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Just chipping in to say that I've never seen it churn for more than 20 minutes in two years worth of usage. The longest I've ever seen it churn is when I had it give extremely detailed analysis of five fictional novels simultaneously.

Fictional novels? Did it have to write them first?

No, I wrote them myself (training my wetware to write more as I get older).

I was using claude to create a codex of characters/lore/etc. I also had it auto-build a website promoting the books.


Love to see it if you're up for sharing

Fun random fact, Eventbrite was first a security company called Molly Guard. I spent years cleaning out the 'mg-' prefixes from the code.


I spent a long time playing with the sim. Nice work.

Most of the random data sets that I ran ended up with a two body system, where the third body was flung far into space never to return. However, some of these were misleading. I had one running for 15 minutes at 5x, and the third body did eventually return.


> However, some of these were misleading. I had one running for 15 minutes at 5x, and the third body did eventually return.

That's not misleading. Real three-body orbital systems show this same behavior. Consider that such a system must obey energy conservation, so only a few extreme edge cases lose one of its members permanently (not impossible, just unlikely).

Ironically, because computer simulators are based on numerical DE solvers, they sometimes show outcomes that a real orbital system wouldn't/couldn't.


I don’t understand. How would energy not be conserved if one flew away? It’s not in the system, but it’s still out there?


I'm just saying that, because of energy conservation, an escaping member would need to permanently carry away more than 1/3 of the system energy (for equal-mass satellites). This is possible but unlikely.


It might be fun to add some kind of visualization showing when a body has enough energy to potentially escape the system.


Question, can you mathmatically plot a trajectory across time X and energy required to see when it's met and how long it would take given a start position or something? Or is the simulation so complex that you can never project. Oh never mind I see answers to this elsewhere here, cheers.


Agree. I was hoping perhaps it would "flash" or do something visually different to indicate "Bye bye!"


TOME can be natively performing with tmux panes.

Steps:

1. have two panes open

2. In pane 0, have your cursor or a line or multiple lines of code

3. :VtrSendLinesToRunner

4. In pane 1, the lines are performed


I'm a tmux/vim user and heavily use claude code. It's good.


I've been using a very similar setup with vim/tmux for about 20 years. I've tried all the new IDEs but still keep coming back. With AI, I thought I was going to have to change until Claude code. Now I'm back in my happy place.


Same!

So relieved Claude Code and Aider exist now - I almost bought into the Cursor hype


Elena's article is content marketing. It doesn't look dead to me.


I'm a founder of 3 small saas companies that I run by myself, generating about $1M ARR.

1. First one I started 10 years ago. I built a bot that auto DMed people in various internet forums. My first 100 users came from that. The product is highly shareable, so it quickly grew. Now it's 1.6M users (most of them free).

2. Second started 3.5 years ago. My first 100 users came from simply emailing the newsletter list from my first company. This product has no free plan, so it became profitable instantly.

3. Third started 1 month ago. And it's been a struggle. I got 10k free users just by emailing my list, but 0 paying users. So I tried ads and had similar results from the ads. Now I'm taking a step back and understanding why they aren't paying, which involves just emailing them.

Summary: once you have an email list and viral social loops built-in, marketing gets easier.


    > Third started 1 month ago. And it's been a struggle. I got 10k free users just by emailing my list, but 0 paying users. So I tried ads and had similar results from the ads. Now I'm taking a step back and understanding why they aren't paying, which involves just emailing them.
I looked at the product! And I think I know why you're struggling. (I am in your target demo)

It's just not worth the price. You're competing against CapCut by ByteDance & that's "good enough." Their platform is freemium, uploads directly to tiktok etc. & can get you serviceable subtitles quickly.

There are a bajillion and one ways to cut videos. And they're all extremely price competitive. You aren't competing against DaVinci's studio license. You're competing against the free one.

And at the stated price point, I might as well buy Adobe After effects for $23 & use it alongside DaVinci's free license.

The value just isn't there.


I'm realizing this a bit too late I think. My only value over something like capcut is the API, which most users don't care about.

But I see products like submagic doing $1m arr and I'm at loss. How are they doing so well? It can't just be their editor.

So I think the way forward for my product, if any, is to just target b2b for API usage or target users who want long form video cut into viral clips automatically. I need to niche it down.


