GPT4 killed our little startup
crowdprisma.com
crowdprisma.com
I think we had a unique value proposition as our NLP engine was fairly sophisticated and we also integrated its output nicely with other non-text variables (check our demo on the site).
Getting significant business traction was difficult (for reasons which would warrant its own blog post), but now with GPT4, Office Copilot, etc coming online it'll be near impossible.
We learned a ton from the experience and wouldn't change one bit, but I do wonder, how many other companies must be out there like us..
Although it might seem like there's a generative AI startup frenzy going on atm (which is great), I do have the suspicion that in most domains, large tech companies will dominate the market, due to several reasons (another blog post maybe).. Will see.. anyways, interesting times ahead..
With LLMs I’d imagine you could do even more interesting things with analyzing survey data. It seems like the core concept of your product is still useful, and could potentially do more now. Are you actually losing customers to GPT or just feel the end is near?
Also would love to read that future blog post! Thanks
From a company with a tech advantage, one that they hoped to capitalize, they are now just a team with a front-end on what's now a publicly availabe commoditized technology - one where a third party controls the state of the art even.
It's a totally different business proposition, and a much less winning one. Not some VC money getting one either.
Is the problem a painful problem that you had a solution people would pay for and now they are using gpt-4 to solve it?
Have you heard directly from existing or prospective customers that gpt-4 was a replacement for your solution?
I am really curious if ChatGPT really beat a slightly modern highly specialized AI. Did you actually try it and get better results, or are you afraid of the hype?
Can I try to spin this moment in a different way: you have a fantastic story to tell as you pivot go head first into AI.
You’ve built amazing, relevant skills in an adjacent space. You’ve shipped, which is more than what most people do.
Rest, refuel, and put together that narrative. It’s an interesting time right now and I think there’s a solid route to raising some kind of initial funding for round 2.
Show your customers where traditional ML beats LLMs hands down.
People are using LLMs as a hammer for everything. That hype will die down.
The failure is that the company didn't have the goal of solving a customer issue. If it did, pivoting to use GPT in the survey space would be completely natural. The reason the company is shutting down is because it didn't just want to solve survey analysis, it wanted to do it using it's own tech. I can see how using GPT doesn't offer as large a moat as your own tech, but if you can't use GPT better than your competitors to solve your customer problems, you're not in the customer service business, you're in the software/tech making and selling business. Both may be ideal but the former is certainly feasible.
The idea that bespoke models match this kind of performance is a joke. NLP is solved and GPT-4 is in fact a game changer.
Or build a startup with an actual moat and not build on top of another product doing the heavy lifting.
That's exactly what they tried to do with a technical lead. This is what GPT-4 made obsolete.
Doing it with mere front-end or "execution" or marketing is close to impossible, as those are much more trivial areas and difficult to differentiate yourself. They're also mostly meaningless, as they depend on investment, which has no reason to go to them (as now they would just become one of many wanting to go to the area, and not the one's that has a tech-lead up its sleeve).
It's like they had an idea about a coffee place with their own secret syrup recipe for great tasting coffee, and they worked hard for 2 years on that recipe, hoping someone will invest in them to help them make it into a franchize.
Now someone came along and gives everyone a ready-made syrup mix, in the same exact vein, that is many times better tasting.
And all the suggestions here to "then execute better than others" are like "just use the new mix, and focus on making a better coffee place then, invest in the atmosphere and service" and so on.
Duh, well, everybody can try and do that. And there's no obvious way to differentiate yourself, or get investment to build a franchize just with this. Whereas if they still have their reciple (technology lead) and it still mattered, they'd have a major leg up the competition.
"He worked hard, built a tech lead, and we hope to get investment and beat the market with that"
is a totally different problem, and a much more hopeless situation than:
"He have a dead-end tech, there's a new better tech controlled by others, and we can only beat the competition by coming up with new ideas on execution, things that anybody can attempt, that have nothing to do with the hard tech work we did all those years".
"Auto surveying" - give the "model" some basic information about the app/business and let it figure out what questions to ask, ask follow-up questions to customers and just come to me with the list of improvements by priority for customers. "AI product manager" Something like that is going to be huge, is definitely viable with current GPT model, but would still require a lot of work to get working (especially working around limited context and long term memory of GPT). If you start on this now, are you sure you won't be able to win this market?
I've thrown away some old code and replaced by the GPT. A lot less than you, but I am happy, as it ultimately allows my company to get more revenue from customers.
There will also be more funding and M&A opportunities available.
Companies with actual domain knowledge will be in much better position because they will really know how to leverage the full power of these new models instead of being blinded by the bling that (cherry-picked) works nicely in 50% of the cases.
My friend and me have a good natured competition in making an AI that writes stories. He's using a custom tuned LLama, I'm calling ChatGPT.
Making cutesy little stories is easy. Making anything you'd actually be interested in reading is freaking hard! We're not writers! We don't know enough to prompt/select/guide the AI to do it well!
Same in other domains. LLMs are powerful tools but they'll make you more poweful if you have the right domain knowledge (and seems these guys do). Don't give up, leverage it!
what would most likely happen is that vc will say no for the following reasons:
No moat and no possible way to make money due to GPT-4, even if they use GPT-4 themselves.
Anyways, I'd never do an accelerator kinda thing again or even take funding unless it makes a ton of sense.. turns out there are a lot of business (not unicorns) you can build with a buddy on the side and not get caught up in the craziness of raising, posturing, raising again, playing someone else's game, etc..
This! Precisely my take away from my own experience with EF (nothing against them, they are quite cool to be honest).
The people i've met at EF, failed startups or not, have been absolutely.brilliant. Keep it up!
As soon as I open the site it talks about an AI solution