HN user

dohertyjf

1,608 karma

growth marketer in san francisco and founder of getcredo.com, entrepreneur, n00b dev, webdev, traveler, photog. johnfdoherty.com.

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www.washingtonpost.com 8y ago

Facebook discovered election-time ad sales to Russians [video]

dohertyjf
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www.johnfdoherty.com 9y ago

Startup Growth and Profit Lessons from Buffer, Moz, and ConvertKit

dohertyjf
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andrewdumont.me 9y ago

10 Years in Startupland

dohertyjf
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www.getcredo.com 9y ago

Twitter Needs a Panda Update

dohertyjf
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searchengineland.com 9y ago

Official: Google makes changes to correct Holocaust denial sites

dohertyjf
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www.getcredo.com 10y ago

How to Hire Growth Engineers

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techcrunch.com 10y ago

Mattermark raises $7.3M at $42M valuation to expand B2B search

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www.pbs.org 10y ago

Here's a map of all the mass shootings in 2015 in the US

dohertyjf
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www.hiregun.co 10y ago

Show HN: HireGun for finding marketing consultants/agencies

dohertyjf
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www.gregkroleski.com 10y ago

Life in a Studio Apartment with My Wife and Two Sons

dohertyjf
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abeastinajungle.com 10y ago

Relax. It's no longer your San Francisco anyways

dohertyjf
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www.gregkroleski.com 10y ago

Life in a Studio Apartment with My Wife and Two Sons

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1pts0
www.johnfdoherty.com 10y ago

What I would tell all executives about growth

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www.johnfdoherty.com 10y ago

Does a Startup Need the .com? A Rebuttal

dohertyjf
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medium.com 11y ago

Why are Valley companies so bad at marketing?

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andrewchen.co 11y ago

The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs

dohertyjf
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news.ycombinator.com 11y ago

Ask HN: I'm not a developer but I got an F8 invite. Should I go?

dohertyjf
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www.johnfdoherty.com 11y ago

The Curse of Being a 10x Manager

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medium.com 11y ago

Go On. Quit Your Job. It might be the best thing you ever do

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medium.com 11y ago

A Year of Designing at Facebook

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hotpads.com 11y ago

Maps That Blew Our Minds in 2014

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hotpads.com 11y ago

Mapping Human Poop in San Francisco

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hotpads.com 11y ago

A Map of Displaced San Francisco Businesses

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rrhoover.typeform.com 11y ago

Ideahunt

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www 11y ago

Show HN: HireGun – for finding online marketing consultants

dohertyjf
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www.johnfdoherty.com 11y ago

I’m Not A Good Employee

dohertyjf
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modeanalytics.com 12y ago

Do VCs have an age bias?

dohertyjf
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searchengineland.com 12y ago

Google rolled out a "spammy site" algo change this weekend.

dohertyjf
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hotpads.com 12y ago

Here are the planned residential buildings in San Francisco, mapped

dohertyjf
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www.youtube.com 12y ago

Pact pays you to live healthy, from members who don't.

dohertyjf
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Some people honestly just need 4-5 hours of sleep. I used to work for Zillow and their CEO Spencer only sleeps 4-5 hours a night. It's all he needs and all he's ever done, according to people who have worked for him for a long time.

But these people are the exception not the rule. I think the reason they tend to be successful is because they are up before everyone else and have time to get a lot accomplished before they are thrown into the day with everyone else's schedules pulling on them.

I can't necessarily say whether they had inefficiencies in their company structure, but they certainly over hired.

Yep, we are seeing this time and time again with startups in the Bay Area who went on a landgrab for talent a few years ago and now realize they can't support them as the VC money dried up. I actually wonder if Medium was trying to raise more and they were unable to, therefore they have to do this and are trying to spin it positively.

I respect Ev a lot. He revolutionized blogging and publishing on the web. And I want Medium to do well. And maybe I'm too cynical about the startup and SV world (I moved away from SF in October), but this smells of the same old same old to me.

a) Would be better displayed as a sliding scale instead of a median. b) not listing the real Twitter founders and their ownership is a huge oversight.

I'd be interested in how much equity each venture firm had for each of these too.

Yeah that's insane. We use a local one here in SF (Sudzee) though it also can take a day or two to pick up and a day or two to return, and on weekends that's a bummer. And it costs $45 each time for over 40lbs of laundry.

