Smash Notes

Back to Stop building AI wrappers. Start building agent harnesses., with Jon Noronha.

Why Can One Niche Grow Into a Big Company?

Jon Noronha says a big company is a thousand little niches piled on each other, so a product can start with one niche and then look for the adjacencies. It does not have to start broad.

Less than a quarter of Gamma's revenue is in the United States. The user base is very broad because many kinds of people make presentations, and revenue is spread across job roles, from consultants to teachers to marketers to salespeople to lawyers. Lawyers make presentations. Where that work leads is unknown at the start. A line of work built for lawyers can become a huge part of the business. A founder does not have to know which niche will grow.

Grokipedia·United States·Gamma

Transcript

Stop building AI wrappers. Start building agent harnesses. ·

The Startup Ideas Podcast

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  1. What Is an AI Agent Harness?Jon Noronha says an agent harness is the set of tools an agent uses to do work, check that work, and hand the user something finished, including asking what…
  2. What Happens When You Paste Notes Into Gamma?Jon Noronha says that pasting messy notes, a document, or a PDF into Gamma and asking for a 20-slide presentation starts an entire computer in the cloud.
  3. When Should a Startup Build Its Own Agent Harness?Jon Noronha says a startup should build its own agent harness when the job looks very different from plain coding.
  4. What Is AI Smell?Jon Noronha says AI smell is the tell that work was made with AI.
  5. Why Does Taste Beat Evals in Creative AI?Jon Noronha says taste beats evals when the question is creative.
  6. Should Startups Fine-tune Their Own AI Models?Jon Noronha says early startups should not fine-tune or train their own models as the plan.
  7. Why Can Slowing Users Down Raise Paid Conversion?Jon Noronha says slowing people down raised paid conversion.
  8. What Is a Marketing Engineer?Greg Isenberg says a marketing engineer runs dozens of experiments a day with AI agents.

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