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My Business Is Dying

bankstatementconverter.com

61–70 of 91 posts

Re: My Business Is Dying

#61
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Places that can't have code leave the work site still do not use AI.

Most places I know that have strict on-premise/air-gap requirements are just investing in on-premise AI and open source harnesses instead. The only ones that don't are the typical places that are slow to adopt technology in general (usually because they can afford to due to historic moat).

Most places that must do things on-prem also have strict requirements and long deadlines.

LLMs can be nice sometimes, but not necessary. Internal teams with "not invented here" syndrome currently working on that stuff are ultimately wasting money until the dust settles a bit more.

Those long deadlines have nothing to do with implementation. It's the game of telephone and accountability bottlenecks. You still want to retain your most experienced devs and give them plenty of time to work. Writing the code was never the bottleneck. A good dev team has balanced experience of the business and the code, not just the code, and certainly not the kind of code an LLM generates. Most of the decisions by those devs happens outside the codebase.

Re: My Business Is Dying

#62
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…

It is not ego tripping. They probably loathe you because you turn the power structures even more in capital's favour by undercutting or overriding them.

Or leaving shitty code for others to fix later, like a lot of contractors do.

Re: My Business Is Dying

#63

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 straightfor…

> 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

A lot of the Internet says otherwise — especially these days. Care to share your sauce?

Re: My Business Is Dying

#65
Hundreds of SaaS companies disappeared in Korea too. They don't even make the news. The examples that do come up now and then, Wrtn, Liner, Qanda, those are the ones that survived, so the press writes them down. A friend's company took a huge valuation cut and ran a round on very bad terms. In the end an existing investor re-upped one last time and that was the lifeline. It's not that the strong survive, it's a market where whoever survives is strong.

Re: My Business Is Dying

#67

There is something I'd call Subscription Fatigue. People and businesses are asked to pay subscription fees left and right. If I convert my bank statements only each quarter in a spike or once or twice a year, why should I pay for each month or the entire year? Of course I don't know the real usage patterns of this application, but that's one scenario I'd think of.

Subscription fatigue is real, and I'm currently going through it, but it's not the existence of subscription-only model which nudges me to cancel a membership. If I pay for something, I want the tool to work for me. I can't use an application if it tries to steal my attention all the time. An upgrade pop-up there, a reminder notification there, and the application wears me down. I like quiet applications. It's there.…

This sounds all like Mark Weiser's "Calm Technology" from 20 years ago [1]. I can't await when that future arrives! (I also self-host and have zero subscriptions, except the Proxmox community license - which is, beyond all, a free choice)

[1]: https://calmtech.com/

Re: My Business Is Dying

#69
post #53
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…

I agree that most companies are awful at trying to get you to stay when you tell them to leave, but I'd be disappointed if a company didn't care at all to know why I left. If I'm leaving I already have a bad feeling about them, and I would have a worse image of them if they didn't care why.

Ideally they wouldn't pressure at all for me to stay and cancellation would be a quick process, and I would be happy to tell them why I left. Either to vent, or to at least get the (most likely misguided) feeling that they might do something about it. But if there's no asking as part of their process, I'd definitely think worse of them.

Re: My Business Is Dying

#70
post #5

Ironically, doesn't the "Get a job" paragraph have the solution? If you believe that is what the future of jobs at a company looks like, perhaps try to market your tool to agents? You could add an API which is perfect for agents to use. Something that survives the pull request review process.

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