pitdesi

I still haven't found a solution better than winamp with advanced crossfading output (which was last updated in 2002) to DJ a party... I usually bust out my 5-year old PC because nothing beats the crossfader of winamp (coupled with the awesome keyboard shortcuts - the ability to search for anything in the ID3 tags and enqueue the song via keyboard is so useful for a DJ)

Anyone have a better solution?

Amazing reading here how many people still use the old versions of winamp... It's pretty much the only thing I use my PC's for.

If you want some justification, read this http://www.shopify.com/blog/6058268-how-pinterest-drives-eco...

TL;DR - Pinterest drives as much ecommerce traffic as twitter with significantly more purchase intent

No they don't. You misunderstood what acquisition-related costs means. Acquisition related costs are costs related to acquiring another company, not acquiring a customer. It is completely standard practice to treat one-time costs like that differently.

Actually most companies and ALL analysts use non-GAAP numbers (search for your favorite company + non-gaap https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&#...)... it reflects the true nature of the business. They are also referred to as pro-forma numbers. There isn't any funny business going on here. It is good that we have GAAP so you can compare apples to apples in different industries but for a further breakdown non-GAAP numbers are very useful to an analyst.

There needs to be some sort of standard for citing other peoples work, sort of like an updated Chicago Manual of Style (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation#Citation_styles) for online publications. These days we have all these content mills that put out very little original work... I don't know what the proper method should be, how much work you can take etc. Also remember this - The New York Times spent weeks writing an article about how Wal-mart and Target learn your secrets and then Forbes wrote a knock-off that stole a bunch of their traffic. http://nickoneill.com/how-fortune-stole-a-new-york-times-art...

This also reminds me that as much as possible we should try to link to the original source on HackerNews, it's in the guidelines! (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Back in July, I spent a lot of time putting together an infographic for FeeFighters on the tech boom and bubble (http://feefighters.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/tech-...). We got links back from tons of magazines, including Forbes, Mashable, Fast Company, etc. Many of them didn't link to either us or KissMetrics (our partner who did the design work), but most complied after sending an email or tweet. One place, Bostinno - refused to link to us at all, despite multiple tweets and emails to them, for some reason deciding to credit Mashable: http://bostinno.com/2011/07/13/are-we-in-a-tech-boom-or-bubb... Massholes.

In a world of short attention spans, I don't want to listen to a podcast, and I doubt the podcast would have skyrocketed up the HN page.

Increasingly, smaller articles about other articles get much more traffic than the original source. One such example is the well-researched NYT article about how companies learn your secrets, and then the Forbes article that cut the crap and got to the real shocker of the story and got more pageviews (possibly $$$) http://nickoneill.com/how-fortune-stole-a-new-york-times-art...

This is a fantastic idea. I could see myself using this thing as a consumer too (ie not just for hacker stuff). May have much broader appeal than something just for hackers. Monetization should be fairly straightforward... You know what apps people have, sell very targeted ads for new stuff, sort of like a mint. Seems like a potential gold mine once you get to scale.

You should build something that searches through my gmail for common bills though, I don't want to go through the process of sending you all my bills

Katherine (CEO) on not getting into YC: http://katherinehague.com/post/18806809604/what-happens-afte...

Is there a startup opportunity for an identity verification service whereby you do the ID verification once and then each service that wants to use it gets charged a smaller amount?

Example: consumer goes to idverificationsite.com, registers there for free- they ask out of wallet questions to verify identity, potentially do a minimal background check too.

You then use this login with Yelp, AirBnB, Getaround, etc.

Yelp, Getaround, Airbnb pay idverificationsite.com some small amount per verified person. Removes some of the friction of ID verification/spreads cost around.

Sidenote: the BBB is the worst offender of these protection rackets - http://feefighters.com/blog/bbb-accreditation/

Also - I've just decided to start posting reviews to Google rather than Yelp, they lost me as a product after reading this thread.

Dave is attentive and useful as an investor, even with 250 investments to date. He's created a brand for himself and 500 that is awesome to be a part of. It's great to be a part of the 500 family/mafia and I encourage anyone who has the opportunity to do so to go for it.

