"Why is Zoom lagging?"

"Is the issue my WiFi?"

"What's going on with the Internet?"

So, I built a local Mac utility that runs in the menubar to give at-a-glance visibility into live network and application issues. It's free (for typical uses), battery-efficient, and gives fast and reliable answers.

https://breakdown.live/

However, Gemini at one point output what will probably be the highlight of my day:

"I have made a complete mess of the code. I will now revert all changes I have made to the codebase and start over."

What great self-awareness and willingness to scrap the work! :)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38356277

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

You're probably going to have to contact folks for quotes for most colo providers. They're doing "enterprise sales", so they want to talk to you, see what the needs and opportunities are, then quote you based on your needs.

If budget is a factor, there are local/regional providers you can find good deals with. E.g. I've had good experiences with https://www.opticfusion.com/ in Seattle.

If low-latency across the US is a factor then...doing that with one will be sub-optimal, however I'd either start in a specific market you want to chase (e.g. LA or NYC), or go more central like Chicago.

If connectivity flexibility and peering are key for you then you might consider locating in a "carrier hotel". The best locations for those vary by geography (e.g. in Chicago that would be at Equinix, but in LA it's Coresite). You'll pay more, but can readily access the peering exchange.

Over the last 10 months I've expanded the product into more of the startup journey. It now provides a full workflow covering idea generation, validation, and prioritization; automated market and competitor research and analysis; and business plan creation. All of this is done with the help of AI, short-cutting users' time to market, filling in gaps in their experience, and ensuring every aspect is custom-tailored to their passions, preferences, experiences, and goals.

You can check out a 5-min demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWU7h83ZO6Y

You can also download an example competitive analysis report here: https://app.companycraft.ai/resources/CompanyCraft_Competiti..., and an example business plan here: https://app.companycraft.ai/resources/Sample_CompanyCraft_Bu...

Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur or a serial founder, CompanyCraft can help you go from fuzzy ideas to a successful launch, so try it out! Idea generation and validation is free to use, and if you want to use the paid features you can use the code SHOWHN (until Nov 15th) for a 20%-off discount.

Let me know your feedback both on the platform, as well as what's keeping you from starting your business. I want to help founders build businesses that improve the lives of the people they interact with, and use AI to have a positive impact on the world.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38206024

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

1. If you communicate that you're in the early stages of building an exciting new business and wanting to get feedback from early-access customers, there should be businesses that are OK with you being solo. They will adapt to that risk, and you won't be able to sell to everyone, but it shouldn't exclude you from everyone either. You might just not be talking to the right customers yet.

2. For milestones (and fundraising) you should think about your goals - what are you trying to get out of this? Do you want to build and scale a big team, serve giant amounts of customers, etc. Or do you just want to augment or replace your income? Or something in-between? You can think about this from different angles: team size, revenue, geographic scope, your personal exit or income, etc.

Here are a couple of examples from my journey in case they're helpful:

In my prior business (https://www.bigleaf.net) my first milestone was to get a working product. I didn't feel as though just talking about it would be convincing enough (and it wasn't), but once I could demo an MVP then it really wow'd customers. Along the way I added a milestone to get a technical co-founder since I got burnt out doing it myself. Those 2 major steps took just over a year. The next milestone was getting our first revenue (took just a month or so after the MVP), then milestones just kept being added from there logically based on the strategic path we chose to be on at that moment.

In my current business (https://www.companycraft.ai) I had a mix of some early milestones. I wanted to talk to potential customers (entrepreneurs) to ensure the problems I wanted to solve matched up with pain they had, and I also wanted to build an MVP ASAP. I completed those in about 3 months, with many other smaller steps and goals along the way. My current milestone is to do a full "v1" public launch in November.

So you just set some milestones that are logical based on where you are and where you want to be in the coming months and years, then hold yourself accountable to them (or ideally be connected with a peer or mentor who can be an accountability partner of sorts).

