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by jreynar·2mo ago·view on hn ↗
It's nice to see an explanation of how they think you should use Claude for a host of different job functions / aspects of building a business, but the tone makes it seem like founding a startup is something you wake up one morning and just decide to do instead of, say, going to the park. Over coffee, you ask Claude about your idea and when it tells you "you're a genius" you're off. That's silly in so many ways. Statements like this "Validation cycles that used to take months now take afternoons" have an element of truth but ring with false promise.

And that relates to the lack of timelines and focus on how long things took around 2020 BC, that is Before Claude. Building a startup isn't like having a lemonade stand as a kid where you just don't bother to do it if you forget to buy lemons or it's rainy or something more fun comes along. There's a significant compound interest element to startups that's easy to overlook. Your codebase grows over time and so does your feature set and that collection of features attracts customers in a way one thing might not. You learn as go, of course, too.

This seems particularly relevant to the GTM section, which I was particularly amused by since that's what I'm focused on right now. It's a long game. Your blog post doesn't get found by anyone in Google until you've built up your SEO mojo, your LinkedIn post isn't read without the followers you need to accumulate and your content has to get engagement for people to see it even then, you don't start off line with a million followers on X, etc.

4 comments
> the tone makes it seem like founding a startup is something you wake up one morning and just decide to do instead of, say, going to the park.

I'm not sure it's a crazy idea when you can run a whole revenue generating company with basically zero employees. You could have a successful 'startup' generating 200k in revenue a year, you just need to cover the cost of your anthropic subscription.

> 2020 BC, that is Before Claude

To avoid confusion and improve clarity, I propose 'BCC': Before Claude, Codex, et al.

Before Covid
Hah! That'd be nice
AD is for After Deepseek
exactly. validation by _whom_ exactly? not your customers!
> Your blog post doesn't get found by anyone in Google until you've built up your SEO mojo, your LinkedIn post isn't read without the followers you need to accumulate and your content has to get engagement for people to see it even then, you don't start off line with a million followers on X, etc.

I hate that this is true. It's the worst part about selling stuff online IMO and I found that you have to spend so much time doing it. In many cases, selling something online can be optimized to the extreme such that spend on marketing should be as high as possible and spend on the product R&D, manufacturing, support, etc should be minimized as much as possible. This equation gives you the most profit, but also gives the customer the absolute worst product that is possible to sell.

Capitalism doesn't really have a solution to this problem that I've seen yet.

I think you either need to split your time in between 100% product and 100% marketing or have a founding team that is able to do both - not just “marketing” but the ability to build and leverage a personal + corporate brand and get specific influential people to work with you on social media and for PR.

The “build in public” thing sort of works if your customer base is other aspirational founder-developers but also has saturated and become less useful. I think the stakes for what constitute a credible and trustworthy product are higher now that AI has lowered the bar for new entrants to get “something” working; in a way it’s almost discrediting now to market something not-quite-ready because randoms on reddit can just as easily do that, and it signals something very different now than it used to.

There’s also a bias towards noticing the noisy advertisers a lot and not how many other startups (some of which are quite large) mostly market through different channels or specialized buyers, and so assuming they don’t exist. HN doesn’t realize how many deeper tech companies there actually are because of that; generally IMO the bleeding edge SV technology companies are about 1-2y ahead of what you see as a product consumer/commentariat.

This problem really bothers me as well. I think that ultimately this problem boils down to reducing search cost[0], which the internet has already partially done. I think AI will reduce them further if it is not captured by the advertisement industry for the average user. However, we cannot assume a fully rational customer in the real world. Especially in software, the customer does not know what they are looking for most of the time. Further they cannot evaluate how good your offering is vs competitors without investing a significant amount of time, which in turn increases search cost.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_cost

Capitalism's solution to this "problem" is competition. If your widget sucks, but is cheaper, and mine is more. expensive, but better, then it's up to consumers to differentiate. eg Dyson makes expensive versions of gadgets. Some people see the value, others call them overpriced and then complain when the cheap knockoff sucks. It's -an imperfect system, but the free market is the solution to that problem.