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Comment by Areibman | Hacker News Reader

We knew the time would come, but we built ChatOCR in a week. If we overthought the time horizon problem, we'd have 0 users and $0.

But also, GPT-4-Vision is multi-modal but does not specifically use OCR. Our tool is used mostly to extract text from documents and load it into context, and we still saw growth after OpenAI built this feature into ChatGPT.

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$20k for a week’s work seems more than good, no?

Whose week's work? One person, a small team (<5), or a large organization? At some point on that axis, the RoI becomes negative.

You can't get a large organization to move fast and ship something in a week. So this was either a solo developer en devour, or at max low single digits.

Thank you for sharing your risk thinking here. I like that you are risk hungry, not prone to hesitation, and you achieved revenue on a shoe string budget.

I'm curious about the idea that your OCR-generated context might give better recall than whatever GPT uses to parse PDFs into context. That would support the idea that it is discoverability, and not feature parity, that is killing the product. Can we discuss benchmarks that show conclusively that your solution does better on QA accuracy with respect to a PDF, as compared to GPT4's own PDF mode?

Also I'm curious about the trajectory of active users after the feature dropped from OAI. Was there an inflection point where new active users per month went negative? How long did it take before that inflection happened? Do you still have enough users to keep the service up and gathering revenue, or do you plan to mothball? Do you have any plans to pivot the offering to other markets?

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