gsaines (u/gsaines) - Readit News

gsaines commented on "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore iamcharliegraham.substack... · Posted by u/grahac

redmattred · 2 months ago

I think you may be missing the mark on your conclusions for why your products had difficulty acquiring paid users.

People still pay for software, but for high stakes problems like finding a new job, managing your mental health, or caretaking an aging parent, etc. taking the leap on a not quite fully baked product offering seems unrealistic.

Also with Skritter you used a completely different customer acquisition strategy. Longform blog content + SEO is a way different beast than SEM.

gsaines · 2 months ago

Thanks for engaging with this. I'm not trying to troll or be sarcastic. Could well be the case that painted door testing just doesn't work on B2C. What I learned on Skritter and CodeCombat is that if you have a couple of years to devote full time to building, it's almost always possible to power through bad channel / market fit with good product and build a small company.

The problem is that it's not a very good idea to invest in that way if you both like money and can hold down a corporate job (not saying everyone meets these two criteria BTW).

The 4 steps to epiphany is outdated, and The Mom Test is great if you have existing deep industry expertise and credibility. If you lack either, though, it's really not obvious how anyone tests product ideas without 12+ months of investment.

gsaines commented on "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore iamcharliegraham.substack... · Posted by u/grahac

gsaines · 2 months ago

This confirms what I've been discovering. I wrote about the details here: https://www.georgesaines.com/blog/2025/9/8/why-is-b2c-user-a...

Maybe it's just that the AI noise has been cranked to 11, but it sure feels like there's something fundamentally different from building and selling software today vs the last time I was building new products back in 2015. A decade is a long time, but it didn't feel nearly so weird even as recently as 2021 / 2022. That makes me think it's the AI slop noise, but maybe I'm incorrect.

gsaines commented on Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users? · Posted by u/amanchanda

osigurdson · 7 months ago

Can this be put more simply as "build something that people want"? I'm not sure what a "demonstrable acquisition channel" is (ChatGPT suggests it is ads, social media, etc). Honest question, not criticizing the comment - just looking for more clarification.

gsaines · 7 months ago

It's more than just building something people want.

I want a lot of things and would be willing to pay for some of them, but unless there is a way to reach me, it doesn't matter.

There is this cultural meme that if an amazing product simply exists, then people will tell other people and it'll grow organically. The reality is that amazing, ahead-of-their time products and services are constantly being created and dying. Not because they don't solve a need, but because they weren't able to reach customers economically with the right message.

That ability to reach customers and contextualize the solution in language that matches their expectation is actually a lot rarer than building a good product.

gsaines commented on Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users? · Posted by u/amanchanda

gsaines · 7 months ago

I don't intend this to come off as confrontational or cynical, but I think this question (and many of the responses in this thread) are mistaking the answer for the question.

What I mean is that you have to understand what you most want to accomplish. If you want to build a growing business, the best way to do that is not to start from a product and then figure out how to attract users, it's to test product / user acquisition channels together.

I have some authority in the space because I've done it the wrong way twice! www.skritter.com is the first company I built way back in 2008 and growing it was really challenging. It's a niche within a niche and most growth tactics simply didn't work. I'm proud that it's become so durable and taught so many people, but from a customer acquisition perspective, it was very challenging.

www.codecombat.com had some organic acquisition channels that worked well, but they proved to be mostly non-repeatable.

I'm now working on my third company (also an AI B2C SaaS play), but I started first and foremost by identifying a viable discovery channel / product pair. In this case, I found that paid advertising in the elder care space converts well.

To put it more bluntly, a product without a customer acquisition channel is closer to a hobby than a business. A product with an acquisition channel that is somewhat scaleable and repeatable is likely to be a profitable business. A product with high growth / viral acquisition channel is a startup.

I'm not knocking operating a hobby product. I've done that and there are good and bad parts to the experience. But if you want to grow, you shouldn't be asking the question "how do I grow this product?" you should instead be asking "what product could I build that has a demonstrable acquisition channel?"

gsaines commented on A Math Lesson From Hitler’s Germany (2017) undark.org/2017/02/01/mat... · Posted by u/perihelions

iterance · 8 months ago

Many of my academic colleagues are considering emigration. A nontrivial fraction have already begun (or in certain prescient cases completed) the process. It is sad to say, but it is difficult to imagine a career in science in the US right now. I am also considering whether that future for myself is best pursued elsewhere. Or, I'm sadder to say, whether the opportunity has been foreclosed upon for good. There is no way to know yet what the future truly holds, but the rhyme history offers for our times is an unpleasant one to imagine.

gsaines · 8 months ago

Where are they planning to go if you mind me asking? My brother is considering moving to Canada, but he's already living in Ohio, so that wouldn't be a huge move in absolute geographical terms. Another friend is in the process of moving to Spain, but there really doesn't seem to be a particularly safe place.

Most nations appear to have their own brand of populist hard-right political leaders at the moment and I've cautioned people that unless they know a lot about where they are moving to, they are likely to just be exchanging one scary regime for another and taking on outsider immigrant status in that new society.

I'm genuinely curious about this, no sarcasm of cynicism here.

gsaines commented on Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed scientificamerican.com/po... · Posted by u/headalgorithm

gsaines · 10 months ago

TLDR Summary: limit your intake of social media and news.

gsaines commented on I Built a Figma Plugin That Generates Custom SVG Illustrations with AI figma.com/community/plugi... · Posted by u/gigantz

gigantz · a year ago

Hey HN!

I’ve been working on a Figma plugin called Vector Image AI, and I’d love to share it with you all. It uses AI to generate custom SVG illustrations and icons directly in Figma based on simple text prompts.

Here’s what it can do: - Generate unique, scalable SVGs in seconds. - Support a variety of styles like flat, outline, pastel, pop art, and more. - Seamlessly integrate into Figma—no need for exporting/importing.

Would love your feedback—what works, what doesn’t, and any ideas for improvement!

Check it out here: https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1440141868641854458/v...

Thanks for taking the time to look!

gsaines · a year ago

Hey, I was actually looking for something like this a while back and couldn't find anything. Really glad to have discovered it. But I couldn't get it to work. I added the plugin via Figma, gave it a prompt and spent my 1 credit to generate an illustration, the credit was used, but no image was created (or perhaps it was created and is just hidden or outside of the frames / groups).

Figured you might want to know / provide some instructions in case others are running into this issue too.