> My friends tell me the job is basically managing AI agents and reading Pull Requests. That sounds like hell, and I’ll try to avoid it for as long as possible.
It really is not that bad when you are in a company with a good culture. Leadership is gonna be AI piled everywhere, but imho that's how you learn where to use (and not to use) the technology.
I disagree. Having to work with the clanker is hell on earth. I'll do it if I have to, because I need to eat, but I hate every second I have to put up with those stupid things.
Ironically, doesn't the "Get a job" paragraph have the solution? If you believe that is what the future of jobs at a company looks like, perhaps try to market your tool to agents?
You could add an API which is perfect for agents to use. Something that survives the pull request review process.
Hang in there. I've yet so see an even modestly successful business that didn't have this or some other bleak problem at one point in time. I'm sure they exist, I just haven't seen one yet :D
My gut says this one can be turned around. Even if 90% of people just happily prefer ChatGPT for this (which I'd doubt), the remaining 10% is still a lot to fund a small venture very well. Just gotta find them effectively.
Even the "giving up" route can be pretty juicy, there's companies that pay decent money for a "distressed asset". And there's also investment firms (like mine) that go for a minority stake and help turn things around.
This is alright, but your main page is just trash. You mention you have 0 pages every 24 hours in the "Registered" free tier. You can't even check that but have time to write a post about how your business is dying? Like I understand you like content marketing but at least have your product ready for the potential customers that you might get via content marketing jfc
If it’s cheaper than having AI generate it directly, how about creating an MCP so AI can use this tool, and then trying connecting something like x402? It’s not exactly a subscription economy, but I think it could become a tool for AI
I have a feeling search traffic is down and lots of people are diverting to using AI, or to one of the sloppy competitors. Conveying bank statements doesn’t seem like there’s much of a moat around the workflow.
There is something I'd call Subscription Fatigue. People and businesses are asked to pay subscription fees left and right.
If I convert my bank statements only each quarter in a spike or once or twice a year, why should I pay for each month or the entire year? Of course I don't know the real usage patterns of this application, but that's one scenario I'd think of.
The perceptive utility of software declines when it is subscription-based in current times. A one-time fee for software is reasonable to a purchaser, renting/leasing software is no longer economical for the size of most phone apps...too little for too much.
Subscription fatigue is real, and I'm currently going through it, but it's not the existence of subscription-only model which nudges me to cancel a membership.
If I pay for something, I want the tool to work for me. I can't use an application if it tries to steal my attention all the time. An upgrade pop-up there, a reminder notification there, and the application wears me down.
I like quiet applications. It's there. I'll use it. An unobtrusive promo button for a new feature is OK, but constant nudging for the same thing is tiring. Dropbox used to do that with document signatures, they stopped now AFAICS.
If I pay for your application, please be patient and respectful, because the moment I feel that your application is more about getting my money than providing me services, I'm out.
The value I get is in the service you provide via your application. Not the existence of said application, so stop treating your users as cows in line waiting to be milked.
This is another reason I'm self hosting as much as possible. I'm willing to put in the work to maintain an application rather than seeing constant banners and pop-ups wedged in to milk me more.
I don't believe such future will arrive by itself, but we can build a calm tech stack for ourselves. I successfully pruned much of the noisier stuff from my environment, and cutting down subscriptions left and right.
Unfortunately, some of the subscriptions are really useful, or I like how they present the thing I'm working on, so they stay for the time being.
In theory we will delegate this to agents, but really companies can already do that (plenty of software does upgrade itself in backgroud (some doesn’t because the user may want to peg an older version).
But really that cacophony of upgrades etc isn’t about user control, but just companies reminding you they exist. It’s spam, and like spam fighting, agents will not be able to handle it adequately.
This is Nextcloud to me. I use it, but it constantly nags me about some software upgrade I need to do.
