mschaecher

Perfect timing as we have a huge need for this for an upcoming launch.

Question...will you be able to replay/backfill as you add new integrations? For example, Klaviyo is a huge hole in your integrations right now especially for marketing and ecomm. If I install Autotrack now, set up a few events and then a month from now you add Klaviyo, I can just replay everything into Klaviyo?

Also FWIW, I was an early user at Segment (was in their seed deck as case study), Klaviyo, and many others. I'm a technical marketer so can be helpful as beta tester and user research. reach out directly if you'd like to connect michael@futuremood.com

Craiglist generates tons of cash, wildly profitable, no investment

Bose has always funded itself via profits for 50 years with no outside investment. $3b-$4b revenue last year.

Beats waited 4-5 years and was huge before taking first equity investment from HTC

Munchery

As a former early Munchery (and Airbnb) employee, you sound like the worst type of arm chair quarterback – hopelessly wrong.

Munchery was first mover in the space and is an order of magnitude bigger than most in the space, and already doing volume that would blow your mind. Original investors in an A round don't reup to lead the B & C rounds unless there is some serious "proof" of customer base.

Munchery is upfront in app too.

This. I've been back multiple times over the years to run some small campaigns for some big startups there and can't believe how bad and rough around edges their tools and processes are.

If I didn't love reddit so much there is no way I would've put up with them to run a small campaign.

I've managed tons of product launches at Airbnb, Munchery and other startups as a consultant.

Do not launch on Thanksgiving. Trust me. Delay until the week after.

Also you should know that Thanksgiving through New Years is by far the worst time of year to try and launch a new (consumer) product of any kind. Every single (consumer) product in the world fights a bloody battle for attention and sales this time of year. Every store, every brand and every product category will be filled with promotions and/or slightly new offerrings.

If you must launch during that window, what you're launching must be either a) fucking amazing itself or b) your fucking amazing at marketing to cut through all that noise.

definitely this. Can get more expensive quick too, especially if a video requires multiple locations, multiple actors, multiple actors speaking, etc etc.

Also I can't remember if Adam does this, but most the industry will have different price tiers based on what you want to do with it. Running something on your homepage is a whole different ballgame compared to homepage + TV ads.

FWIW the Airbnb video stars a very talented Airbnb employee, Venetia Pristavec, who ran video efforts there since the early days.

Everything. Researching is horrible. Purchase flows suck. Fees suck.

Portfolio analysis terrible – For example on a stocks page there isn't even an easy way to see existing positions, let alone my historical purchases like when, how much and what price. It's just "here's this stocks history" not "here's this stocks history including YOU'RE history with this stock.

And on and on like that.

I'm just sick of using software that feels like it stopped improving 5-10 years ago....and figured that has to be more out there.

Thanks never checked out either but will now!

Not super active. Few trades a month. Mostly for fun and to get skin in companies I believe in.

Sharebuilder is horrible. Will check out Schwab thanks!

I have a feeling this story is far, far from being over.

And I'm very curious as to how the fuck this happens.

I haven't seen many theories in general, let alone theories with much evidence behind them about how this could have happened. Other than iCloud! No dropbox! No NSA!

So while I wait for more technical minds to weigh in, I figured I'd take a stab at an alternate theory for people to ponder (or hopefully more likely tear apart!)

tl;dr

Gaining covert access locally via a potential buffet of attack vectors. Feels like this article, but voyeur not espionage (or necessarily China/state-based obviously) http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/11/technology/electronic-secu...

Theory:

- Original hacker is one w/ privileged network access, &/or proximity to sniff, &/or compromise device(s) physically at a place frequented by celebs over a long period of time(years).

- Hotels, spas, coffee houses, studio lots, awards, etc etc.

- Potential for many attack vectors to match any given skill set. From MITM, to malware, to phishing, to gathering PII for social eng to compromised charging stations.

- And gives a window of time to allow for fast data transfer pillaging via LAN.

- Also gives a window where on same network, at same time and place pry helps to avoid tripping some suspicious access detection alarms.

- OG hacker is prob up to lots of nefarious stuff and someone else popped their personal stash.

-- What lead me there and away from a single platform exploit, a la iCloud?

I tried making sense of what was known and a few assumptions.

- If it was a platform exploit, finding even 20 of these girls' actual login emails from which to locate their accounts on a service is a massive undertaking – unless you have some kind of privileged position to harvest them (hotel desk, gyms, award ceremonies, etc etc) -- I feel like the probability of all these girls having passed through same places – like hotels, spas, sundance, soho house, awards, festivals, etc etc – over the course of 2-3 years is way higher than someone managing to figure out 100 correct login emails for them.

- The attacks appeared to have happened over a long period of time. At least late 2011 to within the last month judging from exif data. So they avoided tons of software and hardware updates for bugs and security patches.

