HN user

awicklander

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Founder of http://idealprojectgroup.com

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projectidealism.com 11y ago

Venture Ethics

awicklander
1pts0
projectidealism.com 12y ago

A 30 minute interview with an astronaut about what it's like to ride into space

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projectidealism.com 12y ago

Bootstrapping is thinking long, not small

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projectidealism.com 12y ago

The SaaS products we used in 2013

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2pts1
snowbrains.com 12y ago

Surfers ride 100ft wave in Portugal

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4pts1
www.cnn.com 12y ago

Ex NSA contractor designs 'surveillance proof' font

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projectidealism.com 13y ago

Real Hope

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projectidealism.brytter.com 13y ago

Lessons from being in business for 6 years

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projectidealism.brytter.com 13y ago

You can meet all the requirements and still fail

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projectidealism.brytter.com 13y ago

Not all users are your customer

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projectidealism.brytter.com 14y ago

My web app redesign that led to a 400% increase in conversions

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projectidealism.brytter.com 14y ago

Web 3.0

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projectidealism.brytter.com 14y ago

Pando Daily's Hack Job Covering the Chicago Startup Scene

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blog.brytter.com 14y ago

Show HN: I just launched a new blogging platform

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www.randmediagroup.com 14y ago

Are you a real CEO?

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www.projectidealism.com 14y ago

The technology is the easy part

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1pts0
blog.tulayoga.net 14y ago

Chicago Yoga Studio: "Why I won't do a Groupon"

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signalkit.com 14y ago

37signals is a platform

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2pts0
www.projectidealism.com 14y ago

Mark Cuban's terrible idea

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8pts3
signalkit.com 14y ago

Real Numbers: Our conversion rate from free trials to paid subscribers

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www.projectidealism.com 15y ago

Cash flow and the posture of your business

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2pts0
productblog.37signals.com 15y ago

37signals: Every milestone, task, and reminder on 1 page

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3pts1
signalkit.com 15y ago

How we're investing in 37signals

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signalkit.com 15y ago

New app lets 37signals users see todos from multiple accounts on one page

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3pts0
www.projectidealism.com 15y ago

The developer is the customer

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signalkit.com 15y ago

The power of aligned incentives

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www.projectidealism.com 15y ago

The other side of Color, why I keep playing with it, and...

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4pts0
www.projectidealism.com 15y ago

The real reason people are mocking Color...

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155pts104
signalkit.com 15y ago

Could Facebook be Priceless?

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2pts0
signalkit.com 15y ago

Why Profit Matters

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2pts0

We signed up for Blue Apron and Sun Basket. Time after time, the actual food provided by blue apron was inferior. Often close to rotten. This isn’t a complicated story( Blue Apron delivers food with instructions but the food isn’t very good.

Everything written about here is in relation to VC funded companies. For people building companies without outside investment, and who pay employees with money, none of this is true at all and in fact sounds nonsensical.

G is for Google 11 years ago

And T is for Twitter?

This seems like it would be the perfect foundation with which acquire twitter right? A twitter acquisition makes sense under Alphabet in a way it doesn't under Google, no?

Check out yoga studios nearby. Because it's class based, it's more directed and time sensitive than working out, and a lot of them also foster community, so it might be easier for you to strike up a few conversations than at a gym.

Give a few of them a try to find the one that's right for you.

Well there's two primary things: 1. It shows you ALL referrals that happened prior to a conversion. For example, if someone clicks on a retargeting ad, then a google ad, then our blog, then our docs, then a sign-up. I see that all together.

2. They have a conversion report that shows the weighted conversions, which allows me to see what impact each individual referrer has.

I've been using Tend for about 4 months now.

In all seriousness, Google analytics, and my inability to use it, was one of the most frustrating things I dealt with as the founder of a SaaS product.

Google analytics regularly makes me feel like an idiot, and my frustration level, even with better products like heap and kiss metrics, had gotten me to the point where I was ready to give up on analytics entirely.

By using tend I learned that I was literally tossing away thousands of dollars every month and it's clearly shown me where we get our customers.

It's hands down the best analytics tool I've ever used.

