21–30 of 32 posts
As an aside, I love the website design. Very early 2000s vibe without costing readability (on desktop).
I read it on mobile and, while not optimised for it, it was very easy to zoom into the middle column to read.
I wish more blogs did this: simply setting your content to 38em and doing nothing else makes the content readable on mobile.
>We’re excited. When can you come back and show us a prototype?” When you've put your hand in your pocket.
What do you mean by that? Promise some investment? Commit to something?
Yes, with an actual payment (processed credit card transaction), a signed contract with clear payment terms, or a convincing promise to pay such as a written instruction to send an invoice.
A lot of startups have made the mistake of thinking "customers" are the same as "downloads of a free app" or "people who created an online account" or "people who signed up to be notified of the actual launch."
Accelerators once encouraged this ("you have to show progress to investors on demo day!") but unless you have actual paying customers it's not a real business.
This is great advice (that we need to follow) but needs to be updated for 2026. The information value of providing (or receiving) a demo has dropped to roughly zero with vibe coding. Today, an apparently functional and useful product can be produced and demoed in minutes, but that demo provides absolutely zero information into the technical capabilities of the demoing team to follow through on promises with polish an…
This is great advice (that we need to follow) but needs to be updated for 2026. The information value of providing (or receiving) a demo has dropped to roughly zero with vibe coding. Today, an apparently functional and useful product can be produced and demoed in minutes, but that demo provides absolutely zero information into the technical capabilities of the demoing team to follow through on promises with polish an…
In my experience demos are half about the product and half about the team / company behind it. So I wouldn’t call its value zero: part of the reason a potential client is asking for a demo is to see if there’s actually a real, intelligent company behind the product.
Customer transaction numbers, service response times, human staffing for VIP customer service, and human engineers who are recognized domain experts. The cliche live call to customer support with some hairy-ass customer specific problem.
Plus vibe-upselling of vibe-integrations for whatever Wonderful Engineering the customer has with your profit centres.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience demos are half about the product and half about the team / company behind it. So I wouldn’t call its value zero: part of the reason a potential client is asking for a demo is to see if there’s actually a real, intelligent company behind the product.
AI demos are 5% of the product
This is great advice (that we need to follow) but needs to be updated for 2026. The information value of providing (or receiving) a demo has dropped to roughly zero with vibe coding. Today, an apparently functional and useful product can be produced and demoed in minutes, but that demo provides absolutely zero information into the technical capabilities of the demoing team to follow through on promises with polish an…
And frankly visually being able to explain how your product beats the competition is more important than writing lines of code for a product that could be DOA.
However not everyone can do this. So the scientific approach gets pushed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, and the story now shifts to: What's your customer service & support model? How can you prove this is stable and that you can maintain it? Who is going to handle the pages in the middle of the night?
All those things are beyond the demo itself. Vibe-coded demos are just demos. There are stability, security and everything enterprise that still needs to be added to a demo to actually make it functional as a paid offering. The hard problems still remain.
The described enterprise sales process sounds a bit odd to me. I come from the perspective of existing codebase that is tailored to the specific customer processes/org structure etc. so maybe it's different for a completely blue ocean type of product. It's usually initial contact + demo or feature talk of sorts. The next step is some small project with customer specific data which is billed. They get a quote and eith…
This is great advice (that we need to follow) but needs to be updated for 2026. The information value of providing (or receiving) a demo has dropped to roughly zero with vibe coding. Today, an apparently functional and useful product can be produced and demoed in minutes, but that demo provides absolutely zero information into the technical capabilities of the demoing team to follow through on promises with polish an…
>that demo provides absolutely zero information into the technical capabilities of the demoing team to follow through on promises with polish and at scale. With vibe coding comes vibes-based capital. I'm only half kidding.
Yes, first/fast is sometimes a negative factor (e.g. first to market doesn't mean best, second to market can take advantage of proof of market proviced by first, etc.)
I wish hackernews submissions is more like this
What would you mean "more like this"? The headline is borderline clickbaity. Specifically the word "Ruthless" made me think of something unethical like Delve's business. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47634690
He means things that actually matter to entrepreneurs. All we've been seeing lately are hype-chasing AI submissions.