HN user

ericbieller

207 karma

Designer. Writer. Builder. Co-founder of @speak_io, @sqwiggle.

Posts46
Comments24
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www.theverge.com 11y ago

Google shows what it knows about us in new privacy hub

ericbieller
3pts0
blog.speak.io 11y ago

We spent the day at the top of Product Hunt, here are the results

ericbieller
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www.smashingmagazine.com 11y ago

Don’t Be Scared of Functional Programming

ericbieller
1pts0
medium.com 11y ago

Lessons Learned Raising $1M, Then Pivoting Two Years Later

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www.startingup.io 11y ago

How to Disable Mailchimp's Forced Double Opt-In

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www.startingup.io 11y ago

How I Went from Reading 2 Books a Year to 60

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medium.com 11y ago

Startups: Never Stop Validating

ericbieller
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blog.sqwiggle.com 11y ago

Tricks to Increase Your Team's Loyalty

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ericbieller.com 12y ago

How I Memorized The Location Of Every Country On Earth In a Single Weekend

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ericbieller.com 12y ago

The Best Way to Simulate Photoshop Designs on Your iPhone, iPad or Android

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ericbieller.com 12y ago

This is what investors are looking for in your startup

ericbieller
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ericbieller.com 12y ago

This Is What Investors Are Looking For in a Startup

ericbieller
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ericbieller.com 12y ago

How My Startup Got Thousands of Beta Signups

ericbieller
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blog.sqwiggle.com 12y ago

Lessons Learned From Our First Company Retreat

ericbieller
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blog.sqwiggle.com 12y ago

10 Wikipedia Articles That Will Blow Your Mind

ericbieller
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blog.sqwiggle.com 12y ago

How to Learn Something New Every Day

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www.chriskranky.com 12y ago

Sqwiggle: Someone is watching you

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news.ycombinator.com 12y ago

How a single cold email lead to 1.1 Million in funding

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blog.sqwiggle.com 12y ago

Is Remote Working Right For You? (Illustrated with Cats)

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blog.sqwiggle.com 12y ago

Take Risks, Shake Things Up, Be Happier

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ericbieller.com 12y ago

Insanely Realistic Green Army Man Costume... I think they just won Halloween

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ericbieller.com 12y ago

"Pinterest meets Dribbble for pets"

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ericbieller.com 12y ago

Why You Shouldn’t Use Code Tests When Hiring an Engineer

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blog.sqwiggle.com 12y ago

How to Create Culture in a Remote Team

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blog.sqwiggle.com 13y ago

The Future of Work is Remote

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www.ericbieller.com 13y ago

What happened when my startup was featured in Techcrunch

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blog.sqwiggle.com 13y ago

Why I think Working From Home is Better Than Working from an Office

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1pts0
www.techcrunch.com 17y ago

FriendFeed Is In Danger Of Becoming The Coolest App No One Uses

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63pts55
www.crunchgear.com 17y ago

Video: New Microsoft commercial makes Giampaolo happy for $1,500

ericbieller
1pts0
www.techcrunch.com 17y ago

So Now Everything Is Google’s Fault

ericbieller
41pts39

Yes, currently we are OSX only, but that's for this initial private beta. We'll be expanding to other platforms very soon. If you think it could be helpful for your team I'd love to reach back out when we support other platforms :)

Oh and re codex, I believe we're using opus.

One of the big downsides of Mumble, Teamspeak and Ventrillo is that they aren't made for business. This means they are really hard to get up and running, which is especially annoying when you are just just trying them out. We're actually working on something similar to these tools but built for business.

We're currently in private beta and I'd be interested to get your input on what we're building. We've got a quick walkthrough here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KV7HBXuhT7Q and you can signup for the private beta at http://speak.io

There's also a personal element. It's nice to see the faces of the people you work with throughout the day. Certainly has helped to create a tighter social bond on our team.

Hmm what gave you this impression? In fact we've been using Sqwiggle daily since our very first prorotype :) Tbh I don't think we would get half as much done without it, we certainly wouldn't be as connected given that we're a distributed team.

Hey there, Eric here from Sqwiggle. Thanks for the detailed comment! Seems like you may have encountered a bug with busy mode. If you have it enabled, no one should be able to initiate a conversation with you. They can, however, "ping" you, which will allow you to choose to accept the connection. But it's possible I mis-understood what the exact issue was, if so, feel free to clarify :)

We definitely resonate with the general privacy concerns and are working on a mode which will allow you to turn the camera off, which we'll have completed very soon.

If you end up giving it another try, please let me know if you run into any issues or have any further feedback. Thanks!

Thanks for trying out Sqwiggle! Solid feedback, we're working hard to make the experience more seamless with the OS. Would love to hear if you have any other thoughts or ideas. Let us know at howdy at sqwiggle dot com.

I love it too! I think you hit on a really important point. Working from home drastically improves quality of life since you're able to interact more with people you care about. It also helps you develop more of a passion for your work when you're not being micromanaged. Helps you to feel more free and in control.

Great that you're trying out Sqwiggle. I'm actually one of the co-founders so please let me know if there's anything we can do to improve your experience. Also any feedback you have is super helpful!

I've actually gained several very valuable contacts from this method, not just one ;) So it's actually worked out for me several times in the past, which is why I still do it.

In either case there's no harm in sending the email. Of course your conversion rate is going to be low. But if you can send 10 well written emails and get 1 valuable response, that certainly seems worth it to me!

Thanks for the input. I agree with this not being a sure fire way to get noticed. Again, it comes down to how you write the email, what your goal is and what your product is. But I don't agree that this is a 'once in a blue moon' type of thing.

We actually got quite a few responses from very influential people, not just Naval. The reality is, a lot of them spend hours on email a day. If you give them something worth responding to, they will respond!

Hah definitely valid concerns. I actually prefer working in my underwear as well ;) We are actually working on some really intuitive privacy features which will hopefully make Sqwiggle an even better option for remote workers like us. Thanks a lot for the feedback!

very cool idea.. yep, you definitely catch people in awkward positions sometimes hah but we use Sqwiggle every day and it certainly becomes a non-issue very quickly, you just become alright with it.. Naturally we will be building in some extra privacy features but, as-is, it really isn't as intrusive as one might think! Love the idea of picking more flattering stills, thanks for the input!

nice, glad you like the idea. We are actually trying to build the product for teams which work together in a physical office as well, definitely some benefits there :)

Regarding away status, in the future Sqwiggle will automatically know when you are away or at your computer by monitoring input... good point about the status message though.. I bet there's a cool way to work that in ;)

Great feedback, thanks! Our stream is actually more geared towards media. We found out that, during a conversation, it was always necessary to share links, code, images, etc. Using a separate app for greatly interrupted the flow so we felt the stream was a very valuable addition. Thanks again.. Very open to any other thoughts you have!

Legit concerns! We use it ourselves though and we actually don't look at the app too often, mainly when we want to see if the other is there or are in a conversation..

We'll also be building in some privacy options very soon that will make using the app a bit more comfortable :)

If you wouldn't be confident programming it yourself, try to find someone who can provide a resume and at least 3 good references.

As long as you do your research, you can increase your certainty that your coder is legit and not out to steal ideas.

To be honest, I would recommend learning a bit more about MVC and OOP and just creating it yourself. Most applications are pretty rough when first launched. Just make sure you plan the project out to the best of your ability and keep scalability in mind. It is inevitable that you hand the project over to a more experienced coder so you would need to prepare for that as well. Hope this helps.