gacba

Yeah, I use it at a financial services client. A previous architect chose it because it was a pet project of his (he contributed to Delombok).

The premise is fine...I have no problem with it. But the default generation of @EqualsAndHashcode literally pulls in the WORLD to generate the output.

The real world scenario we had was this. Lots of POJOs were created, many were simply but a non-trivial number were NOT. Those POJOs could have dozens and dozens of fields. And if you have a key abstraction with say, 86 fields, things get interesting.

Suppose you don't use @EqualsAndHashCode on one of these POJOS with lots of fields, ALL 86 fields are included in the default equals and hashCode methods. They didn't realize this, or didn't care, and as a result, had some serious performance issues because trying to run hashCode on insert to a map when you're hashing 86 fields together might actually take some time inserting 100,000 records... ugh

So in short, it's OK and useful, but you have to understand the side effects of everything to know if it's the right thing for you.

SIDE NOTE: A POJO with 86 fields can be common in financial services when you are representing various kinds of financial trades where gazillions of things are tracked on them...interest rates of note, ratings, security characteristics, etc. That in and of itself isn't necessarily poor design, although these choices predated me at this company.

Speaking as a sole founder with many friends that go their path alone as well, this is not anywhere close to a requirement. There are people for whom this journey is natural and they are more suited, and others for whom they'd prefer or need to be with someone else.

There's no one-size-fits-all solution for founders. Co-founders come with their own set of issues--whether you're on the same page about the company's goals, whether your skill sets are complementary or not, what kind of long term commitment you both have to the problem space, etc.

Been using MemSQL for a enterprise-level financial services client since mid-2017. We have this in production and are running it in a multi-TB cluster. We've not seen ANY of these issues here and are heavy, crazy query users. Their support has been nothing but on-the-spot and very helpful.

Bootstrapped would be any self-funded, usually single-person-founded, company. You might have revenue or not, but the key component is that you are doing this on your own time or money. Not VC-funded.

Don't know what equity take they have, I'm guessing it depends on the size of the investment.

We said that as Java developers back in 2004. I'd say we got mixed results on that.

Lived in Boulder County for 15 years until I got married and moved south of Denver.

Boulder itself has ALWAYS been expensive (even when I was in college in the early 90s) for housing. If you're serious about relocating, look at some less insane, but very close communities that the majority of the "Boulderites" live in:

NORTH: - Longmont - Gunbarrel

EAST: - Louisville - Lafayette - Erie

SOUTHEAST-ish: - Broomfield - Westminster - Northglenn - Thornton

You can have a "reasonable" commute, and a less insane house price in those areas. They are all bedroom communities for the area... Personally, I lived in Louisville and Lafayette at least half of my time in the county (the other in Boulder proper, renting, always).

There are always options.

One concrete suggestion I would make is to watch Steli Efti's presentation on sales made to YC. It's filled with great info about how to qualify, follow up, pitch and in general, close sales. Steli is a master at that and maybe watching this will help you understand where things fell apart in your case. It's hard to say where it went wrong but I'm guessing with this info, you may be able to identify it better:

http://blog.close.io/y-combinator-sales-school

The FCC is currently taking public comments about net neutrality and whether ISPs are "common carriers" of content, which would subject them to certain rules of peering and content availability. It would also prevent them from charging more to allow "faster access".

Crappy formatted instructions--sorry!

1. Go to http://fcc.gov/comments

2. Click on 14-28, the third item (not 14-57)

3. Fill out the form, add the Comment “ I want internet service providers classified as Common Carriers. “

4. Click Confirm

5. You're done!

6. Tell your friends and family to do that too. ISPs shouldn't get a free ride anymore.

Simple. My customers aren't asking for it and really don't care. If I'm not focused on them, I'm missing the point of my business. The day they start banging on my door and telling me they'll leave because I don't have Bitcoin support, I'll happily add it. Until then, it's not on my radar.

Can you suggest a solution for those of us on AWS that are SaaS providers that you find to be reliable?

Basically, you've described a Mastermind group. :) It need not be in-person, though. I have one, and we're scattered across the US. You definitely want to have somewhat similar timezones if you go remote, just because it's easier to schedule things. More than 3 hours time difference and someone is eating lunch when another is getting dinner ready, etc.

Gotta keep things simple to make them successful.

There's one key point to everyone's comments thus far, I'll just reiterate it: This is a marathon, not a sprint. Work too hard, too fast, or too long, you'll burn out and get discouraged, quit and say that it doesn't work.

I have a full time job and work on my two WordPress plugins on the side. I make sure that every day I accomplish at least one thing relevant to them or something I'm starting.

Just one thing. It seems so easy, and yet, there have been days I got distracted, bored, busy, or just plain uninspired and didn't do it. Those days are the ones that I wish I had back.

If you make progress on something every day, even a teensy tiny bit, you will head toward your goal. Progress does NOT mean:

- Reading HN

- Tweeting about your business

- Looking at Facebook

- Reading business books

These are distractions (for the most part). And they're GREAT sometimes. But we tend to overindulge and think we're making progress because we read 5 new articles about X on HN today and feel "invigorated". That feeling will fade. You need to do something sustainable.

Action is sustainable. Visible progress can be tracked on a daily basis. After 30 days, you can look back and see a LONG list of things YOU DID. That's inspiring. And it makes you want to do MORE. And MORE.

Once you have momentum, the other key thing you need IMO, is a trusted person to bounce ideas off of. Someone who won't listen to your bullshit, only someone who will listen and call it like it is, not how you want to see it. Most friends are bad for this--they will be an echo chamber. You need honesty. Not ego stroking. This is HARD. It is VALUABLE as hell, too.

