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#bank#job#business#statements#application#thing#code#subscription#pay#more
Discussion (61 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
If I convert my bank statements only each quarter in a spike or once or twice a year, why should I pay for each month or the entire year? Of course I don't know the real usage patterns of this application, but that's one scenario I'd think of.
If I pay for something, I want the tool to work for me. I can't use an application if it tries to steal my attention all the time. An upgrade pop-up there, a reminder notification there, and the application wears me down.
I like quiet applications. It's there. I'll use it. An unobtrusive promo button for a new feature is OK, but constant nudging for the same thing is tiring. Dropbox used to do that with document signatures, they stopped now AFAICS.
If I pay for your application, please be patient and respectful, because the moment I feel that your application is more about getting my money than providing me services, I'm out.
The value I get is in the service you provide via your application. Not the existence of said application, so stop treating your users as cows in line waiting to be milked.
This is another reason I'm self hosting as much as possible. I'm willing to put in the work to maintain an application rather than seeing constant banners and pop-ups wedged in to milk me more.
*Edit: Apparently I forgot how to spell.
I hit this wall about 2-3 years ago at least...
It really is not that bad when you are in a company with a good culture. Leadership is gonna be AI piled everywhere, but imho that's how you learn where to use (and not to use) the technology.
LLMs can be nice sometimes, but not necessary. Internal teams with "not invented here" syndrome currently working on that stuff are ultimately wasting money until the dust settles a bit more.
Those long deadlines have nothing to do with implementation. It's the game of telephone and accountability bottlenecks. You still want to retain your most experienced devs and give them plenty of time to work. Writing the code was never the bottleneck. A good dev team has balanced experience of the business and the code, not just the code, and certainly not the kind of code an LLM generates. Most of the decisions by those devs happens outside the codebase.
I have doubts
This is the magical sci-fi future I always dreamed about, and it's getting better every quarter.
The amount of stuff I can do now, in terms of time and scope and volume, is unreal.
This comes across as very unserious. If you’re truly trying to build a business then this seems like one of the best signals/datapoints you can get…
It was one of the best customer experiences of my life to not have to answer a series of 'why are you leaving?' questions and I would like to head back to Citibank just because of it. Unfortunately I don't live in NYC anymore so can't really do that.
You could add an API which is perfect for agents to use. Something that survives the pull request review process.
My gut says this one can be turned around. Even if 90% of people just happily prefer ChatGPT for this (which I'd doubt), the remaining 10% is still a lot to fund a small venture very well. Just gotta find them effectively.
Even the "giving up" route can be pretty juicy, there's companies that pay decent money for a "distressed asset". And there's also investment firms (like mine) that go for a minority stake and help turn things around.
Any half decent product, with a nice website, a real solution and some SEO can get in front of say 100,000 prospects these days. Here I imagine discovery is mainly from Googling “convert bank statements”, and conversion from prospects to client is straightforward for 1-2% of views.
But a conversion niche like this is dynamic - you basically luck into it and unless you actively find and occupy niches faster than the competition discovers them and stomps on you, your “business” is on a time fuze. For example, if someone like Xero where this is a feature discovers the keyword combo and does some paid ads. Or if Google pushes AI results up and your page goes below the fold. My expectation is that this latter situation is happening everywhere as Google AI search starts to strangle everything.
Leverage AI to be your CMO. It should be telling you things like (i) your product is likely perceived as too technical to break into the general market, (ii) you need a much better handle in target customer profile (demographic, messages), (iii) you need a customer relevant sustainable USP and (iv) you need a distinctive and memorable brand. The ultimate win is to create market pull from customer to customer recommendations.
A lot of the Internet says otherwise — especially these days. Care to share your sauce?
They're much worse now, but that also creates more opportunity than ever before. Chaos truly can be a ladder if you take advantage of it and endure the unhappy parts. Having a bit of savings to work with can make all the difference. You can focus on emerging opportunities without melting down over your next paycheck.
The concept of W-2 employment is completely dead to me now. Especially for this kind of technology work. I charge per outcome now (1099). I am no longer interested in being provided what amounts to hazard pay for the job of interacting with an adult day care center every day. Walking in as a hired gun with no political agenda and a clear mission feels great compared to where I was before. When I do participate in the clients' meetings, I generally get away with murder because I am laser focused on the outcome itself (my compensation) rather than belaboring whatever technical details behind it. If I'm on a call these days, there's an explicit reason for it. The business can sense that I am aligned with their goals, so the proverbial seas tend to be parted whenever I unmute my microphone.
The clients' salaried developers loathe me to the extent that it's creating even more opportunities. The amount of unqualified ego tripping in tech has become astounding and can serve as a powerful ally for humble wizards.
Everyone has a job with a remit and responsibilities. The role of business leadership and management is to make sure the people and remits operate harmoniously to efficiently reach a common goal.
If some people doing their job well decimates another persons job in the same company, that is 100% the fault of the people managing the jobs, not the people doing the jobs.
A job is not an object, a human is not a machine.
You can be another Nero. Come, burn everything down, and leave, or you can be a compassionate with people, talk with everyone, win minds and hearts and accomplish the same thing.
I worked with both kinds of people, clashed with the first even if we were trying to accomplish the same thing, and cooperated with the latter, even if what they wanted is complete opposite of my views.
I behaved that way, because the former one wanted to do the job, get the praise, and get me fired in the process, but the latter one showed me an outside perspective I failed to see, so I agreed and did whatever I can to fix what's broken from outside perspective.
If the first person didn't see me as a threat to themselves, I'd have pushed them to the place they wanted to be, because I'm no ladder climber, but they don't work with us anymore.
Of course there will be stubborn people to do whatever they can to protect themselves, their position or whatnot, but they are rare and generally have other motivations, from my experience.
Are you perchance paid by number of distinct metaphors used?
A lot of build in public is theater with MRR porn which has no basis in ground reality creating noise. Now the agentic world is coming after it. Build in public has turned into display in public these days.
Or you could have AI write a script to handle the conversion for your specific bank. It'll be faster than any service and free forever.
Further the issue of exposing all your sensitive data to the AI provider.
I’m not surprised the business is struggling - the author hasn’t found a deep enough problem to solve.
Two years ago I paid a little app to extract the member list of a WhatsApp community I manage. Now I just ask Codex to do it.
It sucks for the founders no doubt. But it’s better for the consumer not to have a million paid utility apps for solving small nuisances.
"Claude, a business is making $30K/mo converting bank statements!
Use all of my max 20x plan to build a BETTER version. Must have animated per-page progress indicators"
Personally I work at a FAANG adjacent big tech company and dream of quitting every fucking second
And regarding face on video, I just got stuned with video of 106 years old giving life advices and all people but one in comment section didn't notice it is well generated.
That's the hard part :)