This is Dalton plus Michael. Today we're going to talk about Slop versus Craft. Maybe another way to describe this is like, what does it mean to have good taste? Why don't we kick this off? You never talking about Claude Code. You've maybe gone down the smallest of rabbit holes. How is Claude code changing how you think about slop versus craft?

Sure. So I think for context, I've been doing a fair amount of programming over the past nine months, like I was messing with cursor and Windsurf a while ago and it was cool. And, you know, I've been having fun with it. And then of course, Claude code came out probably a while ago, but it really took off mimetically Q4 of last year and definitely over like Christmas break is when everyone went nuts with it. And what I would say is, It's really fun. It's like a video game and you like type stuff in and it just feels powerful. Like you watch the screen fly by, it's like programming with the best programmer you've ever met who's like really nice and really fast. And it's so energizing to watch the code fly by on the screen and see all the tokens it's burning and just like, No, it's super cool. So I would recommend it. And this is not yet another VC podcast talking about how great Claude Code is. Because here's where I'm going with this.

Is there a dark secret?

No, it is great. But I easily could imagine a younger version of myself not really sleeping or taking care of myself. And then being convinced that all of this junk that I was making with Claude Code was really good. It reminds me of like, I remember setting up Linux when I was super young. And I used this version of Linux called Gen2 where you would compile the whole thing from scratch. And so when you were setting up Linux, it would just be like, stuff would be flying by on the terminal. And I felt like a really elite guy that I was like hand compiling my own Linux kernel. And in retrospect, that was like not. It felt really cool to compile your own Linux kernel when in practice I literally nothing beneficial happened before that.

Okay, and so where I'm going with this is there's such a temptation that even I felt yeah using these super powerful tools to basically make slop Yeah, so let's define slop like I like to hear your definition like what what? Yeah, what do we mean by slop here?

Very simply in my mind slop is products that don't actually help the user. They can seem great in your mind. They can give them great when you're demoing. They can seem great when you're raising money. But when we put it in front of the intended user, we do not see the user getting their problem solved and them being happy. It's like, oh, it's just missing one thing.

It's the feature treadmill where you're like, oh, it's bad, but just let me add 10 more features. And again, it's so tempting. The tools are so good. You can just keep adding features to something that's kind of crappy and have a very large surface area, very fast.

Have a lot of crap. So that's kind of what I think about with slop. What do you think when you see slop?

By definition, this is subjective. And so one person, like you could say anything slop and people debate it and that sounds very tedious. I think the best definition is that in your own objective mind, you know it's not that good. Like, especially after you've like, you know, taken a break and taken a walk or gotten some sleep. And then you really look at what you're doing with fresh eyes or people that you trust and you're like, actually, this isn't that good. Because in the Linux example I gave, come on, like the hand-compiled Linux kernel was not actually better than the one I downloaded from Red Hat. It's the same thing. And so I think you have to have this like objective perspective about if something is actually good. Basically you can't practice self-deception. That's what I'm trying to say. Slop is where you're sort of actively self-deceiving that your thing is good when you kind of know it's not it.

You know, as an aside, whenever I work with a company and they say like, oh, our competitor gets funded, our new company gets funded, and they're super afraid, the first thing I do is just like, have you used the product? Yeah, have you used it? Like, you can't even really determine whether something is good or bad by not using it. Like if you're taking all of the clues but you don't try it, you're not getting any signal. So we have some examples of swap, which are fun. First one, web 2.0.

Yeah, SEO spam. Okay, so the real insight when Google was taking off is that if you could rank number one in Google for something, you like wouldn't make so much money, right? If you could like spam your way for your e-commerce site to be the number one Google search result, you would, yeah, you'd make tons and tons of money. So guess what happened?

Or content and you put a little Google ad on it.

Right. So guess what happened is a lot of people built slop farms To game Google. So that they can end up at the top of search results and make money in various ways.

And they had very nice early graphs.

Yeah, they made a lot of money. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna name any of the names of these companies. You can ask Chad should be tea about this.

A lot of money, not a lot of money relative to successful companies. a lot of money relative to...

It looked like it was working.

Yes, it looked like it was working.

So they were spamming the hell out of Google. And some raised like VC money for this.

Yeah. Many, I might argue.

Ultimately, none of those are going concerns anymore. Like it was like a brief moment in history where you could spam Google and make lots of money and then you were done. This is something I've been calling it with PBE. He calls them turkey startups. We were seeing the graph of the life of a turkey. where it's like getting better and better and better and then one day it's over. That's a turkey startup. It's a turkey graph. You know what I'm talking about?

