Back
Swizec Teller

Many founders get so used to grinding and hustling that they forget to stop when it’s no longer appropriate and may in fact be harmful. Tired people make awful decisions.

It sounds like money/uncertainty is a big source of this stress. Istrongly recommend reading Profit First and following its principles when relying on eat-what-you-kill for main income. It helped me immensely.

And yes like you said - timebox all the things.

Like @nikspyratos said, you should read Stark’s stuff. What a maker wants to pay you depends on the value you bring.

I have a page getting hella traffic with good conversions but 50% of users get an error and can’t buy? I’ll pay you a bunch to fix that for me.

I have a product with zero users and low interest? Giving you even 10 bucks feels like a lot.

To give a more concrete example: I have a bunch of problems on my blog that I’d really love to fix but it isn’t worth my time. Would love to pay someone to do it for me, but there isn’t nearly enough work to even begin talking about a /month price.

I use my personal site. It’s been around longer than Medium and is likely to outlive Medium too.

The distribution mechanism built into Medium are nice tho. Especially when starting out

Typically you want to be upfront about wanting money for the service so users aren’t surprised. But you want to pop the question after you get their contact info.

Those leads are gold for market research, product research, and possibly converting later. Most people won’t buy right away, but do intend to buy later unless they forget you exist.

lol ass-pricing sounds a lot like “do whatever everyone else is doing and see if it works”

This looks useful!

The right price depends more on your target market than it does on the tool itself. What are your potential customers currently doing to solve this problem? How much does it cost them? How does your tool help with that? Does it alleviate the pain?

Usually when you can’t price something, that’s a good sign you need to conduct more user interviews.

That said, you can also use yourself as a model. Are you using this tool? How much time/pain is it relieving?

from the response it seems to alleviate pain. It definitely does for me. Its my go to resource before I write any blog post. I feel much much more confident that I am writing about the correct keywords (that will rank) once I use this to make a list. I probably need to conduct more user interviews. Thanks a lot

Really depends on the ToS. Security officers will always have strong opinions around sending NDA'd code and data to 3rd party services. Us engineers have all sorts of scary access levels :)

+1 to what Marc said – the internet is flooded with products right now that all do some version of “We pre-prompt your prompt and give you no-code access to GPT API”

That’s good, iff you have a niche non-technical market you can reach better/cheaper/faster/moretargeted than competitors. Or as Marc said, you make the integration suuuuper buttery smooth for your target users in an existing app they’re already using.

For example: I would love a ChatGPT interface inside VSCode that understands the entire context of at least the local file, full project would be even better, and is as easy to use as TypeScript-based autocomplete.

But even if that existed, my head of security would never let me use it 💩

Thanks Swizec. I actually have a same idea, but not sure if I could make it better than Github copilot haha.

As of security/privacy, I think a paid opensource could work. WDYT? :D

Really depends on the ToS. Security officers will always have strong opinions around sending NDA'd code and data to 3rd party services. Us engineers have all sorts of scary access levels :)