ac132

Sticker Mule built a social network from scratch

https://www.stimulus.com/stickermule

Good feedback, agree completely :)

We use Split: https://github.com/splitrb/split

Most managers decide things without tests. Doing this well is easier said than done, but it's the reality of why some companies outperform others.

Exceptional growth doesn't happen because you're great at a/b testing. It happens when your team is good at decision making period.

Thanks for commenting on the post. :)

To take another contrasting opinion. Who cares if you know exactly why you're going. We know in a general sense why we're growing: we constantly improve the experience of our service and make customers happier.

It's quite hard to maintain aggressive year over year growth targets. If you're pulling it off it really doesn't matter if you figured out why via a/b testing or not.

Obviously, we'd prefer stronger YOY growth without knowing the exact causes than weaker YOY growth because we wasted resources on a/b testing to get precise answers to why we're succeeding.

Beyond that, I wasn't referring to trending growth via GA to see if you're making good decisions. You can trend conversion rate by channel to see if you're getting better over time. Obviously, if conversion is going up and to the right for most channels you're making good decisions.

It's unfortunate to dismiss another view point as you're frustrated or inexperienced while ignoring the actual points made.

The biggest point being #1: Resources are finite. Time spent on A/B testing cannot be spent elsewhere. How you use your time determines your growth trajectory. A/B testing is a growth tactic, but it's not always the best use of your resources.

There is absolutely no way to solve this problem. You'll always have a trade off to make when it comes to how you spend your resources and time. You shouldn't neglect that cost when deciding if a/b testing is necessary for your organization.

Btw, keep in mind, I admit we still do some a/b testing. It's just not an key component of our growth strategy.

Agree completely. :)

Disagree. The main reason we abandoned a/b testing is it's a major resource drain. Getting better at a/b testing would be another resource drain. Time is finite & how you use it determines where you end up.

The point of the article isn't to say a/b testing doesn't work or shoudn't be done. It's simply to say many companies are mis-using their resources by following the standard thinking on a/b testing.

We could spend another month figuring out how to get better at a/b testing or we could spend our time on another activity that produces a higher return on time spent. It turns out that's what we did and the return has been much better.

The post wasn't about the "futility" of a/b testing. It's about the costs of a/b testing that are rarely considered. There's plenty of "pro" a/b testing advice in the world that leads startups to mistakenly waste resources on it.

A solid a/b testing process doesn't just happen without time & effort. You need someone smart analyzing user behavior and forming hypotheses as well as a talented design team to develop concepts that test them.

We simply acknowledged the costs of doing a/b testing well and decided our resources are better spent elsewhere.

At least Google Reader still works :-)

My point was, 5 years ago no one imagined a concept like Square would exist. Just because you can't imagine a nongovernmental organization that serves the same purpose as local health inspectors doesn't mean it's impossible to have such a thing.

On the contrary, quite a few similar organizations do exist, but only when a government monopoly doesn't kill competition in that space. For example, who in the 90s would have guessed that something like TrustE would exist. It's not that far fetched to imagine that if government wasn't policing restaurants a private organization could exist to provide such a service. Yelp doesn't do that because it's not their mission and no one is going to make that their mission since the government already monopolized that job.

I'm not saying we should have 0 government either, but if we're not willing to question the necessity of things as trivial as local government health inspectors then where do we draw the line?

You did strawman. I never said capitalism should be unconstrained. I said a lot of things but nothing to that extent. Instead of responding to what I said, you created a straw man.

Just to clarify:

"A straw man is a type of argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position"

You misrepresented my position. I chastised you for not responding to what I said, but that is not the same as misrepresenting your position.

Ah, sorry I was actually confusing 2 separate comment threads. :-/

I see your point.

I never said that. Please read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

What's the point of commenting if you're just going to name call and divert attention from the original conversation using straw men?

If you really care about people and what's best for society you'd act differently. Granted, 2 people chatting on HN don't matter much, but why even to comment if you don't give a damn about anything other than protecting your current set of beliefs?

Seriously? You don't think it's possible for 3rd party accreditation firms to exist in the physical world?

Have a look at: http://www.bbb.org/

He explained this pretty well. How come most ecommerce websites have "trust badges"? The government didn't need to create an agency to rate web site security, but yet such a thing exists.

If people wanted a health inspection organization to rate restaurants it'd exist. Since the govenrment already monopolized that field it doesnt. Okay, it sort of does, it's called Yelp.

Anyways, the point is pretty clear, we have all sorts of "trust" systems on the Internet to verify everything from privacy (Truste) to security (Verisign, etc.). People can create these types of organizations on their own without government and will if they actually do something useful.

