leros

I'm normally not a fan of AI being shoved into products but I love it in PostHog. I can ask it a product question, ask it to slice and dice data, etc and it does a really good job of sifting through my events, doing analysis, building dashboards, etc. It's normally boring tedious work to do that stuff in PostHog so I'm impressed and glad it works.

If you're non-technical and just wanting to play around with UI, I highly suggest you explore Claude Design. It's programming under the hood to make prototypes, but the coding is 100% hidden away from you. It can help you explore design ideas pretty quickly.

Cool idea!

FYI. Something is off about the data. It said there was one route and that scooter was 7 minutes faster than biking. E-bike was 16 minutes and scooter was 24 minutes.

Companies are happy to pay for SaaS products that are being run by a team of people who are experts in that domain and are also responsible for anything that goes wrong. Cloning something in house, no matter how it's done, doesn't bring you the subject matter experts and it shifts the responsibility/blame internally.

The $20/mo plan was almost enough for me coding daily. Once I added Claude Design, I'd easily spend $20-50/day in extra usage. Upgrading to the $100 Max plan, I never come anywhere near the limits.

I don't really like the model of scrapers paying small fees. I think it devalues things.

I make money when people use my website. I don't make money when AI scrapes my content and answers the question without the user coming to my website.

I'd need scrapers to pay me 5-6 figure payments to replace the revenue they'd be taking from me if my content was easily scraped. I doubt that's ever going to happen.

That's interesting because about a month ago, I noticed Claude Code starting to use about 5x as many tokens. Just my rough estimate.

With the advent of buying online, from sites like Newegg, I felt like the local stores were much less exciting even back then. It was nice to be able to buy something same day but browsing Newegg and having broad selection was more fun for me.

They dry up in unrepairable ways if you don't use them often enough.

How have you made money?

I haven't had any issues like that. Maybe your system is some kind of bad state?

Don't worry about title inflation, it doesn't matter. In lots of companies, everyone is called an executive.

Google killed my startup in a similar way many years ago. In my case, they turned quota on services I needed down to 0, refused to tell me why, and closed my appeal. I never figured out what went wrong.

I'll never again use a cloud service where I'm not big enough to get quality customer service, which rules out the big clouds. It's too much of a business risk.

What's your marketing look like? A bad product that gets put in front of a lot of people will gain more traction than a great product only a few people see.

A competitor with funding may simply be able to kickstart product awareness with lots of lost spend on advertising. Whereas a bootstrapped company will have a much more difficult time getting off the ground.

Presumably being able to influence their roadmap is worth it

I haven't even looked at your idea because it doesn't impact my answer. Starting something is harder than having a good product. You also need marketing, growth, etc which I have no idea if you're capable of doing.

Zooming out a bit. How do you feel about the possibility of quitting your job, spending 1-2 years working on this, failing, and looking for another job? You'd lose income but also have a very interesting life experience. I'm doing something similar and I legitimately don't mind failing because I'm glad I get to have the experience regardless of whether the startup works or not.

I have a lost wallet with about 300 Bitcoin sitting in a landfill somewhere. I tried out Bitcoin really early on and mined those over a few weeks. But they were worthless back then and I was burning electricity for "nothing" so I stopped. This was before that 10k Bitcoin pizza purchase happened. I have some regrets lol.

Why not just pass through charges for them? Let them pre-buy credits or charge them for usage. Seems like a huge hassle for users to setup.

Technology is very cool and certainly has value in improving our lives. That being said, I have realized that I'm generally happier the less time I spend looking at screens. I opt for paper maps when I can. I read physical books. I'm just bored with nothing to do when I stand in lines. I don't really want to tech-ify stuff that much anymore.

A random example. They now make bird feeders with cameras and AI detection to tell you what type of bird you're seeing. But it's so much more satisfying to sit outside watching the bird feeder and then flip through a book to identify the bird. It's slower and old fashioned but it's a calm, satisfying thing to do.

They must have really bungled something if they can't roll back and get the site operational again.

I'd argue setting up a semi-fake version of one side of a marketplace is a little more in the cheating category. Plus it sounds more fun to me :)

But yeah same thing.

It's a thing in second world countries too. There are small communities that don't get package delivery, so they ship packages to the capital city and then pay someone to drive packages to their community once a week or so. I've heard of people paying $50 a package in places with pretty low incomes.

Without burning money you'll need to be creative. Either do it yourself or go sourcing the supply side. Can you go find a group of people you can use to transport things and basically sign up on the platform on their behalf and then hand stuff off to them? Maybe you know some travel group that exist and you could pay them to take packages. You're basically acting in an agency model in the beginning instead of being a true P2P marketplace. It's a common strategy though it does often lead to just becoming an agency because it's more successful than your organic marketplace. This would be like if you called an Uber and Uber calls up a private driving service to pick you up.

You need to cheat to kickstart one side

1) Incentivize people on one side to join without the other side. For example Uber paid early drivers money just for signing up even though they had no riders.

2) You provide one side of the marketplace to kickstart the other side. This would be like Uber hiring drivers in the beginning.

This is why starting a two sided marketplace often requires significant capital. They're very hard to start organically.

Another thing I'd suggest is to focus on a niche. Don't try to solve the global problem just yet. Maybe you know a lot of people want to transport books between London and Madrid. Just focus on that to get that market healthy, then add another product or location. This helps you focus your marketing. Also if you go global to start you might have 1000 users on both sides but no matches because everyone is too spread out.

Managed services have value. It's less to set up, less to maintain, and less worrying about waking up at 3am when something breaks.

I've spent time eating the costs of things like DigitalOcean or SaaS products because my time is better spent growing my revenue than reducing infrastructure costs. But at some point, costs can grow large enough that's it's worthwhile to shift focus to reducing infrastructure spend.

You shouldn't assume it's a hostile design. Do you think Google Maps is a hostile design? It's a similar use case.

So far I haven't seen crawlers or agents utilize the interactive map widget where the final useful data is located. I'm sure it will happen eventually.

I can tell they're not using it because the page is getting hit by their user agents but my API is not.

You sure have jumped to a lot of conclusions. I have a consumer product that people purchase. My free content is a gateway to that product.

I don't want my site to be agent ready. I'd prefer people visit my site so that I can make revenue than have an AI scrape my content and answer the question for someone else.

I've redesigned my site to have enough content so that AI knows what I have but they have to send the user to my site to use an interactive JavaScript widget to get the final answer they need. So far so good, but not sure how long that will work for.

Yeah 99% of consumers are still going want an app from the app store even with that.