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The minimum viable unit of saleable software

brandur.org

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Re: The minimum viable unit of saleable software

#21

Post by cadamsdotcom »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #3

Be careful with making decisions about your livelihood based on a rational calculus. As you correctly point out, there is a threshold for which a programmer or company should not even blink at the cost of software. It's often the case that if the software they're buying saves one single hour of productivity, it's value-positive... and yet they won't buy it. Individual devs are notorious for refusing to pay a cent out…

Thanks applfanboysbgon, this is the type of comment every HN commented should aspire to!

Packed full of insightful comments that cut against the grain and are logical even if unpleasant to hear, delivered with kindness and a thoughtful, caring tone, and backed up with strong justification.

Did I mention delivered with kindness?

And it mirrors my experience. The struggle has me convinced that to sell anyone anything your offer has to be so overwhelmingly good they’d not just win from having it but lose from not having it. It’s why the slick salespeople of old would talk for minutes at you just to get you to buy a thing once - non stop talking attacking your objections from every angle before finally moving on to the price. Sure, as the person offering the thing you see the value - but your prospect just showed up to your site, they’ve got an Amazon purchase to finish on another tab, the baby is crying in the other room, and there’s an outage. Sorry - your thing does what again?

Re: The minimum viable unit of saleable software

#22

Post by chasing »

I find that younger software engineers sometimes take the attitude of: Why would I pay for that when I could easily just do it on my own? As they grow and gain more responsibilities that flips to: Why would I build and maintain something on my own when I could pay someone else a few bucks to do it? At least I feel I went through this change as I grew professionally...

So many things I am completely capable of doing on my own I simply don’t want to. I have better things to do. More valuable things.

Yes, build versus buy. The eternal question!

Re: The minimum viable unit of saleable software

#23

Post by drchaim »

Brandur of course knows more than me, and his framing sounds correct. I would be worried about whether the TAM of Go + Postgres is enough for business sustainability, but that says probably more about my fears than the reality in this huge market called “internet”

Re: The minimum viable unit of saleable software

#24

Post by hilariously »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #10
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #3

Be careful with making decisions about your livelihood based on a rational calculus. As you correctly point out, there is a threshold for which a programmer or company should not even blink at the cost of software. It's often the case that if the software they're buying saves one single hour of productivity, it's value-positive... and yet they won't buy it. Individual devs are notorious for refusing to pay a cent out…

Plus, too many companies don't spend their money in a logical fashion. As a manager, you can direct your $200,000/year engineer in any way you want, but try to spend any amount of money on a new SaaS product and procurement might huffily demand hours of your time and weeks of delay to authorize even $40/month, let alone $400/month. That said, I think the path Brandur is describing is well-trodden and proven out by pr…

This is one of those things that makes me go insane at the last three companies I worked at and the reality is there's just an in group of people whose purchases are basically auto approved, and anyone below our out of this group might as well pound sand.

This creates so many weird inefficiencies that I have seen an entire billion dollar companies analytics run on free google sheets + compute because they couldn't figure out what to use for five years.

Re: The minimum viable unit of saleable software

#25

Post by skybrian »

monkeydust wrote: post #11

I wouldn't underestimate the community effect of software. There are plenty of features that get shipped because a small but important minority requested them, only to benefit the long tail of users who never knew to ask for such a feature but now find it indispensable. If everyone is building their own isolated solutions, how does this positive externality manifest itself?

Perhaps as open source software, but it would require building a community that agrees on some common procedures about what to build and how to use AI.

Re: The minimum viable unit of saleable software

#27

Post by spwa4 »

ahamilton454 wrote: post #20
galaxyLogic wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find myself fixing the spec of my software often, and that makes lots of existing code obsolete. Creating working code is getting cheaper with AI, but creating great specs which make the software easy and intuitive to use seems to be more difficult for AI. Why? Because you have to actually use the product to discover what is wrong, or sub-optimal, with it.

Yeah exactly, I literally don’t know how to change my spec until I’ve gathered more data. I was building a transaction classifier recently and I initially thought it would be a trivial “solved” problem. Throw transactions into a tiny local LLM, let it classify. But that approach was too slow, and not accurate enough. I didn’t know that though until I tried and then needed to change the spec.

So wait ... you're not even going to train based on what you want, just "throw into"? Did you actually put in work on a very clear and accurate prompt with a full manual on what to do?

Re: The minimum viable unit of saleable software

#28

Post by stevenjgarner »

I think this is a well thought out understanding of your specific snapshot in time. However these are indeed exponential times. It may be more realistic to do your calculus on time shifting assumptions, especially given how clear you are about the development time and life cycle of the product.

Re: The minimum viable unit of saleable software

#29

Post by jwitchel »

I recently asked Claude to duplicate Google Docs. It practically threw up. I tried to have it write a plan, decompose it, deobfuscate it.

It gave me all sorts of reasons why this was a terrible idea. I've never seen it resist a task so directly and relentlessly.

It knew.

One point worth considering is that tools like Jira and Salesforce have dozens of screens and modals. But you only ever look at one at a time. So the enormity of the ask "duplicate Jira" is hard to see in its totality.

With Google docs, the entirety of the tool is almost one screen. It resists decomposition. So the true gravity of the request is more in your face.

You say you want to duplicate Asana or Service Now or Jira or Zendesk? Great, here's the keys to the car, a tank of gas, and a quarter to call me on a payphone when you get there. Oh wait payphones don't exist anymore...but it doesn't matter because you're never getting there.

These software platforms are built by thousands of engineers over more than a decade of dedicated work. They are they way they are for reasons. To think someone can duplicate them with some clever prompting is to completely fail to understand the scale of the problem at hand.

Re: The minimum viable unit of saleable software

#30

Post by Exoristos »

spwa4 wrote: post #27
ahamilton454 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah exactly, I literally don’t know how to change my spec until I’ve gathered more data. I was building a transaction classifier recently and I initially thought it would be a trivial “solved” problem. Throw transactions into a tiny local LLM, let it classify. But that approach was too slow, and not accurate enough. I didn’t know that though until I tried and then needed to change the spec.

So wait ... you're not even going to train based on what you want, just "throw into"? Did you actually put in work on a very clear and accurate prompt with a full manual on what to do?

Not every lottery winner has a detailed strategy.
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