apapli

My wife built https://www.jummbo.ai but she doesn't have an HN account so I'll share for her.

Jummbo takes the "umm" out of prospecting in B2B sales.

It makes it really quick to find and prospect new customers, as it googles them, researches them, and writes custom emails and call scripts that are highly targeted to each of them.

The app is in the $hundreds per month, getting a lot of interest in a niche vertical which is quite promising so a lot of extra features will be added in the new year.

We're always up for feedback on how to make it better so if you set up a trial don't be shy with any suggestions you might have :)

TLDR; We want to get free users to move to paid plans sooner, by (a) relaxing sharing limits, and (b) reducing the amount of pages you can create to 3 unless you upgrade.

Existing work created prior to 21 April will be unaffected.

I taught myself to code, started in 2010 after 10 years in IT infra/networking. I’m not a professional developer and it’s a hobby for me - I did a humanities degree with no comp/sci background.

Initially I built a simple crud app to track water changes for my aquarium. For a while there I had it online as a free SaaS app too. It was using Ruby on Rails, and I had no idea how to use JavaScript to make the UX better.

Fast forward a few years and I was getting fed up with voicemail, so I read up on APIs and figured out how to use GCPs transcription service, pointing to audio files in twilio (I diverted my mobile to twilio to act as my voicemail). Actually pretty simple even though it might sound complicated.

Fast forward to last year and I built a free directory to raise the profile of primary producers who were missing out on foot traffic as a result of COVID, closely followed by another project I’m close to launching. These last two projects were in nodejs as I figured I had better finally figure out JavaScript.

When I was completely stuck on something I did a lot of googleing and watching YouTube - that happened a lot, particularly when trying to get my head around promises.

Moral of the story, don’t be put off with CRUD apps, they are very rewarding. Just build stuff you enjoy when you have spare time (for me evenings after child in bed).

I started doing an MBA at a top Australian university. I won the top student award in digital marketing.

I found that I was spending most of my time carrying other students rather than actually learning something beyond what I could read in a book or already knew, at least at the conceptual level.

And believe me when I say I’m not smart in an academic sense.

Family issues came up and with a waning interest I dropped out while getting enough points for a Grad Cert.

Fast forward a decade later and I’ve filed a patent pending in AI and another one in video messaging.

The MBA was for the most part a waste of time, money and energy.

I really didn’t learn much, except to recognise getting an MBA is more to do with ones ability to persevere through an incredibly dry and uninteresting range of subjects for many years at a time.

Save your money, and spend it on something more useful. $40k gets you a lot of azure/aws/gcp credits plus lifetime accounts of Lynda.com training and pretty much any other online course aggregator you care to imagine.

You’re spot on!

expo.io

Agree, but my needs are simple and I develop using expo.io. So once my app is published often minor changes can be pushed straight through to my app without App Store approvals. So it would be $26 per upload (ouch), but my “upload” may only be once every few months so I’d easily be ahead.

My needs are simple enough that the standard inclusions in expo.io work without complication. I could imagine more complex apps need a more involved dev setup but not in my case.

Expo.io is good enough for my needs. Cross platform, just run it on my iPhone and and android simulator. Also, the way expo works is that not all updates need to go through the App Store approvals. I can quickly dev/test/release once I have the app container approved by the relevant store.

expo build:ios actually.

My only need for a Mac with expo is for the upload. The apk file is taken care of with the command above.

I have an iPhone I use for development and testing. Bonus points is that expo is cross platform, so I can publish to google play with the same single code base too.

I’m always developing without xcode. Using expo I can write apps in react native on my desktop and vscode. Mac only required for the upload to the App Store.

Interesting. The deciding factor for our family when buying a Mac or Windows 10 device for my wife’s small business was actually my need to upload iOS apps for review by apple.

I’m an after hours hobby developer, and use a windows desktop. It’s powerful and has all the tooling I require. And it supports all the games I want to play from the steam store.

So - I think apple will lose a little bit of business from people like me with this announcement, as I’m sure we would not have purchased a Mac when we did only a few months ago.

I really admire Google, but they have become notorious for their “fast fail” mentality and product sun setting.