- I assume these celebs have TONS of photos on any of their devices at any given time. Being photographed and taking photographs are part of their lives. So we're talking thousands or tens of thousands. Which takes a lot of time to copy. And like all of us, their photos are unorganized which means it takes a lot of time to find the gems. The longer it takes the attacker to get access and pillage, the more they are exposed. They needed to get in quick and consistently, and get out very fast.

- Given the volume and (alleged) success rate of 100+ celebs, manual social engineering or brute is out.

No they can work fine anywhere just like Dominos can.

They just need to get transaction/delivery volume up, so that density of orders shrinks the coverage area for any given "driver agent".

Scaling while trying to maintain balanced supply and demand key.

Moderate increase in delivery density can mean step changes in efficiency and almost all other aspects of these businesses.

Source: I work at Munchery mentioned in the article but I'm from Nebraska originally and delivery drove in collge.

Yes but it'd be insanely easy for a company like UPS with the data it has to:

- Give you a preprogrammed recommended stop route. - recommended stop route can auto-adjust throughout day based on variables like traffic etc - the only time you have to "look anything up" is when you need to manually change your recommended stop route. - and that could be done via simple voice commands

I really find it hard to believe UPS doesn't have some kind of great GPS like this for most of it's fleet.

Delivery routes in lower density parts of the country are going to be huge geographic areas too unlike a SF or NYC too.

They supposedly use software to determine how to store packages in the back of a truck efficiently, I can't see how they wouldn't throw their same weight at navigation.

As a former Airbnb employee, this is honestly the only thing I don't like about the rebrandredesign!

Airbnb pry has one of, if not THE, world's largest collection of amazing real estate photography.

It's possible some massive real estate company might have as much, but I can't imagine how Airbnb doesn't have the largest collection of lived-in home interiors by a long shot.

Are you managing your FB ads in house or via agency?

It sounds like in house, which I always highly recommend is best.

However, you might consider reaching out to one of the big FB ad partners like Nanigans. $100k+ account with known ROI, which means you'll ramp quick and advertise long term, will definitely get people drooling at those firms.

Because here's the issue:

While your situation is unfair, and your even allocation idea is great for the most part, it doesn't take into account the size of your competitor's ad budgets.

I'd be willing to bet Zoosk is somewhere in the range of $2M-$10M per year, or more, just on facebook alone. Probably similar amount on Google too.

At that level of spend, the executive level access and ad partner relationships on any advertising platform is a completely different world than yours.

I bet the head of marketing at Zoosk has Sheryl Sandberg's number in their phone and could get her on the line pretty much 24/7 if they REALLY needed too.

You're advocating with a dog whistle, while they have bull horns.

But the big ad platform partners have bull horns too.

And while obviously no one there is calling Sheryl on your behalf, even their regular day to day contacts at facebook are going to be way more influential than yours.

So it may be possible to piggyback off of them to get higher up the ladder.

If they can do that, just run through them until your big enough to have your own bull horn.

If they can't do anything for you because you're too small, you could try reaching out to other niche or regional dating advertisers that got the axe too(pry a ton that are pure desktop still too so even better).

Find ones with only a comfortable level of overlap to you guys and join up to bring all your individual accounts to the first platform that gets you unblocked.

Anyways, sucks and I feel ya, but hopefully some of that is useful.

PS - The 10% even allocation model you outlined is obviously ideal because it lets the market sort it out. But you also have to think about what that market mechanism would do to your business – a slower death. Big players can spend more and afford higher CPIs. They could just take all the oxygen out of the market for others until you die off.

I think he's releasing the specific documents tomorrow some of the coverage on this story noted today.

Back-weighting seems backwards to me, especially for early employees. They receive less options for the risky, earlier stage and more options for once things are stable and proven. Most startups won't even make 4 years, and therefore early employees who take that risk can end up with almost nothing if a sale or IPO occurs in, say, 18 months after starting employment.

Thanks for for doing what you do Andrew, and congrats on the 1000th video.

When I was still early in my career and living back in the midwest, I still remember binge watching Mixergy like it was a Netflix original. It was insanely valuable.

Any recommendations on dropbox alternatives?

I've been a happy customer for years but won't stay with a company that appoints a war criminal and spying apologist to their board.

A brand new kia or scion is gonna be faster out the gate and cheaper than a 4 year old cadillac.

But the cadillac wins on looks, power, durability, safety, fuel, utility, terrain/environmental performance, can hold more people and those new cars won't have interiors half as nice on their new models 4 years from now as today's 4 year old cadillac model does.

Oh and if the race is longer than 30-40 yards that caddie will catch up and smoke those cars with it's V8.

tl;dr apples to oranges and all that shit

I'm from Nebraska originally, and I see a bigger market for self-driving cars in flyover country than in an area like SF Bay.