5:30am - 6:30am: wake up, coffee, meditate 6:30am - 7:30am: customer support from overnight 7:30am - 9:30am: breakast with family, kids to school 10:00am - 4:30pm: work, office, lunch 4:45pm - 5:30pm: beer with coworing space coworkers 6:00pm - 10:00pm: Dinner with Family with support sprinkled in throughout the night. Yoga class sometimes. 10:00pm - 5:30am: Sleep

(Of course in the real world there are lots of deviations from this, but this is the goal schedule.)

So is Apple Pay in essence another way to get a credit card processed against stripe? If you have an app that customers can store credit cards on, it's not clear to me what the additional benefit of apple pay is? Is it simply a better/faster way of getting the card information to stripe by way of thumb press as opposed to key entered?

I completely agree with you on this. I can't imagine continuing to use hipchat with this change in place.

This was pretty stunning at first, but after thinking about it my guess is simply organizations that use Jira are the kind of organizations that want/need to keep tabs on all employee communications.

Which hey, I get that for some companies they need that for one reason or another.

What it says to me more clearly than anything though, is that Hipchat's core customer isn't small teams any longer.

It's large enterprises with lots of seats.

Employee Equity 12 years ago

There's another option that people never seem to talk about. Treat people well, give them a good working environment, and give them a fair salary based on the fact that they don't have any equity.

Most engineers I know with stock options and a discounted salary would have been much better with a higher annual salary and no stock options at all.

I have to say, this HN thread is super confusing to me. There are plenty of good points in this article, none of which come off as smug to me.

The fact of the matter is that the helpdesk software market is huge, and the notion that there isn't enough room for multiple companies to succeed in it is just wrong headed.

Very rarely, but especially with niche software, is there ever only one winner. Usually there's lots of room for many companies to succeed.

As a happy Freshdesk customer I pretty much agree with everything written in this post, and think they'll be just fine.

Stopwatching.us 13 years ago

The 'if true' language on this landing page drives me absolutely crazy. It calls into question the very premise on which the protests are being organized.

2010 Conspiracy Theory: The US government is intercepting every online and cellular communication of it's citizens.

2013: Conspiracy Fact: The US government is intercepting every online and cellular communication of it's citizens.

Sometimes theories prove to be true.

It's because most people don't have a point of reference for web development costs, and their experience with web products is with applications that have been around for a couple years with millions (or tens or hundreds of millions) of dollars of development time put into them. Facebook, Twitter, Square, Basecamp, etc.

When someone walks into a $5 million dollar home they instantly know it's an expensive home not because they're aware of the materials and craft that went into building the house. It's because they have a point of reference, their home, for what something costs and they're able to extrapolate an approximate cost for something far more expensive.

People don't have this point of reference for web development because most people haven't ever hired someone to build a web app for them before, and most people have never tried to build a web app on their own.

A tip: Ask people for a few sites that they like and that they use. Take a look at them and approximate how much time it would take you and your team to get that application built from scratch.

Then say - okay to build an approximate version of X, you'd probably be looking at a team of 3-4 people (or 6-8, etc.) working full time for X months.

So that site likely would cost around X dollars for you to build.

The point isn't to get them to understand our craft and the effort involved.

This exercise helps give them a point of reference for how much the things they use every day cost, and from there they can start being realistic about what they can get within their budget.

The thing that makes me most sad about this is that you're beating yourself up for losing investor's money.

Let me tell you - the investors are entering the arrangement knowing that they have a 90% chance of failure. That's why they want deals that might give them a 10x return on their investment and they turn down "lifestyle" business that might return a meager 8% year over year.

It's great that you obviously care about your investors. But you should feel just about as bad over them losing their money as a gas station should feel when people lose a dollar buying a lotto ticket.

They made the decision to play the game, knowing full well there was a higher likelihood of failure than success.

Best of luck to you as you'll inevitably build something else.

Stripe Connect 14 years ago

Not really. Most of them understand that in order for them to get their deposits they need to provide their bank account info.

Stripe Connect 14 years ago

Yeah, right now we essentially say 'hey, go get a stripe account, then come back and give us your api keys'. We give them some video tutorials along the way to explain what an API key is, how it works, and how to set up the integration.

It's relatively smooth, but definitely not as smooth as this new feature allows for.