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mgrassotti

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twitter: @mikeginnyc

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Inspiration is the thing that gets you to the thing.

You’re blog post was 1000% better than the landing page, because it was real. Stick to that voice. Replace the stock images and marketing-speak with halt-and-catch-fire design/quotes, code snippets and sample output.

Don’t try to get customers. Get early adopters who share the vision and want to come along for the ride as you experiment and push the envelope. If you’re vision is clear and speaks to a real pain (getting structured data from the web is a pita) there will be early adopters willing to pay. Those same people are your best market and will make great future employees.

LiftForward | Midtown NYC NY, New York | ONSITE

LiftForward is a marketplace lending platform for small businesses.

We're looking for our 4th (and 5th) full-time engineers so this is a rare opportunity to join a well-funded early-stage company. Just raised $250M so things are really heating up.

  * Fast growing and profitable early-stage fintech startup
  * Small team, so you will have an opportunity for a high-impact role
  * Developers have lots of autonomy
  * Great pay and a low-stress, engineering-driven culture
We use lots of ruby and javascript (emberjs) so a few years of experience with those would be great. That said personality & hustle is way more important than what specific tech you may have worked with. We've all come from totally different backgrounds but ramped up quick and will help you do the same.

details here: http://liftforward.workable.com

or email me mike ~at- liftforward.com

I give $1 pretty much every time, which is a few times/day living in nyc. Didn't used to but a few years back I read a book that changed my mind. Author made the point that the best way to turn $1 into happiness is by giving away in this situation. No matter what they use it for, the $1 clearly means more to them than it does to me. I'd blow it at starbucks or whatever and not think twice. More I think about it the more that seems true.

Only exception is if someone asks comes into restaurant and goes to each table asking for money. That just drives me nuts.

My way of dealing with overconfident people is the best ever. In fact, I am awesome at dealing with every kind person that is or ever was. If dealing with people was an olympic event I would win gold silver and bronze every 4 years.

I can't tell you about my way of dealing overconfident people because I don't want to brag. I'm the most modest person you'll ever f-ing meet. Way more modest than you or anyone else on this forum.

quality is way more important. friction is ok, if people are not willing to confirm their email how will you get them to download your app?

The best thing you can do now is engage the people who are interested in your app. Don't wait until launch to start communicating. Use the next 3-4 weeks to validate your assumptions by talking to as many people as possible. Making sure your app solves a real problem that your customers want solved is the best way to get traction.

I do it all the time in early stages of app development, moving between SQLite/MySQL/Postgres.

Once you get into production it's a different story. A good ORM makes it easy to swap to a different DB without need for code changes. What it does not help with is the much bigger problem of how to migrate the data, indicies, backups, replication, etc. that you'd have in place for a production database.

+1 We've been using both zencoder and filepicker for our Ember/Rails app and that is exactly how it works. Ember posts fpurl to our Rails API, rails hits zencoder to kick-off processing job. API keys stay secure and files never pass thru our system. Awesome!