No matter how good this may be I don’t trust google to not close this down or make major modifications that could cause issues in 1,3,5+ years from now.

So it’s a reluctant “no thanks” from me, as I really wish they would plan their product portfolio more long term than history so far demonstrates.

Looks great. Is there a way to submit other apps?

Read the “challenger sale” book. I’m 20 years in tech sales and it’s easily the best way to get started.

Also - sales is 1:1 conversations. Marketing is 1:many. That’s the easiest way to figure out the difference between the two.

The job title “account manager” says it all. That is a 100% sales role. So don’t expect deep technical expertise. Any assistance rendered will be to grow the vendor footprint.

Put on an old James Bond movie from the 60s and let my mind slow down a bit once I’ve done all my family and household duties.

Or fire up flight simulator 2020, which has just been released and explore some amazing place from the air.

This is interesting - I couldn’t determine how they train them system to recognise all the products though.

Flavour variants, special promotional packaging etc make training hard due to the sheer size of images that need to be in a training dataset to yield accurate results.

How is this achieved?

For a simple and less feature rich option look at Jimp to see if it will do what you need and you’re programming in JavaScript.

It’s a breeze to use. I’ve used IM and GraphicsMagick too and they are insanely powerful, but just quite complex to use.

A market with no competition is a monopoly. They are characterised by extremely high barriers to entry.

You are better off finding something you are passionate about in a competitive market, then working out how you will differentiate and market it with the budgets you have to work with.

I recall ServiceNow use a single tenant model, not multitenant like most other SaaS apps. I suspect (but am no authority on the subject) this means a dedicated database per customer.

I built https://www.provedore.com.au -> a way to find local producers who sell online and deliver to your door.

It should be law that airlines cannot seat people so closely, at least until Covid passes.

If they need to double or triple the airfare, so be it. I don't think increasing the price will alter demand that much, I don't see how people will rush back to travel unless it is absolutely necessary - thus price sensitivity will be fairly inelastic as a result.

The only issue I have with Twilio is their charging. For voicemails, calls typically last less than 10 seconds, and often only a second (because they hang up and don't leave a message) - but as they charge per minute you are billed the full 60 seconds each call.

I built something similar as a side project but switched to Nexmo, purely because they charge per second. It was a fun thing to build and test.

The accidents didn’t help either, right? I like the idea of Boom, but would much prefer the engineering from either Airbus or Boeing.

I think all this talk “MVP” and startups so often in the same sentence over nearly a decade now makes me worried that Boom won’t have enough resources to achieve anything less than an exceptional job with regards to safety.

And my life isn’t worth risking to save a few hours of travel time by putting it in the hands of a startup.

I’m not OP, but Microsoft is one of a handful of stand out tech companies for me. They are paying a decent dividend (almost unheard of in tech) and have a very solid enterprise product lineup that has gained traction, with a huge amount of the market left. Furthermore they have a strong consumer and gaming footprint, and generally are positioned well across their entire portfolio.

Back in the 90s I’m sure I remember something like this in the market.... I was a small-time DJ and liked to keep across the new AV gear.

I also certainly remember magnetic levitating AV stands to minimise distortion. It was a bit of a gimmick, given the cables would still introduce vibrations. But I’m sure some people paid big dollars for them.

It’s not a direct solution to this, but take a look at Snowflake. You can partition off subsets of the DB and provide direct SQL access to just that part, for either internal or customer use. It’s mainly for analytics purposes versus production, but it might handle some light real-time loads I guess.

I'm only a sample of 1, but I loved my original iPhone X - had to replace it due to taking on a new job and they haven't approved that device yet, so I'm back to an iPhone 8 unfortunately.

To me although the screen size was nice the X is just a bit big, and my old 6 Plus was relatively huge when it came to fitting inside my pocket.

I'd much rather an iPhone X no larger than my current iPhone 8 (all screen though), with all the bells and whistles that the X comes with such as face ID. I'd still pay good money for it if it was approved by corporate security.

So Apple if you are listening, just make a smaller X about the same width/height of my current 8 and I'd be a happy camper!

I've been a user for many years - would love to know how large this awesome and vibrant community is. Is there a way we can estimate it via the API etc?