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My Business Is Dying

bankstatementconverter.com

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Re: My Business Is Dying

#51

Post by bayindirh »

bob1029 wrote: post #44

> Last time I worked at a company was November 2020. I love programming, but I really do not enjoy programming at a company. Things were bad in 2020, but I feel like they’re worse now. They're much worse now, but that also creates more opportunity than ever before. Chaos truly can be a ladder if you take advantage of it and endure the unhappy parts. Having a bit of savings to work with can make all the difference. Yo…

Somebody else said most of it, but I'll add a little more. Said developers loathe you because you decimate the thing they care about for your own benefit by being a hired gun of management and doing the killing for them.

Re: My Business Is Dying

#52

Post by Vivek-KY »

imhoguy wrote: post #16
4pkjai wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, I think if you slop out your content it will be disregarded. It seems to be pretty easy to identify now with tools like Pangram.

No, the problem is too much (sloppy) content dilutes good conent. Searching for good content became impossible, so instead people go straight to AI to ask.

yes that's true

Re: My Business Is Dying

#53

Post by AdamN »

jbs789 wrote: post #28

> When a user cancels a subscription Stripe asks them for a reason. At the moment I don’t really do anything with the cancellation reason, actually this is the first time I’ve ever looked at the data. This comes across as very unserious. If you’re truly trying to build a business then this seems like one of the best signals/datapoints you can get…

I often think of my experience at Citibank 15 years ago when I closed my account at the branch. The teller said 'sure thing, just put your debit card into the device and enter your pin'. I did that and he said ok I'll close the account and give you cash? I said 'yes' and then it was done. He said, "have a great day!"

It was one of the best customer experiences of my life to not have to answer a series of 'why are you leaving?' questions and I would like to head back to Citibank just because of it. Unfortunately I don't live in NYC anymore so can't really do that.

Re: My Business Is Dying

#54

Post by qurren »

Symbiote wrote: post #6
wincy wrote: post #4

I liked the article, although I have no idea what it even means to convert your bank statements. Is this a Chinese thing?

I assume it means converting PDFs transaction statements provided by banks into spreadsheets which accounting software can import.

I just have Claude Code do this for me.

Re: My Business Is Dying

#55

Post by oefrha »

echelon wrote: post #45
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Having to work with the clanker is hell on earth. I'll do it if I have to, because I need to eat, but I hate every second I have to put up with those stupid things.

I appreciate your sentiment, but in my opinion this is the best our career has ever been. This is the magical sci-fi future I always dreamed about, and it's getting better every quarter. The amount of stuff I can do now, in terms of time and scope and volume, is unreal.

I too have enjoyed vibing some random shit on the side and not having to beg people to build features I want anymore, but knowingly shipping subpar agentic code at work still kills me a little. (Well there’s no pressure on me to ship, but as a self-respecting guy, I hesitate to say I’ll need 5-10x time to really get to the quality I want when 1x time already gets something working, except for really critical components.)

Re: My Business Is Dying

#56

Post by 1dom »

bayindirh wrote: post #51
bob1029 wrote: post #44

> Last time I worked at a company was November 2020. I love programming, but I really do not enjoy programming at a company. Things were bad in 2020, but I feel like they’re worse now. They're much worse now, but that also creates more opportunity than ever before. Chaos truly can be a ladder if you take advantage of it and endure the unhappy parts. Having a bit of savings to work with can make all the difference. Yo…

Somebody else said most of it, but I'll add a little more. Said developers loathe you because you decimate the thing they care about for your own benefit by being a hired gun of management and doing the killing for them.

I think you're wrong to say "you decimated the thing they care about". The way I see it is those loathing people have a job to care about a thing. The people who gave those loathing people their job also gave another job to another person who's just doing their job too.

Everyone has a job with a remit and responsibilities. The role of business leadership and management is to make sure the people and remits operate harmoniously to efficiently reach a common goal.

If some people doing their job well decimates another persons job in the same company, that is 100% the fault of the people managing the jobs, not the people doing the jobs.

Re: My Business Is Dying

#57

Post by bayindirh »

1dom wrote: post #56
bayindirh wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody else said most of it, but I'll add a little more. Said developers loathe you because you decimate the thing they care about for your own benefit by being a hired gun of management and doing the killing for them.

I think you're wrong to say "you decimated the thing they care about". The way I see it is those loathing people have a job to care about a thing. The people who gave those loathing people their job also gave another job to another person who's just doing their job too. Everyone has a job with a remit and responsibilities. The role of business leadership and management is to make sure the people and remits operate ha…

Management can be wrong about many things, but this doesn't mean that the "hired gun" as the OP says has to come out swinging.

A job is not an object, a human is not a machine.

You can be another Nero. Come, burn everything down, and leave, or you can be a compassionate with people, talk with everyone, win minds and hearts and accomplish the same thing.

I worked with both kinds of people, clashed with the first even if we were trying to accomplish the same thing, and cooperated with the latter, even if what they wanted is complete opposite of my views.

I behaved that way, because the former one wanted to do the job, get the praise, and get me fired in the process, but the latter one showed me an outside perspective I failed to see, so I agreed and did whatever I can to fix what's broken from outside perspective.

If the first person didn't see me as a threat to themselves, I'd have pushed them to the place they wanted to be, because I'm no ladder climber, but they don't work with us anymore.

Of course there will be stubborn people to do whatever they can to protect themselves, their position or whatnot, but they are rare and generally have other motivations, from my experience.

Re: My Business Is Dying

#58

Post by librasteve »

It’s fascinating to read all the tech feedback in the comments here, but I think this business is failing because it has yet to achieve true product market fit.

Any half decent product, with a nice website, a real solution and some SEO can get in front of say 100,000 prospects these days. Here I imagine discovery is mainly from Googling “convert bank statements”, and conversion from prospects to client is straightforward for 1-2% of views.

But a conversion niche like this is dynamic - you basically luck into it and unless you actively find and occupy niches faster than the competition discovers them and stomps on you, your “business” is on a time fuze. For example, if someone like Xero where this is a feature discovers the keyword combo and does some paid ads. Or if Google pushes AI results up and your page goes below the fold. My expectation is that this latter situation is happening everywhere as Google AI search starts to strangle everything.

Leverage AI to be your CMO. It should be telling you things like (i) your product is likely perceived as too technical to break into the general market, (ii) you need a much better handle in target customer profile (demographic, messages), (iii) you need a customer relevant sustainable USP and (iv) you need a distinctive and memorable brand. The ultimate win is to create market pull from customer to customer recommendations.

Re: My Business Is Dying

#59

Post by tchalla »

> Sharing revenue data is a good way to get attention on Twitter, but for this business the Twitter attention doesn’t really translate into sales. I stopped sharing revenue data because a lot of people started using AI to build their own bank statement converter applications.

A lot of build in public is theater with MRR porn which has no basis in ground reality creating noise. Now the agentic world is coming after it. Build in public has turned into display in public these days.

Re: My Business Is Dying

#60

Post by michaelt »

bob1029 wrote: post #44

> Last time I worked at a company was November 2020. I love programming, but I really do not enjoy programming at a company. Things were bad in 2020, but I feel like they’re worse now. They're much worse now, but that also creates more opportunity than ever before. Chaos truly can be a ladder if you take advantage of it and endure the unhappy parts. Having a bit of savings to work with can make all the difference. Yo…

> I charge per outcome now

Are you perchance paid by number of distinct metaphors used?

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