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by code_scrapping
2082 days ago
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You seem to have the impression that I don't see the value of early users, which is not true. They are crucial. Could those 30 students have gotten GCP access and carried out their assignments? Probably. I wouldn't portray myself as a savior while trying to sell a product. I'd
say that those 30 students were doing you a favor. (In the same way Autodesk, Microsoft etc are giving away student licenses to get you into their eco-system. It's really not a new thing) But, to my original quote that you seem to have disliked - you are a small company (I saw 10-ish people?) that's entering a highly populated and competitive market with the assumption that your early adopters "need your product badly". I can only assume you have one helluva product. I'd say in 2-5 years you'll have the answer (not that it has to be bad news). |
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I'm not assuming you don't see the value of early users. I'm giving examples of them being crucial.
>Could those 30 students have gotten GCP access and carried out their assignments? Probably.
Assumptions of this [for the students]:
- They have a payment method and can set up a billing account [they don't]
- They know how to set up VMs [they don't]
- They know how to set up notebooks [could do it difficultly]
- They know how to install dependencies [they had trouble with that]
- They can afford storage and compute including GPUs [nope]
- They can version their code and track their params/metrics/models [nope]
- They can deploy their models to use them in web applications [nope]
- They can get their models to their machines [slow connection, + dependencies]
- Thirty students can easily show their progress to their supervisor [nope]
- A group of students can collaborate easily on different machines [nope]
And the last assumption is that they care about all these things. They don't. The job to be done is to study something, train models, and write a dissertation on different approaches, not to entangle themselves in dependency hell and containers. That is overhead.
>I wouldn't portray myself as a savior while trying to sell a product.
I'm not portraying myself as a savior. I'm stating that the product saved a lot of time.
>I'd say that those 30 students were doing you a favor.
I believe I have given examples of this being true by saying that having users focuses development by uncovering unknowns, and focusing on what matters.
I so believe this that the whole series of replies goes in that direction.
>But, to my original quote that you seem to have disliked
What do you mean by disliked, and what lead you to believe that?
>you are a small company (I saw 10-ish people?) that's entering a highly populated and competitive market with the assumption that your early adopters "need your product badly"
We are our own early adopters, and we do need our product badly. We would have used something else had we found one that solves problems we encounter in the real world.
>I can only assume you have one helluva product.
Not really. We're working on that, though. We want it to be useful for us, first.