If I had to name one thing wrong with the IT industry, *that people become visible in numbers.
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With e-commerce, for example, there is still a human-to-human contact. There is the warehouse person who ships the goods, Sometimes you get a word of thanks from the customer, or complaints from customers. In other words, they are involved with people. That is why, behind the desire to increase sales, there is also the feeling of wanting to be of help, I want to be useful to someone else.
But when it comes to IT services and AI products, it becomes increasingly difficult to have that realisation.
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At the stage of creating the first MVP, The most intense contact with people. Whose problems does it solve and what problems does it solve? How can we make it easier to use? This is very human work, where intuition and observation are important.
But when you scale beyond that, you enter the world of numbers all at once. Getting investment is a money game in itself, Functional development also proceeds with you as a component. Management is also about numbers. In the process, People lose face.
ARR or MRR, Only indicators come to mind.
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Recently, AI products are said to be easy to earn. Even if you look at YouTube, you will see things like, "I made one million yen a month with one person developing the product", There are a lot of videos like that.
Of course, I don't mean to deny that, What I feel when I look at it is that I can't see the people who use it at all. The focus is not on "who", but on "money".
Of course, in the short term that is fine. But to keep chasing numbers all the time, It's still empty. There comes a moment in the middle when you wonder if it's enough.
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Engineers are, after all, human beings. As social animals, If they don't feel that their work is useful to someone else, they will not be able to continue in the long term. The moment you can no longer feel the human temperature in your products, The meaning of working fades away.
So if someone is working in AI or IT now, Before you look at the numbers, I would like you to remember the "face" once before looking at the numbers. Who is on the other side of those numbers? When you lose sight of that, This industry is nothing more than a calculator.