FAV0 Weekly Issue 009 -- Balancing Product Experience and Profitability

A five-second handheld shot of traffic near Lianglukou, Chongqing at night is still remarkably stable!

webSite: fav0.com/en/posts/2024/009

>> Topics to Discuss

Balancing Product Experience and Profitability

Regardless of the type of advertisement, such as:

Splash screen ads that direct you to other apps with a shake
Ads that require 30 seconds of viewing to gain access to certain functionalities
Ads that occasionally appear while scrolling through information feeds
Persistent ads occupying a layout within the product

All of these will inevitably compromise user experience, just varying in degree.

As users, we certainly prefer fewer advertisements; however, as a developer, or more specifically, an independent product developer, advertisements could be a significant source of income. If enticing users to click can yield high click-through rates and thus substantial revenue, would you pursue it?

Take, for example, a splash screen ad that directs you to a link upon shaking your device.

Of course, your product may not currently hold any monopolistic position, and implementing such a feature could lead to a significant loss of users. But what if the loss of users is less than the revenue generated from the induced clicks?

If I were a user:

If I were using a tool website, such as for video extraction, PDF editing, or image format conversion, which I only use occasionally, I could accept some ads or a 30-second ad for a single use opportunity.
However, if it were software I use frequently, like a novel-reading app, I would find it unacceptable to have a small ad at the bottom or a full-page ad after each chapter; this applies to other software like note-taking or collaborative work tools as well.

So, putting myself in the user's shoes, I would generally follow this line of thinking if I were developing a product.

>> Must Read

OpenAI SearchGPT

After a long wait, OpenAI has finally made a move, but it’s not anything groundbreaking—just another AI search tool, and there are plenty of those on the market. Moreover, the results don’t seem very impressive; even the official demo results have issues!

While OpenAI has strong competitiveness in LLMs, I understand that RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) relies more on search results and the information AI needs to reference. The sources and ranking methods of this information are more critical, where OpenAI does not have a significant advantage.

NodeJS Experimental Feature - Run TypeScript Directly Without Dependencies

You can execute TypeScript files by setting the experimental flag --experimental-strip-types.

Node.js transpiles TypeScript source code into JavaScript source code. During the transpilation process, type checking is not performed, and types are discarded.

Additionally, there has been a lot of discussion on Hacker News: Hacker News

2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey

React 2023 Survey Report

LemonSqueezy Acquired by Stripe

Many independent developers in China have been using LemonSqueezy, but there were quite a few issues recently, leading many developers to express their concerns and worry that this small team might go under soon. However, they have now been acquired by Stripe, so hopefully, things will improve, and we won’t have to worry about them disappearing.

>> Useful Tools

gpt-4o-mini for PDF Recognition (TypeScript Version)

Similar to the previously popular gptpdf, but this one is written in TypeScript and provides an npm package for quick integration.

Recognition logic:

Input a PDF
Convert the PDF into a series of images
Pass the images to GPT, requesting Markdown
Summarize the response and return Markdown

Comic Translation - AI Manga Translator

(Submitted by @jinghui su)

The results are quite good. Friends who love comics but are not familiar with other languages can give it a try. This product offers 10 free translations per week, and there are also paid plans available, such as 2 dollars for 100 translations.

PDF to Markdown Tool List

Development Environment on Infinite Canvas

I feel like I can’t get used to it, but the idea is fantastic.

Grammar Club - English Grammar Book

Learn English!

>> Interesting Finds

The Sudden Popularity of Big Character Posters

Recently, big character posters like the one below have become suddenly popular, and many netizens have quickly created applications using Claude to generate this type of poster.

For example: slogan.ishell.online