Hacker News: garrickvanburen

New comment by garrickvanburen in "Ask HN: How do you handle marketing as a solo technical founder?"

garrickvanburen — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:32:11 +0000

I flip this around.

Marketing comes first. Sales second. Product third.

New comment by garrickvanburen in "Ask HN: How do you handle marketing as a solo technical founder?"

garrickvanburen — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:30:38 +0000

“The business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation.” - Peter Drucker

I'm pretty sure my primary job is marketing the work that I do.

New comment by garrickvanburen in "Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'"

garrickvanburen — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:15:20 +0000

Considering: - Anthropic decides how much a token is worth. - Users have no visibility or ability to control in how many tokens a given response will burn.

This is the only expected answer. https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-59-on-credit...

New comment by garrickvanburen in "The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it"

garrickvanburen — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 23:22:58 +0000

Based on my math, taking development in-house doesn’t make sense until we’re talking >$5K/mn.

https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-72-vibe-code...

Strategic Leadership Is Lacking, Not Trust

garrickvanburen — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 02:13:46 +0000

Article URL: https://garrickvanburen.com/strategic-leadership-is-lacking-not-trust/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47433979

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Vibe-Code vs. Buy for B2B SaaS in 2026

garrickvanburen — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:51:07 +0000

Article URL: https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-72-vibe-code-vs-buy

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47417396

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by garrickvanburen in "If you thought code writing speed was your problem you have bigger problems"

garrickvanburen — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:50:29 +0000

I'm reminded of the original Agile joke, "software you don't want in 30days or less." today it's "software you don't want in 5days or less."

New comment by garrickvanburen in "AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox"

garrickvanburen — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 14:46:07 +0000

The most hyped use cases for AI/LLM make me wonder, "why are we doing this activity to begin with? We could just not."

The End of Cargo Culting Startup Accelerators

garrickvanburen — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 23:59:01 +0000

Article URL: https://garrickvanburen.com/end-of-accelerators/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47041965

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by garrickvanburen in "Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing (2011)"

garrickvanburen — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:38:54 +0000

If I recall correctly, the impetus for Christiansen to even look into this was to answer the question: “why are there so many milkshakes sold in the morning via drive thru?”

That’s a different question than, “how do we make our breakfast menu more popular?”

Now, perhaps the latter question begat the former, but either way it is not a product innovation story, it’s a customer/market research story articulating the shape of customer demand (which I fully support).

If there was a second part of the story - like, McD started marketing milkshakes in their breakfast menu and sales shot up ##% or they developed a breakfast flavor milkshake and sales shot up - then we’d have the product innovation story.

New comment by garrickvanburen in "Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing (2011)"

garrickvanburen — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 18:09:14 +0000

I'm a big fan of JobsToBeDone, but partially because of this milkshake example, it took me years to grok.

As I see it, the milkshake example isn't about innovation, it's about actually having human-to-human conversations with customers and appreciating customers define their own competitive set, so perhaps closer to Gibson's "the street has its own use for things."

Outside of those two points, I'm not sure what repeatable lessons exist in the milkshake story for innovation, and because of that, it's probably doing more harm than help to JTBD as a concept.

New comment by garrickvanburen in "Apple's Siri revamp reportedly delayed again"

garrickvanburen — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 22:49:23 +0000

I would say Apple's original exclusivity deal w/ AT&T shows they're comfortable letting a 3rd party control some of the user experience if that's the only way they can get to market.

New comment by garrickvanburen in "Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance"

garrickvanburen — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 01:47:01 +0000

It’s likely the land would be far more valuable as something else.

Small family farms, while romanticized, have all the problems of any small business competing with larger professionalized businesses; consistency in operations, consistency in output quality, access to resources - including people and machines.

Additionally, for their own operational simplicity big buyers prefer interacting with as few suppliers as possible - so, market forces have been driving consolidation for decades.

New comment by garrickvanburen in "Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros"

garrickvanburen — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 21:38:31 +0000

On the news of Netflix acquiring Warner Bros, I’m reminded of how good Netflix has been at innovating their business model.

Over the past 27 years, their business model has changed multiple times and each evolution appears to be in direct response to the bottleneck of growth, from maintaining inventory of DVD to acquiring global streaming rights.

Year / Business Model / Bottleneck to Growth

1998 / Sell DVDs over the internet / Need to continually replenish DVD inventory,

1999-2006 / Rent DVDs over the internet / USPS delivery & return times

2007 / Stream movies over the internet / Acquiring US streaming rights to a massive library of movies

2009 / Start producing movies (Netflix Originals) / Number of subscribers watching Netflix Originals

2010-2012 / Global expansion; Canada, South America, Europe / Maintaining rights globally

2025 / Acquire Warner Bros Discovery

New comment by garrickvanburen in "AI is Dunning-Kruger as a service"

garrickvanburen — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 22:47:40 +0000

I prefer Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect or Knoll’s Law of Media Accuracy

“AI is amazing about the thing I know nothing about…but it’s absolute garbage at the stuff I’m expert in.”

https://garrickvanburen.com/an-increasingly-worse-response/

New comment by garrickvanburen in "Zed's Pricing Has Changed: LLM Usage Is Now Token-Based"

garrickvanburen — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 18:33:09 +0000

My rant on token-based pricing is primarily based on the difficulty in consistently forecasting spend.....and also that the ongoing value of a token is controlled by the vendor...."the house always wins"

https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-59-on-credit...

New comment by garrickvanburen in "Scientists uncover extreme life inside the Arctic ice"

garrickvanburen — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 16:44:03 +0000

Fortitude is amazing. Cinematography, soundtrack, creepiness all top notch.

New comment by garrickvanburen in "Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion"

garrickvanburen — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 14:42:06 +0000

"social media" is forums, IRC, blogs, etc, but through the lens of advertisers.

New comment by garrickvanburen in "PinePhone Pro [GNU/Linux smartphone] has been discontinued"

garrickvanburen — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 19:44:17 +0000

One of my favorite phones. Despite a bizarre hiccup preventing sd cards from being recognized if the camera lens sensor broke.

New comment by garrickvanburen in "Intermittent fasting strategies and their effects on body weight"

garrickvanburen — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 15:29:36 +0000

After briefly looking into it, my assumption is intermittent fasting works great for people that are eating throughout the entirety of the day.