desktopentree

Thanks for the comment and suggestion! Petrel, in its current state, is deliberately in the post-planning phase of travel, but definitely great ideas on planning portion.

We are agnostic on which LLM does the parsing because the rules and structure built around it is the real magic.

Out of curiosity, how do you currently save ideas you get from Reels?

Very fair callout and question.

The extraction setup was actually the easy part. The magic in the tool is from the deterministic rules I put in place over months of iteration using it myself.

Inconsistent date formats, multi-lingual reservations, logic around when a new trip starts and your previous trip ends, parsing both an expense and a confirmation from the same email, duplication rules for when someone accidentally adds the same booking but from a different source, etc. These were all causes of actual parsing errors found from people testing it out.

I built 68 modules within the tool itself from testing.

The logic of the output will only improve over time with more usage. Building the right logic and ruleset into every conceivable scenario is the end goal.

No worries and I appreciate the feedback!

For the technical audience, the tool runs on Cloudflare Worker with D1 for data and R2 for photos. It's one hand-rolled HTML file and is only ~1.1MB. I built in an HEIC decoder utilizing libheif in a Web Worker. It also has an android and apple version with watch, widgets, and Live Activity native capabilities.

Sonnet 4.5 does the extraction with numerous logic variations built in from trial and error, on many different file types. I am challenging all to try and stump it (PDF, .eml, .csv, .tsv, JPG, .ics).

Thank you! I had a lot of fun branding it around the bird. Do you have any unique booking confirmations to test the tool with?

Claude drives me absolutely crazy for that very reason. It's so obvious when people use it to write anything.

I'm a fractional CFO.

Fractional service works for functions that are judgment-dense and cadence-light. You pay for expertise and experience. It's essentially an advisor more than an employee. For building an app, you should hire a contractor or agency with a defined deliverable.

the deployment targets that got cheap over the last five years are all stateless and a protocol that fights that gets no serverless implementations

From a financial perspective, what were your biggest challenges? What was the working capital cycle like? Were you forced to do a certain level of minimum order quantities and did the cash constraint limit other decisions?

The pressure is real but that's kind of what we sign up for. If it's not working, part of being an entrepreneur is knowing when to quit and avoiding falling into the sunk cost fallacy. Quitting this one project doesn't mean you failed. You will just divert your energy into the next endeavor. They can't all be winners or everyone would do it. Hang in there.

I agree with people saying LLM developed websites and apps are just more quickly sent to market and they all likely have similar issues and less oversight.

Six days and three posts isn't really a hard launch. A stress test with trusted users is really important before a hard launch to work out the bugs.

I'm going through the same thing with my product launched last week. I'm going through the sequence of posting on reddit, HN, PH, etc. to build that first base to develop organically but it's a struggle.

From a CFO perspective, this is catastrophic. With monthly billing automatically feeding monthly close pipelines, this would result in results that either need to be adjusted (without proper support) or tank performance until it's fixed on the vendor side. I wouldn't want to be in that situation.

I personally feel one of the biggest shifts is LLM's making it so easy to launch your own website and product that Shopify will start to be damaged dramatically.

i see this less as a pricing or free market issue and more of a governance concern. trading against your own consumer base isn't free market.

i ran into a similar issue when researching how to get my project off the ground. the key is having an aged account with karma and being open and honest about you building the product instead of attempting guerrilla marketing.

from my experience, changing signup friction changes the funnel math. without users, your monetization strategy immediately fails. converting interested users into free users should be almost instantaneous. once you've proven your value, then you monetize.

if growth doesn't materialize, then the infrastructure build out plays out exactly like the dot com bubble. the biggest difference this time around is the earnings. if those fall, the rest crubmles.

I agree with other comments that a multi-app version would be great. Overall, very simple and functions well. I like it.

I catch a lot of issues on the technical writing side.

every output looks similar now across the coding models

I had serious concerns as an accountant until I realized how familiar everything sounded.