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i made a mistake while building my third demo. i’ve been working on it for almost a week now.
it took this long not just because i got caught up in perfectionism, but also because of external factors. still, i could’ve done it much faster.
the funny thing is that this was the one demo where i actually had a clear creative direction, yet it took me several times longer to build than the ones where i had no direction at all.
and honestly, i wouldn’t even say the result is amazing. i’d call it good at best 👇
ALT Website demo for spanish bar
so i want to do a public post-mortem.
over the past week, i could’ve built several demos or reached out to way more businesses. i could’ve been several times more productive.
i’m not gonna sit here and fomo over what i could’ve done, but one thing’s for sure: next time, i’m going to stick to the speed principle as much as possible.
do you guys polish your work until it feels right, or do you just build the minimum viable version and ship it?
my cold outreach stats so far:
businesses contacted: 125
agreed to a free demo: 3
sales: 0
what bothers me the most isn’t even the fact that nobody’s buying yet. it’s how so many of them either never reply or ignore me even after i send them a demo
i think if i reach 500 businesses with zero sales, i’ll start questioning what i’m doing. for now, i’m keeping at it.
what do you think of these conversion rates?
ALT Claude Design chat history
i’m putting startups on hold.
i’ve realized that startups are a long game and are more about building something at scale. even if you want to start small, it still takes a ton of effort and time to get there.
i’ve also realized that, in my situation, my first capital isn’t just about having money for the sake of it. sure, you barely need any money to build a startup today, grow on X, and all that. but there’s one very important thing it can buy: a better environment, both in terms of the people around you and the physical space you live in.
right now, i’m living in extremely unfavorable conditions. i’m almost 100% certain that once i move somewhere i can live more freely and in a decent environment, everything else will start moving much faster too.
so my first priority is to move out.
👇
i decided to start selling websites to local businesses in the country i live in.
to save up money for the move, i decided to try selling websites to clients.
yeah, you could immediately say that this is an insanely overhyped market, nobody needs these websites, and they bring no real value.
but i believe two things:
1. what people say on the internet rarely reflects reality.
2. even if something is overhyped, you can still make it work if you put in enough time and take enough shots.
i think this is probably the fastest way for me to build that initial capital, even if it’s not the easiest. then i can finally move on to something i actually enjoy doing, without the problems i’m dealing with right now.
what do you think is better in general: going straight for something big and long-term, or starting small?
moving to another country as early as possible is one of the best things a founder can do for themselves.
right when i decided to take my X account more seriously and start putting out better content, i got restricted..
but i’m proud to say that it hasn’t killed my motivation one bit, so i’m gonna slowly ramp things back up
something’s coming.
it’s 2 am, i’m sitting in a dopamine pit after wasting hours, and i’m realizing i need to change the direction of this account a bit.
i started it to build in public, but ended up just posting random thoughts once a day for the sake of posting.
from now on, no matter what’s going on in my startup journey, i’ll try to share it. and ofc, i need to be more active on here in general.
after opus 5.5’s performance, everyone expects something insane from fable 5.5, but nobody’s paying attention to how perfect the conditions are for codex to pull off something incredible.
just like what happened when opus 5.5 dropped..
my “loyalty” is keeping me from discovering new opportunities
i’d never tried any AI coding agent other than codex until it started causing problems. then i switched to opus 5.5 and the difference was really noticeable
i feel like an old lady who picked a political party and has been blindly supporting it her entire life
btw, gemini is hyping this up way more than tibo did for devday
the disappointment is probably gonna be way bigger too…
i bought a Claude subscription today while still having Codex, didn’t even wait for the end of the month
i’ve only tried Opus 5.5 on one simple task so far, but even without much data to judge it by, Opus just feels… better?
you can never explain to anyone what it feels like to get closer and closer to a result.
and i’m sure even the developers reading this rarely get to experience that feeling, because most people don’t actually ship the things they’ve been building for months.
you’re missing out on the best part.
btw, i don’t really think you can really teach models to have “good” taste in design. taste is completely subjective, and i don’t think it’s possible to bake something that subjective into a model.
and honestly, what we consider slop today is actually pretty decent design. it’s just so overused at this point that people have started labeling it as bad.
i think even if you told AI to create better designs, those designs would eventually just become the new slop.
nice, now my Astra on medium effort can’t even open a damn browser to continue working and keeps failing 3 times in a row
ALT ChatGPT Astra failure
i know Anthropic made Opus 5.5 this good to reduce the backlash over their new policy on how you can treat the model, but i can’t prove it..
btw, i look at OpenAI’s decision to cut subscription limits a little differently
imo, in the long term, it’s actually good for us as users if the companies we rely on keep growing and improving.
and it’s pretty hard to keep developing while running at a loss
if OpenAI actually becomes profitable and puts all that money back into R&D and growth, they could seriously outpace the other companies over the next few years.
fuck, wait, why did i think @tibo_maker and @thsottiaux were the same person this whole time?
what the fuck is going on 😭