Pratyush Rai
@pratyush_r8
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Founder @foyerwork -- Bringing AI in the workflows of 1M users | Alumnus ~ @IITKanpur • @BCG || Alter ego of @pratyushrai01
palo alto, california
Joined September 2016
There's no better motivation to improve the product, than seeing your friends use the PAID version of it. ♥️♥️. Merlin might be good today. But we promise to make it legendary. 🫡🔥🚀.
It's been a week since I bought the Merlin Unlimited plan; using @foyerwork on PDFs, Research Paper, and even @X is good, man; I don't think I'll find a better way to research stuff. Looks like I'm just Ctrl + M ing my curiosity out
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👋 Folks - Excited to launch Merlin, a command bar AI wizard for browser 🧙♂️ . 🚀 Just press Cmd + G (or Ctrl + G) to call merlin to your help. It uses Open AI's chatGPT to do magic on your browser.
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Folks 🙋♂️ Announcement Incoming 📢. After playing around with ChatGPT & getting addicted to it. We have built Ooogle - OpenAI powered google search 🔍. Get OpenAI to help you on all your searches, all the time, seamlessly! 🔥.
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Indians ducking on Indians is good for none. Pretty sad to see a respected founder from India, ducking on for not being able to show match scores. (Now can totally see what @protosphinx meant when talking abt the pull-down attitude of Indians in his pod).
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Development Bank of Singapore's CIO cites a Bitcoin price meme (🌈pricing ) in their bitcoin evaluation research. This is probably the first explicit use of meme in institutional research I have come across in this domain
Dear @ercwl .Please see page 20.
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Folks, excited to share that OpenAI is an official partner for Gen AI Hackathon hosted by @foyerwork @vaibhavbetter @ContloHQ ❤️ . Top-10 teams from this hackathon will get complete GPT-4 API & Plugin Access 🔥. Plus, participants will get credits worth up to $10,000 ⚡️
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Checking out @ProductHunt every morning is a therapeutic experience. Initially when I started using it, I used to get annoyed on why they keep a timeline style feed. Now I know why! 😃
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While angel investors are great, what many B2B SaaS companies truly need is angel customers. Ones who:.- are patient to work with buggy product.- give money.- hard bound on getting ROI.- understand "its a product and not service business". They are the true saints of capitalism.
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One of our users, out of nowhere, shared an amazing feature idea that in its best case might help us build something super useful for 130M Americans. He sent an email with a detailed thesis backing every point with data. No hidden agenda. Just a guy who got an idea!.
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@yu_angela People should find out for themselves if this is true! . We built out a chrome extension to get ChatGPT results on all their google searches. How much % of your searches does ChatGPT answer better?.
Folks 🙋♂️ Announcement Incoming 📢. After playing around with ChatGPT & getting addicted to it. We have built Ooogle - OpenAI powered google search 🔍. Get OpenAI to help you on all your searches, all the time, seamlessly! 🔥.
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@bentossell We at @foyerwork have created an interface I am proud to share. We provide YouTube summaries with timestamps for videos of any length. This is one of the most loved features in our ~500k strong community.
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Thanks to the @ProductHunt community for your support during Merlin 2.0 launch 🙏❣️. We at @foyerwork will strive harder to make Merlin even more useful to all of you 🚀
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Excited for our new Merlin demo video 😁. If I had to sum up all what Merlin does. It helps:.- Write what you mean.- Research what you want .- Bring the best of AI world to you . This demo shows all the ways we help do this ✨. Check out here:.
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For those who seek accurate info. You know where to find it :)
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We have just launched GPT-4o inside Merlin. 😊. Its available to all users (free + pro). ♥️. Give it a shot. Link below 👇
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Happy to share a few interesting updates on Merlin's recent versions 😊. Many of them have been out for long, but if you didn't notice, this thread/video can be a good recap for you 👇
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We started this IG page ~11 months back. 2 of our amazing meme interns have been posting 5-6 memes daily. Today it is running 1.7M impressions per month. That's almost 50k+ impressions daily. 😳Compounding works in weird ways, but when it does, it's really baffling.
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We have lauched around 11 ChatGPT "GPTs" and so far my main (somewhat trite) learning has been that those who already have distribution are the most to gain from this (given no inherent loops inside). Distribution is truly the king!.
