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Comment by lithboy | Hacker News Reader

This can be a product.

Going from one off prototype to robust product is a huge leap.

I think these ephemeral context tailored projects are really great and useful. But these are not to be thought of as products. They work for you specifically, and people who are tech-brained enough to be able to formulate the complex requirements into a coherent prompt are not like the average user you'd have to sell a product to. It's much easier to make software to intelligent users.

a 3 or 9X leap if you listen to Fred Brooks

The comment above literally said this took them 20 minutes of prompting. That doesn't sound like much if any value add.

It's not going to be a particularly expensive product, but a product it can be.

I’m making $1000/month off of an app that was initially a single prompt.

There’s a gold rush right now. You absolutely can turn these ideas into products.

How do you approach the market with a random app? Posting on X/HN or something else?

I have a number of solutions from the past year that could be products and for sure would be sellable, but since they were so easy to build I just keep them to myself. It feels like such a long shot to throw up a landing page with a demo and start cold calling.

Sounds like something people say to locksmiths.

> The comment above literally said this took them 20 minutes of prompting. That doesn't sound like much if any value add.

You can say much the same about most small SaaS products of the last decade - the value-add isn't the 20 minutes of prompting, it's that someone else has already tested and validated the damn thing.

And yes, you won't sell many to engineers, because they'd rather prompt their own in-house version. But you might well sell to other folks

Homeassistant already has tons of integration into power providers and easily let's you pipe in local data if you have it. In addition - can it be a product if anyone can just type what this guy did into an LLM? What's your moat if anyone can just replicate it?

It doesn't have to be a durable.moat for it to be a product that makes the author money, just right place right time. If it's gonna cost me a bunch of time and effort and tokens, and the cost of the product is lower than the time and effort and tokens, then I'd rather pay for the product.

Right now we're in $1 Uber ride territory. That $20/month OpenAI/Anthropic plan isn't going to last forever. If it's going to cost me $100 in tokens to replicate the product, $20 is a cheap no brainer purchase m

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