People don't appreciate enough that releasing new software has a cost. Upgrading is risky and disruptive. Even on iOS, where app upgrades are as low effort as possible, they're a nuisance; I'm occasionally unable to open an app I need because it's mid-update. One time, I was using an app, closed it to get some information from another app, and when I wanted to go back to the first app I couldn't because it had started an auto update.
Software updates are a necessary evil. As such, they should be as infrequent as is reasonably possible.
I manage an average sized Nextcloud instance, and see these mails every day, but I believe you can change their interval to something longer under your personal settings. Also, you can disable server notification on your client.
If you want to go nuclear, you can disable update notifications altogether under administrative settings, I believe.
On the other hand, I mostly charge my iOS devices at night, and they handle updates & backups when they are charging. I didn't see an app updating midday for years, I believe.
Nextcloud is a bit too noisy on the app updates department, though, we can all agree on that.
The thing is, I don't want to just "not update apps". If there's a security vulnerability which needs to be patched ASAP, I need to be told about it ASAP.
I don't understand how we all just stood by and let "monthly subscription" sneak in and become the dominant form of paying for software (and entertainment/media, too).
Almost everything else in my life is a one time purchase. I pay for the thing, I use it forever. I would never buy a vacuum cleaner subscription. Or a pressure washer subscription. Why should I need to endlessly pay for software?
The usual excuses from developers:
1. But I need to maintain the server and that's a monthly cost!
Nope. Tethering your software to a server was your choice, not mine. I shouldn't have to pay for your decision. I have lots of perfectly good software on my computer that work fine without your server.
2. But it costs money to constantly be developing and publishing updates!
Nope. Nobody is asking you to constantly change your software. Generally, I don't want your updates. The software met my needs when I bought it, and I don't want you to change it, and I certainly don't want to keep paying you just so you can keep changing it.
We need to go back to treating software like it was something you bought in a box off a store shelf and that was it. No recurring payments. No updates. No accounts. No nagging. No telemetry. Just a box of bits that I hand over money for once.
I think software developers feel that their work is never finished. Nothing is ever fully complete. The software always has bugs and security holes. It is always lacking critical features that you haven't gotten around to yet.
I think it's pretty clear that management has taken advantage of that instinct. They keep upgrading software long after it really is fully finished. Nobody has wanted a new version of Microsoft Word for decades.
But it took decades to reach that point. Most software hasn't reached it. We send out software barely good enough -- if that much. Because it takes a long time to actually get good, and if we waited that long, the company would have gone belly-up. And the customers seem content to buy good-enough software, in the hopes that the other bugs and features will get fixed.
Obviously you should be able to opt out of all of that, and stick with a version you like. When enough customers do that, you stop, and move on to a new thing.
But I do think it's inevitable that companies will sell you a Minimum Viable Product and charge you to complete it. Because that's how they are able to afford to get it out the door before they go bankrupt. And if they don't, somebody else will, and get the software out faster.
The problem is that web applications have an ongoing monthly cost to maintain for bandwidth, usage, disk space, etc.. so the only solution is to charge a subscription.
Yes, traditional software also has a cost for maintenance and features but users could opt out to not pay for them.
I personally rather to either pay per usage, pay for the full year if it's valuable enough to purchase a license for desktop / mobile apps if possible.
AI kills SaaS dead - because most will use AI to do what this does directly (presumably convert bank statements), and the rest will use AI to write a non-AI tool that does it likely just as well.
I did this…
I have a specific system-generated PDF bank statement and it didn’t take too long to write a parsing program, which would have taken much longer before.
Seeing this with all my founder friends. Combination of Google AI summaries just sending much less traffic and AI tools being able to do small tasks by themself, rending a ton of SaaS less used.
Taking my homepage as an example, when I allowed AI bots, I got about 1,200 visitors a day. But when I blocked them, that number dropped to around 140. It seems like over 70% of internet traffic these days is dominated by AI bots.
> When a user cancels a subscription Stripe asks them for a reason. At the moment I don’t really do anything with the cancellation reason, actually this is the first time I’ve ever looked at the data.
