lLhTDQ 🖱Logitech mouse: https://amzn.to/3p8edOC 💺Green Soul Chair: https://amzn.to/3mWIxZP ✨ Tags ✨ ishan sharma,OpenAI GPT-4: THE SECRET PROMPT You Need To Know 🤐,ai tools,artificial intelligence,microsoft,microsoft openai,microsoft chatgpt,what is chatgpt,chatgpt tutorial,chatgpt 4,make money with chatgpt,chatgpt,open ai,gpt 4,gpt 4 vs gpt 3,openai,openai chatbot gpt,chatgpt explained,chatgpt examples,chat gpt,open ai gpt 4,chat gpt uses,chatgpt4 tutorial,gpt 4 demo,gpt 4 image input,gpt 4 review,gpt 4 how to use,gpt 4 prompt ✨ Hashtags ✨ #gpt4 #chatgpt #ai