HN user

rksprst

551 karma

Co-Founder at [Stealth] Travel Startup Co-Founder at SocialBlaze, Acquired in June 2011

http://twitter.com/alexkaminski http://www.linkedin.com/in/alexkaminski http://www.alexkaminski.org

Contact: alex[dot]kaminski[::at::]gmail.com

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techcrunch.com 14y ago

LinkedIn Buys Real-Time, Hosted Search Startup IndexTank

rksprst
77pts45
flippa.com 15y ago

Tell HN: I put my startup up for sale. Enterprise-grade social media management

rksprst
9pts13
www.techdirt.com 15y ago

Report Shows Radiation Levels On TSA Scanners 10 Times Higher Than Promised

rksprst
2pts0
www.mercurynews.com 15y ago

In setback, Iran to unload fuel from nuclear plant

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2pts0
www.socialblazeapp.com 15y ago

Tell HN: Enterprise Grade Social Media Management, Now Free

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4pts1
news.harvard.edu 15y ago

Cancer vaccine success - first to eliminate tumors in mice

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6pts0
www.socialblazeapp.com 15y ago

Measuring Social Media: How does @scobleizer measure up?

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2pts1
techcrunch.com 15y ago

Sendible Attack May Have Uncovered A Big Facebook Security Flaw.

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2pts1
news.ycombinator.com 15y ago

Ask HN: A good list of bots/crawlers ip addresses?

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2pts2
upsidedownlabs.com 15y ago

Tell HN: How we optimized our sales funnel using customer feedback

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1pts0
www.popfeedback.com 15y ago

ASK HN: Review My Startup: PopFeedback - learn about your customers

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11pts24
upsidedownlabs.com 15y ago

A fatal flaw of the lean startup model: not focusing enough on the market forces

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2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 15y ago

Ask HN: Good alternatives to ZenDesk? Something free for bootstrapped startups?

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3pts1
upsidedownlabs.com 15y ago

Why nobody is buying your product: startup founder's dilemma & behavioral change

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2pts0
blog.hootsuite.com 15y ago

HootSuite Announces Premium Plans (goes freemium)

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2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

Ask HN: Are there any competitors to KissInsights?

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4pts0
news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

Ask HN: What was the website that lets you create a "step-by-step" guide?

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4pts7
news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

Tell HN: Great new co-working space in LA: CoLoft + Lean Startups Meetup tonight

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1pts1
blog.recurly.com 16y ago

Pricing Response from the Recurly CEO

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2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

Ask HN: What day to launch, how to get press coverage?

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2pts1
news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

Ask HN: How many days in advance to contact bloggers before launch?

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6pts1
news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

Ask HN: Feedback and beta test my startup, SocialBlaze

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9pts6
www.assistly.com 16y ago

Assistly Comes Out Of Stealth: New support platform

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3pts2
news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

Ask YC: Looking for a freelance Microsoft Office Developer for a small gig?

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2pts2
news.ycombinator.com 17y ago

Ask YC: How do I admin my own (windows) server?

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1pts4
news.ycombinator.com 17y ago

Ask YC: Can you use QuickBooks to manage a software/iphone dev business?

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6pts7
alexkaminski.org 17y ago

We Must Look to the Future (and colonize space)

rksprst
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 17y ago

Ask YC: I'm looking to outsource an iPhone app, where do I find companies?

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1pts1
www.youtube.com 17y ago

The Real Pictures in Gaza

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2pts1
news.ycombinator.com 17y ago

Ask YC: Is there a chart for iphone sales based on the price?

rksprst
7pts2

I don't think your example works - when a valuable item is broken beyond repair that is a fact (based on known physics / science). If I snap a ruler into two pieces I know there is no way to bring it back to the state it was originally in - a single piece. We can glue it back and use other mechanisms but it won't be exactly the same - we know this definitively. The same cannot be said about mental illness.

We do not have the knowledge and science to make such a statement about mental illness. In fact, medical science and research shows the opposite, that we are learning more and getting better at treating mental illness.

Mental illness is usually not a downhill spiral to death, but a roller coaster that you can jump out of. Your perception of being beyond repair depends where on the roller coaster you are.

You're right physicians as a rule generally dislike software like that (partly because of their egos and distrust of software and partly because of job security). There are so many edge cases and so many examples physicians could give you of the AI/computer being wrong. A simple example is that any software will need input regarding the patient's history, his/her vitals. Right now heart rate data in ICUs is fed every second to storage systems. Let's say the this is a NICU and the baby's heart rate is suddenly elevated to extreme levels. The software would assume that something is wrong with the baby, when in reality a nurse is simply taking a blood sample and the baby started crying, being agitated by the nurse/needle. There are a lot of examples like this, it's a non-trivial problem to build use machine learning to take all of these factors into account to produce a diagnosis/treatment/intervention plan.

