Ask HN: What's the Point of Your Startup?

AI can't build everything, that assumption is just wrong. Do you even code?

> If AI can build anything. Why do you need a human in the loop?

I'm currently building a SaaS with my business partner. I'm the "tech guy" while he has decades of industry experience with the industry that our SaaS is targeting.

What I found building this is there is a giant subset of preferences, problems, and other minor details that aren't written down anywhere, they are just kept in the minds of the people in that industry.

The reason it's not written down is to those people, these things seem obvious. And these things are both extremely important but also very subtle.

We use AI heavily in designing our application but there's always a testing pass where my partner goes over some changes and calls out subtle things of how "things work in practice". These things aren't in any manuals, they are seldom even written down and thus AI systems are completely oblivious to these details.

Now you could build a system that skips some of these subtleties and still gets the job done but what you will find is potential customers will always return to their existing system that takes these into account.

Now one day we might get an AI system that detects these subtleties but in order to do that you would need a load of training data around those things. But how do you even get that training data if all of it is held inside the minds of the people working in that industry?

AI can build anything... within the tiny slice of the economy/human experience that is data/software.

It turns out there's a vast universe out there involving physical products, real estate, agriculture, plumbing, sanitation, health care...

Honestly speaking, I think it was always possible for someone to replicate what you do in your SaaS, but maybe just a little slower. IMO the value was always in the fact that someone else is willing to obsess about the problem so you don't have to.

For example, I could probably always have make a Quizlet clone for myself, but even with agents around I'd rather just use Quizlet than spend the time making my own flashcard app, even if I have to pay like $5-10 a month. Just food for thought

Prediction: There will be new jobs.

My advice is to find these types of jobs, like powering data centers, cleaning up vibe coded messy codebases as a consultant.

I know of a social org which runs of entirely on its people's face to face interaction. And, these folks have consulted recently with me about how they can adopt tech to facilitate their ops. I can sit with a LLM and build a platform for them, but idk it will cover the entirety of their day to day nuances.

You can't just throw resources at a road with muddy puddles everywhere and let a autonomous vehicle figure it out all by itself.

A perfect predictable problem is solvable with large resources, but the minute you touch something human, you need a equivalent human judgement to give it the sought after direction.

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For me, the goal is to see what happens when you persist and carve out your own market share.

Despite the abundance of tools available today, there's always room to deliver unique value to users (e.g., https://docuqueue.com/#mcp )

Playing the long game just takes patience and composure.

2 kinds of value:

What you know

What you have

Knowing should lead to having, but the two are often at odds - what it means to be wealthy is roughly divided into corporate (knowing) wealth, extracted through payroll and contracts, and asset (having) wealth largely cashed out through institutions.

Knowers form consultancies, invest in startups, and ultimately sell knowledge to other knowers and a few clueless havers, but it’s only half the battle (knowing), the venturing enterprise must ultimately have what it takes