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pmoorcraft

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I launched Tech Talks and Books (www.ttbooks.io) about three weeks and just got my first 600 subscribers. It's similar to product hunt but for book and videos about tech and the community of submitters is more restricted than PH.

I'd like to discuss two things:

1- Signal vs Noise in online communities: Since you've been heavily involved in Reddit (Sam), I'd like to know how what your opinion in curating content vs. having an algorithm sift through the noise. We see companies like netflix and ph (allegedly?) combining big data with human curation and having a lot of success, so my question is: Should online communities invest in curation or big data? Is there a trend towards one or the other?

2- Monetisation: I'm having a hard time monetising this community. Since I'm looking to bootstrap it, its crucial that I get monetisation right so I was wondering if you had any tips on monetising communities?

Keep Your Money 12 years ago

I understand the concept of the app and can definitely see its value. However, I'm not a big of a fan of the way it is described in this blog post.

From my personal experience using mint, I usually find that the big spends are the ones that really cause a dent on my monthly budgets and honestly, from a personal finance point of view, don't see much value in tracking only the small day-to-day savings. It is necessary to have a look at the big picture to contextualize the spending.

I do feel like keep is probably a good tool for staying motivated while budgeting and getting an instant reward for something that usually doesn't give an instant reward, but even so the effort necessary to manually input every single dollar I save into the app just seems like such a commitment. To me, keep would be really helpful as a complement to the services that do connect to my bank account (in my case mint), to help me decide wether I can have the coffee I like such much or if I should stick to the free coffee available in my office.

Keep Your Money 12 years ago

I hate to be that guy, but I must admit that there are a couple of things that me put off about this app:

Firstly, I completely disagree with this notion that young adults should be cutting off in coffees and cocktails every so often so that they can buy more expensive stuff in the long run. If incurring in these small expenditures every once in a while derives enough value for you to feel that you are leading a satisfactory lifestyle and as a result make you steer away from the big, impulsive spends (such as cars and headphones), then why not spend the extra dollar on a coffee? Even if you it every single day, at the end of the month you'll only have spent 30$ extra. If you did that every day for 2 years, you'd still only have spent an extra 730$, which is way cheaper than buying a new car. The goal for young adults should be financial independence, not to be able to spend large amounts of money in dispensable goods.

Secondly, I don't see how the fact that the app "doesn’t connect to your bank account or show depressing red info graphics". After putting in so much effort in reducing my spending, why should I have to manually input every dollar I spend into the app?