lyfeninja

In a similar situation and I understand where you're coming from. Although I have not taken on a Marketing co-founder, I have had a number of important and revealing conversations that I've learned a lot from.

1. Make sure the market for your product exists before you make it. This is counterintuitive to builders like myself and probably you. building is what I'm good at, and I know what I'm making adds value, but that doesn't mean others will see that value.

2. Kinda goes with #1, but talk to as many people as possible in the market you are considering a product for and learn what their problems and pain points are so you can solve them. If you can relieve someone's pain, the marketing will do itself. It's hard to even get the conversations, but each one is helpful, even if it's telling you something you don't want to hear.

3. Focus on gaining external interest, not necessarily revenue. Again, hard, but a pilot or partnership with another startup or small business can go along way and showing value to future investors or customers.

4. Talk to and learn from other founders. Your already doing this, but there are nuggets of information that can help even if it's just a slight change of perspective.

5. Keep your head up. It's a slog and it's brutal, but it's a marathon.

I'm still working on all these things myself, so you're not alone. The realization that a good product without a market is nothing, was a big revelation for me (and in hindsight makes me feel like an idiot). I honestly thought if you solve a hard enough problem or built a good enough product that the rest would fall in line, but that was not the case, but I'm not ready to give up yet.

I get what you're saying here and I agree if you're only using unedited AI content to just increase your post frequency, then yeah it's annoying and feels somewhat abusive.

I personally like to use AI to make a first draft and then edit from there. It's way faster at that first draft than I am, but I can still maintain my voice and ensure I'm making all my points.

I will say many people are also generally bad writers. Is it slop if it's actually a better writer than the engineer making the site or the owner of a small business without a marketing team? It just seems like a tool to write better.

I think I need to give this a go. Cool project.

I noticed chatGPT using 1.4GB in a single chat the other day and affecting performance. Don't get me wrong it was a long one, but it's all text, so I still don't think I understand why it uses so much memory. A novel should only take up a few MBs of memory. I assume it's a ton of backend context, but feel like someone should look into that. No wonder all the robots are greedy for memory.

I enjoyed reading this post, because it's a great little case study. A Large complicated project, a senior dev, and a nieve client. It's their project so they can push all the code they want, but they're responsible for it too. I'd be curious to learn of any updates.

Project name: BlkBolt

Project description: Experimental ML-based data encoding system. No keys, no traditional crypto primitives, just learned unique representations. Early stage and looking for collaboration.

This month: Demo for real-time signing and verification of AI content (streaming messages) and continue networking.

Skills: ML, crypto, security folks for independent validation stress testing and just general support

Link: https://lyfe.ninja/projects (or find us on LinkedIn)

Wondering this myself, thanks for asking!

Being in the same boat, I'm waiting for more external feedback and interest, or ideally some customers, before calling it on the day job. Doesn't mean this fits everyone's situation, but just how I'm thinking about it.

I sprinkled some pixie dust and put a bow on mine and 5x'd my revenue. Turns out people love paying a lot of money for something they can do themselves. Now if only I can get my token costs under control...

The willingness to learn and grow is a big one for me. You always have to learn even when highly experienced but starting in a new position or industry. Additionally, critical thinking and problem solving skills along with perseverance makes a strong candidate in my eyes.

These traits show me someone is worth investing in, not just able to do a job. You'd be surprised how rare the combination is too.

I politely ask the LLM to not share sensitive data, pretty please with a cherry on top.

For real though, @oliver_dr 's approach aligns with most best practices I've seen. I have attempted using a separate "agent" to help with the user input validation and identify leakage in the output. It seems to work in testing but hard to truly know how well it works for real-world uses since you never know what you're gonna get.

A brief history of intelligence by Max Bennett..I like it so far, I've learned a lot about the brain

Deep learning based encoding for data protection. Always looking to connect with interested parties.

https://lyfe.ninja/projects

Agreed, how many forms of cancer or disease have been cured by this AI revolution so far? One example would be nice. I still think it is one of the best forms of information compression the world has ever seen and still see plenty of value, but the primary uses so far seem to be to maximize slop, smut, and ads, which puts us back a square one.

Jaded is an understatement. I'm a data scientist and still like what I do most of the time. I have a decent amount of flexibility and freedom to self-direct my efforts to what I know will help the business best. However, the enterprise BS and 80/20 rule in full force combined with everyone thinking they're an AI expert because they read a few articles is starting to urk me. If I see one more start up that is just an LLM wrapper my head is going to pop.

A little bit of humility goes a long way and separates the good ones from the rest. I hate being referred to as an expert because we're all still learning. Some more than others...

