Digital products I feel are becoming more and more "content" nowadays.
Lots of previously "durable" products because there was some kind of technical or ability moat is gone, so everyone releasing software is always racing against each other.
I think this reality is hitting freelancers, agencies, and all the way past funded startups to large SaaS companies. That's why layoffs are hitting across the board.
If this person was "wildly profitable in most years" and made a around $500k over 9 years — that's less than what a junior engineer would make even if they never got any raises. And they wouldn't have to hire a team, pay corp taxes before paying themselves, etc.
I think every kind of work and job is now getting reduced to the content grind treadmill — including for the large companies. That's the final form of business and work.
> that's less than what a junior engineer would make even if they never got any raises
You have to factor in how much time you spend on the content for it to be comparable. A normal tech US salary job would be 9am to 6pm and maybe 15-30 days of PTO a year.
If you have a course or book that made $500,000 over 9 years, you might have spent 4-5 months making it up front and then XX hours per year for support and keeping it up to date. The return doesn't sound bad if you spent 40 hours a year on it. That's 320 hours over 8 years or roughly 2 months of full time work.
> that's less than what a junior engineer would make even if they never got any raises. And they wouldn't have to hire a team, pay corp taxes before paying themselves, etc.
If they first got a job, in the U.S probably, and kept one for that long, which is hardly a given these days.
Also correlates with the rise in people believing that brand -building is just as important as actual skills. As in, the only way to stand out is to be Someone.
It’s ultimately a pick me scenario, and still fundamentally submissive.
> It’s ultimately a pick me scenario, and still fundamentally submissive.
To add to that, it's very easy for platforms to game the system by actually picking winners and then having tonnes of wannabes trying to 'make it'. It's cruel really.
if you take this analysis one step further, it doesn't make sense for the whole world to sustain itself selling entertainment and hobby products to upper middle class Americans.
In no other market is ip and advertising worth much.
> PS: like I said in early 2023, The programming tutorial SEO industry is dead. ChatGPT and friends can answer all newbie questions customized to the problem at hand. The future is in hard-earned deep insights that are hard to fake or buy.
Well, sure, there's no point in writing yet another Next.js starter tutorial. There never was after the first three, but when new technology comes out, someone is going to have to explore it and write about it if you want an LLM to be trained to do the same. Someone correct me if I've gotten that wrong.
The author makes this distinction between a "business" and a "job", but it'd be more accurate to call it the difference between "rent-seeking" and "production" imo.
Putting aside investing and landlordism, the vast majority of new businesses require decades of work to get to the point where you just make money without doing any work, if they ever do. Just ask any small business owner—if it was that foolproof and easy, everyone would do it.
> It's more like owning a job than running a business
And I like that analogy for its illustrative purposes
As the business couldnt be sold or the key person couldnt be replaced economically, or at all [1] for it to become passive
I think all of those businesses you used as an example are also bad businesses, akin to owning a job
[1] If I was that person I would probably attempt fine tuning a language model on my writing style and churning out more since the brand name is the valuable part, or at least consider it
> But you're only as good as your last hit. You can never stop. The business will milk until there's no more milk to give. Even if it's your own business.
Fits my intuition. I'm about to launch niche "content" site, as an indie side project, and this reality has been at the back of my mind.
For content planning, I have a funnel with a dozen topics in it, and maybe I'll think of a dozen more.
But after that, it's only half a machine: an audience, a formula, some bureaucratic&infrastructure stuff, a little bespoke tech, and a trailing period of recurring revenue from some partnerships.
The half that's not a machine scales only linearly with skilled human effort: a combination of quality content developing, partnership courting, and guerilla marketing.
There's a way to throw LLM methods and some nontrivial code at scaling the content, but the LLM component to the quality will be awful. So the resulting LLM-involved content would be no better than the existing SEO sewage farms that are already polluting Google hits.
One of the reasons I'm not branding it with my personal name is that, once I've handmade the 1-2 dozen content topics that I can do fairly easily, and the monthly recurring revenue (guessing) trends flat and eventually down, I'm thinking I might be willing to sell the business. To grow it, the buyer would have to throw in other humans, to continue to make quality content. (Though, throwing in the humans, to mesh with the gears of the machine, isn't the right imagery.)
(Or, there's a potential pivot to a VC-backed type of company, loosely based on related know-how that's not obvious from the modest, kitchen-table indie content. But I think that pivot involves either B2B enterprise sales to brands doing direct-to-consumer sales, or a different PoC and then acquisition by one of a few massive online retailers. (Google would have the resources to do something related, as a third party to the brands and retailers, with necessarily more of an AI spin, but I guess the first person there to whom you pitched the idea would probably run with it, in-house, since they're no longer acquihiring everyone.) None of those business options I'd attempt without a lot of funding and complementary skillset firepower. Also, none of the possibly very lucrative options I see is a content business.)
> My pulling back started in ~2023 after 8 years of thinking, 24/7, "what's the next thing I'm gonna write about?". I was tired and the biz wasn't sparking joy like it once used to. Burnout is grind with no reward.
