adambratt

Indio | San Francisco | ONSITE | Full-time | Lead Frontend Engineer

Indio (http://www.useindio.com) is getting way too many customers and we need some team members to help us handle the bountiful harvest!

We're really looking for a talented lead front-end engineer!

What we're looking for:

- You’re ready to help lead front-end development for our broker product

- You’ve played with all the major JS frameworks and can debate React vs Angular for hours

- You enjoy learning about how customers use what you build just as much as figuring out how to architect it

- You’re interested in joining a seed stage company that’s experiencing rapid growth and needs help keeping it all under control

- You live in the Bay area or want to move here soon

We’re an insure tech startup… but we’re trying a different twist than the standard “repackage an insurance product for millennials with sweet marketing”.

You see.. we really like the veterans. The insurance brokers who have been in this industry for years and are now seeing insure tech flip their world upside down. These brokers know more about insurance than any of us could ever hope…but they need our help!

They’re behind the times and desperately looking for solutions that allow them to compete again!.We’re building the software that can turn any existing insurance broker into a tech savvy company. We’ve helped insurance agencies of all sizes earn their stripes in the insure tech world by giving them powerful platforms they can use to give their clients a better experience.

And just like our customers, we’re veterans too! Our team has prior acquisitions under our belt and we’re hungry for more. We’re YC and 500 Startups alumnus, and have a tech first culture.

We love delighting our customers and know you will too. Come on board and let’s superpower the insurance world!

Email: adam@useindio.com

Also very curious to see what you've built as I'm building something similar right now. Would you mind sending a link to adam@useindio.com?

Your website is honestly really confusing. The design is nice and clean but the messaging is really lacking. I've ran multiple small businesses and I have no idea what "Zero agent rental forever" would ever mean to a business owner. I also had no idea what IVR meant and I've actually built automated message systems on Twilio.

Are you providing me the agents or do I have to supply themselves? It looks like you're just the software but once again the wording/copy made things incredibly confusing.

Your messaging should reflect that you provide easy to use call center software. If you're competing mainly on price then the "pay only for the calls you make" should be a tagline somewhere... that's a powerful message but I don't see it anywhere on the site.

I also don't really like the design on your features pages..at first I thought they were lists of blog posts. There's so much spacing with big faded images that don't make it easy to see the product. Not to mention you're peppering me with that free trial button when I really just want to read what each feature does...and then you could throw me the CTA at the end of the page if I liked this feature.

How many of these companies were successful because of a character in their logo?

http://fortune.com/unicorns/

Minecraft Youtubers with over 500,000 subscribers were routinely making $15k for a 10 minute video a couple years ago. Probably higher now.

Yes, but I'm guessing they will open up the currency so that 3rd party servers can use it rather than having to deal with payments on their own.

Hopefully it will help legitimize a lot of the current server networks.

There's a few reasons why they're doing this.

My little brother ran one of the top 10 Minecraft servers a couple years ago. On a good day, he'd average 1000 players online during US hours. His server had a bunch of minigames with the most popular ones being a clone of Call of Duty and Star Wars Battlefield in Minecraft.

This was monetized on the backend by charging players money for in-game items. It was fairly regular for a player on his server to pay $100+ to have access to an in-game gun or other virtual item he'd created on his server. I won't say how much he was making but it definitely was enough to pay several thousand dollars in monthly server bills and $3-5k/month to Youtubers who would drive traffic to the server.

The top 3 servers were pulling well into 7 figures a year each for virtual items that would often disappear or for a kit loadout in a minigame that would be gone the next month. A lot of these guys churned through user bases pretty quickly but it didn't stop the endless flow of 13 year olds with their parents credit card. None of them offered support options and there wasn't really a way to get a refund after you'd spent $100 on a virtual kit on a 3rd party server mod.

I think part of the reason Microsoft is doing this is to regulate the number of angry calls they were getting by parents of kids who spent way too much money on servers that Microsoft had no control over. Not to mention this will let them get a scoop of what I'd estimate to be a side income stream of at least $200m/year in revenue through 3rd party servers.

There's a great article on it that I'm struggling to find. But essentially, the Shazam app and related apps built on their tech are used as a massive A/B testing tool now by artists. Roll out 3 versions of the same song to 3 similar cities in the Midwest and see where it gets the most shazam lookups.

