[BoorishBears]

- and 10 other things people who have no understanding of business like to say these days.

OpenAI cannot make every product and market them to every segment. If you wrap their API and provide a novel UX with precise positioning, there's value there.

OpenAI can copy the underlying collection of features tomorrow morning, but if the positioning is precise enough, you will easily outcompete them.

For an example developers can understand, see managed SaaS: which is a collection of companies raking in billions in revenue from simply wrapping AWS/GCP/Azure in ways that the underlying platforms even end up copying anyways but succeeding because their developer experience is better, or their feature set is better focused, or they're just plain nicer to work with.

[dragonwriter]

> OpenAI cannot make every product and market them to every segment.

Even if OpenAI doesn't, if its a thin wrapper with no deep proprietary edge, someone else can; your offering is ripe for commodification, even if that doesn't come from OpenAI themselves.

[BoorishBears]

Software is a commodity, period.

That's why "technical novelty" ranks ridiculously low on scale of things that make most successful software businesses these days: if anything technical novelty is more of an albatross on most software businesses than a saving grace.

Building traction in software is more about the 100s of other concerns that apply to every business: brand recognition, communicating your value proposition effectively, being able to sell to the target customer effectively, having the correct UX, the right proofs, the list goes on.

Copying that is just as hard as ever, if not harder.

[lmm]

> That's why "technical novelty" ranks ridiculously low on scale of things that make most successful software businesses these days: if anything technical novelty is more of an albatross on most software businesses than a saving grace.

Not convinced. Why did Google beat Yahoo? Why is Facebook huge while Friendster and Myspace are jokes? At some point - perhaps further down the line than most of us are used to thinking of - technical ability matters.

[BoorishBears]

If you think that the landscape you build a company in hasn't changed in the 2 decades since the founding of Facebook, there's not much to tell you.

And even Facebook definitely didn't win because if some technical choice... no one cared what tech stack powered a social media site, and if anything Facebook was less advanced than MySpace as far as users were concerned.

—

If you're talking about how it matters further down the line, then you're walking away from the wrapper thesis too: the whole line being parroted is that it's just an API wrapper ripe for the copying. Good luck getting to the "further down the line" reliably as a company, let alone down the line and then killing your competitor with a game plan that mostly consists of copying them.

[jameshart]

Are people so used to monopolies in the modern market that the idea of launching a business where there exists a possibility of competition is seen as a sign of a scam?

[zarzavat]

A lot of these new AI startups just give a plain text prompt to the GPT API with a smattering of web glue. This creates a product that looks impressive and might get funded, but has close to zero value add.

There’s a difference between having competition and having a business that can be trivially cloned. The challenge for a lot of AI startups is to show that they are adding something and are not just a dumb wrapper.