Antler - Day 9

Note: This post was really late. I've been taking time to do more programming than I've done since my younger startup days. As I write this note, we've concluded Week 7, and I plan to do a reflections post on that shortly, but right now I'm playing catch-up with various Antler and TASM notes. Sorry, kinda not sorry.

Sharing discovery

Context free notes from various presentations.

• Not everyone wants to grow. At all. Some people just want to solve the problem in front of them and not think particularly further
• Big pharma is most interested in de-risking potential drugs (they frequently don't research lesser known molecules themselves, but are very happy to license appropriate tech from smaller labs once those labs have done groundbreaking work)
• Computational chemists are rare and extremely expensive, so getting one on your board is a pretty strong signal
• Keep in mind that if you've got a lot of calls that you got from a particular platform listing, that platform may be affected by selection bias
• Parents mostly don't want to hear feedback or get help, they mostly just want reassurance (that they're doing ok, or that they're not the only ones facing a particular problem)
• The kids are alright
• A couple groups re-derived "Awkward Silence" and "Tell me more"
• College students are surprisingly willing to just talk to random old people on campus
• Pricing is weird. Certain verticals just have an assumption that the service is really expensive, so when you tell them what you're looking to sell something for, a common reaction is a sort of "that's too good to be true" suspicion
  • Potential solution is a "try now pay later model"
• Giving freebies is a good way to get peoples' attention (assuming they're actually valuable freebies)
• Some people haven't fully internalized the typical mind fallacy, and are pretty surprised when they see evidence for it
• Sometimes, your idea sucks, and that's ok. You can drop those and move on to better ones.

That's It For Now

This sub-series has been a set of notes that I furiously typed out during the various Antler sessions in a similar style to how I cover the TASM group. There's been a lot of positive feedback on various private channels, including a surprising number of people asking me if I was using some sort of transcription+LLM setup to compile notes so quickly. The answer is no; I type them with my human fingers and try to think quickly enough to wring out insight as I go. As with the rest of this blog, half the point is me working ideas through my brain and seeing what sort of nutrients I can extract.

The curriculum is done now, and most of us are in build-or-sell mode. There will probably be more posts tagged Antler, but they'll be notes on progress, or possibly links to stream VODs of me writing ridiculous amounts of JS/Python in my now-bizarre dev setup.

I'm planning to take a little time off, both to work on the main build, and to do some touch-ups to catwalk so I can resume/fully-automate the audio versions of this blog.

Wish me luck, and as always, I'll let you know how it goes.