iseff

Goodbill | Full Stack Engineer | Anywhere in the US | Remote | Full-time

Goodbill saves people money on hospital bills by identifying billing errors and inflated charges. We're a small, but growing, team and recently raised a seed round from Maveron, Founder's Co-op, Liquid 2, and some incredible angels. We currently work distributed across Pacific and Eastern timezones.

If you like complex problems, lots of data, doing something that's never been done before, changing people's lives, and want to tackle one of the hardest problems in medical billing, you're in luck. Benefits include competitive salary, generous equity, unlimited PTO, flexible work hours (we're all parents), 100% of medical/dental/vision, and a home office stipend or a co-working desk, whichever floats your boat most.

Tech stack: Rails 7, Hotwire

You can email me (https://www.linkedin.com/in/iseff) at iseff@goodbill.com or apply here https://www.goodbill.com/jobs/apply.

Goodbill | Full Stack Engineer | Anywhere in the US | Remote | Full-time

Goodbill saves people money on hospital bills by identifying billing errors and inflated charges. We're a small, but growing, team and recently raised a seed round from Maveron, Founder's Co-op, Liquid 2, and some incredible angels. We currently work distributed across Pacific and Eastern timezones.

If you like complex problems, lots of data, doing something that's never been done before, changing people's lives, and want to tackle one of the hardest problems in medical billing, you're in luck. Benefits include competitive salary, generous equity, unlimited PTO, flexible work hours (we're all parents), 100% of medical/dental/vision, and a home office stipend or a co-working desk, whichever floats your boat most.

Tech stack: Rails 7, Hotwire

You can email me (https://www.linkedin.com/in/iseff) at iseff@goodbill.com or apply here https://www.goodbill.com/jobs/apply.

There's almost no clearer indication that the speed of business is quickening at an amazing pace. In the scooter world, the land grab is on, and everyone is looking at ride sharing as the obvious analog, which means raise a lot of money, expand to new cities, and earn market share... quickly.

Whether a couple (or all) of these companies flame out remains to be seen, and is probably likely. But there's also likely to be a winner in this category. And the winner is likely to be worth a lot of money. These companies likely don't "deserve" their valuations based on current metrics like revenue, but the market potential is huge, the growth is high, and the capital requirements are large... so investors seem more than willing to make bets.

Speed is one of the most underemphasized traits of a great VC for founders. While fundraising, a quick yes is the best answer, but a quick no is the second best. Investors who follow this are truly founder friendly: it's easy to stall and wait for more data, but it's actually helping the entrepreneur to just say no. Those are the investors I want to pitch again later.

It's no surprise founders rank speed highly while investors don't. Find investors who care about speed and you'll find a great partner.

This is correct. The vast majority of funds have at least 1% committed by GPs. This is what Fred means when he writes, "The partners at USV make up a sizeable portion of our funds."

We do a lot of crawling various data sources. We spent over 3 years building a really great infrastructure to do this well. This is how we can present rank tracking for you and your competitors over time. The last time I checked, I think the number was actually over 500k... I should update that page!

I'm a founder and CEO at MobileDevHQ[1], a startup focused on App Store optimization. We have been doing this work for almost a year and a half now and have built powerful tools for understanding the App Store, including keyword research and market/niche finders.

Appsleak looks interesting, congrats on launching! The app ecosystem needs more tools to help it mature and advance.

To those of you interested in understanding markets/niches and keywords in the app stores, it is important to note a couple main points:

First, there are large differences between Google/other web search volume and search volume in the App Store. At MobileDevHQ, we do lots of work to uncover those differences and provide realistic pictures of what is happening in the app stores themselves. For example, the volume on Google for "puzzles" likely has little relation to the volume in the app stores.

Also, competition as defined by number of search results is a great start to understanding the difficulty it will take for you to rank highly for a particular term, but it doesn't go far enough. At the end of the day, it is not just about number of results, but also the factors that the app stores use to rank results, and how "entrenched" those factors are in current results. You can only begin to understand this with lots of data, which is why we have been collecting this for years now and have even released a tool we call Sonar to help developers and marketers understand when an App Store changes its search algorithm.

