Why no AI in Kill the HiPPO?

A Kill the HiPPO reader jokingly asked:

Well, I think he was joking... 😰

Why there’s no AI in Kill the HiPPO

When we conducted our interviews with the founders who feature in the book, we chose not to ask any questions about AI usage. If the topic had come up during an interview, we would have happily discussed it and included it in the book.

But the topic simply didn’t come up.

Isn’t that interesting? Doesn’t it tell you something about AI usage in stable, mature, profitable bootstrapped software companies when choosing what feature to build next?

I’m sure the companies we interview are using AI tools in various ways - we certainly do at Feature Upvote. But the really hard problem of choosing what new features will make our mature products better? That’s something we need to do by thinking for ourselves.

These product decisions are hard because they are poorly defined and require a ton of specific knowledge. These decisions require knowing your customers, your industry, and your product inside out. These decisions also require you to have scars from the product improvements you made that didn’t have any impact—or worse, made customers unhappy.

Social media is awash in dramatic claims about AI and software creation. I think 95% or so of the claims are complete nonsense. These claims come from people who haven’t actually created successful software products—and make up for their lack of experience with the volume of their opinions.

How do we choose the features that will bring in new customers and keep existing customers? How do we decide between the features that will get us “enterprise” customers and the features that the bulk of our customers want? How can we add new features while keeping the UI intuitive and clean?

When I hear believable stories of real bootstrapper founders answering these questions with AI tools, I’ll happily write an update for the book.

Until then, I’m afraid the product management work we do as founders remains something for old-fashioned human intelligence, and not the artificial version.

Reading back over this, it sounds more negative than I intended. I’ll embrace the AI tools that help me make good product decisions when they exist. But I don’t believe they exist yet.

Kill the HiPPO news

• There’s a small and steady stream of sales. Currently, the stream seems to depend on me posting on social media about the book.
• I’m scheduled for my first “Kill the HiPPO” podcast interview next week. This will be the start of a “podcast tour” - as long as I can find suitable podcasts who’ll accept me a guest!
• I’ve been experimenting with Amazon Ads. This is a whole new thing to learn, so I’ve been cautious so far and kept the experiments tiny. No results worth mentioning yet.
• I’ve made the book’s website more sales-y.
• With some nifty geolocation, the “Buy Now” button on the website redirects to the appropriate regional Amazon.

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Until next time,

Steve McLeod
​​​killthehippo.com​​