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"Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

iamcharliegraham.substack.com

121–130 of 140 posts

Re: "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

#121

> The best way to avoid the red ocean is to build for an obscure and complex niche. This seems like the counter-argument... You need to build something incredibly different. You need to message differently, you need to distribute differently. If the argument is that convincing the world that you're different is harder than ever I buy that. So much fluff and noise out there that it's harder than ever to break through…

Are you working towards this? What examples do you have in mind? (I agree with your thesis btw)

Re: "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

#122

Can't say I agree with this article at all. This has not been my experience. I don't quite know how to articulate this well, but there's something that I'd call a "complexity cliff" in the software business: if you want to compete in certain spaces, you need to build very complex software (even if the software, to the user, is easy to use). And while AI tools can assist you in the construction of this software, it ca…

> there's something that I'd call a "complexity cliff" in the software business: if you want to compete in certain spaces, you need to build very complex software (even if the software, to the user, is easy to use) I recognized something similar when I first started interviewing candidates. I try to interview promising resumes even if they don't have the perfect experience match. Something that becomes obvious when d…

Not actually critiquing the comment, just somewhat for my own memory and ref, there's several other "verbs" attached to a lot of those systems.

B / L / S - Browse / List / Summarize, M / T - Move / Transfer, C / R - Copy / Replicate, A / E - Append / Expand, T / S - Trim / Subtract, P - Process, possibly V / G / D - Visualize / Graph / Display

There's probably others that vary from just a Create (POST, PUT), Read (GET), Update (PATCH), Delete (DELETE) the way they're interpreted in something like REST APIs.

Re: "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

#123
post #25

I see this as a great thing. Venture Capital has been way too focused on software for a long time. It’s time for the money in tech to start flowing to other things like hardware, biotech, etc. we’ve seen this start happening for a little while already with companies like Anduril, but hopefully it will continue accelerating because of this.

VC money never stopped flowing to biotech. It just doesn't get as much attention on HN.

https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/fierce-biotech-fundrai...

Re: "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

#124
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Having CRUD operations" and "Just a CRUD app" are very different things. The custom text rendering bit alone should have been a good cue for this distinction.

That was the point. It is a CRUD app but it is not just a CRUD app.

I'm trying to imagine a scenario with a non-trivial app that is missing a create, read, update or delete operation. I'm coming up with so few examples that I have to imagine the colloquial use of CRUD app means just CRUD operations.

Re: "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

#125
I think this is meant to be satire, but it's subtle enough that it went over a lot of heads here. Well, that or I'm reading too much into it, but...

Everything the author said was just as true pre-GPT. He's imparting basic business knowledge under the guise of "oh, now that there's this AI thing, you can't just build it have users show up."

Re: "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

#126
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's essentially what I mean when I say crud app. It's basically a web api written in something like C# or whatever you prefer, which receives HTTP requests and translates them into DB operations. CRUD and views basically. For this type of development you want the DB to handle basically all the heavy lifting, the trick is to design the DB schema well and have the web API send the right SQL to get exactly the…

I think you're missing the point of the comment you've replied to. That comment is talking about implementing the DB. When you're implementing a DB, you can't just forward reads and writes to another DB. Someone has to actually implement that DB on top of a filesystem, raw disk, or similar storage.

With the post's logic if you work on DB you likely have an SQL engine that is a CRUD on top of storage engine. And storage engine is a CRUD on top of some disk storage, which is CRUD over syscalls on files. Think Mysql using MyRocks using RocksDB. And keep applying until there's no sense left.

Re: "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

#127
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry. This is totally not AI slop. AI-edited for grammar, but human-created. What industry are you building in? And have you been building in it a while or is it a new startup?

I think this puts the onus in the wrong direction. I _love_ LLM coding and write probably 70% of my code that way. But having seen its (current) limits, and building a few toy apps myself, I'd love to see examples of successful, complex products that are mostly vibe coded. Until I see that, I'll continue to believe the current crop of LLM is best suited for building prototypes, helping get initial ideas shipped, and…

Look at the AI visibility tools. They all integrate with multiple LLM models, include scheduling, management of multiple external processes, data parsing, site-scraping, graphs, as well as multiple database structures. They need retry and error logic, real-time displays and updates, and multiple flow UX's, and Stripe integration with webhooks, and subscription management.

Same thing with competitor monitoring. These tools require scraping multiple sites, checking X, Facebook, Jobs sites, Crunchbase, etc, aggregating data and displaying and making sense of changes. And the same multi-process management, queuing, and Stripe integrations.

A few years ago, these would both fit into businesses requiring many months of development to get it all running. Now we are seeing dozens of companies emerging in each of these categories each month as they take weeks to build. And if one finds a cool aha (a new integration or graph or UX flow or positioning) the others can quickly follow in a week or less of AI-agent coding.

There are dozens of other categories where this is happening too.

The hard part of figuring out the nuances of the APIs and integrations and retries and AWS integrations and Rabbit MQ configurations and corner cases can all be done by AI with the right context.

Re: "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

#128
post #55

Can't say I agree with this article at all. This has not been my experience. I don't quite know how to articulate this well, but there's something that I'd call a "complexity cliff" in the software business: if you want to compete in certain spaces, you need to build very complex software (even if the software, to the user, is easy to use). And while AI tools can assist you in the construction of this software, it ca…

I'm going to give a very concrete example of this so people can understand. I built a fitness product eons ago where there a million rules that determined what should happen for prescribing exercises to athletes (college/pro teams). If you gave this to an agent today, you will get a tangled mess of if statements that are impossible to debug or extend. This is primarily because LLMs are still bad at picking the right…

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Re: "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

#129

This article is based on vibes just like the trends it hypothesizes. To pick just one claim: “Big companies used to move slowly, but now a ragtag team of two developers at a large firm can whip up something that looks top-of-market to the untrained eye in a matter of weeks.” This is just pure speculation with no consideration of success or longevity. Big companies are going faster now? Where? Which ones? AI coding al…

Even with all these tools available, big companies would still be unable to compete in speed simply because in 99% of cases they don't have the required culture set in place.

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Re: "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

#130
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the point. It is a CRUD app but it is not just a CRUD app.

When people say "a CRUD app" they mean "an app that is mostly just CRUD"

This might have been the response trcf22 needed.

But sure, I’m being too pedantic here I suppose.

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