aroc

Are you a PM at Retool?

I find myself strangely drawn to dystopian aesthetic. There’s something deeply moving about them.

This is great. I think visual tools like this are under utilized. They’re fun to use and can often reveal interesting insights.

Feels like the first company to study is Amazon. They are super customer focused and they have actual content out there you can find where they talk about it in detail and what it means.

In the early days of Amazon they kept an empty seat in meetings to represent “the voice of the customer”, that’s how hardcore they were about it.

Hi there, a friend and I are very excited to release a new education course we've created for instrumenting product analytics. We’ve both been building digital products for some time, and have been involved in the setup and management of product analytics. We’ve learned a lot about what not to do (the hard way), and about what sorts of strategies help make product analytics setup easier and more effective.

We created this course to help people understand how to do it right, so they can start to have more confidence in their data and leverage it more often when making product and business decisions.

We’d love to answer any questions and hear any feedback, including what you’ve found to be the hardest part of instrumenting product analytics on your team.

Thanks so much!

http://www.get-jumper.com/

A way to motivate people (including myself) to exercise with a chat bot that tracks your progress.

Originally built it to track how often I worked out, and if I didn't, what the reason was and have that reported back to me regularly. Now I have a bunch of people using it, but as you can imagine, makes me zero dollars. Well, technically it costs me money so it makes me negative dollars.

This looks super interesting. I built out a spreadsheet of (very rough) projected financials for a business I was considering trying that was going to do something very similar; essentially gear rental for camping. I wasn't able to find a way to have it make sense as a solid business (margins were so tiny), but I still love this concept and would totally be a customer of a business that offered this. I'm moving to the Bay this month, maybe I'll give this a try! :D

Hi there, I work for Keen IO. The AutoCollector SDK was fixed early this morning. Version 1.0.8 no longer sends password fields in plaintext. If you upgrade your version to 1.0.8 you'll be good to go. We're working to inform all users of our AutoCollector SDK that they should upgrade immediately. Thanks again for bringing this to our attention.

Vancouver, BC. Supernatural beauty. Immediate access to incredible outdoors. Great food and cafe scene. Fantastic arts and music scene. Clean. One of the greenest (carbon footprint) cities in the world. Fantastic transit system. Fast growing technology sector. + all the benefits that come with being a Canadian city.

+1. I would be curious to see how it performs vs. a standard form as well.

10. Technology is incredibly interesting. But I base my number off the fact that I'm always pretty involved in product/growth/strategy at companies where I do software engineering and I'm 90% of the time working on an interesting side project. I swap back and forth between working for a company (always a 10-50 person startup) and working on my own company. I think to truly get the most out of engineering positions, you want to be really involved in the crafting of the overall solution to the problem, rather than being told precisely what it is and then immediately starting on the engineering work that needs to meet a handed over "spec".

There's certainly some aspects of bullshittyness to it all, but I find it exciting. It's cool to see new ways of doing things coming into the industry and people trying to improve. I think when you start thinking that it's all or mostly all negative and "hype", then it's time to maybe look for a new role (I mean this in a very positive way - not trying to be rude here!). If you're 30+, have a ton of engineering experience and are starting to feel bored - look for maybe how you can leverage your years of skills and experience in a new role that you can really get excited about. Life works in chapters, being at the end of one (in terms of motivation/passion) isn't a bad thing. It just means you're ready for the next one.

I came to the comments section to post this exact comment. This is a hugely impactful change! Super happy to see this land.

Thanks so much! Honestly, I think I'm more excited about the landing page than I am the chatbot at times haha. I built it using http://tachyons.io and I'm not sure I've ever had more fun writing HTML/CSS. Definitely check out that CSS framework.

This sort of stuff is really interesting to me. I think any app/service can use ML though, it doesn't have to be a chatbot. I'm actually surprised we aren't already seeing more of this. I feel like most all fitness trackers are more concerned with the very specific details of your current workout (speed, heart rate, etc) but don't look at the wider trends across many days, weeks, months, etc.

If anyone has seen a service that does this, I'd love for you to share it here!

So the "friction" conversation about a product like this is pretty interesting imo.

One one hand, the bot is easy to get started with: Almost everyone already has the software (assuming Jumper works on multiple chat platforms) to get started right away with very little friction or commitment (no "signup" required).

