262: Pieter Levels The Indie Hackers Guide to AI Startups

I think you should always do the opposite everybody else is doing. So now, if indie hacking is mainstream, you should probably do something completely different ... You should go where nobody is going.

Most developers are pretty slow to be honest. Like, man I'm not a good developer, but I'm really fast ... I don't make things too complicated ... People try to immediately write a function for something you repeat twice. It's like, man, just repeat it. You know, this kind of stuff.

It means that it's become more competitive and more saturated and more difficult, because you're competing not just with a lot of indie hackers now—a lot of people doing it, it's become like the standard route—you're also competing with big tech companies now.

I always feel you need to run away from the herd, you know, the sheep, and you need to go somewhere else. Look for the part of the grass where nobody is and go there.

I think the government should provide basic income to most people ... I don't know if there will be a lot of new jobs created, actually. Generally people believe in that; I don't really believe in that.

My profit margins for these AI startups is not high. This week I've been charting it, and with the cost of GPU, the profit margin gets really, really low very quickly.

This makes new developers think that they need all this technology to make stuff. And this technology is nice, but in many ways, a lot of the new technology makes things more complicated often.

Often, the time it takes to automate something is higher than the time the thing take. So, if that's true, just do it yourself manually.

Beautiful design is like a red flag for me—these beautiful gradients and these borders that move. It's so fancy. If it's too fancy, it's means you spent too much time on design or it's some VC startup that spent too much money on designers—if it's the beginning, if it's not valid yet.

Look at all the subreddits. There's a lot of problems there. Like every subreddit has a goal, and you can go see there's apps or startups you can make around that.