Does a product include the ability to acquire and retain customers?
What is a product?
11–20 of 72 posts
Re: What is a product?
#12Re: What is a product?
#13A product is something consumable.
Re: What is a product?
#14The problem is that getting your first user or first $1 is not particularly easier with even the best LLMs to help you. Distribution is brutal — Google doesn’t want to index new sites, Twitter doesn’t want to distribute lowbie posts, right here HN’s /new queue is mercurial ..
So building is faster, but marketing—not so much
Re: What is a product?
#15I think it ultimately just comes down to laziness. People are increasingly loathe to make multi-year plans and stick to them, for various reasons.
Building something like a YouTube competitor is theoretically doable by a small team. It’s vastly more possible with AI tools than it was a decade ago.
But the “muscle” of doing difficult things has atrophied for many people, in large part because the AI tools themselves reduce your ability to actually do the work. If day after day, you just prompt an AI to make things for you, do research for you, etc. then you gradually stop working that muscle yourself.
It makes me think that the ideal usage of AI tools might be a deliberately limited one: do everything on your own, but check in with the AI once a week for review.
Re: What is a product?
#16I don't disagree but for some of the examples given (YouTube, Instagram, X.com) a huge entry barrier is the network effect. Even if AI could perfectly clone these products in a day, that still doesn't translate to instant market share.
Re: What is a product?
#17Whilst I agree with the sentiment, there is some irony that the blog itself looks to be vibe-coded too.
Re: What is a product?
#18>A real product has real users, a real market and solves real problems. This misses the mark. A product is something which can be exchanged with others, transferred into their agency, for them to own and use according to their free will. They don't have to use it or indeed 'be a user' - it is up to them whether or not utility is derived. The only requirement is that it is exchangeable and that agency has been transfe…
Not sure I understand the need for the exchange at scale. If I build a tool that lets a single person automate a tedious calculation then as long as they can depend on me maintaining it then it’s a product as far as I’m concerned.
Re: What is a product?
#19A product is something you can pitch to an investor for money. All else is irrelevant.
Re: What is a product?
#20The problem is that getting your first user or first $1 is not particularly easier with even the best LLMs to help you. Distribution is brutal — Google doesn’t want to index new sites, Twitter doesn’t want to distribute lowbie posts, right here HN’s /new queue is mercurial .. So building is faster, but marketing—not so much
I think there are people you can pay to ensure your post gets to the front page.