As for 500s strategy, they have money for follow-on investments. They were in our convertible note but then doubled-down in our seed round. They invest 50k in each of their accelerator companies but also do follow-on in the ones that show the most promise. The strategy makes sense to me... too early to tell because none of the exits have been smashing home runs, but I certainly expect some of them to have huge returns.

Relevant: interesting HNsearch: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=gdrive&...

I like that the first one is Drew's YC app from 5 years ago. And then: GDrive is here! in august 2007

This is an interesting story of why it was killed originally: http://allthingsd.com/20110425/how-google-killed-gdrive-and-...

Hey guys - thanks to HN folks for your support over the past couple of years. We owe no small part of our success to the community here - not just in getting you guys to use our products, but lots of other stuff that has helped our business along the way.

We're super thrilled to be a part of the Groupon team, it has been a great outcome for everyone.

I was going to answer the questions that I could but Thomas has answered all of them accurately for me anyway.

Related: Great comment in an avc post- http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/04/finding-and-buying-a-domain-...

I'll repost the good part here, since it isn't attributed anyway:

The Art Of Negotiating A Domain Name Purchase

I see so much bad advice about how to approach someone to buy their domain... "contact them and say I see you're not using xxxxx.com, I have a little project I'd like to use it for... would you be willing to let it go?" etc. etc. etc. HORRIBLE ADVICE.

People that are sitting on domain names don't keep paying the registration fees every year for fun, even if they aren't using the name. They know it has value. So don't insult their intelligence making them think they should do you a favor by letting you have their unused domain.

Many Domain Owners Think They're Sitting On A Lottery Ticket

Many domain owners think that one day someone is going to come along and give them millions for their .Com no matter what it is. The fact is, domains are only worth what someone is ready to hand you a check for. (A tip to all you wannabe speculators.) I've seen many GREAT domains never get sold, so always keep that in mind. Anyway, because domain owners have this thinking, they are very reluctant to NAME A PRICE. So forcing them to start by naming a price isn't something they want to do, because they're hoping YOU offer some ridiculously high price that they will then counter to go much higher.

Because of this, you MUST start out on first contact with an offer (more on this in a second). The approach of "would you be willing to sell xxxxx.com? If so, how much?" isn't going to cut it; one of the main reasons is that domain owners of decent domains get TONS of emails all the time asking them that, and when they've replied in the past with a price or try to start negotiations so many people are only willing to pay $100 or some insulting price.

So what do most domain owners do? IGNORE YOU. That's right. So if you've ever contacted a domain owner after looking them up with a Whois search and they didn't reply, it's not because they didn't your email (which makes you think that follow-up fax or phone call will do the trick; HINT: it won't.) It's because they think you're like everyone else that thinks they can buy the domain for $100 or so.

Here's how you get their attention and get the ball rolling...

Rule #1: You must start out by making an offer in your initial email.

Rule #2: This offer must be high enough to get their attention and make them at least THINK.

NOTE: Rule #2's amount will depend on how great the domain is.

The two magic price points I have found that work the best (they depend on how valuable the domain is) is either $1,000 or $2,500.

If it's a great domain then $5K-$10K is usually the starting point. These amounts are enough to get anyone's attention. I've bought many $100K+ value domains for $15K-$20K by starting with a $5K or $7K offer.

By starting with at least something that gets their attention they will take you seriously. This is the first step or you have no chance to make a deal.

In most cases for decent 2 words domains, the $1K to $2.5K opener works best.

* TIP: Always know your seller if possible. Do a Whois on who owns the domain, visit the domain in their email address or do some Google searches, etc. You'll often find a struggling Web designer is sitting on a great domain. $1,000 cash to that person is a lot of money. So this also goes into the process of deciding what to open the offer with.

The key here is not to insult someone with a lowball offer, but offer enough to make them know you're a serious buyer.

So here's a sample initial contact email to send... (and I'll explain the rest of the language I use)...

Subject Line: Whatever.com ($2,500?)

Hi,

I see you are the owner of Whatever.com. I'm in the process of trying to find a domain name for a client I am building a web site for and think your name could be a good fit. I am contacting different domain owners as we have it in the budget to buy a cool name and Whatever.com is on the list we came up with.

