Shutting Down My Baby

Like so many startup founders, I was driven by the motivation to build a product that I would like to use myself (or so I thought). My goal was to allow authors to automatically generate new creative text based on text they had written so far (basically a literary autocomplete).

Lesson learned I hope: It seems to me that the author wanted to be an entrepreneur foremost instead of solving an acutal problem. What the author wanted was their own startup with the accompanied startup experience, and so the "problem" was rather secondary and maybe even thought of after that desire?

I mean:

It turned out that writers actually like to write themselves, and the current level of technology was just not good enough to make them really satisfied with whatever output they got from my product.

Really? It continues:

Even though nearly everybody on this planet has heard the “machine learning” buzzword by now, the less technologically experienced hobby writers that I talked to didn’t have a real understanding of what they could expect from my product. This fundamental knowledge divide really made me think about how to reach this group of people.

Again, this really gives me the impression that you're not trying to solve a problem. You're "thinking about how to reach this group of people" to sell them your dream of having a company, not something they want or need.

There's a Dilbert cartoon (which alas I can no longer find) where the punchline is "experience doesn't work like that".

In other words you can predict the outcome of someone else's endeavour, because of your own experience, you could tell them your prediction, but they'd go ahead anyway because experience has to be lived, and is seldom passed from one person to another.

This startup post-mortem seems to happen almost weekly, and despite all the literature (formal and informal) it seems like the same mistakes are made over and over again.

To the author I say, well done, you are gaining some valuable experience, and learning some valuable lessons. By all means get a job to replenish empty coffers, so that when you do another startup you apply those lessons learnt (and if that fails you'll have more experiences to share.)

For my own journey I got lucky. We bootstrapped the business with no investment, writing custom software, until we found our product niche and pivoted into selling that. I have no idea if that strategy would work today - and alas the experience of our mistakes (of which there were many) is unlikely to be transferable.

Good luck! (seriously, a big of good luck really helps a lot...)

My goal was to allow authors to automatically generate new creative text based on text they had written so far (basically a literary autocomplete). (...) The feedback I received was generally favorable, and people thought of my product as a cool gadget. But potentially paying for it? Nah. It turned out that writers actually like to write themselves

Here's what I would pay for: something that would generate a structure / a detailed lists of scenes, given a list of characters and a theme, or the beginning of the text, or maybe from scratch.

I'm an amateur writer, self-published my first novel last year, which is doing reasonably well. I like to write scenes, dialogue, interactions, and given a scene context, can sometimes write fast.

But I have a hard time coming up with what to write, what scene to write, what comes next. I generally know where the whole story is going and how it's going to end, but what needs to be written now, I don't know.

I suspect many authors are in the same situation.

The feedback I received was generally favorable, and people thought of my product as a cool gadget. But potentially paying for it? Nah. It turned out that writers actually like to write themselves, and the current level of technology was just not good enough to make them really satisfied with whatever output they got from my product.

Exactly. It's like inventing a knitting machine and reaching out to hand-knitters. You're offering to destroy through automation the thing they enjoy. The right market to reach out to would have been consumers of writing.

To the extent that this already exists, it's used to create blogspam for SEO purposes. AI-generated text is going to make the next generation of the internet so much worse.