HN user

joelrunyon

8,020 karma

My name is Joel Runyon. I do the impossible.

Personal Site - https://JoelRunyon.com

Impossible HQ - https://Impossiblehq.com

Ecommmerce Site - https://impossible.co

Giving - https://Impossible.org

Posts198
Comments1,890
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impossiblehq.com 3y ago

I asked ChatGPT to help me come up with some ideas for my Impossible List

joelrunyon
3pts1
twitter.com 6y ago

Google Calendar is spamming millions of events with “Google Meet” links

joelrunyon
3pts0
impossiblehq.com 6y ago

Show HN: Lessons from Launching 4 Products in 4 Weeks During Quarantine

joelrunyon
4pts1
woven.com 6y ago

State of Remote Work: How Covid-19 Is Driving Video Conferencing into Meetings

joelrunyon
10pts1
woven.com 6y ago

Transitioning to Remote Work: A Practical Guide

joelrunyon
8pts1
impossiblehq.com 7y ago

Russell Kirsch was right about Apple

joelrunyon
5pts0
impossiblehq.com 7y ago

On Going Pro

joelrunyon
1pts0
www.levelmoney.com 8y ago

Level Money Is Closing Down

joelrunyon
2pts0
kaleandcigarettes.com 9y ago

Just Because You Own It, Doesn't Mean You're Good

joelrunyon
2pts0
medium.com 9y ago

Instagram’s Security Features Are Broken (And They Won’t Do Anything About It)

joelrunyon
4pts0
impossiblehq.com 9y ago

How I Got Estonian E-Residency (and why you might want to too)

joelrunyon
4pts1
nathanbarry.com 10y ago

From Losing Money to a Profit Margin in 5 Months

joelrunyon
252pts40
impossiblehq.com 10y ago

How I Recovered a “Dead” Twitter Handle for $69

joelrunyon
5pts1
impossiblehq.com 10y ago

How I Bootstrapped My First 4 Apps to Six Figures

joelrunyon
7pts0
www.joeanhalt.com 10y ago

I haven't done laundry in 18 months. This is how I pulled it off

joelrunyon
2pts0
pearsonified.com 11y ago

The Truth About Thesis.com

joelrunyon
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 11y ago

Show HN: Business Contract Management Database and Online Signature Platform

joelrunyon
3pts0
www.searchenginejournal.com 11y ago

Google to Drop Domain Names in Favor of Site Names in Mobile SERPs

joelrunyon
2pts0
impossiblehq.com 11y ago

How to Triple Your Startup’s Organic Traffic with Zero Link Building

joelrunyon
1pts0
www.marketwatch.com 12y ago

TSA Doubling Standard TSA Fee Starting Tomorrow

joelrunyon
3pts0
impossiblehq.com 12y ago

The Atlantic Challenge

joelrunyon
1pts0
impossiblehq.com 12y ago

Batch Tasking: How To Create Incredible Amounts of Content Like Clockwork

joelrunyon
2pts1
impossiblehq.com 12y ago

Case Study: How To Triple Your Startup's Organic Traffic with Zero Link Building

joelrunyon
4pts1
online.wsj.com 12y ago

Was Snowden's Heist a Foreign Espionage Operation?

joelrunyon
7pts4
news.ycombinator.com 12y ago

Ask HN: What's With The Dropbox Link Fiasco?

joelrunyon
17pts6
impossiblehq.com 12y ago

Adventure Roulette

joelrunyon
1pts0
www.youtube.com 12y ago

Elon Musk Talks About Getting The Job Done

joelrunyon
4pts1
impossiblehq.com 12y ago

What Are You Willing To Give Up?

joelrunyon
1pts0
www.quora.com 12y ago

Aaron Levie's Answer To Only Having 4% Stake Heading Into the Box IPO

joelrunyon
1pts0
medium.com 12y ago

Why Sports Are A Sad and Dangerous Waste of Time

joelrunyon
15pts16

If you want to just write - the answer is still wordpress (https://startablog.com/guide).

