This is almost 1:1 with a project we worked on several years ago. Unfortunately it never launched - founder ran out of money. It was one of my favourite projects we’ve done and I genuinely believed in the concept, so I was sad we couldn’t see it come to fruition. But glad someone else is giving it another go!

Without giving away anything confidential, I can say your cold start plan is very similar. Can’t say it’s a good or bad plan because we never saw it executed in practice… but it’s not unreasonable!

I think distribution and stickiness will be a challenge. Even if you get enough content that users will have a great first experience, most people don’t travel that often, so getting them to come back regularly won’t be easy.

Best of luck - would love to see this succeed!

It's instructive to look at how a company presents itself to the public, so I went looking at what Adobe says about itself, and what is the first instance I can find of a principle or value that this bad UX violates.

Google result:

> Adobe: Creative, marketing and document management solutions > Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. We help our customers create, deliver and optimize content and applications.

About page:

>Changing the world through personalized digital experiences. >Adobe empowers everyone, everywhere to imagine, create, and bring any digital experience to life. From creators and students to small businesses, global enterprises, and nonprofit organizations — customers choose Adobe products to ideate, collaborate, be more productive, drive business growth, and build remarkable experiences.

>Creative Cloud >Industry-leading photography, design, illustration, and video apps that professionals rely on to do their best work.

Company values: https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/03/07/evolving-adobes...

>Creativity is not only what we enable for the world but it’s also core to the fabric of the company. It has driven our curiosity to look around the corner to transform the industry and ourselves. Over 40 years, we launched the desktop publishing revolution with PostScript, innovated and led every category that we are in — creativity, documents, customer experience management — to serve a wider customer universe. Create the future is all about being the customer and being relentless across all the elements that make up customer centricity to delight them, deliver unparalleled value and innovate to address unmet (and possibly unknown) needs.

>Raise the bar is about continuous evolution and never being satisfied with the status quo. It’s about never settling for good enough and always striving to be first, only and best. It’s about being intellectually honest and direct in talking about the things that aren’t going well and always looking to do better. At the end of the day, our ultimate measure of success is the customer and today more than ever, we need to surprise and delight them at every turn.

So really, the closest I could find to guiding principles being broken are tangential concepts like "remarkable experiences", "customer centricity", and "surprise and delight". Good goals for any company, but not especially design focused in my opinion.

Paraphrasing, Adobe as a company thinks of itself as a provider of technology to fuel content, marketing, and advertising money-making machines. Design at this point is incidental to who their customer happens to be.

I am sure individual employees might feel different, but as a company, we have no more reason to expect excellent UX from Adobe than, for example, Oracle or Salesforce.

Add enshittification, products randomly getting acquired and shut down, etc, and $50/month quickly stops looking like $50/month.

Not saying the math works out for the “build your own” version… But it’s not that clean for the subscription option either.

On a separate note, there is the concept of “ideal customer profile”. If the people you’re speaking with feel they can solve this problem on their own, then they are not it!

>There is nothing else to it – you must eat a few hundred bowls of phở and find out. If this requires moving to Hanoi, so be it.

Not the worst life plan, to be honest!

A little bit sad that my own "death bed pho" - chicken pho from that one stall near the market in old quarter - gets just a passing mention as the only acceptable variation to traditional beef pho.

This also brings back memories of our "mystery pho man" - who had three tiny stools and one large pot outside his house every morning, looked like a character straight out of an 80's movie, and was usually sold out by 8am.

Vietnamese food has got significantly better in Toronto in the past 5-10 years - but still haven't found anything that comes even close to Hanoi chicken pho.

https://blog.kevinzwu.com/symbolhead-syndrome/

The much more useful posts are “my team and I are doing X with AI”. Of course, the challenge there is that the ones who are truly getting a competitive edge through AI are usually going to be too busy building to blog about it.

It's funny, I've always loved that kind of environment. Quiet high school hallways after everyone's left, empty university buildings late at night, offices after hours, even empty offices that haven't been moved into yet. For me it evokes feelings associated more with watching a rainy day from inside, or lofi-girl with headphones studying.

I understand why it can evoke horror or unsettling feelings for people, but for me the first word that comes to mind is just "peaceful".

Even the environments in the Backrooms trailer - minus the obvious horror elements - look like they would be a lot of fun to explore!

If I ever accidentally full screen a window, and it’s not in night mode, I am instantly blinded by a wall of mostly white empty background!

But that is neither here nor there. What is important is the now, and in the now you are in the presence of someone who is Good At Making Money. And you too, by joining forces, will be Making Lots Of Money with this charismatic person, who can clearly achieve great things and will be clearly avoiding any past missteps that may have caused their downfall right before reaching greatness (but weren’t their fault anyway).

Think of the future, not the past!

Claude Code has a Teams plan which includes Max tiers. Why would it be forbidden?

Standing desk, while it's working I do a couple squats or pushups or just wander around the house to stretch my legs. Much more enjoyable than sitting at my desk, hands on keyboard, all day long. And taking my eyes off the screen also makes it easier to think about the next thing.

Moving around does help, but even so, the mental fatigue is real!

By itself, this doesn't tell us much.

The more interesting metric would be token use comparison across free users, paid users, API use, and Azure/Bedrock.

I'm not sure if these numbers are available anywhere. It's very possible B2B use could be a much bigger market than direct B2C (and the free users are currently providing value in terms of training data).

But given the US approach to foreign policy in 2025, one could argue that the list of countries that “have a contentious relationship with the US” (or, maybe more accurately, the other way around) is a lot longer and less clear-cut today than it was a few years ago.

“Simple” example that anyone who’s ever worked on a scheduling application will probably be familiar with:

“Get a list with all of today’s events.”

Well, whose “today” (timezone) are we talking about? Server, client, setting in the user account? Or none of the above, and actually timezone at the physical location of the event, if there is one?

And what does “today” mean, anyway? Truncate the date? 00:00-23:59? Business hours?

And what does “today’s event” even mean? Events can cross midnight… Does an event need to start today? End today? Both? Can events span multiple days?

The fun never ends!