Just chipping in to say that I've never seen it churn for more than 20 minutes in two years worth of usage. The longest I've ever seen it churn is when I had it give extremely detailed analysis of five fictional novels simultaneously.
I spent a long time playing with the sim. Nice work.
Most of the random data sets that I ran ended up with a two body system, where the third body was flung far into space never to return. However, some of these were misleading. I had one running for 15 minutes at 5x, and the third body did eventually return.
Any b2c product I build has huge incentive to share the product, creating more users.
In the product itself, social is part of the value. So the more they interact, the more value they get. Similar to any social network you see today.
I do this a number of ways, none original. Reactions, upvotes, achievements, streaks, creating summary videos (like Spotify year in review), public recommendations, etc
I'm realizing this a bit too late I think. My only value over something like capcut is the API, which most users don't care about.
But I see products like submagic doing $1m arr and I'm at loss. How are they doing so well? It can't just be their editor.
So I think the way forward for my product, if any, is to just target b2b for API usage or target users who want long form video cut into viral clips automatically. I need to niche it down.
I'm a founder of 3 small saas companies that I run by myself, generating about $1M ARR.
1. First one I started 10 years ago. I built a bot that auto DMed people in various internet forums. My first 100 users came from that. The product is highly shareable, so it quickly grew. Now it's 1.6M users (most of them free).
2. Second started 3.5 years ago. My first 100 users came from simply emailing the newsletter list from my first company. This product has no free plan, so it became profitable instantly.
3. Third started 1 month ago. And it's been a struggle. I got 10k free users just by emailing my list, but 0 paying users. So I tried ads and had similar results from the ads. Now I'm taking a step back and understanding why they aren't paying, which involves just emailing them.
Summary: once you have an email list and viral social loops built-in, marketing gets easier.
This isn't used widely because it is hard. But it's not but novel.
1. Companies want to standardize their hiring when really they should be looking to customize it to each candidate.
2. Lots of companies want to spread the blame of a bad hire across a committee of 4 or 5 people, but I think if you looked you'll find many startups doing it this way. They stop when they grow to a large size. They do it because frankly hiring good engineers is no longer the top priority (it's typically quotas AKA butts in seats).
I've never been put in the situation where an engineer shared something alarming from a proprietary code base, but hypothetically if someone brought with them the code for how to hack superuser privs for an old company, that would be an ethics violation and I would pass.
I've interviewed maybe 500 engineers in my career. I'm an early engineer of Instacart, 3rd engineer of Eventbrite, founding engineer of Reforge. Started 3 companies myself.
My interview is always the same:
1. Bring code you've written
2. Share your screen
3. Explain what it does and I will casually ask questions about it
You get so much information from this:
- How they think about code
- If they think it could be better
- Who they blame if the code isn't the best
- Personality
- Product dev glimpses
- Comms
- Sentiment
Assault w/Deadly Weapon - took 15 years to get it pardoned and expunged. The hardest battle I've fought in my life. It makes startups look easy. I'll write more about it one day, but I don't want to screw it up.