Alex_Jiang

If anything google made all types of bullshit more accessible. Just search for articles about: Non-stick pans, chem-trails, hollow-earth theory, etc. etc.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but looking at hardware prices, might also support the case that "miners are hoarders".

(Please excuse the sketchy math in the following post. these figures are just based on searches on Ebay/Google. Most of all I don't know who's doing the majority of the mining and at what scale.)*

(Low End) ($490 investment in mining) At the current level of mining difficulty a machine that has a hash rate in the 200/g/. Returns about $6.00 worth of BTC a day. http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.

I searched "200 gh/s" in a site that crawls Ebay, The machines for sale at this hash-rate costs about 490. You would recoup the cost of the machine in 81 days.

http://www.thepricegeek.com/results/200+gh%2Fs?country=us

If it takes 81 days to break even on your investment, even if bitcoin doubles in that time frame you basically made the price of the machine as profit ($490 in 81 days). (meh)

(High End) (18k investment in mining)

Machines in the single digit tera-hash realm come in at under 20k, they peak at 15-20K per machine. Let's average the price at 18k. They make $90 a day according to the calculator. This would mean you would need 200 days to recuperate the cost of the machine.

In this case it takes 200 days to break even on your investment. If bitcoin doubles in that time frame you made 18k in 200 days. (the online calculator said power costs in this time frame are around $70.)

I'm assuming individuals in both these positions are have long-term holding in mind. My rationale is: getting substantially richer in either case requires the price per coin becomes drastically higher. You're also not hemorrhaging money in either case (power costs seem reasonable). It makes more sense for miners to hold as much of what they mine as possible. Both positions seem to hedged on a BTC being priced a lot more higher, in this sense hard to imagine miners to be selling in great quantities.

I also feel that people DIRECTLY buying and selling bitcoin would dwarf the selling pressure of the majority of miners. The barriers of entry for this also seem much lower than setting up the hardware.

During early elementary school I learned more in camp than I did at school.

I was also first exposed to C++ in a summer program around 1998.

With the right vendors this is more than a marketplace for camps, it could radically change education. Kids can pick up technical skills VERY early (that schools won't give them), and they'll have years to master them.

Great post! I browsed your site some more, and found a video of a presentation you gave. Asking for the close is killer. In retrospect too many of my first couple of calls ended with... "So uh yeah, I'll email you I guess."

Me and my cofounder have been doing test-runs of sales just to test if there was interest in our market. We made a note to take time out of developing to call 20 vendors a day. Some things we found:

1) Doing cold alone is nerve-racking, doing sales with a friend is actually pretty fun. It's almost nostalgic of crank-calling people as a kid. You can joke about the interesting run-ins you have with vendors. My cofounder and I grab snacks and just spend an afternoon calling.

2) We rate each call with "likelihood ratings (1-10 rating of how the call went). These are just qualitative ratings about the disposition of the caller on the other line. Every 50 or so we take note of what language improves the mood, and what turns people off. This way we're consistently improving our pitch.

3) Early on we let the initial tone of the calls dictate their end result. Too many calls ended more abruptly than they should have.(because we perceived that the other end was too disinterested to sway.) But we quickly noted was that many of the vendors had the same objections. It was an easy fix, just come up with a list of simple, logical retorts. There's many calls that we talked out of a ditch. -It's like when you solve yourself out of a cluster-fuck in 2048 :)

4) I'm not a very extroverted person, I don't have a marketing background. But I've actually come to like the calls. The first call of the day is always the hardest. The initial dip into a chilly pool is unpleasant, but you get over it much quicker than you would think. I talked to many interesting people just through cold calls. At first I scoured my network trying to find someone to delegate this task to, now it's part of the daily work schedule.

5) Ask for the close, just let them say "No". Don't dance around it. In the bigger picture who cares that one person said "No".

TL,DR Technical Cofounders can operate telephones; thus they can make sales calls. Make a structure, log objections, find patterns. (It's fun.)

I agree with this. At the risk of sounding nebulous, snapchat 'feels' different. It feels personal like the handwritten notes you pass in classrooms.

A text is more like someone handing a a slip of paper with a typed message.

An email is like someone handing you an 8.5x11 piece of paper.