This comes across as very unserious. If you’re truly trying to build a business then this seems like one of the best signals/datapoints you can get…
I often think of my experience at Citibank 15 years ago when I closed my account at the branch. The teller said 'sure thing, just put your debit card into the device and enter your pin'. I did that and he said ok I'll close the account and give you cash? I said 'yes' and then it was done. He said, "have a great day!"
It was one of the best customer experiences of my life to not have to answer a series of 'why are you leaving?' questions and I would like to head back to Citibank just because of it. Unfortunately I don't live in NYC anymore so can't really do that.
I agree that most companies are awful at trying to get you to stay when you tell them to leave, but I'd be disappointed if a company didn't care at all to know why I left. If I'm leaving I already have a bad feeling about them, and I would have a worse image of them if they didn't care why.
Ideally they wouldn't pressure at all for me to stay and cancellation would be a quick process, and I would be happy to tell them why I left. Either to vent, or to at least get the (most likely misguided) feeling that they might do something about it. But if there's no asking as part of their process, I'd definitely think worse of them.
> People are using AI to convert their bank statements. This works pretty well if you only have a few pages of bank statements to convert. If you have hundreds of pages, then you’ll need to pay for AI to do the conversion.
Or you could have AI write a script to handle the conversion for your specific bank. It'll be faster than any service and free forever.
The author’s product extracts data from bank statement PDFs and puts it in XLSX format. Both of the banks I use provide CSV data export from their apps.
I’m not surprised the business is struggling - the author hasn’t found a deep enough problem to solve.
> Last time I worked at a company was November 2020. I love programming, but I really do not enjoy programming at a company. Things were bad in 2020, but I feel like they’re worse now.
They're much worse now, but that also creates more opportunity than ever before. Chaos truly can be a ladder if you take advantage of it and endure the unhappy parts. Having a bit of savings to work with can make all the difference. You can focus on emerging opportunities without melting down over your next paycheck.
The concept of W-2 employment is completely dead to me now. Especially for this kind of technology work. I charge per outcome now (1099). I am no longer interested in being provided what amounts to hazard pay for the job of interacting with an adult day care center every day. Walking in as a hired gun with no political agenda and a clear mission feels great compared to where I was before. When I do participate in the clients' meetings, I generally get away with murder because I am laser focused on the outcome itself (my compensation) rather than belaboring whatever technical details behind it. If I'm on a call these days, there's an explicit reason for it. The business can sense that I am aligned with their goals, so the proverbial seas tend to be parted whenever I unmute my microphone.
The clients' salaried developers loathe me to the extent that it's creating even more opportunities. The amount of unqualified ego tripping in tech has become astounding and can serve as a powerful ally for humble wizards.
It is not ego tripping. They probably loathe you because you turn the power structures even more in capital's favour by undercutting or overriding them.
I’m smiling a bit reading this thread because I went essentially the opposite way: started contracting in 2010 when my grad school stipend ran out, in Feb 2020 (kind of lucky timing…) one of my clients convinced me to come on as FTE #2 at their startup (I’d done a 6-month prototyping gig for them in 2019 that was responsible for them unlocking their first tranche of funding). Have stuck around since then because the work is compelling and to some degree I’ve shaped the engineering org into what I want it to be, even though we’ve hired people above me (it’s kind of neat and weird hiring your own manager so that you no longer report direct to the CEO)
Anyway, as far as I can tell, the engineering teams that I was paid to help, I believe, generally loved me. The work I’d do generally fell into one of three buckets:
- early-stage prototyping work, where there was no engineering team yet and I was laying the foundation for v1 of a product
- modernization work, where a company has a product line that’s sitting generating revenue but there’s no engineering capacity to actually make v2. This was often more on the embedded side but occasionally stuff like pre-ARC Objective C -> Swift. Everyone’s too busy working on some other thing and the good-but-crusty product is starting to die due to lack of attention
- rescue work, where the engineering organization (management + ICs) have gotten themselves into a situation they’ve realized they can’t get themselves out of on their own. Often performance, scaling, or velocity-related, almost always with an element of pathological engineering culture.
