Ellis Crosby
@elliscrosby
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Dad-gital nomad 🧔🏻♂️ AI storybooks @ (Iterative W23) 📚 AI Dev Agency @ 🤖
🟩🟩🟩🟧⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ $100k MRR
Joined July 2015
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How I 10x-ed my hourly rate as an AI developer (long tweet) 💰:
Prior to 2023 I was working mostly in marketing analytics, but in January 2023 I lost my biggest client, leaving on pretty bad terms. I'd just built the v1 of Scarlett Panda and had been using GPT for ~2 years by
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This restaurant scammed a guy with 400k followers and went from 4.2 to 2.6 on Google Maps in 7 hours.
This is my favourite energy in the world 😂
Got scammed in 🇦🇷 Buenos Aires with the famous "extra zero" scam at Órale Juanito Palermo, mexican resto
Receipt said 24,100 ARS = $28
Then they charged me 241,000 ARS = $280
Staff was rly friendly UNTIL we found out, started ignoring us, didn't wanna talk, didn't wanna return
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I tried to hire a NextJS developer… but I have a northern English accent.
And that’s the story of how our app came to be rebuilt into NuxtJS 😅
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CEO: "Can I get access to the prod db to check something?"
*30 seconds later*
CEO:
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A customer is unhappy that our 7 day trial only lasted 168 hours 😂
And also that our images are too large...?
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Decided to climb a volcano instead of building yet another AI product.
10/10 would recommend.
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I’ve just finished Project Hail Mary, probably the book that has been recommended by the most people.
Anyone have any other recommendations with a similar vibe?
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A competitor just slid into our livechat.
How do I respond?
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My family were worried that the hospitals in Thailand would be awful…
This one has a Starbucks and a koi pond
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Dealing with influencers can be the f-ing worst.
This one only has like 12k followers but they wanted to work on a per post basis rather than commission.
Then they sent an invoice on the 31st July (to the wrong email address) and demanded a 25% late payment fee on the 2nd
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Pretty sure most marketers on LinkedIn wouldn't pass the Turing test.
"Customers don't want ads, they want experiences"
Oh really, is that true, barely-articulate-marketing-bulls**t-generating AI bot?
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Getting antibiotics for a tooth infection…
SEA: Google symptoms, go to pharmacy, get antibiotics
Europe: call up doctors, stay on hold for one hour, get an appointment, go to doctors at the right time, wait two hours, get a prescription, go to pharmacy, get antibiotics
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@NithurM
Not necessarily something malicious. I know some people on here (I think
@nico_jeannen
?) block competitors because it can be a distraction to look at how other people are building the same kind of product as you. I don’t block competitors myself, but with one of my apps I got
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The long queues on
@replicate
for Flux Schnell has finally motivated me to try out
@FAL
.
So far so good:
-No queues
-~3x faster generations
-Same price
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All these guys hating on OpenAPI wrappers while just building database wrappers themselves smh
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My new favourite cancellation reason: "my husband is a turd"
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Wooo! First two sales on
Although now we've switched from the "we'll build it when someone buys" stage to the "oh damn! Someone bought, and now we need to build it within an hour" stage 😅
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Client: “You are without a doubt the most expensive AI freelancer we’ve ever paid for”
Me:
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Arrived in Bali.
Spent two hours leaving the airport.
Spent ninety minutes in traffic to get to the hotel.
Spent $7 on good quality all-you-can-eat-sushi.
So overall a 10 out and of 10 place I reckon.
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I can finally share what I’ve been working on recently.
Personalised children’s stories and illustrations using AI magic 🪄
I made it for my daughter (Scarlett) but now we’re opening it as a wider app.
Beta out very soon!
A story made for Scarlett, who was playing with her friend Wet-Tail the wolf.
This story and its image were created entirely with AI magic for Scarlett.
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I think I'm getting better at prioritising what I work on 😅
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We’re in Singapore visiting a few potential investors for the next round of Scarlett Panda 🐼
I feel like I’m in some kind of business movie. Definitely not where I saw the product going when we started a little app to make stories for our baby last year.
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Stripe defaults were becoming a huge pain so we've switched to charging $1 for the 7 day trial to weed out cards that just don't work.
Fingers crossed!
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Overpowered development process:
1. Sketch out what you are thinking using
@excalidraw
2. Give a screenshot to GPT-4 in ChatGPT
3. Have it describe what you've drawn (so you can check it interpreted everything correctly)
4. Get it to build (or amend) code based on the new
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I've changed my mind about Claude 3.5 Sonnet being the best model that everyone in any job should use to increase output...
It's a terrible model, everyone should stop using it and go back to OpenAI 👀
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I’ve removed Live Chat from our site.
In two weeks we only made one sale from it and it took way too much time mostly answering questions that were already on the FAQ 🙄
I've added a Live Chat to the site as people seem to spend a while scrolling around.
How long until I regret it?
(And yep I'm pretending to be
@VivienBresson
- she has a better face than I do)
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This section of the new Scarlett Panda landing page took waaaaay too long
I'm not sure how impactful it'll be but I did enjoy playing around with CSS more than I usually do
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If you don’t like the price of ChatGPT pro just go into the OpenAI playground and put some effort into your prompts.
