Anyone can build a platform now. Almost nobody can get people to find it

46 points by misterinfo 16 hours ago on hackernews | 26 comments

ctdinjeu8 | 15 hours ago

We need vibe marketing

boredatoms | 15 hours ago

Just need to pay for ad placements within the LLM prompts

chasd00 | 14 hours ago

It’s inevitable the ads end up in code. How much would a third party ORM library creator pay Anthropic to get Claude to use their ORM wherever possible and then prompt the user to buy a license to continue? Think about that across different use cases and not just code. It would be bigger than Adsense.

stavros | 6 hours ago

Who would use a coding tool that said "I've used library X out of all the alternatives, please pay the license now"?

castedo | 15 hours ago

... and vibe subscriptions that we can vibe pay with vibecoin.

kevmo314 | 15 hours ago

I’ll take one vibe life please

coldtea | 14 hours ago

vibe buyers

em-bee | 12 hours ago

you mean like AI agents?

coldtea | 4 hours ago

No, I mean what is missing is an AI solution to "nobody cares to pay for what you generated".

an0malous | 15 hours ago

A related dynamic: even getting attention requires increasingly fantastical and absurd claims. You basically have to lie about what your product is capable of because your competitors are. If you're making an app to find and save recipes, you have to pitch it as an AI chef that will find delicious, customized recipes that will cure your diabetes while also making you last longer in bed. There's so much mania right now that your traction will outpace any public criticism or scrutiny, and you'll get acquired by Amazon for $50M within a couple years. Crazy times.

jakerubo | 15 hours ago

In B2B I see the opposite.

F500/large enterprise buyers are getting questionnaire-fatigue from endless internal AI security, compliance, and legal reviews that they actively avoid products who market "AI" as their primary feature.

The rules of product market fit and go-to-market fit remain the same. Customers will always buy the product, AI or not, that both solves their problem and is priced/marketed in a way that makes it possible to purchase.

OptionOfT | 14 hours ago

So the market is healing?

cheschire | 15 hours ago

Not hotdog. But eight octopus recipe.

AlienRobot | 15 hours ago

This platform could have been a single article titled "10 projects made with Claude." You'd just need to find another 9.

aatd86 | 15 hours ago

network effects in action and supply flooding demand.

cpard | 15 hours ago

This is a good article and hopefully it served its purpose of generating awareness for the platform but I have to disagree with the core claim of the article.

Distribution was always the hardest part in building a business, sure today it’s easier to vibe code something in a day or two but there is a reason that for a long time now the standard advice to technical founders has been to not build before you have conviction on the product market fit.

And product market fit means that you have also figured out how to get to the market, aka distribution.

jochem9 | 11 hours ago

So maybe now the advice could be to build a passable mvp and then use that to figure out the product-market fit.

It's a lot easier to think about it and discuss it with others when the product is tangible instead of just an idea. Biggest challenges then are being able to still diverge (broaden/pivot the product idea) and killing functionality that doesn't work out afterall.

blini-kot | 15 hours ago

well maybe we don't need those platforms?

the big platforms are sort of tolerated because you can't really escape them, not because people like them

another small one? nah, thank you, I have plenty of my own useless projects to look after

> "Claude" is a (registered) trademark of Anthropic PBC.

The author is attempting to bait Anthropic by using their registered trademarked product name to send a cease and desist for attention. This is how it works:

1. Anthropic sends the cease and desist and tells him to change the (domain) name. The author does it quickly.

2. The author then in another blog post says he got so much attention, Anthropic tried to shut him down.

3. Everyone falls for it and the author relaunches with the new project / domain name + with more attention.

The domain similarity and layout looks like a setup for that purpose for manufactured drama and attention so that he can make another post crying wolf about Anthropic shutting him down.

ricardonunez | 14 hours ago

I was going to point out that the Claude was trademarked, it didn’t cross my mind that it was by design.

nickvec | 14 hours ago

“And that part, as I'm learning the hard way, is the part that actually matters.”

Anyone else’s slop detector go off on this sentence? Or am I losing it?

TonyAlicea10 | 14 hours ago

Lots of slop indicators in this article. That’s why I didn’t finish reading it.

If the author doesn’t have the time or care to write it, why should have the time or care to read it?

crummy | 14 hours ago

I think your detector is overly sensitive. That sounds like a very common way to phrase a sentence.

lesostep | 9 hours ago

My slop detector got pinged.

I'm not saying it's AI. But founder build a platform around this issue and then discovered that this issue is hard?

If it's not an AI-slop, it still shows a sloppy reasoning.

He claims anyone can build what he build, and furthermore that he doesn't know how to actually solve the outreach problem. So essentially he did nothing and achieved nothing and instead only moving on, he decides to double down.

Site menu doesn't work, half of pages are missing, I tried to learn what his plans are moving forward, and couldn't find anything.

Even with AI, if you want to sell people on the idea that you personally can make a site, you should present a site that works.

If you claim that there is a solution, you should present an evidence.

It's not enough to say "everyone can do it with AI". I wouldn't trust a site like that not to leak my info.

Even if it's not AI, it still sloppy. I understand if it was a blog rant, but it's not.

cbdevidal | 14 hours ago

> The fourth thing is that I am trying out marketing ads on social media and that includes posting ads on Facebook and Reddit. I'm doing a smaller ad spend at first to see if it is worth spending extra money on advertising on certain platforms.

Drill into this. Really optimize and test. The more I learn about marketing, the more I recognize that paid ads can and do work, but you must really persist with them.

Learned a lot from Alex Hormozi, Allan Dib, and Seth Godin. Start there.

skybrian | 14 hours ago

It seems like if I were looking for software to do something specific, I might do a Google search, or ask an AI to do some searches for me. I wouldn't be interested in browsing this sort of website even if it had a lot more content.

Are there other people who find software this way? I've heard of Product Hunt, but never used it.