something_else

Brand consultant is cool and a clearly marketable skill, I can see you being good at that. If it made you so much money, why not double down on that? I think the dating app / instagram profile pic overall as a one off product is solid, which is I assume what you offer now. My main question about your model as someone close to your demographic would be... what exactly am I paying $1000/m for? Instagram and dating app photos? That's a one off purchase. Style overhaul? Also a one off purchase, really. Dating advice? I mean sure, that can be a service, but I'm going to need to see lots of evidence that your advice is better than what ChatGPT gives me for free before I'm parting with that kind of money. Nothing you have said here convinces me that this $1000/m subscription is a good use of my money. I mean that's insanely optimistic assuming you're starting from <6 figures right now. But I wish you luck I think you missed my point, it's not about it being you that they message. It's about whether they're messaging an AI or a human and how deceptive you are being in that regard. If someone has a suspicion that they're chatting to an AI chatbot but the brand doesn't make it clear, a potential customer often interprets that as an attempt at deception, which is one of the most damaging things a customer can feel your brand is doing. So it is very relevant. If AI chatbots are really as good and you think it shouldn't matter, so just make it clear to the customer that they're chatting to an AI upfront and offer them an escape route to talk directly to you if they want it. And again, to return to the original point, there are tons of services that offer this already. It's not something you need to custom build.

Out of curiosity, what does your business actually do? Just photoshoots? AI can absolutely help with this, just not in the way you're imagining. Get a ChatGPT Plus subscription and use Work mode to help set up CRM automations, manage your administrative tasks and analyse your data. You can connect it to external services through plugins or MCPs. I'd explore that before building custom software. There are already off-the-shelf services that do this. My issue isn't with AI handling basic enquiries. It's with passing off an AI chatbot as a human. That's deceptive, difficult to do, and you're going to piss people off. I think there's an issue with obsessively optimising metrics like CTR and conversion rates while neglecting the human element. Better numbers don't necessarily mean better customers or a better brand image. You risk losing sight of who you're actually marketing to and how your business is perceived. That's especially important if you're planning to scale significantly. If you provide top notch human service, the chance of a customer sticking around in the long run and using you in the future goes up significantly, for example. The stuff your business does that makes customers go "wow, they didn't need to do that but they did" is really important for building repeat customers instead of a CTR funnel optimised pump-n-dump. On a tangential note, I've also run Meta ads, and my experience with its AI enhancements has been pretty poor. Meta pushes you to use them claiming they'll increase CTR. Instead, most noticeably reduced my CTR, and if CTR did improve, it sometimes came with a shift towards older demographics, attracting more people over 50 and fewer under 30. What this tells me is that AI enhancements are both not good enough to run autonomously yet, and shift the targeted demographic significantly further up the age brackets. I think you're assuming progress will continue linearly. Going from sounding 50% human to 70% is considerably easier than going from 70% to 90%. That final stretch towards being genuinely indistinguishable from a human is much harder, particularly when you need the system to perform reliably across thousands of real conversations. And again, you still seem ambiguous about whether you intend to tell customers they're speaking to an AI. That's important point to establish.

It really isn't, and the improvements between iterations aren't nearly as significant as they used to be. In fact, some recent iterations have actually gotten worse at writing naturally. For a while, Claude models were practically incapable of speaking in natural English. Yes, these models can write copy really well with some oversight. I've built landing pages using Codex/ChatGPT before, and while they can produce a great-looking page, their copy choices are often abysmal and they need to be guided through it. And that's an entirely different ball game from convincing people they're talking to a human when they're actually interacting with an AI agent. Doing that at scale, through custom vibe-coded software, and then trusting your entire business model on that working reliably, is a monumental task with severe risk.