3. On location, I go back to your team goals. If you're going to stay solo then no, location shouldn't matter. If you want to build a fully remote team then it shouldn't matter much (though being near-ish to a decent airport would be valuable for visiting the team and customers). If you want any local team members then you should think about where you'll gather and what the talent pool is like in your area.

4. It sounds like you're already on a good track here - talking to people who have the pain you're solving and gathering their emails. If that has you on the right track I'd just keep doing that. However you mentioned below that you're selling this B2B...so in that case you may want to consider if you're actually talking to the buyer of your product. Are the people you've met the people who would approve the purchase of your solution? If not, try to connect with those people. Identifying a list of them on LinkedIn and cold reaching out could be one method.

5. Fundraising goes back to your goals as an entrepreneur :) If you want to grow this to IPO or a really big exit, have a team of hundreds, and build a market-changing or world-impacting offering, then you probably need to raise outside funds at some point. However, if your desired scale is smaller and/or you see a path to profitability without fundraising then you get to keep control of your destiny, which is great. If you can afford it and you don't sense the market is going to run away without you, I'd advise continue building, talking to customers, and close your first deals; don't rush into raising money. If/when you know that you can't succeed at your goals without raising money, then dive into that path.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36264558

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

They cite "two to 15+ seconds" in this blog post for responses. Via the OpenAI API I've been seeing more like 45-60 seconds for responses (using GPT-3.5-turbo or GPT-4 in chat mode). Note, this is using ~3500 tokens total.

I've had to extensively adapt to that latency in the UI of our product. Maybe I should start showing funny messages while the user is waiting (like I've seen porkbun do when you pay for domain names).

"predictive AI will seem stuck while generative AI accelerates in 2023. Most high-value AI will still be predictive- so there will significant frustrations around AI ROI."

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34072522

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

As a former wireless ISP architect/engineer, it's wonderful to see the leadership that Starlink is providing in LEO satellite connectivity (due to the low latency compared to geostationary). I hope the "block the sky with satellites" visual/astronomy concerns won't play out as an actual issue, because this seems like a great platform to address connectivity needs in harder-to-reach areas.

Bigleaf is what we call "Cloud-first SD-WAN" - we use a software-based network to optimize the connection from businesses to their key cloud applications. For example, grocery stores use us to ensure their credit card transactions are successful and law firms use us to ensure their VoIP calls always sound good.

We're hiring for a number of roles right now:

  * Software Development Manager
  * Sr. Front-End SW Engineer
  * Linux-focused SW Engineer (firmware and Linux networking subsystem)
  * Software Engineer (general role with focus on back-end and networking)
  * DevOps Engineer
  * Director of Network Engineering and Operations
  * Network Support Specialist

Bigleaf is an SD-WAN platform that provides reliability and performance for Cloud applications over commodity broadband. We're a small team but we've got an established business with hundreds of paying mid-market customers, and we're growing quickly.

Our interview process entails some initial email discussions, 1-2 in-person or phone-based interviews (no crazy technical algorithm memorization tests), and often a brief (~1 hr) coding challenge for you to do from home.

We're hiring for the following technical roles right now: * Front-end Developer * Sr. Software Engineer (Linux networking focus) * Network Operations Engineer * Network Integration Engineer

Check out more details here: http://www.bigleaf.net/careers and feel free to email me (Founder and CEO) at joelm@bigleaf.net (no recruiters please).

Bigleaf is an SD-WAN provider delivering internet redundancy and optimization, keeping businesses connected to the cloud. Our proprietary platform uses Software-Defined-Networking (SDN) technologies to provide seamless failover and dynamic application prioritization.

We have a reliable and high-performance service that’s growing quickly, so we're looking for a Network Operations Engineer to join the team.

The Role

• Network Operations

• Technical Support

• Device and Service Provisioning

• Software Engineering / DevOps

Fit Check

• Do you love serving customers with outstanding support?

• Do you know what ARP is and how it works?

• Have you troubleshot BGP or OSPF issues?

• Do you know what jitter does to a VoIP call?

If you think this might be a good fit for you, please check out more info below and get in touch:

http://www.bigleaf.net/careers/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074046

Points: 3

# Comments: 1