I would say both in this case, you can make the decision if you think you need investment money or not and the number of paid users you have can be can be a valuable point of data used to help determine this.
You have the advantage of being able to start and potentially get something into the market without needing to take investor money and promise larger than life returns on the money you take. Use this time wisely to make an honest judgement of what you think this business could turn into, if it's just something that pays your rent then let it be that. If you grow like crazy and need investment money, only then pursue it.
Dealing with investors is a really big headache, so only accept money from them if you really think it will make a difference in being able to grow the business.
Yes you will almost certainly have to use one or many extension stores, you will also need to setup a secure way to handle subscriptions and give elevated access to users that pay.
1. Keep it closed source, offer a paid vs free model with more options that your power users can subscribe to if they really find what you offer valuable. This is also the best / fastest signal you can get as to if what you have made is going to be able to achieve your goal of becoming a startup and making money or not.
Offering what you have to this tech company is probably the quickest way to get whatever it is that you're doing copied. Companies pretend to be interested in things they have no interest in buying or just want to get a head start on by having you show them in great detail how everything works all while telling you they are seriously interested.
The tech company will only seriously consider buying what you have to gain the userbase you have built with your product, not the technology itself in 99% of cases.
2. There is no way to stop this, especially for browser extensions. Making it more difficult to copy the source code will slow people down, but this is something you will have to deal with especially if you gain any traction and prove that your product is something people are willing to pay for.
You have an enormous advantage over these people if you are the first mover in this space however. Focus the majority of your time on creating a truly great experience for your users that will build loyalty towards your product instead of trying to play a never ending game of cat and mouse with people copying your idea.
I think it's CRUD endpoints all the way down 95% of the time unfortunately. I'm not sure how old you are, but early in my career I jumped around a lot feeling the same way and that if I could find a company or technology that I was passionate about, I would be less bored, less burned out, happier, etc...
Overall what I've found is that the things I find interesting and enjoy working on in an engineering capacity almost have 0 overlap with things that will make money or turn into a business of some kind. Instead of continuing my search to find the perfect balance of company mission statement, interesting technology, competent and friendly coworkers (culture), and pay, I optimize for trying to get at least 2 out of 4 of these, if I can get 3 it means it's a great fit for me. Of these, company culture has made the biggest impact on my overall happiness.
There is some truth that joining a smaller company or a startup to wear multiple hats can fix this somewhat, but I would advise against doing this unless you either really strongly believe in whatever the company is doing, or really strongly want to learn something you feel is only possible to learn at that company. Otherwise you will end up working 60 hour weeks making CRUD endpoints for someone panicking about how to raise the next round of funding or get to the goal of the month that the investors have said is important now.
Until you find some field or area of technology that lights your hair on fire in excitement, keep CRUDing my friend. Realize that you are exchanging your time for money at your job and treat it as such. Save the interesting things for your personal time or if you believe strongly enough in it, start your own company and have someone else CRUD for you ;)
Agreed but the main thing that is reminding me of crypto in this case is the combination of hyper excitement, adoption, and evangelism of the technology, and how defensive people get when you start to ask questions about why they feel so strongly about it.
There is definitely value here, I use the product a lot myself, but I don't agree that the value is as high as the majority of people seem to think (ChatGPT is going to reshape economies, every industry will replace 90% of humans with some form of AI soon, in more extreme cases that AGI is close to happening, etc...)
I wanted to see if anyone here had examples or use cases that could make me think otherwise
> They things I’ve had it do with me are mind blowing, my guess is the people who understand it and how to leverage it will increase their own productivity so much that it will reshape economies and put many people out of work that don’t learn how to use it.
This is the kind of hyper sensationalism that I'm talking about. Do you really believe that, or is this you extrapolating to what could be possible in the future if the technology keeps improving? I feel like that is where a lot of the arguments always ended up with crypto advocates as well, if you had doubts or questions about how big of paradigm shift this was going to be for the world, you just didn't get it yet because you couldn't connect the dots this early on.
I'm not doubting that the tool is useful, or that ChatGPT is quite an accomplishment, but I just don't see it "reshaping economies" anytime soon.
Anything beyond one off asks is pretty hit or miss at least for me on if what ChatGPT is telling me is correct or not. Write me a complex SQL query that does this, write a python script that will do that, show me the regex that will find these patterns in a string, all of those work really nicely and do save time.
When anything gets more complex than that, I feel like the main value it provides is to see what direction it was trying to approach the problem from, seeing if that makes sense to you, and then asking it more about why it decided to do something.
This is definitely useful, but only if you know enough to keep it in check while you work on something, or worse if you think you know something more than you actually do, you can tell ChatGPT it's wrong and it will happily agree with you (even though it was correct in that case). I've tested both cases: correcting it when it was really wrong, and correcting it confidently when it was actually right. Both times it agreed that it was wrong and regenerated the answer it gave me.
I've also gotten good results that have added value to whatever I was working on at the time, but I also get a lot of partially correct responses, or responses where ChatGPT will forget what I told it seconds ago and repeat the same incorrect response from a few prompts ago. It's very effective if you know enough about what you ask it to disregard incorrect information quickly.
It can be very helpful to guide you in a direction maybe you didn't consider looking into to begin with, but I don't fully trust it.
There was a fun example I had a few months ago where I wanted to see how well it would do with being asked to solve a problem iteratively instead of recursively, something like: "generate all valid, distinct permutations of a provided string given that you have a dictionary to check valid words against" and it got most of the problem correct, but when asked to fix anything it would go right back to a recursive solution with the same issue appearing, or in some cases a new issue.
It got me most of the way there with some edge cases I needed to handle myself, but it definitely seemed like that was as far as it was going to be able to go
I'm surprised it's not already bankrupt honestly. No one working at a WeWork has ever asked me to badge in, or show any kind of proof that I have paid for a day pass to be there.
Going there for team events is the same thing, everyone is supposed to pay for a day pass but does not so the entire day for 15 people ends up only costing whatever you spend on shared meeting rooms. It's pretty easy to just go into a meeting room that isn't reserved and use that for free, again with no checking from the staff there.
I guess the private offices that people pay for there are making some money, but not enough to justify the massive real estate bill WeWork has to pay for the great locations they usually have space in.
Unless you have an EE degree from an Ivy league school, not really.
It definitely won't hurt you and anyone who is an engineer reading your resume will be more likely to give you a shot after seeing that you completed a rigorous degree, but engineers aren't the ones reading your resume when you're starting out unfortunately.
I say this as someone who has a EE degree (not from an Ivy league, but a well known engineering school) and found it pretty challenging to switch into software engineering here in SV, although with persistence it did finally happen.
I agree that your time is much better spent learning the skills that are in demand for the kind of software work you want to do eventually, web dev is going to give you the biggest pool of companies to send your resume to and is one of the easier areas to get yourself up to speed on without having to go back to school. If you have your heart set on a very specific field that could benefit from more school, then I would agree that finding a program to study this in more detail could be really interesting for you and help you in your search for jobs.