The first two cases aren’t as relevant, but the third type was always a hearts & minds campaign. The outcome was two-fold: fix the software, fix the team.
First step: take the team out for lunch without their manager. To the loathing comment above, not everyone would take me up on the offer, but I could usually get enough of a critical mass together. Two objectives: convince them that I do not, under any circumstances, want to work with them long-term; convince them that I was on their side. Get them talking about what’s wrong, ostensibly about the product, but this would frequently pivot to the structural organizational problems that led to the product being how it was.
From there, put together two plans. Plan 1 was for how to tackle the software problem. Plan 2 was how to fix the engineering org. Typical situation was they had some ideas on the first part and LOTS to say about the second part. The connection between the two was they often had a good high-level idea about how to fix the software but didn’t have the specific skill to do the fix and didn’t have time to learn.
Then I’d start working both problems in parallel: knock out a quick win on the software side, do a lunch & learn with the team and their manager to explain what I’ve done, what tools I used if I used anything exotic, discuss next steps, and discuss whether someone else on the team wants to work together on the next thing. Meanwhile, I’m watching the team (incl. management) and the complaints that I got from them over lunch and while working with them. Looking to see which of those complaints I can see in the day-to-day work environment and who to… blame isn’t the right word, but figuring out who I need to nudge in which direction to make the problems that led to my involvement go away.
This usually went through a few iteration loops but I was always clear to everyone involved that my goal was for the team to not need me anymore. That was the outcome: problem solved, team can solve the same kinds of problems on their own without me. I’m available if you ever need to hire me again, I’m here if you get stuck on something tactical and can help out for a few days here and there.
If my goal was to get fired, how do I know that I did good? Direct feedback from ICs was one way. I smoked a fair bit back then and the number of times I had people come up to me outside during a coffee/smoke brea...
Somebody else said most of it, but I'll add a little more. Said developers loathe you because you decimate the thing they care about for your own benefit by being a hired gun of management and doing the killing for them.
I think you're wrong to say "you decimated the thing they care about". The way I see it is those loathing people have a job to care about a thing. The people who gave those loathing people their job also gave another job to another person who's just doing their job too.
Everyone has a job with a remit and responsibilities. The role of business leadership and management is to make sure the people and remits operate harmoniously to efficiently reach a common goal.
If some people doing their job well decimates another persons job in the same company, that is 100% the fault of the people managing the jobs, not the people doing the jobs.
> I generally get away with murder [...] The business can sense that I am aligned with their goals, so the proverbial seas tend to be parted whenever I unmute my microphone.
>The amount of unqualified ego tripping in tech has become astounding and can serve as a powerful ally for humble wizards.
Of course they do. You waltz in, do exactly management's bidding (finally someone who doesn't talk back!), and leave them to deal with the consequences. The onus of proving that it's because of "unqualified ego tripping" is on you.
It’s fascinating to read all the tech feedback in the comments here, but I think this business is failing because it has yet to achieve true product market fit.
Any half decent product, with a nice website, a real solution and some SEO can get in front of say 100,000 prospects these days. Here I imagine discovery is mainly from Googling “convert bank statements”, and conversion from prospects to client is straightforward for 1-2% of views.
But a conversion niche like this is dynamic - you basically luck into it and unless you actively find and occupy niches faster than the competition discovers them and stomps on you, your “business” is on a time fuze. For example, if someone like Xero where this is a feature discovers the keyword combo and does some paid ads. Or if Google pushes AI results up and your page goes below the fold. My expectation is that this latter situation is happening everywhere as Google AI search starts to strangle everything.
