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Chris86

367 karma · joined November 2, 2014

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Chris86··on New BBC News Website
Not sure if it will be visible in all regions, but it's very white and very new!
Chris86··on ChatGPT banned in Italy over privacy concerns
Thanks!
Chris86··on ChatGPT banned in Italy over privacy concerns
Face punch?
Chris86··on Ask HN: Any alternatives to Google Analytics that don't require cookies?
hey Jamie, I just received a notification from F5Bot about you mentioning Squeaky on HN (I'm one of the cofounders) and thought I'm come and say hello ヽ(∀ )ノ

We are indeed cookieless, and don't use IP-based tracking either, though we do screen IPs if you're using our IP-screening functionality to keep your teams internal data out of your analytics (optional). We also suppress data capture of sensitive data client-side by default, particularly helpful to ensure session recordings don't accidentally scoop up personally identifiable text-based data, and there are lots of other ways to fine-tune which data you do and don't want to capture.

If you'd like a demo some time feel free to get in touch via hello@squeaky.ai :) Also happy to chat about alternatives and their pros and cons, the privacy-first analytics space is heating up nowadays!

Chris86··on Restoring a Vintage Rolex GMT
Been watching these videos for several months now, pretty relaxing to watch and fascinating too. I feel like this is the BMW equivalent: https://www.youtube.com/@M539Restorations
Chris86··on One year of building a new product analytics tool
We don't mention this in the article, but we're a 2 man team and we've bootstrapped the product part-time around our day jobs, though I've recently taken a few months off to focus on it full time - there's a long way to go and lots to learn, but it's been a fun year :)
Chris86··on How We built a $1M ARR open source SaaS
We capture browser version in Squeaky analytics at the moment, but we don't surface it cause nobody ever asked for it haha. If you want to try/use it I'm happy to visualise it for you!
Chris86··on Italy next up to ban Google Analytics
Austria, France, Netherlands and Italy now all considering bans if Google won't stop sending data to the US.
Chris86··on Ask HN: What do you do to receive honest feedback for your products?
This book was really important for me early in my career, and I still recommend it to others quite regularly https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9039673-undercover-user-... it will give you plenty of tactics you can use to conduct user research and gather feedback when you have no users or low budget etc.
Chris86··on What we learned in studying the most effective founders
Is it really 'learning' if there's literally nothing new uncovered? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Chris86··on Is social audio already dead?
I think Clubhouse was perhaps another VC pump and dump. Not necessarily deliberate, but that general flavour of startup that investors hoped to massive inflate and grab market share, with the expectation that there is some early mover advantage to be had in a new category. But because they were only manufacturing demand, rather than creating something people really wanted, it's just not worked out.
Chris86··on Show HN: Got rejected by Hotjar, decided to build my own
Sorry, client-side was not in fact accurate: We check the incoming IP address against a list of blacklisted IP addresses stored for a site before upgrading the WebSocket connection
Chris86··on Show HN: Got rejected by Hotjar, decided to build my own
Ah thanks, we updated all the tabs 2 days ago and some of the empty state links must have been missed! Just pushed up a fix for this now, good catch :)

There's also a feedback item in the nav if you catch any other things, and do let me know if you'd like a demo or any other help getting started ( *・∀・)ノ゛

Chris86··on Show HN: Got rejected by Hotjar, decided to build my own
yes, it says web app now :)
Chris86··on Show HN: Got rejected by Hotjar, decided to build my own
Hi wingerlang, sorry about that, it should have said web app on the homepage - I've updated it now! I've tried to say web app all the time in the app but forgot on the homepage, where it's arguably most important :(

Mobile session capture is technically possible using the approach we're using i.e. not screen recording but just tracking events and DOM changes and they rebuilding that. We looked into it but it was out of scope for now as we're just a two person team. Fullstory already solve for mobile, as do a few other competitors, perhaps you can find out a little from googling their approach?

In terms of privacy, for the web we can mask form inputs by default, and otherwise you can just add tags to elements you don't want to track and then the script ignores them client-side.

Chris86··on Show HN: Got rejected by Hotjar, decided to build my own
Sure, no problem, it's on IH here https://www.indiehackers.com/post/turning-a-loss-into-a-laun...
Chris86··on Show HN: Got rejected by Hotjar, decided to build my own
yes definitely, we really liked that feature in fullstory, also noticed it in some competitors too. We have it in our roadmap, though it's not until next year some point :( It's clearly something that will be super valuable to people though!
Chris86··on Show HN: Got rejected by Hotjar, decided to build my own
oh haha, nice catch, I've updated it with the correct copy now! No idea how I didn't spot that :(

If you would like a demo of Squeaky then let me know, there's a demo booking page on the website - I'd also be really interested to learn about Microsoft Clarity from you too :)

Chris86··on Show HN: Got rejected by Hotjar, decided to build my own
They invited me for a job interview for a Principle Designer role out of the blue (i.e. I didn't apply). I was really excited cause I loved the company and had lots of ideas how it could be improved. Anyway, ultimately they felt there were 'more data driven candidates'. I respect that, they know their business better than I do, but I still was really excited about some of the opportunities in the user analytics space and I learned some really valuable stuff in the interview that gave me the motivation (along with the rejection) to go and solve the problem for people :)

I have actually written a short blog post about it if you're interested I can share a link.