You’ll get basically the same thing for a fraction of the cost.
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When I accidentally open a project in VS Code instead of
@cursor_ai
and the app doesn't automatically build itself within 5 seconds
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My experience of Vietnam in a graph. Huge confidence over here; I'm jealous 🇻🇳
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Llama3 has been a game changer for the complaint I hear the most from LLM chatbot clients: message length.
No prior "smart" model had message lengths that were consistently controllable with just prompting but Llama3 is almost always within the requested boundaries.
This graph
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The average generation time for a short story on Scarlett Panda (~450 words, 2 images) is now 7 seconds since switching to
@FAL
.
Which sounds good but it's actually a bit TOO fast! We find that the story_read_rate and conversion_rate drop off below 22 seconds, I guess because it
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I’ve been busy with something over the past six weeks so haven’t really been on Twitter.
I can’t tell you exactly what it was, but let’s just say that it started in the Shire and ended on Mt. Doom…
The Kingdom of Men is safe again so I’m back to shitposting and GPT-wrapping 👋
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I got paid as a freelance developer for the first time last week!
I’ve been coding for a few years, but I’ve only ever been hired as a marketer or analyst up to now.
It’s nice to have some extra validation that I kinda know what I’m doing.
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A cool little image gen model I've found on
@replicate
that excels on style control:
They're calling themselves a "Debiased Diffusion Model" which in practice seems to be that the images aren't stuck in the styles/people/objects that MJ/SD tend to be,
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Why are the croissants in Bali better than in France though?
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AHHHHHH!!!!!
We've been testing physical prints with Scarlett Panda since Christmas but this is the first time we've got one for ourselves as we've been on the road and not able to receive parcels.
My daughter is so much happier seeing her strawberry shorts and cat teddy in a
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I wrote this article recently based on a learning from the Adtiplier beta. Most Google Ads accounts (from 500/month to 100k/month spend) had bigger issues having data spread too thinly across search ad assets than poor performing assets.
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I got food poisoning... at a cooking class... from food I cooked myself... 🙃
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Progress after one month of bulking: I’m lighter than I have been in over a year 😅
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I can’t believe I’m married to someone with a 4.2 Uber rating
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Upwork is savage...
Project description: Client is looking for an expert and is willing to pay higher rates for the most experienced freelancers
Est. hours: 40
Budget: $20
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Stripe disputes will drive me to an early grave 🤬
We had a customer request a refund - usually we give customers some leeway despite our pretty solid T&Cs on refunds for people who forgot to cancel. But one customer was actively abusive to our customer support staff so we
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I'm at least 50% more productive in Asia. I don't know if it's because of:
- Cheap coffee delivery straight to my door
- More async comms with European clients
- Both
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I held on to my bashed up 2.5 year old phone for as long as possible but after it slowly lost its charging port, camera and wireless charger I had to finally say goodbye 👋
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I’m sad to be leaving Bali today. I came here to see if it was liveable and found that it definitely was.
I’m on to Malaysia (KL then Ipoh) now but I’ll for sure be back here next year!
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I've just tried out Mike's simple stack and I think it might be my favourite for AI-assisted development.
Just simple, well-documented frameworks with no breaking updates so neither GPT-4o nor Claude 3.5 were confused.
I added Pocketbase too for auth on top of SQLite for auth +
It has taken me more than 10 years but I finally found a tech stack that matches the way I think.
SQLite = fancy spreadsheet
HTMX = fancy html
FastAPI = fancy flask
Tailwind = fancy bootstrap
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What is going on with
@replicatehq
over the past few days?
4 seconds to run a model, but 15 seconds total to get the response from the API?!
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I try not to do these but…
After a couple of weeks where I haven’t had much time to work, I finally found a peaceful place to smash through my giant backlog 😌
📍Ninh Binh, Vietnam
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Kids cafe's in Bali:
+ Super fast, reliable wifi
+ Espresso machine
+ Burgers with high-quality meat
+ Better deals on beer than you find in a bar
+ $4.50 day pass for the kid (adults free)
- Lots of kids screaming
Coworking spaces in Bali:
- Intermittent wifi that drops on
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We’ve officially been around the world!
We just landed in San Diego, meaning that we’ve been all around the world since we were in LA ~480 days ago.
Since then we’ve been to 12 countries (with a bit of back and forth between Europe and SEA).
I can confirm, the world isn’t
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Me: Can you make an image of two siblings hugging... and make it Christmassy-
MidJourney: Say no more
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Using Excalidraw to make graph examples saves so much time
It is the antidote to being a perfectionist
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Publicly shamed by my own wife for accidentally sending a localhost link 🤦🏻♂️
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10 emails later it turned out she'd unsubscribed from our newsletter and expected this to cancel her subscription 🙃
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Me, really hesitant to quote an hourly rate much higher than normal: I don't know...
My wife: SEND IT
The client: Ah that's well within our budget, let's move forward!
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My $1.81 lunch in Bangkok.
A very tasty Tom Yum soup, with lemon ice tea.