I was recently at a medical/technology conference and the physicians in attendance were all actually in support of moving to using machine learning/AI (selection bias though, that was what the conference was about). They would rather have a machine with a 5% error rate than a human with 20% error rate. They believe that the role of physicians is going to change and become more of a management role as technology catches up.

Something similar does already exists, telemedicine. A lot of hospitals are starting to experiment with consulting via telemedicine (with robots for instance for video communication and bedside visits) for interesting/hard cases. It's not the same as what you're describing, but HIPAA regulations and how hospitals work would most likely rule out an "open" service like that.

In the tweet display guidelines: "No other social or 3rd party actions may be attached to a Tweet." https://dev.twitter.com/terms/display-guidelines

Wonder if that means 3rd party apps can't add actions to tweets like "assign to a user", "translate", "schedule a reply", etc. That might just kill major functionality for apps like HootSuite, CoTweet, Radian6's Engagement Console.

Or, since it's under the guidelines for individual tweets, are tweets in the timeline excluded from that limitation?

Companies have gotten acquired for very low or no revenue. In that case, you'd make nothing off the sale.

If you'll be a co-founder, ask for equity (50%). Or if he's looking at you as an employee, ask for a market-rate salary and the profit/sale share for the risk you're taking.

Great to see a fellow startup get acquired.

But, I wish they held off on the acquisition until other "cloud providers" were willing and ready to implement these services that will be open sourced. Or at least keep your service up until then. This is great for the IndexTank team, but screws all of their customers (of which I am one).

What I posted on the Flippa site:

To make showing the stats easiest, I'll focus on the past 90 days: From Jan 25 to Aprl 24, we've had 1916 unique visits. The average time per visit is 4 mins. From those visits; we've had 319 signups to our product. That's a 16% conversion rate.

We also ran some SEM campaigns, Facebook + LinkedIn ads. We had a 13% conversion rate from Facebook ads. And a 5-40% conversion rate on LinkedIn depending on the ad. With the right marketing budget, you should be able to drive a lot of signups and usage to the product.

Our actual application (app.socialblazeapp.com) has had 737 visits in the past 90 days. Average time spend inside our application, per visit is 11 minutes.

The tech is all Microsoft based. The application is ASP.Net MVC 2.0 C# using SQL Azure. We are hosted on Windows Azure although you can easily move the application to dedicated windows servers and to use MS SQL.

It's not an auction on Flippa. It's a private sale; meaning people make offers and we accept the one we like. We did this because we want to make sure the product goes to someone who will do something with it.

We don't want to wait the 3 months. We would prefer to sell as soon as possible so that the product doesn't fall behind in terms of the roadmap / competitors.

We've been working on Socialblaze for over a year. We strongly believe in the product and have users who would attest to how critical/useful it has been for them. We have a very strong roadmap that clearly differentiates us and solves problems that nobody in our space is solving. However, simply, we ran out of money and weren't able to secure the funding we needed.

We have some of the top brands and agencies using it. However, we need more users and don't have the necessary budget to do proper marketing and continue to develop on our roadmap. We want to give the product to someone who can take it and has the resources it needs.

Clickable link to product: http://www.socialblazeapp.com

There's a lot of competition in this space from some pretty big, well established players.

I'm wondering what you're bringing that isn't available yet? What's your differentiation?

The issue you're going to face (because you're a small team) is that you won't be able to reach feature parity with your competitors. I'd suggest to focus on one aspect of your product first, execute it perfectly, and then possibly expand.

Also, does your product actually serve a need? Unless it has all the features of MailChimp, Socialblaze, Wordpress, etc... I would rather just use all of these products independently. Otherwise, you'd still end up using them for certain things.

[dead] 15 years ago

Why not focus on something more productive then Karma points? Your startup, job, school, hobby, significant other?

I can guarantee you that none of the successful people on here care about Karma points. (Unless, of course, your definition of success is having tons of Karma points.)

Good idea, but I'd like to have some more info about what you actually do and how you do it (and what information we need to provide for you). Also, how secure are you? How do you secure my information, where do you store it? Will you use my data for aggregated reports?

Some of the data I want is also very specific to my industry, it would be nice to see some of that industry jargon on your site to know that you get what I want.

There's also lots of competing business intelligence software for various niches, are you trying to be one tool for everyone? Personally, I'd rather use a tool specific to my industry/niche.