Lots of long, straight drives with far less vehicles on the road probably even make it more realistic to accomplish bc it's a less dynamic environment. I know 20+ who drive an hour both ways to work...and on the morning drive you can do it and only see a handful of cars if it's early.

I have a feeling being able to determine immediate near term road conditions is a 1.0 feature for self-driving vehicles?

Waze-style technology + GIS + networking with other vehicles + weather data (if you look, there is already tons of small weather monitoring stations all over major). thoroughfares).

I mean many vehicles within the last handful of years have automatic traction control that can react faster to a real time change in road conditions than any human could ever hope too. A lot of the stuff I mentioned above is just extending that foresight out further so as to not be so jarring.

The three cars I've owned in my lifetime all had 90% physical controls, with a small little digital screen that would display something like the radio station you're on, the temp, the strength of air, treble/bass, etc, etc.

There was absolutely zero tactile feedback on all of them, as their were dedicated buttons that had to be cycled through to reach a state....and the only way you could know if you were getting to what you wanted was if you looked at the tiny little digital display.

Want preset radio station #x? Jam the preset button a few times.

Want to warm the passenger side a bit? Jam a button to select that side, then select heat, the turn it up.

That's on a Honda, a Cadillac & a Toyota spanning a decade in years....so I'm guessing you must be referring to pre-1990 vehicles that literally had dial tuners and manual button to control valves...and 5x less options for stuff that could even be adjusted?? Or did you speak too soon?

How so?

BS - I've watched both videos twice and more sophisticated targeting solves 90% of their "problems."

How much facebook advertising have you managed? I hope it's a lot if you're going to call out "fundamental flaws" and "large portion of ad spend...likely wasted...on what is effectively fraud."

I've managed many millions across a handful of companies. Has their been issues? Yes, just like every other channel.

You're spot on about being jaded though.

Wading through the masses of BS is a huge pain.

75% of the people probably give up, 20% outsourced to varying results, 5% nail it in-house or via finding the right partner.

But that 5%-15% of potential advertisers that lock it down?

That's 80% of the ad spend right there.

One Expedia is worth 100,000 small businesses to Google.

Google, Facebook, et al have all tried to simplify their ad products to capture more potential advertisers at different levels.

But in doing so they arrive at a Catch 22 though...

To make it simpler, they hide sophistication and advanced options. The very options that are needed to drive campaigns with meaningful ROI. But those options are also over the head of the SMBs.

So what are they supposed to do?

You're right it's a real problem.

There are literally hundreds of "startups" doing that for social media advertising. Hundreds for search. Hundreds for display, and not just regular display, but RTB(sarcasm)! There are tons of startups doing it for native ads. And don't forget video, seo & content marketing among others.

Add on to that, the partner/provider lists of "startups" that sit on top of one or many of those tools.

And let's not forget about the 1000s of agencies out there to roll it all up.

There are tons of snake oil salesman, and many good tools and people in that list. But as with pretty much any ecosystem, it's 80% crap, 10% meh, 10% bam.

And there is no one right answer. Just like no absolute answer to Python vs Ruby.

So whenever I see articles like, "facebook ads bad! look what they're doing!"

Change it to, "facebook ads bad! Look at all the things I'm doing wrong, but don't even know enough to know I'm doing wrong!"

You're correct that there certainly a lot of snake-oil merchants out there. But they're not just limited "new" media channels. Just as many slimeballs in the traditional world.

I'm going to get crucified for this, but paid advertising is somewhat analogous to software engineering/developers. There are many languages/platforms/technologies out there. Some old, some cutting edge. Each one most likely has it's own syntax/terminology, patterns, approaches etc.

So when hiring a full stack engineer, you look for someone who cuts pretty deep across a few key areas, but can also roll up their sleeves across the stack if need be. Example: Ruby Expert, Getting into Angular, and knows how to provision AWS if need be.

Same thing with full stack marketer. If you know Google Adwords, Content Marketing and a bit of PR are your core, then optimize your hire for that.

As someone who has helped massively grow a handful of businesses with Facebook being a significant channel, part of me wants to say "Yep, FB advertising is bunk. Everyone stop!"

But in reality I'd be saying that in a weak attempt to make my own Facebook advertising more effective.

Lemme tl;dr this in three bullets:

- It's far easier for non-sophisticated advertisers to waste money.

- The ad platform is pretty technical and nuanced

- Notice I didn't mention facebook in the previous two bullets? That's because it's true for anywhere you buy ads, even print or flyers, radio or direct mail.

So to reiterate: For any given paid advertising channel, it is far easier for non-sophisticated people to waste money as it is to see significant ROI. Any place you can buy ads is far more technical and nuanced than people who don't live and breath it could every imagine.