Thread

1. johnfn · 1789843452 · focus · HN ↗

   It’s a tale as old as time — people don’t understand that marketing and branding are just as important, if not more so, than the product. Jev is exceptionally-well branded. Anyone can look at the webpage and understand it, and the implications, instantly.

   OPs “marketing” is a single post on Reddit titled “ Predicting sales conversion probability from conversations using pure Reinforcement Learning”. Can you understand what that means? I can’t, and I consider myself reasonably technical. Is it obvious it has the same implications as Jev? Again, no idea. And it was just a single post on a subreddit that I don’t even browse! I see people on this thread saying “Jev is just BERT”. Sure, and Dropbox is just a ftp account mounted with curlftpfs!

   I do feel bad for the author for finding something cool and being unable to brand it. But the full definition of “product” INCLUDES being able to coherently communicate it. In some sense the branding is just as much the “breakthrough” as the model.

   1. tootie · 1789854476 · focus · HN ↗

      I wrote an article detailing an idea I had back during web 1.0. I thought it was clever and maybe some people would find it interesting. Few years later a SaaS popped up selling the same idea as a service. It eventually became a pretty commonly followed pattern for a bunch of huge companies in the same domain.

      I have no idea if I was literally the first person to have this idea or if anyone who launched one of these businesses read my article. I definitely didn't understand how much commerical value there was or even considered making a business out of it. I blame nobody but myself for missing an opportunity if there even was one.

      I did get like $200 for writing it which was nice.

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