If you want to focus on tweaking the site to your heart's content, go right ahead, but the number #1 component to a blog is...writing.

Focus on that and stop worrying about the rest of the details.

Not sure what HN has against wordpress, but it's still the GOAT in terms of blogging platforms. It's

1) Easy to setup

2) Incredibly SEO friendly

3) Most importantly: you own your content.

Yes - it's not as technically advanced as engineers would like - but let's be real - it's a blog - not a venture funded startup.

Buy your own domain. Own your content. Then, just write. If you need help, you can even get it set up for you for free → https://startablog.com/free-blog

How soon until someone lets you

1) create a series of help docs

2) trains an AI on those help docs

3) solves customer headaches using a chatgpt interface with that training

4) drops you into a human that can help as soon as you ask for it.

My primary issues with "live chat" features are

1) They ask you for stupid stuff (email/name/etc) when you're logged in that are already in the system. This makes things worse somehow.

2) The sheer resistance to handing me over to a human when I've asked for it. If you don't have humans on live chat - that's fine, but at least send it to a help desk.

3) The fact they try to ask me to categorize the issue vs. semantically figuring it out via the request is extra annoying as they will often ask you this AGAIN if they can't initially place you in one of their pre-selected categories.

Company I consulted for had 12 engineers, spent millions and 18 months to build some niche custom e-commerce solution.

They were burning money and about to go belly up.

We spend 3k on shopify plus some outsourced shopify engineers to get 95% of their solution in ~4 weeks with zero engineers.

Turned the company around and ended up doing a M/A 2 years later.

I spent way too much time in the calendaring space.

Makes scheduling collaborative instead of a nuisance.

This is not a strong opinion (sorry Derrick, I love you)

Every calendar/scheduler thinks they do this. Most are just variations of calendly (which no one loves, but does it's job).

Calendars (imo) need to stop getting enamored with scheduling and more enamored with helping people use their time wisely.

Stronger opinion: scheduling sucks - do less of it.

Stronger opinion: you should schedule your calendar exactly this way (https://www.nirandfar.com/schedule-maker/)

Stronger opinion: a full calendar doesn't make you productive. Making sure you've scheduled the things that matter to you first before you let any other events is, is the only thing that matter.

Tying the way someone calendars to a specific workflow is what matters. You saw Superhuman do this with "inbox zero." They convinced you that inbox zero means you're productive. It's the wrong metric IMO, but that's how they built out their fan base.

If someone is trying to get a calendar off the ground, they should just hire Nir as an advisor, make his workflow the default calendaring experience and start from there. That would do worlds of work for differentiating in this space where everyone largely does the same minor improvements in different colorways.

Yes - they're both great compounds for helping improve sleep performance - (which unlike knockout pills you can improve over time). Most of our customers tracking their sleep with an Oura ring, Whoop band, or Eight sleep see improvements in both their scores and energy levels when adding our product to their nightly routine.

- https://impossible.co/blogs/health/magnesium-and-sleep - https://impossible.co/blogs/health/l-theanine-for-sleep

MASSIVE POINT

If you're an early stage startup looking for market fit, a A/B test really will authentically take weeks or months to get enough data.

Most of the times at startups you will never have enough data to parse out exactly why something is or isn't working. It's more like an artist where you need taste to see where things are going.

Once you have that - then you can start to optimize with data.

Seen so many super-smart data guys at FAANG companies switch to startups and get stuck in the mud because they're looking at dashboards everyday and wondering why they're having a data anonomoly instead of looking at the bigger picture.

Sometimes there's not a huge reason why traffic/conversions/sales are lower. Sometimes it's just Thursday.

I've noticed instagram does this too.

You try to create a second account and they will "suspend" you automatically and force you through a verification system.

Their spam algorithms have to be better than this...