CosmicShadow

Great article, finally something worth reading fully on here. As a serial entrepreneur this definitely hits home and is something I've had to learn the hard way over my 17 years of entrepreneurship. Just because you come across a great opportunity and you have the skills and gusto to make it happen doesn't mean it's a good fit. If you don't give a shit about the idea/problem/market it doesn't matter if you are good at every aspect of the business, it will be a slog and you just won't care and will set yourself up to fail sooner or later.

I think if you are in public, you can't expect to be in private. You can try, but it obviously doesn't always work and we are exposed to all types when out of the house.

So far since continuing coding/debugging with 4.7 it's failed to fix 3 simple bugs after explaining it like 5 times and having a previous working example to look at...hmmmmmm....

She checks them every time she's on her computer, no point in closing them and they are always posting to social media every day, whereas you may get a generic email once a month if they even have a mailing list. Instagram is admittedly a LOT better at showing what you want than FB, as she follows them all there as well, but sometimes they post different stuff on each. She wants to both support and help these bands and band members by engaging on their socials so they actually get shown to more people. These are metal bands, so not big by any means, although some of them are still "large" or well known in their genres, but still struggle to get any good traction online. Most people in metal bands still have full time jobs, even if they are at the top of their genre (excluding the mega bands people have heard of).

Yet my wife uses it daily and has to keep 16 separate tabs open to people and bands she wants updates from because Facebook refuses to put them on her feed, despite her commenting on every post and story from them; she instead gets all these random shitty "suggested" posts from things that she would never have interest in or actively hates and FB should know that. She constantly mutes and reports shit. I get the same thing, but I don't use FB nearly as much. Those same bands have to spam repeatedly because despite having tens of thousands of fans they show everyone that their posts are only shown to 16 people. It's a shit site that maybe works for some folks, but not at all for us active or not.

This sounds like a company idea someone just came up with yesterday off the cuff, pitched it, and got money for because of their credentials so no one can really say no to investing in it, despite nothing new or different? What's the service or product and how is it different than every 3rd Show HN?

Is this one of those, Hey turn off the overcharge protection because you can go $50 into debt for free, and then maybe you'll just keep going and not notice you owe us an extra $500 type of situations?

Facebook Messenger constantly tells you shit like "Hey, it's been 1 minute since someone messaged you, you better check it out!", Uber Eats is constantly telling me about meal deals even directly after I just ordered food on Uber Eats, and now it's giving me Uber ads implying the only thing stopping me from going out is that I haven't ordered an Uber, despite my history of only using it once a year when out of country and that I JUST ORDERED FOOD TO MY HOUSE!

You can't turn these off without never getting FB Messenger messages or notices of if your food has arrived because no one knows how to ring a fucking doorbell anymore even if the note specifically says to :/

Yet if I turn off my ads my sales drop to nearly nothing, but when I turn them on again I get a steady flow of new customers as well as some repeaters who either forgot about us or needed a reminder to buy again, sometimes literally years later.

It all depends on how big you are, what you sell, and how people can or will find you. I sell something that some people REALLY want, but they will never think to Google if it exists, they just think it's not available anymore/end of story, and I rank #1 unpaid, it's frustrating.

Now I only have one ad platform I can get to work at this point and I've wasted so much money on others, trying again every few months, but they all seem to suck or I don't have the patience and pockets to try and figure them out compared to how I've figured out the one that works enough to make a living off of.

Interesting to see this whole thing shown outside of Astrophotography, sometimes I forget it's the same stuff!

This is really amazing, I've been working with AI generation for months and it's amazing how fast separate tools are coming together into one and are usable on your own local machine.

I've been using Ovi for about a week and it's a blast. Like all AI gen, it's a slot machine and even putting in good inputs might lead to bad outputs, but if you run it enough you'll get something good or usable.

I've definitely made many things that look and sound real with both I2V and T2V, albeit T2V tends to look more like 90s tv quality at times, but that also makes it seem more real. If you use Flux SPRO as the image source you can get some pretty realistic looking videos.

I do have a 5090, so it takes about 4 to 5 minutes to make a 5 second clip.

I also don't bother advertising to Canada anymore as it's just more valuable for me to sell to the US in USD. I've spent a lot of time working on getting shipping as cheap as possible to make it alluring for the US and it currently is cheaper for me to send to California from near Toronto then it is to send something in my own city, let alone anywhere else in Canada. It is getting better here with these new cheap providers like Intelcom, but it's still not worth it when dealing with 10x the people paying me in a currency that's 1.38x mine.

