fredrivett

1/ This is very cool 2/ What a beaut of a domain

Will deffo try this out.

Hey folks, I built this as a side project as I couldn't see a list of privacy-focussed tools specifically aimed at startups (rather than consumers).

The project has languished a bit recently as my focus has been taken up elsewhere, so if you like it feel free to hit me up at fred[at]hey[dot]com. I'm open to collabs/acquisition.

Another great place to look is Open AI’s example list:

https://beta.openai.com/examples/

I think this is a good point I didn't convey in my hastily-written-in-10-minutes-blog-post-that-I-didn't-expect-to-reach-the-HN-front-page.

I can fall into perfectionism, but I find this a suboptimal mindset for healthy outcomes.

Excellence seems the far better path.

Keeping a high bar still, but not expecting something that's unreasonable.

Continuing to challenge yourself to get better, but not expecting yourself to have achieved something already that's out of your grasp.

For me it's about trajectory and momentum over perfection.

100% with you on this smitec.

It's what I tried to capture in the post, but probably could have put better.

The sense of just taking the steps I can today, rather than burdening myself with the expectation of needing to have worked it all out and achieved all of my comparison-driven life goals.

The key is to find healthy rhythms that help us continue to better ourselves over time.

The other key difference here as far as I understand, is that Telnic required you to register .tel domains, you couldn't bring your own domain and store contact information against that.

yep, it's still down, failing to install packages for me, says they're working on a fix

Hey folks

For the past few months Barry (https://twitter.com/pace) & I have been talking to a bunch of young'uns about their news habits and one thing that keeps coming up is that people are overwhelmed with the news, and in particular, they're sick and tired of Brexit. So tired, they've switched off.

So, why are we providing more Brexit commentary?

We believe context is important, that our democracies need us all to be informed and engaged. Brexit is the defining issue of our time (at least this side of the pond) and so if anything deserves some extra effort, it's this.

But context, though vital, must be given in the right package.

By slicing it into 5 bite-size, interactive chunks (~3 min read time each), we hope to be able to clear some of the fog surrounding Brexit to help play our part in our nation moving forwards with clarity and purpose.

We hope you enjoy this short-series, but whether you do or don't, we'd love your feedback. We'll be hanging out in the comments here most of today ️

Many thanks to Larry Ryan (https://twitter.com/larry_ryan) for writing the content & Alicia Gomez (https://twitter.com/ali_gomeztapias) for making it look good

Hey ohazi, thanks for sharing your thoughts here.

A point of clarification that didn’t make the article: we’ve not technically raised VC funding yet, we’re in an incubator. But we’ve effectively raised an initial round via our budget, and are on the path to raise our first round proper.

I agree with the rough sentiment of what you’re saying but think it’s a slightly too narrow point of view. Joining an incubator or accelerator helps minimise downside whilst in the process of figuring out the problem space and whether your hypothesis have legs. Sure, you can do this as a side hustle first and that’s great too, but as I say in the article, it depends on your circumstances.

I’m not raising money specifically because of personal life challenges, deciding to raise only came after making the big life adjustments. It’s my belief that raising can sometimes be less pressurised than bootstrapping, though admittedly most startup founders don’t live it out that way. We’ve got our beliefs based on what we know and our experience so far, I look forward to walking it all out and reporting back on what I learn.

Hey ausjke. Sounds tough, but congrats on getting this far. I'm not best placed to give advice here, and might need more context to do so properly anyway. I know a good group for bootstrappers, if you want the details my DM's are open on twitter (https://twitter.com/fredrivett).

That specific point was that people often start a business because they want the freedom of not having a boss, but in many ways you always have someone you're serving, be it a boss or a customer.

The wider point was: both bootstrapping and VC funding are good options, depending on your specific circumstances and goals at the time. One isn't objectively better than the other.

Hey Andrew, appreciate your perspective here.

I agree bootstrapping itself wasn't the problem. The problem was that I felt my focus on building a business on the side of my day job limiting to what I could do next. At the start of the year I decided the healthiest thing for me to do was to start from a clean slate and bed down somewhere. I wasn't sure where, but London is where I ended up.

I realise there are much more sane ways to live our lives than a startup, bootstrapped or funded. I agree it takes a lot of personal sacrifice too, mentally more than anything.

