I've had a wild ride of a career, from founding multiple products (some of which are ) to working with celebrities in the alcohol industry, to working on $26 billion worth of M&A deals, plus I've won awards for my comedy writing. Also, I like to meditate, burn sage, and collect crystals. Here to answer any and all questions about SaaS, content marketing, remote work, document apps, product, transitioning from corporate to startups, writing, selecting crystals, the future, and me
Are you the kind of person who believes in your dream enough to burn through most of your savings on it?
For millionaires, this might not be a big deal, but what about people with a typical 9 5 job? I see how much a solid marketing campaign costs on just one platform (often the monthly expense is equal to at least a full year s salary).
The day before yesterday, a friend told me he and his wife are closing their restaurant, which they opened just six months ago. They had taken a loan for it, which makes it even worse.
Credits look like a solution to variable cost. They're really a way of moving the variance onto the user without telling them.
In Arteza a quick edit and a full multi shot render are about 12x apart in what they cost us to run. Both are priced in the same unit. So someone learns an exchange rate from the cheap action, builds a mental model, then spends a third of their balance in one click and feels robbed. That isn't a pricing bug. We asked them to hold a cost model in their head that we never showed them.
What's worked is putting the credit cost on the button before the click instead of in a docs table. Boring fix, and it cut the where did my credits go messages more than any price change we made.
The part I haven't solved is failures. A bad output still burned the compute. Refund it and people retry until they like the result. Don't refund and credits feel like a slot machine. We refund and eat it, which won't scale.
At a time when everyone allows themselves to build any solution using AI, it is difficult to differentiate themselves, and makers are betting on more aggressive distribution.
Some differentiate themselves with good tech support, some build their personal brand as a founder, and some pay influencers.
