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> Like so many startup founders, I was driven by the motivation to build a product that I would like to use myself (or so I thought). My goal was to allow autho
by ganbatekudasai 5y ago
> Like so many startup founders, I was driven by the motivation to build a product that I would like to use myself (or so I thought). My goal was to allow authors to automatically generate new creative text based on text they had written so far (basically a literary autocomplete).
Lesson learned I hope: It seems to me that the author wanted to be an entrepreneur foremost instead of solving an acutal problem. What the author wanted was their own startup with the accompanied startup experience, and so the "problem" was rather secondary and maybe even thought of after that desire?
I mean:
> It turned out that writers actually like to write themselves, and the current level of technology was just not good enough to make them really satisfied with whatever output they got from my product.
Really? It continues:
> Even though nearly everybody on this planet has heard the “machine learning” buzzword by now, the less technologically experienced hobby writers that I talked to didn’t have a real understanding of what they could expect from my product. This fundamental knowledge divide really made me think about how to reach this group of people.
Again, this really gives me the impression that you're not trying to solve a problem. You're "thinking about how to reach this group of people" to sell them your dream of having a company, not something they want or need.
- eganist 5y agoHm I mean, to a certain extent, running a startup often means convincing people of a problem they didn't know they had. I think a more accurate simplification of their post mortem is something like: "I had a problem and solved it for myself. I thought it was a problem others had, but it turned out most people didn't think it was a problem, and I couldn't convince them otherwise."
- arlcode 5y agoI was wondering the same. It feels like a mature version of this product would be ideal for publishers and other customers of authors. However I suspect we are not there yet technological wise and therefore he was unable/didn't attempt to sell the product to these companies.
- yakak 5y agoIt would be ideal for someone, but either he can't summarize his product well or it gives me the chills.. Autogenerated texts with correct form and an appearance of putting in the thought is the kind of thing that turns people off to whole industries and gets them to go back to reading things with an earlier publication date than the technology.
- lozenge 5y agoThis seems like a product fit for content farms/SEO optimised sites that have no intention of anybody reading the output.
- Aeolun 5y ago> publishers and other customers of authors To do what? Auto-generate new books about a particular series when the writer doesn’t want to write any more? Possibly with some prompting help from a ghostwriter?
- manmal 5y agoIt IS basically Github's CoPilot, but for plain text, no?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fuzzfactor 5y ago>"thinking about how to reach this group of people" to sell them your dream of having a company This is actually a very effective approach if you have something to offer they both want & need.
- WJW 5y agoI think the criticism was that the author of the article was more interested in "being an entrepreneur" than in offering something they want and need. In this case in particular, offering people a way to automate away things they do for fun seems to be basically the opposite of what they want and need.
- fuzzfactor 5y agoI agree, but I wouldn't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.