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@OfficialLoganK @OpenAI We have many features powered by GPT3.5 and knowing usage on each key can help segment which feature is costing us most. And determine corresponding ROI on each feature.
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Super happy to see @sayashk on this list. He & @random_walker are doing phenomenal work on which gives a super holistic picture of exact state of the AI land. Even if you are remotely related to AI world, it's worth checking out their newsletter.
Honored to be on this list. When @random_walker and I started our AI snake oil newsletter a year ago, we weren't sure if anyone would read it. Thank you to the 13,000 of you who read our scholarship and analysis on AI week after week.
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Finally! ♥️♥️. Given Foyer was a directly and severely impacted company due to SVB crisis. This is a big relief. Appreciate the prompt response of US Gov on this matter.
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Have a bittersweet relationship with OpenAI bills. When its high it usually means the usage has increased, which is a great thing. But man, that's still a lot of money. Even after that 50% discount on GPT-4o. (hence am excited about the cost drops that Nvidia is pushing 😋😋).
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The IIT JEE prep times, however messy, has this as its biggest advantage.
The first time you work really hard on something, in addition to the immediate benefit (whatever you were working for) you also learn that you're capable of working really hard. This makes it easier to be ambitious in all your future plans.
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In the startup world, most want to be contrarian & right, in the long term. However, few are willing to be contrarian & wrong in the short term. Most of us must realise, that there is no path to contrarian & right, that goes through consensus & right . It doesn't work like that.
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❤️❤️.
5. Merlin Unified API does exactly what the title says. It brings APIs from your favorite chatbots (Open AI, Google, and Claude), all under one roof so you can make calls easier.
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Excited to launch a fun project called "Apes and AI" or AAA. It's as if Twitter & Character AI had a baby. We wanted to see how autonomous AI characters interact with humans in an open forum and decided to make AAA. Check this out 👇.
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The best investors to work with are typically former founders who have seen both legitimate failures and success, in their professional & personal life. This category of investors are genuinely kind and humble (not discreetly or situational kind). And are great problem solvers.
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Ideas are truly super fragile. Met a founder friend today who started with a very poorly formed idea an year ago. Today their product is so useful, it's stunning to see what they have made with 1/100th of capital vs their competition. Time & obsession are deep super powers.
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$1 Billion is the highest donation that has appeared on my wall, towards India's CoVID crisis . No news, no boasting, no PR. Just a silent donation!. This is a very altruistic act of philanthropy towards this cause. Thank You @VitalikButerin 🙏🙏.
🔔Vitalik donates 1B Worth Shiba INU To India Covid Relief Fund !. @VitalikButerin @sandeepnailwal $SHIB
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We have launched Merlin Chat 2.0 with a cleaner and more powerful version of interacting with AI on the web. Do give it a shot. 👇.
After months of hardwork and sleepless nights, we are launching Merlin Chat v2.0 in beta! . We are still fixing things and improving so give us your feedback at Or ping @lakshay983 on the fly 😅. Check it out as below or go to
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Midjourney is for the mid, Bonkers is for the mad!. We thought, what if you could have a firehose of different (finetuned) AI models help you test your content ideas altogether, all at once. And so was born Bonkers. Try it out👇(& support us if you ♥️).
🚀Exciting News Alert! 🚀. Thrilled to announce that Bonkers, our latest innovation, is now live on Product Hunt!.Bonkers is more than just a product; it's a solution crafted to generate images from texts with minimal efforts. Now, we need some serious help:.1. Visit our Product
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For years Zuck was doing PR speak & trying to hold on to an image. Everyone hated him. And suddenly it seems he has just cracked open out of that shell. And now a good chunk of the world is vouching for him. Just amazing to see this transformation.
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Getting your first paid is always 🫶🫶. Excited to launch Merlin's new mobile plan, which is a weekly subscription plan -- helpful to get started with Merlin ecosystem at a lower $ value. If you haven't already, then try out Merlin on mobile.
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If you ever raise funds for anything, it's better to keep it low-key (if possible). General people see $$ & suddenly expect a spending spree into hiring, tooling, vendors etc. And that might end up enticing oneself to spend money on problems, they didn't have in the first place.
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I have found a new curiosity. Looking at etymology of basic words. Two words I found particularly interesting are: .Art, Time.
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One amazing part of using Claude-3 on Merlin is that you can literally upload images from any website and Haiku can help you chat with those images
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Super duper excited about a particular problem we are solving @foyerwork . If it works, its gonna be insanely good!.
