The ideal user is someone who has been building the same thing. It's the guy who's using an excel sheet or wiki to manage their D&D sessions. It's the modders who who have been making fancy, expensive hacks. I personally don't start until I find these communities.
I tried making a grocery price comparison app once. There were tons of these though, and nobody really wanted one. It's just something they'd find useful. So I flipped it, proposed recipes that export into grocery lists. Again, no community. Then I searched around for recipe sharing communities and found one that did low carb diets. I bundled their recipes (with credit) and shared it to a FB group. I got 1000 downloads in the first 24 hours. People on the app kept asking about where they'd get the ingredients. 3% of the app users bought something. So it worked out and ended up a business for over a year.
Even if this doesn't work out exactly, I would say it's easier to start with the sales channel, and then work backwards. If you're making a game, figure out what kind of screenshots or name would make people want to try it.
Hmmm… so find a problem currently not solved by anyone and solve it, right? In the sense of making life or processes easier and more comfortable.
I’m developing two apps: a GPT, infinite context translator and a language learning app filled with AI. In fact, this is a preview of the translator https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43199806, although it does currently not support the infinite context window. I know how to make it but won’t be as easy.
I’ll focus on the translator now. It takes a bit more time o deliver the translation (up to x5.5 what Google Translate) but its quality is 20-40% higher (BLEU score) and its API will be fixed at $0.70 per million characters in fast mode and $2.10 per million in Deep Translate (reasoning) mode. Google offers $20 per million characters. That’s a significant drop in price and a better translation.
I’m currently concocting the benchmarks with FLORES-200 and a bunch of languages to refine the product. My idea was to make a press release or something and send it out to portals like TechCrunch. I expected a better reduction in price and much more quality increase than a /10 and a +40%, but still might be worth a press article.
What do you think about this? Following on in your comment, I should maybe find a Reddit post that studies translation and translators?
It's important to find the problem _first_. To me, it sounds like you're already building a solution (which can be a fun project, no doubt!), but in search of a problem.
Most books / talks will advocate finding your customers first, which means listening for problems that they have. It doesn't mean there can't be a solution on the market already, because competition in itself is validation that there's a need, but it means you need to be better than your competition in executing 1-2 particular features your customers want.
A common example is a large enterprise product having so many features that certain customers are turned off from the bloat; you could step in here, execute 1-2 features well, and sell that (provided customers want that).
#1 Consider searching for "sell the sizzle"
#2 Never forget who pays your wage; your clients.
#3 The Pareto principle is often important ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
The ideal user is someone who has been building the same thing. It's the guy who's using an excel sheet or wiki to manage their D&D sessions. It's the modders who who have been making fancy, expensive hacks. I personally don't start until I find these communities.
I tried making a grocery price comparison app once. There were tons of these though, and nobody really wanted one. It's just something they'd find useful. So I flipped it, proposed recipes that export into grocery lists. Again, no community. Then I searched around for recipe sharing communities and found one that did low carb diets. I bundled their recipes (with credit) and shared it to a FB group. I got 1000 downloads in the first 24 hours. People on the app kept asking about where they'd get the ingredients. 3% of the app users bought something. So it worked out and ended up a business for over a year.
Even if this doesn't work out exactly, I would say it's easier to start with the sales channel, and then work backwards. If you're making a game, figure out what kind of screenshots or name would make people want to try it.
Hmmm… so find a problem currently not solved by anyone and solve it, right? In the sense of making life or processes easier and more comfortable.
I’m developing two apps: a GPT, infinite context translator and a language learning app filled with AI. In fact, this is a preview of the translator https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43199806, although it does currently not support the infinite context window. I know how to make it but won’t be as easy.
I’ll focus on the translator now. It takes a bit more time o deliver the translation (up to x5.5 what Google Translate) but its quality is 20-40% higher (BLEU score) and its API will be fixed at $0.70 per million characters in fast mode and $2.10 per million in Deep Translate (reasoning) mode. Google offers $20 per million characters. That’s a significant drop in price and a better translation.
I’m currently concocting the benchmarks with FLORES-200 and a bunch of languages to refine the product. My idea was to make a press release or something and send it out to portals like TechCrunch. I expected a better reduction in price and much more quality increase than a /10 and a +40%, but still might be worth a press article.
What do you think about this? Following on in your comment, I should maybe find a Reddit post that studies translation and translators?
It's important to find the problem _first_. To me, it sounds like you're already building a solution (which can be a fun project, no doubt!), but in search of a problem.
Most books / talks will advocate finding your customers first, which means listening for problems that they have. It doesn't mean there can't be a solution on the market already, because competition in itself is validation that there's a need, but it means you need to be better than your competition in executing 1-2 particular features your customers want.
A common example is a large enterprise product having so many features that certain customers are turned off from the bloat; you could step in here, execute 1-2 features well, and sell that (provided customers want that).
#1 Consider searching for "sell the sizzle" #2 Never forget who pays your wage; your clients. #3 The Pareto principle is often important ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
90% of all of that is just having a great product that is better then any other solution. Rest is details.