If I recall correctly a few years back they were doing $100m a year by basically being able to give everyone in the music industry insight into what's the most popular and upcoming songs in every major city.

However, with the popularity of Spotify I'm guessing they're losing a lot of market share in the mass music metrics space.

Exactly, it's really easy to look at the consumer value of 4sq and shrug them off without realizing their database has incredibly valuable data.

Another similar company who is making a ton of money off data on the backend is Shazam.

Aside from the fact that they are a data company, not a fund... While what they are doing is completely legal it's safer for the company investing off of data to be separate from the company creating the data. Less conflicts of interest in the event it eventually becomes a legal issue.

They still get millions of location updates every 15 minutes. I don't remember the exact number as it has been a couple years since I talked with people using their data but it is much much higher than you would expect.

They don't need you to "check-in" when they are grabbing your location every 15 minutes in the background. They've also built APIs into ad networks that ping their location database with coordinates millions of times a day to find relevant ads. There's thousands of apps using ad networks that funnel location data back to 4sq.

Techies may have abandoned them, but they still have a ton of middle America thinking that 4sq is cool. My mom for example.

On another note, 3-4 years ago I had access to a large anonymized bank/credit card transaction database from a well known company. It had about 1-2% of all transactions in the US by our estimates. When we modeled the quarterly sales of Walmart compared to it we found that it was incredibly accurate going back 5 years, even with 1/50th of the US population.

Foursquare honestly has some of the best user location data you can buy on the market.

The only companies out there with better historical data are Facebook, Apple, and Google. And as far as I know, I can't call them up and start buying from them within a few weeks.

I've seen hedge funds right now making millions off of Foursquare's data as they can build algorithms around it quite easily and there's plenty of history to backtest off of. The great part is that Foursquare's previous money maker was selling their places database so they've already done a great job mapping GPS coordinates to businesses and it's pretty easy to map that further to a ticker symbol. Perfect for quants.

By combining Foursquare data with anonymized credit card data from Intuit or Yodlee... you've got the ability to predict retail sales on a DAILY basis rather than on a quarterly basis. You might even be able to a better job than that actual business in predicting their growth if you've got a whole team of quants working on creating the data models.

This is the start of a shift from the market at large relying on quarterly earnings for these types of companies and instead being able to track performance on a daily level. As far as I can tell, there's nothing companies can do to stop this either.

They don't need to wait for the clients to get rich. Fidelity or Schwabb will buy them and then start to upsell the Robinhood users into other financial programs.

Robinhood is just a marketing play. Anything about them selling flow or using margin offerings to become profitable is not realistic.

Traditional brokerages have a customer acquisition cost of around $400 to get someone to deposit at least $100 in an account.

They've got a million users and continue to grow quicker and quicker. For a small multiple of traditional CAC they are already close to their >$1B valuation just in terms of user acquisition.

It's not easy to get funded brokerage accounts, especially funded accounts by millennials. Their current user base might not be worth much, but the average age of a brokerage account in the US is over 20 years. That means that Robinhood's AUM is only going to grow as their user base gets older and has more money.

Frankly, the current brokerage houses have been dumping hundreds of millions into marketing to try to acquire millennial users without a ton of success. TD Ameritrade alone spent $300 million last year in ads, a lot of that targeted at the millennial market.

Robinhood is a user acquisition strategy for the millennial market and they'll get bought for $2-3 billion within a couple years by one of the existing brokerage houses.

Because we totally needed stored procedures to be re-implemented outside of the database in a templating language. /s

Just do Command+W, Command+T really fast on the last tab

I focus mainly on driving clicks to both content and eCommerce. The actual likes and comments on a post don't really matter much to me but it does help for increasing the CTR

I've spent a good amount of money on Facebook ads in Asia (>$300k) and while there may be some fraud, there's definitely a completely different pattern of Facebook use in some countries. I think what you're observing is cultural differences in Facebook use, not fraud.

It's incredibly hard to get people to like or engage with your posts in Korea/Japan unless you have a ton of social proof already. This is definitely a cultural aspect as no one wants to be the first or one of just a few to engage with the post. In general, I've found these two countries to be more expensive than the US for getting likes even though it's about 1/3 the cost for getting post clicks.