I also sell something that has a max value people would be willing to pay, so if that number is $6, then I'd rather get $6 USD than $6 CAD.

Unfortunately we make custom items. We'd have to move our actual operations to the US to really get ahead of the game, but I don't want the nightmare of having to hire someone and do business from within the US, especially if something goes wrong. Maybe if we were 5-10x the size I could afford it, but not at this moment.

You, good sir, have made the mistake of thinking people can and will read!

We've put warnings for things on every single page, step of the checkout, and emails, and people still complain that things are a surprise, even after checking a box acknowledging the facts :(

The sad fact you learn after shipping 10k+ orders is that you can't prevent issues by preparing and telling people about them. It really sucks and defies all logic.

I sell a niche, handmade product for a living from Canada and 90% of my sales are to the US and this bullshit really fucking sucks. Even our shipping partners don't know what is going on and usually can only fill us in on or after a due date goes past because nobody on either side of the border has any idea what to do or what is actually supposed to happen.

Here's the stupidity: USPS doesn't know who is supposed to collect the tariffs...hmm it's the person in the US who bought the product, and you collect money from them, like UPS and FedEx do all the time. It's going to your own government, how do they not understand? I know it's unrealistic for mail carriers to be able to do that en-masse now, but I'm not sure why they think Canada Post should be collecting tariffs, they don't have employees that deliver mail...IN THE US! So we can't ship with Canada Post to the US now as they'll just send it back. Canada Post can also strike again at any moment, but that's another story.

So the current advice is for us to now ship our products as Delivery Duty Paid or DDP, which means I'm supposed to pay the tariff that the buyer should be paying all because USPS doesn't know how to collect the money to give to their government. I'm getting double boned.

Oh yeah, I also have to pay an extra $2 per shipment to a broker now in addition to the tariffs, which nobody really has any clarity what they will be yet and there doesn't seem to be a good source saying if the items I sell are CUSMA or not.

It's one hell of a mess for sure, and especially damaging when you sell low ticket items on volume. I'm going to have to jack my shipping, which will hurt as our shipping is already more expensive than what someone would normally pay from someone within the US.

Once we can ship Delivery Duty Unpaid or DDU we will expect 4 out 5 customers to send angry emails asking what these "Hidden fees" are as we don't expect anyone to realize they actually need to pay tariffs and then we get stuck on the defensive side educating people what tariffs are and who caused them and who is supposed to pay them, which is not great for business, sanity or time :/

One was with Topaz Video, the other was with SeedVR2.

Wan2.1 was great, but Wan2.2 is really awesome! Here's some samples I made locally with my 5090:

- https://imgur.com/a/VeTn4Ej

- https://imgur.com/a/CujxVX3

Those were both Image to Video and then I upscaled them to 4k. I made the images using Flux Dev Krea.

Took about 3-4 minutes per video to generate and another 2-3 to upscale. Images took 20-40s to generate.

I already had to go through so many hoops to sign up for a teams account for 5 separate accounts for myself, I wonder if this will be any better or not. At least if one account starts getting dumb or somehow runs out of context, I can just switch, but if something goes wrong and your $200 account exponentially loses context, then you are stuck waiting. Anyone have any idea of the actual differences?

I feel your frustration, only 100 times over as nearly every title on HN is missing the: ...in the US

The exciting thing about AI is it let's you go back to any project or idea you've ever had and they are now possibly doable, even if they seemed impossible or too much work back then. Some of the key pieces missing have become trivial, and even if you don't know how to do something AI will help you figure it out or just let you come up with a solution that may seem dirty, but actually works, whereas before it was impossible without expert systems and grinding out so much code. It's opened so many doors. It's hard to remember ideas that you have written off before, there are so many blind spots that are now opportunities.

But the value is still there. I see ads in it that I never click (they are garbage and never change and made for Americans, which I am not), if I do click a link, I've got adblockers on, and every single site is pretty much an advertising company already. I still get the latest tidbits I want in a small package. Most of the time I don't even need to click anything, I just get context to the latest memes or the summary of news I don't need to actually click into.

Digg is the only daily email I actually get with some sort of news or missed memes and I enjoy it. People make fun of me for still using Digg, but it's just short enough to keep me up on what's the latest and 4 of the biggest news points. I never really hit the site. Curious to see how it improves or changes!

Yep, I have 2 accounts I use because I kept hitting limits. I was going to do the Teams to get the 5x window, but I got instantly banned when clicking the teams button on a new account, so I ended up sticking with 2 separate accounts. It's a bit of a pain, but I'm used to it. My other account has since been unbanned, but I haven't needed it lately as I finished most of my coding.

