I Sent a Working Tool. He Sent Back a Prettier Mockup.
A client replied to a working, fully integrated tool with a prettier artifact his Grok bot rendered in a minute. It stings. It also explains exactly why he hired me in the first place: a chatbot rendering is not scalable, not safe, not governed, and being right half the time is not a foundation. A week from first contact to a working tool he could actually comment on.
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It is a very vulnerable and threatening time for people who are building what I'm building right now.
I'll tell you a story about this. Yesterday I had sent out something I really worked on. It was beautiful. Fully integrated, a tool with a wireframe interface. What that means in plain English is that it doesn't look pretty, but that's fine. That wasn't a problem.
And the client gets back to me with an image. Not really an image, but a rendering. It's called an artifact, from his Grok bot. It looked prettier, and even in some ways more functionally what he wanted.
It's very threatening, because you're like, well, what if they ask themselves: why should I go with Mendy, when I can build it myself in Grok?
On the other hand, these are exactly the clients I'm targeting. They're people who understand enough about AI to understand that they can take advantage of it. But why are they coming to me? They're coming to me because they realize it's not scalable, or safe, or governed, or even valuable if you try to do it every single time.
So a lot of folks are relying on their Grok bot and going back in and saying "can you find me" and then it's right fifty percent of the time. You need to build a foundation.
But forget about that. The point as well is that a week ago is when this person reached out to me, and a week later I was able to demonstrate to them a fully functioning integrated tool that they were able to then comment on. So the value is there.
But it still feels very threatening when you're sending someone your work and they come back with something that looks and functions prettier, for the moment.
It just feels that way. Just sharing. Share Friday.
