Look at the last 3 years of AI startups, and it’s crazy how the big guys are folding use cases into their platforms - I cannot be the only one wondering what’s the point of developing a tool only for OpenAI et all to just incorporate the same eventually. There is no clear boundary as to what the business of the big ones is.
Not only that, but also they have deep monitoring of any little good idea that might get traction within their platforms.
It’s trivial for them to see what’s picking up and bring in-house.
Yup, pretty much all quality of life upgrades in ios came from shamelessly copying popular jailbreak tweaks on cydia. Which they could do without credit since the tweaks were frowned upon in the first place.
This is a classic example of people misapplying the logic of the SaaS world to the AI world. If you're building software to sell, you're in trouble. The people that are finding success in this space are using AI to allow them to solve the problems they used to have to pay for software and hire people to solve.
All of the most promising companies I know today are very small and are leveraging AI to solve physical problems in the real world that just wouldn't be possible with so few people even a few years back.
Yeah "start a business with AI" is the new "learn to code". Like what does that even mean, do you just go to Claude "hey what business should I start?"
If starting a business was so easy, almost all of us who work salary would go do it. This advice is like, if your local football club gets shut down, just work hard enough to make into Manchester United
> If starting a business was so easy, almost all of us who work salary would go do it.
Would we? Starting a business is easy. Building a profitable business isn't even that hard. Wanting pleasure in our work is what stops us. Running a business generally isn't much fun. We work salary because it means we can focus on the enjoyable parts of the business, letting someone else deal with the crap.
This is completely wrong - Good for you if you think its so easy. I would do almost anything to get out of salary but every idea/attempt (and I have made several attempts) I have never even makes revenue let alone profit. Yet I can make 200k as a software engineer on salary.
> Yet I can make 200k as a software engineer on salary.
Then I dare say you've found your market fit. Tomorrow, your task is to start looking for a contractor position doing the exact same thing you are doing now. There's your business.
> but every idea/attempt (and I have made several attempts) I have never even makes revenue let alone profit.
Not even a single penny? What did these attempts look like? Were you out there knocking on doors offering to weed every flowerbed in the city? Or were you sticking to fun tasks, like programming, that made it feel like you were busy building a business but in actuality were hiding from it?
Starting and running a business is an entirely different skillset from "doing the work" - even someone who could easily "be on their own" (think: plumbers, doctors, etc) really often prefer the salaried position where they don't have to think about "the business".
It's an older book, but The E-Myth Revisited is worth a read for everyone, a business is not a job. It's related, but it's not the same.
When you get right down to it, collecting a salary is running a business with a client of one. So virtually everyone will start a business. I acknowledge the false dichotomy I submitted earlier.
But what you don't often see is one being willing to scale that client base to two. That is what I was trying to get at. Having two clients actually provides greater security than just one, as even if one client relieves you of your services you still have the other to help support you during the downtime. However, there is no free lunch. Two clients wanting your attention is orders of magnitude less enjoyable than just one client, and it only gets worse as you scale even bigger. There is good reason why most prefer to never scale beyond a single client.
Only a small sliver of the world has to worry about health insurance. Job security, maybe.
I think the biggest component is all the crap that comes with running a business.. accounting, sales, budgets and planning, regulatory concerns, office/site management, the list goes on forever. I'm an engineer, I want to do this and leave the other jobs to people who specialize at those, not run around trying to spin a dozen plates at once. I'm sure there's a tidbit more money to be made but it's just not worth it for me.
Now, if someone can make a vibe-business platform where AI handles all the drudgery and I can stick to the tech.. that might be worth talking about.