Jemaclus
But what Jev actually has done that's new and interesting is that it allows you to define a new semantic decision at runtime in natural language, without training a model for that task, and get a fast, cheap, bounded, probability-bearing result designed to be consumed directly by software.
In other words, you don't have to fine tune a model. You should if super high quality is really important to you -- but you should also do that with other things that people reach for LLMs for as well. But for the rest of us for whom good enough is, well, good enough, and who aren't interested in training or fine-tuning models? Jev unlocks a lot off-the-shelf.
You should be impressed. It's doing something more novel than the haters suggest.
And as you approach the "coworkers vs family" problem, you start to drift toward individual invitations, which again adds friction and decision making.
What I think I've settled on is the least friction for the most value. It's not perfect, and I'm not chasing an endless roadmap of features for the sake of features. I've hit upon what really works for me and my social group, so I'm trying to be really, really thoughtful about any additional features.
I do have a draft of personas on my beta app, but I'm not totally happy with it, so I'm going to continue tweaking it and testing it with my social group before releasing it.
Randomisation is one I've thought of before, but ultimately rejected because it's a thing I've played with in the past and never liked. I dunno if you remember an app called Urbanspoon from back in the day. It was basically a randomized Yelp. More often than not, I didn't want to do the randomised activity, so I'd just spin it again and again and then get frustrated and go to my normal places. But maybe that's just me.
I do have a couple of other ideas, though.
One idea is to re-holler. If I say I'm going to this brewpub and that hollers out to my friends, then one of my friends could say "Yeah, I'm going here, and I'll invite my friends, too." But then you start getting into some weird network effects that might be problematic.
Another is the idea of personas or profiles. There are events where the acceptability of your friend group changes. If I'm going to a farmer's market, it's totally appropriate to have a coworker join you, but at a BBQ at my house, I'd rather not have my coworkers join. Similarly, my family can join a BBQ but I'd rather not meet them at a professional conference.
Similarly, there are some events where I think it's OK to bring a plus-one and in other circumstances absolutely not.
Another concept is that sometimes I might go to, say, ComicCon with some friends in a faraway city. Now my definition of "local" has changed, so if I holler while I'm in San Diego, my friends back home in Boulder won't be able to attend anything -- but my friends that are with me at the convention might totally want to know what's up. So having some sort of mechanism for saying "I'm not at home base, I'm somewhere else and the rules are different" might become useful.
So far I've rejected all of those for one simple reason: they increase friction. I want this to be as simple as it can possibly be to hang out with my friends. The more friction you add, the less likely people are to keep using it. At least, that's my philosophy. So I've rejected just about every other feature I can think of.
This app is designed to make the world a marginally better place, so maybe instead of shitting on someone's hard work, providing constructive feedback would be more in the spirit of collaboration and positivity. Have a nice day. :)
I think perhaps one sort of semantic/slight difference is that Holler is hyper-local. If you live in LA and your friend lives in London, they obviously aren't going to the local farmer's market with you. I'd say the vast majority of my WhatsApp friends aren't local (I'm based in the States.)
BUT I can totally see that being an easy way to do things if your local friend group is on WhatsApp!
One of my questions would be whether anyone (strangers?) can see that or not. And again this is a US-centric concern, but one of the things I think a lot about is ICE and the government tracking non-white people, and so if there's any semblance of a public "I'll be at X place at Y time," then I'd rather not make that public. So Holler solves that.
But yeah, that's a creative use case for WhatsApp I hadn't considered! Very neat. Thank you for explaining.
I spent a lot of time thinking about what a "public" feed might look like and ultimately decided that my goal wasn't to make a social media app, but to specifically hang out with my friends in person. There's also a locality angle to this, where if you live in LA, you won't add a friend in Montana to your group, because they could never attend your events. So it becomes hyper-local by default.
