This is a great idea. One suggested improvement is if I could resume tracking time on a previous item. If so, I would use consider using this app to track time spent on various projects.
Great UX direction, cool idea, congrats on launching! Was fun and easy to play with.
I argue that with Code Interpreter, GPT-4 can indeed reason in lots of cases, although it's more brittle and expensive than it seems to be on the very polished surface level. Working on proving this in lots of cases.
I spent a long time thinking about business like this after a decade and a half of hard knocks in SaaS and marketplaces where I simply hadn't been thinking clearly at all. That's how we came up with Best Parents (www.bestparents.com) in 2020. It's the first marketplace for high-end, in person, short courses and travel experiences for teenagers worldwide. My wife has expertise in the education sales industry from Turkey and Europe, for me deciding to jump into this particular business with her involved reasoning from my first principles, which greatly overlapped with the ones presented here in this doc. So this post is my confirmation bias speaking!
About Best Parents
1. It sells the world - we have customers from over 30 countries now
2. Demand is inelastic - families are always going to seek out programs for their kids abroad / away from home
3. Cannot easily be substituted or copied - the suppliers have to trust you, that trust has to be earned over years
4. Minimal labor requirements - our website is automatically translated into 4 languages with AI
5. Enjoys low overhead
6. Does not need big cash outlays
7. Cash billing - we have a 6 month billing cycle, we hold all the cash
8. Relatively free of regulation - also common sense prevails
9. Portable / easily moveable - we live in SF but have spent 3 or 4 months travelling this year
10.Loads of fun intellectually - thinking about how AI can guide teenagers to better and more diverse experiences, teach them and their families how to appreciate and contextualize those experiences, teach suppliers what to offer and how to improve their offerings ... v fulfilling. Feels like the real future of education
11.Leaves me with some free time now, prospectively lots later. Still just our startup's second year in sales, my first year full-time, lots of product to build
12.Income is not limited by personal output
What I was surprised by was how little VCs in general seemed to respect my reasoning. I had not been anticipating that kind of a tepid reaction. There's a lesson I learned here - that the businesses VCs are generally looking for are far from the ones entrepreneurs logically probably want to consider. I believe that after the popping of the crypto bubble the whole ecosystem as it recovers will wend its way back to a more balanced, forward looking place where enriching the lives of children and helping families overcome their generational trauma by joining an international parenting community is seen plainly by many as exactly what it is - world-changing and relevant.
Another thing I did come to realize was just how sweet a business B2B SaaS and Enterprise SaaS really is. Wow. It's a money printing machine, makes marketplaces look relatively paltry even though eBay was "The Perfect Store" like the book @Animats cited. Oh well, at the end of the day the business has to satisfy your intellectual and emotional needs for you (i.e. me) to give it that 150%. And this one's a winner with 20%ish gross margin and really decent basket sizes.
At the time, we didn't know where else to get $500K-$1.5M. Turns out $220K and some pain and hustling was enough. Thank God the fundamentals are really sound and upside is really there.
Now we're more looking into nondilutive funding and our lines of credit are burgeoning so it's possible VC won't be needed altogether. Not ready to close the door yet though, especially to the most selective programs and institutions both now and down the line. If we got into YC we would definitely accept, or even some other selective program like NFX FAST we would definitely consider very seriously.
Stability, runway, my father had a bankruptcy where he was accused of having his hand in customer funds. I strongly believe the right kind of partner can unlock incredible wealth in this case.
It's a B2C business with a B2B side (we also sell to schools and affiliate with SAT courses and college counselors).
What I meant was that when going out for fundraising in Silicon Valley your financial model is often compared to that of a B2B SaaS as they are both asset-light web software companies. Having studied those, I now realize why investors are so gung ho on B2B SaaS. The relative predictability of success, high profit margins, stickiness and network effects are quite simply hard to beat.
I don't want to spam everyone so will just reply here in the chain - I setup https://aicoding.club/, a lemmy instance for this. Emails aren't working just now as I've only just setup the domain and need to sort spf/etc, but I'll keep an eye on things to approve people.
