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Ask HN: What happened to startups, why is everything so polished?
130 points by keepamovin 3 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 130 comments
At launch everyone has the complete package: polished website looks like they already have 1000 customers, are hiring, have investors, and ... well, it's all a bit generic and potentially ... phoney, right?

Wind back the block to Microsoft and Apple, and those guys were super scrappy, not an ounce of polish at the outset, yet they made their dent in the universe.

Now everybody's fronting like they're making a dent, but maybe it's just a slick template from WordPress again.




I see the same in the consulting space - people who've barely ever talked to a prospect let alone had an actual customer (I happen to know from talking to folks like that) have a shiny website with pricing packages talking about "their team" and what not. Feels like pure hustle culture.

I started my business a year ago, and there is no "we". There's me and (at this point) enough clients for comfortable living. I went completely scrappy on my website (https://dahlke.tech). Felt rebellious in this day and age, but it doesn't seem to hurt.

I don't think that stuff matters in the beginning, clients see right through it from what I've heard. Some people get off on trying to look and feel like "a real company". I find there's joy in accepting that my company is not that, not yet, and putting all of my energy into getting there.


Some feedback:

If im a prospective customer I dont care about

“Over time, I aim to use this income to bootstrap a software business based on one of my side projects.”

Tell me how you can help me make more money or save more money. Your side project ambitions are not relevant to your customers.

Instead I would recommend personal info on an about page or a separate site for your side project.

For your background info this should come later, please tell us what skills you have and recent projects you have done straight away so I can understand if you are the right consultant for me, I dont want to first read your life story!

Note: feedback can be hard to receive and give, please treat feedback as a gift, I am trying to be kind, but also nice and kind are not the same thing, so if my feedback is unwanted or seems blunt that is why!


Thanks for the feedback! I was actually pondering about that sentence. I don't think it helps sales in any way, it's just me trying to be transparent, but it's probably too prominent for how irrelevant it is.

In an interesting plot twist, at this point, I enjoy my consulting work more than working on my own projects, so I'm not even sure this is still my strategy. There's something about genuinely helping people that I find more rewarding than building things nobody asked for by myself.

Edit: Ah, you added some more thoughts - thanks for those too! I might revisit the content of that site and maybe even add a sub page one of these days I think. 


  For the time being, I, Firstname Surname, am the main product;
love it

all the stock websites with photos of suited 'professionals' (usually just models) are a real turn-off, unless they show the actual team; customers want to know who they're dealing with.


Thanks :) I got plenty of advice to not write something like that, but it's just how it is.


This is truly inspiring. Authentic is the way to go! Hahaha :)


In a past role, one of the things done was to create an IVR system that had all manner of different menus for sales, support, or technical questions and they were split by whether you were a casual or enterprise user. There was just one person answering, no matter what you selected. The goal was to seem sophisticated and thus more reliable and trustworthy.


Did it at least ring through to that person differently depending on menu selection or did they want to seem properly enterprisey by immediately asking all those questions again?


Properly enterprisey. They didn't record the pathways or announce them. It was just all there to make it seem sophisticated rather than a guy on a cell phone.


> my answer is usually that I refuse to chose just one

Refuse to choose. Not sure if spelling mistake or typo, but since everyone is doing feedback, thought I’d point it out.


Haha, thanks, I didn't even spell check this I guess. I also wrote "advise" as a noun in there...


Very cool!

I thought the same thing when I started my consulting company 10 years ago. It'd called Nerdian Inc (My name is Ian). My website and brand name is simply my name: www.iancollmceachern.com


I'm curious: how come there are no German version of the website? Are most of your (desired) clients not German? Or is it that practically everyone speaks English in Germany so it doesn't matter?


Almost all of them are German in fact - since I find them through my network primarily. I guess the answer to your question is because I'm too lazy :) Plus I primarily work with startups, they tend to be pretty international here.


Honestly, I liked your website. It's clean, minimalist, professional & to the point.

In future, I will make for myself similar one.


You're surely joking. It's gone the other way. Maybe your memory is better than mine.

All the apps today look all the same, made on electron, single page landing page, same live chat/support, same style of charging, same flat design, same email campaign styles.

Everything is set up from a SaaS or tool to help deploy it so rapidly the polish and self character is almost non existent. Everything is rushed to the point they all look the same.


I’m not sure that you and OP really disagree that much.