Leverage AI to be your CMO. It should be telling you things like (i) your product is likely perceived as too technical to break into the general market, (ii) you need a much better handle in target customer profile (demographic, messages), (iii) you need a customer relevant sustainable USP and (iv) you need a distinctive and memorable brand. The ultimate win is to create market pull from customer to customer recommendations.
> Sharing revenue data is a good way to get attention on Twitter, but for this business the Twitter attention doesn’t really translate into sales. I stopped sharing revenue data because a lot of people started using AI to build their own bank statement converter applications.
A lot of build in public is theater with MRR porn which has no basis in ground reality creating noise. Now the agentic world is coming after it. Build in public has turned into display in public these days.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 18.1 ms ] threadIt really is not that bad when you are in a company with a good culture. Leadership is gonna be AI piled everywhere, but imho that's how you learn where to use (and not to use) the technology.
I have doubts
You could add an API which is perfect for agents to use. Something that survives the pull request review process.
My gut says this one can be turned around. Even if 90% of people just happily prefer ChatGPT for this (which I'd doubt), the remaining 10% is still a lot to fund a small venture very well. Just gotta find them effectively.
Even the "giving up" route can be pretty juicy, there's companies that pay decent money for a "distressed asset". And there's also investment firms (like mine) that go for a minority stake and help turn things around.
If I convert my bank statements only each quarter in a spike or once or twice a year, why should I pay for each month or the entire year? Of course I don't know the real usage patterns of this application, but that's one scenario I'd think of.
*Edit: Apparently I forgot how to spell.
If I pay for something, I want the tool to work for me. I can't use an application if it tries to steal my attention all the time. An upgrade pop-up there, a reminder notification there, and the application wears me down.
I like quiet applications. It's there. I'll use it. An unobtrusive promo button for a new feature is OK, but constant nudging for the same thing is tiring. Dropbox used to do that with document signatures, they stopped now AFAICS.
If I pay for your application, please be patient and respectful, because the moment I feel that your application is more about getting my money than providing me services, I'm out.
The value I get is in the service you provide via your application. Not the existence of said application, so stop treating your users as cows in line waiting to be milked.
This is another reason I'm self hosting as much as possible. I'm willing to put in the work to maintain an application rather than seeing constant banners and pop-ups wedged in to milk me more.
[1]: https://calmtech.com/
I don't believe such future will arrive by itself, but we can build a calm tech stack for ourselves. I successfully pruned much of the noisier stuff from my environment, and cutting down subscriptions left and right.
Unfortunately, some of the subscriptions are really useful, or I like how they present the thing I'm working on, so they stay for the time being.
Thanks for the link. I'll be diving into this.
But really that cacophony of upgrades etc isn’t about user control, but just companies reminding you they exist. It’s spam, and like spam fighting, agents will not be able to handle it adequately.
People don't appreciate enough that releasing new software has a cost. Upgrading is risky and disruptive. Even on iOS, where app upgrades are as low effort as possible, they're a nuisance; I'm occasionally unable to open an app I need because it's mid-update. One time, I was using an app, closed it to get some information from another app, and when I wanted to go back to the first app I couldn't because it had started an auto update.
Software updates are a necessary evil. As such, they should be as infrequent as is reasonably possible.
If you want to go nuclear, you can disable update notifications altogether under administrative settings, I believe.
On the other hand, I mostly charge my iOS devices at night, and they handle updates & backups when they are charging. I didn't see an app updating midday for years, I believe.
Nextcloud is a bit too noisy on the app updates department, though, we can all agree on that.
Almost everything else in my life is a one time purchase. I pay for the thing, I use it forever. I would never buy a vacuum cleaner subscription. Or a pressure washer subscription. Why should I need to endlessly pay for software?
The usual excuses from developers:
1. But I need to maintain the server and that's a monthly cost!
Nope. Tethering your software to a server was your choice, not mine. I shouldn't have to pay for your decision. I have lots of perfectly good software on my computer that work fine without your server.
