Not sure if your comment is supposed to be sarcastic, if not, it’s totally narcissistic. I hope in next 6 months your competition would increase 10x

While I understand both of your perspectives, please think about how frustrating it can be to have poured years into building a product genuinely solving a problem and building a relationship with clients only for a dozens AI copy cats to come in. Even if your product is clearly better, the SEO slop alone will raise your marketing cost, price cutting will affect you as not all clients are able to tell quality before purchase or will know of your project, etc. And in the end, everyone is worse of. We get less for the products we build. Customers in many cases get a worse solution. And the AI copy cats multiply until none of them can make a living from it.

If your product is really good, then people will choose it over AI copy cats. If that’s not the case then it’s time to take a really hard look at your product and see if that’s really as good as you think

Exactly. People on a forum dedicated to a VC should know that disruption happens everywhere, AI just makes it easier but it's been happening for a long time, that is the nature of startups in general.

That's a naive view of things. People don't have perfect information about the world around them. They can only go on what limited information filters to them. AI copycats will by their very nature be better at marketing and pushing information into people's faces. It's bad information, but how are customers supposed to know that?

> And in the end, everyone is worse of.

I don't know, it really depends on the product. If we were all still paying for proprietary UNIX in the current year, then it's likely that these startups would never exist in the first place. Sometimes a SAAS has to admit that it's not providing real value before actual innovation becomes the status quo. I don't weep many tears for dying businesses because nobody lives forever.

The guy is genuinely worried for his future. I see nothing shameful or narcissistic about that, and I don't think it makes sense for you to wish him any harm.

He is not worried about his future, he’s just mad the competition is catching up to him and his superior complex. It definitely make sense to wish him more competition to humble him

He/She is literally talking putting food on the table and yet you are interpreting it as superiority complex. I am not sure if we are even reading the same comment here.

Also, competition in itself not bad. It does mess people's livelihoods when competition is sudden and massive - he/she mentioned 5x increase in competition in 6 months. That is too much, too fast, it is not easy navigating/surviving it

you most probably read some other comment. Also competition is not bad as long as it doesn't affect you in a negative way is not a valid argument, it's just a another selfish rant

Most people work to survive, not for the sheer joy of delivering value to company stakeholders.

then work on something else.

How about no

Then stop whining or suffer in silence

Person who lacks empathy accuses another of being a narcissist...

I’m not empathising with narcissists

It might be miserable for you, but it sounds great for your customers. I am genuinely sympathetic though.

A healthy competition is always good for the customer but I have my doubts on the healthy part.

A flood of fly by night products with low effort mess is going to lower the trust in genuine indie development products and could drive users towards established names in the industry.

In some way it's like the new PR flood on github. On the surface more PRs looks like a positive thing but it had unintended consequences.

Like the famous Market for Lemons, where a similar information asymmetry produces market failure that ends up making things worse for both buyers and sellers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

New signals of trustworthiness will emerge (are already emerging.)

More shots at the big names is not going to entrench them, even if most of those shots don't go anywhere.

The big names also need to stay competitive against internally developed solutions inside what would have been their bread-and-butter enterprise customers, so they have to compete on features and quality like indies.

Now we have 100 fly by night vendors! Awesome!

Reputation will matter more than ever before

How do you build reputation when you have 100 competitors who will do shady things to get customers before pulling the rug out from under them. Your pockets aren't deep enough to survive until there are pieces to pick up.

> People that didn't have the skills to compete, now do.

Come on now, you can’t be mad that people acquired the skills.

Realize that whatever your frustration is, those people who acquired the skills are probably not the root cause of whatever is currently going on, in the bigger picture sense.

Maybe a lot of them can now put food on their table.

I sincerely hope things work out for you.