Yesterday I checked a month worth of conversation with one of my AI (yes it was claude). This month alone i shared with Anthropic my blood test results to figure em out and some legal contracts (back and forth) that I wanted to revise both manually and thru mr claude to double check. Those were the most sensitive ones among other information i sent within conversations. Search engines already knew a lot about me, i see that from ADs tailored to my preferences. Companies like this go beyond knowing your liking, with context, including private things. I don t necessarily think that makes anyone a villain, as this is roughly the same trade we made with email and maps and photos, and most of us took it (I did at least) without much hesitation. What I notice is that I never actually decided how I feel about it, as it is me who decides what to share with them (more or less). So my question to you is where s your line? Do you think about what goes in, or is this a trade you ve already made? If none of it left your machine, what would you ask that you don t ask now? (you don t have to be specific haha)
Dragging a dead project along for months just because you've already put so much time into it is a terrible feeling. I've been there you know deep down after month two that the idea has no traction but you keep writing code every night just to avoid admitting it failed.
Deleting that repository hits hard because it feels like throwing away all those late nights.
Looking back what was the exact sign that made you finally kill your project instead of pushing through?
When we launched our software year we set the price at nine dollars a month because we were afraid that nobody would pay more for an early stage tool. Signups came in fast. Our support costs soon grew faster, than our revenue and working late nights became unsustainable.
Of raising the price on the entire public landing page we ran a quiet experiment with new visitors. We added a forty nine dollar tier that included priority setup support. We expected the conversion rate to fall to zero. Surprisingly twenty percent of new users chose the higher tier.
The higher price attracted serious users who needed less hand holding and who valued the software s core utility. Our monthly recurring revenue tripled, even though the customer volume was cut in half proving that underpricing was our bottleneck.
How did you find the courage to raise your price. How did your early users react?
Everyone says to test demand before you build. We didn t. We built the product first, like a lot of people do, and only afterward found a fast way to test the part we d skipped.
What we re testing now isn t really the idea - it s the positioning: Does someone landing on our page understand what the product is? Does the offer make sense? Does the pricing feel right? We use a paid research panel (Prolific, though there are others like Wynter, PickFu and Lyssna) to put the page in front of people who match our audience. They read it and answer a short questionnaire: What do you think this does? Do you understand it? Does the price seem fair? You pick the audience, they review, you pay per response. A few hours to prepare, results back the same day.
It's been most useful for catching where people misread the offer - something our existing users can t really tell us, because they already understood it well enough to sign up. We ll use this approach for landing page changes from now on, and we ll run these tests before building the next thing rather than after.
How do you test whether people understand your product or your idea before you commit to it?
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