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I know this is probably going to annoy some people, but I’ve been online long enough to recognize this pattern. A simple product appears. Someone posts it on X. A few founders start talking about it. Then the screenshots start. $1,000 bid. $5,000 bid. $10,000+ bid. Suddenly everyone is writing “how did he do this?” posts, people are building clones, and half of founder Twitter wants to launch their own version. That’s basically what happened with Outbid.lol. And to be clear, I think the product is clever. The mechanic is ridiculously easy to understand. Pay more, move higher. The leaderboard itself becomes the content. That is excellent internet product design. But here’s where I disagree with some of the conversation around it. People are looking at the traffic and revenue and concluding that this is some new formula for building startups. I don't think it is, I think Outbid is a very good example of how quickly X can manufacture a temporary market. The product creates competition. Competition creates screenshots. Screenshots create curiosity. Curiosity creates more bids. More bids create more screenshots. And now you have a loop. But loops like this can burn extremely hot, the moment people stop caring who is #1, the reason to visit starts disappearing, that’s the part I’m watching. Not whether Outbid was successful. It clearly was. I’m watching whether people still care about Outbid when there isn't another ridiculous bid to screenshot tomorrow. Because there is a big difference between: “Everyone is talking about this.” and“ People still need this six months later.” I’ve seen enough startup hype cycles to know that founders often copy the visible part, they see the leaderboard, they see the money, they see the traffic. Then they build another leaderboard. What they miss is that the hardest thing to copy wasn't the website.It was the timing, audience, distribution, novelty and social behavior around it. That’s why I wouldn’t call Outbid a bad idea. I’d call it a very good reminder that attention is a drug, and X is very good at giving founders a huge dose of it very quickly. The interesting question is what happens when Twitter finds something else to talk about.

I almost jumped on the Claude Fable hype. For about 24 hours it felt like everyone was talking about it. People were sharing demos, posting threads, showing what they built with it on X, and making it sound like the next thing every founder should be using. Then almost as fast as the hype arrived, the headlines changed. Watching it unfold made me realize how risky it can be to build core parts of a product around something you've only known for a day or two. Maybe I move too slowly, but moments like this make me glad I didn't rush to integrate it into anything important. Now I'm curious about the founders who actually did. Did anyone here use Claude Fable in a real project, even as a test? What did you build with it, and was it actually better than the alternatives or was the hype bigger than the results?

Validate before you build - the 2-week sprint that saved me 3 months