Would you be interested in selling it for $2,500?

Let me know and I can have the funds wired to you next day or PayPal'd to you. Just let me know your PayPal address.

Thanks for your time.

-YOUR NAME -------------------------

Let's breakdown why I used that language...

1. You've positioned yourself as not the future 'owner' of the domain. You're just managing a budget for a project. This helps because as they will usually counter with a higher amount, you'll play the "sorry, I just don't have it in the budget to go that high" to work towards a price you want. You'll also be able to play the "let me see if the client can approve a budget increase to accommodate that price" etc. etc. This also allows you to play Good Cop, Bad Cop in a way. You're just someone trying to get the deal done to do your job (build the site). You're also presenting yourself as someone LESS EMOTIONALLY INVESTED IN THE NAME -- which will potentially keep the price down. (Trust me, it works very well.)

2. You mention that you're contacting several domain owners (i.e. making multiple offers). You're playing up SCARCITY, one of the most powerful emotions when it comes to sales. For all this person knows they could reply and say "okay, I'll sell it" but you may come back and say, "sorry someone replied to our email first and now we have a domain."

3. By closing with the "we'll pay you right away" it makes the offer more REAL. Many of these domain owners get offers that people back out of and have no intention to actually pay. And you're also ASSUMING THE SALE by saying, "what's your PayPal address?" :-)

Again, all of these things are very, very powerful and I have tweaked this initial contact email over the years.

ADDITIONAL TIPS

Let's say you initially offer $2,500 on a great name and the owner counters with, "I couldn't sell it for that, I've had higher offers. I would never sell it for anything less than $10K."

FIrst, you must IGNORE anything they say. You'll get the "I've turned down higher offers" response a lot. In the example response about $10K above, unless you would love to have it for $10K, just reply with something like this... "While I do think your name is possibly worth $10K to someone, we just don't have the budget for that much, sorry. I could probably get something more like $5K-$7K approved, but even that's pushing it. Anyway, thanks for your time."

That's it. Cut them off. Trust me, they'll come back to you 90% of the time. Sometimes you just have to be a little PATIENT and you'll save a fortune. Remember to always play up the SCARCITY. "That's just too much for our budget... looks like we'll just go with an alternative name that we've been negotiating for a lot less, even though we preferred your name. Thanks for your time and at least trying to work something out." That's NOT what they want to read from you. ;-)

There are THOUSANDS of amazing domain deals out there waiting to happen. I, personally, buy domains all the time this way. In fact, this is probably a good time to negotiate some deals as many people need the cash more than in recent years.

FINAL TIP: It's not uncommon to settle on a final price that is 30% of what their original asking price was. Keep that in mind as a general rule of thumb. I've had many deals for great names where someone "really wanted $60,000" and we closed the sale around $20K.

We've found that candidates who submit a dynamic resume are good because

1) it shows personality

2) it shows initiative

and 3) a willing to think outside the box, all of which we value.

Obviously the content of the resume has to be great and everything else has to line up too, but this gets you a lot of facetime that not everyone gets. We were looking for a UI guy and got a ton of interest from folks (thanks HN!), but one applicant stood out to us because he went through the effort of making a site focused on getting the job with us (http://jaredhardy.com/fee-fighter/). We hired him.

The results are disappointing to analysts, but surprisingly good to me. I read this as "Groupon cuts marketing expense by 25%, manages to triple revenue (YOY) this quarter." They are in MUCH better shape than LivingSocial (lost $558mil on revenues of $245mil in 2011 http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/livingsocial-...)

Groupon had $507 million in revenues this QUARTER, and lost $43 million. My guess is that if they wanted to lower expenses with their current model, they could cut the writing staff pretty significantly. From talking to friends there, at the moment the writers write 5 deals per day... They could easily do some huffpo style shit and cut that staff in half. They also are planning to get in deeper with their merchants... remains to be seen how it goes, but will be interesting.

