I agree, and a willingness to experience failure as soon as possible has always been a competitive advantage.
If anything LLM chatbots & synthetic users will make the majority of founders evermore comfortable not testing reality.
1,095 karma · joined March 4, 2009
If anything LLM chatbots & synthetic users will make the majority of founders evermore comfortable not testing reality.
Marketing comes first. Sales second. Product third.
I'm pretty sure my primary job is marketing the work that I do.
This is the only expected answer. https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-59-on-credit...
https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-72-vibe-code...
That’s a different question than, “how do we make our breakfast menu more popular?”
Now, perhaps the latter question begat the former, but either way it is not a product innovation story, it’s a customer/market research story articulating the shape of customer demand (which I fully support).
If there was a second part of the story - like, McD started marketing milkshakes in their breakfast menu and sales shot up ##% or they developed a breakfast flavor milkshake and sales shot up - then we’d have the product innovation story.
As I see it, the milkshake example isn't about innovation, it's about actually having human-to-human conversations with customers and appreciating customers define their own competitive set, so perhaps closer to Gibson's "the street has its own use for things."
Outside of those two points, I'm not sure what repeatable lessons exist in the milkshake story for innovation, and because of that, it's probably doing more harm than help to JTBD as a concept.
Small family farms, while romanticized, have all the problems of any small business competing with larger professionalized businesses; consistency in operations, consistency in output quality, access to resources - including people and machines.
Additionally, for their own operational simplicity big buyers prefer interacting with as few suppliers as possible - so, market forces have been driving consolidation for decades.
Over the past 27 years, their business model has changed multiple times and each evolution appears to be in direct response to the bottleneck of growth, from maintaining inventory of DVD to acquiring global streaming rights.
Year / Business Model / Bottleneck to Growth
1998 / Sell DVDs over the internet / Need to continually replenish DVD inventory,
1999-2006 / Rent DVDs over the internet / USPS delivery & return times
2007 / Stream movies over the internet / Acquiring US streaming rights to a massive library of movies
2009 / Start producing movies (Netflix Originals) / Number of subscribers watching Netflix Originals
2010-2012 / Global expansion; Canada, South America, Europe / Maintaining rights globally
2025 / Acquire Warner Bros Discovery
“AI is amazing about the thing I know nothing about…but it’s absolute garbage at the stuff I’m expert in.”
https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-59-on-credit...
I'm all for it, just curious as the law has existed for 8 years and been in effect for 3. Seemingly little interest from anyone in the tech world to put lobbying behind reversing it until this point.
What changed?
A calendar is for storing commitments, and a specific date/time is part of that commitment.
I consider a 'to do list' a 'to schedule list', they are potential commitments.
From my perspective, a thing is either a commitment (on the calendar) or not (essentially in a backlog).
if however your goal is to make other people happy (which I'd argue is no longer a personal project)...the iterative "work" described above is the fastest, straightest path.
They successfully solved it with an advertising....and they also had the ability to cache results.
I’m not sure how LLMs output is indistinguishable from Wikipedia or World Book.
Maybe? and if the question is “did the student actually write this?” (which is different than “do they understand it?” there are lots of different ways to assess if a given student understands the material…that don’t involve submitting typed text but still involve communicating clearly.
If we allow LLMs- like we allow calculators, just how poor LLMs are will become far more obvious.
For all the complaints of these books today (and I’ve complained about Lean Startup as recently as Dec 2024) these were written in a different time and likely written about tactics obsolete at the time of publication.
Let’s allow them to be artifacts of their time.
1. Presumably, the surgeon has determined that this specific intervention is the best possible intervention of all the possible ones (fewest downsides, best outcome, etc). There are always alternatives - including #wontfix.
2. Once this decision has been made, I don't want them second guessing, I want them 100% confident in the decision and their abilities. If there's any lingering doubt - then return to step 1 and re-evaluate.