paulitex

Thanks! Definitely sounds like we need to tighten up the message.

This is great. :)

Yes, prospects. Mailing lists, relevant LinkedIn groups, etc.

I generally agree with you, but I think this community has an eye for detail we might not find in other groups.

Thanks – that's similar to what cooperadymas was saying.

Who did you mean by "their"? We are soliciting feedback on our more B2B channels too. But I'm posting here because a) it's a startup and HN likes startups and b) I like HN and wanted to share. :)

vegetarianism is not the answer. Monsanto is one of the evilest companies on earth and they control most soy production (I say this because many vegetarians eat a lot of tofu). It's about understanding the source and making good choices. Eat grass-fed, antibiotic-free beef (these two things virtually guarantee you're not supporting the concentrated feedlots) and free range chicken. Eat non-GMO vegetables that are locally grown and in season. It's about supporting the right suppliers, which thankfully exist for all parts of the omnivore spectrum.

I just watched "Food, Inc" this weekend, it's a very well made documentary. Much more evidence-based and non-preachy than I expected.

They talk at length about what they call 'veggie libel laws' and other laws introduced by food producer lobbies that limit free speech and surveillance about food productions. There's a long history of this, unfortunately it's nothing new.

If you have amazon prime, you can watch it for free: http://www.amazon.com/Food-Inc/dp/B002VRZEYM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=U...

Learndot – Vancouver, BC, Canada or San Francisco, CA, USA http://www.learndot.com/ Full-time, Intern, or Remote (North America)

Learndot builds beautiful learning centers for organizations. We exist to make the world a smarter place. Learndot is leading a sea change in how learning for organizations is created, comparable to the change from waterfall to agile software development.

We are alumni of the GrowLab accelerator in Vancouver. We sell to many happy businesses that love us (Get Satisfaction, Zirtual among them), make money and are growing very quickly.

Both founders are developers and we care about creating great work environments, providing flexibility and autonomy, and helping everyone continuously become better at their craft. We are currently a team of five fulltime. Core technologies: Client-side Javascript (we use Sproutcore), Scala (all server-side code).

To apply email prlambert@learndot.com with [HN] in the subject line. Open positions:

1) App and Web Designer. We are looking for a talented visual designer who wants to help us build smart and beautiful applications for web and mobile. Time would be split around 70%/30% between design on our core app and design for our website & marketing pages. You would work closely with our Chief Product Officer to create solutions for user needs, with your end product being photoshop or keynote exports for our dev team.

2) Front-End (JS) or Full Stack Engineer (JS + Scala). We are looking for a great javascript developer who will work directly with our CTO and Designer in building our core application across multiple devices. Learndot is a thick-client JS app using Sproutcore. Our backend API is written in Scala. The ability or desire to work in Scala is a bonus, but our immediate needs are on the JS-side.

Worth noting, we actually did that as well. I believe we got 7-8 conversions on launch day from the ML.

Built from ~6 months of email capture on the landing page + 4 months of active customer discovery interviews.

Sorry about the confusion. When I say I will pay $60 for a warm lead, that's assuming a number of them will not convert. Our LTV is in the 1000s, but another part of the cost of acquisition is the time on the phone to close the deal.

It's more like this: - We'll pay $300 bucks for 5 warm leads to hand off to sales. - Sales will work the leads to close, spending another $200 of time. One of them will close. - We'll get a customer with a LTV of greater than $2000, for $500. LTV >= 4x total CAC.

In valuing the leads from TechCrunch, it's a mistake to assume they'll all close (in which case their value is beyond $5520), we have to value what they actually are: potential. We have to discount the risk. That value, is about $60, so all 22 are worth $1320.

I like the optimism though. :)

And you're right it's not a great payoff overall. ~$3000 isn't a great ROI for the effort that went into the launch. There were other channels as well beyond HN and TC, but I wanted to keep the story focused on these two.

We've been testing more channels since and there's lot of data there as well and so, so much more to learn. Looking forward to your post!

Numbers are always trustworthy if they're accurate. You just need to right context to interpret them in. These numbers are straight from Google Analytics, and you are correct that one was a direct link and the other was via TC. I say this in the article.

This is a real world scenario. Many people ask how much traffic we got from being on TechCrunch. This is just data, take it as you want. I do my best to explain the main caveats, including the one you pointed out. There are many.

Thanks, fixed.

Good catch, thanks.

Another great solution that doesn't involved changing anything in how you run your blog (or even moving off of Dreamhost), is a front-end cache like http://www.fastly.com/.

It's really affordable for personal sites, and for static sites like yours you'll be getting 98%+ cache hits – almost no traffic will ever hit your Dreamhost box, it will all come from their highly optimized Varnish caches around the world.

Learndot's blog is hosted on a ec2 small instance fronted by fastly, our launch article was on HN/Techcrunch/etc... simultenously and we never went over 10% cpu.

tl;dr: Use fastly.

...5 minutes ago

"Paul, come look at this cool new recipe website. This is awesome. It's like a really good recipe sharing site" - Sonia (she points to Punchfork on her screen).

"Oh, I just saw on HN it got acquired by Pinterest." - me

"Wait what?" (Sonia reads the announcement) "'we will soon be retiring the Punchfork site, API and mobile apps'..." What the? I just found this site and now it's gone??"

