dglassan

Do not blame this on Groupon's US engineering team. This is code from crazeal.com, which Groupon acquired (check the 'was thrown in' part of the exception message).

A lot of Groupon's international sites are on different platforms than the Groupon US site. This is because they expanded by acquiring the leading daily deals sites in all the countries they moved in to. There's been a big project within the company to move all international markets onto a single system but I'm sure you can imagine how difficult and time consuming of a project that is.

That's not Ben's username...you're completely wrong here.

You're basically asking them to be consultants...I don't think they'd be too thrilled to get into the consulting business.

Fake data? Give me a break. Groupon pioneered a new business model. With a new business model you need to account for things in ways they have never been accounted for before. While I'm not arguing their numbers didn't look shady at times, but it's because no one knew how to account for how the cash moved through Groupon's books because no one had ever done it before.

Do you count the full price of the deal as revenue? Or do you count only Groupon's cut of the deal as revenue? How often should they pay out the merchants? How do you account for refunds? Where do you keep the reserve pools Groupon needed to pay out all those refunds? Are the reserve pools considered an asset? Or a liability? How long do you need to hold the reserves before you can be sure there won't be any more refunds?

Management had to answer all of these questions in a matter of weeks because Groupon was growing so fast. It's not surprising they kept changing the way they accounted for things so often. The fact that you think Groupon knowingly misled investors like it's some sort of conspiracy is absurd.

Rocky Agarwal is far from credible. He made a name for himself by making it his personal goal to bash Groupon as much as possible. Probably because a number of his co-workers at TellMe left to join Groupon and he supposedly wasn't offered a job to join Groupon.

His so called reporting wreaks of jealousy as he watched his former co-worker's equity skyrocket with Groupon's growth while he was left out.

As a former Groupon employee, that's Andrew's personality.

I just came across this today and I couldn't find much online as far as reviews or testimonials. If anyone is using this I'd love to hear about your experience.

clickable: http://bounceexchange.com

This has the potential to be a great example of software making a real difference. I'd never heard about nextdoor until a few days ago when my parents of all people told me how great it was and that they had heard on nextdoor of a series of break ins around our neighborhood. I've now heard greats things about nextdoor multiple times from different people since then

You'll never comprehend just how good a 10X developer is until you actually work with one. You'll be able to tell they are 10X when you see how much work they get done in short amounts of time.

I don't think it has anything to do with "getting in the zone." A novice programmer that spends 4-5 hours straight focused on a problem is still a novice programmer no matter how far "in the zone" he gets. 10X can only come with experience. And that has to be experience working with other 10X programmers.

A programmer that has 15 years of freelance experience may be good at his/her job, but I doubt they would be as productive as a programmer with 15 years of experience working at top tier companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.

I really think the only way to become 10X is to watch and learn from other 10X programmers and that will still take years of learning.

I worked as a consultant for 11 Months right out of college. During that time I launched a side project that got some traction and a little press but didn't really go anywhere. I put it on my resume and started applying to startups in the Bay Area. The project got my foot in the door for some interviews and I was eventually hired as a lead dev for a YC company.

I didn't create a startup but I was able to work in my spare time on a project that proved I could ship a product, which enabled me to leave my soul sucking corporate consulting gig.

You shouldn't be marketing this towards consumers. If you and your friend had this problem with the apartment gate then I'm sure more people at your apartment have to deal with it also. Why don't you talk to your apartment complex and see if they'd be interested to use it as a service for their tenants?

You should be marketing this towards apartment complex properties, not consumers living in apartment complexes.

Not everyone in Silicon Valley is a douche like you seem to believe here. Just because someone lives there doesn't automatically make them a part of the culture or 'detached and not personal', so I don't understand why you're generalizing here.

I've lived in the Bay area most of my life. I grew up in Silicon Valley and I'm living in SF now. Frankly, I've never seen this startup culture everyone talks about because I've chosen not to be a part of it. I've never been to a launch party, never been to a tech meetup, never been to a hackathon or these hackerspaces. Sure, I agree with you that the startup space is filled with douches and that's why I don't hang around those people. But that's a fraction of all the people living in Silicon Valley.

Have you even been to Silicon Valley before? Or even the Bay area in general? It's a huge place with lots of people. Your assumption is like me saying "Dallas can suck it because I don't like cowboys." It's a terrible argument.

In the future, please don't submit content to your own blog with link bait titles, thanks.

you already answered your own question. They limited signups to only people with @hardvard.edu addresses. When they expanded they just added more schools to that list of approved addresses

Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston

It's a collection of interviews with founders who started successful companies.

#8 - Recognise bullshit when you hear it

Sums up most of the points in this article if you ask me.

You make a fair point. I guess I'm just a little bitter after reading that article. Over the years I've noticed that a lot of articles being written are just plain assumptions and opinions of the journalist, and not always accurate of what's going on from the inside. But that's just my experience reading articles written about the companies I work for.

What is with all this hate for acqui-hires lately? I was part of an acqui-hire, I've seen it from the other side. I worked my ass off with my fellow employees at a startup here in the valley. We never achieved the scale we needed to be successful in our industry, but we were acquired by the major player in that space.