It was another $0.50 for fried banana for dessert.
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Here are two models with way too few runs on
@replicate
that you could build an app around in a weekend:
CogAgent-Chat: A vision model specialising in UIs.
Ideas:
-A chatbot that helps elderly users navigate the internet
-An agent or scraper that can navigate complex interfaces
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Me: Can you make an image of two pandas playing... and make them look like they're having fun-
MidJourney: I know exactly what you mean
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Why is there not more hype over the Black Forest Labs models?
I'm getting way better speed + prompt adherence on these (on
@replicate
) than I was with SD3-Turbo
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I'm back!
I took some time of X to get through some larger freelancing projects + travelling because...
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I took a few days off (for the first time since Christmas) after a heavy 3 months of building and speaking to investors.
We visited Tioman in Malaysia, an island with really not a lot going on, so that I could turn my brain off for a bit.
One brain got more switched off than
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It's not every day that we run an experiment that more than doubles our conversion rate and hits 100.00% significance within 1 day 😳
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Just finished working on an MVP
Pretty vague name, can you guess what it does?
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A customer disputed a payment without first messaging our support team to request a refund.
4 months later their bank throws the dispute out as they're very provably lying about cancelling their subscription.
And they've now come crawling back to our support team asking for a
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Anyone got any cool apps that are just waiting on the new smart models (Claude 3.5 Opus, GPT4o-large) rumoured to be launching this week?
I have one use case that didn’t quite work out with 3.5 Sonnet that hopefully is solved soon 🤞
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I built + deployed a landing page for a new project in ~9 minutes. This used to take me like two days 10 months ago...
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People say that VCs are cut throat, but have you ever had an indie hacker try to acquire your mid 7 figure business for “low 5 figures” 😅
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I'm unsure about how much I should lie to my daughter. Like, should I tell her that Santa is real? Or first-click attribution??
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Me: Hey! Can you give me an Anthropic key to attach to the content generation app we just built for you?
Client: Sure, what is Anthropic used for in this app?
Me:
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I love how savage this Youform pricing page is
Usually I'd think this tactic is petty but Typeform do bring it on themselves with their ridiculous pricing mode
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You do realise if you’re hiring developers to write code you ought to put them in solitary confinement so they don’t learn the latest version of Python.
And don’t feed them too much omega-3 so they don’t get too smart and find new solutions.
Right?
You do realize that if you start using prompts to write your code, you really ought to put your prompts under version control.
Oh, and you’d also better lock down the LLM you are using for the life of your system, to ensure that every time you apply that prompt you get the same
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I think the freelance developer I work with dislikes talking to me so much that he's made the clearest, most useful documentation I've ever seen 😅
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Customer support so good that the issue was solved before I'd even asked 🤯
@elliscrosby
@neeldesai23
@constantout
@PaddleHQ
No contest.
You were approved before you even posted this tweet
Happy selling ✨
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A very stupid workout plan:
-Saturday: Leg day, hit a personal best for 3x10 squats weight 🏋️♀️
-Sunday: Hike up to the highest point of Mexico City at 3930m, where the oxygen level is 40% lower than at sea level 😴
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I'm doing cold outreach for a new B2B tool I'm working on and it's so not my usual style.
"Hello there and sorry, I'm really sorry to message you about this app. Sorry but I think it could really help you and I'm very sorry about contacting you out of the blue. Sorry, Ellis"
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Claude 3.5 is so dependable as a coder that it is basically an employee at Incremento now.
I can just sell development tasks, throw them at 3.5 and it will plan the approach, give me the code and tell me how to deploy it.
Then I only need 2 or 3 rounds of "This looks weird" or
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People spend way too much time creating a logo and perfecting their design.
We got Scarlett Panda to $1000 MRR and $150k of funding using the panda emoji (🐼) as a logo and this colour scheme that a user once called "exhausting to look at".
At launch stage most businesses are
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This ad was made mostly by AI...
The script, audio and images were all generated (and then put together by a human). With a tiny budget and short deadline we ended up with 6 variations to test out.
I with AI was a bigger thing back when I worked in performance marketing.
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I read that the most popular car brand in Monaco was Smart 🇲🇨
I had a hard time believing it wasn’t Ferrari or Maserati or something so I went there this week to have a look.
Turns out it checks out! It seems like parking is a PITA so most of the none-mega-rich have tiny cars.
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Since leaving Europe 3 months ago I’ve lost 4.5 kg literally without trying.
It’s so much easier to eat delicious, healthy food here.
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I’m not really a course person but I’m all for the many, many short and highly actionable gems on Vexpower.
It has easily been a 1000x+ ROI purchase in my consulting work.
We decided to do the black friday thing again, so don't buy a vexpower membership until Thursday, when we'll have the deal live! Last year was big for us, can't wait to see how it goes this year.
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@mattshumer_
We just have to wait another week for Opus to degrade further and we'll have a bunch of better-than-Opus OS models 😅
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Will my 2,000th post get me to 2,000 followers?
Or do I have to bribe you all?
The next 8 followers can get some free AI dev advice (I'll send you my calendly link to book it after you follow)
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