justinmares

This is just not true - corn/soy/wheat are the most sprayed crops in agriculture.

Nope, we did not do this. We invested a ton in the business and didn't take a dollar out (besides small salaries) for 2.5 years.

More context here - https://microconf.gen.co/justin-mares/

Exactly

This is almost exactly correct. Though what's crazy is they charge fees on the notional - aka the amount they're "insuring".

So if you have a 4b portfolio, they're charging fees on the 4b.

The 3600% return in March is sort of misleading.

The returns are on the premium paid for options (or margin), not the notional (which is where fees are paid). That $4bn fund is counting its performance on only $40 million of invested capital (of the $4bn). So they are up 3600% on $40 million.

Universa’s model is they take 3.5% of a portfolio value per year and use it to buy puts over the course of a year. So at any time, maybe they have 30-60 basis points of the portfolio in puts. So they are up 3600% on 30 basis points or like 12%.

"Spitznagel included a chart in his letter showing that a portfolio invested 96.7% in the S&P 500 and 3.3% in Universa’s fund would have been unscathed in March, a month in which the U.S. equity benchmark fell 12.4%."

"The same portfolio would have produced a compounded return of 11.5% a year since March of 2008 versus 7.9% for the index."

2.6% per annum is a lot of outperformance, albeit not quite as eye popping as 3600%.

That's on the roadmap! Starting with restaurants as that's the world I know best right now

You can type the name of the city you're searching for on this page - https://givelocal.co/search

Great feedback though! This is definitely something we pulled together quickly over the last few days.

Crazy. Over the weekend my friend Brent and I built something to help - https://givelocal.co/

Basically, a site that helps you buy gift cards and support your favorite local restaurant through the COVID pandemic.

Would love community feedback!

We built Fomo to make it easy to display recent actions (Github pushes, reviews, recent purchases, website visits, etc.) on your website. We're launching version 1 today along with our API that allows you to pass any data into Fomo's notification tool.

Full documentation here - http://docs.usefomo.com/reference

I'd love to hear the community's feedback on our app's V1!

Investing in spaces you don't know or don't have strong hunches is difficult. I'd recommend just putting money in index funds unless you feel really, really strongly about an investment and/or have some special knowledge of the space or company.

Though, in the long run, losing $250 while getting your feet wet in investing isn't that bad.

Yeah, still incredibly volatile.

Best investment (outside of investing in myself) was buying into Ethereum when they first announced it. In the 2-3 years since, that's been up nearly 50x.

Basically because we were 1st-time authors. We hired a professional editor and paid him to edit our first draft. Then, we shared that draft with readers and it just wasn't good enough. So, we had to go back, re-edit the entire thing, and then pay for the editor to go over it all again.

Pretty frustrating, and the reason why editing was likely 2-3x more than it should have been. However, it also resulted in a much better book.

Honestly, no. One post to reddit, one to Growthhackers.com and the rest has all been organic.

I'm around $5500 a month total from 2 Udemy courses and a launching Traction book. It breaks down like this (all links below):

My SQL for Marketers course on Udemy does about $1500 a month, and has been pretty steady since launching the course on Udemy in late April. This takes almost no maintenance, though I am starting to work on improving it in response to student feedback.

My other course, Productivity for Mac Users, is a simpler keyboard shortcuts one can use to be more productive on Mac. This one makes $400-800 per month, though average over the lifetime (launched in May) has been around $500.

Lastly, we launched Traction book 3 months ago, and it continues to sell really well. Even after splitting with my co-author, I make about $3500 a month from that. You can see full numbers breakdown in the blog post we wrote summing up our launch.

https://www.udemy.com/sql-for-marketers/#/

https://www.udemy.com/mac-keyboard-shortcuts/#/

http://tractionbook.com

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2014/10/getting-traction...

After having a product - Traction (book) - hit #2 on PH a few weeks ago, I can say that PH drove more and higher quality traffic than several other well-known blogs we were mentioned on.

PH is great and Ryan is awesome - really excited to see where PH goes after the raise!

In the book we talk more about offline channel tracking, but basically you can tie them to online activity (e.g. discount codes, unique URLs, etc.) or via the "how did you hear about us?" questions.

For beating chicken and egg problem, generally you want to figure out which side is more difficult to get (demand or supply side) and then think about what traction channels work to acquire people on that side of the C&E problem. Happy to chat more over email if you'd like specific help.

Or go here - http://snip.ly/5Wwo

Sign up for the email list (small text at the bottom)

We have no power to discount on Amazon, but you can get the first 3 chapters free here - http://snip.ly/5Wwo

Great to hear it!

EPUB should be out in 2-3 weeks. Feel free to email me - justin@justinmares.com - and I can send you a PDF.

Awesome! Top 3 learnings are hard to pull out, but roughly:

1. Most startups fail because they can't get traction, not because they can't build a product.

2. Many startups focus too exclusively on product and ignore traction until they launch. This leads to this situation where a startup will spend 3-6 months building something, launch, and then realize they need to start marketing in order to hit profitability or raise their next round of funding. However, they're starting from square one again and with half the money they started with gone.

We talk about companies that focus on traction and product in parallel. This leads to a dynamic where companies are testing acquisition channels early on and launch to a group of beta customers. Additionally, they have a better understanding of which acquisition channels are effective, which means they can scale those channels up as after they have a more fleshed out product.

3. We found that founders and marketers have a bias towards using channels they know. Many founders never consider channels outside those they have experience with - usually Facebook/Adwords/content marketing - which means they don't acquire customers in unique ways their competition isn't. Thinking holistically about each of the 19 channels is a much better approach, and allows you to potentially acquire customers in a more cost-effective way than your competitors.

Dropbox is a great example of this. There were many file storage companies around before Dropbox, but none that used referral marketing as their main acquisition channel.

Awesome, thanks!

That said, paid acquisition channels (Facebook, AdWords, etc.) can be highly profitable - AdWords for almost 10 years now. They just get more expensive and less profitable as time goes on.

I disagree. I think this post says it better than I can - http://signalvnoise.com/posts/1643-failure-is-overrated-a-re...

Someone who's failed has now learned 1 way not to fail. Someone who's been successful multiple times has learned the principles and what to do to win, which is much more important.

I would assume they checked with investors before releasing this, no?

You're pretty much describing EasyPost, right? They're a YC company out of the last batch - https://www.easypost.com/

I believe DuckDuckGo is using Perl, or were as of a few years ago.

Source: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/03/duck-duck-go-arc...

Here's a pretty good comparison of the two - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10558465/memcache-vs-redi....

Disclaimer: I wrote the above article and work for RedisToGo. But that article is unbiased :)