i feel like when they style them all cute like that (see muse) it means they're problematic and invasive.

I think they're just meant to be friendly. I don't think it's that deep. They're useful and not scary and its marketing is meant to project that image.

Just like they always present Astra as useful and not scary?

You can consider the cute & fuzzy presentation of the new consumer AI agents an admission that the doom and gloom so far has been a marketing mistep. It's good that companies are trying to rectify the image of AI.

I was surprised by how much I liked the Muse avatar and its customization options. It’s very good at coming up with something decent looking based on your prompts, and animating it.

The services without the custom avatar now feel like they’re missing something.

As a kid I used to love the video game “Megaman Battle Network”, which depicts a world where everyone walks around with an PDA device carrying a fully customized AI buddy that navigates the internet for them. It was the first time I felt like we were getting close to that.

But even with the nostalgia, I don’t think I can ever connect up a Meta owned agent service to all of my accounts and information.

you don't have to give yourself up to irrational, anxious feelings.

Is it irrational?

Does no one remember the MS Paperclip?!?

I feel like this should be memed as something like the "Jar-Jar Binks Marketing Flop": intentionally design something to be childishly adorable and inoffensive, which ironically makes it loathsome and offensive to adult customers.

Or how much paperclip was abhorred?

That's because it was pretty much a useless gimmick. If it was a capable AI assistant like Astra, it woudn't have been abhorred.

Muse makes sense since it targets the general normies. Dots explicitly are targeting developers instead which makes it a bit weird.

Dots seem to me to be for the rest of general knowledge work and not specifically developers

Requires $100/month minimum, are non-developers paying that?

Of course they are. Why wouldn’t they?

- non-developer

Yes, they're trying to break into corporate knowledge work by appealing to efficient gains due to reducing busy work.

Just different interfaces on top of the same product (selling tokens)

I mean the fact that it's not available in the EU is a pretty big tell

Couldn't agree more - feedback at the early stages is make or break for any new idea. I built Zigpoll to help with this: https://www.zigpoll.com/

Thanks for the kind words and feedback! Cool that you're building in this space as well.

I was just working on a zigpoll integration and thought it was me...

I've been working on Zigpoll[0] for ~4 years. AI has changed my trajectory dramatically where it's way more realistic to compete with the big players as a one man show. Trying to close out on 2M ARR this year and then maybe look to sell and ride off into the sunset.

[0] https://www.zigpoll.com

go bears!

Solo founder (and sole employee) getting to 2M ARR with Zigpoll[0]

AI is making it possible to go after bigger clients so the strategy is to focus on marketing and going upmarket. A lot of new features to add and things to learn as you move up to bigger customers with larger contracts!

[https://www.zigpoll.com]

Scaling Zigpoll[0] to 2M ARR as a solo founder (currently at 1.5 ARR). Each year you double ARR for a business it comes with a whole new set of challenges which are layered on top of the changes in the tech landscape.

Fortunately I think I've been bailed out by agentic coding the last couple months from a product perspective but I think the major gains so far have been due to marketing and exploring alternative growth channels. Even so, keeping momentum is never a given and requires constant output from all angles! Onward...

[0] https://www.zigpoll.com