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221 points caspg | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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spaceman_2020 ◴[] No.42164682[source]
I have about 6 months of coding experience. All I really knew was how to build a basic MERN app

I’ve been using Sonnet 3.5 to code and I’ve managed to build multiple full fledged apps, including paid ones

Maybe they’re not perfect, but they work and I’ve had no complaints yet. They might not scale to become the next Facebook, but not everything has to scale

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njtransit ◴[] No.42164691[source]
Can you share some examples?
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spaceman_2020 ◴[] No.42164994[source]
ThumbnailGenius.com (has a ton of new features I haven’t pushed yet as I wait for approval from a payment processor)

MetHacker.io (has a lot of features I had to remove because of X API’s new pricing - see /projects on it)

GoUnfaked.com

PlaybookFM.com

TokenAI.dev (working with blowfish to remove the warning flag)

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imiric ◴[] No.42165072[source]
Good job, I suppose, but the existence of all of these, and the fact you're able to pump them out so quickly, is genuinely depressing.
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1. spaceman_2020 ◴[] No.42165573[source]
Why is it depressing? I find it exhilarating

I’m able to bring ideas to life that I could only think about before

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2. imiric ◴[] No.42165766[source]
Honestly? These were ideas that you put a lot of thought into?

All your sites are essentially wrappers around LLMs. You don't disclose which models or APIs you use in the backend, so did you train your own models, or are you proxying to an existing service? Your T&C and Privacy Policy is generic nonsense. What happens to the data your users upload?

ThumbnailGenius.com has an example thumbnail of a person with 4 fingers. I honestly can't tell the difference in the comparison between Midjourney, Dall-E and your fine-tuned models. MetHacker.io is not loading. GoUnfaked.com claims to have royalty and copyright-free images, which is highly misleading and possibly illegal. PlaybookFM.com is another effortless wrapper around NotebookLM or a similar LLM. TokenAI.dev is non-functional and seems like a crypto+AI scam.

I'm sorry to be so negative, but if you're going to leverage AI tools, at least put some thought and effort into creating something original that brings value to the world. I think you'll find this more rewarding than what you're doing now. Quality over quantity, and all that.

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3. spaceman_2020 ◴[] No.42165897[source]
These are not the things I wanted to create, but its better to ship out something than waste months just building something and never shipping. I did that with MetaHacker which, under the hood, is very capable. But because I spent so much time building it, I never got around to marketing it or monetizing it, so much of it is abandoned and only 1/10th of it is live for end users.

So for my future projects, I told myself I will only spend at most a month working on them. Learn to launch and get users before spending months just building

There are much bigger, more creative ideas I want to tackle, but before that, I want to get the hang of actually building something from scratch

I spent almost ten years as a b2b marketer. All the clients I worked with were established businesses that needed some scale and direction.

I quickly learned that growing a 10M ARR business with established pipelines is a whole lot different than building something from scratch. This is my attempt to go from 0 to 1 as fast as possible and learn as much as I can before diving into bigger things

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4. imiric ◴[] No.42166241{3}[source]
> its better to ship out something than waste months just building something and never shipping.

I agree with you there.

> There are much bigger, more creative ideas I want to tackle, but before that, I want to get the hang of actually building something from scratch

Fair enough. And good on you for doing a career shift and learning new skills. I don't want to tear down your efforts.

I just think we disagree on the approach. You don't need to ship a half-dozen cookie-cutter web sites with minimal effort. Sometimes it pays off to really think about a product-market fit—something you should be familiar with as a marketer—and then spending more than a month working on that idea. You'll learn new skills along the way, and ultimately shipping something will be a much more valuable achievement. Besides, shipping for the first time should just be the start of a project. If you're really passionate about the project and building a customer base, then the hard work only starts there. Currently the impression these sites give off are quick cash grabs or downright scams. But good luck to you.

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5. spaceman_2020 ◴[] No.42167011{4}[source]
Well, I've had dozens of signups every day for ThumbnailGenius depsite 0 marketing. Whatever I'm doing, people seem to like it. I had way more data on it about thumbnails (including an index of 100k thumbnails) but had to remove that because YouTube didn't like it.

I can't see why any of these would seem like "scams" because I'm not asking for money for any of them except for ThumbnailGenius. Not sure how a free product can be a scam or a cashgrab?

And I don't know how familiar you are with YouTube, but most serious creators typically take multiple pictures of themselves, then get multiple thumbnail variants created by an editor. A good creator will typically spend hundreds of dollars just testing out variations to see how they "look". AI just makes it easy to create the variations and visualize different ideas.

Most of the users end up visualizing 20-30 ideas, then picking 1-2 and actually creating them in real life. It's a massive time and money saver