telecuda

Just my opinion — don’t change anything. I got to 9 words, had fun, will try again tomorrow. Simplicity and urgency win

If you like this, check out Dany Bittel https://x.com/DanyBittel or https://www.instagram.com/bitteldany/. His Patreon includes a lot of how-to content if you're interested in macro photography of insects.

Congrats. You may want to consider dropping the "reverse engineer" language though, since most every application's ToS is clear on that being prohibited. Perhaps just "replay any application" or similar.

Thank you!

Related, I've found this to be the most effective gadget to stop the itch of a mosquito bite: https://www.amazon.com/Vibis-Rechargeable-Mosquito-Chemical-... (Source: Floridian who has tried everything)

The Nixie Tube Watch I received from Kickstarter is as wonderful as it looks:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1944794242/timeless-ele...

If working in this space interests you, I recommend checking out Magnet Forensics. They make the best tools for end users tasked with taking those recovered hard drives full of CSAM and performing the analysis. Great company to consider working for (I have no affiliation, just a longstanding respect for them).

https://www.magnetforensics.com/blog/real-time-hash-matching...

Important callout beyond the headline: "Last year, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children received 4,700 reports of generated AI child porn, with some criminals even using generative AI to make deepfakes of real children to extort them."

Different method, but related goal: I enjoyed this episode on making carbon-negative portland cement for construction https://wondery.com/shows/how-i-built-this/episode/10386-lit...

Check out the site Devpost for public, online hackathons (https://devpost.com/hackathons?challenge_type[]=online&open_...)

Link to source letter: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1447669/000119312523...

Don't miss in there:

"We’ve decided to end-of-life (EOL) Twilio Programmable Video as a standalone product. Given it’s such a niche area and a relatively small part of our portfolio, we believe partnering with video industry leaders is the best way to ensure long-term product innovation for our customers. Removing Programmable Video from our portfolio will also allow Communications to more effectively focus on our pillar products - Messaging, Voice, and Email."

They've done that at least!

While I usually withhold personal comments here, I love this article because the Hogfish is the only main species here in Florida that for whatever reason I can't catch (while all my mates have). They even bought me a Hogfish cutting board to remind me each day of my "white whale." I'm so glad to read of their camouflage abilities to use that as an excuse!

They don't appear to artificially, no. But like any auction, when it's a good deal, a lot of people may watch and wait until fairly near the end. I've used them before and had a very positive experience.

https://www.loveseat.com/ is a great example of a business built on a second market for returns (Austin, San Antonio, San Diego)

That’s true. The narrative can get lost or at least watered down in the process.

The most useful thing about software patents IMO is what you uncover during the patent writing process. When you’re sitting there writing the equivalent of a 10-20 page college essay on the problem background, operating environment, then all the present and future uses of something novel (the provisional stage), it forces you to think in a way that no typical product management process does. There are few (any?) other forcing mechanisms I’ve seen that produce the same results.

Suggest appending (2015) to the title unless there’s evidence this is still active?

Ask to be put on frontline email/phone customer support for your product a few times a year.

Hearing problems/complaints directly from the voice of the customer, then having to explain a sometimes cumbersome workaround to solve them, is invaluable. Plus you buy goodwill with your support team for walking a day in their shoes.

A $30,000 car today often has a far better screen/user experience than a $300,000 boat. iPad/tablet apps for boaters attached to mounts are common, though lack communication with the boat's sensors (without something like Signal K), and are hard to see in full sun. Compound that with the Coast Guard being a defense agency where getting new data typres in and out is "a process."

Shameless but relevant plug -- I was annoyed hearing radio traffic of boaters trying to share their location with the Coast Guard, so I built a free tool for them (i911) that allows USCG to text the boater a link to share their location. The vast majority of distress calls are made within cell phone range (<15 miles from shore), so tapping that link isn't as much of an issue as you would think it is. It was the fastest tech to graduate from their R&D site to nationwide sector adoption.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF1pi2-ygXU

Excited to dig into Signal K to see if something there can help improve that response even further.

Yes, as AnhTho_FR said, some * notating “fair usage” or “unlimited for advertised use-cases” gives you a fallback in the event of a dispute. It ultimately depends on what you’re selling and who your customers are. If a customer is legitimately consuming way more than planned - so much that it’s not compensated by other customers who use it way less - then just reach out to them and talk person-to-person about why they love your product, what it accomplishes for them, and your situation on cost. A genuine customer will welcome that feedback. A customer trying to game your unlimited system should can be unwelcomed for renewal - you can fire a customer if need be!

