After literally years of being told that by technologists about software, books, etc etc I can’t think of almost any market which has ever been saturated in the way that people claim every market is saturated.
Freaking *Starbucks* is not.
Starbucks of the industry-leading commercial real estate team which will give serious consideration to putting two Starbucks on the same street corner to avoid losing potential Starbucks customers who were at that street corner wanting Starbucks but not enough to turn for it!
Tagging the above tweet as being in no way sarcastic; they factually are one of the best real estate operations in the US (Walgreens and McDonalds also very good at this even within their categories) and they absolutely will take two corners.
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X: To get compensation for XYZ the firm wants all nine digits of our zip code.
Me: Oof well thats look-uppable.
X: I think this is intentional friction to avoid a payout. Certainly they didn't need [nine digits] to charge my credit card.
Me: Oh AVS verification fun fact.
X: What could be a fun fact.
Me: So AVS *can* return a code allowing some credit card schemes to discriminate between a 9 digit match and only a 5 digit match but in practice false positives eat all the benefit from more aggressive forms of matching than just five digits so...
... relatively few companies would benefit from either asking for the full nine digits or rejecting transactions for which they are wrong.
X: Not helping.
Me: Sorry.
A word to the wise. Don't invent a fictitious entity and attempt to open a bank account for it. The laws for bank fraud are drafted *broadly.*
But if you must, then don't do it while arguing for an expansion of the Bank Secrecy Act regime, because the existing BSA regime already orders your bank to inform on you.
But if you must, then don't do it while engaging in organized pressure campaign against firms with strong recordkeeping culture and an institutional desire to please government.
Term life is a commodity product. Premium never changes after you lock in the term. Many people reading this will pay tens or low hundreds of dollars per million in coverage.
Next up at MicroConf: @robwalling on How to use AI in SaaS.
This has been something of an undercurrent in a lot of conversations here. Lots of unease and anxiety about it, and IMHO a bit overblown w/r/t impact on SaaS specifically.
With that, Rob:
Rob did informal survey of a few hundred TinySeed companies (he runs a VC/accelerator which invests in many bootstrapped-adjacent software companies) to see how its actually getting deployed in production.
Taxonomy: six-ish ways that companies actually metabolizing it.
AI as product: Difficult for bootstrappers to keep up with the labs on LLM/etc development. Very, very tractable to make something downstream of the labs.
A common model I have is that, like many people, I have some finite amount of consequential decisions I can make a day. This is sometimes a frustration for my wife, who wants me to spend a decision on e.g. “What color should we make…”
There are some classes of non-domestic decisions which still seem to take a slot, and where there are theoretically wrong answers, but where any plausible answer is fine.
I love having LLMs available for this.
Example from earlier: “Should we use X medication for symptom management of a minor recurring condition, or should we escalate to a medial professional for a recommendation?”
I probably could have Googled to kick off a research process, but that’s -1 for the day.
Also helps in the intermediate stages when you're dealing with accountant questions which might be, how do I say this nicely, "I thought I was hiring you to give me answers in this domain." Much higher bandwidth than multiple messages in an email thread at tax time.
"Why is he asking this?"
"Presumably he is attempting to qualify whether you have specified foreign financial assets."
"What does he really need to know?"
"Is the Tokyo condo held directly or in an LLC/etc"
"Held directly."
"OK so no you don't have those assets."
"Find authority"