gsaines

I’m hacking on an app that helps immigration lawyers spend less time chasing client documents: https://casedaemon.com/

We just launched a couple weeks ago and we’d love any feedback or suggestions!

For anyone interested in really digging deep into this trend, I recommend picking up the book “After the Spike” by Dylan Spears and Michael Geruso.

It opened my eyes to the mathematical inevitability of short-term population contraction. Seriously, there is no way to avoid short term population contraction at this point. None. Zilch. Zero. We made our proverbial bed in the 1980s.

They convinced me that population contraction is almost certainly bad for people alive today, but also probably for our species as a whole.

Finally, they present a dozen or so hypotheses about what might be at the root of declining birth rates and what we might be able to do to stop reverse current trends.

The thing that made the book a true 5/5 for me is that they end with questions, not false certainty. Basically, demographers aren’t completely sure what’s driving the trends nor do they have fully baked conclusions about how it can be solved or if that’s even possible.

https://www.georgesaines.com/

Thanks for engaging with this. I'm not trying to troll or be sarcastic. Could well be the case that painted door testing just doesn't work on B2C. What I learned on Skritter and CodeCombat is that if you have a couple of years to devote full time to building, it's almost always possible to power through bad channel / market fit with good product and build a small company.

The problem is that it's not a very good idea to invest in that way if you both like money and can hold down a corporate job (not saying everyone meets these two criteria BTW).

The 4 steps to epiphany is outdated, and The Mom Test is great if you have existing deep industry expertise and credibility. If you lack either, though, it's really not obvious how anyone tests product ideas without 12+ months of investment.

This confirms what I've been discovering. I wrote about the details here: https://www.georgesaines.com/blog/2025/9/8/why-is-b2c-user-a...

Maybe it's just that the AI noise has been cranked to 11, but it sure feels like there's something fundamentally different from building and selling software today vs the last time I was building new products back in 2015. A decade is a long time, but it didn't feel nearly so weird even as recently as 2021 / 2022. That makes me think it's the AI slop noise, but maybe I'm incorrect.

It's more than just building something people want.

I want a lot of things and would be willing to pay for some of them, but unless there is a way to reach me, it doesn't matter.

There is this cultural meme that if an amazing product simply exists, then people will tell other people and it'll grow organically. The reality is that amazing, ahead-of-their time products and services are constantly being created and dying. Not because they don't solve a need, but because they weren't able to reach customers economically with the right message.

That ability to reach customers and contextualize the solution in language that matches their expectation is actually a lot rarer than building a good product.

I don't intend this to come off as confrontational or cynical, but I think this question (and many of the responses in this thread) are mistaking the answer for the question.

What I mean is that you have to understand what you most want to accomplish. If you want to build a growing business, the best way to do that is not to start from a product and then figure out how to attract users, it's to test product / user acquisition channels together.

I have some authority in the space because I've done it the wrong way twice! www.skritter.com is the first company I built way back in 2008 and growing it was really challenging. It's a niche within a niche and most growth tactics simply didn't work. I'm proud that it's become so durable and taught so many people, but from a customer acquisition perspective, it was very challenging.

www.codecombat.com had some organic acquisition channels that worked well, but they proved to be mostly non-repeatable.

I'm now working on my third company (also an AI B2C SaaS play), but I started first and foremost by identifying a viable discovery channel / product pair. In this case, I found that paid advertising in the elder care space converts well.

To put it more bluntly, a product without a customer acquisition channel is closer to a hobby than a business. A product with an acquisition channel that is somewhat scaleable and repeatable is likely to be a profitable business. A product with high growth / viral acquisition channel is a startup.

I'm not knocking operating a hobby product. I've done that and there are good and bad parts to the experience. But if you want to grow, you shouldn't be asking the question "how do I grow this product?" you should instead be asking "what product could I build that has a demonstrable acquisition channel?"

Where are they planning to go if you mind me asking? My brother is considering moving to Canada, but he's already living in Ohio, so that wouldn't be a huge move in absolute geographical terms. Another friend is in the process of moving to Spain, but there really doesn't seem to be a particularly safe place.

Most nations appear to have their own brand of populist hard-right political leaders at the moment and I've cautioned people that unless they know a lot about where they are moving to, they are likely to just be exchanging one scary regime for another and taking on outsider immigrant status in that new society.

I'm genuinely curious about this, no sarcasm of cynicism here.

TLDR Summary: limit your intake of social media and news.

Hey, I was actually looking for something like this a while back and couldn't find anything. Really glad to have discovered it. But I couldn't get it to work. I added the plugin via Figma, gave it a prompt and spent my 1 credit to generate an illustration, the credit was used, but no image was created (or perhaps it was created and is just hidden or outside of the frames / groups).

Figured you might want to know / provide some instructions in case others are running into this issue too.