Kind of, but it entirely depends on how complex it is. "Cutting edge" reliable business-grade software still cannot be made reliably by somebody with zero technical experience. A simple CRM is pretty easy to make technically and is probably within the realm of what Claude can do for you with zero technical experience. However, trusting your entire client-base to vibe-coded software is... unwise. And letting AI agents talk to your clients with zero approval required is also a huge risk. People can usually still identify AI-speak, and it's especially frustrating if someone tries to pawn off an AI chatbot as a real human. This is terrible for reputation, especially if you're trying to pitch yourself as a successful entrepreneur who makes a lot of money. The natural question is "well why can't he afford a real human". You also need guardrails set in place to prevent the AI agent from going off script, or being co-opted into doing something it isn't meant to. All doable, but you'd really need somebody technical to implement and test them if you really want to trust those guardrails. Otherwise it could come back to bite you hard when an AI agent starts insulting one of your clients, or talking to them in French or Chinese out of nowhere. Building vibe coded software with zero technical experience is analogous to asking a team of 20 year old entry level construction workers to build a house for you. They're cheap, they work hard, you'll probably have something that looks like a house at the end, but you're constantly going to be finding weird little things that are broken, unreliable, rough around the edges, dangerous or otherwise sketchy. Eventually you'll start to wonder how much of the important parts you can't see, like the foundation, had a similar lack of quality control. And when you get in an experienced professional to do an extension in the future they'll probably quote you double to deal with the mess, and tell you to rip out half the electrics to stop your house from burning down. If you bring in the team of 20 year old construction workers again to get it done, they'll accidentally knock down half your house. There are tons of solutions out there already. The CRM space is crowded. I guarantee something already exists that can do exactly what you want to do, or is extensible enough to do it with some minor customisations.

I mean go for it and see what it’s like. But I suspect 5 partners would be hell on earth

As said, literally everywhere. Cheers @Elliott for the links

You’ve put down almost everybody on the planet who isn’t you, lol. And no you don’t need to take it, but there’s a difference between discernment and coming up with an excuse for why almost every single piece of advice other people have given you won’t work

Lmao, sure bro

Tbh I was on your side at first, but the more I read your replies, the more I get the spiritual ego vibe as well. It goes beyond confidence in yourself towards sheer arrogance, and putting down others. At the same time every time someone gives you genuine advice you come up with several excuses for why it won’t work for you. Overall that gives off a very “I need help but I’m already perfect and above you all so none of your advice could possibly work for me, I’m just suffering so much from how great I am” kind of vibe Again, this is my interpretation of what I’ve read. I’m not deducing your internal state, just telling you the impression I’m getting from you.

The college expelled several of them and suspended several others. The police report got fucked up because someone made a mistake and sent in a condensed 6 page report from her interview missing many details instead of the full thing. Why are you so inherently against this situation? It’s plain as day that lots of sketchy stuff happened that night, this time around there will be a much more thorough investigation and much more of the truth should come out.

I actually think it’s an excellent idea. One of the main reasons dating apps can suck is that they’re unregulated, do funky shit with their algorithms, and have really annoying / impossible appeal processes for unjustified bans. The main flaw is that the govt sucks at doing stuff like this well, so I’m not sure I’d trust them to execute on it. You also have the issue that marketing it would be hard because it’s inherently difficult to advertise a dating app run by the govt to people The next best thing is strict regulation on private dating apps. Make their algorithms require transparency, enforce fair prices, ensure appeals for bans are dealt with appropriately

She was pressured into taking ketamine, more alcohol, and weed. She consented to the threesome, she did not consent to 7 guys fucking her while she was fading in and out of consciousness. It’s very likely that in the morning she initially had quite vague memories of what even happened. She could have stronger memories of consenting to a threesome when she was more sober and from there on just a patchwork of memories of what happened afterwards. Her mind could very easily convert that into “I consented to it all” until she took the required time to process what even actually happened. Expecting someone who went through this to behave rationally immediately afterwards is ironically very irrational of you.

A women don't need men to survive anymore, which means there's less incentive for her to put up with a man who doesn't add any value to her life, or who actively subtracts it. Being single and dating casually can be much more appealing in that scenario. I don't think it's a bad thing, but it does up the competition for men. Sucks if you can't compete, but it's great if you can.

The first step to writing a good comeback is that it makes sense

Yea, but most of them still date and have sex with guys. It’s largely just said out of frustration because they have a lot of negative experiences with men. It doesn’t mean they hate every man

Something better? What exactly were you envisioning as a better outcome for that night than a threesome? The feeling of abundance and flow from talking to lots of girls is good, but it’s temporary. The more permanent feeling of abundance comes from actually being able to get laid consistently. What is your end goal here?

Why did you not go for it? I feel like the answer to this question is at the root of the problems you’re facing

I don’t entirely disagree. Asia in general has a lot of this to cater to western tourists, but it does also have some genuinely spiritual communities (and people) a bit more off the beaten track.

