But even your example gets worse with AI potentially - the "upsell" of his blog isn't paid posts but more subscribers so there will be thankful readers, a few donators, people talking about it. If the only interface becomes an AI summary of his work without credit, it's much more likely he stops writing as it'll seem like he's just screaming into the void
I think the hard part with these ai models is it’s kind of hard to figure out how many tokens you’re going to use, especially as a new user. 4,000 tokens sounds like a lot for instance, but is tiny
If companies offered any sort of counter, users would quickly understand their usage patterns and adapt accordingly. But users are kept in the dark on purpose, often not knowing how many tokens they use, and sometimes not even knowing what are the token limits.
While I don't disagree that determining usage is incredibly difficult, it doesn't take a genius to see that something sold "by the million" is something you can expect to to use a lot of.
That's great, but just look at the profiles advertised on the front-page there: Harvard, Berkeley, MIT, etc. Nothing against them personally of course, but I really think this is the trend YC is going towards these days. It's the old school institutional prestige back, but this time it's blended together with SV startups.
> I got 3-4 emails telling me to strongly consider finding a co-founder
A lot of YC's advice is terrible, such as their advice on finding a cofounder.
You can easily tell when they give bad advice: ask them for their dataset. When they don't offer it, consider doing the opposite of what they tell you.
Now, some of their advice is great, when it is data backed an easily testable like Jessica Livingston's "I don't know of a single case of a startup that felt they spent too much time talking to users."
Now, what's a version of their "find a co-founder" advice that doesn't suck: "I don't know of a single case of a successful founder that wasn't building things all the time with many different people."
Don't find a co-founder or two, find dozens of "building buddies" who you just build shit with. Every now and then you can form a legal entity and be "co-founders", but the more important thing is you just create stuff together.
I think Heroku has a right to charge what they're charging but the price is really the only con for Heroku. It definitely isn't the cheapest service out there by miles so if someone could make a Heroku that's cheaper, that would be a huge improvement
Not entirely. There's room for improvement on pricing. But you have to employ a culture where being cost-effective is engrained in the company.
I like to quote the pizza chain Lil Caesar's when I discuss this, which is why my company I am building is able to provide the same core features but cost less. We look for ways to save on operational costs and resources ourselves so that we can pass the buck down to our customers without compromising on quality.
But heroku charges a pretty big multiplier over the underlying AWS resources and does a pretty large volume (I don't know if the numbers are public, so I could be wrong, but my sense is they have a LOT of customers).
It seems likely to me that their prices are more about "what the market will bear" than about what they need to support the business. There's nothing wrong with that, nobody's forcing any customers to pay for heroku, the customers think the value is there.
It just makes me surprised that nobody's competing effectively on price. Which may mean I'm wrong and you are right. But there could also be other explanations.
If they HAD competitors offering the same thing, we might think that the competitors were forced to compete on price so all maybe were charging the least they could to support the business. At least that's the theory. But that they have no real competitors offering quite what they're offering... when what they're offering has been so successful... is surprising to me.
Maybe it's just hard to create something as high-quality as heroku Or to do it without funding, or to get funding for it?
Hi HN! Comradery was a startup that I founded and worked on from 2019-2020 before unfortunately deciding to spin it down in the middle of last year (you can read more about why here: https://twitter.com/rishab_hegde/status/1361387261175025666).
I decided that it would be best to open source the platform so hopefully others can make use of it :) Would be happy to answer any questions!
As an FYI, most of the newspapers’ dream places/best places to work are bought and paid for by companies’ PR departments - it’s not a meritocratic competition and afaik, they rarely actually conduct polls or ask real employees. At best they’ll take a glance at Glassdoor rankings
Hi HN! Occasionally I get a little overzealous with my music volume and my roommate has to ask me to turn it down so this weekend I built something that lets him to do it remotely! Hopefully this can make WFH a little easier for a few people :)