On the other hand, once you are started - the chatbot interface is certainly higher friction than a traditional app would be (say, with two big buttons as you suggest).

But the while the app approach is lower friction once you've started, getting people to download and install an app is quite tough. Have you seen the latest data on how many apps the average American downloads in a month? It's zero!!! Crazy eh? So that barrier is one I wanted to avoid.

In the end though, the reason I chose the chat platform and the reason it is the final implementation for Jumper is that I've been super interested in the power of conversational interfaces and their ability to change human perception. Don't get me wrong - the "chatbot" craze is pretty exhausting to me too and I feel most chatbot products/services could have been built in a more traditional interface and have been far more successful. In fact, I built a failed chatbot for analytics not long ago. But when it comes to motivating people to exercise, I think having a conversation with an "exercise buddy" is more likely to get people to exercise. I mean, if I didn't believe that, I would have just used one of the currently available fitness apps and set up simple reminders. Of course, I may be very wrong here haha. But so far it's working!

No kidding - happy to hear some feedback about how well those actually work. I've been wondering.

That's not a bad idea. If people covered the cost I'd have no problem adding SMS back!

No unlimited plans from Twilio, unfortunately. https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing

Maybe another SMS service offers that? If so, I'd certainly consider SMS again.

I use Zwift as well! It makes indoor riding nearly fun! (so long as you have a decent bike trainer, of course).

Ultimately there are no magic bullets, you have to do the exercise. And that's the idea with Jumper - motivating you to get out there every single day and get some exercise.

Jumper actually started out as SMS. It operated solely on SMS for about 2 months, but the unpredictable message delivery, high cost or messages (esp. images) and lack of access to user profiles made me switch.

Is there another chat platform you'd prefer to use? Slack? Google Hangouts? Telegram?

Thank you!! :D

I actually started out on SMS with Twilio! I switched to Facebook Messenger simply because it was starting to get expensive and I really started to miss the niceties of using a proper chat platform: thing like predictable message delivery, getting someone's first name without asking, and easy/free image embedding.

I'm going to try and do Google Hangouts and Slack next - unless someone has other good ideas for platforms to support?

haha this will hopefully do the trick! If it doesn't, let me know how it could be better! :)

I probably should have said "chatbot" instead of robot. :/ And thanks for the congrats! I really appreciate you letting me know your impression on it.

So this the crux of this whole project. You nailed what is "interesting" here. This should, by no means, be more effective for anyone who's currently using it. This bot is pretty damn simple. But the personification is seemingly the reason it "works". I did actually spend a reasonable amount of time writing (what I think) are kind of goofy/silly/funny/motivational responses to things which I think has made this project fare much better than simple "You worked out? K thanks." style responses.

Example: My girlfriend joked recently, after starting to exercise a lot more after a short hiatus, that she was "rekindling her relationship with Jumper." I found that statement pretty deep - that's not something she would have said about a standard exercise app (I think?).

Thank you so much! I've been operating Jumper for ~4 months with a small group of people and the conclusion most people have made: It's useful because it's very lightweight and the personal style interaction helps with motivation more than say, a RunKeeper iOS push notification. Whether that conclusion holds true for lots of people, who knows! But it's sure been a fun project so far that's helped some people get into better shape. :D

"backwards Tamagotchi where the computer takes care of the human" has got me down a deep dark hole of thought about computers taking care of humans now haha. Simple statement, but lots to unpack there.

Having "robots", whether chat bots or something else, look at your data and make suggestions on how to improve is something I find super interesting. One for your finances certainly is a n interesting idea.

Hey everyone, I recently built this FB Messenger bot to help me exercise more regularly. I found that I was pretty off-and-on-again for exercise and wanted to be a lot more consistent. I feel so much better when I exercise every day. I originally built this for just myself, but I was asked by a few other people if they could use it - so I went ahead and launched it publicly.

I know, it's pretty basic. With the amazing exercise apps and services out there, what use is a silly little bot like this? I can't really give you a solid answer - but I will say it's absolutely helped me exercise significantly more than I had before. The daily reminder in the morning gets me in the mindset of wanting to do something active each day.

Let me know what you think. :)

This is great. I love easy to start playing web games like this. I was playing the game in < 20 seconds and enjoying myself.

I really like Circle CI, but I've used (and enjoyed) most of the other services as well.