What about smaller, privately owned businesses? For example, if you own a company worth $5,000,000 and die than your estate needs to come up with $2,500,000 in taxes.

The problem is, owning a company worth $5,000,000 doesn't mean you necessarily have $2.5 mil in spare cash laying around.

For this reason, estate taxes encourage businesses to go public so that they can convert the value of their business into liquid assets enabling their estate to easily pay taxes. Or, if going public isn't an option, often the estate needs to sell the business to a larger corporation.

End result is, these smaller $5 - $20 million dollar corporations disappear when the founder dies and they morph into bigger, lifeless enterprises. That's not to say all small businesses are great places to work, but if you ever talk to people that work for founder ran enterprises vs. shareholder ran enterprises there is often a significant difference in quality of life and in how the owners treat their workers.

Estate taxes kill small businesses and also raise very little revenue.

There are poorer countries than China that are not growing at their pace. Your claim implies all developing economies should be growing because of the "gap" between them and developed countries. In reality, most developing economies are struggling to find a path to growth.

You're perhaps right, people will one day "demand regulation" because that's what happens when countries get so wealthy that politicians can't pander on bigger issues and instead start making big deals out of smaller ones (i.e. we'll protect you from unhealthy restaurants). Not to mention, like all organizations, governments fight to continually grow. Unlike corporations, governments can't go out of business (easily) and have the support of misguided do-gooders.

Europe is going through this right now. They developed before the United States and they are declining before us as well due to the excess of government.

Finally, to claim economic growth in China is "abusive" is to show total disregard for the poverty of the people living in the country. China is still an incredibly poor country and economic growth is helping move millions out of poverty every year. Would you prefer slower growth and more poverty?

What does AIDS & malaria have to do with food inspectors in the US?

In China, far more people die from a lot of things because the majority of the country still lives in poverty. Lack of government regulation is why they are one of the world's fastest growing economy and economic growth is the main engine for solving their health issues.

I was in china for a month and had a great time eating at local restaurants that weren't monitored by health inspectors.

Most of the developing world does not have health inspectors monitoring restaurants because it's not that important of a thing to do.

The lack of food regulations in China made it possible for lots of amazing restaurants to exist because local people don't worry about regulations. If they want to sell you food, they just do it. Somehow, society manages to exist in this manner and it's actually quite nice.

we're looking at: http://www.2600hz.com/

Lots of great stuff mentioned, but here's some I didn't see:

SEO:http://raventools.com/

Password Management: http://passpack.com/

Stickers: http://www.stickermule.com/ :-)

Pinboard is better.

I vote in favor of selling your organs upon death. It's not a bad way to pay for the funeral. :-)

How can a user trust your bot? So essentially, the only way to win at this game is for it to no longer be human-to-human interaction?

What exactly are you studying? Human willingness to gamble their money away based on the potential that the thing on the other end is really a stupid bot?

Are you trying to "study" auctions or make money? You need to be more explicit about the goals of your site and as other people suggested: hire a designer.

Another really bizarre aspect of your site is the use of Adsense. If this is supposed to be a real business why attempt to make some small pocket change off Adsense? It's really quite confusing.

These things all add up to make you seem untrustworthy. 3 things to do:

1. Clarify your purpose. 2. Clean up the design. 3. Get rid of Adsense.

Unless you're a content site that is living off ads it makes no sense to have Adsense. Given that you're running a gambling site, the inclusion of Adsense just makes it seem even more obvious that you have this naive get rich quick ambition.

"both renting and hotels are pretty heavily regulated, mostly for a good reason."

Says who and what are those reasons? I suspect the reasons are: old people got scared and stakeholders saw an opportunity.

Luckily the Internet is mostly protected from scared old people and powerful stakeholders.

Maybe in another decade when we're all older we will be willing to give up the freedoms we once enjoyed when the Internet was still young. And it will be for "mostly good reasons."

I was being facetious, but I didn't realize that everyone that cashed out also moved on. Makes more sense now.

It doesn't make sense to sell to CN and then beg users for money. If they stayed independent it'd be more logical.

Why don't the founders who cashed in put up some of their own money? What exactly was the purpose of selling if the founders are still broke and Reddit is hovering around break even?

I think this kid's problem ultimately boils down to one statement: "He majored in political science and minored in history."

And he wants to earn north of $75k? Why? Because he read a lot of history books? And he's arrogant enough to say this to the NY Times? He might as well put a stamp on his forehead that says "Arrogant bastard. Do not hire."