Everything looks very similar. Whether you find the look polished or uninspiring is almost tangential.


I think when you know how the nuts and bolts work, you realize that the shiny chrome is just cheap metal.


Personally I can't tell all the SaaS startup sites that get mentioned here from each other.

Most of the time I can't even figure out what they do. Maybe they're there to display generic team stock photo with fake smiles #2618782?


Character doesn't really make you money, IPO and late series products all look the same


That doesn't seem to be true if you look at Apple products. All the high margin/high growth products/services don't follow that generic nature.


I was talking mainly about software products and their landing sites. But let's disagree that Apple products have character


"MicroSoft" is not a unique name full of character.


op literally used the word generic so not sure why you think you're in disagreement.


Website using webflow, etc. Reality is that even customers are moving on that direction. If you don't look like you're a serious company, they won't look at you.


I agree that in many cases people are puffing their feathers to try to be something they're not (at least not yet). Some believe in the fake it until you make it mentality.

With NeuML (https://neuml.com), the website is a simple HTML page. On social media, I'm honest about what NeuML is, that I'm in my 40s with a family and not striving to be the next Steve Jobs. I've been able to build a fairly successful open source project (txtai 6K stars https://github.com/neuml/txtai) and a revenue positive company. For me, authenticity and being genuine is most important. I would say that being genuine has been way more of an asset than liability.


I love your website. It's awesome.


Thank you.


The key is that it's not polish, it's simply because the baseline level increased.

Now it's easy as hell to get something that looks polished, but that's all it is: visually polished.

If you talk about actual functionality, I don't think I've ever seen so much half-baked shit being sold as a product as in this day and age. Every startup I see is taking the "fake until you make it" a bit too literally. It's basically only the fake part.


There what "fake it tip you make it" means. But not "make it" is much later, and "fake it" survives longer from investors.


Because that visual is easy nowadays. Just take something ready made, slap logo, stock photos. Search replace company name and done.


I agree. Also bothers me that everything looks the same. People are afraid to try something new or go with their own style.


For big tech products the "style" is dictated by at most one to two hundred people, living in the same place whose formal education involved the same dozen or so people. Those decisions then get bundled into one of several design systems which are filtered down to the rest of us. That's one of the big reasons why there's so little diversity in thought.


You’re both right. You can have a pixel-perfect web site with Tailwind in a few minutes.

And that’s why OP sees everything as polished. The backend and features are another story…


Expectations and abilities have changed. Consumers now expect things to look polished, or at the very least, have a defined aesthetic. Businesses also expect that you have other customers and want assurance that you will not disappear.

I believe the bigger story here is that individuals are now capable of doing much more than before. I'm a product designer. And over a decade ago I started my career building Wordpress themes. I'm starting to redesign my personal website—and I'm not going to build a theme from scratch like I used to. I'm going to use the Wordpress block editor because it's just easier.

So expectations are higher and individuals are more capable than ever before.


Hi Sam, are you open to an email? I didnt see a way to contact you directly on your site.


Sure—sam at solomon dot io


"Consumers" have always expected things to look polished. The group of people looking at some fancy new juicer is a lot smaller than 'consumers'.


All the low-hanging fruit has been picked. You can't start with just a crappy app that solves a problem, you have to get all the packaging around it right too.


I'm not a businessman, but I don't think so. Case in point: Beeminder. Their web app has a bit of an "unfinished" feel to it – definitely not a "modern SPA", rather a traditional Rails web app (not that it's something bad, quite the opposite!), but it solves a real problem and has stayed afloat for over 10 years now.


I absolutely love Beeminder - I use it daily - but they’re not a good example of what an average startup is going for. They have a small but dedicated group of users, not a massive user base that they can later monetize. That makes enough revenue to pay for their employees and for the founders to take a salary, but they’re never going to go big and have an exit. That’s fine (a good thing, in my opinion), but it’s the opposite of what most startup founders want.


I don’t know Beeminder. But if they launched 10 years ago, they are not a case in point. By now, they probably stay afloat despite feeling unfinished, because they have established marketing channels and word of mouth. Would the same service with the same presentation be as successful if they launched today? Hard to tell.


A crappy app that solves a problem would be an upgrade in a lot of cases, rather than a company engineering a problem to justify an app that’s been created.


It's more likely that a company started off with a solution for a problem, then got told by investors that it wasn't a big enough problem, and so they had to "pivot" into a more crowded space, without really adding much value.


