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Cold messaging on Facebook + word-of-mouth growth. We found people in one large Facebook group.

To get 1,000, we used SEO.

Our product helps people get ready for the Duolingo English Test, so our target audience was well-defined from the beginning.

I could not agree more with this. I think as the quantity of content increases, quality content will only increase in value.

Because we're just 2 people, the only team we have is us :) That's why whatever our focus is becomes the next phase of our roadmap.

This is the most thought-provoking company I’ve encountered in a long time. Congrats on doing genuinely interesting innovation.

Speaking as a potential user, my biggest hang up is trust. How can I trust that Roundtable’s results are accurate and not the result of hallucination?

One of the powerful things about data is that they surprise you. This is why data integrity is so important (“crap in, crap out” as the old adage goes). But if I get a surprising result from Roundtable, how can I verify it? I think you two are already thinking about this and building features to address it.

I’m also wondering if trying to verify a surprising result from Roundtable is the wrong response…Why would a LLM give me that answer? There may be something useful to understand about why the LLM is “hallucinating.” In terms of features, it may be interesting to see whether Roundtable’s LLM could explain its answer.

The UX could be like having a brilliant but inscrutable research assistant…

You identified exactly the cycles I’m trying to speed up.

Another way to phrase my question would be: What are the cycles that I will likely encounter and what can I do now to be better prepared for them?

That definitely makes sense to me in B2B startups because that’s where I’ve spent my career.

But what does “sales” look like in B2C startups, which is my current project?

I don't think that domain registration would generate enough revenue for Google to care about it as a core business unit, especially because part of Google Domains' pitch was that they had all these obscure domains that were cheaper. My inference is that Google cared about domains because they were complementary to another, core business unit. The obvious one to me is Google Workspace: You come to Google, get your domain, set up your business email, and you're well on your way to having an online business presence. The big missing piece is a website.

I know! It also helped that during Covid, the DET was one of the only online English tests. Many schools started accepting it because people couldn't take the other, in-person ones. This greatly accelerated the growth of the DET!

We have a landing page, but we wanted to give people access to the app directly to test it out. But your feedback makes sense. We're going to see how we can convey the value of Arno without requiring a sign in. Thanks!

Thanks for this feedback and helping to educate me on the norms of Show HN :)

That's right! It's the distinction Henry Frankfurter makes in his brilliant book: On Bullshit (https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691122946/on...)

The lawyer said: “I did not comprehend that ChatGPT could fabricate cases."

I wonder how many other people using ChatGPT do not comprehend that ChatGPT can be a confident bullshitter...

I'm surprised that this one case is getting so much attention because there must be so many instances of people using false information they got from ChatGPT.

The way I think of this is validating the problem before investing any time in building a solution.

It's surprisingly easy to build something that no one wants. This is because it's easy to build something that doesn't solve a real problem. For reasons that I still can't figure out, we're very good at fooling ourselves about what are real problems that people experience.

Now when I have a new idea, I force myself to dwell on the question, "What is the cheapest way I can validate that the problem I'm solving is real?" You did that with an ugly prototype and a video. That's quite cheap. Maybe you could've even done it with no product at all!

I learned the hard way: Incorporation seems easy but man can it be a huge pain when done poorly. Before I do it again, I'm reading this guide.

One recommendation: Add a section on winding down a corporation. This is difficult and easy to get wrong and can be quite costly when things do go wrong :)

I think a key motivation behind this is that Reddit wants to be able to collect more data on users. For example, reddit can't see how long you spent reading a post or a particular comment if that is happening in a 3rd party app. FB, IG, and especially TikTok monetize data like this extraordinarily well. If reddit is trying to play in the same league as the other social media companies, keeping all usage on the platform you own and control seems to be table stakes. This is why Twitter did this recently and FB did this years ago. Own the platform, own the data, make more money.