    > How are they doing so well? It can't just be their editor.
Their B-roll feature is amazing. People often spend time hunting down B-roll and it seems they solve that. They make it easier to make videos by splicing in applicable B-roll + cleaning up audio so that it sounds nice.


> First one I started 10 years ago. I built a bot that auto DMed people in various internet forums. My first 100 users came from that.

Isn't this by definition Spamming people as you were using bots to mass DM people?


Yes. Surprise surprise, most businesses generate most of their initial sales via cold calls/emails/DMs/other automated marketing. That’s the real world


And because they create so much noise, no option left for a new comer other than trying to shout louder than them. All-in-all a vicious cycle of spamming!


This is older than the ideas of the internet itself.

Channels get saturated and marketers start looking for new ones with les noise/competition.

The oldest that I can think of is old school markets where is shops yells to tell you how good of a deal you're gonna have if you buy from them. I think they date back to the middle ages, no?


Older, almost certainly. The discovery of advertising murals and graffiti in Hereculum makes me smile a little. Humans have been humans all along.


A.k.a. the marketplace (the literal one) 50 years ago!


What do you mean, 50 years ago? Go to any smallish town in German and you’ll find a farmers market about once a week, with people shouting at passerby’s to buy their cheap produce. Probably the same in most European countries, and I’d wager in many other parts of the world?


Sure. One difference.

I can't hear them here in Canada, and indeed, I can't hear everyone on the planet who is shouting.

Unlike spam.


You read the spam in my inbox today?

You got the initial product invite from the GP?


This might be the reminder bot


  Now I'm taking a step back and understanding why they aren't paying, which involves just emailing them.
Maybe too anecdotal, but inflation has hit everyone I know really hard in the last year. Especially in tech.

Subscriptions, insurance, bills have skyrocketed. I believe many are taking a step back and rethinking necessities.


Ripple effects of success! How do you manage customer support for so many users in 3 different companies alone?


I have them all wired up to helpscout. Then a contractor checks the inbox every 8 hours to clear them out. She covers the hours I'm asleep as well.

I also have it posting to a slack channel so we can quickly scan any urgent ones while I'm working.

Bugs pop in heavily on new feature launches but then it's the usual "my email didn't arrive" type of questions.


How is it working for you to just email users? I've done this in the past and didn't get great response rates.


Am I correct to assume that each of these 3 businesses are roughly in the same problem space? I’m not sure how useful re-using an emailing list would be if each business was wildly different.


Yes, I generally build new products around my current audience.


Awesome! Followed you on X. Can you elaborate more on what you mean by "viral social loops"?


Any b2c product I build has huge incentive to share the product, creating more users.

In the product itself, social is part of the value. So the more they interact, the more value they get. Similar to any social network you see today.

I do this a number of ways, none original. Reactions, upvotes, achievements, streaks, creating summary videos (like Spotify year in review), public recommendations, etc


If you want some great reading material on this, I recommend Reforge's viral loops info. I believe it's free.


I checked, there is a membership to access the full content.

I see what you did there.


I thought they were still doing one free lesson. It's been a while since I was on Reforge though.


ha ha, i was just kidding :)


Not OP but there are more than one ways to tap in to the distribution channels that exists thanks to influencers (Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Substack, Telegram). I, personally, don't see it any different than Nike hiring Lionel Messi or Uniqlo hiring Roger Federer. Where Nike is a global company, indie developers (especially the ones in Software) are smaller and thus could focus on just the right content creators, ie rely on marketing to boost sales.

This phenomenon isn't new. The book The Long Tail posited (way back) that even niche software could make millions now that the Internet had made it cheaper to reach just the right audience.

Teenagers, Zach Yadegari (calai.app) and Blake Anderson (apex.inc), who built million dollar app-based businesses in 6mo, plan to release a book on it: https://x.com/zach_yadegari/status/1845842051314614681 / https://archive.md/xXf9a


It's good to see these success stories, but is also important to account for survivor bias before blindly following their rule book.


Any plans to support other backends besides javascript?


We have an unofficial HTTP api, will add it to the docs but we've already had folks use it for non-js backends! [1]

[1] https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/Unofficial-Admin-HTTP-API--CVa...


Andrew Kane and Chris Oliver are the best of the best in the ruby community IMO. Even if I don't use all their contributions, they are most welcome.


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