HN user
http://nickboyce.com
Brilliant stuff. Fascinating to see how seasonal some of the searches are – "rosé" and "Aperol" spikes in July and December (southern/northern hemisphere summers?), "carbs" and "low-carbohydrate diet" peaks in January (when people want to change their habits?).
Monzo let you deposit cash and cheques at the post office
Not quite. You can deposit at any PayPoint location (mostly corner shops and the like), not Post Offices [0]. They also charge £1 for each deposit and the maximum deposit is £300. This is not an issue for me (I rarely see or use cash), but it would be for some.
Having made my first deposit at the weekend, the main issue is that the shopkeepers have no idea how to accept a deposit. I tried four places, and only managed to succeed in the end because I instructed the shopkeeper how to do it.
Farage admitted the morning after the result that the £350m a week to the NHS was a lie
The bus was part of the official Vote Leave campaign not Farage’s Leave.EU, so that particular lie is not for Farage to defend. Many others are though.
You’ve linked to an article about Soros advocating a second referendum, not funding the Remain campaign. Meanwhile, the Leave.EU campaign is being investigated for receiving funding from “impermissible sources”.
I think it would certainly be very interesting if more companies provided rationales behind some of their corporate policies. Perhaps this would create more of a discussion and better educate employees rather than just setting out the rules. Maybe go one step further and allow employees to request changes?
I'm curious what would make someone get into stuff like this anyway?
I’ve worked on dozens of these “print on demand” programs over the last 10+ years for museums and galleries like Tate, MoMA, The National Gallery etc. They are a fairly standard part of most museum’s retail operations, but this is a particularly nice example.
Licensing for fine art reproductions in museum retail can work in very strange ways, even if the work is out of copyright. For example, if a work is not part of the gallery’s collection, permission may be sought from the owner who may or may not own the high res, as well as the estate of the artist. I many cases this is not required as the work is not in copyright, but nobody wants to step out of line.
I’ve met a bunch of new people since I got a dog, in public and in the co-working office. Some have come to be good friends.
I should point out that meeting people was not my motivation for getting a dog though.
I do E-commerce consultancy, CRO and Facebook advertising (still figuring how much to specialise).
I was fairly fortunate to bring by previous employer on as first client, the rest of the leads have come through my personal network. The nice thing about prioritising lifestyle over growth is I don't need many clients.
I'm in my first month freelancing. The last time I wasn't in a full-time job was when I was running a small web design company in the 90s (it still exists and is run by @prawn).
Finding work was not difficult – I was lucky enough to book all of my capacity from day one. The biggest challenge I've had so far is managing my time across clients, and adjusting to not having a team.
This could be a useful place to discuss all the newest ICO's coming out in real time. The unique rank is "Friend of the Universe" by the way. http://icogo.biz
Same experience here. The day after finishing Cockpit Confidential I experienced my first go-around landing in bad weather. I wasn't nervous because I had some idea why it occurred and what was happening in the cockpit.
My understanding is that contactless cards have limit of £30 per transaction in the UK. Apple Pay (perhaps it's the same with Android Pay?) has a significantly higher limit.
I'm happy to pay for things that provide value in my life.
I pay a modest amount to some bloggers directly via Patreon for what I could otherwise get for free. I'm also considering doing the same for The Guardian (though that gets me the removal of ads). It's not out of the question that I would want to do the same for Medium.
I would miss them if they went away or had to change direction to monetise in new ways that reduced their value to me. Is this so bad?
We're not a startup, but we've had great success with Helpscout too. Our customer service team absolutely love it, to the point where it's difficult to convince them that Intercom is worth trying!
We have just completed a profitable FB campaign (5.5x ROI), after many attempts. The key for us was:
(1) Audience. We created a lookalike audience based on the attributes of our high spenders, which outperformed all previous attempts by a significant margin. I appreciate this option is not going to be available to businesses with no existing customer base.
(2) Tracking. Given the majority of our ads are served on mobile, but convert on desktop or iPad, only Facebook is able to join up the impression and transaction. Previously we had expected to be able to see the attribution in Google Analytics.
