u/badhiyahai

At this point I have developed 2 full stack agents or products. One was to "schedule repeatable jobs in the cloud" - kind of "intelligent cronjob".

I expected the process to be quite simple with claude code being around but the reality is far from that.

Code for the core logic is probably only 20% of the things and thankfully cc or codex does that easily with the proper guidance. Then comes giving the login support - do you just generate a magic email link or let them login with Google and GitHub. If you allow those where do you get the api keys from. Those are cumbersome. Do you want to pay for stuff like clerk just for this feature. All these decision fatigue starts building up.

Then you have deployment question where do you want to host it, is it AWS or vercel or something. Serving small traffic or big. Then you give the AWS keys to your agent which ideally should be scoped but you are tired anyway.

And if you letting users do ai stuff in your product. Do you use one single api key - does the provider like openai have allowed you for higher tps. Do you want to also provide sandbox for your users for their each request - does sandbox providers e2b or instaVM have support for secret injection.. how long due to want to keep the sandbox running.

The amoujt of questions and decisions you have to make just to deploy one freaking product to production is enormous and the things I have listed is probably half of it.

Well since everyone is sharing their @vkhosla story, here is mine. It was 2016, we were just selected for YC interview and were asked to fly out to SF. We fly there and do our interview with YC. TURNS out the location around yc office is filled with tier 1 VCs including Vinod Khosla.

There is a area called Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto where all of them have offices. We didn't try to meet him per say that day so no idea if he would have tried to break the cofounders or would have allegedly slept through the pitch. We don't have any investment from Vinod till date. Sigh.

Writing this from a hotel in San Francisco. There is an advantage being here - you are playing a different game here. If you have come for fund raising, you will get to meet a lot of VCs, almost every other day you can schedule a meeting with someone, ranging from angels, pre seed, seed to series A only VCs.

Getting angel checks will be easier. People will prefer you to move here permanently as a precondition to invest.

There are atleast 3 events everyday where you can go and talk to other developers about your product. If you are a dev focussed startup, this is quite useful.

Seed of $5m are very normal. And infact encouraged. People raise pre-seed without even a single paying customer.

I am being terse but happy to expand more as things are fresh in my mind.

Anecdotes -

1.demoed my product to 100s of people in the room within first week of landing.

2. Was in the same room as Sam altman and patrick collision

3. About to close our angel round. Talking to VCs for pre-seed too

4. Got 100+ users including couple of yc companies.

5. Got first paid customer that too inbound.

Being here is expensive on Indian money but can be a multiplier if things work out even a little bit.