Ryan Kulp, a startup founder, writes about running companies, marketing, leaving San Francisco, and learning to code.
HN commenters list it among personal blogs worth reading, while one says they distrust the founder over his earlier company's manipulative popups.
>my first child is due in a couple months and it’s difficult to imagine tweeting as a parent. why would i argue with a childless blue haired atheist about Islam’s (in)compatibility with Western values? why would i tolerate The Algorithm showing me prostitutes on my social media feed? have we lost our mind? [...] i’m bringing back the 90s.
Bringing up this example of all cases made me a bit curious so I found this piece from a month ago[1] and it gives some context. Ryan, you will never guess who hung out with prostitutes!
There's certainly a lot of malicious stuff on the internet but the desire for an internet full of like-minded people out of a gated community strikes me a bit odd. If you hate weird argumentative people the 90s internet wouldn't have been for you. One of my more curious memories from the earlier internet is being involved in the Unreal Tournament modding scene and finding out that one person I was talking to was Asia Carrera, who was a pornstar, Mensa member and apparently self taught programmer and modder.
If all you want is be around people who think the same thoughts, with an oddly elitist and judgemental touch to boot, I think leaving the internet is the only option.
[1] https://www.ryanckulp.com/are-you-my-people/
launching a company doesn't have to take years to take off.
just build a scrappy mvp in a week & find people who are willing to pay for it.
you say you are great with automation & making bots. someone just coded up an nft bot & sold it in 17 days [1]
nft is all the rage so you might be able to cook something similar & sell it on microacquire [2] which helps a lot of saas get a modest exit (< billion-dollar exit)
you can build a bunch of micro-saas & sell it on microacquire. of course, it's harder than i'm making it to be but start. hopefully, you might strike gold!
i think web3/crypto/nfts is a good space to be in for bots so find a problem there or check forums like reddit/discord/twitter where people talk a lot about web3/nfts or acquisition marketplaces like microacquire to get ideas as what people are building
[1]: https://www.ryanckulp.com/buildsell30-hackathon-review/
[2]: https://microacquire.com
I don't trust the founder, and I don't want to do business with him.
His previous company was called fomo, which added popups to ecommerce stores to manipulate users into buying by claiming that others had recently bought the same product. I haven't dug into it to prove that the data was fake, but it's highly likely it's fake.
He sells marketing courses where he boasts about techniques like exploiting a website vulnerability to spam 20k people who never engaged with him at all.[0] He also proudly shares how he lied to 78k inactive users to trick them into responding to an email.[1]
[0] https://www.ryanckulp.com/targeted-outreach-email-with-20-lines-of-code/
[1] https://www.ryanckulp.com/birthday-reactivation-hack/
Gwern Branwen - https://www.gwern.net/index
Shan Carter - http://shancarter.com
Nikita Voloboev - https://wiki.nikiv.dev
Alexey Guzey - https://guzey.com
Ryan Kulp - https://www.ryanckulp.com
Tania Rascia - https://www.taniarascia.com
bingo. wrote about this too, last week:
https://www.ryanckulp.com/politicization-of-everything/