There are tons of things I could riff on about App Store search, but those are the 2 most common thigs I see people missing, so I wanted to make sure I mentioned those in particular.

[1] http://www.mobiledevhq.com

Great point. Engineers sometimes like to see the broken in the world. Leaders need to have the tendency to see the possibilities. Emotional Intelligence is so, so hard (and something I struggle with consistently).

Totally true. In our case, it was after our seed round, once we were able to start selling and we felt as though we have proved the initial idea as being worthwhile to customers.

When that happened, we started hiring, and me coding turned into more of a detriment than an advantage. It was approximately a team size of 7-8 for us/e.

Is it just me, or is half the craziness of this that Jeff Bezos took off 3 weeks to be at sea?

Certainly agree with this. Understanding where your customers are, what they're reading, and how to get in front of them is the most important factor.

But, after that, finding the most authoritative sources within those markets is crucial. So, when people say TechCrunch is irrelevant for mobile/tech startups, well, that's just wrong (at least for us).

Thanks! We've been trying to be very transparent recently, so we'll do our best to do follow-ups and stay transparent. :)

We've been working on a similar idea for a few months now, and have some pretty solid data and sophisticated algorithms which are now giving us quite reasonable insights. We support iOS App Store and Android Market. We want to really focus on how to get better at organic distribution within the app stores (e.g. what keywords should I focus on based on my competition and, most importantly, where the search volume is in the app stores).

TechCrunch wrote about it a couple weeks ago and since then we've been on a tear (thousands of signups representing tens of thousands in monthly revenue): http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/28/aso-app-store-optimization-...

App Store Optimization (ASO) is a big deal today, and is going to be a HUGE deal shortly. The growth of mobile is just too much, too fast for search not to become massively important. You can see Apple bet on this fact with its acquisition of Chomp recently.

Even more broadly, there are too many players in the mobile app ecosystem who are searching for ways to help app marketers get distribution through various paid means, but not enough (virtually none) who are searching for ways to help app marketers get distribution through organic (unpaid) means. Yet this is exactly where the vast majority of downloads come from.

We want to focus on the organic side of app distribution: search, rankings, social/sharing, earned media, web landing pages, etc. All things that help app marketers promote their apps without paying per download. Marketing channels that really scale. It's the SEO/social/viral channels for mobile.

Check out our product at: http://www.mobiledevhq.com/aso

And always feel free to email me with any questions, ever: iseff@appstorehq.com

I've been a part of the beta of inbound.org, and have been really impressed with the community thus far.

It's still very immature and small, but it brings together some of the brightest minds in inbound marketing.

Rand Fishkin (SEOMoz) and Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot) deserve a lot of gratitude for getting this community started.

Agreed. Stripe is working wonders for us at: http://www.mobiledevhq.com

We tried to integrate with PayPal's recurring APIs for three weeks, scrapped it when we found Stripe, and had it completely ready to go in 24hrs.

Not to mention their customer support is absolutely fantastic. I get responses within seconds in their Campfire chat room and hours if I send an email, anytime of day.

That's a really nice feature, though it's surprisingly hard to find on their site. I wonder why they prefer to promote their Tour rather than the Live Demo (found via a small link in a list on the right rail of the Tour page).

Would be interesting if a Live Demo doesn't convert nearly as well as a Tour.

Love this.

I've been thinking A LOT about App Store Optimization recently. It's a big problem for app developers and, as someone who loves making tools for app developers, is something that I'd like to help fix.

We're (AppStoreHQ) thinking about creating some App Store Optimization tools, but we need more input from more app developers. If you'd like to learn more, please sign up (it takes 2 seconds and I'll keep all info private):

https://docs.google.com/a/iseff.com/spreadsheet/viewform?hl=...

And for those who want to hear more about what I've been thinking, I've been writing on MobileDevHQ about App Store Optimization (and will continue to add more to the series):

http://www.mobiledevhq.com/appstoreoptimization-25/articles/...