The point of an experience is totally about the experience, it's why I don't even take my phone out to take pictures or videos at a show. People get hung up thinking this is about "proving" you were at a show, they even get surprisingly angry in comments about this on my ads, but it's totally not the point.

This has nothing to do with the actual concert experience or proof, it has to do with your tradition of collecting ticket stubs that you can go back to for that nostalgia bump and/or to keep track of every event you went to. It's about having a jar/box/album of memories.

If you've been collecting for 20 years and suddenly someone takes away your ability to add to your collection, you are going to get pissed off, and trust me, people definitely do.

Sure you can do anything else to collect, but the power of a streak/tradition/collection is real. It drove me to create this entire business because looking at a printed email or post-it note just made me mad instead of nostalgic.

Going through my binder and remembering that I saw Nine Inch Nails at a 1000 person venue is awesome, or when we saw Sabaton with 40 people and the singer just came into the audience to put his arm around me while singing, and it's not like I'm going to stop going to 10-30 concerts a year for the rest of my life, so more cool things will happen, memories will need to be preserved and it's nice to have them all fit into one album instead of anything else. I've got tickets for shows I've forgotten I've even seen, but it's in there with the mix which is handy. Forgotten venues, crazy low prices, "holy shit this massive band opened for these guys back then???".

Some people see tickets as trash and clutter, that's fine, for others it's a precious memento, despite how useless, wasteful, or unnecessary it is. I've got room for junk in my house that's meaningful for me, so it doesn't bother me to have, quite the opposite.

Well if you've got a pile of ticket stubs that you've been collecting for 20 years and suddenly you can't keep that tradition alive, it kind of ticks you off. Sure you can start adding printed photos or something else, but it ruins your consistent collection and/or your streak.

I specifically have a ticket stub binder and seeing blank spots, or print outs or post it notes just made me mad instead of nostalgic. I can't shove tour posters or tshirts in there, so this was the solution for me. I have over 200 band tshirts, but I don't buy one at every show.

Never discount the power of a streak or continuing a tradition or collection. I just talked to a guy the other day whose jar of ticket stubs is his prized collection, even if he never opens it to reflect. Some people go to one concert every few years, others go to shows and games every week.

I've got a stub binder that started having print outs of tickets in it or post-it notes. When I would go back to see what I've been to and get a burst of nostalgia, I'd just get mad at the lack of ticket instead of the good memory. Having one that looks and feels like the real thing let me move on from that.

There are a lot of folks who feel like the object obtains some "magical aura" by physically being at a concert with you, and that's ok, but for me, it's just a way to remember the show and keep track of everything I've been to. I go to enough shows that a single ticket isn't like a massive special memento, which may be the case for the person who goes to like one show a year.

Gifting is huge for us as well as parties, retirements, anniversaries, you name it!

Thanks, I appreciate it! After many startups and business ventures to not get anywhere, it was nice to have one finally hit, and one that I actually care about too!

I definitely think it's a minority, but even so it's a very large group of people that liked to save tickets. It's why I made Stubforge, so I could keep adding tickets to my own collection. I've got a lot of repeat customers who have been able to keep their collections growing as well. Even if you don't look at them, it's a way to remember what you've been to in a consistent fashion.

As someone who has been saving my ticket stubs for 20+ years I was very frustrated by the disappearance of physical tickets. I paid the extra fee to have them mailed to me, but eventually that went away. Printed emails are not the same.

I eventually figured out how to make the most realistic replica ticket stubs possible to add to my ticket stub album. I spent several thousands dollars on professional printers and real stock as well as months building my own software to customize and print tickets, all to scratch my own itch. Now my collection continues to grow with the 20 or so shows I go to every year and I've helped over 16,000+ people do the same with my website https://stubforge.com, which I'm now lucky enough to run full time.

A lot of people don't get it, and that's ok, but for those that do, they really get it.

People buy our tickets to give as gifts (because it's not easy to do anymore in a non-awkward or non-art project fashion), to add to their collections, to frame with posters, to use as surprise proposals, to invite people to their weddings, to announce their pregnancies and more things I never would have imagined when I started.

There are people that do miss ephemera. Even if you don't look at it that often, it's something precious to you. It doesn't matter if your kids will get it or just chuck it, it's there for you to enjoy and remember in the fashion that you want to.

I just cancelled my Midjourney subscription, it feels like it's fallen too far behind for the stuff I'd like to do. Spent a lot of time considering using Replicate as well as Ideogram.