Just wanted to say I had a really positive experience as a Trussle customer recently :)
(1) Is a killer, unless collaborating over distance comes naturally to the team.
I have a remote member on my team who came to us as part of an acquisition. He travels to our London office once a fortnight. It works well, but I wouldn't hire remote workers for new roles.
The key reason for this is that our culture and processes within the company are not very well equipped to accommodate remote workers. We're spread across two sites (one of which is a factory), and communication is difficult enough as it is.
My London team is based in WeWork, Old Street (London). We have 10 memberships, of which 8 have dedicated desks. At £400 per desk it's not cheap, but definitely comparable to equivalents.
Beyond the physical space in a desirable location, the value for us comes from:
* Perks like free beer, free food (sometimes) social and professional events * Networking via their social network * A big, fun, creative space
The staff always seem busy to me and the place is really well kept. Happy customer.
I’ve run almost exactly the same number of experiments as the author, and experienced the same frustrations until recently.
It sounds as though the author needs to combine the "How we improve conversion without A/B testing" section with user tests and data analysis to build stronger hypotheses. Since we've put more effort into the research phase, our success rate has improved dramatically.
The real value of A/B testing is validating meaningful hypotheses that help you learn what matters to your customers, not unrelated individual improvements. By only observing the overall trend, you miss out on this.
I wrote about this recently here: https://medium.com/@nickboyce/5-steps-to-a-better-a-b-testin...
Reminds me of how someone embedded the chip from their Oyster card (London travel card) in a magic wand :)
How does this "organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful"?
I'll be disappointed if there isn't some ulterior motive at play. Some in this thread have pointed out they stand the collect more customer information or they may potentially have a use-case for drones.
I've been lucky enough to have handled one of these books in the rare books room at the Natural History Museum in London, and have also been involved in developing reproductions for The British Library.
The really surprising thing about the books housed in public collections is that each of the pages is unceremoniously stamped with the mark of their owner, much as I would expect they would mark a more easily replaceable text book.
Granted, though I think the difference is even more pronounced when the primary purpose of the physical object is to be appreciated visually. Not to detract from the visual appeal of record sleeves, but the primary goal is to house the album.
I would also argue that sound can be reproduced digitally in a way that closely resembles the analog equivalent, but the same is not true of displaying art on screens vs on actual paper/canvas (despite the impressive efforts in the linked post).
Nicely done, though I would have loved to have seen some build pictures. There are a number of commercial players in this market (for example https://frm.fm/) which combine hardware and marketplace, and the geek in me would love to see these succeed.
I work in e-commerce selling art reproductions and have thought a lot about this. I believe as soon as you make the art ephemeral or changeable, its value (to you, rather than monetary) is diminished and it simply becomes a means of displaying pixels.
I jumped at the chance to digitise my music collection, I just can't imagine doing the same for visual art.
There is much more to running experiments properly than it seems. While I'm not an expert on the statistics side, there are a few things I've learned over the years which come to mind...
1) Run the experiment in whole business cycles (for us, 1 week = one cycle), based on a sample size you've calculated upfront (I use http://www.evanmiller.org/ab-testing/sample-size.html). Accept that some changes are just not testable in any sensible amount of time (I wonder what the effect of changing a font will have on e-commerce conversion rate).
2) Use more than one set of metrics for analysis to discover unexpected effects. We use the Optimizely results screen for general steer, but do final analysis in either Google Analytics or our own databases. Sometimes tests can positively affect the primary metric but negatively affect another.
3) Get qualitative feedback either before or during the test. We use a combination of user testing (remote or moderated) and session recording (we use Hotjar, and send tags so we can view sessions in that experiment).
Exactly. And for whole business cycles (for us, that's weeks) to accommodate changes in behaviour and traffic throughout the cycle.
We try to run as many experiments as our traffic can handle, but we always estimate the sample size upfront when planning the test.
I'm a big fan of the Helpscout content. It's an almost guaranteed click from me every time they send an email.
Crawling JS content, yes. But does it rank for that content in the same way it would if the whole document was generated on the server?