written in 2021. I think this is more true than ever in 202

• It often takes very little time to create a DIY solution for something you would like to have both in software and hardware.

  • The first version of Fixkey was a Python script written in 1 hour, the first version of every AI necklace company is just a Arduino with a microphone...

• It's 100 times harder to make this solution easily understood and usable for everyone else, which we then call a product.

  • For the bigger software products I worked on myself the core DIY solution mostly took me 2 hours to code (python scripts with local files, no auth, no db...)
  • The rest 100 hours put into the project (98%) was all in packaging the thing into something which is usable by everyone else:
    • UI instead of headless terminal script
    • Auth / Hosted databases
    • User onboarding (I really underestimated how much time you need to put into nailing this)
    • Distribution: Landing pages, ads...
  • The core functionality remained the same though...
  • This time difference between creating the actual value generator (2%), and bundling the value generator into a product (95%) is insane and largely underestimated by first-time founders.
    • This is why packaging something that has no unique value into a product is a fatal waste of time.
    • Build "MVPs" (hacky DIY solutions) and see if they're useful for you. Then think about whether you want to distribute them to others, and if others would find value in your thing.

• I am most fascinated by products / companies which make something possible that I, as a single human being, wouldn't even achieve if I would spend my whole lifetime working on a personal DIY solution (Tesla FSD, OpenAI, Apple, 1X, Neuralink...).

  • Instead of putting lots of energy into packaging something which I could have built myself.
    • To be fair I could create my own hacky solutions for tools like loops.so, cursor.so, beeper.com etc. but I am not doing it because they would not be as good as the actual product, and motivation would be so low to do that with them already existing.
  • These companies still need to put a lot of time into packaging their innovation as a product, but at least they don't need to spend that much time on marketing because the innovation is so big that it eats the market by itself (zero to one).