The AI researchers at Andon Labs, the people who gave Anthropic Claude an office vending machine to run, and hilarity ensued, have published the results of a new AI experiment.
They wanted to see if LLMs were technically capable of functioning as a robot s brain, that is, connecting their thinking (textual decision-making) with real sensors and movement.
Almost every founder I know has one line from a customer that's better than anything they'd have written themselves. Usually it's the oddly specific one. The bit you'd never have thought to claim about your own product.
What I find interesting is how those actually arrive, because it's almost never the polite follow-up email asking for a testimonial. Mine turn up by accident. Someone says it in passing at the end of a call, or drops it into a support thread, and if you don't catch it right there it's gone for good.
I have a confession. I'm a Petroleum Engineering major who's in love with marketing. Sometimes, I think I'm too in over my head. I started doing "marketing" with social media management as my first foray into anything remotely associated with digital marketing (show of hands if you started the popular way). And then, I think I lost a bit of love for social media marketing, and moved on quickly to something shiny email marketing. This was heaven while it lasted. I sold personal financial management courses and eBooks for a popular consultant here in my country. The conversations in the inboxes were so direct and personal that it always felt like I was looking directly at, and talking to the person's soul. I also tried my hands on SEO and content strategy. Doesn't it just feel amazing how you pick up so many useful micro-skills for digital marketing? That's always so intriguing. Now, I do product marketing, thanks to charting newer territories. I find it intriguing how numerous teams work together to solve a problem. Be that small-scale, or global. And meeting a lot of amazing makers and marketers here launching really helpful products here daily (some of which have been time-savers for me) reinforced my reason why I want to identify with this industry. I read a book recently by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares called, "Traction." Recommended by a senior colleague in marketing. The ideas in the book just made so much sense and held so many insights for me. And it made me understand one thing, "whatever you want to get better at, reading books help you navigate there faster." As a marketer, what book(s) gave you your best "aha!" moment?
One thing that kept coming up in a recent discussion:
Live chat can make it easier for visitors to ask a quick question but it can also create an expectation that someone is available right now.
For a small B2B team, that can backfire.
A visitor sees a chat widget, sends a message, waits a few hours, and starts to assume nobody is home. In that case, the real-time interface may feel worse than a clear async path.
Tons of great products that we know and use everyday are the result of pivots. You know, sometimes the original idea just isn't working and you have to find a new niche and quick, other times you stumble on a use case that changes the whole game.
Have you ever pivoted? What's the story behind it? How successful was the pivot? I'd love to hear your stories, and potentially feature them in our newsletters!
Saw Aravind's post yesterday about Perplexity's new computer.
Got me thinking: we launched Happycapy - the 1st agent-native computer here on Feb 11 (beta was Jan 27). Grateful @rajiv_ayyangar and the PH community witnessed it from the start.
As a founder building a hardware + app product (InvisOutlet Pro launching soon ), I ve found myself going way too deep on tiny details most people will never think about: icons used in our app, length of screws, even how the packaging folds.
Some of these details make a huge impact others? Maybe just to me