> The business stopped being profitable almost immediately. That's the strongest sign I have that this is a bad business. It's more like owning a job than running a business.
Did I get that right? Having to work to earn money makes a business bad?
And I thought extracting money without creating value was the bad thing to do.
A sound business should have solid inertia to still create value to people for quite a while when an individual takes a short break from putting in 100% (voluntarily or not). A business which immediately become unprofitable the second you stop working is, like the author describes, acting more like a contract job than a healthy business (especially if it's only at 500k of revenue in that time with a small team of people - not much buffer to be made out of that revenue regardless of the margin).
Usually the main goal is to create value doing something you like to do. Of course there are far more than one bad or one good thing to do with a business so that doesn't exclude other things from being on either side of the scale.
Does inertia matter? Or is it just another way of saying that the revenue is low?
I'd rather have X in my pocket instantly after creating the value rather than have half instantly and get the rest as an inertial trickle over the next year.
If you can make the assumption the total amounts will be equal then sure, better to just want it no and pocket it for later. Almost always they won't be equal though, even if you can convince everyone to buy immediately (which is a feat in itself).
More likely you'll reach some percentage of your target market in your first month while some other percentage still won't have heard of you or won't have the interest/money/time (depending what you sell) at that exact moment (and for them it's the opposite - better to wait until they expect to use it than buy early). In a year there might be a significant new group to sell to (say you're selling intro to python material and now you've got a new years worth of people to sell to).
None of that really matters if nobody buys your content after 6 months. You get those initial ones and you're done. It's a tough environment to build a business in because you can't just flick a switch that says "anyone who can possibly want to buy my stuff will do so this week", you have to battle to get as many as you can before it dies out and you need the new thing (or at least an updated thing).
Assuming that the amount of value you create corresponds to the amount of money you are rewarded with - within the same market, then it's just about revenue.
In your examples, you open up new markets, and doing that changes the other side of the equation: you need more work to get that extra income later.
In the end, that example changes all three: the amount of work, the amount of reward, and the time distribution, so I don't think it really shows that inertia is so common.
"Bad" in the sense that it's not a business that is much different from being in a job.
It is reasonable for someone to think that a business isn't a good business if it relies so much on any single person that the revenue craters the moment one person is pulling away.
It's at the very least not a solid business, and it is a high-risk one. What if you get sick?
I'd have kept my keyboard shut if the implication presented was "work and little revenue is bad business", but here I'm seeing "no work and no profit is bad business".
I’m not seeing the no work part. He has other people working for him. It’s one thing to have a passion project you enjoy. Having something that seems to be at least aspirational in terms of being a business that is burning you out? Seems time to move on.
500k in 8 years for a software engineer is not that much money. Unless you live in a LCOL location, you'd probably would have to juggle between a day job and your side hustle.
Most people would think, ok, but once the content is ready, it'd pay itself. But things are not that easy. You have to answer questions, need to update your content for it to continue attracting customers.
There comes a time when you're fucking tired, and you put down every hour you worked on your content vs how much you got, and you find out that you're making 2x, 3x dollars an hour in your day job than you're making on hustle hours.
But not only that, those hours have a higher marginal cost for you, any additional hour after a full work day is increasingly more painful.
The idea with most businesses is that you invest in creating the machine, so eventually it doesn’t require 100% of your attention to get paid every day. Either because you hired and trained someone to do parts of it, or automated parts of it, or invested enough capital that it doesn’t require as much ‘sweat’ every day.
Something that requires you show up and do the same work every day to make the same money is generally referred to as ‘a job’. In this case, one with no real job security or safety net either.
All content will be consumed by AI and regurgitated by them, and content creators won’t get anything from it. Content creation is a complete waste of time at this point unless AI companies are prevented from consuming content for free, and regurgitating the answers.
Distribution is a part of the business. A question-answer based AI is an inferior distribution method to a human-written email that gets sent to my inbox once a week.
Is it really that hard to make utility of a crawler visit to ones page negative? Hidden links with boatloads of garbage, generated nonsense and so on ...
Seems like the only viable method how to fight back to me.
Maybe a link that effectively works as a crawler trap, where it links to a bunch of Markov chain garbage, and the Markov chains just keep linking to more that are randomly generated.
Markov chains are almost free compared to LLM generation, and the content, from a machine point of view, couldn't simply be ruled out as non-human unless you had a smaller model in the background pruning out that sort of thing.
That won’t matter because AI changes the market from a “speculative, broad-appeal” content model to an “on-demand individually tailored” one. Consumers will stop searching for something sorta like they wanted and start asking for exactly what they want. Pushing static content onto a web site won’t be able to compete most of the time.
What wouldn't matter? LLMs feed on content and data scraped from web pages, and writers don't want their work stolen. That's it. It doesn't matter if AI made search engines obsolete and changed the market or whatever. It will still need to scrap content in some other way and the comment above is exploring counter-measures.
They don't need to fight "AI" and prevent it, they only need to make sure their work isn't stolen at individual level, and there are tons of options they can adapt.