I'm amazed how much these networks charge for things like SMS messaging. You would think it would be cheap and then you realize it is almost 1 penny per message or two. Also, explains why you see so many MVNOs anymore.

Focus on what you can control. Detach from social media. Get outside. Spend time with the people in your life who matter. We live in an information age where we know everything immediately, but it's a blessing and a curse.

Yep, it's the AI that's going to save your flailing company and this had nothing to do with the obsurd pandemic hiring spree or your poor business performance in recent years.

I don't totally disagree with the mindset, just the rational for the downsizing.

You can file a provisional patent, which gives you the ability to discuss your innovation in public without compromising your full patent filing. It gives you a year to file a full patent for the invention, and it's much cheaper than a full patent, but does not necessarily protect your IP. That's what I did in the hopes I can get enough traction and capital to file a full one. Otherwise I would just consider the IP a trade secret and not disclose.

I've wondering about this too and tend to agree. Vibe coding a single function app is easy, but delivering a platform that scales to enterprise levels is much different, especially with proper security, QA, and UAT. Not saying AI won't be capable of this fully, but it's certainly harder. Plus, do companies really want to take on the burden of upgrading, debugging, and maintaining everything themselves, I think not. But what do I know, I'm just a human hoping he'll still have a job :p.

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47034849

Well you're about to do one of the hardest tasks any human can do, which is raise a child. It takes a ton a patience, care, and work to do it right.

You're company will hopefully be tuned into this and be reasonable and show you some grace through a life changing experience. You also need to be kind to yourself through the journey. You will have to make adjustments, but it will be worth it.

As for imposter syndrome, everyone puts their pants on one leg at a time. Just keep learning and doing your best and you'll be fine. The fact you're asking this question at all is a good sign.

Congratulations!

I hear ya. I'm particularly tired of working for other people who can barely keep their priorities straight, let alone give clear direction or have a vision. That's why I'm trying to start something of my own. I'm a year in, and it's not easy, but it's very rewarding. It's tiny, but my tech already is light years better than my employers and I get to decide where it makes the most sense to put my energy.

I would say pick/find something you're passionate about or interested in where you think you could make money, find a market and go for it.

I'm guilty of this, mostly for work, but it's a massive time saver for me and gets me out of my own head. I always proof read and modify them to get what I'm looking for as far as overall content, tone , and detail. Now that I'm thinking about it, I really don't do this at all for messaging people I actually want to talk to. I guess that says something...

I think the tech would continue to exist since there is already a market for it and I do believe it will increase productivity. I just get concerned about the concentration of value (for example, 30ish percent of the S&P 500s value is tied to 7 companies) and the shear size of the capex going on (conservatively, hundreds of billions). This increases the risk significantly. Even a normal correction (20% decline) of the stock prices of those 7, will wipe out trillions of dollars in market value and hit everyone, because everyone is essentially invested in it already and the repercussions of that could be brutal (deep recession).

Additionally, new tech could make all the CAPEX in data centers or businesses useless in the fairly near future, but this can be hard to predict (black swan). I think of quantum computers or advancements like DeepSeek's LLM reinforcement learning style, but it will likely be something that isn't in anyone's mind yet. There is also a vast opportunity cost to all this investment.

Those with wealth will be fine (why do you think they're building bunkers), everyone else will pay the price.

I'm your guy. Super boring, but definitely cool.

Niche business tools. Ones that solve specific problems or improve workflows unique to industries. I think this is a going to be interesting because you will have a ton of industry SMEs who now can just ask an AI to build them a tool to solve a unique problem they've seen throughout their career and start a business on it (hopefully). I know someone doing this exact thing, and it seems to be working so far.

Procurement at bigger firms will likely only get harder at least around CS. The auditing required to be SOC2 or PCI DSS can be time consuming and expensive, but probably better to do earlier than later. I understand that may not be financially possible at the moment, but there are some benefits to being small for that type of compliance, like actually knowing your networking setup, where you're data lies, etc. This type of auditing for enterprises, especially legacy ones, can be brutal because they're too big and don't know where anything is.

My two cents for whatever that's worth. If you can't financially do it, focus on growing your business with the SMBs until you can, but enterprise firms will want to see these things. If it's tight pick one that is often sought after like SOC2 and build from there. If money isn't as much of an issue, get the certifications and go for the big fish.

I love that I started getting this exact warning from git and that people are thoughtfully thinking through this. I wonder what their adoption rate is? From experience it is hard to get people to care about a threat that doesn't technically exist yet, even if it's coming.