I hope it is. I'm not a fan of virtual reality - especially not with crackpot marketing and product divisions of unhinged tech giants that have been out of touch with our needs deciding the roadmap for this tech.
74 karma · joined February 22, 2016
if not, then neither a person's religion nor a person's sexual preference should be a public topic.
I would err on the side of having mental peace and joy at the risk of taking a dent on my financial prospects, only if I am assured that my financial sacrifice is only big enough to take away my luxuries, and not my necessities.
I commend your idea, and I hope that you succeed in forging a new path for entrepreneurs in the area of providing services that maintain human rights. Hopefully you'll get good questions from experts in this area from fellow hackers.
my question: I understand your vision, but not how you plan to implement it. you'll have to scale up the process you used for coming up with a treatment plan for your gf. The company can't individually interview every patient, gather enough information to isolate root cause(s), then prescribe personalized treatment for said patient. Also, will you prescribe medications, or will you limit yourself to suggestions (including alternative treatments) that can be fulfilled over the counter? Even in the latter case, you may need some government approval depending on how the process is conducted.
Edit: omit "sickening". changed "you" to "we". Changed "three people" to "some of us"
As it is with most natural progressions, the company began as a dense clump of inspiration that has been unraveling itself within my mind over this short period of time. Its features were much less recognizable compared to its current stage when I submitted YC Summer 2016 application. The very limitations of start-up evolution given the stage Dais is in necessitate formulation of generalized strategies in relevant space that take on specific forms as the business progresses. A prudent entrepreneur knows how to wait for an idea to unravel itself, takes notes of important developments, and acts decisively yet flexibly.
With these in mind -
i) Youth in their twenties (see my answer to user 'bestattack') will be targeted as early power users. 3rd and 4th year undergraduate students and graduate students are most sociopolitically motivated to engage in discussions online and offline, and can be reached in large numbers by marketing on selected college campuses. A specific example scenario - we will deploy flyers, recruit users through student groups, and employ the campus newspaper at UCB as three major avenues to increase our user base. I can provide an example flyer if desired, but that's better not done until parts of the product is built over the next few weeks.
ii) There is no single path to solving the biggest challenges of a start-up (i.e. early growth, establishing a market, etc.). Employees of Dais/Agora are hired with specific goals in mind, and their responsibility lies in meeting these goals to contribute to company’s bottom line. Voluntary employee involvement (as users) in the online community built by the company will be partially effective in fighting off “ghost town” issues if needed, but by no means is that meant to be a primary solution.
ii-B) No, we do not hire people to write content. That would be a death knell for our company. Therefore, the need to identify such people is nonexistent. The content will be created by the users as they have conversations on relevant topics.
iii) There are two forms of marketing – a) explicit marketing, and b) implicit marketing. In the former, a company will rely on advertising and focus groups to grow its market. In the latter, the company turns inward and aims to perfect itself on its vision, so that customers will be drawn by the quality of product and clarity of its purpose. Inherently viral features (eg. prompted to recruit FB friend on common "debate topic") are also categorized as forms of implicit marketing. At Dais/Agora, we will heavily rely on our well-planned and –developed product as a marketing tool.
Other sites present in this space including Brigade, DebateMe, Debate.com, State, and Lighthouse fall significantly short of providing an appropriate debating space. Their traffic is miniscule, their content switches between popular and sociopolitical topics, and breadth of discussion within these topics is wanting. Please see my detailed post on this subject elsewhere in this thread. Dais/Agora fully commits to idea of debating and leaves behind any unnecessary element of social networking at large.
People currently meet their debating needs via commenting on news articles and posts on social networks. Neither space is dedicated to conversations between users. In Dais, the user will receive peer responses on specifically initiated topics backed by evidences. This format will influence the conversations to be constructive, since it is designed to bring clarity to messages. Users, currently unsatisfied while debating sporadically across sites, will be satisfied by Dais' organization of topics and responses which will improve readability. It will also allow users to subscribe to chosen topics more effectively. The ability of the user to initiate debates will allow more local issues to be brought into attention, that are currently neglected due to bottleneck in news media.
Edit: I realized that your reference to a tweet was in effect a questioning of the validity/purpose of Dais/Agora. I'd like to answer this. Unorganized debating and commenting is inefficient due to their delocalized nature. Dais allows the true values of debating to shine by creating appropriate space, and via structured guidance (see differentiated visuals compared to competitors).
By creating the first proper online space for debates, Dais gives birth to the possibility of entire cities, states, and nations being involved in issues (from temporary and local to far-reaching and international) at a level not observed since urbanization began, thus allowing unparalleled civic activism to flourish. This is the vision of Dais/Agora.
