FireWireLily

joined 10 months ago
 

Hi guys,

I'm in a bit of a dilemma and could use some wisdom from this community. I've been trying hard to better myself as a "leader" in my small company - staying calm, being more approachable, criticize constructively - you know the routine.

But, as I'm navigating my second business attempt (started about 4 months ago), I'm hitting a wall. No big clients yet, and what's really testing my patience are the negative attitudes of my two employees (that's all the team as of now). It's been a tough year and a half, and I sometimes wonder if I should keep pushing or just dismiss the team and be a freelancer/ take a job. Because it feels like I'm changing myself too much for the sake of keeping cool with the team.

But here's the thing: I love what I do. I'm providing GPT-like solutions for sales and customer support, and it's genuinely exciting stuff. My tech skills are solid, but sales is not my strength, and employee attitudes aren't helping. Sometimes I wonder if it's me - am I expecting too much, or maybe micromanaging?

What do you guys think? Any advice, experience or thoughts on handling these challenges, especially with employees, would be really helpful right now.

[–] FireWireLily@alien.top 1 points 10 months ago

My two cents: make a landing page for each of these services, and run a LinkedIn campaign targetted for each.

Soon you will realise where is the demand. Why do the market research when a simple campaign can tell you how many clicks are coming for each service?

Check Click through ratio, cost per click, and contact form fill up. These things will guide you about what the market is demanding.

One more thing - start broad, and as you have enough work, start going narrow towards where your ability to serve and market demand both are highest. But in the start, try to take all kinds of projects. That will help you with the revenue.

All the best!

[–] FireWireLily@alien.top 1 points 10 months ago (3 children)

I beg to differ. The startups that use GPT 4 API for their software can readily switch to PALM 2, Claude 2 or the other competitive Language models.

The startups add a lot of proprietary code to create value out of base language model. They also learn many things about the user behaviour. These things don't change even if OpenAI shuts down completely.

Furthermore, GPT 4 is going nowhere - before everyone leaves OpenAI, it will surely be merged with Msft in the worst case scenario. So there's that.

Also, even if GPT 4 gets shut down, Msft has such clauses in their contract that they can get the weights and run it on Azure.

So all in all, there is no concern for such startups.

[–] FireWireLily@alien.top 1 points 10 months ago

There are many aspects.

  1. You will only be able to sustain efforts for a few months to 2-3 years, when you're genuinely interested in that thing - be it a problem being solved by some tech or a startup, be it some research, or some creation like writing a book.

  2. That leads us to, how do you find what you're genuinely interested in? It is by trying a lot of different things. Even if they seem not so interesting at first, give yourself a week or two to try one thing at a time.

  3. So then how do you try different stuff? 3.1 Pick any random course online that sounds at least somewhat interesting or similar to what you already know 3.2 Go out and participate in some workshop, or events 3.3 Connect to friends or random people on LinkedIn - and meet them in person to have conversations. This will help with better clarity (far better than ChatGPT or internet) 3.4 Buy books on various topics and force yourself to finish them.

  4. By doing all this, you will definitely find something that's at least 10-20% or more interesting.

  5. That's when you double down! Go deeper and deeper, enjoy the intricacies of that area. Let your curiosity run wild for a few months in that field.

If the curiosity dies completely, start from 3 and repeat. Generally by 2nd or 3rd iteration, you will have gained a lot of deeper knowledge in two-three fields which will help you focus on your master piece or that problem you just have a sheer fire of solving. Good luck from there!!