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JarekS2

97 karma · joined May 16, 2010

http://smartupz.com and http://blog.smartupz.com - contact me via email : sygitowicz.jarek [at] gmail [dot] com
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JarekS2··on Ask HN: Which of your start up mistakes has taught you the most?
If I would start over I would do the following:

* have at least 10 customers willing to buy my service when it's done. During the time of development they would commit to spend time with me validating my product hypothesis.

* prepare spec for a _REAL_ mvp.

* clearly _describe_ problem that I'm trying to solve. (now I know that it takes multiple iterations to achieve this - most importantly discussing the problem with your future customers)

JarekS2··on Show HN: Real-time Team Collaboration on top of your LinkedIn Social Graph
We are fixing this right now. First idea was to use Disqourse (we still have disqourse.com) because discourse.com was taken. Now we've seen that Google is changing all the queries from disqourse to discourse so we've changed our domain name to discoursehq.com :)
JarekS2··on Show HN: Real-time Team Collaboration on top of your LinkedIn Social Graph
What do you guys think of our system?
JarekS2··on Poll: What CRM do you use at your startup?
http://disqourse.com <plug>
JarekS2··on Ask HN: Any Polish developers or entrepreneurs on HN?
+1
JarekS2··on Hello from Gondor -- New Django cloud hosting provider from makers of Pinax
Any chance HN readers would get beta invites sooner?
JarekS2··on Paul Buchheit: Chrome OS Will Perish Or “Merge” With Android
Google ChromeOS and Google Wave share some similarities in terms of marketing messaging behind those products. In both cases biggest value of both products is in business - they should never be marketed as a consumer products.

I agree with Paul that ChromeOS with its current market target will fail - just like Wave did.

But there is still hope for ChromeOS. Google should target bigger companies with it. Make it a hardware extension of their Google Apps offering. IT departments and CFOs will love them.

And you know what? I think that they are thinking about this already - that is why we've seen Citrix client there.

JarekS2··on CR-48 Tracker
This is US only tracker - you think that they are shipping to US citizens only
JarekS2··on My Y Combinator Interview (W2011)
There was an interesting blog post about this problem few weeks ago on HN. In general you can defend your b) or c) or d) situation with on word "Timing".The only problem is that you must convince people in the audience that Timing is right and why it was hard/impossible before and right now is easier/possible.
JarekS2··on Problem With Email - Between Unread & Read
What we are looking for here is something like an Instapaper for email. I often open an email - scan in and if I find something important I make this email "unread" again...
JarekS2··on RockMelt
I think that this may be a good idea but should be implemented as a browser plugin. I don't want to switch from Chrome to something based on Chrome that will not be updated as fast and often as the original.
JarekS2··on Offer HN: Will Work For Karma
Just sent you an email - we need help with http://disqourse.com - a lot of help! :)

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

JarekS2··on How to be successful: steal ideas and copy people
Interesting article - but I think people should note that creating 10% better business and trying to compete with the incubants is a very risky and time consuming game. Much riskier and much more time consuming then anyone could anticipate... Of course - it all depends on the market segment you are trying to conquer.
JarekS2··on Review my weekend HTML5 project: DropMocks
Dude - you could really check http://disqourse.com - this app is to help you get customer ping-pong with mockups etc. easy.
JarekS2··on Public Diaspora Seed is up, but buggy.
Is there a way to remove my account from Diaspora?
JarekS2··on Rate My Startup: Basecamp + Yammer for employees, customers and partners
Clickable link: http://disqourse.com
JarekS2··on Took me more than 2 years to get 200 paying customers for my Web App
People have no idea how hard it is to get first 10 paying customers (not to mention 200!!). It's one thing to get people to say "I love your product - will buy premium plan for sure!" and the completely other thing to actually receive a payment ("I'm sorry I was busy", "Will buy, just waiting for my customer to place an order" etc.).

Best of luck to everyone trying to persuade their customers to pay. I'm also one of you!

JarekS2··on Paul Graham on trends for the future
We are trying to do this right now at Smartupz. Please check this out - http://blog.smartupz.com/2010/08/summary-of-key-elements-of-...
JarekS2··on Facebook-like app for customer communication that turns email into an SMS
Yes - we do that.
JarekS2··on Facebook-like app for customer communication that turns email into an SMS
We are seeing very interesting pattern. A lot of people (including PG in recent interview http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1632477 ) noted that YC founders communicate via Facebook not email. We take this observation to the business - customer world (b2b) and we have created real-time facebook-like communication platform that controls the context (sales business process). Each action fires up an email - but in this case email is just a notification - SMS-like service to let you know that something is going on in the project.
JarekS2··on Tell HN: "Who's Hiring?" Threads Are a Mess
Instead of the first point (what the company does) I suggest link to a Company website. 3 other points are very good - maybe one more point with the salary/equity info?

And all of those posts should be aggregated under http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs link.

JarekS2··on Tell HN: "Who's Hiring?" Threads Are a Mess
Maybe it is time to get http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs a little bit more useful and turn it into a job posting board? Then it's just one step to create a specialized submission form to make things more organized.
JarekS2··on Ask HN: Best places to ask "please review my startup?" question?
Looks like a high traffic site that I haven't heard of. Thanks for the tip!
JarekS2··on Ask HN: How to get major bloggers write about my bootstrapped startup?
One thing I remembered from the Mint.com case - they were selling to the news not themselves directly but their by-product. What do I mean by that? In your case you can analyse your customer cases and find some interesting common patterns like "using word Love in the tag line usually gives 50% better results etc etc". Or "compelling tag line can not exceed 5 words - our research proved etc etc"

You have plenty of data to play with and I'm sure there are extremely interesting points you can make.