(edited to add YOY - thanks for the correction vladd)

FeeFighters

INTERN OR FULLTIME

Rails Developers or Intern (Chicago or Remote) and a Marketing Intern (Chicago only)

http://feefighters.com

Looking for a Rails developer. We’re a startup working like mad to disrupt a multi-billion dollar financial industry and cut out tens of thousands of inefficient middle-men. Customers include Fog Creek/Stack Exchange, Photojojo, Weebly, Kickstarter, Make a Wish Foundation, tons of awesome startups, and even some public companies! And... we're just getting started.

We recently launched a new product called Samurai into public beta. (http://samurai.feefighters.com) It's an all-in-one all-in-one solution for taking payments online. It has come out of the gate swinging - there is a ton of pent-up demand to fix this industry and we're excited at how many people have been interested in our new product. We have a few more AWESOME tricks up our sleeve and need developers to help build them out!

We have passionate users, awesome investors and partners, and products that our customers love. We enjoy a very fun and stimulating work environment in our new office in River North. Much of the Samurai dev team was early on in another payments startup that grew to be a $2Billion company (including the CIO of that company). Here are bios of some folks that you'll be working with: https://samurai.feefighters.com/about We're still finishing up our job description - but here's a start. http://feefighters.com/jobs/rails-ninja-developer/

Email josh at feefighters with your interest. Also looking for a marketing intern to help us with social media and PR. Lots of fun stuff! http://feefighters.com/jobs/kickass-marketing-intern/

This analysis is interesting but deeply flawed, as you're just using one variable. I don't think anyone would refer to OC as the most hipster place in America.

Weather is a huge missing component. Another is hilliness/other bike-friendliness (bike lanes, etc). The top 12 cities in the analysis are warm-weather cities (mostly California/Hawaii).

For example, no-one is buying bikes in Chicago at the moment, because it's freaking cold. But there are likely many more fixed-gear bikes here than almost anywhere else (flat, bike-friendly city with lots of hipsters). Portland is capital of hipsterdom - well atleast until Pittsburgh takes over (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/arts-post/post/portlandi...) but it's cold there right now so people aren't selling their bikes.

Completely agree with you, except for one point... Ron Paul (a republican candidate for president) wants to abolish the TSA: http://thehill.com/blogs/transportation-report/tsa/188271-ro...

This is not a place for political discussion (so please don't make it one, people!), but he certainly qualifies as a career politician, having been in congress 35 years.

EDIT: lots of downvotes... I'm just stating a fact in response to the DrJ's statement... what is the cause for your downvoting?

This is pretty smart recruiting by livingsocial, certainly one way to bridge the talent shortfall, but i wonder what happens if someone wants to leave? Will be interesting to see how it all plays out

Another similar program but without the lock-in is Code Academy (http://codeacademy.org) in Chicago. It is different than hungry academy in that you pay up front ($6k) but my understanding is that most of their students are going to be offered a job with Groupon (where it is hosted) or another LightBank company, but under no obligation to do it. I think some of the current students might be starting their own companies instead.

Feefighters did a guest lecture, and i know theyve had a bunch of other a-list guest speakers, including dhh and harper (cto for obama). I met some of the students at an hn meetup, and they were pretty awesome, motivated and bright.

Pretty cool that both of these exist though, I think they'll continue to grow. There are a lot of people who didnt do comp sci in school and don't want to do it on their own

After experiments on many other places, I'd suggest that best place to find developers (the kind our startup wants, anyway) is this site. On the 1st of the month, a bot named whoishiring (http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring) posts "who is hiring?" and "looking for freelancers" posts in which I put my companies (http://feefighters.com) needs.

Posting on there has led to many good candidates for us. Also check out angelist jobs if you haven't. Both of these methods are free and have led to good candidates for us.

FYI this is a secondary purchase (ie it was not an investment in twitter directly, but rather he purchased shares from other investors): http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/12/19/saudi-prince-deal-...

There's a hazy line, but it gratifies my intellectual curiosity (as someone who is relatively ignorant of the subject) so I submitted it.

From: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What to Submit: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

I started a couple of profitable small businesses while working a ton of hours management consulting, including a headphone website where I used all my vacation to travel to China to get my products manufactured cheaper. I was hoping to do a few things on the side until it made sense to quit my day job, but I found it never made sense to quit my day job.

