Ask HN: People who make $10k+/month working on AI tools, what do you do?

25 points by keploy ↗ HN
We're on our way to hit $10k/mo with our product and I was wondering what problems you guys solve with AI!

Let’s have an open discussion on this topic and share the steps on how you grew !

How do you keep making your users happy at this stage?

15 comments

[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 32.1 ms ] thread
Telling other people that i make 10k + a month and sell Coaching /s
We found the first honest one!
- create master class

- blog posts selling coaching/master class

- yt videos promoting “how I made $10K/mo using this simple trick!”

- Reddit posts linking to yt video series and blog posts

- Show HN and use a guerilla tactic to promote your blog and video series

- switch coaching to “ai guru”

10 years ago I was making that kind of money developing something like a recommendation engine for a startup and then a search engine for patents powered by a neural network.
Wow, that sounds interesting! What do you think of traditional recommendation system algorithms vs AI-powered recommendations?
My YOShInOn RSS reader uses BERT-family embeddings to capture the "gist" of text the way the neural network for that search engine did, then I treat content-based recommendation as a classification problem. (e.g. "Will the user like this?")

My system is quite a bit different from others because, like TikTok but even more so, it demands a thumbs up/thumbs down judgement for every article so I get a set of negative samples that are really reliable.

There are numerous frontiers of improving this system. One of them is that there are certain things, like "roundup" articles that cover a wide range of topics (say https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/jun/03/russia-uk...) that the embedding doesn't capture well, adding some new features could clear out maybe 10% of articles I'd rather not see but I am not in such a rush because overall the system is very satisfying to me and I am already blending in more random articles than that to get samples to keep it calibrated and also sometimes discover new topic areas I find interesting.

Another interesting frontier is sequential recommendation

https://paperswithcode.com/task/sequential-recommendation

but I'm not sure if I really want to take an ML approach to this because I'm not sure there is enough training data for one person's content-based recommendation. I'm not sure exactly how I want to do it, but when I post to a place like HN I do not want to post a stick of five articles from phys.org, rather I want there to be some diversity in my feed not just over the course of a 300 article batch but on the scale of individual posts. Items can be hung up in queues for several days in this process; most "news" on HN is fairly evergreen and it doesn't matter if it is delayed a week but articles about sports have a short shelf life as you look like a fool if you post an article about what happened in week 3 of the NFL after the games of week 4 have played. So I need some way for sports articles to "jump the line" ahead of other articles but I don't want that to privilege sports over everything else.

Similarly there is "the probability that article A is relevant" but there is also "Is A or B a higher quality article?" One Google innovation was using a document quality score (PageRank) asides a normal document-query ranking which is tricky because now you're not optimizing for one thing but trying to optimize for two things that could compete with each other. I am thinking about switching that system from a batch to a streaming mode and need some answers for that.

Thank you for the introduction, really glad to learn about this!
(comment deleted)
(comment deleted)
We do general AI/LLM consulting in the data space - not so much generative text, more along the lines of analysis, indexing, and search. Our path to customer happiness is simply to produce systems that actually work!
(comment deleted)
This is a trap question, folks.
I think what you mean is OP is going to answer their own question with something selling resources to help others "make $10k/month with AI apps"? Whether or not that's the intention this type of question does attract the snake oil sales pitches.