> 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.)
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.)