I'd love to chat with anyone about this topic, so if you're interested, just email me: iseff@appstorehq.com

Looks nice.

There's also OneWed (http://www.onewed.com) which has a directory of all types of wedding vendors as well as their sister site, Nearlyweds (http://www.nearlyweds.com), which makes beautiful wedding web sites. I highly recommend them (disclaimer: I'm also friends with them. :)).

We might have been able to get away with raw SQL, but because of some of the complexities and dependencies on this same code, I felt like it wasn't the prudent choice during a fire. I wouldn't have had time to properly test it.

As for moving the inserts to an async job, that was one of our thoughts, too. Really it's what we did, but we just have the intermediary step of MongoDB. We wanted that step (rather than just immediately returning to the user and having the client not know when the inserts actually occur) because we wanted to keep the user experience great. Our app immediately sends you to personalized recs. We didn't want the initial experience to be: open the app => sent to a blank page of "recommendations."

An async job that didn't wait for any sort of confirmation would have left us in this position (or we would have had to implement a poller to check if the inserts were complete, which seemed wasteful and would need a push to Android Market which seemed less feasible.)

I'm the author of the post.. as others point out, this is actually Tumblr's fault and is incredibly frustrating (it just went down).

Given the last day we've had, this tends to fall into the "there's nothing we can do but laugh at this point" category. :)

Hopefully Tumblr comes back shortly, brings our blog back up with it, and you can read the full post in all its glory.

Sorry for the trouble!

Funny, for me it's the opposite. I've taken to kind of _enjoying_ folding laundry since I started working on AppStoreHQ. It's the mindless release that I need every once in a while.

As a UChicago grad, congrats!

Question: what differentiates you guys from another past NVC winner, PrepMe (http://www.prepme.com)?

Except that’s only true because until now, nobody has launched an alternate store that offers web stack applications (WSAs). Maybe that’s because nobody is really building WSAs yet, at least not in numbers large enough to justify building a store to sell them. But then, maybe developers aren’t building WSAs because there’s no central place to sell them. The centralization of stores is at least as attractive to sellers as to shoppers.

We've done a poor job of raising awareness about this (I promise we're trying to do better), but we've been quietly testing out using our store, AppStoreHQ (http://www.appstorehq.com), as a mobile web app store (what Eric calls WSAs). We also promote native iPhone and Android apps. I could go on and on about what we're doing, why it's cool, and how it helps developers, but Eric does a relatively good job of explaining that.

Instead, I'll just give you a tidbit of information about how we're _actually_ seeing this work in the wild: In short, it works. I developed -- as the first test app available for purchase on our mobile web app platform -- an app I named fortysquires (http://fortysquires.com). Fortysquires is just an HTML5 frontend to foursquare's API. I open sourced it so developers could see just how simple it is to integrate with us (http://github.com/iseff/fortysquires).

What's amazing about fortysquires is that I really didn't expect to sell more than a few copies. It was built just to be a reference app. Remember, this is a paid ($0.99) app that competes against free, more well-featured native apps for Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry. There's also a mobile web version of foursquare (but it's not HTML5 and doesn't include geolocation, etc, like fortysquires does). I really thought I'd sell maybe two or three copies to developers looking to test out the workflow.

Yet, what I'm seeing is that real users are purchasing this app, everyday. Everyday, I sell at least one -- but typically more like 3-4 -- "copies" of the app. It's not a gold mine, of course, but it far surpassed my expectations. These are users from all over the world on all sorts of different devices. iPhone usage is >50%, but Android is close to 20%, and Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm, and Samsung all make the cut. And 50% of visitors are from the US, 25% from western Europe, and the rest is divided between many, many countries like Canada, Australia, Israel, Russia, many Asian countries, Costa Rica, Maldives, Camaroon, Kyrgyzstan, etc. In all, more than 70 different countries have checked out fortysquires!

