I think you should be open to the idea that your competitors are not competing with you in the way you think they are. They may be fighting (and winning) elsewhere. Fundraising, customer acquisition, specific use cases, communities, niches, etc. Also, they might be losing. From the outside every company wants to look successful - raising money, hiring, growing, etc. The real story is almost never told, so you can’t assume much from the outside.
"Because you think the quality of the product matters."
If you want to get customers then the right focus is getting customers. Not making the product.
There are 2 of you. Your product is already better. Stop coding. Start marketing.
Like some others here, it's not something I would use, indeed I can't imagine using it, so I can't offer specific advice other than "find the market".
I'll also point out that you did the easy part first, which is your real mistake. Don't build a product then look for the market. Find the market first (that's the hard part) and build a product for them.
I started and sold a company in the industry, and agree that macro level analysis misses this. In the us healthcare as a “product” has an AWFUL customer experience. On so many levels. And the worse it gets the more people want to “burn it all down”, despite the fact that it might not be as dire as we think when we do the high level analysis. Whether or not that’s a good thing is up for debate.
Agree with you that the overall sentiment is surprisingly negative (especially when I have been really enjoying using gpt as a lightweight tutor), but AI girlfriends are going to happen and could have huge social and cultural impacts that are worth exploring now. Especially given the birth rate difficulties western nations face.
I'd disagree. That's the same as saying pornography or lewd novels have an impact on doing the deed.
In reality, none of these have a tangible correlation to TFR, which is driven largely by economic considerations [0]
TFR drop is global now that people are increasingly educated and don't want to push back their careers by several years and reduce their earning potential as major reason why women on aggregate are paid less than men - the same salaries are paid, but women who have kids are out of the workforce for a couple years [1].
The total fertility rate (TFR) is the average number of live births that a woman would have during her life if she experienced the age-specific fertility rates of a given period (usually a year). It excludes the effect of mortality and is usually expressed as births per woman.
Users should have access to their own data. Whether it’s a university coursework app or anything else.
These students should be applauded. They are making studying easier. How are universities, of all places, so inept at making basic common sense decisions?
They are the quiet, stable, regional, unsexy businesses that have been around for 40 years. I have a friend who is an SWE at a large regional insurance broker. Very calm work indeed.
As a candidate, how do you separate this kind of company from one where the owners are cheap and want to pay you as less as possible?
There are a lot of companies that advertise terrific WLB, pictures of their employees and their families laughing only to find out none of those employees work there any longer and the pictures were taken on their once-every-10-years retreat at a cheap hotel in MO or WY.
I think the stereotypical calm company is one with strong financial performance in a stable industry that is somewhat insulated from swings in the macro economy. Think large regional players in insurance, healthcare, finance, banking, etc. It’s large enough to have “professional” managers and a big customer base (so one customer having a problem is not a hair-on-fire emergency).
In my experience you tend to find many more penny pinching owners in the world of small businesses, not at a 1000-person regional life insurance company.
Lots of people dislike their first jobs, which is totally reasonable because you don’t know what you like and what to look for. So congrats on realizing quickly what you don’t like. Over the course of a career, that’s progress.
You could change careers, but if you like tech and coding maybe try changing environments first. There are certain things you don’t like about your current work environment, and you can probably find a new place where those things are not present.
I think it would be unwise to tax away a financial ecosystem that has driven innovation for the world and funded one of the nation’s largest growth industries in exchange for marginally increasing infrastructure spending.
I am not convinced that we have seen much worthwhile innovation through VC money.
Apple has released innovative products. Many other tech companies, too. Compared to that VC funded business in the last 20 years seems to have been very good at creating personally and socially destructive attention machines to sell advertisement.
That's certainly addictive and has been profitable, and being early movers has allowed the US to capture a lot of value from the rest of the world, but whether it's valuable is another question...
VC is a tiny corner of the $4T private equity business. In fact all the funds discussed in this article are late stage / crossover funds who put money into established businesses. Hmm, and none based on Silicon Valley.
Absolutely! It's pretty magical to go from a user report -> session replay -> exact API call being made and the backend error logs.
We dogfood a ton internally and (while obviously biased) we're always surprised how much faster we can pin point issues and connect alarms with bug reports.
Hope you give us a spin and feel free to hop on our discord or open an issue if you run into anything!
