bmr

Even kids who go to law school don't learn how to practice until they arrive at a firm, so this is not an obviously inferior method of training.

If you aspire to BigLaw this will never get you there, but if you want to be a consumer-facing plaintiffs' lawyer (where the reality is that well-executed advertising probably beats a stellar education anyway) this might be a wise move.

I don't think the holding turned on the number of antennae at all. Nor is oral argument very important in appellate practice.

This thread has turned me off HN for st least six months.

1957: Future NBA superstars are unlikely to be black.

Sometimes I wonder if we should all just take a walk outside.

We laugh at people "on the lower half of the bell curve" who use the "length equals strength" heuristic to evaluate long-form letters, but the same thing happens in these comments all the time.

Three months into my own (exhilarating) journey, I think the best answer may be to become one yourself.

I wrote about a grubwith.us-esque dating site in an Ask HN submission a little over a year ago.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=878657

The challenge with this model is that extracting money from users requires repeated action on their part. That subscription money is so much easier. With an average account life of six months, match.com gets about $180 per paid user.

If you went with a Groupon-like model for a site that revolved around sending people on dates, and assuming you could make about $10 on $20ish dates, each user would have to get out there 18 times in order for you to beat the subscription model.

I still think there could be a big opportunity in a site like this, but it's not hard to see why the incumbents hang onto their subscription models for dear life.

Sure, I was just curious if paid traffic could have been profitable for you. With $8 in profit per shirt and a conversion rate of 0.5%, it looks like anything over $0.04 per click would have resulted in a loss.

Your site was gorgeous, and the idea was strong. Amazing how hard it is to push people to action.

I seem to remember you saying you had a new visitor every 4.5 seconds for 48 hours (can't find it again though). That works out to about 38,000 visitors.

So the conversion rate was 200/38000 = 0.5%? Or am I missing something?

I've seen it mentioned here a few times, but if you haven't heard of the permanent portfolio, check it out here:

http://crawlingroad.com/blog/2008/12/22/permanent-portfolio-...

Thanks for being open. I think the most interesting part will be about how many hits you got and what kind of conversion rate you were seeing.

Some of my personal curiosities: How many people abandoned the purchase when confronted with the PayPal form? Do you think you could have been profitable with paid customer acquisition methods (like geo-targeted display ads), or would that have eaten into your profit too much?

Groupon's real "dirty secret" is that they've brilliantly navigated the seedy world of affiliate marketing. As far as I know, Groupon uses the same affiliate networks as Acai scam artists (as opposed to say, building their own a la Amazon) and is (was?) willing to pay several dollars for a single email address.

How they managed that is the real secret and I would be extremely interested in that story.

Maybe not, but those things may still wield pretty heavy influence. Advertising is a strange world of subconscious desires and difficult-to-rationalize preferences (colors and shapes of buttons, for example).

Obligatory exercise your cat with a laser pointer patent:

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5443036.html

This was always included on the first day of any patent class in law school.

My unused CA S-Corp has been the bane of my existence lately. From the $800 fee to the documentation required to stay in good standing (small, but easy to forget when the company does nothing), it's more pain than it's worth.

If you're someone with lots of ideas and lots of peaks of excitement, it actually might better to postpone incorporation until you can't responsibly continue without some sort of limited liability.

Grellas, any idea how a "SLAPP-back" suit would fare for any of these defendants?

One curse of gifted children is that their work life is significantly more "regular" than their academic achievements. Even if they become doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. there will be plenty of people with the exact same title - many of whom were not similarly gifted.

I imagine there's quite a bit of worry that they should be doing something greater.

In their early days, they were paying affiliates $2 per email submit.

Those first three paragraphs make up one of the best explanations of entrepreneurship I've ever read.

I thought the same thing, but not having a lot of experience hiring designers, I am curious what type of numbers we are actually talking.

1-5k? 5-10k? More?

-startfatendskinny.com

-startfatendfit.com

I came here to say this. Ignore the silly title - it's one of the best marketing books I've ever read.

This smells contrived, as if TechCrunch will somehow be cooler if it rebels against its parent a la Reddit v. Conde Nast.

This is a little rosy. Some issues with bars include: (1) 90% of your revenue comes from two nights a week; (2) Given all the cash, employee theft is a real problem; (3) Lose-it-all liability. Think about all the ways drunks can die/seriously injure themselves... and about how you'll get blamed every time. I'm not saying it wouldn't be a good investment, but it's hardly a license to print money.

The fact that many "performers" are somewhat unfocused doesn't mean that planning is overrated. These people would likely do even better with a little more discipline.

It just that big successes more often come from people with lots of ideas and lots of experimentation as opposed to people who pick relatively unambitious careers and rotely execute day after day.

Nobody likes a grammar Nazi, but second paragraph, last sentence. Perhaps they should have learned from Groupon? :)

This particular quote is not newsworthy, but has anyone started to wonder if Google might have to cut ties with Schmidt at some point? I started using bing this week in no small part because I find Schmidt creepy.

I don't like it either. I think it falls into the category of technically impressive, but real-world silly. The small decrease in search time is completely offset by feeling like I'm having a seizure.

I've done grunt work on some deals and seen multipliers in the 6-14X range. But the multiple was of EBITDA, not revenue.

If you talk in terms of revenue, multipliers can vary as wildy as companies' margins do. EBITDA (or one of its zillion variations) common-sizes the multiple.