We have a lot of work to be done to build a great platform for mobile web app developers to sell their apps (read: we need to make distribution even better for developers, and the purchasing workflow even more frictionless for users, among many other things), but I think we're well on our way to doing so. Mobile web apps may never compete head-to-head with native apps in certain categories (Games), but I think we're proving that they can compete -- and even win -- when the ability to discover and purchase the apps is easy and the apps are great.

I didn't actually mean for this to be a blatant advertising post at all. I'm really sorry you feel that way. Hopefully I can help explain my real goal better here:

My goal was to help educate developers to the fact that mobile web apps have a bright future. Developers don't necessarily need to feel trapped by the popular native mobile platforms (iPhone, Android, etc) when there are other options available that are more open, more familiar, and easier to port to many different devices.

Still, mobile web apps have a long way to go for both developers and users, and distribution and monetization are two of the most important vectors that need to be improved. The point of the post was to show the potential of mobile web apps first, and to show how AppStoreHQ is helping these vectors for developers and users second.

A couple quick thoughts pop in to my mind:

1) A rising tide lifts all boats. I suspect this isn't a zero-sum game.

2) Chrome Web Store appears to be more geared towards desktop web apps. We're solely focused on mobile web apps. This is a key differentiator as the use case, experience, and expectations are all different. But Google pushing web apps as a legit form of apps will help us as we push mobile web apps as a legit form of mobile apps.

My startup, AppStoreHQ (http://www.appstorehq.com), has been private alpha testing a mobile web app (HTML5) app store for the past couple months. It's been working out great and having Google come in for standard web apps should be a big wind in our sail, I think.

Our mobile web app store focuses on distribution and monetization of developers' work.

Here's an example app (it's an HTML5 frontend to foursquare) called fortysquires:

http://www.fortysquires.com

And it's purchasable from AppStoreHQ: http://www.appstorehq.com/fortysquires-mobilewebfoursquarecl...

It's also open source (so you can see how simple the API to interact with us is): http://github.com/iseff/fortysquires

There are certainly features that are better suited for native apps, but the ones you stated aren't necessarily them. For example, GPS is doable on both Android and iPhone OS. Multitouch is also doable (check out Google Maps on the web on iPhone for an example here).

Accelerometer, native graphics, etc are the key features I think about that are not well suited for web apps.

My startup, AppStoreHQ (http://www.appstorehq.com), is a huge believer of mobile web apps, and we even have a private alpha going on for monetizing your mobile web app (check out an example like fortysquires: http://fortysquires.com ).

If you use Firefox's geolocation support[0], you're seeing the benefits of this[1].

FWIW, I find that it is FAR more accurate than my iPhone indoors. Without the line to a satellite, my iPhone is generally wrong by a radius of a few blocks, while Firefox is generally within a few meters.[2]

[0] http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/geolocation/

[1] http://www.google.com/privacy-lsf.html

[2]: NOTE: This is from Los Angeles, a heavily populated area, which probably makes it easier. YMMV.

To be fair, before you used Google, you likely thought you could live without totally fine.

Perhaps if all your contacts, relationships, events, etc were already on Facebook, you might think you couldn't live without it.

Agreed. My startup (http://www.appstorehq.com) is a multi-platform search and discovery site for mobile apps. One of the platforms we support is mobile web (HTML5) apps.

One thing we've quietly rolled out and are private alpha testing is a dead simple payments API. This allows mobile web app developers to monetize their apps with just one API call.

I'd love for anyone to check it out and let me know what they think (iseff@appstorehq.com). We don't have docs for it yet (since it's still private), but I created a test app for it and open-sourced that:

Fortysquires (a foursquare checkin mobile web app): http://fortysquires.com

On AppStoreHQ: http://www.appstorehq.com/fortysquires-mobilewebfoursquarecl...

And the source on GitHub: http://github.com/iseff/fortysquires

If anyone wants to try it out, I'd be happy to explain further how it can work for you. We hope it helps remove the payments "muck" as well as increase distribution with our hundreds of thousands of UV/month.