monkeyspaw

I must thank you for giving me enough motivation to finally leave hacker news. I was listening to the new import this podcast, with ken reitz, wherein they were discussing the negativity of this community.

Now I'm going to try and go do something useful with my time, rather than get into obnoxious arguments.

I hope you're able to do the same as well.

Philosophically, I disagree: taxes are for the public necessity, not the public good. Roadways, fire/police, civil governance = necessity.

Granted, there is a lot of grey area. But the phrase "public good" means different things to different people. For those grey areas, private donations have been important. (see Planned Parenthood, the NRA, etc.)

This is easily disprovable, via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_United_States_federal_budg...

Can you elaborate? My understanding is that most merchant accounts are in the 2% + .45 range. Are you suggesting that merchant margins depend on a 1% margin?

I disagree, mostly because you presented your opinion as black and white.

Apple has, what, > 10k workers? If it cost them $100 billion to prevent one software worker from getting carpal tunnel, your statement suggests that cost should be born by Apple. Similarly, if it cost the cumulative GDP of the US to prevent N amount of pollution, your statement suggests that Apple should go bankrupt preventing that pollution.

Back in the real world, I suspect we generally agree. The problem, IMO, is that companies (and consumers) aren't forced to capture the hidden costs of injuries/pollution.

I just disagree with your black and white assessment. The laws of economics mean companies have to assign dollar values to human life and safety, as much as we dislike the feeling it gives us.

What does f2p stand for?

Although I'm cynical enough to not expect this, things could be partitioned into "grant access to people with no payment on file" and "need payment on file to download this app".

I'm not sure of your point. Cocaine does have legal uses, especially with ENT doctors/surgeons, who use it as an effective anaesthetic.

But the profit margins in the illegal drug market is largely because of the risk involved. Facing legal competition, which does not have to include that risk in its price, is effectively creating a market where legitimized producers have an extreme advantage.

I was going to upvote you until I saw your edit about downvoting. I believe you should state your mind without concern for arbitrary internet points. If you express concern over these points, it weakens your perspective, in my opinion, and I am much less likely to award you those useless points.

I frequently wonder - is Facebook allowed to say, "bing, you can crawl us. NewCompetitor, you cannot."

I feel like once a company allows public access by posting stuff on the web, they can specify terms, but not include/exclude groups specifically. (In a legal sense; I understand blocking systems that hammer servers but will respect robots.txt. IME bing is the worst offender -- they hammer my sites, send no traffic, but will stop if I specify in robots.txt.)

Does anyone have an opinion about "once public, I can crawl"?

IANAL, but that sounds either like you can't do all of those things together (the "and" conjunction), or you can't even read the website. After all, if you can't download it, you can't view it.

I"d like to add that I'm also OK with Facebook/Google/whomever making money off that. I think it's just a spectrum of perspective. One side is privacy concerns, the other is the win/win/win where I see ads relevant to me, facebook makes a little money [in exchange for providing a free service that I value], and the advertiser makes a sale for promoting a product that I want.

I don't know the right answer, but I think there's a balance to be struck.

One final thing - be resourceful. You have to call, email, visit, get referrals to, use linkedin (seriously, linkedin is great for b2b companies because people on Linkedin actually want to talk/connect with you!).

Doing the whole landing page "Field of Dreams" approach isn't going to work. Be resourceful (or, if you're into this term, hustle!).

You seem to be on the right path by saying you want to work with 10 of them. However, it doesn't sound like you're ready for your first customers, since you haven't talked with any of them!

While you think you have a great idea that will change the real estate business, the truth is that you don't know at all. You need to start talking to real estate agents. Send emails, phone calls, offer to take them to lunch, drop by their office. Talk about your idea (focusing on why they should care -- what will this do for them?). And -- importantly -- listen to their feedback.

Once you've had several in-depth conversations with 5-10 of these folks, you should know what they care about, and what the value of your product is to them. At that point, it should be easy to get your early partners to pay for the service -- after all, it was pretty much designed for them!

Also recommended: Steve Blanks "4 steps to the epiphany".

I don't exercise as I yet have to see data showing me that exercise will increase lifespan by longer than the time invested doing it. Add the opportunity cost of the lost time to the picture as well

That's double counting. If exercise time gets you the same increased lifespan as time invested doing it, then the "time" factor cancels. So there is no opportunity cost -- you get more life for "spending" life.

Second, are you aware of the vomitories in the Roman Empire

Not a real thing, other than the architectural term. Nothing to do with regurgitation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vomitorium

While your personal mileage may vary, I find my quality of life immensely increased with regular exercise.

Science supports it -- exercise helps mood, life quality of insomniacs, increase happiness, reduce anxiety, and many other positive qualities. (http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/exercise-happiness.htm has links to all these studies.)

I encourage you to do as you wish with your life. I, however, will continue to put my time in. Preferably in high intensity cardio exercise 2-3x/wk, and 1-2 strength training sessions per week.

FWIW, the "life extension foundation" seems to support exercise. http://www.lef.org/magazine/mag96/feb96-fitness.htm

Referring to their decision to go print-only as "DRM" is inflammatory.

It's a book, dude. Not a piece of technology that allows publishers to control your access. It has it's limitations, which are fairly well known at this point in history.

- Fair natural resource utilization (water, petrol, etc.)

- Increasing political instability in totalitarian regimes

- America will struggle with not having such a high standard of living relative to the rest of the world.

Any idea what the error bars are on that .7% figure?