That’s what Alexander said


I have to trust his judgment then.


I came to this post literally 2 minutes after rage quitting doing some UI design for a startup idea I have. I was trying to make it look too shiny. Thank you for reminding me to be more authentic.


Hahaha :) good, you’re welcome. Can relate! This is my favorite comment


Co-founded a startup about a year ago. Also released a bunch of websites in the past 15 years.

The experience is really different now. It has become really easy to get the design and content 80% there with free tools. We’ve used goHugo with a template at first, it was faster than writing our HTML/CSS, but then discovered webflow and it was REALLY faster. Our non-technical co-founder could do really powerful customizations in there too without diverting efforts from the product. (Result here: https://www.hellodata.ai)

In essence, I don’t think people necessarily spend more time on their landing page now, but given that you can get 80% there by spending a weekend or two on your website, not doing it would almost feel sub-optimal.


And they all have that "Life at x" section in their website. How can all those businesses I never heard about provide life.


Yeah, with generic stock photos of some random office and actors


So you think their employees are dead?


Haha check our scrappy website https://opral.com

We got a bug report once that „the website is not loading“.


Hahaha that’s awesome. That’s like the original Google user testing sort-of-bug report where people they showed it to would sit in front of the screen with the search box, doing nothing. and when they asked them what are you doing? It’s: I’m waiting for it to load.

because at the time it was so strange to just have a search box in the middle of the page and nothing else.


I would suggest to fix the orthography to “PS: Nothing is broken about this page. It's just simple on purpose. :)”. Simplicity is nice, but correct punctuation and capitalization is also appreciated as a proxy indicator for professional diligence.


fixed the capitalization https://github.com/opral/monorepo/commit/6127c6899290b35442c...


Kudos for the transparency of your monorepo, and in addition to its simplicity, the lack of tracking on your homepage.


There used to be several star-architect offices that had white background at their website with only black text for contact. While other firms had shiny websites with all project in huge pictures.

But these were just like "me shit is out there and you already know it".


Love your page. Especially your careers page - never seen one posted as a git repo before.

You really know your audience.


the reason is less knowing our audience and more "it was just easier [than setting up a careers page]" :D


Wish I could work for an employer like this.


inlang's website is beautiful


thanks. do you understand what inlang is by looking at the site?


No

Mainly because:

> The globalization ecosystem for software companies. Plug inlang's products together for market expansion and a broader customer reach.

I have no idea what that means and who it’s for.

I don’t know if this is exactly what your product does but maybe a heading like:

“The developer platform that makes data integrations easy”

That at least tells me who is the buyer and what benefit I will get


> That at least tells me who is the buyer and what benefit I will get

That is our problem. Taking a software product global (i18n/localiation/marketing) targets multiple personas and buyers (managers, developers, translators, designers, etc). We started with a dev-focused line but that didn't work for everyone else.

Are product pages clear(er)?

- https://inlang.com/m/gerre34r/library-inlang-paraglideJs - https://inlang.com/m/tdozzpar/app-inlang-finkLocalizationEdi...


Maybe something like this might be better …

Heading: “Localizing your app, has never been {easier/facile/etc}”

Subhead: “A developer platform for all your i18n needs”

That the {xxx} is animated and changes languages


Well there is section 'popular products' directly on landing page so it is not hard to guess.


I did, but I had to click a lot to understand.


No, and I suspect GP was being sarcastic.


What is unclear?

we know that we haven't nailed communication yet. one team member is working full time on communication/the website


I have no idea what “globalization ecosystem” is supposed to mean. There is a list of software components (“products”) I’m probably supposed to see a use for, but why would I go to that website to browse them? There is mention of “inlang projects”, but what is “inlang” and why would I have such a project? There is mention of “plugins for inlang”, but again, what is inlang and why does it need plugins?


I’m the responsible person that Samuel talked about. I agree thanks for the feedback. Any chance that we can get on a call?


Great feedback. I'll forward it to Nils, who is responsible for communication. Reply from him should follow on Monday


I got it. But it’s because I worked on software that is global by design and we serve markets all over the world.

I think some of these others may not have worked on such software requirements.

Your site makes sense.


There's little to gain from innovating on the landing page. A slick Wordpress template gets the job done just as well as a tailor-made landing page. Effort is better spent elsewhere (the product).


Why has the baseline for technology companies improved?

Because the cost and complexity of implementing technology has improved orders of magnitude.

