By default you can’t access the latest OpenAI models unless you request access. We requested access for a very straightforward use case and never got it. We switched to Anthropic and Bedrock for that reason.
I think that when people are worried about ZDR, what they really worry about is data governance. From what I’ve seen there’s a general distrust of OpenAI. AWS may keep your data around (without formal ZDR) but the concern of governance (using your data to train without your consent) seems like it would be much lower, because any breach of contract at AWS would have potential to destroy trust in what’s already a massively profitable company, so the incentives just aren’t there.
I’m not claiming OpenAI is training on API data. Just that they don’t have as strong of an incentive not to as AWS.
Software for teachers. Teachers tend to talk to each other, which is great for distribution. On the other hand, they have very little spending power. But back on the other hand again, they don't get as many cold emails as execs do.
> Research we’ve seen shows execs still spend 6+ hours per week on scheduling.
Be very careful not to delude yourself here. No one is spending 6+ hours a week on scheduling who is willing to use your tool. That's almost a full workday. If you are at this point, you probably have a human assistant who handles this.
> Would you be bothered if you were on our 23/mo plan and still had a banner there?
Probably not. But if i were, i'd probably just upgrade to a higher plan.
> First time founders are obsessed with product. Second time founders are obsessed with distribution.
I have personally grown an app from zero to 100k+ users, with no marketing budget. I don't have a magic formula, but i can say in hindsight that the first 5 users were harder to get than the next 999,995.
Here was my secret: I begged. Finding 5 people to actually use my product was soooo freakin hard. Once I got to ~100, organic growth started to take over, but things like responding to emails, fixing bugs and looking into new features right away make early users personally like you and more likely to tell their friends.
The hard part is finding the right people at the right time. I googled "Persona email scheduling" and found https://usepersona.app/, so I'll assume that is you. I don't know much about your product, but i assume you are targeting people who need to schedule lots of meetings. I have a few notes:
1) Your pricing is crazy. $660/year is a lot for automated meeting scheduling. Your comp should be Calendly which is closer to $10/month.
2) What problem are you trying to solve? Calendly seems pretty close to the perfect solution for one-on-one meetings. This seems to be for scheduling larger groups. Make that clear at the top of the page. If you are directly competing with Calendly, then just make that clear.
3) I'm not the audience, but think about who really has this problem. For me, 90% of my group meetings are scheduled within my company and we use Google calendar to find times that work. I dont do this enough that I'd feel compelled to try out a new product. Sales people schedule lots of 1-on-1 calls, but not sure that group calls is a big issue. So think about who this is really for. In general, just about the only time i will try a new product is if it provokes my curiosity (not gonna happen for a meeting scheduling bot) or it is solving a problem I need solved right now. Some products are really great, but finding the right person at the right time is a huge challenge. This is why I brought up the quote at the beginning. The right product with no distribution is very hard to get off the ground. I'd say that your early goal should be to find power users if possible... if you try to spread too wide of a net, you will probably fail. Better to have a few people who love your app than a larger group of people who think it's nice.
4) Let's say you do get a few users. Well, you are an email scheduling tool, so distribution is actually built on. On your free or basic plans, you can have a banner at the bottom of outgoing emails that says "This email was drafted by Persona, the tool for automated emails". Now you have free marketing on every email that goes out. Same way that my calendly link is free marketing for calendly. If people want that banner removed, they can upgrade their plan.
Again, take this advice for what it's worth, which is very little, since 1) I dont know your market well, and 2) what worked for me may not work for you.
There are 190+ other countries that can also approve it (or that aren’t organized enough to care about drug approvals). If there was an amazing treatment working in Lichtenstein, we’d hear about it.
You can easily simulate an early stage startup by getting together with some friends and each of you calls random people from the phonebook, tries to sell them a product that they don’t want right now and then gets hung up on. The winner is the one who persists the longest after repeated failure.
The sentiment here is right, but redis does make a difference at scale. I built a web app this year on AWS lambda that had up to 1000/requests/second and at that scale, you can have trouble with Postgres, but redis handles it like it’s nothing.
I think that redis is a reasonable exception to the rule of ”don’t complicate things” because it’s so simple. Even if you have never used it before, it takes a few minutes to setup and it’s very easy to reason about, unlike mongodb or Kafka or k8s.