[ves]

> You could retire tomorrow, but you weren't put on this Earth to just be idle.

nice

> Your startup is "Ramen profitable" - that means you're making around 7k/month revenue to cover 2-5k expenses. If you start saving 100% of profits NOW you can afford 1 of those engineers in (checks notes) just under 8 years! What's your next move?

Offer the engineers meaningful equity rather than the one or two points they might ordinarily expect.

[grepLeigh]

Just curious, would you accept $1k/month salary + 4% with a 1 year cliff to hack on PrintNanny.ai?

The app stack is a mix of Python, Rust, Typescript deployed to a single-board computer like Raspberry Pi or Rock Pi.

New features are released monthly, via a rolling release embedded Linux distro based on Yocto/Poky (PrintNanny OS).

[janalsncm]

I know this is your baby and building it all out on a raspberry pi is pretty cool, but I feel like that could be a bottleneck long-term.

First of all customers will need a physical device so you have to figure out shipping. Second, the RPi puts a limit on your computation. If you ever want a bigger and better model, you’re out of luck.

Why not just make it into an iPhone/Android app? Either do the processing locally or use the app as a thin client for a SaaS ($$$). Hell, people are running stable diffusion on an iPhone these days.

If it’s an app, people can easily try it out, and if it works for them you have a new customer overnight. Plus you don’t have to deal with pain in the ass RPi supply chain issues. Maybe it already exists as an app in which case ignore everything I said.

So personally what I would do is spend $10k porting to a mobile ecosystem and go back to YC saying you need cash for a couple mobile devs and maybe a temporary designer. If you’re comfortable doing the ML yourself you can save on that too.

[ves]

I would not, but I know some people who would consider a deal like that. At $12k/yr and your stage you’re basically hiring a cofounder, so four points is… not a lot. You sound like you probably still have most of the equity left, so I’d expect more.

And a cliff? Nobody does cliffs these days after big tech axed them.