[eastbound]

You’re talking about VC startups.

I disagree with the sour mindset, as I don’t feel those games were necessary for my startup, although I admit mine was bootstrapped (0$), and didn’t grow as far as the others, it still made me millionaire, has paid my employees a high-than-average salary and has the potential of adding them a few hundred thousands each.

I admit the old market (do web apps to manage records! or notes!) is saturated but the IA market is brand new and fresh open.

[jongjong]

How do you find users? Organic? SEO is useless as all the projects with any meaningful pagerank are all pointing to each other. Social media advertising is useless; nobody even sees your tweets or posts. Advertising? How do you get a return on CPC? All the big competitors seem to be running negative margins. Also, small volume social media ads tends to attract only bots... Are you operating in a niche? How do you get word of mouth in this case? Niches related to solving bureaucratic problems are often regulated! No SOC2 or ISO27001, no contracts for you.

In the last 15 years, I met just one person who bootstrapped a tech startup 'on their own' to be worth a few millions... This guy was super smart and switched on... But I later found out his wife's parents were multi-millionaires. I'm thinking that was probably the differentiator. I met a LOT of successful tech people. They always got major help. I never actually met one who didn't have access to significant help.

[KellyCriterion]

It all crashed when Sundar Pichai took over:

In hist first speech/announcement he said: "...everything is AI now..." - from this day on, Google was dead for customer acquisition.

From now on, every search query with same terms served always an individual page at different times. The good old SEO days were dead, this user-acqui channel died.

Then they increased & enlarged the space for ads at top of page; and these days finally they introduced this AI panel - most people wont scroll anymore on Google.

[selimthegrim]

AI?