“Defense tech” should not be a capitalist for-profit venture. The incentives are all wrong. The business model is basically “milk the government for as much money as you can get, over the longest possible time period”, which is never a good business model for incentivizing efficiency or innovation. That is how American defense manufacturing got so slow and costly. It’s why America struggles to produce something as simple as cheap artillery shells at scale: simply not profitable enough. Much more profitable to sell fancy tech at $3m a pop.
Readit News_xnmw commented on Ares Industries – Building low-cost cruise missiles ycombinator.com/launches/... · Posted by u/carabiner
Yup and this is the reason I just use Apple devices. Google and Microsoft products are design-by-committee garbage, and most open source projects eventually devolve into a mess, unless it is tightly controlled by a single author (such as SQLite or Redis or even Laravel).
People forget that Nature's default is to devolve to the chaos of the jungle (beautiful, but does not work toward any human purpose). The absolute best human designs are those controlled by benevolent dictatorships with a ruthless focus on simplicity. Nature's default is for every garden to overgrow with weeds, unless a gardener keeps at it relentlessly. Eventually the weeds become a beautiful jungle, but the absolute worst gardens are those designed my multiple competing gardeners. Either have 1 gardener, or 0.
See also the incompetent clusterfuck that is the European Union.
_xnmw commented on Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC? · Posted by u/OnuRC
No we don’t, and I’m working on solving this problem. There’s no reason for a pure SaaS company to pay these middlemen if the only thing they buy and sell is software. Software vendors can settle accounts directly like banks do, we just need something like an ACH for SaaS. And I’ve been thinking a lot about how to do this while having the equivalent of a petrodollar to create underlying value based on a commodity. For example a meta currency for compute credits that is cloud agnostic.
Do you have concrete numbers for that, then?
Warren Buffett has a term for this, it's called "float". At my current (active, not abandoned) startup, my guess is somewhere around 30% of active paying customers are also non-users. Lots of industries have this. The majority of gym membership sales (50%+) and even a significant number of airline tickets are unused.
Given how easy it is to get a refund for an app purchase, I would be really surprised if this results in a significant revenue stream, but I don't actually know, of course.
You'll be surprised at how many people don't know or don't bother to refund.
> still make a few thousand $ per month, years later
How did you find out? Apple doesn't reveal anything about how many are paying to an app, do they?
You can guess from the number of reviews and downloads as they change over time. Everyone says it "doesn't work" yet people still download and try it, which means they paid for it. Granted some might chargeback and refund, but not all. Also my personal experience as the owner of such listings is that you get about 1 review per hundred customers (unless you have a very pushy review process). I've made thousands of sales with only a dozen reviews. Also I'll admit to once having an app on a marketplace that was never updated and barely worked still making hundreds of dollars a month almost a decade later.
I think the Flywheel analogy is great. One of the big differences between working a regular job and running your own product/content business is that it's a flywheel - it works even you don't. Your creative/productive output might be very sporadic and jerky, but the output tends to be smooth and compounded over years.
One of my "revelations" when I founded my own SaaS project a while ago is when I realized there are a bunch of abandoned, yes, completely abandoned, apps on various App Stores and marketplaces that still make a few thousand $ per month, years later, even though they don't even even work. The founder clearly put in a bunch of effort to build it initially, and then didn't carry on for whatever reason, yet it still gets a steady trickling stream of actual customers paying real money.
It's also one of the reasons it is counterproductive to burn out or over-hire or over-raise when building a bootstrapped SaaS. Just don't die, keep pushing the flywheel occasionally when you have some creative inspiration, and eventually you may build something truly great. Or maybe you won't, but at least it will keep you going. But have a flywheel, something that stores your energy and continues output, don't just waste energy trying a bunch of different unreleased projects.