Bali is a weird place, it’s a mixing pot of a huge variety of people in a very small island. I prefer the surrounding islands like Lombok, but Bali is also cool. It definitely isn’t the case that people are only there to hookup. There are plenty of digital nomads and remote workers there long term who actually want to date. I met many, and briefly dated one (hottest girl I’ve ever been with, story below 😂). I also used dating apps a lot there and there was no shortage of girls with “long term” on their profile. Honestly, it seems like for every potential solution you’re offered you have an over-generalised excuse for why it wouldn’t work. Try something out before you make your mind up instead of immediately shutting it down based on your ideas of what a place is like. —— Anyway, story of the girl I dated in Bali Very relevant to this thread. This is the hottest girl I’ve ever been with, like I said. Half Romanian / half Spanish, grew up in Spain. She had worked as a model back home. Guys would come up to me on the street and congratulate me when we were walking around together. It was bizarre. I’d never experienced anything like that before. She used to talk to me in Spanish when we were fucking. Oh my god, so fucking hot. Memories… It’s such a shame how it turned out, but I’ll get to that in a sec. She was a digital nomad there and absolutely looking for something long term, not casual. She wanted someone to travel the world with, and I was very open to that. For a while it seemed like it was going to happen. She was super spiritual too. We did a ton of yoga together at a spiritual retreat there. Then we did sensory deprivation tanks together for the first time. Afterwards she told me about how her mind was filled with only two things during the experience, sex and the idea of death. We then quite naturally had a very deep discussion about ego death, spirituality and sexuality. We were seeing each other regularly for around 6 weeks, it was absolutely amazing, and then… It turned out she was a Nazi. And I don’t mean in the moralistic “everyone vaguely right wing is a Nazi” sense. I mean literally. At one point she suddenly asked me “would you ever date anybody who wasn’t white?” I said yes, of course, because I have. Then she looked shocked and replied with “no, that’s awful, you need to preserve the white race”. I thought she was joking at first, but no, she was deadly serious. She had already told me that she had grown up shitposting on 4chan throughout her teenage years, which I thought was funny at the time. Seriously. Like this is one of the hottest girls I’ve ever met and she was a 4chan shitposter But in hindsight it made a lot of sense. She then started working out of some cult mansion in Bali for a shitcoin pump-n-dump scheme. Truly bizarre and almost comical. It’s amazing what your mind will do to rationalise staying with someone that hot even if they have values that directly conflict with yours. But I did (painfully) end things at that point because I just could not date someone with values like that no matter how hot and spiritual they were. In the end I’m glad I had this experience because it kind of shattered the illusion of the “perfect hot girl”. Super hot girls are just people like the rest of us. They can be weird, irrational, flawed, interesting, deep, or even pretty fucked up. There’s no reason to put them on a pedestal just because they’re hot. Treat them like any other person you’ve ever met.

Dude 😂😂 so many opportunities here? Why didn’t you capitalise on any of this? What are you actually trying to accomplish because it sounds like you could get laid if you wanted to, but instead you’re giving up those opportunities to spam approach more women

That’s quite interesting, and actually quite different from approach anxiety. I don’t think you can make that anxiety go away by doing lots of short approaches, you really need experience talking to girls for a longer period of time and learning how to hold a convo with them to make this go away. 100 one to five minute approaches won’t solve it

Ironic

If you’re really socially stunted even alcohol won’t help. If you just struggle with confidence and a stick up your ass then alcohol will solve that problem real fast. But obviously it comes with other costs.

You can, it’s called alcohol. Lol.

This is one of the reasons why I don’t find her inconsistent account afterwards that strange. She consented to a threesome when she was already pretty drunk but probably still mostly with it at least, and then it escalated way beyond what she was comfortable with and what she consented to. They give her ket, weed, more alcohol and suddenly she’s phasing in and out of consciousness and there are 7 guys around her. An inconsistent account after that is what you would expect. Substance and alcohol use probably left her with very fuzzy and disjointed memories of what happened later into the night, but substantially clearer memories of the initial consensual encounter where she was less intoxicated. The mind can easily rationalise that into “I consented to all of it” or “I was just drunk and stupid” before taking time to process what really happened.