It is a question of choosing between two evils for us now. Neither option is completely free of flaws.
Human: Recruiters with "gut feelings" who harbor unconscious bias. they reject excellent candidates who just didn't go to the "right" school or didn't just "click." Inconsistent, unfair, and un-auditable.
AI: Algorithms whose training datasets are themselves replete with historical biases. They increase the scale of discrimination at light speed, becoming so-called black boxes that end up rejecting qualified candidates for reasons that humans cannot even fathom.
We are truly deciding to exchange messy, subjective human prejudice for cold, ruthlessly efficient algorithmic prejudice. Is that really an upgrade?
Something I changed my mind about while building a finance app for freelancers.
Say someone made $2,000 last month and $0 this month. The math says -100%. A big red number.
It's correct and it's still misleading. For a freelancer, an empty month often just means a payment is late. So in my app, when a month is at zero, that comparison doesn't show at all. Same with small samples: if there isn't enough history to say something, the screen says that instead of guessing.
A credit balance turns every click into a purchase decision. That's the whole problem and it has nothing to do with the price being too high.
In a tool with several studios a video render costs roughly 40x an image. One credit unit spanning both means the user is doing arithmetic before every button, and the arithmetic gets worse as the balance drops. The first render feels free. The third one has a price tag on it. People stop long before the balance hits zero, and that shows up in your dashboard as low usage, never as a complaint about cost.
As builders, we love tracking daily metrics: MRR, GitHub commits, daily workouts, Inbox Zero. Standard habit trackers are incredibly optimized for this gamification.
But lately, I've realized my "mental RAM" gets completely eaten up by the irregular tasks. The stuff you only need to do every few weeks or months:
Changing the AC filter
Watering specific houseplants
Following up with that one dormant enterprise lead
When I started building, I used my own tool all the time. That was kind of the whole reason I made it. I had a problem, nothing out there fixed it the way I wanted, so I built something.
But lately I ve noticed something.
Most of my time now goes into fixing bugs, answering emails, thinking about pricing, writing posts... and I barely use the product the way a normal user would anymore. I open it to test things, not to actually get stuff done with it.
And I m not sure if that s a problem or just what happens as things grow.
I launch in 5 days. I have 2 paying customers, gotten before I ve done any of the official launching. So now I ve got a new problem: is 2 a trend, or is 2 just 2?
Here s what I ve got so far, and I genuinely can t tell which of these mean something:
Lowering prices because of exit survey data is a classic trap.
If a tool saves someone hours of work they won't care about a twenty dollar price tag, but if it lacks a key integration, no discount will keep them around.
The hardest part is getting them to reply once they've already canceled and moved on to another tool.
Did offering a small gift card or discount help increase your exit interview response rate?
