Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The only moat left is money?

elliotbonneville.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 398 posts

Re: The only moat left is money?

#171

Post by alfalfasprout »

autoconfig wrote: post #63

> When creation was hard, skill was the differentiator: you had to actually be good to make something worth showing. Now the barrier is near zero, so you need reach. Reach costs money or it costs years. Probably both. Creation has progressively been getting easier since the invention of the computer, it is not a new phenomena. This naturally pushes the boundary on what needs to be delivered in order to find paying cu…

The thing is, the barrier isn't near zero. The time to reach an MVP has just decreased. But you still very much need expertise, strategy, etc. to deliver something worthwhile. The bar has just increased.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#173

Post by nickelpro »

> a paid, invite-only social network where every person is verified human and there's no algorithm

This seems like an incredibly niche product that only a handful of people are interested in to begin with. It isn't an notable or surprising result that building it resulted in little interest from general audiences.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#174

Post by ncphillips »

neom wrote: post #72
showerst wrote: post #3

This AI boom is just a hyper-version of previous tech booms (web 1.0, VC, crypto, etc). You have an enormous number of people who just want to get in and build something, but the products they are pumping out don't serve anyone's need or solve anyone's problem. The moat isn't money for out-marketing your idea that 750 other people are building, it's having a good idea that solves a problem that nobody else is solving…

I worked during the digital revolution in film, I've told the story a zillion times on HN but basically, I went through the first pure digital film program in Canada, by the time I graduated 70% had dropped out, as far as I know I'm the only one who made a proper go at it, and even then when my startup was taking off, a new hot shot would show up every month and be gone the next when they got bored or frustrated when…

> a new hot shot would show up every month and be gone the next when they got bored or frustrated when nobody thought they were special

I don't know much about film industry, and I have a ton of brainfog from being sick today.

Could you say more? What made them a hotshot? They thought they were like, creative geniuses with digital film or something?

Re: The only moat left is money?

#175

Post by arrsingh »

showerst wrote: post #77
boplicity wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the products they are pumping out don't serve anyone's need or solve anyone's problem. This isn't true though. Yes, there are too many products being build that don't serve anyone's needs or solve anyone's problems. However, many of the AI products do solve problems and serve needs. You're right though, to compare this to other booms, which also had the same problem. This is very much a "hyper" version, which is pr…

I don't mean that _all_ AI built stuff is useless, just that the number of products where 'marketing budget' is the bottleneck is dwarfed by the number of tools that aren't that special in the first place. If you have a product that: 1. Solves a real problem people would pay for 2. Is not trivially replicable by your potential customers or competitors 3. Does not have a natural discovery mechanism by potential custom…

I think item #2 in your list is the real kicker here. Given that AI can write code the threshold for "trivially replicable" is going down.

Unless your thing has strong network effects or a large capex requirement (ex: GPU infra) its easily replicated and I think that's really what makes things hard.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#176

Post by ericmcer »

autoconfig wrote: post #63

> When creation was hard, skill was the differentiator: you had to actually be good to make something worth showing. Now the barrier is near zero, so you need reach. Reach costs money or it costs years. Probably both. Creation has progressively been getting easier since the invention of the computer, it is not a new phenomena. This naturally pushes the boundary on what needs to be delivered in order to find paying cu…

Seriously you can ship in a week things that FAANGs would have paid billions for 10 years ago.

LLMs are just glue between pieces of your code you still need to be able to plug them into a coherent architecture to do something impressive.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#177

Post by vadepaysa »

One thing I’ve noticed doing Show HNs recently:

People are flooded by new projects and assume (rightly) that most are low-signal, so they don’t engage. Because there’s low engagement, new projects get even less visibility. That reinforces the belief that nothing interesting can be built anymore.

I ship earlier now (often free and open source) to learn faster, but it doesn’t change the attention dynamics much.

The bottleneck isn’t building. it’s distribution and who already has an audience. Now dont get me started on getting an audience. thats a whole different pain.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#178

Post by nomel »

egonschiele wrote: post #141

Coding agents are good, but once the complexity is high they're not good enough. Eventually your agent won't be able to make changes to your code base without introducing bugs with every change. In my experience, the agents aren't very good with abstractions yet, and no amount of testing can completely paper over that problem. So yes, the industry is changing dramatically and at a breathtaking rate, but I don't think…

Not just complexity, but also anything requiring any actual ingenuity. It's impressive how "junior" it can be, with its (current) statistical shackles. Worse, if you flat tell it what to do, if your approach is too far into the statistical weeds, it'll flounder like crazy.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#179

Post by colinnordin »

Everyone now have access to a tool that makes them nearly as powerful as only the most creative builders were before.

But these new builders have a tool, they don’t suddenly have a newfound creativity.

I think with time we will stop seeing what we consider AI slop, simply because we know it’s not worth sharing. Instead great creative people will share very impressive things that simply wasn’t possible to build before.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#180

Post by jrecyclebin »

nickelpro wrote: post #173

> a paid, invite-only social network where every person is verified human and there's no algorithm This seems like an incredibly niche product that only a handful of people are interested in to begin with. It isn't an notable or surprising result that building it resulted in little interest from general audiences.

Kind of ironic - the moat is money...

At the same time, I see the appeal. I feel like 10% of the comments I read lately are "is this an AI response?" - would be nice to be free of that. Probably not possible tho.

Post reply on HN