Leander_B

I agree it might not always be the best use of resources, this depends on a wide array of factors within your business.

What I mean is that don't see it anywhere as a hidden cost in the true sense of that word as you know it takes resources and time, but more so about wrong priorities and business value.

As for the other points, they are so easy to solve:

>Lost conversions

Trade off you need to make beforehand and need to be aware of with the end goal in mind which is to improve your main conversion metrics.

>Performance

Most decent conversion platforms use fallbacks and also your way of setting up experiments makes a big difference.

>Confusion

Letting other departments know what you're doing and what's running, might be harder in big corps though.

>Speed

This goes for everything in a company I think (new feature/product releases, quick fix vs. proper solution etc.). I personally don't mind spending x amount of time to improve y % in conversion rate, so comes down to setting good KPIs and testing what really is important to your business.

>Focus

Can be done with a proper conversion team that has all these roles covered (bit hard to set up but possible) or making the conversion department a client within the company. Also the teams mentioned work for other departments as well and improving conversion is a win across the board not just for the conversion team.

Can't really agree much on this article and I have the sense it is somehow written out of frustration and lack of experience.

The '6 hidden costs' can all be addressed, some are not even hidden like time, running tests take time and resources like anything else. The other factors like speed/performance and confusion can all be solved very easily.

Some of my take-aways for testing

- Don't focus on small changes like buttons, copy etc.. these are mostly useless yes

- Make radical changes, e.g. on stickermule can try to have the whole product to make a sticker to checkout on 1 page or start with configuration first and then select sizes etc..

- To filter out false positives, compare same sample of data (e.g. organic traffic is good) for the same period range before a winning test went live and after

Personally I have seen some great results with the above tips in mind, from B2B making visitors perform small actions first or showing a demo vs. presenting them with a form immediately (4x more leads) to e-commerce sites adding a direct checkout vs. normal checkout path (lower avg. order but much higher conversion rate to largely make up for it) etc..

You could argue these are part of product (which a conversion department should be part of, not marketing) but without doing the testing you can only guess about the outcome. And sure many tests are fixing usability (e.g. seen 250% increase in registrations by fixing telephone number prefix and date of birth field formatting) and UI issues but that's part of it.

Tarifa (ES), has some small 'digital nomad' scene and nature, sea and mountains. Other option is Granada (ES), some of the highest mountains of Europe, good weather but nature/mountains a bit dry compared to Switzerland

Brasov (RO), fast internet (faster than UK), good food, friendly people and more nature and mountains (Carpates) than you can hope for (and bears for bonus points). Also good priced vs Switzerland and nature wise looking very similar, Brasov and surroundings being more unspoiled. With what you would spend in Switzerland you'll be able to live 3-4 months in Brasov in the same conditions.

And then you apply for a job and wait... wait... and wait some more with no updates. Rather fix/speed up recruiting than making bogus slides. If a customer (or applicant) expresses interest in your company, also be humble and give an answer within acceptable time.

Quick glance:

- Remove the 'beta' tag [1]

- If this is a real LP, remove all navigation, your goal is to catch e-mail addresses here

- The headline and paragraph below are quite the same, use the paragraph to explain what I can do with it but keep it broad (plan your vacation, prepare a sales pitch, share recipes..)

- "Invite me" is a strange choice of CTA wording as you don' get invited but rather create a group. Why not "Create Group" or "Get started" alternatively can add some text below 'ready in 30 seconds' as you do below in the copy.

1: http://blog.sumall.com/journal/how-boost-sign-ups-website-ch...

Why is this on frontpage?

Mind to share/send me your project? I am searching for good RE software for Spain, might be possible to scale from German.

I own a content website with well targeted affiliate partnership. Currently at a bit over 1,000 Euro a month pure profit, as all traffic is organic.

I didn't touch the website in about 2 years. Now that numbers are growing month on month, I'm freeing up some some time add more of the specific content which brings in the money. Also trying to scale the above for different related markets and languages. Hope to get it to +2k within the next year.

I clicked the "Buy now" to see if this was serious. It is.

I asked about this a while ago on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7751806

Our son always seems to end up on such videos and can watch them for as long as possible. Really freaky.

Seems the people behind it are taking a nice cheque home each month.

Working in betting for >5 years. In EU, if real money involved, you will need a gambling license. Bit hard to provide you with more help with the little information you gave.

What would you like to know on technical side?

For many reasons, I think this will never happen. I think we could go as low as 3-4 employees for a 1B exit, but nowhere below that number.

Anything similar for JavaScript and its MVC frameworks?

Yes, it is indeed free. Thanks for noticing, edited OP.

Considering most of the HN people are in high demand, I doubt indeed. But on the other side, not all of us might be that fortunate or the one's among us looking for a career change might appreciate it.

Tech Recruitment is a $ 25 Billion market in the U.S. that hasn't innovated much in the last 20 years (besides recruiters getting more expensive).

I'm looking for 2 co-founders in exchange for significant equity. The two roles: One developer to help me further with the backend, and one sales person/growth hacker (preferably in US) who can help us gain momentum.