Chris86··on Show HN: Got rejected by Hotjar, decided to build my own
Pricing-wise, currently it's free, and we'll make sure there's a full-featured free tier if/when we introduce paid plans. The current plan is the have usage-based pricing i.e. a certain amount of sessions per month, but we'll be surveying our users to set appropriate tiers and price points :)

We experimented with live sessions but weren't happy it was real-time enough to be more meaningful than after a short time delay, it's in our backlog to revisit when we can spend time on performance though!

At the moment it's not set to be triggered for specific sessions, none of our early users have requested that but it would be pretty easy for us to implement :) At the moment we're letting our most engaged users take a very active role in determining what comes next e.g. we rolled out IP screening (all happens client-side) and email/domain name screening yesterday as per a request we received yesterday morning. If you sign up we could get triggered recordings in for you super fast ;)

No open API access, we have discussed it though. Recording link sharing with private, or public links, and mp4 and gif (snippets) export is next up.

Sounds like you're a FullStory user at the moment, which features do you currently get the most value from?

Chris86··on Show HN: Got rejected by Hotjar, decided to build my own
One of the things we've really focused on is not using IP and offering cookieless tracking, so the tool is really great for people who are concerned about protecting their users privacy (there's other features to support that too, like custom masking of html elements, though that's powered by a library we're using).

Otherwise, at the moment I'd say Fullstory and Hotjar are both definitely more feature-packed, having been around a lot longer. Squeaky is faster and, though it's subjective, the UX is considerably better imho :)

We've got big plans going on in the background to offer predictive analytics too, but that's very much a work in progress!

Chris86··on Recruiter-Proof Contact Page
I stumbled across this and thought it was pretty great, hopefully a useful reference for others :)
Chris86··on Show HN: I built a gamified forum to help hackers fund each other
The general idea is that for those that wish to bootstrap their business, and/or delay time before they take investment, they're odds of success increase significantly if they're able to show consistent progress, get support from peers and earn experimental or operational capital.

For example, our first winner plans to spend their funds as such:

"I'll be able to pay for the CI/CD pipeline for the next billing cycle, this lets me route the amount planned for that cost into the referral program which will, hopefully, help the platform acquire more users."

Essentially by choosing this project as their winner, the community has enabled the startup to cover some of their core operational costs so they can experiment with a new marketing/sales channels. This is exactly what we were hoping HackerStash could do :)

At face value 'points' can lead to distorted incentives, but we're working hard to ensure that altruistic behaviour is most rewarded. Second to altruism is evidencing clear progress in your own project, with some big features coming in the next few weeks to support that. In fact I'd say the later is our current weakness but not for lack of attention, just we've decided we'll learn and iterate faster with more eyeballs on the product, users in the contest etc.

Thanks so much for the feedback, also glad to hear you like the UI!

Chris86··on Show HN: I built a gamified forum to help hackers fund each other
haha, the forum aspect has some overlap but other than that it's very different :)
Chris86··on Show HN: I built a gamified forum to help hackers fund each other
Thanks, this was a really helpful link. In the case of HackerStash I'm confident it falls within the definition of a contest, and not sweepstakes or lottery. There are a few areas where this could be tightened up and the article will help with that, but likewise we've met all the criteria set out in the article other than terms relating to 'what happens to prizes if someone dies'. We'll have something added there!

Curious about what you're working on now, feel free to come join HackerStash and share your progress ;) haha

Chris86··on Show HN: I built a gamified forum to help hackers fund each other
something akin to 'reward points', but yeah...it's a bit of a grey area! Cadoo.io is doing a similar thing with exercise and they treat it legally as 'loyalty points' but in reality it's prizes. It's one of the big unknowns about the model to be honest - we kind of hope that it will seen more like a community finance initiative or a business cooperative.
Chris86··on Show HN: I built a gamified forum to help hackers fund each other
hey, Chris here (one of the makers of HackerStash) - it's really hard to get this right for sure and we're thinking a lot about balancing the incentives! We removed a lot of the weekly challenges during beta testing that we felt weren't conducive to symbiotic participation...it's a work in progress though.

In terms of benefits our end, all money from subscriptions goes straight into the prize pool and back out to the communities favourite projects each week. The main reward at the moment is the times when we genuinely see people helping one another. In the future if it can generate income for us that would be cool but we don't really know how that would even be possible - for now so the community comes first :)

Loved your breakdown of gamification motives, it's a really helpful perspective, thanks. If you have ideas for how something like HackerStash could offer the benefits of gamification without risking incentives that eventual lean in favour of the company itself that would be awesome!

Chris86··on Show HN: I built a gamified forum to help hackers fund each other
there's a promo code on the homepage NEWHACKER102 that gets you 2 months for $10
Chris86··on Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution
Interesting, well that is reassuring as nobody I asked in the Netherlands believed that they were recycled.

Regarding your early point, obviously there is a industry built around waste disposal - but the problem is still that we are creating types of waste that are destined for landfill. The fact there is this option to put it in the ground is a barrier to solutions for how we package our products, which chemicals we use, what we actively recycle etc.

Chris86··on Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution
I guess it doesn't help that 1/3 of the country is below sea level...nowhere to dig
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