Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49711181

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49702661

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

https://modelrigs.com - a website for running open weights models on various hardware setups, including benchmarks, how to run them, and a TCO economics analysis

https://riverfish.uk - this one's a bit different! It's basically a pSEO experiment in combining fish population surveys and river data across England

https://findclients.org - a B2B client prospecting database of UK companies across different cities and industries, with a market analysis of the different sizes and ages of companies

https://octoloops.com - AI growth app. I've downgraded my time on this as although I could get users to sign up, getting them to actually use the app hasn't worked out at all; new users won't reply to my nice founder emails either. Bit of a bummer because I invested quite a lot of effort but it just doesn't seem to be working. Ironically I still use it to dogfood on my own projects...

https://signalbump.com - another experiment: enrich people's projects in monday.com with data on new (capital) projects and expansions of their clients. It's a monday.com app, the marketplace submission process was very challenging as a solopreneur. We'll see, very early days.

Also: "distillation" - seeding or running training sessions on the output of frontier models.

Then there's also "newspace", an interesting area to watch!

It's not all roses -- I've seen some regressions -- but generally the 3.x Flash models are pretty great for our use cases.

The great thing about LLMs though is it's incredibly easy to diversify and have fallbacks. But of course that means additional costs, mostly centered around engineering efforts to test and integrate them.

Not Mistral

That being said, Anthropic is also so insanely expensive for everything I ended up switching that particular part to Exo instead...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49537535

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

I first started building OctoLoops around 2 months ago because so many of my own projects, big and small, had failed or petered out from lack of users and the valuable feedback that comes with them.

When I started seriously digging, I found that distribution is one heck of a rabbit hole. The more I read, the more I found how much I didn't know. But I wanted to learn - and I really wanted to _apply_ that learning too, to all my new projects, in a repeatable, autonomous-as-possible way.

What better way to implement this plan than building a distribution app?

The idea was supposedly simple: implement a handful of "agentic loops" that anyone could easily run, in a web UI - no downloads or installing Claude Code, no complexity, human stays in the loop. A simple agentic harness in the browser with some superpowers to let it do its job.

I launched it quite soon after, and immediately started dogfooding, running the Community Loop. It found threads across Reddit from all those builders who'd made something cool, but were now at a loss when it came to finding and acquiring users. It drafted replies for me and gave a "spam risk", because yes - many kinds of marketing and sales walk a fine line between signal and blatant spam - and I started working the loops. Often I'd edit or write the replies myself; sometimes I'd remove the OctoLoops mention from the message.

It worked. I now have ~50 users, including one from a post-revenue B2B startup interested in using the Outbound loop. But there have been significant challenges already that I want to be open about here, in the hope that it helps other public builders.

1. Activation. This is currently my #1 pain point. My Community loops work - I can get people to sign up, enter their email, and I know there's even some buying intent. But people often log in once, then don't use the app. I've reached out to users, and they've said it's partly just that they don't want to post their app in communities they don't yet feel a real part of. Resistance to being rude or spammy, imposter syndrome - anyone who's done any marketing can identify. I'm trying to solve some of the issues of activation by building a more streamlined, less cluttered UX, but I'm not sure how to motivate people to really use the app in earnest. Maybe it's missing evidence of outcomes? Video tutorials?

2. Product focus. While researching competitors, what I notice most have in common is they focus on _one thing_: automated outbound; automated advertising; keyword monitoring. Not many people seem to be trying to make a fully autonomous omnichannel GTM agent, because that's too much. I decided to hide most of the channels I'd built already behind UI so users focus on community outreach and outbound sales. It's too early to say if that's the right call, and I know I'm still following an omnichannel strategy for OctoLoops itself.

3. Prioritising. I'm sure everyone says this, but: content strategy; SEO; socials; dogfooding... trying to talk to users, to understand why I'm not yet solving their problems and delivering them the outcomes they want. Attempting to keep my potential corporate customer in the funnel. Implementing new features - but which ones? And keeping up with the _insane pace_ of agentic apps and AI at large: so much is happening right now, hype and BS is everywhere, sometimes it's hard to know what's real.

So that's where I'm at, 2 months down the line. It's already been a fun journey. Any questions I'm happy to answer. Criticism is welcome too - I recognize some will view this as contributing to the already high volume of spam and slop out there, but that's honestly a balance I'm trying to find, and I'd love to hear opinions on how people should do sales and marketing in 2026 without driving people crazy.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49535048

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49514799

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

I guess the closest thing we have is an iPad - my mother can just about use tablets, but I have to say onboarding onto a tablet these days is full of gotchas and fraught with peril too if you don't understand computing.

I'm reminded of "The Dream Machine" by Licklider - if we read that today, we'd get this odd sense of having come very close, but yet missing by miles, many of the goals set back then.

Anyway, yes, monospace typesetting...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49501785

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

So I have zero social media networks on my phone and, looking at everyone around me who does, I'm very pleased with this decision.