More incredibly to me is FeeFighters (http://feefighters.com) CEO Sean was

1) Raising a VC round

2) Having his first kid

and 3) Working full-time at BCG

All at the same time (May 2010) Any one of those are enough to make you go crazy, but he managed all 3. (note: FeeFighters is not profitable)

He also previously started http://tss-radio.com and bootstrapped it to a spot on the inc 500 list, all on the side while working at a VC firm (Longworth) and then while at BCG (management consulting).

FeeFighters

INTERN OR FULLTIME

Rails Developers or Intern (Chicago or Remote) and a Marketing Intern (Chicago only)

http://feefighters.com

Looking for a Rails developer. We’re a startup working like mad to disrupt a multi-billion dollar financial industry and cut out tens of thousands of inefficient middle-men. Customers include Fog Creek/Stack Exchange, Photojojo, Weebly, Kickstarter, Make a Wish Foundation, tons of awesome startups, and even some public companies! And... we're just getting started.

We recently launched a new product called Samurai into public beta. (http://samurai.feefighters.com) It's an all-in-one all-in-one solution for taking payments online. It has come out of the gate swinging - there is a ton of pent-up demand to fix this industry and we're excited at how many people have been interested in our new product. We have a few more tricks up our sleeve and need developers to help build them out!

We have passionate users, awesome investors and partners, and products that our customers love. We pay ourselves decent salaries, are generous with equity and we enjoy a very fun and stimulating work environment. Much of the Samurai dev team was early on in another payments startup that grew to be a $2Billion company (including the CIO of that company). Here are bios of some folks that you'll be working with: https://samurai.feefighters.com/about We're still finishing up our job description - but here's a start. http://feefighters.com/jobs/rails-ninja-developer/

Email josh at feefighters with your interest.

Also looking for a marketing intern to help us with social media and PR. Lots of fun stuff! http://feefighters.com/jobs/kickass-marketing-intern/

Yup. Further complicating things, ACH isn't truly settled for a 6 months! ACH's can be charged back for 180 days and there is no adjudication process, like with credit cards. If an ACH gets charged back, you lose the money, that's it.

The other major complication with ACH is that most Americans use credit cards for the credit (70% hold a balance). That is something that won't be solved. Others like the benefit of rewards (miles, dollars, whatever). To get payers on board, you need credit, rewards, and exclusivity (i.e. is this the only payment method available at somewhere where I want to shop). The last 2 meaningful companies were paypal and discover card. PayPal had millions of Ebay sellers using PayPal AND they initially paid people to become members. Discover card started the cashback movement and was the only electronic payment option at Sears (largest retailer in the world at the time).

More details and discussion in a previous article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3238880

ACH's are essentially free - there are some costs but Dwolla is part-owned by a credit union which probably helps lower the costs. They have major fraud-related costs, but given that fraud under $10 should be very small, their costs aren't much

Another data point... This is a snapshot of our (http://feefighters.com) google analytics visitors page for this year (~70k visits), filtered for news.ycombinator.com: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3446069/Screenshots/bc.png

US: 65%, CA: 7.4%, UK: 6.1%, Germany: 2.2%, Australia: 2.1%, India: 1.7%, Netherlands: 1%, France: 1%

Drilling down within the US: New York: 8.8%, SF: 8.6%, Chicago: 4.6%, Seattle: 2.5%, Austin, LA, Mt View: 2%, Boston: 1.5%, Palo Alto: 1.4%, Portland: 1.3%, Cambridge: 1.3%

Drilling down in the bay: SF 48% Mt View 11% PA 8% Sunnyvale 6% San Jose 5% Berkeley 4% Oakland 4% San Mateo 3% Santa Monica 3% Santa Clara 3% Stanford 2% Cupertino 2% Redwood City 2% Emeryville 1% Fremont 1% Menlo Park 1%

Which reminds me - a good way I like to check what the tech-iness of a city is to look at these stats, search for it in quora/reddit/hnsearch and take a look at the number of hits.

Caveats: Our site is currently tailored towards the US and Canadian markets and generally gets posted to HN during US waking hours.