Snapchat lets you be really gestural, for instance I draw on >95% of my snaps. In instances where I want to add text I draw it on with my finger.

The last snap I sent was to my girlfriend, it was an image of our dog with a ripped up shoe, I scrawled "How mad are you?" on it.

/r/programming doesn't get that specific into programming. I think it's mostly an aggregator of resources for beginners learning how to program. (a large percentage of the posts are questions like 'which language')

I think its possible that your product could have gone over many peoples heads, at least in that particular sub.

Have you looked into subreddits like r/webdevelopment or r/html5( or javascript,CSS)? They have less readers but maybe they're more your target?

I'm actually interested in using your site for a quick landing page (for an app I'm developing). I'm checking out the 'Pro' section, is there any coupon code available now?

Nice article, some ideas reminded me of a passage I read on Chris Dixon's blog a while ago.

"The successful products took big meals and converted them to snacks. The Internet likes snacks – simple, focused products that capture an atomic behavior and become compounded only by linking in and out to other services. This has become even more so with the shift to mobile."-

His entire post wasn't necessarily about 'specificity', but I really liked his 'snack' analogy. Looking at currently successful products, many are incredibly focused and snack-like.

1. A defined use-case (flavor) they users easily distinguish from other products.

2. Efficient interaction (consumption) that addresses the problem: quickly, simply, and mobile(ly).

I'm not sure that understanding this is that predicated on cultural familiarity. I'd argue the majority of its meaning comes from the fact that it "breaks the rules in order to be overly brief." The syntax being intentionally wrong, bad, and clumsy coincides with the fact that it's often used to describe absurd things and situations. Clumsy syntax = slightly belligerent rhetoric? I could be wrong, my main idea of a idiom is a proverb or figurative parallel illustrating a concept.

The added inference I get is "that's just the way it is."

"Because politics" is like saying "because politics are just crazy like that."

It's a flippant way of saying something is simply absurd. Or an issue is pretty much binary.

I guess it's a little semantic at this point.

Though, there's services like pricegeek that crawl Ebay graphing the better deals. They piggyback of Ebay's existing affiliate model. They never solicit anything from the customer, nor does backlinking alter the price of the item. I guess the utility is of an 'aggregator', that makes decently priced items for more accessible.

My main point was that 'Your Product is Going to Fail if you Don’t Ask Users to Pay' seemed a little overtly broad.

Zenefits is a licensed insurance broker it's free for users, they collect a referral fee from insurance companies. Since it's online they're sustainable from broker fees alone and don't charge users. I think some travel startups also work on a commission model for hotels + flights. Hipmunk etc...

Though referral/affiliate models are uncommon they challenge the statement about "Two kinds of companies".

My dad is a chemist who does a lot of lab work. Currently he uses an iPhone's basic features a lot: notes, timer, etc. Before the iPhone he used a chronograph.

Glass would actually be a much better form-factor for him, for simple things like timing reactions, tagging which compounds are in each container, and taking notes. It would free up his hands and let him multitask a lot better.

http://isbm.smeal.psu.edu/library/working-paper-articles/199...

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296304...

Consequently naming is not the end all be all of branding. But studies have shown that a name's: connotations, imagery, and ability to generate "top of mind awareness", has proven to generate equity and favorably move a company upwards in consumer preference ranking. This may be diluted at when a company reaches a certain critical mass.

But consider this: Why wouldn't you want a name that's expressive to: who you are, and what you do as a company? It makes you much easier to remember and talk about.

If you search brand name in google scholar there's many more interesting studies on this subject.

tldr: It's not everything but it certainly helps.

I think where this might fork a little is consumer vs enterprise. Dropbox is meant to be understood by a much wider audience than Heroku. For a consumer facing company being easily understood makes you much more accessible to many more consumers. It also makes your service more memorable when your name is: simple, appropriate, and conversation-optimized.

"I'll put it in the Dropbox tonight."

If you treat this as an equation, you want to increase: % of people that 'Get' what you do (off the bat), and % of instances people can easily recall your name, the next time they have that problem you solve.

I like the sizing and composition of 2.

But one strength in 3-4 is contrast. The eye tends to gravitate to contrast, and I feel like the black in 3-4 gives the icon more punch.