Founding is a snowball
blog.bawolf.com
blog.bawolf.com
To answer a few of your comments:
Writing is all mine but I had Claude proofread it, in addition to some close friends. Honestly it pointed out some great weaknesses in the original draft.
The art is all nano-banana through a tool called flora ai. I’d love to work with a human illustrator for something like this. I can draw, but I can’t paint and there’s an aesthetic here I think it handles better than I would have.
Man, it’s amazing that I can get something out there that expresses a vision all by myself. If this were a revenue generating project like an actual children’s book or something I’d love to work with someone that could bring it to life a bit more.
It doesn't need to ruin the metaphor, though: The sun could do that job. It could also explain the fact that the portion that's taken differs depending on where on earth you are creating the snowball.
I know it wouldn’t have happened easily with Nano. Banana to keep things consistent across multiple images. I haven’t tried recently, but image generation gets progressively worse (darker and off base) as you generate multiple of them. So kudos for the amazing art.
As someone who had an interest in drawing as a child and have bought trackpads and tablets, but never had the time & developed the skill to actually create the things that I imagine, I completely understand what you did.
I know some people are going to be upset at model generated illustrations. But I think the alternate is probably, no illustrations. There’s a lot of unnecessary AI image slop all around and most add no value or worse makes you just avoid reading the content by their awfulness. This was done really well and I am not sure I would have read it fully without it.
Buying digital drawing tools before you have the fundamentals nailed is a bad idea.
For anyone reading this who wants to learn how to draw: look up dynamic sketching, it’s a method that was developed by Norm Schureman at Art Center in LA in the 90s, targeted to getting product design students quickly up to speed. It’s very analytical and works well with engineer-brained people in my experience.
It’s mostly carried by Peter Han, a former student of his, these days, you can easily find resources online.
I appreciate the sentiment and I agree. While I think there are countless humans who could do way better, I was never going to hire someone to illustrate this. Furthermore, I don't think it reads very interestingly without the images. I doubt it would have even gotten published.
But now thousands of people have seen it, it's shown that it can strike a chord. Maybe it is worth polishing a little more. It would be adorable as a small book
I think it's dangerous sentiment to say if you create a snowball (startup) and just keep pushing it forever it is guaranteed to grow to something large. Some might say "duh, of course", but I still think a lot of people don't understand this.
I would perhaps point out this is not a VC business journey, that snowball looks very different.
And sure, the business starts in a easy environment (lots of snow on the ground) but the idea of starting alone resonates.
And it leaves out the sun. That pesky sun which melts the snow causing 9 out of 10 snowballs to melt. The sun, which melts the snow around you even as you struggle to push. Your direction is meaningless if you insist on pushing away from the snow.
Only if you push it down the mountain. Then it’s also susceptible to crashing and breaking down.
Normally what you do is you have to push the snowball manually. The bigger it gets, the more people you need to push it in a coordinated manner.
I think it’s excellent metaphor.
You first have to find somewhere that involves pushing it mostly downhill instead of uphill. Otherwise this turns into the tale of Sisyphus.
Depends how steep it is. In this metaphor, I guess we're talking about something like product market fit.
That being said, this is definitely one that's particularly optimistic, particularly low-ego, centered around a curiosity one has with the world.
That I like quite a bit.
I tried to focus on 3 main bits:
Early exploration, problems between people, and then how much is ultimately in or out of your control
Taking that meaning and the VC money required for the inflationary marketing, is probably closer to reality.
I get that it is about cooperation, "pushing" and growing the size and impact of organizations, but applied to the wider world it quickly becomes complicated; the snowballs interact.
Everyone is pushing multiple snowballs over complex terrain. For many their snowballs are melting as they roll them, sometimes actively counteracted by institutions or higher powers.
And don't forget that huge snowball we all roll around on, called earth, because it's losing snow...
What ruined it for you?
Bill spent a lot of energy fighting commercialization of his work, arguing that it would devalue his characters and their personalities. I don’t know what is cheaper than using an AI model to instantly generate similar art, for free.
Compared to what we see on most blogs, even patio11's, this is capital-A Art.
Still, right now I think we can tell, so I focused on making sure they were my words, but I let an llm help edit and I think it honestly made it much more readable