Founders

One thing I'm realizing is that you can quickly spend tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars building products only for no one to use them and the money basically having gone to waste.

Def feels like the most expensive game of trial and error to ever exist.

Onchain is the new online - FID 206 -  cooprecords.xyz

shipping open-source allows us to take the tech from one failed startup to bootstrap the next idea.

I see each day as a death / failure. 

Keep costs as low as possible.

Ship the lessons open source daily.

Wake up inspired to build something new bringing your experience from the day before.

If you think you need to spend X amount of weeks/days/hours working to launch the first version of something, really start to believe that X/2 and X/3 is likely more optimal.

I've progressively learned this over the years from values of X = 4 months, then 1.5, then 3 weeks, and so on... I launched the initial version of /amp after a few days, the semantic search after just 2. I launched the AI-generated homepage (ampcast.xyz/news) with about 3 hours of work on the first prototype - it turned into one of the top launches on the network that day, but I was genuinely surprised and was expecting just a few people to try it out and give me feedback, and instead I've had over a thousand land on the page that day.

Shaving scope is its own challenge - but unnecessary delay in launching hurts your learning. Launch faster.

For software startups (not hardware) you should really shave the scope down to a series of tests, not a full blown bells and whistles singular product launch. I like what @nt said about it

let's build clank.fun. prev: web3 founder, improbable, github, amazon. ntik.me

For software startups (not hardware) you should really shave the scope down to a series of tests, not a full blown bells and whistles singular product launch. I like what @nt said about it

https://warpcast.com/nt/0xe49c8a94

running into this, where building agents with access to whatsapp/tg has distribution 100x+ beyond crypto. No matter that farcaster/lens/XMTP has certain benefits for auth/payments

This is most of our industry at the moment, unfortunately

it's not waste in the same way that soldiers aren't wasted in the attempt to win a war.

need to fund 100 startups to get 1 breakout success. usually, that one will define a category and change the world.

if you didn't fund 100, you may never get the 1.

Usually starting with asking is better/cheaper than building.  There's so many useful forms of fidelity before actual code.  Know what success would mean as soon as possible.

That said, I think the bar for most users has gotten quite high - they're jaded by what's possible now.

Indeed
That's why marketing is an important factor in building

if you think that's expensive wait until you hear about the financial stockmarket...

Same kind of thing is true with music. You can spend years producing music alone in a room and then find out it doesn’t resonate with people. I think touring acts have an advantage cause they can try songs for a real audience and get real feedback along the way

Constant user feedback/research seems like a good tool to reduce this

It's a very bad feeling. I understand it.

probably why hardware projects are difficult to scale up and find pmf for?

This thought haunts me as my team builds. Our market research suggests we are building a useful product, but until you get it in front of customers, it’s never a definite

Totally feel you on this. Building products can definitely burn through cash fast, and it sucks when no one ends up using them. It’s like playing the world's most expensive guessing game. But hey, every mistake is a lesson learned. The trick is to keep moving, adapt quickly, and use those lessons to make your next move better.

building for real users is a humbling experience

the most expensive thing you end up spending. is not the money. It’s the time