Remember that the more you do something that is scary, the less scary it becomes. Don’t let your fear keep you dead in the water.
I’m not running an ai startup. I’m not looking for advice either, just opinions and discussion. Thank you for sharing yours!!! I agree, there’s a lot of posts seemingly seeking external validation or some sort of permission. But that seems to just be Reddit in general lately.
I appreciate the sentiment but respectfully disagree.
Starting an ai company has not been gated to the release of chat gpt. Using chat gpt as your ai has been available for the past year, enabling a magnitude of early movers in the chat gpt space. Before chat gpt we had other “ai” - machine learning (outside of an llm context), and a trend of startups claiming to use AI/ML whether it was accurate or not. I’m genuinely pleased to see the representation of non ai startups. I’m not working on an ai start up.
My day job is at a start up that doesn’t use chat gpt (in our product, employees are definitely personally using it), but does have bespoke ML applications that are indeed legitimate and solving real issues and opening up opportunities for us. I have friends, yes believe it or not lol, in the real world, and a handful of them are working on ai projects or companies. Important to note they aren’t chat gpt based projects. My real world experience of ai applications is not skewed toward gpt based projects. With the high volume of content focused on ai, often a code word for chat gpt/open ai, I’m curious if people see the lack of differentiation and barriers to achieving a true competitive advantage are a concern. Or if I just didn’t drink the look aid and missed something.
Reddit is a great place for some founders to connect with potential customers. It’s got dedicated self selecting groups generally willing to interact and engage with authentic content. Acting like social media isn’t a huge marketplace is a bit dismissive. Like anything, context is important. Doom scrolling might not generate revenue but access to well defined groups of people that self identify with something is objectively valuable. Social media strategies don’t work for everyone, and that’s ok.
I agree that there’s a LOT of verified opportunity in markets not related to ai and not being taken over by “ai”. AI will be a huge discovery for humanity (idk if it’ll surpass fire or the wheel though lol) but we don’t have real “AI” yet, we have marketing buzzword AI. A few years ago machine learning was hot and many companies just the machine learning into their pitch deck without doing any machine learning. Seems like ai is just the next thing to throw in a pitch deck either due to fomo or ignorance or on purpose, I’m not going to pretend I know the reasons.
Internal documentation knowledge base.
Many companies have documentation scattered between services - google drive, confluence, maybe something bespoke for engineering documentation. There’s also ad hoc documentation happening every day - jira tickets, github comments, slack convos, video meetings. It’s a skill in itself to proficiently search disparate services to answer questions. Knowledge is lost every time someone leaves a company. Knowledge also degrades over time - we forget the context of our decisions, later leaving us to wonder why we chose something particular in the past. Or even if we deliberately chose to do something or it’s just a consequence of other decisions. Imagine onboarding. It’s a huge pain point.
Now imagine as much of that context that’s recorded in some way is aggregated, ranked, and easily searchable in a single interface. Sounds pretty sweet in comparison to the reality many startups face.
This is the top use case I would have for chat gpt builder, but there are other LLMs not managed by a third party that are a much better choice if data governance is a concern. I imagine anything training on gpt builder is available to chat gpt itself. Perhaps anonymized to some level, but in practice with tech like this that really just means it’s impossible to attribute the creator after the data enters the model. So anonymization by consequence, not necessarily design.
My dayjob has guidelines about what we are allowed to feed into chat gpt prompts, what policies to follow if using GitHub copilot, etc. There is no way we would ever get something like handing over our IP to open ai approved. However, not every company has resources to train its own internal LLM so the trade off is probably worth it, not important enough to consider right now. It’s also likely these details are buried in legalese hiding within the terms so people agree to it without even realizing.
Not sure what your tech stack is but I’d look at getting a cms package and hosting it yourself. With all of the scaffold-centric dev frameworks it’s trivial to set up a cms and then you also have control over how it interacts with your api. CORS? Stupid web form plugin won’t do what you want? Not an issue when you control it all.
I know the goal is to use your valuable dev knowledge on the “hard problems”, but I feel like you run the risk of using wix/shopify/etc and end up investing time in making it work for you. You could punt on it and use a hosted platform but if you do that, you don’t know when the hard problems are going to hit. Reacting to them could completely wipe the gains from using something off the shelf. Maybe buying the time is worth it, you’re a dev so you know every decision is a trade off and it’s ok to do something sub optimal if that risk is assessed up front.
Jekyll (ruby) and docusaurus (node) both come to mind as viable options. Combo it with a wysiwyg plugin if your wife is uncomfortable with markdown formatting (although she can always use a previewer in a text editor to verify her formatting). Themes are plentiful and simple to integrate for both the options I mentioned. There are of course many many other routes than Jekyll and docusaurus, your preferred language likely has options as well.
GitHub pages for hosting while it’s just a static site, depending on resources needed to integrate with your api you could probably get by with less than ten bucks a month on Heroku/north flank/fly.io/etc, or move it to wherever you choose host your api when it’s all piped together.
Alternatively you could consider Wordpress, since customization there is well supported. Some trade offs: you’ll be writing php, hackers/nefarious folks love Wordpress because inexperienced people use it without solid security practices, plug-ins might be less vetted (again security concern), hosting can be expensive annoying (though this third point holds true for other options as well).
Just my 2c but I’d seriously consider hosting this myself with a reliable package. It tows the line between being at the mercy of someone else’s code/limitations and distracting you from building your saas product by rolling a completely custom solution.
If it’s not celebrities, is it publicly available and accessible data you’re looking to track? Access to the data could be your biggest hurdle here, depending on what data you’re going to need