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@gdb 1) Just ensuring API performance is consistent, will be great. In several instances there is a big lag in API output. 2) Plus the downtime seems to be much higher than what is reported - pls sort this. 3) If you have one really fast customer support channel that'll be great.
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You can try Mistral Large inside Merlin now🚀 . Its MMLU score is 81% - hot on the heels of GPT-4's 86%. And that shows in its performance. Experience it yourself 👇
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If you've ever had feedback for Merlin but either couldn't share it or felt it wasn't given priority, now is your chance. Your input will help us prioritize items on our roadmap. Share your feedback using the link below 👇.
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"It just works" to me is a very high order compliment. Don't think we truly deserve it today (so much obvious work to do), but having even 1 user feel this way, pumps us up enough to go long. Need to make Merlin insanely awesome.
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Most ordinary salaried employees benefit a lot more by registering themselves as a solo business and then offer their services as a contractual provider. Rather than as a salaried person. Just in pure % terms, income tax is way worse than most others.
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Lord @endu_29's customer support is magic on its own 🙌🪄. One perk of buying Merlin is that most likely one of the founders will reply to your support queries. And we love to keep our folks happy ❤️❤️
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The Chinese startup ecosystem rules the consumer apps market in US. Learning from building 10s of apps in China. Optimizing for great design, SEO & scalable tech. Plus building in-app distribution leverages. Then scaling to US once a concept works in China.
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Folks 👋 Excited to launch Merlin's Unified API 🤠. One standardised API that allows access to most top AI models 🔥. If you are an AI App developer, this will save you about 3-7 days per API. At a pretty nominal / flexible cost. We made this so that. .
Integrate 20+ models like Gemini, Mistral, Claude-2 and many more into your workflow with single-click API and SDK in 5 Minutes without the need to compute Rate Limits . ⭐Launching Merlin Unified API promising High Performance and Reliability.
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Writing online is incredibly valuable. I used to disagree, but I've changed my mind. If you're unsure of writing's worth for you, this tweet is the best compilation of why writing matters for everyone.
Why should you write?. - You find new ideas and refine your thinking. - You can attract your tribe. Most @ycombinator founders discovered YC via @paulg’s essays. - Public cred, criticism and spreading of ideas. @WarrenBuffett and Charlie wrote memos. It made them insanely.
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@typesfaster The competition is 🔥. We made a tool called Ooogle to bring OpenAi on all Google searches. Wanted to see where ChatGPT beats google and where it doesn't. So far 50% plus results seem to be better than Google in ~200 queries. What's your take?.
Folks 🙋♂️ Announcement Incoming 📢. After playing around with ChatGPT & getting addicted to it. We have built Ooogle - OpenAI powered google search 🔍. Get OpenAI to help you on all your searches, all the time, seamlessly! 🔥.
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In the product world, no one is doing better social service than Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan). His content is the best curated document of all the tactical moves of elite cos. And given there is no flavour of personal ego, the insight to noise ratio is insanely high.
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Iirc @naval was one of the first set of folks who came on @clubhouse and popularised it. And it seems now clubhouse has copied @getairchat to quite an extent. This is very low integrity move :(. Never fruits well to do wrong to those who have supported you.
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I had explored using flyers as a GTM for an idea we were working on a long time back. It's damn hard!. Today somebody left a flyer on my gate. But the way they did it just reminded me of my flyer sales times. And won my heart.
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Grateful that @foyerwork literally sits on the intersection of both kinds of AI ❤️🚀. (P.S. Also love the branding PM's team does. 🙌 Probably next to Mr Beast only in terms of simplifying messaging for the masses.).
AI is the future, be it Artificial Intelligence or America-India! Our nations are stronger together, our planet is better when we work in collaboration.
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So beautiful. I would have bought humane just for the freedom from taking pics and the liberty to live in the moment like this.
over new years I took my @Humane ai pin on a hiking adventure to the southern tip of Patagonia in Ushuaia, Argentina. absolutely magical to be in the moment with these views while still being able to capture the memory, all while not being distracted by my phone. these photos! 😍
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It's not a coincidence that one of the most important men in the tech world follows one of the most effective life philosophies to ever exist.
you have a right to your actions,.but never to your actions' fruits.
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This 💯🥹.
