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by onion2k 1173 days ago
The challenge of building, running, and growing a startup is rarely building some novel algorithm or complex machine. You can reduce almost all SaaS businesses down to "It's just a UI and a database!" if you want to, and many developers do. That only shows how easy it is to over-simplify things.

My first startup was literally just some Javascript and a Postgres database. It didn't even call any external services, let alone one that's truly on the bleeding edge of computer science. I still thought it was a viable business (wrongly, it turned out, but still... I had a dream!).
1 comments
raverbashing 1173 days ago
I find it funny some people being dismissive of what they built to defend the AI startups

"Some JavaScript and a DB" is a web service. It does stuff. Sure if it's small or a basic crud then the moat is small

But if I can replace the value proposition of a startup with "open chatgpt and type a short prompt" then there's not much value in it right. Maybe if there's value in the surrounding services.

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onion2k 1173 days ago
If the business is literally just sending data to GPT and outputting the response then sure, but I've not seen any businesses trying that yet. Pretty much everything I've seen to date is "A CRUD app with GPT to fill in blank data". That's automatically more valuable than just a CRUD app.
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