How I changed the world in 2013 | Hacker News Reader

How I changed the world in 2013

planscope.io

9 pointssherm8n4 comments

> As an example, today my admin dashboard popped up with a notice that Fred had closed an estimate for about $30k. I tabbed over to GMail and wrote Fred a quick congratulatory note and asked him if there was anything I could do to help him close future estimates faster and with less resistance.

I don't know how this application works, but is there an option to opt out of this? This seems like it could be a serious problem. Fred seemed happy, but there are a lot of other businesses which I'm sure wouldn't be too pleased to have their business activity popping up on Brennan's dashboard.

I hate to hit a negative note because I think his articles are helpful and its great that he is out there building something and making things work.

(Brennan here)

I've thought about this a lot too, especially since I'm pretty much a stickler about asking permission to jump into a project before checking out a bug or something for a user.

I've made sure to sanitize my dashboard to just show first initial milestones. For instance, when someone invites a client and they first sign in, I get a notification saying "Bob's first client just accepted an invitation", which will have me then go and say "Hey Bob, saw your client joined. Let me know if they need any help in getting setup..."

Based on your comment above, I think it might make sense to just notify me with "Bob closed an estimate", and that's it. Bear in mind, I only get this notification the first time one of these milestones is reached.

Good comment though, and great food for thought.

Thanks for the info Brennan. As you may recall, there was a bit of a stink over 37Signals posting that X picture uploaded was "cat.jpg". This seems similar, so that's certainly something to keep in mind.

As I say, I hate to bring any negativity about what you are doing. You are obviously of great help to people and your post is inspiring.

You were providing value above and beyond by offering more help, which is great. In this day of privacy concerns, that may be a dangerous road. One important reason that I bring this up is that I'm more hesitant these days to sign up for "cloud services" due to the possibility that someone might possibly have the permissions to look through things that I wouldn't want open.

In any case, continue kicking tail. I love reading your posts and I may give your service a test drive in the future.

Thanks! And I totally agree. While I like to think project tasks that say "make the logo bigger" aren't as sensitive as, like, bank statement data, I definitely understand the concern.

So far, I've had 0 pushback to these little notes I send, and the good (helping them close more deals = more money = less chance of going out of business) has outweighed the thus far non-existant bad, but it's still something to think about even if it hasn't become a problem (yet?)

If you ever sign up in the future, drop me a note and I can run you through how Planscope can work for your business over Skype or something :-)

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