Update 3 (I guess)
I’m finally back in one place and have no plans on leaving for the rest of the year, so now we can actually make Ship-Off progress.
I’ve narrowed down to 2 solid ideas that I would pay for if somebody else made them:
- the digital shadow
- I still believe there’s real value here that doesn’t exist in current time-tracking solutions, because an LLM can “reason” with you about whether what you’re currently doing is actually relevant to your life, and then it can “explore” what causes those sidetracks
- there may be a good amount of psychology involved in the prompt engineering
- I think this is a great product that I personally want to use, but I think it may be the harder of the 2 to get paying customers for early on
- the AI debugger
- plugs in to a CRM, has context of the codebase, and creates PRs based on bugs that the customers find
- this one is very clearly saving users time and in a case like mine where I have software products that I’m very hands-off with, it makes it that much easier to let the business run itself
By next weekend the plan is to have chosen an idea and have the basic codebase set up, and then there are 2 more weekends left in the month. Not a ton of time, but it’s enough time for me to build an MVP.
P.S. I saw a comment on Hacker News that was a nice reminder that the GPSO really is putting pressure on us to build a product in the most efficient way possible:
always build the minimal thing that can be “sold”. Use AI to build the dirtiest MVP as fast as possible. Even better if your “MVP” is a deck and you can get people to put money down to wait. Figure out your GTM and messaging with that deck. If you are an engineer, you must resist that urge to build until you’re sure you can find enough people that have this problem and want to pay you to solve it.