pboutros

If you're reading this... yes, I posted about this a second time, because I did a horrible job of describing it the first time.

You either need: - distribution: have some community effect, where the more users you have, the more valuable the product is (and the harder it is to replicate) - a proprietary dataset: so that it can't be replicated - a cost model others can't afford to replicate - something incredibly catchy (luck!)

I figure that I should (finally) post about the thing that we built / launched. Compass is an AI product trained to give you specific answers to challenging questions about software vendors.

Marketing, Product, and Ops teams use Compass to get critical information they can't find online—like:

- Where customers struggle with their product (and their competitors')

- What terms you should redline in SaaS contracts

- How software vendors price and how to talk them down

- and… any other question they need answers to.

How it works: We trained Compass on InsightDB, our repository of >20,000 firsthand experiences from people who recently purchased and implemented software. (Basically, we have a small army of contractors doing in-depth interviews with people who have bought software). We interview our customers about their experiences using software—you're joining a community of people helping each other.

For any information not already in InsightDB, Compass Pro subscribers get the answer within a 2-week AnswerSLA. (Compass Scale subscribers get answers in just 1 week).

Importantly... the behavior is self-reported (by dog owners), who almost certainly have some bias about their dogs. I know I do. :)

Haha. Assuming this isn't sarcastic—I would assume that (1) sentiments on the last day are probably similar to many of the days before it, and (2) you should weight the wisdom of those days higher than days early in life, because they have more experience.

If that was sarcastic... you got me.

Nobody in these threads is saying that housing them is the silver bullet. But shelter is part of the foundation of a human's hierarchy of needs, and being anything but single-minded about people's right to shelter distracts from helping them obtain it.

_What if they want to sleep on the street?_ Let's start by sheltering as many people as we can, and when our problem becomes "too many empty beds", then we can move on to that problem.

_Where do we build them?_ I bet there are choices we can make that house 100+ people for every 1 person who is mildly inconvenienced.

_Are there barriers to living in these dorms?_ No.

Yeah, that was fantastic

I think you're right -- if only because it's probably the most viable path to growth.

If your value prop is 'we're stable and you can trust us', and your buyers are 'large enterprises that don't like to take risks', your biggest impediment if you have a great product is that you aren't part of a company like ServiceNow.

What's the saying? "The battle between every startup and incumbent comes down to whether the startup gets distribution before the incumbent gets innovation."

Even harder when you need enterprise proof-points...

I think blackmailing someone in the closet is almost always wrong -- I'm sure there's some contrived edge case that could be thought of, but as a whole, it's never okay.

Just because most / all intelligence agencies do something doesn't mean it's okay. It's unambiguously wrong.

This is a really smart acquisition for Twitter to make. I'm subscribed to a number of substacks (and Patreons) that I only discovered through creators on Twitter.

Job #1 for twitter should be making it easy to subscribe to Revue newsletters from within Twitter. Please do not put the team that rolled out Fleets in charge of Job #1 ;)