Side point - it's likely you had many more "visitors" than the <10 / day indicated in the article. On most sites I run, I see about 10% of my traffic as showing up in Google Analytics. I hypothesize this is because most of the traffic on the internet is bots.

Bing Bot is the worst at this. They hammer my sites, send me zero traffic, and don't appear to allow me to control their behavior very well. I get 50x the traffic from google cmp to bing, but google is about 1/3 the hits (when looking @ raw logs).

How so?

I always thought mail in rebates were a good way to experiment with the price-sensitivity of the purchase. Is that the feedback you mean?

I was curious, so I looked at US fertility rates by state. Fortunately, wikipedia has a nice chart. The birth rates do appear to be higher in Western states than in the east.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territo...

I am unfamiliar with this history, but it sounds fascinating. Can you elaborate a little more, or point me to an article discussing this?

Yes. Am in San Diego on Cox Cable.

Mind maps don't imply a hierarchy. This change in how a problem is structured can alter how you think about it. (It's basically a different data structure, which makes it easier or harder to perform certain processing on it.)

And their focus over the next few years is to be the cloud computing company for businesses. Had a salesforce VP tell me recently that SF wants to dominate non-CRM software (e.g., electronic medical records in the cloud) while Oracle and SAP are still working on figuring out this whole "cloud" thing.

Large businesses are still just entering the cloud with a lot of their software. Salesforce is the company they think of when thinking cloud. There's a lot of power in that.

San Diego recently removed their cameras because they found that they were put at intersections designed to maximize revenue, regardless of the pre-RLC safety.

They also found that accidents were increased.

http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/Feb/01/san-diego-red-lig...

I guess I would answer by saying, it depends, and possibly.

If 1 user needed 2501 emails and your plan only offered 2500, then chances are they would be at least a little turned off.

Pricing is really important. If a 0-3000 person list at MailChimp was $20 per month, but Constant Contact tier required (2000-10000) $50 per month, the user could say something like "MailChimp solves my problem for $20, CC is $50. I can't tell the difference so I'll go with the cheaper one."

Again, though -- I doubt there is much focus on targeting competitors' users, but are competing against the user not knowing of their existence.

MailChimp's free tier allows up to 2k list members. They know most people with lists that small won't pay for a solution. As their list grows, MailChimp can ride their success into a paid tier.

Great question. This is a perspective that I had when I first founded my company -- how do I convey to my customers that I'm the best solution for their problem?

What I have discovered is that it doesn't matter. There's room for lots of companies. All things equal, you want to be the best (which is my shorthand for "stand out from each other in a positive way for the customer's context"). But many customers just want to solve their problem, and don't care about solving their problem in the optimal manner.

As hackers, we're obsessed with the idea that the best solution wins. As an entrepreneur, I've discovered that second rate products with first rate sales and marketing will likely outshine a better product that has outreach as a secondary priority.

This used to upset me, because I was focused on the product. As someone trying to run a business, I'm looking at the company as a whole. That means that sales, marketing, product, support, organization, strategy, vision... they're just 1 component of the whole.

It makes the sales side easier if the product is unique or clearly the best. --

Back to the original point -- companies don't need to stand out from each other when they are the only solution a customer has heard of.

Imagine you are a sandwich shop. When you started, you could just send your marketing by BCCing people through your gmail. Now your list is 2500 people, and you need a way to send to everyone.

You just want to send your email to 2500 people. You don't want to spend a day to compare the relative merits of mailchimp versus constant contact.

Flip the perspective (mailchimp's perspective, looking at the sandwich shop owner). Mailchimp's challenge isn't to differentiate from constant contact, but to simply communicate that they exist and can solve an existing problem.

--

This may be more relevant for b2b versus b2c. I confess I do not understand marketing in b2c much at all.

My interpretation is best viewed through an example.

There are lots of mail newsletter providers (mailchimp, constant contact, etc.)

They aren't trying to compete against each other. Rather, they are trying to compete against nothing -- people with no ESP.

This seems like an immensely useful service (looking up executive level social media accounts). Are there companies out there who provide this service?

This concept really is the holy grail of people who like to talk about startups.

I think there are some mis-perceptions about the idea. Here is how I how found the concept useful, in my company.

Startups who focus on revenue rather than growth can use this technique as a success metric (duh). Rather than using active users, etc., as proxy metrics for success, this method is a very direct one to measure how marketable your idea is. Get one success banked, then you can start to optimize -- pretty neat!

However, it's also incredibly difficult to do. So the second purpose becomes this: a proxy to evaluate the importance (in your customers' eyes) of the problem you solve. If you're solving a problem that everyone in the banking industry desperately needs solved, they will be more willing to try something that isn't feature-complete (or in existence).

So while few people will actually buy your product before it exists, using that as the goal can help you in your business development. You can figure out the problem's importance (and, believe me, it's better to solve a hair on fire problem than to solve a minor inconvenience). You can get feedback from people who are actually willing to pay -- this signals they are probably your customer! (So it helps you prioritize feedback, and sort people you talk to into actual / window-shopper type customers).

What the gurus don't tell you is this is very difficult to actually accomplish, at first. But after several iterations, you can get valuable feedback from people who are closer to having skin in the game.

And, of course, there is the chance that someone will have such a big problem that they want to pay you to solve it right now. If you can find that big fish, and their problem is similar enough (or uses core technology sufficiently similar to your "productized" version), then you can partially pay to make the product. (This comes with the caveats about how you don't want to be a slave to a single customer, etc. But we're having luck developing our core technology in the process for the big customer, and will re-use it for our product.)