kareemm

Lobsters are moving north to the Canadian Maritimes from New England

Lobsters have been in the Canadian Maritimes for centuries.

I don't really understand why some prefer to travel outside of Sweden in June/July/August since those are the best months to be around (and it's high tourism season anywhere else in Europe).

I live in a part of Canada where the summer months are the best months to be here. I used to spend lots of the summer here and travel mostly during less pleasant parts of the year until I had kids. Now they’re out of school for the summer so that’s when we travel… especially to see aunts and uncles who have kids, who are also not in school and thus available to spend time with us when wee visit.

The primary goal is to physically exterminate the population.

Um, source?

Nope - Canadian here, opted out in Austin.

Do a roadmap. Fixed scope small project that you get paid for where you define requirements. Deliverable is a functional requirements doc. It derisks the project for them, and gives you more confidence when quoting a fixed scope fixed price project. You just don’t guarantee timeline. I’ve been doing it for over a decade - it works wonders.

Dan Hebert does exactly this in his coaching and community business: https://www.salesmvplab.com/

you have to realize that there will be fewer such startups if a tax on unrealized capital gains is passed, and that VC activity, along with the future startups chasing their money, absolutely will move to countries without such a tax.

That's a bold claim. The tax-averse amongst us say that, but in my experience investment flows to the best ideas / best distribution / best businesses. If those people are in the US because they're citizens, the capital will flow to the US, and investors will take the hit.

I run a one-man dev agency that staffs up a team to help non-technical execs build their v1. Here are some learnings:

1. There are three common dev team models: in-house, individual freelancers who eat what they kill, or agency (where you're sold by a principle and then juniors do the work). I recommend to all my prospects that if they can find a trusted lead dev, they should go that route - it's more economical for them and when I roll off a gig I set my clients up with the senior dev that built their app. Next best is eat what they kill freelancers - more expensive, but faster and incentives are pretty aligned. I would recommend NOT working with a fully staffed agency - they make money by having juniors do the work and incentives are often not aligned - they have staff on the bench they need to feed work to, so their incentive is to keep running the project until the client is out of money.

2. I just wrapped an MVP build in logistics for a European client. There are lots of devs who want to work on interesting technical problems, and for whom the industry doesn't matter. I hired two devs to build the MVP and both were keen on the gig. That said, it's hard to attract and evaluate good talent without at least one of those folks in house, which is what I do when I staff up a dev team to build my client's MVP.

3. Transitioning from third party to in-house - I'd pick the key pieces that are isolated from a business process perspective from the rest of your existing tool, spec them out with wireframes (https://www.reemer.com/consulting/roadmap), and build those. One of the biggest failure modes with building software in general is not enough definition of what "done" looks like when it's cheap to iterate and change (i.e. before code has been written). It's painful to write a long spec and wireframes (I've been doing it for 20 years) but once you've fleshed our your v1 and agreed on ~95% of what the final product looks like, it's generally pretty straight line to writing the code and shipping the product.

4. Re: quagmires - you need someone wearing the product management and engineering manager hats. Product will ensure the app's functional and technical requirements are clear, and an engineering manager will ensure your dev team doesn't get stuck spinning its wheels. In early-stage projects one person often wears multiple hats. Later on you can scale it up to an individual PM and Eng Manager in addition to your devs, if necessary.

Happy to chat more if you like - no sales pitch... just drop me a line a k@reemer.com.

Was looking for one in Canada. Tried this out and it seems like some of the data is missing from where I live (halifax). Got an email I can hit you up at? Mine's in my HN profile - couldn't find yours on HN or your site.

Personally I’d way rather work on that software than some social network. I like unsexy b2b and would state that right out if I was interviewing for that company.

Which I think is the point - it takes all kinds and you’re better off picking the person who wants to be there than who’s just looking for a job.

The broader point is if you care about sports you understand the passion and that there’s often “a way” of doing things in a sport, you learn it, and you move on.

You don’t argue for 10 minutes that your way of displaying a box score is better than how literally millions of fans expect it to be.

Enh. When I interviewed at ESPN the first few questions were about sports knowledge: were you a fan who understood the storylines and stats? Or did you just want a job?

If you had somehow managed to slip through the HR screening without being a sports fan then the day of interviews would root that out and you would not get an offer.

It ensured that everybody who was there lived and breathed sports and would run through walls to create a great product.

Compare to later when I worked at FOXSports.com where sports knowledge was a bonus. The product was worse and the team had to spend too much time (more than 0 minutes) explaining to a front end dev why a baseball box score had an order that stats were always displayed in because that’s the way fans expected it (true story).

I think the value of the question is that, all things being equal, do you want the person who wants to be there because they have a connection to what you do, or do you want someone who just wants a job?

I’d pick the former.

Induction requires a specific type of pots and pans. When we switched to induction we were pleased that we didn’t have to buy a single item to use our new stove.

In other words it really depends on the cookware you have today - it may require new cookwar, but it may not.

Tried it. It doesn’t integrate with what I use and it has a whole other time blocking workflow. It’s a big change from a GTD style workflow.

Boy would I love an task manager to respect the fact that work happens in other tools, and provide a centralized layer on top of the tools I integrate with.

