Jason Leow

Saw this tweet and really enjoyed the contrarian perspective when starting on a new idea or product:

> Don't try to validate your next startup idea. Instead ask people why you SHOULDN'T start working on it. That way you'll reduce your own biais 🔥 – [@xavier_coiffard](https://twitter.com/xavier_coiffard/status/1625865771384463363)

Because we always consider more reasons we can add to the list of reasons for doing it, but seldom consider *removing* reasons, or reasons that disprove the idea.

It's Nassim Taleb's *via negativa* approach basically. Focus in what it isn't. A recipe for what to avoid, what not to do. Subtractive, not additive.

And when you're entralled by a shiny new object of an idea, everything in your brain is compelling you to make irrational judgements to persuade yourself and others that you are right. You might even co-opt "intuition/gut feel" as a reason even if you don't. There's so many things to watch out for:

- Personal bias - You're interested in the the topic and that blinds you to seeing the reality of the market conditions needed to judge if pursuing the idea is a good decision
- Lack of information - As with most products starting out, you don't even have enough data to make a good judgement call, but you make them anyway, filling in the gaps with your own subjective interpretations.
- Over-optimism - You drank the Kool-aid and believed in narratives like "patience for results", even if you're working on the wrong thing and you're actually stalling.
- Media hype - Everyone and their mother is talking about it (like NFTs, web3, now AI), so you got on the bandwagon too without deeply understanding the technology or how investors/companies hype up certain things because they are incentivized to do so.

The way I see it, there's a lot more skewing forces to convince you that your idea is a good one and you should pursue it. Less forces balancing out the other way (other than cynical family members/friends).

It just makes more sense then to ask people why you should drop it, to address those blindspots directly. You usually have enough knowledge of the pros anyways...

Ask why you shouldn't do it, not why you should.

I've been brewing this idea for a SaaS for a while that combines a bit of my wide-ranging interests: web accessibility, design for disability, social impact work, SaaS, indie hacking, and GPT-3 AI.

Idea:
Consumer/Enterprise GPT-3 AI app for image captioning, and generating alt text for images on the internet.

Problem:
- Inclusive design and web accessibility (aka "a11y") is important work but often deprioritised because it's deemed as "expensive" or "time-consuming" or "not relevant to our target customers". But companies might take it up if it's dead easy to implement, like just *npm install a11y*.
- One important a11y feature is having alt text for images in your website. Without alt text describing the images, folks who have visual impairment/blindness using screen readers will be deprived of social participation and understanding the context of the content through the image. Like say memes for example - all the context is in the image, and people don't often caption or describe it in the post or in alt text.

Opportunity:
- Platforms are now giving more algorithm weight to images with alt text. So it's good for business/marketing. Personally I add alt text to all my images on Twitter, not just for the higher algo juice but also for inclusion.
- AI like GPT-3 aren't just good for text-to-image generation. They can also read images and describe them. There's already [2 MVPs](https://gpt3demo.com/category/image-captioning) doing that. I tested out one of the [apps called CLIP](https://huggingface.co/spaces/akhaliq/CLIP_prefix_captioning) using a Spiderman meme, and the result "A group of cartoon characters standing on top of a blue skateboard" isn't not the most accurate description tbh. Lots of room for improvement and maybe that's where the opportunity is?


Features & business model:
- Imagine if alt text is automated and hassle-free. All it takes is to install a package and the software adds all the required alt text for you into the code. Or you're uploading a picture to Twitter and the app auto-generates a description in 1 second. Most basic MVP version would be like CLIP – a drag and drop for an image to get a text description.
- B2C: Chrome extension to write alt text for you when triggered on a site. Or a mobile app that adds an alternative AI keyboard option to your normal keyboard that you can trigger on any text field using a command like `/gen`.
- B2B: Premium npm package or plugin that reads all images in your site, adds alt text descriptions to HTML automatically. Payment can be a mix of recurring and non-recurring: one-time generation vs monthly ongoing generation. Great for ecommerce sites with lots of images uploaded every month.

*What do you think?*

Being rich is being often portrayed as having mansions, supercars, yachts and expensive divorce settlements. That's what being rich for the top 0.1% is like. But for the us mere mortals, we don't want to be that kind of rich. Our rich looks a lot simpler.

What "I wanna to be rich" really means for me:

- Waking up without an alarm clock, and going back to sleep after waking up because I can. This includes no 3am downtimes, no urgent support cases.
- Waking up in a new city or country every week or month if I so choose to. Or being able to choose to stay in a foreign place for long term. Travel anytime, anywhere, first class.
- Not buying fast cars but being able to afford one if I so choose to, while not actually exercising that option... because it's lame.
- Buying all the healthy food I want and need for me and my family, and not having to second guess if I can afford it this month.
- Donating generously to a social cause, or helping a friend out without expecting any return, or just having time/money to help others more.
- Retire one's parents. My parents are already retired but it'll be great to give them a quality of life that's more than comfortable.
- Being able to have leisurely and quality time with family and people I love. Key word is "leisurely", not in a hurry to get back to work.
- Having lots of time to do what I truly enjoy working on. A steady stream of interesting creative projects done in a calm and joyful manner, with no concern for making it profitable.
- Being healthy, free from chronic ailments, having time for personal fitness and feeling a sense of wellbeing.

*Does this resonate?*

A bit of a [trending indie hacker thing](https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1623710997331738625): Validating product ideas with just a tweet, and a Stripe payment link to collect presales.

Before, the barest of MVPs would be a landing page with some copy and an email sign-up form, *ala* Dropbox.

Now, you don't even need a domain and website! Just tweet and buy button! Love how we're pushing it to test product ideas with the most minimum of effort.

I find this to be poetic. Such economy of effort, and so simple an approach to show an idea. No bells and whistles, no snazzy "change the world" copy, no invasive click funnel tracking, no rainbow gradient call-to-action text or buttons.

Just 280 characters. And a link to buy.

The 280 characters is key. If you can't communicate what's valuable to your customers in a tweet, maybe it doesn't really have legs.

The Stripe payment link is key too. Waitlist sign-ups are notoriously unreliable metrics to validate market demand. It's such low commitment to just give your email. But open up your wallet to pay right there right now, with no real product made yet? A lot of upfront faith, a huge commitment and a great signal for demand.

And with tweets having only a 24-48h life cycle, it's clear at the end if your idea have potential.

Tweet + buy = pure poetry.