Brigade - User scrolls through topics and scrolls through multiple one-line statements within said topics. Then user chooses between "Agree", "Disagree", and "Unsure". User bonds with others who share similar percentage agreement on various issues as decided. Dais/Agora is at least 70% different. Even though Brigade has an active blog section and claims that it "is a free app that lets you express your opinions on news and politics", it does not give voice to the issues the way Dais/Agora will.
DebateMe - Last updated 10.6.2015. There were 4 total debates going on worldwide. They are one- or two-liners, with ability to include images. Dais/Agora is at least 40% different, and will work hard to be a more vibrant community.
Debate.com - Has about 30 total "debates" and "polls" in database - ranging from super bowl ads, death penalty, gun control, math vs. english, Abraham Lincoln vs. FDR, Deadpool vs Starwars, etc. Few votes and views, very few comments. We are 60-70% different.
State - Established app in this space. Shows "opinion mixes" that are one-liners and gives user following choices to act in response - i) pick up to 3 words, ii) search, iii) pick from words featured. Dais/Agora is 65% different.
Lighthouse - One of the more similar ones. Hosts conversations on local and national issues. User feed and profile are adjusted by gaining agree/disagree/neutral feedback on one-line issues. Users participate in conversations via texts ranging 2 or more sentences.
A point to note is that most of the apps have gone for instant gratification methods because they followed the success of Facebook and Twitter. These companies are not providing the debating population with what they want (which is why they haven't succeeded). Dais/Agora realizes it is a radically different company from the existing successful social networks, and has a vision for itself.
Dais/Agora has the task of using technology to bring back conversations that used to exist in a village, but has been systematically alienated due to urbanization. In Dais/Agora, issues such as an incompetent teacher in some neighborhood school will be able to reach a larger number of people more frequently, thus gaining momentum in the community more often and being addressed as such. We only hear one or two such cases on nationally televised media every month, and perhaps the number increases to three or five - in local media. However, well-ingrained and systematically-inbred transparency in such a massive civic society as ours remains a major hurdle for human civilization to overcome.
edit: cut text "(which is desired)"
My post, at its surface, appears full of "marketingspeak" and cliched language. But in essence, each of the points are directly implementable solutions that address the challenges raised by HN user in parent comment.
i) I provide a viable (albeit well known, but this doesn't make our strategy weaker) early growth strategy that targets a specific user group.
ii) Another well known but nevertheless essential custom for early startups. I understand that mentioning such basics may take away from my credibility, but we must realize that startups often fail because they forget the basics.
iii) I suspect this comment can be deemed too vague. It is encompassing the uniqueness of Agora/Dais, and expressing it by invoking comparisons to hacker news. My purpose is not to cozy up to the user base here, but to state the truth. Hacker news is highly unique in how well its content is organized and displayed. HN is also unique in how its user base interacts (content-oriented as opposed to profile-oriented). Agora/Dais respects HN and will learn from her best points. But we are not direct competitors. Targeted social capital of our product, its UI, and the targeted user base are all differentiated substantially.
iv) This point states a fundamental company operating principle. The vision of Agora/Dais is to dramatically improve the quality and quantity of debates held online and offline on relevant topics, and to see our platform become a facilitator for improved quality of life among our users. This is a very important point that will be highly featured in all of our presentations to VCs.
This is how I understand it: if we apply the mirror point number algorithm on the binary description of some composite, we will recover at least one of the basis components. That's basically what you said with your reference to a fundamental weakness in encryption.
Would you explain more clearly what is the mirror point trick?
How will you convince the first hotel owners to start using your service? How will you find and convince the first users (you will have to choose one or two mediums in the beginning)?
How long will it take you to become Ramen profitable? The traffic in Nairobi (compared to SF, for example) may not be heavy enough, requiring you to spend and expand.
I also agree with your latter points, which are no less important. All early members including myself are investing significant amount of time to research now, and will continue to do so long into the company's lifetime. We will also establish a company culture that emphasizes learning among employees.
i) We will aggressively market toward a niched group to find early power users. This group can be college students. A higher proportion of all college students are likely to resonate to Agora/Dais. This will be enormously valuable for the company during the early stage to a) fight off "ghost town" issues, b) gain feedback for iteration.
ii) Early employees, all with equity stake in the company, will be encouraged to regularly participate in the social network. We hope to make debating a part of company culture. This will also fight off "ghost town" problem.
iii) We aim to funnel the constructive and creative energies currently visibly abundant yet mostly wasted across social sites, blogs, comment sections, and discussion forums. We are similar to hacker news in this sense, that it is the first and most uniquely designed forum for hackers (in the broader meaning of the word). Agora/Dais aims to be such a thing for debaters of sociopolitoeconomic issues.
iv) Effective marketing of our values will help us find users who share the spirit of debating. Our challenge is to show that Agora/Dais can add value to the user's life by being able to talk about issues that affect them directly, and by being able to share in each other's knowledge on specific topics. Our "north star", the thing that gives value to our users, is each time a user gets a response. This is our metric of interest.