Hieu Pham

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

The reality of the Turing test

[Yasser @yasser_elsaid_]

Chatbase made it to React Conf!

Thanks @leeerob and the @vercel team for the shoutout!

[Yasser @yasser_elsaid_]

How Chatbase went from 0 to $4M in ARR bootstrapped in less than 2 years.

What worked:
- Organic content
- Influencer marketing
- Paid Ads
- SEO
- Timing

What didn't work (yet):
- Short form content
- Newsletters

Organic content
If you're bootstrapped, this needs to be your biggest growth channel in the beginning since you probably can't afford the other methods.

Also being able to get customers from organic content is the best way to see if there's PMF.

This means:
- Reddit (It has to be a FREE product that solves a real problem. Note: hide your pricing page or get banned)
- Launching on PH and other platforms (multiple times)
- X (product demos, business tips, sharing wins, etc..)
- Tiktok (mainly for B2C)
- Youtube (like @marclou)
- Appear on podcasts

Influencer marketing
Don't look at follower count, it's irrelevant on most platforms now.

Find accounts with decent engagement and ideally low follower count (cheaper) and DM all of them. Not all of them will respond, and those who do will be expensive.

Negotiate their price and make sure that at least a part of their payment depends on how the content performs. This can be number of views, link click, conversions, etc..

Ideally you have an affiliate program they can use bc this aligns your incentives and they have more of a reason to do a banger post/video.

For videos, its much better to have a full video on your product than a 30 second ad read that most people skip.

Paid Ads
Don't start this unless you do the first two. Paid ads are amazing but you need a solid foundation of organic content and brand equity for ads to be effective.

You can work with an agency but you need to follow up with them constantly and do your best to understand what they're doing. Unfortunately, you cant assume it will run perfectly on autopilot.

B2B: Google > FB > Linkedin > Reddit
B2C: FB > Google > Tiktok > Reddit

SEO
This takes a while so you should only start once you know you have a business and customers are willing to pay.

You should either buy @dannypostma course for this or find someone like @illyism to help you.

Timing
This is the most obvious and most impactful factor for Chatbase's growth.

I launched Chatbase February of 2023. This was right after ChatGPT was launched and was peak LLM hype. Chatbase was probably the first SaaS that did RAG.

If you have good timing, all of the things mentioned above will have orders of magnitude the impact.

Influencers will talk about your product for free, your content will get more engagement, your ads will perform better, etc..

What didn't work (yet):

Short form content
still can't figure out how to make this work for b2b

Newsletters
You get better results having an influencer post about your product on social media vs adding a link to their newsletter.

After you do all of this and it works, you will realize you will need a lot of help to scale. Hiring is one of the hardest and most impactful things you do as a founder. Will have a post about this soon.

[Yasser @yasser_elsaid_]

Here is everything you need for your RAG pipeline:

1. @llama_index parser

2. @firecrawl for web pages

3. Process CSVs and Tables to a SQL table and use text-to-sql as a tool for your LLM

4. Use a multimodal model to describe images and embed the description

5. Query expansion:
Generate multiple queries from the original user query and use those for similarity search.

6. Hyde:
Generate hypothetical document to the user query and use it for similarity search.

7. @cohere reranker for all the results.

8. Evals

[Hieu Pham @merlinhi]

@FlySWISS Thank you @FlySWISS for your support to address the issue. Appreciate it

[Hieu Pham @merlinhi]

@FlySWISS I'm terribly disappointed. Spent already hours on the phone, chatting, sending complaint email in the last month but still cannot get back the connection flight (Seoul/ICN - Hanoi/HAN) that got disappeared in my booking. What can I do??

[Swiss Intl Air Lines @FlySWISS]

Taking flight is more than just leaving the ground - it's embracing new heights and endless possibilities. ✨
Just like our HB-JCD which is up for a short trip to London. ��🇧 🤩

Thanks @patmurphyaviation for this great take-off picture. 🥰

#flyswiss

[Hieu Pham @merlinhi]

@Ricksrimes Thanks for your prompt response. I've DMed you with the info requested.

[Hieu Pham @merlinhi]

@NeoImagine A smart, cute little robot AI assistant that knows everything. Futuristic. Portrait taken with 35mm f/1.8 focal length

[Brian Feroldi @BrianFeroldi]

You can learn a lot about accounting by studying this picture:

[Hieu Pham @merlinhi]

@AirFranceCH I filed a complaint about booking a bassinet for my baby on the flight Paris-Hanoi. Many calls happened and still neither AirFrance or VietnamAirlines take the responsibility to handle my request for the bassinet. As a client, I am left in the middle. Pls take action

[Hieu Pham @merlinhi]

@UPC_Switzerland Internet speed of my Internet 200 Mpbs package has been very slow since a few weeks, ~60Mbps every time i check

[Hieu Pham @merlinhi]

What are the best ways to pick up Deep Learning skills as an engineer? by Greg Brockman https://t.co/7HwEJi9Qu8

[Troy Kelly @troykelly]

As Google's #Magenta composes a piece of music: Who Owns the Rights and Royalties? https://t.co/Mh1FHQaOq3 #AI

[Hieu Pham @merlinhi]

Alex Tellez, Deep Learning Applications by @srisatish #applications #autoencoder http://t.co/j5aMtEPvN2 via @SlideShare

[Hieu Pham @merlinhi]

1. Focus on your strengths first
2. Then on fixing a few important weaknesses you might have
http://t.co/eL0GbBMVhk

[Hieu Pham @merlinhi]

Next generation of person-to-person market place:
How Airbnb and Lyft Finally Got Americans to Trust Each Other|WIRED http://t.co/wt91che9dO

[Hieu Pham @merlinhi]

Content marketing lessons from 10 years and 41 Millions web visits https://t.co/4JvaCJE7wU

[Hieu Pham @merlinhi]

SaaS secrets to raising venture capital https://t.co/HXHwV9gqCg