2. But it costs money to constantly be developing and publishing updates!
Nope. Nobody is asking you to constantly change your software. Generally, I don't want your updates. The software met my needs when I bought it, and I don't want you to change it, and I certainly don't want to keep paying you just so you can keep changing it.
We need to go back to treating software like it was something you bought in a box off a store shelf and that was it. No recurring payments. No updates. No accounts. No nagging. No telemetry. Just a box of bits that I hand over money for once.
I think it's pretty clear that management has taken advantage of that instinct. They keep upgrading software long after it really is fully finished. Nobody has wanted a new version of Microsoft Word for decades.
But it took decades to reach that point. Most software hasn't reached it. We send out software barely good enough -- if that much. Because it takes a long time to actually get good, and if we waited that long, the company would have gone belly-up. And the customers seem content to buy good-enough software, in the hopes that the other bugs and features will get fixed.
Obviously you should be able to opt out of all of that, and stick with a version you like. When enough customers do that, you stop, and move on to a new thing.
But I do think it's inevitable that companies will sell you a Minimum Viable Product and charge you to complete it. Because that's how they are able to afford to get it out the door before they go bankrupt. And if they don't, somebody else will, and get the software out faster.
Yes, traditional software also has a cost for maintenance and features but users could opt out to not pay for them.
I personally rather to either pay per usage, pay for the full year if it's valuable enough to purchase a license for desktop / mobile apps if possible.
This comes across as very unserious. If you’re truly trying to build a business then this seems like one of the best signals/datapoints you can get…
It was one of the best customer experiences of my life to not have to answer a series of 'why are you leaving?' questions and I would like to head back to Citibank just because of it. Unfortunately I don't live in NYC anymore so can't really do that.
Ideally they wouldn't pressure at all for me to stay and cancellation would be a quick process, and I would be happy to tell them why I left. Either to vent, or to at least get the (most likely misguided) feeling that they might do something about it. But if there's no asking as part of their process, I'd definitely think worse of them.
Personally I work at a FAANG adjacent big tech company and dream of quitting every fucking second
Two years ago I paid a little app to extract the member list of a WhatsApp community I manage. Now I just ask Codex to do it.
It sucks for the founders no doubt. But it’s better for the consumer not to have a million paid utility apps for solving small nuisances.
Or you could have AI write a script to handle the conversion for your specific bank. It'll be faster than any service and free forever.
I’m not surprised the business is struggling - the author hasn’t found a deep enough problem to solve.
They're much worse now, but that also creates more opportunity than ever before. Chaos truly can be a ladder if you take advantage of it and endure the unhappy parts. Having a bit of savings to work with can make all the difference. You can focus on emerging opportunities without melting down over your next paycheck.
The concept of W-2 employment is completely dead to me now. Especially for this kind of technology work. I charge per outcome now (1099). I am no longer interested in being provided what amounts to hazard pay for the job of interacting with an adult day care center every day. Walking in as a hired gun with no political agenda and a clear mission feels great compared to where I was before. When I do participate in the clients' meetings, I generally get away with murder because I am laser focused on the outcome itself (my compensation) rather than belaboring whatever technical details behind it. If I'm on a call these days, there's an explicit reason for it. The business can sense that I am aligned with their goals, so the proverbial seas tend to be parted whenever I unmute my microphone.
The clients' salaried developers loathe me to the extent that it's creating even more opportunities. The amount of unqualified ego tripping in tech has become astounding and can serve as a powerful ally for humble wizards.
Anyway, as far as I can tell, the engineering teams that I was paid to help, I believe, generally loved me. The work I’d do generally fell into one of three buckets:
- early-stage prototyping work, where there was no engineering team yet and I was laying the foundation for v1 of a product
- modernization work, where a company has a product line that’s sitting generating revenue but there’s no engineering capacity to actually make v2. This was often more on the embedded side but occasionally stuff like pre-ARC Objective C -> Swift. Everyone’s too busy working on some other thing and the good-but-crusty product is starting to die due to lack of attention
- rescue work, where the engineering organization (management + ICs) have gotten themselves into a situation they’ve realized they can’t get themselves out of on their own. Often performance, scaling, or velocity-related, almost always with an element of pathological engineering culture.
