Reading research papers is too complicated, lets make progress
Reading novels is too complicated, lets make progress
Reading newspaper is too complicated, lets make progress
Did you see my viral Tiktok post?
Sorry ! Its too complicated, I already made progress
Research show studying on paper leads to better comprehension and deeper learning and digital devices [1]. No wonder schools in norway have banned digital devices. With my own experience on kindle, it is not as fulfilling as reading a comic book in hand. An ideal ePaper should have following characteristics:
- Soft / Foldable
- Easy on eyes
- Support color
On a waiter's bill pad, numbers dance. Reality and unreality collide on such a fundamental level that each becomes the other and anything is possible
Numbers on restaurant bills do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers anywhere else in the Universe, depending instead on the observer's movement and the table's mood
- Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
Lets rewind a few years back in 2018-2022. Blockchain technology was revolutionary and everyone tried to put in into various things - real estate, banking system, even facebook tried LIBRA.Ultimately, nothing worked! Blockchain has a niche and effective usecase which is of decentralized payments. Now I see LLMs panning out the same way, stuffing LLMs into everything is not working out. It has few very good use cases like search, text summarization and boiler plate coding.
Lets not try to put tomato sauce in everything. I love my dosa crisp and buttery, please don't ruin it!
Bitcoin flows straight in,
No middleman takes a cut,
Wallets fill with light.
https://www.blockonomics.co
A great music has a story worth listening
A great movie has a story worth watching
A great software has a story worth experiencing
Tell a good story, greatness will follow!
Gahmen give subsidies, yet you don't make babies, I know why ?
LifeSG credits keep getting expired, I know why ?
Ministers say make babies, yet you remain a DINK, I know why?
I can make a million babies,
Just need more sweet GPUs, you know why ?
Claude Opus AGI
The CEO thinks - let me fire my 10 coders. The product manager will code everything using AI agents. I reduce salary costs and ship features 10 times features. What a brilliant CEO I am !
The CEO thinks - My coders are top notch. Let me train each of them to become product entrepreneurs. Now my company has 10 products - at least 3 will become successful. I will get 5x revenue. What a brilliant CEO I am!
With AI coding there is a talk that SAAS companies are overvalued and all software can now be self hosted / maintained. Let us take a simple example of replacing slack by self hosting slack using something like a Zulip
| Category | Component | Monthly Cost (USD) |
|---|---|---|
| Server | 4GB RAM / 2 vCPU VPS (e.g., AWS t3.medium) | $20.00 |
| SMTP | AWS SES (~$0.10 per 1,000 emails) | $0.50 |
| Backups | AWS S3 Storage + Server Snapshots | $6.00 |
| Domain | Annual renewal (pro-rated) | $1.25 |
| Maintenance | Admin Labor (10 hours @ $10/hr) | $100.00 |
| Total Cost | Estimated Monthly Total | $127.75 |
Even before AI coding tools, open source versions of all major SAAS tools were readily available. So essentially software has been free for quite sometime. You are paying primarily for maintenance/infra
As a 2024, slack had roughly 200,000 paying customer. Most of time are Fortune 500 companies. When you are using slack for free what is essentially happening is that the big companies are subsiding your infrastructure cost. Over 600,000 SMEs use free slack and its not economical for them to be self hosted
SAAS is not dead, in fact large SAAS companies will becoming bigger monopolies using AI tools
The hackathon was well received . Congrats to the winner idearoast . Product market fit is the most difficult part of a startup journey. Billions of dollars have been spent on products that have no takers. The progression to PMF is very clear:
1. Users are not curious about the product
2. Users are curious but not willing to pay
3. Users are willing to pay
Getting users (not your friends) to pay is actually the fastest way to validate the product. Subsidizing a product or giving it for free creates a illusionary PMF , which can be detrimental in getting the actual PMF