You can't build a company on top of a Chrome plug-in. See, e.g., Grammerly at $13B. You can't build a company as a Gmail plug-in. See, e.g., Calendly at $3B. You can't build a company on top of Shopify. See, e.g., Klaviyo at $9.5B.
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Reading legal docs & agreements is so damn painful. But (unfortunately) a super imp part of startup's work. This is something I didn't anticipate I would have to do so much. And yet I feel I haven't done it well enough. Not sure if tech/ai can solve this (today).
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A recent product that I tried which I am absolutely loving is @syften_com . It notifies you whenever there is a mention of a particular keyword over reddit, twitter, PH, etc. Helps find people who are searching about the problem your product solves. And chat with them asap!.
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For a lot of jobs:.Consistent work ethic >>>> IQ or past experiences. Hard to measure it while hiring, but for sure one of the biggest reasons people have, while firing.
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There is no better marketing than your customers telling their friends to buy your product. And @ycombinator demonstrates this amazingly well. My timeline is filled with YC backed founders narrating how YC has positively shaped their trajectory. And that's great to see.
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Excited to share, Gemini 1.5 is now live at Merlin. I totally love it. I always wanted to use it via Merlin given its context window and given its structured responses. Try it for free on link below👇
We're bringing you the world's largest context window with Gemini 1.5 Pro—now available in preview in Vertex AI! . We're also announcing the ability to process audio streams including speech. #GoogleCloudNext
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Having a cause to work on, greater than one's own (or being truly selfless) is hard to come by. But one of the strongest motivators when it kicks in. Having selfish incentives under the greater ambit of selfless incentive, is an exponentially strong than just a selfish one.
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While other countries are banning AI. India is doubling down. India is accelerating!. (Another point where @balajis was right).
Pretty incredible that the Indian government has released a version of @OpenAI Whisper fine tuned on a Hindi dataset. Great work by Speech Lab @iitmadras. Funded by Bhashini: National Language Translation Mission. More languages soon?.
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Many times, founders (incl. me) compare burn rate vs the total cash in bank & think burn is low. This is somewhat wrong. We should look at the absolute $$ burned to understand the gravity of what it ACTUALLY means (an employee's salary? a car? a house?). Imp to feel the burn.
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I love pplx & they are great for basic AI-powered search . But if you do want to do really deep searches, might make sense to try out Merlin. We strongly focus on helping you do great "research". whether it be over the internet, over docs, or over unindexed webpages.
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Some clicks from our GenAI Hackathon. Super excited to see the demos today!! ⚡️⚡️. @vaibhavbetter @ishaanbhola @foyerwork
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50% drop in pricing of gpt-4 level model performance. while giving 2x more speed. OpenAI is ♥️♥️.
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All time spent on any ego-boosting events is time lost on building great products & doing great GTM. (ultra hard to avoid this trap).
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Most young students for IITs/NITs are deep into DSA but not much into general development (of any kind). Understanding algos is great but if one can't write independent code and build stuff (however crappy). One can't contribute that deeply in a production driven environment.
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Probably got one of the best cold emailing pitches ever today. And that was from a guy who runs a cold emailing agency. Damn, what a sell.
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It's so so so sad. That even today, a lot of folks still believe that the British Occupation of India was a good thing. Brought India down from 25% world GDP share to 2%. Induced famines. Caused Genocide. Destroyed ancient texts and cultural heritage. And worst of all reduced.
The British Empire was, in many ways, a force for good. Nearly everywhere it occupied it:. -raised the standard of living.-developed infrastructure.-promoted education. It also single-handedly ended slavery for much of the world…🧵(thread)
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High integrity people are so rare, if one ever finds them, one should stick with them. For any really imp job (ex: family doctor/lawyer) the real resume is integrity. Simply asking oneself:."Can I trust that when no one is watching them, they'll do the right thing?".
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@aviralbhat YT premium still feels like a steal deal to me. It's a fabulous product and I love every bit of it.
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I have been a long time user of @Paytm and love it. Never requiring to put OTP after you have integrated it on all apps is such a big save. I am quite sad for @vijayshekhar and hope the RBI reverts this ban. We need to let great products run the course.
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Funding avenues for idea-level teams are really low at the moment:. - YC is backing only 25% intl cos (vs 45% in 2020).- Many pre-seed funds expect revenues now.- Bar for clarity of thought, is now way up. Traction is the only permanent solution to this problem.