Yes. It's a little brutal.

It's like when you're like, oh, my startup's going great. And then it's just like over.

Google change algorithm.

Yes. So an SEO slop company is the definition of a turkey startup.

For me, when I think back to mobile consumer, there were so many products where when you would dig deep, someone would subscribe to them for a year and their activity would end after 30 days. And like the business model was like, okay, like I love this business model. It's like, all right, we're going to acquire the user for this much. If we get them to buy the annual subscription, we have one year LTV, that's pretty good. And if we get them to like somehow forget and subscribe for two years, well, I mean, that's it. And then we did run that play across a hundred million users. And all the graphs look great.

And remember, like the early app store, it was a lot of slop. It'd be like, I beer.

Yeah. Lightsaber.

It was just like crap. And people made money in the short term. But again, none of those became durable businesses because it was, it was slop and Apple didn't want slop in the App Store either. Like no one was that excited about this stuff. It was effectively a scam.

It was a scam. And there were users understand when things are scammed. So you get like a negative word of mouth and then, you know, but to your point, like the SEO thing, you look in the first 10% of the race, you look like you're winning. And it's like, that's why it's like so interesting. Cause it's like, man, it's so desirable to look like you're winning in the first 10% of the race. You can sometimes just forget that you have 90% of the racer.

I just thinking about this, um, out loud. It's almost like the same shills that are selling courses were into all this stuff. Like basically on the dark corners of YouTube of like get rich quick. They love this stuff. Like everything we just mentioned, there were totally people that were like, this is the secret to wealth. And it was some version of like whatever the latest scam was to like fool people.

Get in and get out with money before.

Well, they made money selling courses. So that's the irony is selling content to explain to people how to make slop. It's probably a better business than making slop.

So then crypto happened, which was slop free, right?

I mean, I think that the thing with that is it was so intoxicated in the same way. Again, to speak to myself, when I first learned about Bitcoin, I thought it was super cool. I remember telling you about it. It was hard to think about anything else for a little while. This was like in 2013 and 2014 because it seems so revolutionary. Again, it reminds me of the feeling that I've had messing with a lot of the vibe coding tools like Claude Code. It's just feeling like I'm seeing the future and feeling almost like a euphoria about it and an excitement. And because I've been through multiple cycles before, current Dalton is like, yeah, chill dude.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that's kind of where I ended up with the crypto stuff too, which is to realize there was an incentive to do low quality stuff with crypto like ICOs or there's a lot of things like that. And ultimately, enduring value was not in creating as many of those as was created by Coinbase and what have you.

I think the moment that crypto really kind of jumped the shark for me, I remember I was working with a company in the batch who made something like a Discord plugin or something. And it was an interesting seed that something could have grown from. And then they were, the plan was to ICO and monetize it and be done.

Dump on retail.

And I was like, you guys have something like you might be able to make something and they're like, what are you talking about?

Like that's not the game.

That's not the game we're playing. And I was just like, oh, come on.

Yeah. And to put a fine point on this, I still think there's like really cool things that are gonna be built with crypto. But backwards facing objectively, a lot of the startups were the equivalent of like the crappy Facebook apps or the crappy iPhone apps or the SEO sites where they kind of got some activity, maybe they made some money and then it's a turkey, like there's nothing left.

Well, I think that's the interesting thing is that like maybe the difference between when we started and now is the venture world has gotten so much bigger and there's so much more money. Whereas I feel like a lot of the things that were like this back in the day had to bootstrap. Whereas some of the things like this now, a lot of schlopp can raise funding. And so that confuses people. Like, well, how can it be schlopp if it's raising around?

Well, this is where it goes back to the thing I said earlier, which is you have to have your own good judgment. And just because, like if you're looking around and you're like, everyone else is scamming, maybe I should scam too. That's not a great way to make life decisions. And so I do think this is where taste comes in. Is it if we, you know, I'd love to hear your definition of taste. But in my definition here, taste just means having a strong barometer, having a strong compass of what is good and what is not good and not producing things that you know in your heart are bad, right? Or like not helping people or hurting people.

You make such a good point because I feel like there's like a artistic definition of taste, which like I'm not much of an artist, like I don't really can't really engage with. And then there's just like a pure like value generation, right? Like almost in like kind of the core of the economy, like is what you're doing positive some. It's weird because I think in a classic definition of taste, people are like, well, some people have it and some people don't. I think everyone has the ability to look at something, honestly, and ask whether it's positive.