It's been an incredible journey and all of us have grown our skills and are moving our careers forward working with the new company. It's been the best thing that could have happened to my career and all I hear on HN, and now in the media, is people bitching and moaning that these people shouldn't be acqui-hired and that all these acquisitions are bogus? Give me a break. It's business. That's all it is. This is capitalism working. Companies investing in human talent hoping to produce long term revenue and results. We built something together at our startup. It didn't work out but our new company liked what we built enough to bring us in and solve the same problem with more resources.

Downvote me, but I'm sick of hearing all this complaining about acquihires. Especially from journalists who's only job is to tell people their opinion...real tough work.

I was part of an acquihire within the last year, so I'll try to explain a few things. Some of these comments are accurate but I wanted to clear things up.

Not all acquihires are the same, so my experience is surely different from others, but there could be a number of reasons why founders would decide to be acquihired. Job security, higher pay, you get to solve the same problem you're passionate about but on a much larger scale, you have more resources to do what you need to do, you get to build a larger team than you would have been able to previously, you get to work with some amazing people and learn from them, you get an exit under your belt which looks good if you decide to do another startup in the future.

As far as why a company would want to acquihire a team? The team dynamic is more valuable than building a team from scratch. The team has proven they can design, build, and deliver a product. I'm willing to bet that 100% of the founders that get acquihired have domain knowledge of the product they work on, and that can be valuable to a large company that is trying to build a new business unit and may not know that industry as well. Corporations need to move fast to please investors, so often times it's easier for them to acquire a team that knows an industry rather than launch a new business unit and learn as they go.

I've seen so many people on HN complain when a company gets acqihired...but I bet that the majority of you would take the same deal given the opportunity. Sure it can be seen as selfish, but sometimes you have to do what's best for yourself, your career, and your family.

Didn't google lose a huge lawsuit about something to do with online pharmacies not too long ago? My guess is it's something to do with that.

"The artists we've spoken to love our service but can't afford the price"

So, why is lowering your price a bad idea?

What happens if my site relies on your account service and you guys go out of business?

Also, remind me again what your product does and why I'd want to use it.

If it's been 6 to 8 weeks then I definitely forgot about your product and have no idea why I was interested in the first place. Remind me.

This isn't just geared towards larger companies with more predictable business models. It's good business no matter what size company you are. Even startups use these marketing techniques. And I'd argue that in a startup, everyone on the team is a product guy.

define your customer: use analytics to find out where your visitors are coming from. Is your audience just English speaking or should you internationalize your site? What income brackets is your web app designed to cater to? Lower end 99 cent app? Higher end quality software?

Gathering feedback: Startups can easily email their customers surveys and ask for feedback

Iterate: When you talk to your customers, ask them what they like and don't like about your app. Iterate based on their suggestions

Packaging: Landing page. Having good copy and a strong selling page. Simple sign up flow and an on-boarding plan to help them get started and using your app

Price points: Use surveys and the customer "persona" you defined above to break up your customers into different price brackets and sell them features based off what they want and what they can afford.

Has anyone watched these yet? This is what I've been interested in lately and would like to know what people think about the videos.

Getting the word out is only a fraction of what marketing actually is. Marketing involves:

- defining who your customer is (demographics, income, etc.)

- gathering feedback from the customer through surveys

- using that information to iterate on products/launch new products that solve your customers pain points (if half your customers are left handed this will tell you that you need to design your product for left handed people as well)

- packaging and designing how your product will look on the shelves

- defining price points based on the data you gathered from your surveys

Not to be a jerk but it sounds like the author of this post hasn't even taken a Marketing 101 course if he's defining marketing as writing blog posts...

I recently bought a domain name from a premium domain seller and I asked the same question. The original post can be found here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4278380

Don't make the first offer. They'll probably give you a price higher than what you offer and they just want to see how much money you're willing to spend. You contacted them about buying some of their domains. Ask them how much they are willing to accept for the domains.

I was able to cut the price of the original quote almost in half when buying my domain because they gave me the price first and I responded with a final offer at a much lower price and said that's all I had in my budget for the domain name. It was a polite "take it or leave it" offer and they took it.

I've been really happy with MediaTemple.net

They have great support and helped me a whole lot when I was first getting started with server administration. They were always available to answer any questions I had about how to do something.

I get that, and I'm saying you don't need someone at an incubator to tell you that.

It's not about managing your time, you need to figure out how to scale your business, especially operations and customer support, that's the most difficult part about running an early stage startup.

I previously worked at an early stage daily deals business so we were very operational. One of our major costs was the amount of time it took for our sales team to set up a deal with a merchant. One of our main focuses was to build internal tools to scale this part of our business. If we could reduce the time it took to set up a deal, we could run more deals and offer a better selection products to our customers.

Figure out how to scale the operational work. Build yourself tools that will automate parts of the business. Scaling customer support? Maybe offer a discussion forum so customers can help each other? Or at least build a help section that answers the most frequent support issues.

Just remember it's about scaling the process, not getting better at time management.

There are tons (maybe more?) companies that are successful without the help of an incubator. People have been raising money and building successful companies decades before the idea of an incubator even came about.

Not making it into an incubator didn't contribute to the flop at all. A bad company going through an incubator is still a bad company. I'm not saying your company was bad, I'm just trying to explain that this whole idea that a startup can only be successful if they go through an incubator is completely bogus.