alt Hacker News> When creation was hard, skill was the differentiator: you had to actually be good to make something worth showing. Now the barrier is near zero, so you need reach. Reach costs money or it costs years. Probably both.
Creation has progressively been getting easier since the invention of the computer, it is not a new phenomena. This naturally pushes the boundary on what needs to be delivered in order to find paying customers. In other words, creation still is "hard" if you want to succeed.
> I launched something last week. 14 people signed up — no ads, just a couple of posts. 14 real people who didn't have to. That number is tiny and it felt like something. Then I sat down to think about what it would take to grow it and I couldn't look at that math for very long.
This applies to 90+% of founders that have ever launched something. The hard part comes from continuing to push forward when you experience this (which you will over and over). It sounds like the author expects that what was hard suddenly should be easy.
Replies
Something I've noticed a lot with Twitch streamers and YouTubers is that many of them want the outcome and are prepared to do the work, but want some sort of guarantee of success. It's very difficult to really sell to people that you will work very hard for a while and there's absolutely no promise that you'll ever have more than 14 subscribers. That's simply the core risk of entrepreneurship.
Seriously you can ship in a week things that FAANGs would have paid billions for 10 years ago.
LLMs are just glue between pieces of your code you still need to be able to plug them into a coherent architecture to do something impressive.
> Creation has progressively been getting easier since the invention of the computer, it is not a new phenomena. This naturally pushes the boundary on what needs to be delivered in order to find paying customers. In other words, creation still is "hard" if you want to succeed.
Only for developers. Outside of software creation is still hard. Global markets giving access to excellent manufacturing sure does help, but software is a bubble.
i would argue that reach has already been the biggest limiting factor for the last 10 even 20 years.
The thing is, the barrier isn't near zero. The time to reach an MVP has just decreased. But you still very much need expertise, strategy, etc. to deliver something worthwhile. The bar has just increased.
It's just another way of saying "Ideas are worthless, execution is what matters" which has always been largely true.
Yes, you need the idea first of course. But that's truly the easy part. 99% of "ideas" rely on great execution to be worth even looking at - much less paying for - for anyone else.
You've basically chosen to ignore the whole AI argument as if it was just another tool and we had business as usual. Given how pervasive and fast developing it is, there should be an argument why it can be dismissed so easily.
sounds like the author is discovering business.
I didn't read the article, but yes, going from 0-1,1-10 is really hard and really rewarding. And it got easier with the Internet. Going from 10-1k and 1k-1M is a different ball-game. Always was.
The dream of running my own company got me to learn programming. 20 years later I'm an employee at a company still dreaming of running my own company. But now I can realize that reality and dreams are not the same and that's ok. As in, I probably really don't want to run my own company. We'll see =P