Austin, TX

Pros: cheap cost of living for a tech city, warm most of the year, BBQ and live music

Cons: it's hellishly hot for 2-3 months, it's expensive compared to other (non-tech) cities, politically liberal folks will find state politics oppressive

I wrote a much more in-depth analysis of the best city for techies in 2024. TLDR, I think Seattle is probably the best place overall. The Bay is still king if you want to maximize for career growth, though: https://overthinkingmoney.com/2023/11/21/best-city-for-techi...

Yeah, this was completely my bad. Any chance you'd like to proof future posts for stupid mistakes like this? :P I joke, but I'm writing 2-4k words per week, and the sheer number of simple arithmetic calculations makes it tough to catch even big mistakes.

Seriously, though, if you know of a way to proof posts (services, forums, etc), I'd be interested. What I need is an editor as a service. The blog is just a hobby, so I can't afford a real professional editor.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm curious about the job data as well. I mentioned this further up in the thread, but when I moved from the Bay to Austin back in 2020, I did some searches for software engineering, UX, and PM roles and what I found was a lot more skewed. IE, Austin had massively fewer roles (if I recall, 5%) compared to the Bay.

But, when I ran this analysis, the differences were much less pronounced. Do you know of any way to correct for this bias? Clearly searching on public job boards doesn't appear to be getting at the reality.

Yeah, geez, thanks for pointing that out!

I'm not sure how that error slipped in there. Thanks for pointing it out, I'll fix it. I need an editor for these in-depth analyses. I always end up making at least 1 typo somewhere.

I happen to agree: I like Austin's weather better than Seattle, but everyone I talk to disagrees with me. Don't get me wrong, I have no love of the 40+ consecutive days of 100+ heat, but overall, I'd take it over the darkness and cold of the Seattle area.

I didn't include crime rates just because unless they are super high, they don't really factor too much into the financial calculus of living in either place.

Super valid criticism, but how to incorporate it in a quantitative way? I happen to agree with you about the quality of jobs and the ecosystem as a whole being far superior in the Bay. I had expected CA to soundly defeat all other cities by a wide margin, but either due to remote work or some other weirdness in the data collection, that didn't turn out to be the case.

Maybe glass door reviews? Another commenter suggested # of Unicorns?

Yeah, I actually considered including that, but the answer is super obvious: the Bay Area trounces every other place.

I responded to a comment above about this, but I don't want to come off as a Seattle booster or Bay Area basher. I live in Austin and think my own analysis makes the city seem better than it is. We lived in the Bay for 7 years and both my wife and I agree that if we hadn't wanted to raise kids near our parents (a value we agreed on way before having our first), we would definitely have stayed in CA. So many cool people and interesting roles.

Ah, shoot, I didn't mean to give that impression! I'm actually a big fan of the bay area and lived there for 7 years. I live in Austin now and think that the analysis made Austin appear too good. I need to dig deeper into why the job stats were so similar across cities because that doesn't pass sanity check for me.

I'm envious of this approach! As I mentioned in another comment on this post, I do get intrinsic enjoyment from the act of writing and thinking, but I enjoy it more when I can talk with other engaged people about the topic. External vs internal locus of self validation perhaps?

Thanks for sharing - I didn't think product hunt permitted blogs and other content sources. Has that changed?

Can't speak for op, but for me, I enjoy thinking and writing a bunch, but it's even more fun if people critique / praise / question me. That might just be an idiosyncratic preference of mine though. I'm not all that interested in being an influencer or monetizing my audience, but I love a good well-intentioned argument.

Do you know if this works for non-technical subjects? I used to write about design tools and some front-end coding, but that was years ago and I was never super passionate about it. Recently, I started writing about personal finance, which so far has been pretty fun, but I don't know if you can sign up to give talks at conferences unless you're Ramit Sethi or equivalently famous.

I've been trying to boost readership on my blog, largely without success. Here's what I've tried:

1) Posting here when it's relevant. Success rate so far: 0%, but I've only tried a couple of times.

2) Answering questions on Quora and including a link to my blog. # of visitors so far: 0, but I've only answered a couple of questions.

3) Answering questions on the relevant Subreddit: # of visitors so far: 0, despite having tried a bunch.

4) Starting a companion Substack: don't know, just launched it today!

5) Contacting other bloggers in space: I'm playing the long game here, so I haven't directly asked for backlinks. Feature posts seem to be a dead format, most bloggers in my niche explicitly don't do them.

6) Posting all content to social media: I regularly post to LinkedIn, Facebook, and X, but I've only seen engagement with LinkedIn. I think that's because I have ~1,500 organic connections there and a couple hundred followers.

7) Creating content on other platforms: I dipped my toe into Tiktok, but the brand and the format didn't match. I still want to at least try Youtube, but it's a much bigger time investment, so I imagine it'll be a while before I can do that.

I've only been it at it for about 8 months, so still early days, but as with most other stuff on the internet, attention and followers seem to follow a largely luck-driven power law distribution. So my current strategy is just to try as many possible avenues as I can afford.

My contact info is in my profile, happy to connect to discuss this more if you'd like!

And for anyone curious, my blog is over here: http://www.overthinkingmoney.com Don't mean to shamelessly self-promote, but I figured some people might be interested in the context.

