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A college student reached $64k/mo in 6 months by being an AI first mover

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Re: A college student reached $64k/mo in 6 months by being an AI first mover

#31

Post by brundolf »

pmart123 wrote: post #24
teach wrote: post #3

Somebody always wins the lottery. This doesn't mean that playing the lottery is a useful path to riches for anyone else. Edited to add: This is not an indictment on the college student in question! Congrats to him for being prepared to seize on an opportunity and executing well.

A lot of the ai plays seems like small vertical business opportunities that fill a particular niche that could be quickly profitable for a small team, but aren't really scalable or could quickly become obsolete.

A lot of successful SaaSes are this way. Niches are things that other people might not have solved already, and big players may not even want to bother solving. If you're happy with not eating the world, you can make a good business in a niche

Re: A college student reached $64k/mo in 6 months by being an AI first mover

#33

Post by cddotdotslash »

abxytg wrote: post #8

there is literally a "how to" in the open AI api docs for the exact use case. I need to be more shameless the next go around.

I’ve seen this argument repeatedly. The example is just that - an example. It doesn’t cover anything related to productionizing the application, dealing with user management, rate limits, cost controls, hosting the service, data persistence, documentation, billing, marketing, or any of the other 100 things you need to do to turn a simple script into a product that people are willing to pay for, trust with their data, and embed into their own websites.

So sure, be shameless, but don’t be surprised when your copy/pasted version of the example doesn’t take off.

Re: A college student reached $64k/mo in 6 months by being an AI first mover

#34

Post by mritchie712 »

tbm57 wrote: post #5

OpenAI continually gaining even more leverage in the business world with their API. They'll be able to charge whatever they want eventually, if they can't already

Open source LLMs are getting pretty good. The one mosaicml[0] just released is impressive and I expect a dozen more like it by the end of the year.

0 - https://www.mosaicml.com/blog/mpt-7b out Mosiac

Re: A college student reached $64k/mo in 6 months by being an AI first mover

#35

Post by kordlessagain »

wefarrell wrote: post #27
jrpt wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs aren't a fad though. Yasser has thousands of customers paying him real money because they find value in what his product does. I'm running a somewhat similar website ( https://Docalysis.com/ ) where users chat with files, and it's clear there's a lot of value being added, so people are willing to pay. What's less clear is how this all plays out when there's more competition, but it's not like we'll all go out of…

I do expect constraints to emerge, in the form of regulatory capture and copyright challenges from content owners.

The bigger play is maybe data lakes. Upwards of 80% of that data is unstructured. And, it likely can’t move off prem.

Re: A college student reached $64k/mo in 6 months by being an AI first mover

#37

Post by theautist »

k2enemy wrote: post #7
teach wrote: post #3

Somebody always wins the lottery. This doesn't mean that playing the lottery is a useful path to riches for anyone else. Edited to add: This is not an indictment on the college student in question! Congrats to him for being prepared to seize on an opportunity and executing well.

Did he win the lottery though? There's a lot of MRR, but I didn't see anything about profit. He could be losing money.

He did mention towards the end of the interview that he made some money. Doesn't specify how much though.

Re: A college student reached $64k/mo in 6 months by being an AI first mover

#38

Post by becquerel »

atonse wrote: post #20
_gfwu wrote: post #13

>"It made it very clear that my goal of making $10k a month from a side project is not a crazy goal to have." Honestly that entire interview just reveals how much of that poor guys thinking is already infected by the virus called capitalism. Accumulating personal wealth shouldn't be the end goal here. It's short-sighted and perpetuates the very system that created inequality and injustice in the first place. Instead…

(genuinely asking) Is there another theoretical system that properly incentivizes people to compete with each other, innovate, and take risks to solve problems? I ask in the "build new solutions" space – we all know there are plenty of rent-seeking businesses that add no value but just take money from everyone. I'm not trying to defend any of that. I'm only asking in the case of "people doing new, innovative things a…

communism, because when everyone's basic needs are guaranteed they have the mental/physical bandwidth to be innovators, and without commodity fetishism, scientific advancements can be made for the sake of responding to human needs, rather than facilitating the creation of products

Re: A college student reached $64k/mo in 6 months by being an AI first mover

#39

Post by koochi10 »

I know this crowd / silicon valley is accustom to these kinds of stories. But we should remember that this is a college kid, who saw an opportunity and took initiative to build a business. The comments here are WAY too critical. We should celebrate these kinds of stories, instead of nitpicking.

Additionally these 'A.I apps are just gold rush' comments are too dismissive about the potential. It may be that there are some low hanging fruit that will get picked first, but I personally think that the vast majority of opportunity requires some level innovation, creative thinking, and grit to utilize.

Re: A college student reached $64k/mo in 6 months by being an AI first mover

#40

Post by TrackerFF »

My first thought was: Good on him, that's solid revenue.

My second thought was: This sounds like another idea that could easily be killed off by Google or similar companies, if they just add a "this is googlebert, your personalized analysis robot - just link your website/upload docs and ask away!" function.

Or this kind of functionality simply becomes part of the batteries included package for ChatGPT etc.

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