I realise my path looks strange, going from "I need more time to focus on things outside of work" to "I'm starting a startup", and it was never my plan when I came back. It was only 4 months after returning that the opportunity came up and it was the best fit for me at the time.

I may be too naive, but both myself and my co-founder believe that working excessive hours isn't a necessity to make a startup succeed. Sure there are times when you need to work longer in short periods to get something over the line, but the idea that being on the brink of burnout gives the best odds of success goes against what I've read about how the human mind works, and my experience too.

Maybe in a year or two I'll do a follow up post.

Appreciate your thoughts here Dave, agree with what you say. A quick point of clarification on my situation (author of the post), I didn't take a failing bootstrapped company and get it funding. I stepped away entirely from the bootstrapped work I was doing, for personal reasons (to focus on things other than working all the time), and then an entirely separate opportunity came up to start a startup with funding, which I took because of the autonomy (mostly self-directed work), mastery (learning a tonne in a role I've never done before, alongside super smart people) and purpose (creating a company culture that isn't "crush it" startup bro style + attempting to help the news industry adjust to today's culture).

Hope that makes sense, just wanted to clarify that.

I would say you gain different* experiences, not necessarily more valuable. It depends on your circumstances and your goals. Hopefully my perspective on that came through in the post.

You're right on the 10x being low asprouse, I probably shouldn't have included that.

Agree Tiny Seed looks interesting, I actually recommended someone that earlier this afternoon. Great to see new takes on funding businesses and I'm excited to see what it can unlock for those who need a little boost but don't want to chase the unicorn.

Lost and founder is already on my Audible wishlist, expect to get to it in the next month after finishing Scott Belsky's Messy Middle.[0]

https://www.amazon.com/Messy-Middle-Finding-Through-Hardest/...

Definitely agree the west coast has it's own culture that's more open to risky ideas and the like.

Hey [redacted], thanks for the thoughtful comments here.

One thing that is undeniable is that a bootstrap will always leave you in control at the end of the day.

I agree bootstrapping gives you more say over which way you take the business, and hopefully that came across in my post (although I only mentioned it briefly).

I think a product should not be made for the potential profit it could amass but to fill a need for these users, listening to them feels like the next logical step to take (and most companies, even tremendously giant ones, still fail to do this I feel like).

I agree we should be motivated by more than money. As I mention in the post, money is a bad master but a great servant. We need money to serve us, so we can feed our families and keep the lights on, but money itself shouldn't be the goal. I realise when taking funding this confuses the matter, as now you're not just responsible for your family, but for providing a return to your investors. I still believe it's possible to be mission-driven having taken funding, but understand it can complicate the matter.

Even more important than that is that it might not be the next unicorn, but that is absolutely fine for some people. They just want enough to feed themselves and their families while having a sane work life/rhythm of say 4-5 hours a day once you get it rolling.

I agree the end goal for us is often spending time with those we love, whilst having that sense of purpose I mentioned in the post. We all want to leave some impact on the world, maybe that's a partner or children who know we loved them, maybe it's a few hundred paying customers who love your product, maybe it's some big swing towards a big dent in the world.

My co-founder and I are relatively counter-cultural in the startup world, admittedly it's early days, but we don't work crazy hours as our belief is that the long hours are often busy work, not important work. If we can look after ourselves, not get burnt out, make wise decisions from a place of rest and do important deep work regularly, we believe we can outcompete any startup bro culture that works 80+ hour weeks.

I feel like the author used to somewhat adhere to this moto but somewhere along the way got lost and is now simply after the money for the sake of it.

I don't believe that's the case, personally. My current wage is half that of 2 other contracting roles I was offered at the same time as this gig. I'm fully aware the vast majority of startups fail, so I'll very likely be out of pocket. I took the role as I admire my co-founder and wanted to learn from his product skills, an area I realised I needed to grow in.

Before taking this role I used to work a full-time job, come home in the evenings and work on my side-hustle. For 3 years it meant I didn't really have a life outside of the day job and the side hustle. Now I normally work 8-4, home by 5 and have the evening to meet friends or relax. People often think taking funding means having less work/life balance, right now for me it's the opposite (again, caveat we're early days).

It gets messy. As are all startups to one extent or another. You ride out the highs and lows and keep moving forwards. I wasn't trying to say that going the VC route is necessarily easier or better (I hope I made that clear), just that there are different upsides and downsides to each, one isn't objectively better than the other.

