In term of business, the era of "MVPs" have long sailed already, probably 95% of every projects released now is done so lazily that you can know in the first 5 seconds that the company will die in the coming months.
What is a product?
51–60 of 75 posts
Re: What is a product?
#52I agree with the point generally but: > I haven't seen any real competitor of YouTube, or Figma, or Google, or Instagram created solely with AI. Is a ridiculous set of products to expect competitors for. First all but 1 rely heavily on network effects. YouTube is a low cost provider. Think about it, they provide unlimited high quality video storage for free. They process 500 hours of content every minute. Google and…
That list is a pretty high bar but you can make it as low as you like and it’s still crickets.
That’s because no one wants to admit that their product is vibe coded… But there are plenty of vibe coded products out there making money from actual users.
Re: What is a product?
#53>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.
Yes, I guess I wasn't clear: it's a product if it is exchanged - at all. At any scale. (There was a missing 'any' in my original statement.)
You can sell a single product for an enormous price, you can sell 1,000 products at a low price - the only thing that matters is that the two parties agree to conduct the exchange at any scale and, most importantly, that it actually occurs.
Common to both high-end scale and low-end scale scenarios, is that the exchange occurred and all parties agree to it. That's the only thing that makes something a product - the exchange.
Re: What is a product?
#54The most successful products are Cartesian.
Re: What is a product?
#55The 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
What happened to HN's new queue? What changed? I only watch homepage so I wouldn't know. Also, dang ought to make a new tab "Trends" (or just name that "AI") and move all AI/LLM/etc posts there. We might possibly see something other than AI then. > So building is faster, but marketing—not so much Producers are AI/agents now but consumers are still human beings. Maybe it will be different when it will be: by the AI, f…
It's just stuffed full of AI slop products, same as before AI but now with AI.
Re: What is a product?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes, I guess I wasn't clear: it's a product if it is exchanged - at all. At any scale. (There was a missing 'any' in my original statement.) You can sell a single product for an enormous price, you can sell 1,000 products at a low price - the only thing that matters is that the two parties agree to conduct the exchange at any scale and, most importantly, that it actually occurs. Common to both high-end scale and low-…
Not sure how that’s helpful in the context of the question the article poses: What is the difference between a vibe coded thing and a “real” product?
Re: What is a product?
#57A product is just a software output packaged for sale. Most products these days are actually services, where delivery of the application is as important as its development. One man’s prototype is another man’s MVP. You can’t No True Scotsman your way into discounting the fact that low quality software can still make money.
Re: What is a product?
#58This just reads like someone's cross at the AI hype and wanted to take a shot, but missed. The underlying point --that network effects exist and determine the success of a product-- has always been the case, long before AI made it possible to vibe code a rough Instagram clone in a weekend. Anyway, if you want a successful new product, the path to success (obviously) isn't likely to be copying an existing behemoth, bu…
You may say that, but it seems to me that by definition vibecoding things will make them less unique because the technology is best suited to reproducing best practices even when those are cumbersome. Your best case scenario is a nontechnical person with a bright idea vibecoding something far beyond their ability to understand, and that's a recipe for implementation problems that'll harm the value of the novel thing…
You can still create enormous value modelling things that are well understood, and even boring. Most LOB SaaS wasn't created from deep Google-level engineering, it was taken in modelling an ugly workflow in CRUD and creating customer records, job scheduling, worker assignments, quotations, recurring contracts, invoices, inspection checklists. Most Construction Tech startups for instance today is this.
Re: What is a product?
#59This article is riddled with logical fallacies. And this is a very Silicon Valley-esque, growth-minded, narrow way of thinking about this new world we live in.
I maintain half a dozen products, some of which enjoy only a handful of dedicated users, and I consider them all a resounding success. We are living in a new future of readily available custom software for extremely niche use cases.
> Don't feel bad if you don't have anything to show up with all the free intelligence available nowadays. Almost nobody has.
But I can empathize with the author's attempt at "vibe writing" something meaningful, considering that they seemingly don't have anything better to "show up with".
Re: What is a product?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I guess I wasn't clear: it's a product if it is exchanged - at all. At any scale. (There was a missing 'any' in my original statement.) You can sell a single product for an enormous price, you can sell 1,000 products at a low price - the only thing that matters is that the two parties agree to conduct the exchange at any scale and, most importantly, that it actually occurs. Common to both high-end scale and low-…
Not sure how that’s helpful in the context of the question the article poses: What is the difference between a vibe coded thing and a “real” product?
It doesn’t matter one bit how you made it, as long as you’ve got someone who is willing to exchange with you, for it. That is the only factor in determining whether something is a product or not.
Nobody wants to know how the sausage is made. Vibe coding is just sausage-making.