> LLMs feed on content and data scraped from web pages...
Not exclusively, no. As we march forward I'd expect:
- the number of web pages generated by AI will outpace the number generated by humans, probably on the order of a few magnitudes, meaning that human-generated content will drown in a sea of machine generated content. Furthermore, ad-supported web sites will all be AI generated, cutting off advertising funding for human-generated sites
- this will make web pages a very poor source of information to scrape overall, since it'll mostly be LLM output
- sophisticated AI builders will start signing licensing deals with content creators that gives them exclusive access for their AI. Think: Medical and legal journals, large archives of historical works, stock market historical data, technical manuals, etc. This content isn't very consumer friendly as-is, but could be used to generate consumer friendly content that is technically more accurate.
> It's weird how you paint that it's inevitable, just to tell them "tough luck"? They don't need to fight "AI" they only need to make sure their work isn't stolen, and there are many options they can adapt to.
I think you're suggesting that people can continue publishing their content on publicly accessible web sites and that they're somehow able to detect that their site is being visited by an AI web scraper, and in those cases they feed "garbage" to the scraper. I'm suggesting that this will be a loosing battle, that trying to detect bots already is a forever-war that can't be won, while at the same time consumer behavior will change such that publishing pages on public web sites won't be an effective way to reach an audience because of the mountains of AI-generated content.
Which raises the question what would be the point of LLMs when the majority of their training data is just the fluff generated by other LLMs. When the output of an LLM becomes indistinguishable from its input, why go to the trouble of training it at all?
I don't believe that LLM's cannot be made such that they distinguish AI from non-AI content. On the contrary. There are ways to compare similarly looking content and digging up the one that provides most insights, new ideas or actually measured data. There are ways to find out how 'old' the content is by keeping track of when it is updated and in what way (the actual data or just meta data about it, or just their interpretation or presentation).
The crawlers/bots spend time and energy and hence will be optimized to not just blindly eat rehashed content. Unlike currently google's search engine. The latter feeds on the revenues of the rehashed/ad'ified content.
The obvious answer is to do more with it. This will actually be a positive as soon as science is done by AI. As soon as the economy is done by AI. As soon as wars are fought by AI.
> Most people consuming this beginner content should turn off youtube, think of a project, and go write some code.
In theory. In practice, they will stay on YT and then use an LLM to crank out some code. I suspect the ways newbies learn to code are about to change, and there will be no going back.
And it looks like the author agrees:
> ChatGPT and friends can answer all newbie questions customized to the problem at hand. The future is in hard-earned deep insights that are hard to fake or buy.
LLMs don't really teach you. They give you masticated and off-base talking points that make you feel like you understand something. Worst case scenario they do the work for you and you have a crutch.
There will be a lot of 'coders' unable spot the bugs in their AI slop and incapable of deviating from the deep ruts of the most common code bases LLMs get trained on.
The hype will not sustain its current intensity, that's for sure, but even so, some of the LLM usage patterns will stick. I'd consider anything outside of entertainment too risky, but that's just my opinion.
> The launch is an intense marketing push with a component of artificial scarcity.
I consider artificial scarcity to be an unethical practice. It's literally lying. It uses fake timers to pressure people into buying or fake limits to suggest that they need to buy now. Does it work? Absolutely. Is it ethical? Not a chance.
The situation where "hey, we've got too much of [this] because [whatever reason], so we'll mark it down in order to sell it" is how a Free Market is 'supposed to work': prices operating as a signaling mechanism, by which everyone receives all of the (relevant) information.
Price-manipulation strategies juice sales by exploiting buyers' psychological reward mechanisms. Defenders of current practice will say it's OK because willing-buyer-willing-seller - which is certainly true - but everything about those techniques injects noise into the price-signals that make market economies efficient goods-distribution systems.
I'm kind of a free-market fundamentalist, and think any marketing beyond informational marginally contributes to market failure.
Yes, I know nearly everyone on this board makes their money downstream from manipulative marketing practices, so it's easier to close our eyes to the consequences. (I'm not playing the purity card, by the way: my company does very little marketing, but it manipulates other psychological reward systems in equally destructive-to-humanity ways.) We're all complicit in building the systems we (should) deplore.
retail stores have inventory and limited space to store it. they do need to get rid of old inventory before they can store new products. because of long timespans from production to delivery, they need to anticipate demand, and sometimes they get that wrong and they don't sell their current inventory before the new stuff arrives. then they can either try to sell more through sales, or rent extra storage.
Lots of previously "durable" products because there was some kind of technical or ability moat is gone, so everyone releasing software is always racing against each other.
I think this reality is hitting freelancers, agencies, and all the way past funded startups to large SaaS companies. That's why layoffs are hitting across the board.
If this person was "wildly profitable in most years" and made a around $500k over 9 years — that's less than what a junior engineer would make even if they never got any raises. And they wouldn't have to hire a team, pay corp taxes before paying themselves, etc.
I think every kind of work and job is now getting reduced to the content grind treadmill — including for the large companies. That's the final form of business and work.
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