Well, again, the irony, you've heard me say this before, but anyone that insists what good taste they have, it's like, definitionally, that's how you spot the people that don't have good taste is that they talk about how great they are all the time.

Well, I think that's the funny, because like, When people are like, oh, taste is where the buttons are on the screen, or how cool my dark mode is.

But to recognize great taste in other people. It's people that have high standards. And that they really care about anything that they release they're proud of. And they would stamp their name on it and just be stand by their work.

And the user gets value out of the work. Because there are a lot of people, if you stand by the work, but you don't care whether the user gets value, that's art. Which I think is great, it's a perfect category of things to do, but that's not building businesses. Like at the end of the day, value has to be created to the user. Interestingly enough, one would argue we're in a slop war right now. And maybe one would say like, this is what happens in any new platform kind of zone, right? Like you got a lot of, easy to slop out things, and then things kind of get sorted out. How do you think about the slop war? Who wins?

I would almost compare it to the Facebook platform, App Wars, where a lot of people were competing with Zynga. Zynga was buying people. Or it could be with Farmville. And ultimately, no one won that was playing that game.

I mean, Facebook won.

That's true. So yeah, the people selling tokens are like, yeah, this is great. Everyone should use cloud code to make whatever they want. But if you are the people consuming all these tokens, I think you wanna stay out of a symmetric battle for who can slop harder. If there's a competitor and they're spamming a lot and you're like, well, our only solution is to spam harder. And you're just in an arms race of who can create the most garbage to make the graph go up. I think don't do it. I think you have to find a way to stay out of trying to produce the most low quality crap. Whatever that is, whether it's features, whether that's content. Because again, if you look at this to back test it, usually the winners in any space state out of these symmetric spam battles, right, man?

Well, it's fine because I always like to think about, you know, there've been phases where I've worked in consumer and I've cared about my top line user growth and then the phases where I've worked in consumer and I cared about retention. There are all kinds of things you can do when you're only looking at top line revenue growth or top line user growth or top line DA use. They're all kinds of tricks. Why don't we just send more push notifications? Because that's what users really want.

Send them more email. Let's send them deceptive email. You know, there's a problem with your account. I'll make our GA use go up. We can go up with like dark patterns all day long, right?

And whenever I've had to work on retention, It's like funny because it's like, you have to start with like, well, am I helping user? Is it actually working? Oh, if it is working, well, why do these users not see that it's work? Like everything comes back down to serving someone. Whereas I feel like whenever I worked on the top line graph, I was serving myself. The user was a side store. The user was someone to be, I don't want to say exploited, but certainly someone to be extracted from. Whereas whenever I worked on retention, it was like, it's hard to make these users happy. I gotta really do more work.

If you find yourself looking at the graph that allows you to take more from users than you give, I think that's how you lose the slop war. If you find yourself looking at the graphs that other people don't want to look at, that's how you win.

I think the last thing I like to talk about when it comes to slop and why I would encourage kind of early stage founders to be very careful is pre-slop there was always, there was already kind of a high likelihood of people getting to pivot hell. What I worry about is like cloud code and slop might accelerate that already pretty aggressive.

Well, because you can one-shot anything. So basically if you're low conviction, and you decide to pivot, you can just send it a tech crunch article and say to clone it. You're like, oh, clone this new startup. And so it's even more tempting to just randomly change your idea over and over again and to build plausible prototypes. Again, I'm saying these are pretty good. Yeah, it's good. I like Cloud Code. It's like we're giving, you're getting a really powerful weapon and like don't hurt yourself with it. I think it's easier to, because you can crank out really good prototypes so fast to have lower conviction on what you should be working on and to constantly change your mind to seek the next shiny thing.

Well, and we always talk about this, but in Pivot Hell, the shiny thing is often the thing you know the least about because you know why the things that you experience or you use are hard to build. So it's kind of like, it's so much easier to go so much further astray from things you know anything about. You only have so much energy before you wake up. Look at your startup and you're like, this is not working. I gotta stop.

Think about it, you could one-shot, hey, build a Salesforce clone. I was reading tweets about that. Okay, here's your Salesforce clone. Now what?

Try to get three startups to use it. Oh, they don't like using it. Oh, maybe I should build some more.

And wait, if it was so easy for you to clone it, why won't someone clone you? And basically you can start poking at this and end up in a very sad, low conviction place.

Yes. In conclusion, don't play in the slop war. Figure out how to focus on creating value for users and maybe be a little bit less addicted to graphs that go up, but where no value is being created. I love graphs going up. Like graphs should go up, right? But like graphs that go up where no value is created, come down. They have a life of a turkey.