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> If the market is filled with cheap products and a clone of your product can be easily made, then the survival of the business is in positioning, marketing, packaging the product, distribution, sales...

Most people stop after having gotten their dopamine hit. It was the case before, it's still the case now with AI.

Try any newly released software, and you'll notice a trove of issues, whether it's UX, UI, features not working properly. Errors, etc. All of the unsexy work that is needed to go from "it works" to "thousands / millions of people can rely on it daily".

Playing the long game has always worked, and will always work.

There are two ways forward for any company (whether big or small):

- Expand the pie: push AI to its limits while keeping your employees, new markets, new offerings

- Keep the same pie, and increase the size of the slices among the shareholders (employees or not)

Multiple ways:

- Cold outreach (rapidly becoming impossible with the amount of unhinged automation pouring over LinkedIn)

- Engaging on the posts with my "takes", not selling anything, just genuinely helping / contributing

- Warm connections that I've made, for me it's attending work fairs / conferences then connecting on LinkedIn

- Posting as myself (the founder): AI-assisted engineering, industry takes, etc

For some of us (founders, sales, GTM engineers), LinkedIn is "the place to be" if you want to find and engage with prospects.

My customers are in healthcare, and they don't hang out on X for example (which is where I get most of my tech news alongside HN).

Most people randomly accept invitations on LinkedIn: "We're both humans, so I felt we should connect!".

But if you actively prune / curate WHO you add to your LinkedIn, you end up with a feed that is genuinely useful.

What you do need to know is WHY you want to use LinkedIn. It could be to find your next job, finding potential customers, or just keeping up to date with <INDUSTRY>.

> like that, but (and I might be ignorant) can't you just change it's all in browser to something else and the users would be oblivious?

Excellent question! The answer is simple: we're known on the market, and trusted by our customer for this secure handling of PDFs. Should we decide to change that (unbeknownst to them), we would effectively kill our reputation and the company by extension.

> Is it possible to download as an app and disable internet (not sure if it's a feature of any browsers).

Back in the days, SimplePDF used to work offline. However maintaining that in conjunction with our paid customers features (where the online connectivity is mandatory) was too big of a maintenance burden. We decided a year ago to drop this support (silently), and no one has complained since then, confirming our hunch that it is not a high-demand feature.

Thanks! We have plans to improve it further (file support), possibly also voice, but for now in the backlog!

And if you’re French, don’t worry, you didn’t miss it.

It’s the 31st of May

Thanks! You caught a real bug: the form labels fed to the LLM were mangled. Now fixed: values land in the correct field.

On "what are we trying to solve":

Forms (PDFs, scanned paper) are still everywhere and aren't going away. SimplePDF Copilot exists to make the transition less painful. A few concrete use cases:

- Pre-filling repetitive forms from existing data sources (CRM, EHR, etc. via MCP/RAG). In most industries, employees fill forms by copy-pasting or retyping. With AI + tool calling, most of the form arrives pre-filled and the employee just corrects or adds the missing bits.

- Filling foreign-language forms. If you've moved to a new country, or know someone who has, you've had to fill out forms in a language you don't master.

- Understanding a contract before signing it. "Can I actually trust all the clauses here?" Reading proficiency changed the world by giving people a way to understand what they were signing. This extends it to legalese and odd clauses.

On Claude Cowork:

Different shape, and a different privacy model. Cowork drives a sandboxed virtual desktop: you can't see exactly what it's doing while it fills, and correcting a wrong value means another back-and-forth with the LLM.

Copilot works inside your editor: every change is visible as it happens, you can amend any field with one click, and the document never leaves your browser + it's LLM agnostic: bring your own (local or hosted).

Absolutely not insulting! In fact an excellent question!

Preview was an inspiration when I started SimplePDF, my goal was to make the "Preview" of the web, so that people without a Mac would benefit from a software matching Preview in ease of use and overall polish.

Adobe Acrobat: SimplePDF has "Simple" in the name as the philosophy is to keep it simple (both in ease of use, and features): I don't intend to support everything that Adobe Acrobat does. There's a lot of features that I could build that I intentionally do not, as they would bloat the UI and hard the overall usability. Most people have very simple needs and don't need advanced features (like scripting, etc).

It already does! More specifically, SimplePDF supports "WebMCP": the tools that the LLM is using are exposed as WebMCP tools