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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

In a WhatsApp group full of doctors, managers, journalist and engineers (including software) in age of 30-60 I asked if anyone heard of openclaw and only 3 people heard of it from influencers, none used it.

But from my social feed the impression was that it is taking over the world:)

I asked it because I am building something similar since some tome and I thought its over they were faster than me but as it appears there’s no real adoption yet. Maybe there will be some once they release it as part of ChatGPT but even then it looks like too early as actually few people are using the more advanced tools.

It’s definitely in very early stage. It appears that so far the mainstream success in AI is limited to slop generation and even that is actually small number of people generating huge amounts of slop.

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> I asked if anyone heard of twitter vaporware and only 3 people heard of it from influencers, none used it.

Shocking results, I say!

No, these people ("managers, engineers" etc.) do just not work in tech & IT but in other fields and they do not read tech news in your country etc.

Most people are just "not that deep in there" as most people on HN.

I spend between 1 and 2h a day on hn and I barely know what openclaw is. I've seen it mentioned once or twice and checked their website but that's all.

If one lets AI FOMO since the release of chatgpt drive them they'd be glued to their screen 24/7.

What is happening is nonsensical.

OAI wants to keep the hype train going. That is all. OpenClaw is just a project that attracted the interests of people messing about with LLMs. Which as a proportion of economically active people is.... tiny.

They brought him (Pete) over as he seems to have some way of thinking about LLMs in the form of a product. Will he have repeatable success on a large scale? Who knows. I doubt it personally.

> “Tech news”

A guy attached Claude to his socials, groundbreaking tech.

Once I was working for a consulting & development company; they were trying to enter sector ABC by stuffing up a team of people, so I was told, who had interest in sector ABC stuff and want to do some projects there.

While they were deep in software development in general, no body of them read any of the essential/required daily industrial news (also not that one related to doing software development in sector ABC)

:-)

So no, even people somehow attached to a topic are not necessarily somehow deeper involved.

> I asked it because I am building something similar since some tome and I thought its over they were faster than me

If you have been working on a usecase similar to OpenClaw for sometime now I'd actually say you are in a great position to start raising now.

Being first to market is not a significant moat in most cases. Few people want to invest in the first company in a category - it's too risky. If there are a couple of other early players then the risk profile has been reduced.

That said, you NEED to concentrate on GTM - technology is commodified, distribution is not.

> It appears that so far the mainstream success in AI is limited to slop generation and even that is actually small number of people generating huge amounts of slop

The growth of AI slop has been exponential, but the application of agents for domain specific usecases has been decently successful.

The biggest reason you don't hear about it on HN is because domain-specific applications are not well known on HN, and most enterprises are not publicizing the fact that they are using these tools internally.

Furthermore, almost anyone who is shipping something with actual enterprise usage is under fairly onerous NDAs right now and every company has someone monitoring HN like a hawk.

Do you think that it is a good idea to release it first on iOS, announce on HN and Producthunt? How would you do?

On my app the tech is based on running agent generated code on JavaScriptCore to do things like OpenClaw, I’m wrapping the JS engine with the missing functionality like networking, file access and database access so I believe I will not have a problem with releasing it on Apple AppStore as I use their native stack. Then since this stack is also OS, I’m making a version that will run on Linux, the idea being users develops their solution on their device(iOS&Mac currently) see it working and and then deploys on a server with a tap of a button, so it keeps running.

Who's your persona? How are you pricing and packaging? Who is your buyer? Are you D2C? Consumer? Replacing EAs? Replacing Project Managers? ...

You need to answer these questions in order to decide whether a Show HN makes sense versus a much more targeted launch.

If you do not know how to answer these questions you need to find a cofounder asap. Technology is commodified. GTM, sales, and packaging is what turns technology into products. Building and selling and fundraising as 1 person is a one-way ticket to burnout, which only makes you and your product less attractive.

I also highly recommend chatting with your network to understand common types of problems. Once you've identified a couple classes of problems and personas for whom your story resonates, then you can decide what approach to take.

Best of luck!

The persona is, someone who knows what are they doing but need someone to actually automate their work routine. I.e. maybe it’s a crypto trader that makes decisions on signals interpretation so they can create a trading bot that executes on their method. Maybe its a compliance who needs automate some routine like checking details further when some conditions arise. Or maybe a social media manager that needs to moderate their channels.Maybe someone who needs a tool for monitoring HN that specific way?

Thanks for the advice! I’m at a stage where I want to have such tool and see who else wants it. Not sure yet about it’s viability as a business and what is the exact market. Maybe I will find out by putting it into the wild and that’s why I consider to release it as a mobile app first.

That's too broad. You aren't going to get any nibbles.

You need to narrow it down to a single and specific persona and business domain.

This is because it takes years to fully flesh out and productionize a workflow from scratch, so concentrating on a business domain you know intimately well helps you build that muscle, which you can then repeat if you are able to hit revenue metrics for a Series A/B.

That persona still sounds too generic, too unfocused.

But even with that persona, it should already answer your question whether posting on HN and producthunt should be a core part of your strategy. Not a lot of social media managers or compliance people around here. And even for crypto traders there are better places to pitch products to them

> every company has someone monitoring HN like a hawk.

Monitoring specific user accounts or keywords? Is this typically done by a social media reputation management service?

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