Also, people starting startups are flush with cash from the longest bill run in modern history, so tend to spend.

Why do people feel the need to launch with a big “feel” when their companies are still small?

Market incentives and startup advice all explains this phenomenon. Look big, be big. Look small, stay small.

Why do they all look the same?

I’ll take a #3 with fries and a milkshake. Can I get extra salt on the fries?

Truth is, the technology industry has spend the last 10-15 years optimizing the heck out of its technology platforms for delivering small innovations, and not whole new product categories.

There was a time where every site had to be hand coded and custome built, but now companies are really focused on just the small part of the tech that’s different, which is often a small component of the overall infrastructure.

The lower value stuff ends up just being more and more off the shelf and less custom, and therefore less custom looking.

The rise of SaaS in particular really incentivized everything looking the same, because the “same” was the way to get people started with the least amount of ramping.

The whole “show instant value” means “use familiar interfaces” et al.

My 2c.


Yeh. Makes it intimidating to try to make a startup until you realise it’s just generic polish over some cobbled-together SaaS APIs and docker containers. That’s what depresses me. You don’t need good tech, you just need business sass, marketing, and networks.


I first got similar feelings when Bootstrap CSS framework plagued the (new) web.


Aesthetics and branding is a much lower bar than being useful. Substance is much more important, but in very short supply.


If they'd had slick WordPress templates they probably would have used them too.


That’s a good point.


If it makes you feel better, I’m at a start up right now and we definitely are not polished yet!

But as a point of reference to maybe give insight to your question, the last time I joined a start up was 21 years ago. Here are some differences I have noted:

- Stunningly vast array of high quality, open source tools, platforms, and frameworks. Some of this stuff we had to pay for. A lot of it wasn’t very good or limited. Even more of it we had to invent ourselves.

- Cloud services. I, all by myself, can write some YAML and have an industry-standard, production-ready stack published to the Internet and ready for traffic in a couple of hours. Of course, I’ll pay out the nose if it hits big, but compare this to the extremely high barrier to entry when I spent weeks or months planning out infrastructure, procuring and deploying hardware, configuring endless firmware/software, tuning, testing, building out failover, backup strategies, and a billion other things, not to mention the actual software I want to deliver.

- Available talent. Extraordinary engineers and developers have always been hard to find, but good enough ones are fairly plentiful, especially now that you’re no longer limited to hiring or moving people local.

- Freely available knowledge. You younger folks shit constantly on Stack Overflow and the likes, but y’all don’t know how good you have it now. Blogs, vlogs, online and often open courses, SO/reddit, ChatGPT, etc. enable you to go from zero to hero in minutes, where I often had to spend days or weeks to figure something out for myself or to find some wizard in a dark cave to share their arcane knowledge.

- Established patterns. People have written voluminous books and blogs about precisely how to build large scale and high quality applications and systems, and as we discussed, a lot of the tools are readily available to you with little or no money involved.

It’s called commoditization. As for appearing to already have customers ready to go: I think the low barrier to entry allows people to more freely experiment with ideas closer to a potential customer, get it in front of them, and further build out from there fairly quickly and organically. That, however, is no guarantee it will be a sustainable business.


> I often had to spend days or weeks to figure something out for myself or to find some wizard in a dark cave to share their arcane knowledge.

There used to be printed manuals that you had to look things up in and there was no Internet. That's when I learned how to program. Things these days are so much easier.


> “Wind back the block to Microsoft and Apple, and those guys were super scrappy, not an ounce of polish at the outset…”

Well, the Personal PC did invent desktop publishing. Before that print brochures, what I guess you would take for polish, were expensive to produce and manufacture.

And the WWW largely replaced the desktop publishing world. Why print something you can’t change?

And today commerce on websites has clear solutions you can spin-up in turnkey fashion or DIY with Web frameworks.

You can call it polish, but I call it evolution. With all of these capabilities, why wouldn’t you do all of these things?


A polished website is as simple as a Webflow template (for landing page) and a component library (for app). It would be more work to have something not polished, as it meant you built everything from scratch.


I worked with a startup late last year and they were prerevenue with a small amount of investment. They hired an agency build everything for them. This is why all startups look a like. Founders fear looking messy. The tradeoff is massive. You trade polish for intimately understanding your product and customers. To get there you need to be willing to sit through the mud and dirt of a unpolished product. It is painful and many do not want to do that. So we end up with vanilla products which still can be successful but yea that's basically it


There's some irony and conflicts of interest.