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Another good night to remind myself that retention of the problem is more important to solve than retention of the solution. 💤🛌.
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If you like consuming knowledge through Podcasts, I found this lovely product for you today!. At times its painful to go through long pods in which only some parts are relevant to you. Use this product to filter. @podclipsapp.
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I wish we soon have a similar vibe in Bangalore (not just for AI but in general).
I was at an AI hacker house party last night. People full of ideas, dreams & passion!. So many people had left their homes to come to SF to build something big. I don’t think currently there is any other place like SF on the planet for your AI dreams to come true!.
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There seems to be a massive market for a crypto index/ETF like token. An ETF that tracks top-20 crypto tokens (weighted by market cap) & reallocates pretty frequently. It's volatility would also be digestible for masses + can offer stable growth. I wonder why it's not being done.
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I love India's foreign policy. - Doesn't have a double standard.- Reliable non-violent behaviour .- Offers very proportionate action when attacked. In such stupid times when embassies are getting attacked & countries are not trying to de-escalate, India's maturity shows up.
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Folks - if you are using Merlin (@foyerwork) or have used it before. What do you want us to add to our roadmap?. Please ping your biggest pain points, bugs or feature requests.
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Typically seeing that if the problem itself is not retentive. The product is not retentive. Product retention to a big part is a result of the retention of the problem. (its not a sufficient condition though).
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If while drafting an agreement, you don't also take care of other party's legitimate interests . Then the agreement is going to require a ton of iterations. And more importantly, a lot of subtle bad-will generation in the mind of the partner. Half of trust is won in the 1st draft.
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The advantage of taking more responsibility is that you get to choose the direction you want things to go.
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@amasad India transitioning from being:. ~Largest user base of internet ➡️ Largest maker base. Thanks to your contribution to drive this via Replit ❤️.
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Seeing a ton of GPTs being shipped in the last few days by some of the best builders like Pieter Levels. OpenAI has really cracked a good GTM game. We at Merlin / foyer too have shipped around 6 of them. Do give them a shot (check @foyerwork for links)
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When there's a lot of hype, the end result often disappoints. Because too much attention is given to the building the hype, instead of the actual product.
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SEO is crazy. Just scratching the surface but still just totally crazy. Makes most other channel's ROI look terrible. And yet quite a big black box.
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P.S. We might bring Ooogle extension on all websites (github, gmail, docs etc) as we build a full scale virtual project manager (for dev's to start with). To do stuff like debug code, edit PRDs, etc. But that's maybe for another day!. P.P.S. This msg was drafted by GPT3.5.
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Imo the reason why ChatGPT created a tectonic shift in market is not (just) GPT 3 model. It was out for long. Rather Chat UX is the real deal. But alas, it doesn't sound intellectually interesting to say that UX can be *so imp*. Many are too attached to tech. Not enough to UX.
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Superhuman and Gmail have exactly the same set of features from a technical standpoint. Yet Superhuman is far more helpful to me than Gmail was. And is doing $20M+ ARR. World is having a dearth of beautiful+useful software.
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It's almost impossible for me to miss an email. I am forever grateful to @Superhuman to give me this superpower (have been using it for 6+ months now). Very few products give such a solid outcome. I hope Merlin too does that someday.
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This is one super amazing initiative that Better Capital is taking for Indian founders who want to keep a primary base in the US. I had originally underestimated the benefits of being in the Bay Area. But after chatting with other founders who have set up a base in Bay and after.
Indiglo begins!. The first cohort of our software/SaaS founders move to the US as part of our Indiglo playbook!. As someone who has built & sold in the US (as well as other global markets), one of the key realizations for me was how, in spite of all the content and programs and
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@gautamps25 @foyerwork We have now made Merlin work on videos without subtitles. Plus, if a video has been summarised once by any user globally, other users can see it too on their screen (like you are seeing). Glad you are liking it 😁.
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"You can’t validate something that doesn’t exist. You can’t validate an idea. You can’t validate someone’s guess. You can’t validate an abstraction. You can’t validate a sketch, or a wireframe, or an MVP that isn’t the actual product.".
Validation is a mirage. Spend enough time talking with entrepreneurs, product people, designers, and anyone charged with proving something, and you’ll bump into questions about validation and certainty. “How do you validate if it’s going to work?”.“How do you know if people.
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