wxce

I'm trying to find good problem statements and gaps to solve, Tech/Non-Tech.

But it just seems to hard find something substantial. Everything seems to be already done.

The gaps seem very teeny-tiny. I really don't want to solve a hyper-specific, niche B2B sales gap for example.

It seems like people earlier had it much easier and the ideas seemed a bit obvious. This sounds envious, and could be somewhat wrong. But I truly am still trying to figure out a good gap.

Hi HN,

My co-founder and I have been working on a startup since the last 12-13 months or so.

It's a social media that caters to a niche and we think it will work.

We've built the MVP, and we have a certain amount of signups with minimal marketing costs. We think there is a market fit here.

To scale up, we've been thinking of starting to approach funds for a seed round.

At the same time, we're thinking of the future -- if/when we get funding, we will have to quit our jobs.

We're 24 right now.

We were discussing all of the possible outcomes that might occur. A couple of scenarios:

Scenario 1: Our product really flies to millions as we are expecting it to, and we make a decent amount of money through Series B, Series C rounds etc.

Scenario 2: Our product shows decent promise during seed stages etc, we raise money through two rounds but then the startup dies for some reason.

----

For the second scenario, we'll be 28.

We will probably have made no savings through the four years, and will be behind our peers in terms of professional growth and monetary savings.

28 also happens to be the age when most people get married. It seems like not a great idea to not have a good financial cushion at this age.

--

Both of us are decently smart I think, and if things end with scenario 2, it simply won't be great. We'll be so behind people our age in terms of money saved etc.

This post does focus on the monetary aspect of the process, even though building something of your own will be super fun. How would you approach this predicament?

Hi HN,

My co-founder and I have been working on a startup since the last 12-13 months or so.

It's a social media that caters to a niche and we think it will work.

We've built the MVP, and we have a certain amount of signups with minimal marketing costs. We think there is a market fit here.

To scale up, we've been thinking of starting to approach funds for a seed round.

At the same time, we're thinking of the future -- if/when we get funding, we will have to quit our jobs.

We're 24 right now.

We were discussing all of the possible outcomes that might occur. A couple of scenarios:

Scenario 1: Our product really flies to millions as we are expecting it to, and we make a decent amount of money through Series B, Series C rounds etc.

Scenario 2: Our product shows decent promise during seed stages etc, we raise money through two rounds but then the startup dies for some reason.

----

For the second scenario, we'll be 28.

We will probably have made no savings through the four years, and will be behind our peers in terms of professional growth and monetary savings.

28 also happens to be the age when most people get married. It seems like not a great idea to not have a good financial cushion at this age.

--

Both of us are decently smart I think, and if things end with scenario 2, it simply won't be great. We'll be so behind people our age in terms of money saved etc.

This post does focus on the monetary aspect of the process, even though building something of your own will be super fun. How would you approach this predicament?

I'm thinking what the the most optimal way might be for this purpose. I'm thinking of implementing a daily stand-up doc of all the things I did on X day and what could be done better, and a value plan for the next day.

I wanted to work on something really interesting, such as problem statements that don't have good solutions yet.

But I fail to find things that could be done that haven't been implemented yet.

It seems like all the low (and even medium, high) hanging fruit has been covered. [Of course not calling Redis and such low hanging fruits, but just to give examples of something fundamental.]

How would you explore what to work on? Especially something non-AI.

I've been thinking about this every now and then.

Sure, there are already a lot of mentions of this in the mainstream news. But there doesn't seem to be an actual discussion around what the next steps would be.

Only vague notions like "AI bad, job will be loss".

Shouldn't there be some onus on companies putting millions of dollars into AI research to also provide some practical solutions/ideas to tackle issues that will arise?

This feels like it will have crazy chain reaction and also seems likely one of the biggest issues our society will face in the next 10 years.

Maybe I'm being paranoid, but it seems like it won't hurt to be paranoid this case.

ChatGPT scraped data from various sources on the internet.

> The model was trained using text databases from the internet. This included a whopping 570GB of data obtained from books, webtexts, Wikipedia, articles and other pieces of writing on the internet. To be even more exact, 300 billion words were fed into the system.

I believe it's unfair to these sources that ChatGPT drives away their clicks, and in turn the ad income that would come with them.

Scraping data seems fine in contexts where clicks aren't driven away from the very site the data was scraped from. But in ChatGPT's case, it seems really unfair to these sources and the work that the authors put, as people would no longer even to attempt to go to these sources.

Can this start breaking the ad-based model of the internet, where a lot of sites rely upon the ad income to run servers?