More on the messy parts: https://www.amazon.com/Messy-Middle-Finding-Through-Hardest/...

When you take VC, you've just hired yourself a board full of bosses.

Agree taking funding brings back an element of having a boss again Alan. It's certainly a trade-off of the VC route, and one of the main reasons I haven't taken funding before.

That said, I still think you get a good amount of autonomy by (co-)founding a startup, as you're often free to execute how you choose, but with the agreement that you'll pursue a path that can give an outsized return for your investors. Investors rarely want to dictate what and how you do things, in my experience.

When does that ever stop being true?

Again I agree it doesn't, but it's something many bootstrappers don't quite understand when starting out (I didn't way back when), and I think is a point worth noting.

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Happy to make edits if there's ways I can clarify this better. Gotta ship something before EOP today but will revisit the article tonight.

Haha, it's just a bit of tongue-in-cheek fun really. I don't expect folks to try to con their friends over that they're football mad in reality!

Hey folks.

Feeling left out at work? Not sure quite what to say when you find yourself at the watercooler? Fear not. With Bluffball, you'll know exactly the lingo to win the bingo. And all for free.

Would love to get your thoughts.

Ben keeps surprising me, showing how much can be built without code already. As a front-end dev I even planned on using Typeform, Zapier & Airtable for my latest quick side project before I canned it, as it's just so much quicker for me than wiring it up myself.

Even as a coder I'm contemplating whether going the no code route for MVP'ing new projects. These days we can create fully functional prototypes without touching code and I'd bet in quite a bit less time.

Ben's the best guy on the internet for teaching how to do this stuff, so if I do go this route I know who I'll be looking to learn from.

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We're offering 50% off for life at UserCompass (https://usercompass.com/). 60 second setup, 100 responses free, AND 50% off for life.

We automate NPS surveys to your Stripe customers. No more excuses not to start sending NPS surveys now! :)

We're offering 50% off for life at UserCompass (https://usercompass.com/). 60 second setup, 100 responses free, AND 50% off for life.

We automate NPS surveys to your Stripe customers. No more excuses not to start sending NPS surveys now! :)

"Very easy" is an interesting way to put it.

How long did it take you to get to a few thousand dollars a month cheez? Out of interest, how far into your career was that?

I'm not sure I'd class getting to a few thousand dollars as "very easy", certainly do-able for a lot of businesses with a few months to a years hard work, but I wouldn't call that "very easy", personally.

Hi all,

For a few years now Mike and I have been dreaming of this day. We've seen the trends, we've watched from the sidelines, always waiting for the right moment for our big release.

Today, for no specific calendar related reason, we're launching Stories as a Service (SaaS for short).

SaaS enables you to add Story functionality to your site in just one line of code. We know you've all seen Stories by now, they're all over the face of the web. But you've not seen them like this.

Including revolutionary features such as +1™ (each story lasts for 25 hours), FaceStickers™ (our stickers are IRL and very sticky) and Photoshop1™ (pretend you're in Bali whilst in your underwear in your 1 bed flat), we think you're gonna love SaaS.

We're super excited to finally bring down the curtain on what we believe will be a revolutionary product.

We can't wait to see what you do with it (especially you, Facebook).

p.s. You can read the (short) story of the behind the scenes here: https://twitter.com/FredRivett/status/847825413422415872

I'll be about today to answer any questions you have (but may be asleep at times due to last nights late night push).

Ah nice, that's pretty cool to be fair. Respect it when people do it manual first and then switch it over to automated later, if manual is quicker then by all means do things that don't scale :)

I'm always looking for a new book to read or listen to. Sites like these help give me a grasp of what's up my street and what's not.

Q1: How do you pull in the highlights? Goodread? Q2: Any plans to expand beyond the Zucks?

http://founderskit.co/

FoundersKit – The membership that saves you money, on the tools that save you time.

We launched this last year (it was the 2nd highest upvoted product of the month on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/founderskit).

We've not focussed on it at all since launch, other than launching v2 based on some feedback. There's been no marketing efforts gone into it due to other focusses.

Looking to sell it on so we can give the users the best experience and focus on another project.

DM me on twitter (@fredrivett) or message me at fred [at] wearecontrast [dot] com.

Happy to give more details on request.