"Yup." - me

Maybe congratz to the founders who got an early exit, but it seems like another unfortunate case of users getting the short end of the stick.

Maybe we need better business models. Maybe Sonia would have paid $10/month for Punchfork. Who knows. I paid for Sparrow, and that didn't seem to help.

Sigh.

Learndot – Vancouver, BC, Canada or San Francisco, CA

http://www.learndot.com/

Full-time, Intern, or Remote.

Learndot builds beautiful learning centers for organizations. Our goal is to help make the world a smarter place. We've been creating learning technology for 3 years, are alumni of the GrowLab accelerator in Vancouver, and were recently profiled by TechCrunch as an up and coming player to watch. Our business model is SaaS, we are B2B, are revenue-focused, and growing very quickly.

Both founders are developers and we care about creating great work environments, providing flexibility and autonomy, and helping everyone grow to continuously become better at their craft. We are currently a team of five fulltime.

Core technologies: Client-side Javascript (we use Sproutcore), Scala (all server-side code).

To apply email prlambert@learndot.com with [HN] in the subject line. Open positions:

1) Lead Quality Assurance Engineer. We are making our first QA hire. looking for someone who can grow to lead a QA team, can cultive a processes for quality throughout the entire development pipeline, is exciting about continuous deployment, and can build the infrastructure for high-quality automated and manual testing procedures.

2) Front-End (JS) or Full Stack Engineer (JS + Scala). We are looking for a great javascript developer who will work directly with our CTO and Designer in building our core application across multiple devices. Learndot is a thick-client JS app using Sproutcore. Our backend API is written in Scala. The ability or desire to work in Scala is a bonus, but our immediate needs are on the JS-side.

Thanks Micah. The final price was greater than 1k and less than 5k.

[meta: HN is a great critic, the two biggest issues we had before pulling the trigger was this one and what pud pointed out :)]

This was a tough call. We thought it was a clever design that tied together the name mark and the logo. In the post I mentioned I printed it out and got people on the street to read it – that was specifically because some people found the 'r' hard to read!

If it turns out to be an issue for a lot of people, we'll revisit.

Fair enough - usually I just say "Learndot, dee oh tee" and it's no problem. Though I agree it's not perfect. The other factors balanced it out (spellability, MVP-ness and so forth).

You're right, naming is hard.

Hey pud, OP here.

The thing is, we never say the domain. We say the name of the company. I totally agree that "Learn dot dot com" is confusing. But "Learn dot" isn't. Vast majority of people use Google to find things on the web (that was the theory). Last couple weeks of trying it out has backed that up.

Repost of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4098430

Here's where he discussed the metrics around last time it hit #1 here: http://rigoneri.com/post/25804668500

Yes, I saw Vic interviewed by Guy Kawasaki at SXSW this year and he basically said exactly this. He was counting active users as people who had plus accounts, were logged in, and were using any product with a plus/social component, i.e search. By this metric, I'm an 'active user' (using their search engine) despite having not visited G+ in over 6 months.

> There is not a single other industry I can say that about, certainly not one that comes to mind so quickly.

Airlines?

> contemptible customer support

IMHO better than Google's dogmatic avoidance of any kind of customer support.

The person (Bruno) replying on behalf of Droplr is "in charge of the whole server-side circus — API server, system administration, web app backend —, the SDK libraries for third-party clients, the Windows app and the iOS app." http://biasedbit.com/about/

(I realize there is a risk of sending a mob by linking to his personal page, but I think there is evidence he is indeed "intelligent" and simply misunderstood this particular piece of the puzzle. He just need a bit more humility.)

Found through Techvibes: http://www.techvibes.com/blog/confirmed-salesforce-just-boug...

And here's the TechCrunch article: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09/salesforce-com-reported-to-...

People seem to realize this once a year... http://www.televisionsky.org/2010/04/tech-startups-vs-rock-b... http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/04/nice-analogy.html

Haven't heard much from the US startup visa movement in awhile, anyone know what's the current status of the bill and can provide some insight into its likelihood of becoming law?

Matygo (http://start.matygo.com/careers/) - Vancouver, BC, Canada

Come work on the most ambitious project of your life. Matygo is building the flipped classroom platform. We enable any person, school, or college to deliver provably better learning at scale by combining decades of research and the techniques Khan Academy and Udacity have popularized into an accessible web platform. The goal is to move forward how education is delivered around the world.

Having just closed a seed round with some top investors, we are looking to expand our founding team with first hires in Software Engineering and UI/UX design.

Core technologies: Scala, Sproutcore (and Ember.js)

We care a lot about team culture, great compensation, and inspiring workplaces. Learn more and see our openings: http://start.matygo.com/careers/

No remotes unless you are in San Francisco (we travel to SF quite often). Feel free to ping me directly with any questions: paul@matygo.com

"features interactive instruction, online laboratories and student-to-student and student-to-professor communication"

Gerald Sussman is one of the professors (coauthor of SICP and father of Scheme). If the first statement is true, this is quite an opportunity.

I would pay for this provided it was reliable and relatively cheap. $1/cron, for e.g.

$74/hour for contractors?? That seems incredibly low, especially in contrast with the 100K+ for employees.

Could someone please post a screenshot for those of us outside the US?