[bemmu]

I used to build in public (Candy Japan), and now don't.

Good things. It does bring customers directly. At least for blogging, building in public posts can get some backlinks, which is great for SEO. For some time I had the #1 result for my top search term. That might make it worth it overall.

Negative things. It motivates others to clone your project, as now people know that $X/month can be made doing that. Almost no-one will, but if your posts are seen by say 100k+ people then you'll have a few in there who might.

It warps your own thinking, as now you have a bunch of people on social media who see your project as your identity. You start buying into the narrative of being this X project guy so you can't just go away to do Y, even if on a rational level you know no-one actually cares that much whether you do X or Y.

Seems @levelsio has been immune to this, as he's been smart to have his identity be a guy who ships a variety of things quickly vs. just being say the "Nomadlist Guy" forever.

[inquisitor26234]

thing about levelsio is you can copy his ideas but you don't have his existing audience, connections, and resources

and the guy ships like a machine good lord

"just code more carefully" jesus

[elicksaur]

Does he ship like a machine, or are his products relatively simple GenAI wrappers?

[inquisitor26234]

ships like a machine yes

his products being genai wrappers, some are partly yes.

in his interview with lex fridman he explains how he built his recent photo ai one, yes most of it is wrapper on some ai service, but his team goes the extra mile of training models on their own so it looks more photorealistic than the generally available ones

he built products before ai like nomadlist and remoteok.

his hit and miss rates are as real as it gets

https://x.com/levelsio/status/1457315274466594817

[elicksaur]

Yeah, kudos where kudos are due for making something that is easily tweaked, but I was thinking of a recent example of his “speed”.

Adding a “comic book” style in “4 minutes”: https://x.com/levelsio/status/1836735235658072144

If all you need to do to ship a new feature is add a prompt option in a configuration somewhere, yeah you can ship fast. And, again, all the props for making something that can iterate like that!

I think what I wanted to but failed to convey by being pithy is: For the people out there comparing themselves and think they’re “slow”, they might be trying to solve a problem that can’t be solved with a configuration tweak. It’s ok that it takes more time then.

[laike9m]

With his influence and followers, I think @levelsio has made sure that, even if he has competitors, he's gonna gain more attraction than others and do better