Your Company, Inc; A Programmer’s Journey
Tuesday • May 2nd 2023 • 10:55:34 pm
It is hard to find the motivation to learn programming, which is little more than functions filled with ifs, loops, and other functions, if you are not sure what to aim at, or what to dream about.
And it does not help, when people fail to give you simple answers, and instead babble about thinking up, backwards upside down pyramids, and building or inventing on principle.
So without getting into details, I present to you with your imaginary company;
Your Company, Inc. Which sells monthly subscriptions to its product, they may offer a lifetime license for a dollop, that is OK too.
This simple product called “Marketplace” is a store that sells files, or images created by AI, but there is a twist to it.
But first, let us take on the role, of Your Company customer.
This is a person that loves the idea of AI art, especially selling entire packs of dozens of related images.
That then can be used to decorate a room, or an cheerful office, or make a bunch of t-shirts with a common theme.
This is where the twist begins, because they already had an on-line store.
But no one was buying anything, there was no community, no chatter…
And advertising brought in visitors, but nobody really signed up.
This is where this young lady had a brilliant idea, she would allow users to open up their own AI art stores inside it.
And while she would still hope to sell her own products, she would make the bigger money…
By taking a small percent, of whatever other users sold.
Let us call her Alice and name her business, Alice’s Marketplace.
So Marketplace, the Your Company, Inc Product, is not an e-commerce store that sell files.
It is a multi-store marketplace, where every registered user can open their own store inside it...
And the owner of the marketplace, takes a small percent of every sale.
They don’t telly need to sell anything, and they may not really need to do much advertising either.
Because when a user opens up a store they are presented with a todo list, where they have to create at least ten art packs.
Use AI to create good product and store descriptions, and spend time working on their brand, like logo image, bio, and graphic theme.
Most importantly, they have to advertise their products, not all at once, but weekly, maybe daily.
Social media posts, are a way to get a click or two, and with dozens of stores, there will be a steady inflow of visitors.
Now let us take a look at Bob, he is a real Art Prompt Wiz.
He already has a hundred images, divided in ten categories.
He goes to Alice’s Marketplace, signs up, opens up a store, uploads his 10 products.
And then schedules social media posts about, each of his products.
Here when someone clicks on his media posts, they are taken to his store, but next to each product…
Is a colorful related products side-pane, where other stores get their exposure from.
Alice, receives an alert that Bob created a new storefront, under the name “Bob’s Storefront” and she approves up upon manual verification.
Few other users registered in hopes of selling their AI art as well, and she can see where all the social media posts are going out to.
It is still not a lot of visitors, and bob is unfortunately, not going to return, nobody knows why, he is a brilliant scatter brain.
But his 100 products, will continue generating social media posts, for the next 100 days to 100 weeks, depending on the configuration.
Bob will make a total of $120 dollars, the first year, that is after the $20 Alice takes during the several lonesome sales.
Though, she will see that using social networks for advertising is effective, it will be pretty fantastic to watch all these posts going out everywhere...
Alice will learn that internet is a cruel and empty place, and with an extremely short memory, to boot.
Yes, she will have to advertise on her own, create a mothy local meetup, where she instructs people how to make a sale.
Eventually she will purchase from you two marketplace extensions, she will really appreciate your work, your brilliant inventions, and tools.
One, where people can order T-shirts and Mugs and other things, like backpacks, posters, and even notebooks with photographic covers...
Directly from her site, it is a print on demand extension, clever but most of the money will go to the businesses that do the actual printing on physical items.
Here she will discover the simple pleasure, of calling up, dozens of skateboarding shops.
And getting them to setup in her marketplace, in a way, where people will be able to order a custom skateboard, with custom AI art.
And the skateboarding store, will be picked based on customer's location, and the speed with which the product reaches the customer.
So, the digital to physical goods extension, has a little back-end, that allows people that do printing, to set their prices, and options, and the like.
The second extension she will purchase, will be an AI Kit, where sellers will be able to generate AI Art, right from their admin area.
Now, to save money, Alice has an option, to either, pay for a little bot of mothy Ai service for her top sellers.
Or just offer the tool, where her sellers, will still need to sig-up with the AI Art generator.
She will help her top sellers with new art, and every once in a while offer 10 free generations to new users.
So that they can start off with ten products, and here they can earn more free image generations.
By doing some advertising for Alice, fair and square.
Alice will eventually have an expensive TV commercial, that will result in a huge traffic spike.
But she will never make million s of dollars, she will learn, that to sell reliably, she needs to be actively enraged with real people, and real hearts.
Though it is possible, you’ve never promised Alice millions of dollars, sometimes internet sucks, and it is all about luck.
Other users that you sold your multi-store marketplace to, will get lucky, and you may even get a little bit jealous…
Until you find out about the insane amounts of money, they threw at influences, advertising, and TV and Radio commercials.
Having that money to throw away, is a kind of luck.
While users in a marketplace are connected, via “related products” pane.
The marketplace product you sell, does not connect with other marketplaces.
These marketplace installations are separate companies, in distant parts of the world, and even different cultures.
Th only connection is that they pay you a license fee, for using your marketplace product, and having access to plugins such as those that Alice purchased form you.
Your Company, Inc, will continue selling the marketplace, some people will get rich, others will just love approving storefronts…
And getting paid, when other people make a sale, getting paid for just maintaining the copy of your product.
Lastly, there are two experiments you can run, the first one deals with how much Alice pays you for a copy and license of your incredible marketplace.
Let me put it this way, if you set the price in tens of thousands of dollars, which is way too easy to undercut, for a competitor, by the way.
You can make a neat deal here, that could work out for you, and only take money when your customers make money.
So take a percent of their monthly sales, is someone only makes a $100 dollars, you take only $50.
This means no upfront investment, and they cancel the license, they won’t owe any money.
This way a High School student will be able to afford your $50K or $200K platform, and they will only pay that off, if they start marking huge amounts.
The second experiment, deal with making important parts of your code public, code is hard to keep secret anyway, any of your customers can leak it.
So make it open source, where critics, other programmers, penetration testers, and even black hat hackers can examine it.
You may setup a bug bounty program, where you pay a thousand bucks per bug, and half jokingly take that money out of your lead programmers golden parachute.
You won’t open source everything, not your User Interface stuff, not most of your plugins that add that fancy functionality.
Just the core, where Authentication, Authorization, and Throttling is located at.
(Throttling is used to prevent DoS attacks, where too many requests are sent to your website at the same time, and while Authentication is just Passwords and Session Cookies.
Authorization is embedded in the code, and constantly evaluates, what groups the user belongs to, and if that group can execute some core API function in your program.)
This isn’t as scary as it sounds, because you can pay a penetration tester or two, to go over the code before you release it.
Though, I think it would benefit code quality quite a lot, if your wrote your Marketplace program, that the code will be public from the get go.
See, programming is not like math, where you memorize it and it is useless, programming is exactly the same as superpowers of superheroes.
Except, it is not a silly fantasy.
Learning programming, will grant you the ability, to make invented ideas into actual reality.
A programmer is like a real magician, programmers can use code spells to make things appear in reality.
Traditionally becoming a programmer is something you do on your own, you learn in a sequence that makes it fun, and at the pace lets you dream.
As a side effect, it will teach you, to tell effective and ineffective education apart.
Beyond programming, as you grow, you will take to your own narrated non-fiction book, in your own sequence, at a pace that makes you wise and without being slowed down by school.
Here, you will find, that every human being is charged with growing all the way up, until they rise to stand as a great independent being, capable of making lasting and positive contributions.