If you want this report for your site: Create a custom report in GA that looks like this http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3446069/Screenshots/bd.png And drill into news.ycombinator.com

Much of this is not true. This is in an occupy subreddit so be careful what you see in comments and what gets upvoted...

One thing that he doesn't make clear: hedge fund fees are 2% annual management fee PLUS 20% of any upside (very similar to VC's)

After fees, index funds often perform better than hedge funds: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/business/yourmoney/04stra....

Also - relevant is this long bet: http://longbets.org/362/

“Over a ten-year period commencing on January 1, 2008, and ending on December 31, 2017, the S & P 500 will outperform a portfolio of funds of hedge funds, when performance is measured on a basis net of fees, costs and expenses.” PREDICTOR Warren Buffett

This article does an absolutely terrible job describing work "Inside McKinsey" and seems to be more of a puff-piece for the firm than anything else.

If you are interested in what management consulting is or looking for an interesting read (the background is fascinating and unexpectedly entertaining), I highly recommend the book Lords of Strategy referenced in the article. Here's the WSJ review which gives a good summary: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870486930457510... and a BW interview of Kiechel: http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/feb2010/ca20100...

The origins of management consulting are actually in Frederick Winslow Taylor's work around scientific management, using a stopwatch to cut excess labor on railroads... you could call it hacking labor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management

I worked at BCG before coming to FeeFighters, as did our CEO. My 2 roommates worked at McKinsey and Bain, so I have a pretty good perspective on the industry. This article goes way overboard on the prestige associated with working at McKinsey - noone at my school chose an offer from McKinsey if they had one with BCG or Bain (more of a culture/fit decision than anything else at that point). I worked with multiple Rhodes and Baker scholars at BCG... but you don't get to 10,000 employees only hiring the smartest guys in the room. People are generally VERY smart, but you also have partners where you wonder how they got there. There are a few different types of partners... the rainmakers (they can sell), the teachers (awesome to work with, they teach junior people a lot), and the ones that do amazing client work. I hated working for rainmakers.

Working in consulting can be an awesome time... at times, you get to do strategy work that decides how billions of dollars will be deployed (that is when you do pure strategy work). But at other times, you're spending days building gantt charts deciding who will manage a particular document in a new organization (most of the work these firms do now - they had a desire to grow, so they take on shitty operational things that they aren't well suited to, to create an "ongoing relationship" with clients). As for recycling stuff, sure - you are paid for your expertise and part of that expertise was learned at your competitors. It is no different from hiring anyone from a competitor, which happens all the time, even at junior levels. There is a huge chinese wall where you can't get information from someone who serves or has served a competitor.

BTW - there are certainly skills that transfer well from the consulting world to startups... I wrote about some of them (sub consulting for MBA) http://feefighters.com/blog/should-you-hire-mbas-at-your-sta...

This is an interesting business model. I like it, but am interested to see how you will commit people to paying you $100/month for the next 5 years unless structuring it as a loan (which has it's own headaches)

For those interested in something similar, my understanding is that Code Academy (Different than YC startup codecademy) http://codeacademy.org in Chicago is phenomenal. I met a bunch of their students at the HN meetup in Chicago last week and they were raving about it. From what I understand, the 35 folks in their current batch are going to have multiple job offers, and DHH is a huge supporter, so much so that he's taught a class.

We get a lot of crap email address signups at http://feefighters.com We do a little bit of filtering to check that the email address is legit, but let you get by anyway (with an additional click) if it isn't... we have a 1-click unsubscribe but this is making me rethink whether we should let fake email addresses through at all.

We recently got this email from Fake.com

Hello

We own the domain fake.com, and from time to time some moron out there in the world-wide-waste-of-time uses our name to try and sign up for something...

Not just that, there’s also a whole slew of dozy IT people who test links by doing the same thing without doing a whois check first!

Whichever it is, could you please delete this account?

Thanks [redacted]

fake landscapes - the artificial plant company http://www.fake.com*

Somehow I don't think this has the desired effect... that's a tough domain name for this sort of thing, feel sorry for the guy but not much we can do.