Some thoughts have been swirling in my head given the discontinuation of the penny but the extreme precision of crypto stablecoins like USDC. What does this mean for privacy and are we in a slide towards someone knowing how you spend every dollar no matter how hard you try to have private transactions?
See my comment in this thread - I got an email from "someone" (an AI clearly) that signed up for my service (togetherletters.com) from the same domain (agentmail.to) after we had launched on ProductHunt. I looked up the address and that email was never used for a signup and it was just a way to then pitch their product (second email, not the first one it sent). I hate this so much and this is going to now make email just as bad as parts of the web.
I agree with what you’re saying, but I think that email was one of the first parts the web to become terrible. This happened a long time ago, we’re just used to it.
This was likely a free tier user. We do this intentionally and don't allow free users to send from custom domains, so you can have a easier time identifying LLM emails. In this case, it seemed like it worked :)
I've already received spam email from AI agents using a seeming competitor to this (agentmail.to) and then claiming they aren't AI agents and then trying to sell me garbage. I can't tell you how much I hate this.
Now that I think about it I’m pretty sure that’s illegal in Germany under UWG §7 (which is insanely strict, to a fault, but is helpful here). And maybe in other parts of the EU under ePrivacy laws
We did a Show HN a few weeks ago (updated from 4 years ago) and have no AI, LLM, or anything and got... zero traction. We're on ProductHunt today but everything that is trending is all AI stuff. So that is where we're at.
Years ago I had bought a Volvo XC90 T5 (gas powered only). It had this stop/start feature when the car was stopped to help improve fuel economy (lots of cars have this now). Except mine wouldn't work. I took it into the dealership and the sales guy was surprised to see me there on my third or so visit. He advised making a stink with Volvo North America and sure enough after a few months and about two years or so after I bought the car they bought it back from me for my full purchase price - no depreciation.
That made me a solid Volvo buyer (I replaced that car with a newer XC90 T8 - a plug-in hybrid that I still have and is a great vehicle). That said, new versions of any product have issues sometimes but the loss of propulsion on the highway is extremely concerning. Hopefully Volvo comes through and irons this all out like they did for me.
The whole geo-IP space started back with my startup, Digital Envoy, in 1999 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39734355). The way we went about it was by providing an API to clients but we actually hosted our entire database (encrypted and in a proprietary format) with clients. The reason for this was for latency (back in 1999 we could get about 0.03ms per transaction something that you can't get on any edge delivered service) which was necessary for the types of clients we went after.
The business was very valuable across a lot of industries - gambling, encryption, advertising, security, adult entertainment, etc. - so there was a lot of demand that also helped smooth out the demand up/down cycles. If one market was cold, another was hot. But basically it's a lot of work and a lot of hand-to-hand combat. This is the best way to learn and get passionate customers. Show up, sell to them, and convince them they need you. You'll learn so much by doing this. And don't use the excuse that you're an introvert or not good at selling. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you need to learn and improve. No one is the best at anything on day one - you won't be either. But you'll get there if you keep at it.
Being the absolute best in the market meant that even having much more better funded competitors ($50m+ for competitors against our $12m in funding) meant we tended to win all the time. And before you ask, if I had this to do over again now, I could do this company for a LOT less money given how commoditized things are. I can tell you the time I almost spent $1m on a storage array until I found a cheaper vendor for $250k. Oh, that storage array was for 1TB of storage. So yeah.
Feel free to ask me anything. If there are enough people who have questions and want to do a chat I'd be happy to host a video call and get peppered with whatever questions you might have.
I’m just now really trying to put myself out there and get into sales to further develop our business. We’ve been lucky with some early network sales, but for the next chapter of our business (https://resonancy.io) I need to build the sales engine and I feel very much out of my depth.
Just telling myself its a practice and trying to chip away at it one week at a time.. At this point identifying potential customers and getting meetings is a real challenge. Been trying Apollo and doing cold outreach but is a slow grind. Also trying my best in linkedin..
IMO - and again, remember this is experience from 20+ years ago although I still do a lot of this now - using these kinds of automated shotgun approaches is a mistake, especially early on and especially if you are selling something. We use an automated engine for our podcast agency (https://edgewise.media) but that is a different pitch when it's "come on my podcast and talk about yourself" versus "I want you to spend money for my widget".
What we did was more labor intensive and a function of these kinds of tools not existing (initial dot-com days). We would read the tech press, etc. and identify companies that might have a use for our tech. Then we would email the top person (guessing their email address usually - and most companies use a small number of variations for addresses) with a custom written, but short, tailored pitch to why they could use us and see if they wanted to talk. No pitch deck or attachments. Literally 2-3 sentences. Something that if even someone is going to quickly delete, something in those 2-3 sentences might catch their eye and make them reply instead of delete. We landed customers like Google (who we ended up later suing - that is a different tale), Doubleclick (who ended up being bought be Google), PayPal, Xbox, and a bunch of others through this method.
Happy to chat more. Startups are hard and all of us should help one another out to make the road a little less hard if possible. Keep at it - I know you'll get there. Hard work will get you there, shortcuts (usually) won't.
Did running the geolocation service allow you to see otherwise hidden abuses by ISPs and other service providers ?
What I mean is: did anything ever break or behave badly ... and then when you investigated you discovered "Oh, look at what these people are doing ..." ?
Interesting question. We never saw anything to this extent but did see when mergers happened how dial-in POPs would be merged and reallocated. Also interesting was how many IP addresses existed for North Korea (less than 32 IIRC) versus Antarctica (more than 2k IIRC). Reminder: I've been out of the business since 2005 (stayed on the board until we were acquired in 2007). So my data is quite dated at this point.
I "wrote" this DNS validator to help me migrate DNS from one service to another and make sure I didn't miss anything. I didn't write any code (or even the README or example BIND file) and just used AI (Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet) to write the initial version and iterate until I got all the features I think are needed. I have not reviewed the code (so there may be bugs) but it seems to work properly. For me this is a super eye-opener with what is going to happen next in the tech industry.
CAIDA had some awesome stuff back in those days. There was also an outfit that generated poster maps of the Internet backbones too. I wish I had bought one back then because I don't know of anyone making things like this anymore. Our data was used by a number of companies to create visualizations too. One even appeared on a 60 Minutes story (I think it was that show).