People make slick landing pages and try to get interest to decide if enough people sign up for a thing that doesn't exist yet, then "it may be worth building it"

But also potential customers are fed up of such tactics and want to actually try a product before signing up to another thing which may or may not ever exist.

So what happens in the end sometimes is that the developers may think "nobody signed up for it so I will pivot".

Would love to hear opinions and experiences about it though for success and failure.


Not just websites, entire "Businesses" have replaced Marketing/Sales with Bullshit/Hustle and nothing is believable anymore.

The biggest problem i see is that the presentations are so vague/over-the-top/buzzword-heavy/Outlandish-claims/throwing-in-everything-and-the-kitchen-sink that i don't even understand what the product/company is supposed to do for me (as a prospective client). If you can't explain what exactly you do in specific terms, you are doomed to failure.


If you look at our product metrics, then numbers are anemic. Constantly, I get messages from all the corners not to publish the numbers that make us look bad. But that's the reality. That's how most of the startups start. https://blog.neeto.com/p/neeto-marketing-updates-for-decembe...


just depends on your perspective imo... my startup (ctx: I'm the CTO) is lean, pretty mean, and a modest bit scrappy under the hood!

B2B means making sure our customers feel the weight of the value we deliver (why should they care), which means more emphasis on direct relationships beyond just our website. but we have learned considerably from our advisors and industry peers the right way to do a lot of things, meaning that we don't have to figure it out again. but there's always something new to figure out! the website should clarify the immediate value to the target customer profile, and pass the "surface" check so to speak.

part of this I think is also shaped by what those sly VCs are looking for, in that they have a higher confidence bar required to feel confident in the sales engine (underpinned by security/compliance, engineering, etc).


Everyone is "fake it 'til you make it" today.

But Microsoft really was, too. There was some story about a shared tie that was worn to talk to the "shirts" at IBM in the early days. No idea about garters, which were also part of the IBM dress code at the time.

Not sure about Apple's early days, but there are certainly many stories of Jobs' "reality distortion field."


True, good point. It just looked different I guess


Costly signalling is a decent way to think about it. Having a polished website/UI used to be more work/money so it served as a costly signal - companies would invest in that polish only after having some measure of success.

Now its easy to achieve, so it no longer serves as a signal of success. But if you still believe it signals quality as it once did, you will be confused.


I’m confused why everyone’s doing it when it doesn’t signal quality. When it does look phony.

It’s not a great feeling to do from kick ass landing page to a SaaS that is clearly a bit broken and doesn’t even work on mobile. It makes you feel like people don’t even have their priorities straight, they just want to get you through the door but not deliver, like they don’t care about anything except money.

Like the cheap tricks of a fancy facade or design in a Main Street shop, but inside the product quality is low and the staff are generic, dressed nice, but not experts or truly caring about what they’re doing. it’s a betrayal, or feels like it, and not a great first touch point.

Nice username ! :) hahaha


I'm just now finishing our first marketing site after having like a crappy landing page for the last year.

In part it's users having higher expectations.

But in part it's also that no one takes you seriously unless you have a proper marketing website. And I don't mean customers but even providers or other companies for stuff like integrations. Everyone just ignores you.


That’s a fair point. But more like an industry sickness. A Liu’s of taste

Almost as if websites have come to be cheap suits for cubicle workers. Necessary by norm, but no signal of quality


Reminds me of amie.so calendar lunch the past few days, cool site UI and all, but still having trouble with the servers until now.


Today's tech world is very product and market focused. So it does stuff like webpages well.

That's not bad of course, it is how you win against competition or when the value you provide is a convenience or non ground breaking in other ways. The websites of the hard tech people are often less polished. They just come from a different DNA.


Those things are super easy to put together, so now they are a requirement to get investment. So all the startups do it.


It's just a case of sampling bias.

You don't see startups that are not like this because they receive less publicity and press.


That’s an interesting point. Again likely valid but also hinting at an industry sickness that doesn’t value quality but something specious and generic


You forget the SEO optimizations, the marketing campaigns, and the general fluff that is filling the Web.

Blandness is the common denominator, anything that is not fitting this schema doesn't fit to what the Web has become.

Edit: in part, the gatekeepers of the Web require this standardisation for their algorithms to handle human content.