Full info of my startup: http://likewise.io

To get in touch: hello@likewise.io

Do you think 4-5 months learning Java, C# or C++ are enough to start taking on projects? I doubt honestly. Contrary to learning one specific language and getting decent enough (to take on projects) at one of its frameworks like Rails, Node or Django would be a lot faster and feasible within 5 months.

Not too sure. Considering the limited timeframe and wanting to get ready for employment, I think it's the correct decision to stick to one and get good enough in it rather than learning more technologies and not being able to work with any proficiently. Compare it to the bootcamps which usually also only stick to one language. (I will teach her HTML CSS and jQuery, but this is not included in the 4-5 months of learning a programming language.)

Thanks for the answer.

The 'how' to learn a language or portfolio is not really the issue here, rather what language to pick. Which language is best to learn today to be able to get freelance work today and in the future. Which language is in demand and will be even more in the future and will be adopted by larger companies. And last but not least, which language can be learnt within this timeframe to have enough understanding to build and ship things (almost alone) requested by clients.

Private tech recruitment community: http://likewise.io

> "Vertical advertising for sports betting" sounds like the definition of useless to society.

I work in the same 'industry' and equally dislike it as a whole and also completely lost my motivation.

> No pay is worth working at a job like that.

Not when you have a family to raise or bills to pay, the thing with this betting industry is that it pays as said relatively to very good. There is also an overload of jobs, and if you are anywhere smart and in this stuff for a bit you can get a pretty good salary. I made a salary jump of about 80% in 3 years working in this industry.

What I hate the most about this industry is that there are some very talented people working in here, which could do much better things then programming systems to make people loose more money then they already do. Makes me sad.

What I do? I am working on some side projects, and just 'grind it out' during the office hours and do what I have to do, time goes by faster. Hoping to get one of my projects off in the next months/years and leave this industry behind for once and all.

Where are you based?

Uff.. I haven't read A list apart in some years now as my interests shifted. But, is this what a once quality website/blog has become? Don't even want to open the article with such a bogus title.

Also, I have read and heard what has happened these last few weeks and can't seem to change my mind that the US folks are much more 'sensitive' to this kind of things then in EU.

Not talking about the content of the article, but this 2-column style of reading is not very pleasant for the web.

Tough spot..

Maybe tell us a bit more about your background (location, salary, work conditions, relationship, responsibilities, also social life etc..). As maybe there is more then just the job which is bothering you? (2 hours of commute a day would make me hate >90% of jobs)

If you are really sure it's the job, my suggestions would be to try to save as much as possible the next 5-6 months, quit your job, live frugal as long as you can and explore other options and then decide to pursue what makes you happy the most. Also, how 'hard' is your work? I know plenty of developers who only work 5-10hrs a week at their day job and are busy with other stuff while working. So if you can, use that time to plan ahead.

For me also, I kind of dislike my job (but I'm paid extremely well at my age, don't have much alternative, have obligations, have in general a very very good life so I don't really care of one aspect which is my job) but I just do it because I have to and don't mind after all compared to the rewards.

Would much rather be a farmer, but then again, I wouldn't want to give up my comfortable life or get back problems in 20 years of now. So maybe you are not that bad off after all?

In my country this is called a meal replacement. I live in the future..

Definitely! I am a big fan myself of Kiva and charity:water. Just saying that a lot of (tech) people have different perceptions of how exactly technology can make an impact. Unfortunately the scale between charity and money driven startups is not exactly well balanced. So lets not praise ourselves too much..

No one has a choice, either born in US or Western Sahara. Hard to accept, but this is reality. Only most people think they have the illusion they have, but this is false. Even Bukowski is trapped, still needs to work/money for food and to live. Yes, he does what he wants, or has the illusion as I said above.

And a big grin at the people saying we working in tech can make a difference. Creating a new social photo sharing app is not changing the world. Get real.

As a trapped life, the closest you can do to live happy is to do as much what you want (again coming back to the above) while living in the system. And yes, working in tech gives yoy higher chances to live how and where you want, but it stops there.

The only way to escape is living separate, somewhere deep down a rainforest. But then what, die from a snake bite or die from fever. Sounds better, no?

You forget to pretend we add a middlemen into a business where it is completely unnecessary. Now pretend that this middlemen will take a big cut, can drop you anytime they like since I guess there will be little or less strings attached/contract, or close their business because the founding hipster has another 'brilliant' idea of disrupting something that does not need to be disrupted.

Usually the saying goes "Build a great product and users will come". Reading this reminds me more of "Build whatever product and drag users to come". But in the end, for a real business, it's all about being able to pay the bills, stay alive and make some profit. And for that last one, I think some of the points in the article can gain you some advantage against another average product you compete with..

This! I personally really can't stand these apps anymore who only show us the best case scenario design on their website or screenshots. I have exactly 0 photos assigned to contacts on my phone. Also, why is there a picture of a city at night for the 'woodwork workshop'. Makes sense, huh? We're not all hispters.