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0 pointsbrigadier1322y ago0 comments

I read the other 4 sections and they were true pre chatgpt too. It all still applies. There are so many companies out there that I look at and think "how does this business still exist? How has this not been copied? Why hasn't big tech just killed this thing with a clone?"

I think people who know how to code and code for their day job really underestimate how hard it is to build these things. Even the weekend projects. A ton of these "weekend" projects, took a weekend to build, plus years of learning and research into the best most efficient ways of building those kinds of apps.

Building a startup is completely different from your faang / unicorn software engineer dayjob. Where everything is perfectly and comfortable setup for you. There is a team dedicated to making sure your code is deployed every day. The test harnesses are already built. You have dedicated designers telling you exactly how everything should look. It's all easy.

This is like the twitter clone effect. It's a cliche at this point, the casual "I could build twitter in a weekend". Why aren't there a million reddit clones? Why aren't there a million instagram clones? Why aren't there a million notion / canva / figma clones?

If it were that easy to replicate these things they would be out there.

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4 comments · 1 top-level

lossolo2y ago· 3 in thread

There's a difference between social networks, where a network effect is needed, and why we don't see clones of platforms like Instagram or Reddit. Many of today's 'AI startups' are essentially just a landing page with a few hundred lines of code generated by GPT-4 to connect with the OpenAI API. The key element in these startups is their unique prompt used with the API. Essentially, cloning this type of startup boils down to replicating this prompt.

brigadier132OP2y ago

> There's a difference between social networks, where a network effect is needed

Ok, but why aren't there a thousand "made in a weekend" clones that at the very least function but have no users?

> Many of today's 'AI startups' are essentially just a landing page with a few hundred lines of code generated by GPT-4 to connect with the OpenAI API

This is a strawman. Most of the AI startups that have raised significant money are not that.

Zak2y ago

> Ok, but why aren't there a thousand "made in a weekend" clones that at the very least function but have no users?

There are.

When Reddit switched from Lisp to Python, a number of Lisp users had negative things to say about that, and made their own clones over short time intervals to show just how superior Lisp is. There are a bunch of open source clones now: https://github.com/topics/reddit-clone

Twitter is even more trivial to clone, and this has more results: https://github.com/topics/twitter-clone

I'm not going to track down all the attempts to commercialize clones of either that shut down after a month, but they're out there.

lossolo2y ago

> Ok, but why aren't there a thousand "made in a weekend" clones that at the very least function but have no users?

Because you are using social network to connect/interact with other people? If I'm making a simple AI tool powered by LLM then I don't need other users to make it useful for you.

> This is a strawman. Most of the AI startups that have raised significant money are not that.

It's not a straw man argument if adding a condition to your statement is necessary to refute it. In fact, having to do so is essentially the definition of a straw man.

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