Group chats, I think, are a fantastic medium for directed messaging (you have to explicitly choose the friends that you're group texting), and if that's something you like, then there's no reason to use Holler. This app, on the other hand, is about undirected messaging, where you simply broadcast your activity. The friction of choosing the group text and possibly excluding someone or accidentally including someone you didn't mean to goes away.
It does introduce other problems, to be fair, but I think it's a trade-off that I'm happy to make.
As someone else pointed out, there's pressure in group chats to reply. This explicitly avoids that.
Also, let's say you want to go to a park for a picnic, and you have 100 friends. Which 100 friends are you going to add to a group chat? That's thinking you have to do, friction to getting the engagement going. You have to start thinking about "if I invite Sue, then I can't invite Dan because he's her ex," and blah blah blah.
Group texts are excellent directed communication media. But this is undirected event management. Rather than me inviting 13 specific people, I'm simply broadcasting the destination and time vector.
It's a different way of doing things. I'm not surprised at your question -- it's often the first one I get. But I'm explicitly attempting to solve a different problem than group texts solve.
If business owners outsource their websites to agencies, then they don't care about your service, ergo your premise of "many business owners would use it" is not a statement around which to build a business. In other words, business owners should not be your target audience -- agencies should be.
So if I were in your shoes, I would go talk to some businesses that you think should use this site and ask them straight up if they would use it. And when they inevitably point you to their agency, you should go ask the same question to the agency.
I would not spend more money on ads until you have real user feedback.
Part of the deal is that only the people you've added explicitly as friends can see your hollers. There's no "public feed."
One of the things that really jumped out at me is that several of my friends are Latino, and I was building this back when the ICE in Minneapolis thing was really big. I don't want to create world where people can track them and say "I know this group of non-white folks will be at this location, therefore we'll park our ICE truck outside and wait." So there was a lot of thought that went into how to make it safe for them.
Among other things, the data in the system only sticks around for a few days after the event. Also, while there is RSVP functionality, it's not required -- you can just show up. There are a few other things I've added that I can't remember off the top of my head that focus on the privacy angle.
E2EE felt like overkill at the time, but I can certainly work on adding it. Thank you.
Thanks for calling out the broken links (I don't use Twitter, and the email just needs to be wired up), and for the call out on privacy. Will get that updated soon.
Thank you for your feedback :)
This weekend, for example, another couple invited my partner and me to go do an activity. They sent the text at 11. We finished giving our kid lunch, walked the dog, and loaded up the car. They texted and said their kid wasn't ready yet, and maybe they'd leave by 2. They didn't leave home til 2:30, so we didn't start our activity until noon, almost three hours later. The activity lasted about an hour, then we suggested going to a brewery to get some drinks, but for one reason or another, we wound up going our separate ways.
My partner looked at me and said "This would've been a better Holler use-case. We could've just gone for a hike ourselves and not had to coordinate with someone else who can't show up on time."
Sure, it might've just been us, but we spent a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth coordinating with people that we ultimately barely spent any time with, and instead lost half our day.
Holler, to me, represents a form of social freedom. I'm freed from the constraints of other peoples' calendars. If they really want to hang out with me, they'll come to the events I holler. If they don't, then that's fine, we can still be friends, but if they can't be willing to attend things on my schedule, why should I adjust my schedule to conform with theirs?
So I'm going to do what I want to do, and if anyone wants to join, fantastic.
Better than sitting at home twiddling my thumbs wishing I was doing something fun.
Glad you like it. :)
I'm an introvert and socially anxious, but I do enjoy hanging out with my friends. I just HATE the invitation-and-coordination game. If someone invites me and I don't want to go, I hate having to come up with a socially acceptable excuse. Inviting someone and waiting for them to make a socially acceptable excuse is equally awful to me.
Then you get to coordination. I want to go to the brewery at 2pm, but your kid has soccer practice so you can't get there til 3:30, but then Joe has to leave at 4 to pick up his mother in law at the airport, and... ugh. It's the worst.
So I made Holler, which is basically you hollering to your friends, "I'm going to be at the farmer's market at 2pm," and then you just go. If they show up, fantastic. If not, whatever, you were going to go anyway.
