Comment by _fw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _fw | Hacker News Reader

As somebody responsible for the acquisition of users and growth of a company in terms of customer and revenue, this is a VERY salient point:

> “… we could not have accelerated Zotero’s conception, because we did not know exactly what we wanted, and so could not have written coherent prompts for an LLM.”

A surprising proportion of software products, maybe even businesses today, are solutions in search of a problem.

Sometimes that’s okay, but only sometimes. And being a solution in search of a problem requires you to get everything /else/ pretty much perfect if you want to succeed.

The fact Zotero paid attention to what people wanted, and gave it to them, and were market oriented, is demonstrably a big part of their success.

It is MUCH easier to make something people want, than to make them want something you made.

Agreed, but it is also much easier to get something made in the first place. LLMs enable rapid prototyping and rapid shifting to solve real problems. My applications are morphing from mediocre to highly useful problem solving machines much more rapidly now.

That’s a really good point! But I am always surprised by how often people will avoid putting their prototypes out there and let the market shape their product.

Rapid prototyping is an amazing opportunity afforded to us by AI. But some people use that potential to spend even longer on a more developed prototype that they are too attached to to get feedback on!

> But I am always surprised by how often people will avoid putting their prototypes out there and let the market shape their product

I see the opposite. I see thousands and thousands of quickly produced apps that have been put out there, but have 0 users that could shape it. Not so much because of their quality, but rather distribution in a very crowded and shouty marketplace.

Indeed, the solutions in search of a problem are teeming in the day and age of LLMs! I think the opposite framing is quite interesting aswell "solutions in search of a problem" -> "problem in search of a solution" as in solution are not always self evident and what might work for one might not work for someone else, striking the right balance takes time. And to me this article highlight this, they are academics that are well aware of problem at hand, but still, they can't easily formulate a solution to it.

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