tquinn

Very, very cool.

I founded logotournament.com in 2007 when I didn't even know what a two-sided marketplace was. I only learned many years later that this was considered hard[1]. Luckily, as a self-funded, solo-founder I had no idea it was hard, so I launched my side project anyways. It's done roughly $25,000,000+ USD in sales since.

At the time I was a partner in an ecom firm (few guys and a small warehouse), and I needed a new logo every week or two, so I had the initial demand covered. Acquiring customers is at least 3 orders of magnitude more difficult than acquiring designers.

I launched a private vbulletin forum and invited about two dozen designers from a handful of forums. I posted my first logo contest with a prize of $200 IIRC. I offered $25 each to the first 4-5 people that submitted, to get the ball rolling and building some initial trust. And just like that I had my first successful logo contest. Over a few months I would host a contest 1-2 times a month, and would manually message each designer when there was a new one.

In parallel I started development of the actual site. When it was time to launch, I manually imported the vbulletin logo contests, and kicked things off with a single contest that I was hosting. That site still wasn't a living breathing thing yet, until I had an actual customer that wasn't me. So I burned about $1800 on adwords over a month, and received 3 customers where I made maybe $100 in fees. A rough start, but running nevertheless. After that I was able to get Facebook ads working after lots of trial and error which led to the first 100 customers.

[1] It's not that the actions were hard, it's that a successful result had a low probability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand

I enjoyed their live show very much in Las Vegas. It looks like they are currently touring. I would check them out if get a chance.

https://startingstrength.com/contentimg/figure1te.jpg

https://NameSampler.com

I’m working on a name generation tool that uses 83 structured naming methods. Examples: React (Verb-based), Vue (Obsolete English), Facebook (Compound), Netflix (Portmanteau), Lyft (Creative Misspelling), Alexa (Personal First Name), etc.

I wasn’t happy with the slop generated by the overly general name generators or my own prompting/brainstorming. I went on a tangent and read the top (5) books on naming from Amazon. From there I was able to create very specific and detailed prompts which started producing consistently good names, the odd great one, and a small amount of crud.

Eventually this escalated from a large spreadsheet of detailed prompts to a side project.

Please give it a try, I’d be happy for any feedback on this early version. (I recommend the options tabs for some granular tweaking)

(The name was inspired digital music samplers where there is a lot of rapid experimentation and tweaking similar to this app)

Mid 40s and I can do short tests on Monkeytype at about 145+ WPM with 100% accuracy when conditions line up. My regular daily typing speed is quite a bit lower though.

I use a split ergo keyboard, blank key caps, and correct fingers for every key. I highly recommend all three.

I've been frustrated with my scheduled blocker, so based on your landing page I'm giving it a shot. So far it looks like a breath of fresh air.

Semi-related in the same vein of background ambient music:

For fans of the film Heat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHP4qbgAN6s One of my absolute favorites to work to.

My ideal keyboard would be taking a Magic keyboard (in black or space gray) and splitting it into two. This is the closest I have seen. I'm too committed to a standard layout to go ortho linear at this point, but I admit it looks the most sleek and modern for sure.

I first used Turbo Pascal in a high school programming class. I remember our teacher saying: "Make it work first, then you can make it look pretty."

I've read it a few times. I would recommend reading:

Talk One: Harvard School Commencement Speech (aka Prescription for Guaranteed Misery in life)

Talk Eleven: The Psychology of Human Misjudgement which is the most important talk in the book. Interestingly enough it doesn't have any illustrations or sidebar notes like the other talks.

Then go from there.

Super interesting, I didn't know it was a reaction. Looking at Usenet thread screenshots, I think the UX issue with their threads is that they actually listed the title, not the actual message in a branch format. Whereas Reddit has the actual message content in a branch format.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversation_threading#/media/...

VS

https://preview.redd.it/r7k2gf1kav6z.png?auto=webp&s=9fd7a0b...

I think the flat sequential thread works fine with a limited number of messages. Eventually with enough replies it degrades to being very unwieldy like traditional forums.

That's awesome, I've never heard of anyone ripping from their car.

It's interesting that you were collecting for the sake of collection and not gaming. It reminds me of people that go full tilt building PC gaming rigs, but never actually play anything.

The world isn't going to fit perfectly into mental models, it's much more complex, variable, and random. "The Bed of Procrustes" comes to mind: The mythical innkeeper that wanted his guests to fit perfectly into their bed, so he would either stretch the guests or chop off limbs to make them fit.

IMO the maps don't always match the terrain, but the maps are worth studying.

I'm going to buy the book as I found Traction super useful, and I'd like to see their take on popular mental models. But I'm keeping in mind the limits of models. (I like a good dose of Nassim Nicholas Taleb for this)

If anyone is looking for an accessible Aphex Twin track, I would give “Alberto Balsalm” a try. One of my favourites on my University radio show. (That no one listened to back in the early 2000s. :)

Kelowna, BC

Canadians with enough funds can use the US system or other countries. In addition there are also private medical clinics. If you can get past the high taxes, it is nice to have this optionality.

By design the US system should work better for those with more money.

An anecdote with the Canadian system:

A family member was diagnosed with Stage 3 form of cancer, and was receiving Chemo within a week. They have received excellent treatment the past 4 years and have "beat the odds" so far. I'm pretty sure the bill for this would be somewhere in the range of 500K to 1M in the US. The main costs for this so far has been parking, and some travel expenses for an out of City surgery.

I also know of someone of similar age who was going to be waiting well over a year for a hip replacement. (They went out of country I believe)

I absolutely loved Fireworks, and it was mind boggling to me why people were using Photoshop at the time which seemed painful for most UI work.

I've gone from Photoshop (1st version was 4.0 that I remember) -> Fireworks -> Sketch

I feel the EU regulators could stand to learn something. If EU citizens are small portion of your users, and your tasked with parsing this document http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX...

just blocking them doesn't seem like that bad of an idea, especially with the fines involved.

I think the things that bother me is:

1) A College student working on a side project with no revenue are treated the same as some massive multi-national.

2) It's a foreign requirement that feels like a violation of sovereignty. Most business/startup owners complain about there being too much domestic regulations, now we have to worry about things outside of our own countries -- that also can come into conflict with our domestic tax authorities on things like data retention. An international agreement would be entirely different.

3) The GDPR requires clear and concise language, but have done nothing of the sort when writing the regulations. For most websites outside of the EU, could they not have produced a concise 1-2 page infographic produced by the regulators themselves?

I've run a small distributed team for years, and I've mostly resolved the manager vs maker challenge through a combination of:

-desynced collaboration tools

-avoiding interruption based tools as much as possible

-short & focused bi-weekly meetings at the front or back end of the day

It allows the majority of the day for a maker schedule, while allowing for just enough manager time. Also with desynced tools (ex: outstanding support/bug/etc issues in Trello), as long as everyone is checking in at regular internals (say 2x a day) -- things can move through fairly quickly without constant interruptions.

For the manager side I use a mix of:

-Calendar/Contacts

-Evernote

-Workflowy

-Trello

-Slack (at scheduled times, leaving it on all day is horrible idea)

For the maker side:

-Workflowy

-Trello

-Pathjet.com (A small tool that I designed for myself which mixes GTD + Kanban + Pomodoro)

-Prior to my own tool, I used a Pomodoro timer + Workflowy on my machine

-Sometimes I think it's great to get off my machine, and just use a pen+legal pad to do planning/sketching/brainstorming