No coordination, no invitations, no friction. Just holler and go.
It's iOS only for now, but I'm working on an Android app as you read this, so hopefully that's coming soon.
But to be honest, it sounds like you haven't found your product-market fit. Couple of questions:
1. Why do you think many business owners would use it?
2. Who is your target audience?
3. What's your advertising campaign targeting?
One reason I ask is that you state "I genuinely believed that many business owners would use it." Consider that the vast majority of business owners outsource their websites to agencies and don't know HTML from a roller coaster, and that might indicate that your ICP (ideal customer profile) might be wrong. And then further consider that agencies have been doing SEO and these other things for a long time, which... might indicate that you're solving a solved problem for your ICP.
That doesn't mean that your business is a bust. But it might mean that your marketing strategy and market positioning might be off. I'd find some local businesses, run some analysis on your own dime, and then go talk to them and see what they say. Chances are they'll just direct you to their web dev agency.
So then you talk to the agency, and... maybe they've already solved it. Or maybe you can get the agency to pay you instead of doing it in-house -- especially if you're doing more than they are for less than they would spend.
This is not an uncommon space to be with new business ideas, so I wouldn't take this as a sign to give up, but rather a sign to dig in and figure out how to pivot to generate real income.
Best of luck!
From my personal experience, the context of the fix lives in a dozen different places: the ticket, the code, the commit message. And now I need to document it a fourth time? From a dev perspective, the value just isn't there beyond a vague "fixed zoom issue for #1355," because you can go look at ticket 1355 and see the context, and look at the diff to see what changed.
From a dev's perspective, I'm documenting the same thing for the fourth time, except this time, perhaps, I have to think about the information from the perspective of a customer or non-technical person, and then decide how much information and detail is appropriate, and so on and so forth. I wouldn't say it's laziness, per se, as much as it's more work, and we have a lot of other things to do.
Also, let's be real: how many people read release notes? My boss doesn't, the CEO doesn't. Release note quality doesn't show up on my performance reviews. Customers don't leave Yelp reviews or App Store reviews because my release notes were bland. There's no career incentive for me to do "better." Maybe that should change, but that's the reality.
So the question comes back to you: what value are you seeking from release notes, and what level of detail makes sense to you?
I'm not convinced that throwing more money (i.e. tokens) at the problem would make us any more efficient, but 1.5x improvement ain't nothing.
And just to address the "night and day" bit.. if you gave a construction foreman a machine that made his team 20% more productive, he'd take that all day long and tell everyone it's "night and day." I'm not sure what your threshold is, but +20% isn't nothing either. That foreman would hit more deadlines than not, and get more bonuses than not.
The sad truth is that the job is changing, and that means we need to change, too. That _doesn't_ mean we need the power saw 100% of the time, but it does mean we need to be very very proficient at it or we'll be left behind.
Because they're two different tools and situations.
Let's go with your analogy: you would hire contractors to build a house, but not to put an IKEA bookshelf together. You would hire a professional chef to cook a five course meal, but not to heat up pop tarts. You would hire a surgeon to operate on your brain, but not to prescribe advil.
The point is that it's one of many things (tools, contractors, whatever) in your arsenal, and you use whichever one you need. You don't automatically reach for the surgeon or the chef or the contractor.
We don't insist that HVAC installers use hand-powered drills to "feel closer to the work," but we also don't insist that they use battery-powered drills and impact drivers on every single task.
We don't insist that a chef use a Vitamix blender to chop a single onion when a couple seconds with a sharp knife will do, but we certainly wouldn't only use a sharp knife to create a salsa.
We don't insist that a carpenter use only hand-saws to build a house, but we also don't insist that they use a chainsaw to make a chair.
We don't insist that an accountant write out taxes by hand, but we also don't insist that they use a calculator to determine how old you are from your birthdate.
You use the power tools when appropriate, and you use more delicate, surgical tools when appropriate. It's not any more difficult than that.