Meanwhile, in Indonesia/Vietnam/Philippines it's incredibly easy as many people just "Like" everything in their feed as they scroll down. I've talked to several people from these countries about Facebook usage and they say it's their way of marking that they've seen a post. It's funny but I frequently get more likes than clicks on my posts that I run in these countries. Some may be fraud, but after seeing how people actually use Facebook in these countries I'm inclined to believe it's legit.

One of the hacks that works well for me is to take something I want to run as an ad in Korea or Japan and run it in Indonesia first. $2 for a post engagement campaign will get me around 500 likes. That seems to be enough to tip the scale in Korea/Japan and get them to start liking it en masse as well. It's crazy but my like rate goes up around 30x in Korea when I use this strategy of pre-seeding likes.

Anyways, going back to this author's post, the Facebook algorithm seems to be trained to follow what works and gets you the cheapest engagement rate. This is why I never ever run a single ad set with multiple countries and interests as it will just all end up saturated on the one that starts out working best. You should be running separate ad-sets for each country/interest, doing it any other way is a COMPLETE WASTE. Do not run Facebook ads like this.

Furthermore, these really don't look like spam accounts. These look like real Southeast Asian FB accounts. Most of my friends in that part of the world have very similar looking Facebook accounts with a shit ton of random friends/likes.

Not to mention a good chunk of the companies they were writing this type of code for won't exist by then either...

A full year of development?

I think this is probably the best suggestion in here.

And I'd just add that there's no need to jump into a new backend language if you used PHP years ago. Sure it's not as robust or structured but for a hobbyist it can do everything you need and there's still plenty of jobs for it if you want to graduate to an MVC framework.

As someone who's met Warren Buffett, I can say he's definitely an extrovert.

He's a complete social butterfly and absolutely loves being the center of attention. He's constantly telling jokes and making people laugh.

That said, his partner Charlie Munger is definitely a lot more inline with the classical definition of an introvert.

You're forgetting all the money that we had to spend on marketing.

Please read the book Rocket Fuel if this is really your current situation. It might just be that your co-founder is a visionary with the wrong responsibilities and you're the perfect integrator. Or your co-founder might just be an asshole period. If that's the case, jump ship now.

People who are commenting and saying that this doesn't make any sense are missing the real use case here: fast prototyping and iterations.

What product manager wouldn't like to be able to quickly test and iterate on concepts without bothering the developers?

I feel like if bubble.is can nail this, in a year 90% of "Show HN" product launches and new ideas on Product Hunt will be built with this tool.

It's the new and better launchrock as it's actually a reflection of the product.

What's really the advantage of this over writing 50 lines of javascript to automatically do the same thing and using segment.com to track events?

Benzinga -- is getting massive amounts of new traffic and we need some more team members to help us handle all the new visitors - full-time in Detroit, MI.

   Positions
      ☆☆☆ Lead Front-end engineer
      ☆☆☆ Senior Django Developer 
      ☆☆   Senior Drupal Developer


   Quick Stats
      ★ Customers include TD Ameritrade, Microsoft, Yahoo
      ★ 20 million+ monthly readers
      ★ 1000s of subscribers to our private Marketfy trading communities

Being a media company we find our way into all kinds of cool stuff. Our office is furnished with things like a $3000 high-end bed that was sent to us to review. We got to talk to and get pictures with Warren Buffett and Lloyd Blankfein (CEO of Goldman Sachs) when they came to Detroit.

But, you interject, finance is one of the toughest startup seas to sail upon! The old boys club runs an ironclad ship with no visible decks for boarding. Avast! We've built a battering ram of a business in just a few short years that has pummeled its way deep into the heart of Wall Street. Old Ironsides has warmed itself to Benzinga and once a taste the thirst cannot be quenched.

And if you happen to trade or invest yourself you'll find us inside almost all of the major brokerages in the US. So, where do you fit in this rigging, you swashbuckling scalawag? Well, our team is crazy ambitious, motivated, and experienced with shaking shit up. If you know your tech, and want on deck this is the place to do it. Your exact technical background and language of choice doesn't matter as much as your motivation and your ability to adapt quickly.

Why be a ninja when you can be a pirate? This ship is forging a new course, send an email to careers@benzinga.com to board! Email us now: careers@benzinga.com

Check us out: http://marketfy.com and http://benzinga.com

Truth. I remember coding under my blankets at night with a flashlight on my TI-83. Made some mad BASIC apps.

What sites do you all use to check up on your stocks, read news etc?

Doesn't look like the API side will make a comeback at least.