This is an incredible price. Lucky students.
292 karma · joined September 19, 2021
> Think about it: when/if this company grows to a larger size, if they can’t handle AI slop from contributors how can they handle AI slop from a large employee base?
god help us
But you're right about the todos... except that the majority of times my little /issue command actually produces really great issues and digs up root causes very well. I still need to read and bless them though. Maybe we need a "potentially slop" label.
Maybe it would have been better to keep the original no-body "fix truncate in sidebar text" style issues, though I quite like my little /issue command. I'm sure I'll have something else in a month.
About the README etc: we ship an SDK and a lot of people use our source code as docs or a prototyping environment. I think a lot about agents as consumers of the codebase and I want help them navigate the monorepo quickly. That said, I'm not sure if the CONTEXT.md system I made for tldraw is actually that useful... new models are good at finding their way around and I also worry that we don't update them enough. I've found that bad directions are worse than no directions over time.
When I was doing pricing discovery and asking early adopters what they would pay for tldraw, almost all the teams I talked to either said "nothing because we don't have any money yet" or a number between $5,000 and $10,000, with a handful of outliers. In the end, my solution was just to put a price on the thing and then find ways to provide for everyone else, including PRPF commercial teams. In 3.x our solution was a watermark, which caused other problems for us; but this discussion made it pretty clear to me that we need to have a better answer for these teams in 4.x.
That said, we've at least got the startup sales _process_ as close to self-serve as we can. Someone still needs to validate the size of the company and send a Stripe link, but 20% of startup licensees were delivered in under 24 hours and more than half are done in under a week.
I expect we’ll do extended trial licenses for teams that are serious but just getting started, or are pre-revenue pre-funding; and there’s a hobby license for non-commercial projects. Pricing… never ends.
Excalidraw was already really established when I started tldraw, yeah. I was a contributor (the app uses my ink library perfect-freehand!) and still love the project. Excalidraw has done really well with their SaaS app Excalidraw+. I still think the bigger long term need / opportunity is for an SDK product, given that whiteboarding is becoming more of a commodity feature, like kanban boards or maps.
Two of the starter kits we released today are more flowcharty. It’s been possible to make this kind of thing with tldraw for about 18 months, since we made our bindings API, and a few teams have built graph UIs on tldraw already, but I wouldn’t say it’s an easy path. Hopefully these starter kits will make it easier to uh start.
At the peak, when we were streaming back video from Fal and getting <100ms of lag, the setup produced one of the most original creative experiences I’d ever had. I wish these sorts of ultra-fast image generators received more attention and research because they do open up some crazy UX.
I should really share the design doc from when we started putting this together. The core idea here was a) making a little hobby machine on the canvas and b) using LLMs to “power” the widgets. Somehow that ended up looping back to “ai workflows” but definitely not where we started. I’m only catching up on the space now!