Those two things will make a huge difference in getting you moving forward. That's what I rely on daily.

As a parent of 3 girls, I can't emphasize that trust thing enough above.

I would absolutely, never, EVER use such a service. My wife would balk at the very suggestion of it. It sounds like a great idea on paper but no matter how much profiling, checking, due diligence, etc you put into it on your side, none of that matters to her, or my kids. They have to KNOW and TRUST the person they are with. We need to be able to vet that directly by observing them with the kids and get references from people we already know and trust ourselves. Having someone else say "Yep, they're cool!" when we don't know the source, means nothing.

Most of my friends who are parents are equally paranoid about these issues in this day and age (sexual predators anyone?). You're going to have a really tough time selling this to your target market.

You may not agree with my perspective, but I can absolutely guarantee this will be your #1 roadblock in getting parents to sign up for such a service, so you need an iron-clad answer to that question at the very least.

If you are adding features for features' sake, then you are not adding value. Bloated products result when you add features without understanding their value to the customer base you serve.

Of course, it could be that you serve such a diverse customer base that adding in "valuable" features creates bloat as a side-effect (Hi Microsoft Excel!), but for a SaaS app that is less than 3-5 years old, I think you'd be hard pressed to fit in this category.

So what all did you tweak to make it work? If you'd prefer not to be public about it, message me in the Academy (this is Dave Rodenbaugh)

So wait--you said you almost went back to collecting CC's up front, and that article says it was a better fit than the no-CC trial, so what data did you collect to say otherwise?

You're arguing both sides Brennan. :) I'm confused as hell as to which worked and why.

Another way to handle this is to NOT hire teams, but hire independents. That's what I do on oDesk, to ensure the person you hired is the one doing the work.

Contact me through my profile. I'd like to chat about my current ventures and see what we can work out.

Not quite.

ICANN Fees

ICANN charges a fee for each domain name registered. The fee is 20 cents per domain.

The domain registrars pay additional fees to ICANN, but it's hardly anywhere near the 90+% you quoted.

It would be nice to see some follow up on the items "Need to run this test longer..." or "It's too early to tell..." items. You have a LOT of those, and for a growth hack to be valuable, you need to see some results.

Since you post the hack without the results, it's harder for people to learn from your actions here. Can you do some updates for the earlier rounds?

Thanks for NOT giving him the "hang in there" speech and some real alternatives to get him back on his feet. You're awesome, man.

There really is no such thing as "fully thought out" here w.r.t what the customers will actually do with it. If you look again at the article, they went through this kind of progression:

- Best guess at a starting price model

- Revisited price model after poor test performance. Did research, revamped model based on research

- Revisited price model after poor test performance. Simplified plan to match the philosophy of business. Performance greatly improved

It's about testing the ideas, not keeping them in your head. What you think works and what actually works are often counterintuitively different.

I would suggest asking some tough questions to the CEO/founder like this:

- What is the burn rate of the company?

- How much money do we have in the bank?

- What kind of revenue are we getting (you may already know this, but it could be worth asking anyhow)?

- What is the current horizon for fundraising?

All of this adds up to whether the company is tightening its belt in anticipation of lean times. It's happened before to many companies (for startups I've been involved with, it was the end of paid happy hours and the twice-weekly bagels disappearing) and it will happen again.

It's a panic response to a shortening cash runway that often doesn't help extend it very much. Be aware of the situation and prepare yourself for the worst, if necessary. It may be what others suggest here (a salesman suggesting a lower cost alternative) or the CFO trying to clamp down on expenses based on what they see in the next quarter or two.

Control what you can, be prepared for the rest.

Here's a few suggestions:

- Don't expect to find an undiscovered market. Instead, look to see what existing competitors there are in a particular market. Are they dated? Tired looking? Do they have a terrible UX? Is their pricing model geared toward only Enterprise customers, leaving the small-and-middle business tier underserved?

- Look within a crowded market and see if there's a niche within the market you can serve where the other products are simply too generic to handle their needs (for example, is there an invoicing solution for just auto-parts vendors instead of just an invoicing solution for everyone)

- Start surfing forums where customers of a particular SaaS solution hang out. Are any of them complaining about how bad existing solutions are? Can you fix that problem in a way the competition can't?

Those are a few ideas. There are probably more. Most it will depend on your level of interest and desire to dig into this kind of info as a whole.

Good luck!

"John Thomas" is a British slang reference to male genitalia, so this broker name is pretty apt since they were out to screw everyone they came in contact with.

I'm not sure if that was intentional or not, but it sure is funny.

You might consider that "building the product" is not really "most of the work" here. There are three things:

- Product

- A Market for said product (solving a problem for a customer who has money)

- Getting your Product to that Market and convincing customers you solved their problem

In reality, you are probably doing about 33% of the hard stuff (and the other 66% is hard too, making sure you have the correct MVP and promoting it)

Until you've put a product out there, you don't really know how hard the other two are and how critical they are to the success of your venture. hmexx is offering to do that part for what I consider a reasonable cost to test the waters.

YMMV, of course, and you're free to take on 100% of it all, but reducing risk is how you get a product launched. I personally like hmexx's approach here.

Amy Hoy: http://unicornfree.com/

Rob Walling: http://softwarebyrob.com/

Dane Maxwell: http://thefoundation.io/blog/

Great post--I can use this exact setup with my AWS server and was about to start writing something similar. Thanks for saving me loads of time.

oDesk gets around this by having a time limit on when feedback can be left. If one party fails to enter feedback, then it posts the other's feedback anyway.

Parties can lobby to have the other person change the feedback, but only if they lobbied party wants to. Seems like a workable system to me and allows each to be honest without consequences like eBay's original system.