I’m writing a book about epistemology. It’s about The Problem of the Criterion, why it’s important, and what it has to tell us about how we approach knowing the truth.
I’ve also written a lot about AI safety. Some of the more interesting stuff can be found at the site of my currently-dormant AI safety org, PAISRI.
Scaling the business is different than getting started.
To get started it’s really useful to have a very specific problem you’re trying to solve. Provides focus and let’s you outperform on quality by narrowly addressing a single need better than anyone else can.
That is often the wedge to scale the business. You get in by solving a narrow, hard problem, then look for opportunities to expand your business by seeing what else your customers need or what else you could do given the position your in.
To give another example from a previous employer, Plaid got their start by providing an API to access banks, and they did everything they could to make it the best-in-class experience, with special attention on making the experience great for developers so they would advocate for paying a premium price over cheaper alternatives. That’s still the core business, but they’ve expanded into other adjacent products both as API access to banks has become easier to come by (in part thanks to Plaid’s success) and as customers have come looking for more all-in-one solutions to their fintech platform needs (e.g. a money-movement product so they don’t have to manage transfers on their own, alternative credit decisions tools, etc.).
Given your desire to do something that’s more lifestyle business than a high-growth startup, better examples might be to look at similar lifestyle products. In the LW-sphere there’s things like Complice and Roam, and outside LW you’ll find plenty of these that have been quite successful or were successful in the past (Basecamp is a prime example here, but I think Slack was arguably a lifestyle business that accidentally figured out how to take off when they pivoted to messaging away from MMOs, etc.).