[Mizoguchi]

That's ok.

This is how many successful businesses operate in the "atoms" world.

You take a product or service that's already popular and has a solid channel for distribution, you transform it or add additional value to it and sell it for a profit.

Think about a $8 precut, packaged pineapple at the grocery store.

Once you get your business going and get additional funding or generate cash flow, you can invest in getting rid of some of the middlemen so that you can take their profits too (start growing your own pineapples).

Sounds pretty straightforward, but the selling part is the difficult one.

[raverbashing]

Yes, I am aware, and I agree

The value proposition to the sliced pineapple is the time and skill to do it. Sure, it's "cheap" to do it at home (if your time is free and you have a good knife - I pay way less than $8 though ;) )

While I do believe there are startups with good value added, I think a lot of people are just throwing a simple call with very little thought added. And while the service is sellable, your moat is how easy people can duplicate it.

Is your service a product or a feature? If it's a feature OpenAI can just add it to their systems in a day

[truthsayer123]

Is comparing to atoms world a good comparison though?

Especially when these products can be built by a school student in an hour using ChatGPT?

I think the barrier of entry to atoms world companies are quite higher than that.

[Mizoguchi]

I guess my point was we see examples everyday in the atoms world where people take an existing product, do some trivial work around it and create a multi million dollar business.

Generally yes, software is usually easier, although today you can start a new brand of vodka or cosmetics from your computer.

Customers acquisition is equally difficult for both though, so sales and marketing is where the secret sauce and differentiation is now, not so much in the codebase, I think.