I’m not suggesting it’s easy, but the trick is to play with pricing a lot in your early days while learning what those costs are. Start a little higher than you think you need - it’s easier to adjust down later than go up. Outliers can be caught with a small amount of code (hey, Slack me if a customer who I thought would use this thing once a day uses it 20 times so I can reach out to them to learn more about how they’re using my product).

Agree. I never paid attention to it while building the business, but then later saw how much weight potential investors gave to predictability and how much customers wanted it too. Even my electric company gives me the option to pay a fixed monthly amount that grows by x% per month versus having to budget for variability.

Great question. So yes, while our suppliers charge us for usage (and that made us initially think we should too!), our customers didn’t use the product any more or less once it became unlimited.

If you’re solving a problem that a typical customer experiences let’s say 3x per week (perhaps routing an inbound sales lead to a CRM), you could charge per use, or ask “If we made it unlimited, would they use it 5x per day? 10x per day?”

With many SaaS products, usage is self-limited by the customer’s actual need, not by a transaction cost. Same goes with most telephony use cases - a typical user will only make so many calls per day, making it relatively easy to arrive at an unlimited monthly price.

Congrats! We built a usage-based telephony (voice & sms) billing system for our customers and appreciate the pain. Not to take anything away from your launch, but founders / product managers should carefully consider if usage-billing (even with a tool like Lago) is best for your business and customers.

We started as usage-based then learned a few years in (once we understood customer usage trends - key) that customers would gladly pay ~20% MORE per year for unlimited access because the customer wanted a predictable bill. We essentially rode the same trend of pay-as-you-go mobile to unlimited plans.

Later in our history we found investors (and our accountants) liked the predictability as well. It's easier to show "up and to the right" when not dealing with a few large customers varying down in usage in one quarter (even if the business was on the upswing).

One-size doesn't fit all -- usage billing has its place for sure -- just carefully weigh your model as it's a huge lift to flip it midstream.

Persona definitions are super helpful training for new hire onboarding. Nothing beats F2F time with a customer, but it’s a great start to learn who you’re building for or selling to.

Thanks! If you're looking for an easy place to start, look to tabular reports.

Ask a stakeholder (e.g. contract renewals team) to create an ideal report with maybe 5 rows of sample data in Google Sheets / Excel. A good example may be a list of customers, when their next renewal date is, who their sales rep is, etc. Ask a developer to turn it into a real-time (or nightly updated) internal web page, then once again, each quarter see if it needs to be made better. Sure, Salesforce and the like should have a lot of this data, but odds are you need a hybrid of info that leverages your own DB (e.g. usage, # of users). If a new vanilla Salesforce report comes out of that monthly meeting instead, hey, still good stuff.

We call this team "Ops" for short and more formally the "SaaS Operations" team since they satisfy all the internal bits that get help us run an efficient SaaS business. For reference, while we have a small team, it's 20% of our headcount (and a great place for interns/co-ops). Happy staff with the right tools stick around longer, are better at serving customers, and have more free time to work on more important goals.

This has been our approach as we scaled from customer one to acquisition by bigco a decade later, and I'd still point to it as being a key driver of our success:

- Set a monthly meeting with a co-worker from each functional area (e.g. finance, support, sales). The meeting should be run by whomever has the best horizontal view of needs across the business, along with whoever is running point on development to clarify things.

- Go around the room and ask the question, "What's one thing (report/tool/insight/data/etc) that would make your job easier?"

- Track those requests on a shared document or board, giving stakeholders an opportunity to reprioritize their list (should never be more than a "top 3") each meeting

- PUNCHLINE: Commit to addressing one item from each department's top 3 every quarter. We did this starting early with engineer #2, but if you can't devote a FTE, divide and conquer among your current team.

10+ years later we have dozens of internal tools that have automated so much of what I see bigco still addressing by throwing people at it. It's never too late to start and it's a great way to build a love affair between your non-technical departments and developers!

Would this be classified as a "tiny home" by most jurisdictions? Not at this price-point, but we've been looking for prefab housing related to a transitional housing grant, where many cities in Florida do not allow tiny homes.

We did this a lot in our early days, and while we didn't correlate it with spending, customers occasionally would acknowledge the note in future conversations.

To me, it falls in the category of "do things that don't scale" as you try to grow your business. An over-emphasis on customer service is rarely a bad idea.