The first two cases aren’t as relevant, but the third type was always a hearts & minds campaign. The outcome was two-fold: fix the software, fix the team.
First step: take the team out for lunch without their manager. To the loathing comment above, not everyone would take me up on the offer, but I could usually get enough of a critical mass together. Two objectives: convince them that I do not, under any circumstances, want to work with them long-term; convince them that I was on their side. Get them talking about what’s wrong, ostensibly about the product, but this would frequently pivot to the structural organizational problems that led to the product being how it was.
From there, put together two plans. Plan 1 was for how to tackle the software problem. Plan 2 was how to fix the engineering org. Typical situation was they had some ideas on the first part and LOTS to say about the second part. The connection between the two was they often had a good high-level idea about how to fix the software but didn’t have the specific skill to do the fix and didn’t have time to learn.
Then I’d start working both problems in parallel: knock out a quick win on the software side, do a lunch & learn with the team and their manager to explain what I’ve done, what tools I used if I used anything exotic, discuss next steps, and discuss whether someone else on the team wants to work together on the next thing. Meanwhile, I’m watching the team (incl. management) and the complaints that I got from them over lunch and while working with them. Looking to see which of those complaints I can see in the day-to-day work environment and who to… blame isn’t the right word, but figuring out who I need to nudge in which direction to make the problems that led to my involvement go away.
This usually went through a few iteration loops but I was always clear to everyone involved that my goal was for the team to not need me anymore. That was the outcome: problem solved, team can solve the same kinds of problems on their own without me. I’m available if you ever need to hire me again, I’m here if you get stuck on something tactical and can help out for a few days here and there.
If my goal was to get fired, how do I know that I did good? Direct feedback from ICs was one way. I smoked a fair bit back then and the number of times I had people come up to me outside during a coffee/smoke brea...
Everyone has a job with a remit and responsibilities. The role of business leadership and management is to make sure the people and remits operate harmoniously to efficiently reach a common goal.
If some people doing their job well decimates another persons job in the same company, that is 100% the fault of the people managing the jobs, not the people doing the jobs.
Are you perchance paid by number of distinct metaphors used?
>The amount of unqualified ego tripping in tech has become astounding and can serve as a powerful ally for humble wizards.
beautiful, funniest thing i've read all week
Of course they do. You waltz in, do exactly management's bidding (finally someone who doesn't talk back!), and leave them to deal with the consequences. The onus of proving that it's because of "unqualified ego tripping" is on you.
"Claude, a business is making $30K/mo converting bank statements!
Use all of my max 20x plan to build a BETTER version. Must have animated per-page progress indicators"
Any half decent product, with a nice website, a real solution and some SEO can get in front of say 100,000 prospects these days. Here I imagine discovery is mainly from Googling “convert bank statements”, and conversion from prospects to client is straightforward for 1-2% of views.
But a conversion niche like this is dynamic - you basically luck into it and unless you actively find and occupy niches faster than the competition discovers them and stomps on you, your “business” is on a time fuze. For example, if someone like Xero where this is a feature discovers the keyword combo and does some paid ads. Or if Google pushes AI results up and your page goes below the fold. My expectation is that this latter situation is happening everywhere as Google AI search starts to strangle everything.
Leverage AI to be your CMO. It should be telling you things like (i) your product is likely perceived as too technical to break into the general market, (ii) you need a much better handle in target customer profile (demographic, messages), (iii) you need a customer relevant sustainable USP and (iv) you need a distinctive and memorable brand. The ultimate win is to create market pull from customer to customer recommendations.
A lot of the Internet says otherwise. Care to share your sauce?
A lot of build in public is theater with MRR porn which has no basis in ground reality creating noise. Now the agentic world is coming after it. Build in public has turned into display in public these days.