[zachncst]

Isn’t this what they always tell startups to do? Fake it and get product market fit. I recall the stories of task rabbit where the founder was delivering all the meals.

[Aurornis]

"Fake it till you make it" was about presenting yourself as an established, stable company to overcome objections about using a startup. Things like having a "Customer Support" phone number and e-mail address that just go to the founders, for example. It's fair game if the founders are actually picking up the phone and doing customer support, and it overcomes one objection people might have about using a startup instead of a big company.

Claiming you can do something specific (use AI to do something) and then using humans to do the labor is something else entirely. If you raise money on that, it's just fraud.

[MangoToupe]

There's a good deal of grey-area there, for instance in faking user activity in social media startups. Reddit did this for instance, although I don't know if they reported active user numbers as part of fundraising.

[pyman]

See: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240611122778/en/Bui...

[tacheiordache]

You say that as if Amazon Alexa was some kind of amazing product. t succeeded because it has Amazon backing and it's kindof a crappy product.

[manuelisimo]

so, yeah, but not enough?

[mrtksn]

IMHO you are not supposed to fake your core value proposition when taking money. If the AI part was an implementation detail probably wouldn’t have been a problem.

[drewda]

"Do things that don't scale" to quote Sir PG.