I struggle too. I've generated 39 ideas in the last 18 months and none have looked very appealing to work on. If it was easy, more people would do it. But, you probably have a unique perspective and set of skills that would enable you to address a problem that you experience on a regular basis. So don't discount your personal experience!

Shameless plug, but I write semi-regular "Steal This Business Idea" posts on my blog. This is an example: https://overthinkingmoney.com/2023/04/25/steal-this-startup-... They're all examples of businesses that I think have promise, but I don't have the skills, experience, insight or all three to execute.

Really glad to hear that! It's always awesome to know that the product is helping people.

If you're already a software engineer earning a normal salary in the US (several assumptions there), it's really hard to find side hustles that pay at or above the hourly wage that your employer has already committed to. I personally think that it's a good idea to focus on building a small lifestyle software business over the course of several years. I wrote a long series of blog posts about this over here: https://overthinkingmoney.com/2023/05/02/start-a-business-no...

My first company (Skritter.com) fits this mold. It's been growing slowly, but steadily for more than 15 years now. In the first couple of years we were able to generate low five-figures per month, now it's substantially higher.

There are other ways to earn cash outside of tech, but most of the common suggestions (drop shipping, affiliate marketing, laundromats, etc) are mostly terrible if you really do the analysis.

For better or worse, low risk generally means low upside!

https://overthinkingmoney.com/ I started this one about six months ago as a way to indulge my passion for hacking wealth. No technical topics, but I've been writing about startups and businesses regularly. This series might be the most applicable to folks on Hacker News: https://overthinkingmoney.com/2023/05/02/start-a-business-no...

https://www.georgesaines.com/ My personal blog. I originally started it when I was running my first company to document the stuff I learned. It's been around in various incarnations since 2008, but I don't blog very often. In the last couple of years, it's devolved into personal book and movie reviews. If you like indie movies or nonfiction, give it a read!

I am not a lawyer, but I worked on a project at Facebook years ago that touches on the underlying case law here. I spent a full year of my life bashing my head against opaque legal precedents to understand how to build a product that met legal requirements and user needs. Maybe this comment will prove useful in distilling some of the nuance here so you don’t have to spend 12 months of your life doing what I did.

This decision confirms a nearly-unanimous legal consensus that existed before this ruling about the legality of disparate treatment vs disparate impact.

Disparate treatment is enshrined as illegal in other legislation like the fair credit and lending act. It basically states that the use of protected class data for most use cases is illegal. I know the most about how this is interpreted in the context of private companies, but my understanding is that the embargo on the data use is much broader.

Disparate impact, by contrast, is a legal theory without much case law to support it, but it asserts that what is illegal is not the use of the protected class data, but unequal outcomes.

This is super thorny territory. On the surface, disparate treatment (which again, is what the court upheld here) appears to only reinforce the racist, sexist, unequal status quo. And personally, I agree, but it at least prevents overt discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and other important human characteristics. The law right now makes it illegal to outright say that you are treating someone else differently on the basis of those traits. It doesn’t prevent all the other ways to still be racist and sexist and awful, though.

So you might say, let’s go with disparate outcome, then! And this is indeed what I first thought. But there are huge problems here, too. First, the only way to ensure that outcomes are equal is … to measure and report on the very traits we think are sensitive. This wouldn’t just be invasive, it would entrench the collection and measurement of this information. I can think of a lot of ways that bad actors could misuse petabytes of accurate racial demographic information in ways that would make current ML-based inferences and regression correlations laughably indirect.

Then there’s the issue of whether or important things in our society should be equal at all. Take the example of sex and employment. There are professions that are heavily male or female dominated. How would you feel if a colleague of the opposite sex with no training in your discipline was offered 2x as much compensation as you to perform the same task because society insisted that your profession have exactly equal representation? I think of myself a bit of a bleeding heart liberal, but I don’t think that’s a desirable outcome.

And then there are the second and third order effects to consider. Is the fact that most commercial truck drivers are men a reflection of different preferences, social norms, or something altogether different? I have no idea and I’m not about to go all Charles Murray and act like I do.

My goal in writing such a long post isn’t to make an apologist defense for what seem to me a clearly socially regressive finding from the Supreme Court, just that finding a better alternative is really, really hard.

So let’s not get discouraged by this setback. Let’s find a better alternative and get that written into law.

This is a clickbait title. Altman is mostly talking about startups here, not larger or more well-established companies.

I’m a huge believer in remote work for jobs at big and midsize companies. But I’ve also started two companies myself and would never start a startup full remote. Context is key.

Access and valuations. Although YC does much better than other incubators in terms of outcomes, the batch sizes are quite large these days and the best deals are oversubscribed before the batch even starts. There's a lot of money chasing deals. So unless you have a solid reputation, it's hard to get started.

Obviously, you can overcome that by just spending the time, building dealflow, etc, but it suggests that new angels won't get access to the 1% deals. One of my batchmates was Cruise Automation which has had a spectacular trajectory. I don't know for certain, but I suspect Kyle wouldn't have been willing to take $10k from me. :)