Episode 829 | AI is Bad at Product, Top 5 Startup Success Factors, and the Beastie Boys (A Rob Solo Adventure)

This podcast is brought to you by Mercury, the banking solution I use across all of my businesses. I manage half a dozen Mercury accounts from my personal single member LLC to MicroConf, our 7 figure global events and education platform, to TinySeed, our venture fund and accelerator. Mercury handles every one of them. Traditional banking forces you to duct tape tools together and work around slow processes. Mercury doesn't. The dashboard shows me exactly where each business stands at a glance. The interface is simple enough for daily banking and paying invoices, but can also handle the multi step approval processes we need when wiring large sums of money to the dozens of companies we invest in each year. There's a reason more than 300,000 entrepreneurs have made the switch. Anytime founders ask me where to set up their accounts, I send them to mercury.com. It's free to get started with no in person visits and no minimum balance. Visit mercury.com to apply online in minutes. Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and column NA, members, FDIC. This is the difference between being a developer and being a product person is a a good product person would never do this. Whereas a developer says, oh, I have these tools, and email's the easiest one, and I have this whole class already built to send emails. So why wouldn't I just do that without thinking through the ramifications for your end users? Another Tuesday morning, and another episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. As always, I am your host, Rob Walling. And in this episode, I tackle a few solo adventure topics. I revisit the core four SaaS skills and talk about what AI can do and help you with in terms of the core four and what it cannot do and what I'm not convinced it will ever be great at. I talk about a terrible user experience decision that a local Minneapolis app has made, and I wanna walk you through why it's bad so that potentially you can learn from that. I wanna talk to you about a few success factors in companies. According to Bill Gross, he studied 200 different companies and has several factors in order. And maybe I'll finish with a little anecdote about the Beastie Boys. Before I dive into the meat of the episode, I wanna thank you for listening. Whether you've been listening for a week or a year or ten years, Startups for the Rest of Us just recently hit its sixteen year milestone. So on 03/30/2010, my former co host, Mike Taber, and I launched the first episode of the show. And that was, obviously, just a few weeks ago here, sixteen years ago. And after the first few months of getting started where we shipped some episodes every other week, past those first few months, we've shipped an episode every week since 2010. And the …