CMD-Shift-D -- TIL, thanks!

If you organize your life using a todo app then $8/m is not even worth thinking about. It's 1.5 coffees.

Agreed re: 18 months. Been using Things for 8-9 years now, tried Sunsama, Todoist, and Amazing Marvin but keep coming back to Things.

Godspeed looks interesting enough vs Things to kick the tires b/c:

1. Speed of date picking and moving todos (choosing dates in Things is a mouse operation and I do it multiple times a day. It's 2024 guys, we don't need calendar pickers when we have command palettes)

2. Image support (super annoying I can't include files in Things. Again... 2024, come on)

3. Sharing lists (can't do in Things which doesn't respect that todos are often collaborative / shared)

I have both Things for Mac and iPhone. The money's trivial for organizing my life. I don't want to spend a second more in my todo app than necessary and would rather pay to have things just work.

Pay no mind to this guy/gal. S/he's not your ideal customer.

$150 once for an app to organize your work and personal life is a screaming bargain.

Love it. I've been increasingly dissatisfied with Things.

Specific things I'm looking for in a Todo manager:

1. iPhone <=> Mac apps and syncing

2. Hotkeys + Speed

3. Shared lists (you don't even mention this until I get into Guides, but I love it)

4. Smart lists

5. Nesting

6. Pasting images

7. Projects + subtasks

8. An inbox

9. Snoozing to the future

10. Focus mode (gets rid of everything else EXCEPT for the current task... really nice as a reminder when I start a task, hop into a meeting, and flip back to the todo list to see what I'm meant to be working on and it's staring me in the face vs. seeing a long list of items). Don't think you support this - first saw it in Amazing Marvin.

Concerns:

1. How painful will it be to import from Things?

2. What if the app goes away? I don't want to lose my stuff or switch again, it's a pain. How big is your company? Are you a going concern with real customers or is this a side project that will fall by the wayside?

3. I do love not paying a subscription for Things. I like the $150 one-off fee for 18m. Would consider that.

Regardless, going to play with it today. Seems very promising!

There’s been tons of opposition to building up in Vancouver, especially outside of downtown. Opposition isn’t unique to indigenous builders.

What is unique is that nimbys have a new arsenal of tactics to use as to why this isn’t a good idea eg “concrete skyscrapers aren’t the indigenous way so you shouldn’t build your project.”

I am Canadian and lived a literal stones throw from the site in question for 4 years.

The real issue is that Vancouver is full of NIMBYs who want sightlines, low density, and “character” preserved. It’s basically encoded into the zoning laws for the municipality. Those groups will use whatever tactics at hand to prevent density at a scale they don’t approve of from being built.

How did things change after they were bought?

Nice write up!

I used RoR and Turbo Native for both iOS and Android apps last summer on a client project. To do that I used Jumpstart Pro’s iOS and Android add-ons [1]which Joe (the author) contributed to.

As a non-mobile dev they were an absolute dream to use. I was VERY pleasantly surprised how easy it was to get our apps out the door. Even though it was 10/10 would use again I would’ve loved this write up last year as seeing more how-to examples in the wild is always helpful.

1- https://jumpstartrails.com/ios

This reminds me of one of my former ESPN co-workers - Mike Davidson[1] - who founded of one of the first community news sites (Newsvine[2]) back in 2006.

Newsvine had comments and upvotes and link submissions and posts - it was very reddit-esque except it was focused around the news. The team had to have a way to deal with spammers and trolls. They found the most effective way was to flag a user as a troll on the Newsvine backend. If the troll flag was set to true, Newsvine would add a random 10-60 second delay to every page load for the troll's account. IIRC it solved the problem pretty effectively.

1- http://mikeindustries.com/blog/

2- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsvine

How are you different from other tools? Why would I switch?

I use Synology Photos to back up to my Synology NAS in the basement:

https://www.synology.com/en-global/DSM70/SynologyPhotos

It has mobile apps that back up photos automatically. My wife and I each have the iOS apps running and photos just upload magically to the NAS. Viewing photos is a good experience too. I also use another Synology app to back up my photos from my NAS to AWS Glacier.

Super happy I moved them from Shutterfly.

Curious how this is recovered. So they send down another submersible that is able to attach a cable to debris that can be pulled up by a winch?

Been watching your journey for a while. You've hit on a couple of key insights that I think are really smart because they accelerate TTV which historically has been sloooow in the metrics space (been watching and using tools in this space since Kissmetrics was in beta):

* B2B SaaS is a lot more qual. than B2C (We also sell to B2B SaaS[1] and this squares with what we've seen). You don't need to cater to all the scenarios that Amplitude or Mixpanel or Heap cater to which narrows the scope of what to ask of users (and what you need to build!)

* Honing in on SaaS means you can offer canned AARRR reports and key feature usage reports out of the box which massively accelerates that.

* Pulling metrics from where they already live and transforming them into immediately useful data for PMs. CDPs like Segment enable that but you could even de-risk customer migration to June by pulling data from Mix or Amplitude

Congrats on hitting 1k customers. Looking forward to seeing where you go next.

1 - https://www.savio.io