Slick generic websites are cheap and easy to make. Had web technology was available 50 years ago, I'm sure both Apple and Microsoft would have those, even without any income and customers - Gates and Jobs were too shrewed a businessman to miss on those.


VC money is more readily available than in the 70s, which means startups staff up faster, which means more ability to polish around the edges. I’d say the core functionality is often similarly incomplete, but design, packaging, docs, localization, etc. are more complete aka polished.


To an extent, having a polished established look is to build trust.

If the website looks poorly executed, customers will walk. Think about it, if the site has zero reputation and looks really janky, would you put your credit card in?

Your average consumer will say no.


Yeah but what’s changed. Back in the day those bigs I mention don’t have polish at all at first but people wanted what they had. Now people look to polish


Next time you read the testimonial section, copy paste the author's name into Google. You'll find that they're made up.

They also share the same stock photo of the smiling woman in red.

It's borderline fraud.


I always check if the testimonial tweets are clickable.


This is important to understand! Don’t debase yourself with phoney testimonials it only erodes trust


It was always the way. Microsoft and Apple "fronting" like they were big companies before they were, as did everyone before them.

It's just easier to do nice web design now.


That’s a good point. They sort of did too!


Yes, it all looks very hollow, more marketing front than anything of substance, the marketing copy often bordering on cringe (“beautiful”, “awesome”).


Don't forget the Pricing page that asks you to schedule a call with their sales team to get pricing for more than 1 seat.


You see the same thing with influencers. Attractive people with polished perfect lives and comfortable wealth. It’s what the market responds to.


It’s a good point. I wonder why tho?


Our website is just a bunch of "hand made" HTML files . We promise to update it every month but here we are, like 10 years later.


We noticed this pattern as well and actively decided against a flashy landing page (you know the one: dark background, large text on the left and interact-able glitzy Rubik’s cube/sphere/graph on the right, the one that spins/asjusts on command…)

Instead we put the product front and center — and people seem to like it. After some tweaks, our conversion from unique user to “Loop Creation” is now at 40%(!)

It lacks polish, but we don’t put up a facade: https://magicloops.dev


That's why I'm making www.aiadbuilder.net slowly, doing it my way, releasing it as I want and ignoring the naysayers.


Those slick wordpress templates enable even the scrappiest startup to have a website that doesn’t suck.


It's so easy, cheap and fast today to produce a "polished" website... So why not ?


Good luck making a beautiful "website" 40 years ago. Curious grounds for comparison.


It's turtles all the way down, many of these startups customers are all startups.


I think the expectations of potential users have increased and it's an upward spiral.

Reasonable design and interactivity have become the norm with no-code tools, templates and frameworks taking a lot of pressure of those who may have struggled with design if starting from scratch.

This proliferation also increases the standards of users who expect a more polished feel of a product (even if it's simple and barely works with a dumpster fire backend). Notable mention of Craigslist though which is only able to buck the trend due to lock-in. People using your product is the biggest signal that you are on to something but if potential users bounce because of your lacking UI/UX you may be less likely to pursue the development of your product.

Of course this isn't everyone and some of us are more than happy to put up with a less-polished UI in favor of the product itself (I'm looking at you *nix users). 'Show HN' states 'A Show HN needn't be complicated or look slick. The community is comfortable with work that's at an early stage.' and I feel that may be a portion of the users here but chances are higher that even those of us who are willing to use early stage products would prefer cleaner UIs.

Personally though - as someone who likes to launch products - it can be quite disheartening. On one hand I don't want to spend too much time on design however I fear that if I don't it will hinder me. My approach is to apply the 80:20 rule. Educate myself a little in design and use pre-made stuff as much as I can.


a lot of the twitter startup and indie dev are totally phoney. they share numbers saying they making money but what they really sell is their course or discord channel or whatever scam they can use to milk their base


Yeah that’s a weird thing hey. People who don’t know how to do it selling to people who want to learn how to do it all based on a lie. it’s like some kind of pyramid scheme.


With the advent of ChatGPT & its brothers, it's easy to generate fake text and visual effects that are eye-catching.

And companies look for more experienced/bigger companies rather than startup-level ones, which have less trust, when it comes to cooperation/business.


The bar has been raised. That's what happened.


shadcn/ui and chatgpt makes it pretty easy to pull off some nice design in hours compared to days / weeks


sign up for pi.fyi if you want a brand new buggy app that's fun


thanks




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