The problem is well articulated and nice story for both cofounders.
One thing I don’t get is why would anyone use a direct service that does the same thing as others when there are services such as openrouter where you can use the same model from different providers? I would understand if your landing page mentioned fine-tuning only and custom models, but just listing same open source models, tps and pricing wouldn’t tell me how you’re different from other providers.
I remember using banana.dev a few years ago and it was very clear proposition that time (serverless GPU with fast cold start)
I suppose positioning will take multiple iterations before you land on the right one. Good luck!
Hey Oras, thank you for the feedback! I think we definitely could list on OpenRouter but as you point out, our end goal is to host finetuned models for individuals. The IonRouter product is mostly to showcase our engine. In the backend, we are multiplexing finetuned and open source models on a homogenous fleet of GPUs. So if you feel better or even similar performance difference on our cloud, we're already proving what we set out to show.
I do think we will lean harder into the hosting of fine-tuned models though, this is a good insight.