To add to all the good ideas, there is also a "dark path" which no big company will go.
Which kinds of GPT startups will thrive?
81–87 of 87 posts
Re: Which kinds of GPT startups will thrive?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then one day Google tweaks their model in an unfortunate way and you fall all the way down that vertical.
Just build a product that is even slightly reliant upon customer service. They won't know how to compete.
This comment isn't getting the recognition it deserves.
Re: Which kinds of GPT startups will thrive?
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's only a matter of time until open source models catch up.
Closed source models are also improving. Not clear to me why would open source models will catch up.
I mean if GPT-4 is good enough at its current level for people to start companies on it then they will be able to do the current level with open source models at some point.
Re: Which kinds of GPT startups will thrive?
#84Re: Which kinds of GPT startups will thrive?
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
A large majority of SaaS businesses can be done for free with an Excel spreadsheet, but many of them are still making millions a year.
Interesting. Such as?
YNAB, the budgeting app is a good example. Having it as an online app means you can use it from many computers or a phone, but at its core it's really just a spreadsheet.
Re: Which kinds of GPT startups will thrive?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
And, FAANG doesn't go after ideas that look like $100 million ideas that end up becoming $100B ideas.
For example? Looking at killed by google I don’t see any obvious examples
You wouldn't see them there. The vast majority of $100-500m ideas explored by Google are never actually turned into Beta products. They get killed during prototype testing and early alpha, because teams can get that far without meaningful VP sponsorship. But to get the investment required to scale from what a team can do with a UXer, a couple of volunteer SWEs, and a part-time PM ... you need exec support. When I was there, back in 2015-2016 we proposed several product concepts to Prabhakar that we'd already run detailed TAM analysis on, created business cases for, and tested in local markets. All of them estimated at $100-300m ARR. All of them rejected for being too small.
The plus side of allowing experimentation like this at Google, though, is that the work doesn't just go poof even after a rejection. From that core team of 5, two of them are now successful PMs, with one of them having "re-pitched" our concept of appointment booking to the Geo team as a feature addition for Google My Business. It was adopted, as was he, and that's how & why you can book appointments within Maps' business panes now. Another of them took one of our ideas into A120 and ended up mildly pivoting on the advice of the Travel VP. After some additional work, the project was adopted by Travel and is now why you get rich tour creation and destination exploration features inside of travel.google.com. A third member of our team - the UXer - maintained our team site with all the high-res mocks, business cases and pitch decks, and another one of those ideas was ultimate adopted as part of the Workspace team's investment in creating the "Gmail Hub" features that are why you have an expandable right pane with lots of app integration.
The point is not that my team was a bunch of anomalous superstars (we were not - just high achieving normal googlers), but that these kinds of things happen constantly within Google. For every idea you see on a Killed By Google list, there are probably 100 things that were killed as product concepts before release but ended up baked into one of the "15 products with >500m DAUs" Sundar referenced at I/O a couple weeks ago.
Re: Which kinds of GPT startups will thrive?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
A nonprofit that I was (voluntarily) running a mostly static wordpress website for paid a consultant thousands to rewrite the whole website because they wanted an entire conference registration and scheduling system. The new website is still in wordpress, they're paying hundreds per month in 'maintenance fees' but can't get the consultants to do anything for them, I don't have admin access, it doesn't have any new co…
If you or they have access to the database, just assign you/them an admin role and/or change the password and/or create a new user. Consider any contracts currently in place before you do something like this, and figure out who is the name on the hosting, or whose server it is.
The nonprofit appears to consider it a success and is embarking on a new project to buy/build/whatever a CRM that will do the things they originally believed the website project would achieve. I can't even get them to use Mailchimp reliably, and they want to solve that with magic technology.