I miss my days of $12 wash and fold in Brooklyn :-/

I value stock options at zero. There is potentially a huge upside if you are an early employee at a company that gets enormous. Even then, you have to be top 20 or 30 to get f-you money, and even then it might not even be that.

I had stock options (not RSUs) at BigCo where I worked for 2 years. At one point, had I been fully vested, I was sitting on about $240k worth of stock. After a 3x1 split and the company going back down to almost the strike price I was granted stock (and most of it was worthless because was given it as part of a raise at a high strike), after I parted ways with the company and sold my options (had to as part of the severance agreement), I walked away with $2000. Basically a $1k/yr bonus. I would have gladly taken extra salary instead of stock. Lesson learned.

Right! I'm sorry, but $9k/mo in revenue with 45 sales people and $100k in expenses??

Definitely not in a bubble. I run my own bootstrapped company that does $5k/mo recurring and my expenses are sub $750 a month.

Hi Hacker News! Today I pushed live an update to HireGun, which is my company aimed at bringing transparency to the consulting industry while connecting businesses with marketers (to start)!

HireGun is very upstream from eLance/Upwork and focused on businesses who don't have a Fortune 500 level online marketing budget, but also can afford more than $50 for a Twitter bot army.

There are a few more versions already planned with more around consultant/agency partner transparency, making the lives of service providers easier with payment support, and more. It's early days, but I'm excited to be working on it fulltime after wanting to for a few years now!

I'd love your questions and feedback!

What a classic terrible management move. I worked at a ski shop in college that also sold (really bad) used ski equipment on eBay. One time the lead manager accidentally let a lot of stock go live with a $1 minimum. They realized it and went back in under different accounts and bid them all up. When eBay caught them, they blamed the employees for it (myself and 4 others), who all had nothing to do with it.

We all quit the next day. Who wants to work for someone like that?

Holy shit that last line gave me goosebumps, especially being a climber and extreme sports enthusiast and knowing that Dean's spirit animal was the Raven.

"A person who went through the trouble of setting up analytics tracking is probably a person with just enough vanity to immediately check up who's referring to their site."

Wait, what? I'm pretty sure if you go to the majority of sites on the Internet you will find some sort of analytics tracking code, whether it's Omniture, GA, or another. They don't do this out of vanity - they do it because they want to know where traffic is coming from so that they can monetize it.

BTW, you have GA implemented on your site as well. Does that make you vain, or simply smarter than the average bear?

Hence why business owners need to be educated that "all the traffic" is worthless if it's not making you money. Vanity metrics are called thus for a reason.

Disclosure: professional marketer and former FT SEO who is tired of people getting fed snake oil.

I try to address this by asking a lot of questions about why they're choosing to do something in a particular way. Don't go at it with trying to poke holes in it (which is the point of the original post), but rather to understand what they are doing and why. Ultimately, the job of the senior person/manager is to set the vision/direction and ultimately trust the person to do what's right. This is hard with junior people, but you were allowed to screw up (and succeed) when younger, so allow them to do the same thing :-)

This is true in every sector of work. People are motivated by success. As a marketer who manages a team of 8 (including myself), I've been trying to learn to a) give context into why I might be poo-pooing something and b) a few ideas for other directions we could go.

Part of the job of being a mentor and manager is to guide them in a helpful way to greatness. Allowing them to work on whatever they want to work on is no way to build someone's confidence and skills, let alone a business.

Once again, if they have your sleeping records it's because you have chosen to give them that data. It's your problem then, not theirs.

Also, if you think others care about what time of day you take a shit, you have way too high of a view of yourself.

In response to antr and others talking about how this is "private" data, a few things:

1) Jawbone is a data company. You get what you want from them by giving them your data. Giving them your data is your choice, so if you are uncomfortable with it then you should not have a Jawbone. 2) What's interesting about this article is that it's in aggregate, across a statistically significant (so they say) number of people in these areas. They're not looking at individual stats, and I would bet would have a hard time tracing it back to a single person/name/etc, if they're even allowed to store it that way (not sure, but it would surprise me if they did).

If you don't like your data being stored somewhere, why are you even on HackerNews? You know your data is being stored here and being learned from.

Are you saying that the sleep data is more personal than calling 911? I have to question that, because you could call 911 for all sorts of private situations that you wouldn't want publicly known. So no, it's not really different.

Can you ever have all the data? Or are you just advocating for more? If advocating for more, agreed. And the author says it's not a complete dataset and also only shows the first touch by the company (ie when they first got funding). So it doesn't take into account repeat rounds as the founders age.