Think of Apple or Nike, those are real logos. The recent logos and icons, including apps like Photoshop's, seem more like we're prioritizing metrics over creativity.
For example, I found "Paris, Texas" to be pretty disappointing, yet most reviews were overwhelmingly positive. So, I sought out others who also didn't enjoy it and explored their review history to find movies we both agreed on.
Occasionally, you'll hit the jackpot and find an avid reviewer whose taste aligns perfectly with yours, providing a treasure trove of excellent movie recommendations.
I like to call these users my "IMDb doppelgangers."
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.
Isn't this by definition Spamming people as you were using bots to mass DM people?
However, witnessing the rapid evolution of AI with just a few hundred GPUs, enough data, and power, I no longer wonder what a billion years of feedback loops and randomness can achieve.
While everyone’s ready to grab their pitchforks at Matt, this actually sounds somewhat reasonable. Still, given its impact, this could easily be seen as a breach of trust. Definitely a move that's going to stir the pot.
As a programmer, I found this perspective particularly enlightening. It taught me that effective selling isn't just about persuasion; it's about conviction and truly understanding the value of what you're offering.
This might be an apples-to-oranges comparison, but I've noticed that writing vanilla PHP or JavaScript code, while harder at first, results in more robust and easier-to-debug applications. On the other hand, using frameworks, ORMs, and other abstractions can make the codebase feel brittle and harder to maintain.
I speculate that in the coming decades or centuries, a new instrument may enable us to delve deeper into the atom and reveal that what we perceive now is merely a minuscule fraction of the whole picture.
Perhaps the notion that the subatomic world is as vast as the universe, as stated by Richard Feynman when he said "There’s plenty of room at the bottom.", holds more truth than we realize.