_xnmw commented on I put a toaster in the dishwasher (2012) jdstillwater.blogspot.com... · Posted by u/ctoth
Ooh, I love these points of Conventional Faith presenting itself as Reason. I would argue that most true Knowledge is actually knowing what is not true, yet commonly believed. Actually, if used wisely, you can execute arbitrages on financial markets for profit, aside from other social benefits, at the cost of appearing insane in the beginning. Peter Thiel says that almost every successful person has "secrets", i.e. things that they know about the world that fly in the face of Conventional Faith and that they therefore exploit to their advantage until it's a fait accompli. Personally, I have quite a few, which if I posted here, would get me downvoted like mad, even on HackerNews, but here are some of my LESS controversial ones:
* Cloud services like AWS actually take more time, resources, and headache to maintain than baremetal servers, whether at the scale of a few backoffice users or millions of consumers. Related: the vast majority (95%+) of apps could run on a single baremetal server and be more reliable than whatever cloud shit you use.
* Most SPAs are garbage. Unless you are building something like Figma, write backend code only, don't use a frontend framework like React, and when reactivity is needed, tie it to the backend with something like Livewire. Actually even Figma uses WASM.
* Using a framework like Laravel that makes the business logic easy is far more important than choice of a language based on its technical characteristics.
* People who are outwardly racist are often the easiest to work with, as a minority. And vice-versa, people who outwardly appear anti-racist are often masking a deeply inbred superiority complex and patronizing attitude (hello Democrats), and are the most difficult to work with unless you submit to their authority. Allowing open racism actually makes it easier for a minority to live, and I say that as a minority.
Oh I could go on but I'll stop here.
_xnmw commented on OnlyFans' porn juggernaut fueled by a deception reuters.com/investigates/... · Posted by u/achow
This problem is as old as time itself and a part of human nature that monotheistic wisdom (or even Buddhism) has always cautioned against. People attributing love, protection, adoration, etc. to fake images construed in their imagination is also known as "idolatry", or "polytheism".
_xnmw commented on YC is doing a first ever Fall batch – applications due by 8/27 ycombinator.com/blog/yc-f... · Posted by u/Astroboy007
YC was always the dream for me, and I've applied about 25 times over the last 10 years. My work has been all about startups/side projects since I was about 14 years old. I live and breathe startups. But since then I've learned there are downsides to even applying for YC, let alone actually joining.
1. People will steal some of your good ideas. I interviewed with YC back in 2021 where I discussed some unique marketing strategy that had not yet been done in my space. Very suspiciously, I was rejected, yet some large YC companies working in adjacent spaces immediately started implementing that exact specific idea over the next few months. It's possible that was a coincidence, but the timing was very suspect, especially since I was explicitly told during the interview "you have good ideas, but a large team could do this better". And so I'm pretty sure they stole my ideas and gave them to larger teams on the YC portfolio. Beware!
2. It's just a massive distraction if you can actually go it alone. Sam Altman famously said earlier this year, it's only a matter of time before there is a billion dollar company run by a single person with AI. I used to say that back in 2021 even before ChatGPT was released. For many types of SaaS companies which could effectively just be a single person, there is no need for funding, networking, or anything else except writing code and talking to customers. Everything else is just a distraction. YC advice is free on the internet. Vinod Khosla said many investors bring negative value to the companies they invest it.
3. The Silicon Valley groupthink bubble. I laugh at some of the nonsense that comes out of SV, but it doesn't matter to them because there is so much money sloshing around SV that as long as you can attract money by playing their high school popularity contest, you are validated. No matter if there is no substance to your idea. YC companies should count their actual revenue as not including money that comes from other YC companies because it is suspicious if your “product” only matters to people with VC money to splurge. For me, the ultimate test of a good idea is if people are willing to give you their OWN hard-earned money.
4. I, personally, don't do well under intense competition and social pressure. My best ideas and most productive spurts of my life have been when I don't feel pressure to grow, but I work out of a sense of enjoyment in the craft and wanting to solve people's problems that I care about. I have a feeling that YC is one intense pressure cooker, and I'd most likely die there.