Update 1

Almost immediately after writing my last post, I found out that one of my ideas was just launched (the same week) by someone else.

So I could still create an audio tool that does something similar for removing elements from audio, which I think is still useful and may actually produce cleaner results (akin to subtractive synthesis). That being said, this one is a bigger undertaking, and I only have 2 months where most of this GPSO work will happen exclusively on the weekends, so this idea is going in the trash.

That being said, I also have a new idea which is to steal one of Pat’s ideas and make it better. He mentioned he was working on something that would take existing customer support conversations and generate help documentation from them based on the answers provided. This got me thinking about LLM-based customer support tools, and then I started thinking about what kind of tools would actually be useful for my software business. Which led me to:

• a tool for SaaS products that takes in customer support requests and additionally takes in the codebase as context to make changes in response to the customers
  • if the customer reports a bug, the code would be updated to fix the bug
  • if the customer has a question how something works, the code would be read to understand what the customer is talking about
  • if the customer’s message appears to be a new problem by an existing customer, we could look at recent commits to focus in on specific changes

Pat also mentioned he’s been using Cursor to build everything, which made me think a bit more about how to speed up my development for this. Like I said, I have a limited amount of hours to actually dedicate to these before the end of the year. Some of the logic I need can’t be done cleanly by LLMs, but it is worthwhile delegating more tasks to my coding LLM tool (Supermaven).

generated with Google Gemini

I’ve been wanting to ship more software projects, mainly to get more reps in to decrease the time between ideation and distribution. That being said, I need some kind of pressure to actually work on those projects or else I’ll never finish them.

From now until December 31st, 2024 ( days from now), I’m challenging myself to ship as many profitable projects as possible. There’s no guarantee that the projects will make money, but the idea is that each one should be able to make profit. This focuses the ideas a bit more and helps avoid working on projects indefinitely with no clear direction.

To help with accountability and add an element of competition, my friend Patty Cake (he asked us to call him this) will be joining me. He just moved to Vancouver and I’m in San Diego, hence “Pacific”.

Rules

1. Products can’t be free. There has to be a way for each project to accept payments.
2. Each week we need to post an update on our blogs, even if it’s “I didn’t do anything this week”.
3. The deadline for building is the end of the year. Then we let the products generate revenue for the month of January. The winner is whoever generates more revenue within that month.
4. The loser’s punishment (and the winner’s reward) is that the user has to pay for all of the winner’s products for a month.

Potential Ideas

I have a few rough ideas so far, which I need to think about more to figure out the ratios of how much someone would be willing to pay vs how much time it will take to build. Some things I’ve been thinking about:

• a digital “shadow” that keeps track of what you do on your laptop and then provides insights at the start/end of each day
  • I have a Firefox extension that’s a very rough MVP, and keeping it as a browser extension might be the easiest way to get to V1. That being said, I don’t know if people actually pay for browser extensions.
• an audio tool to add or remove sounds to audio based on text input
  • It would probably be best for V1 to just pick a direction, either adding sounds (so being able to type out “snare drum with snappy transient”) or remove (“remove the snare drum”) sounds from audio samples
  • This idea seems very complex, but I know that there are people who would pay a good amount for this
• a Google Sheets app that enables listeners in spreadsheets
  • The idea is that you could supercharge your spreadsheets by adding a “listener” to a range of cells. If those cells change, or have a certain value, then some other action takes place. Basically like IFTTT for Google Sheets.
  • This is by far the easiest to implement because I already do this (but would still need to build a UI and more features)