bumpkinjunkie

Location: New York, NY

Remote: Yes, hybrid preferred

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Experienced product/GTM/business/design generalist (10 years banking, 5 years B2B software). PostgreSQL and MySQL, Python, and Javascript in light capacity (querying, scripting, scraping, webhooks and API calls). Postman for API testing. Front-end web/devtools for QA. Miro and Figma for design and prototyping.

Resume: linkedin/in/douglas-c-rogers/

Email: douglasc.rogers [at] gmail

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Hello, I'm Doug, an experienced software business generalist looking to be one of your early non-technical hires. I've worked on product, sales, marketing, and ops for three B2B startups, including one for a year as co-founder. Previously a capital markets banker doing marketing, account management/sales, and multi-stakeholder deal execution. Adjunct instructor in digital service innovation.

Example of a side project I worked on for creators/consultants to change Google Drive file permissions (Apps Script) based on a successful Stripe payment (Webhooks). https://twitter.com/DouglasCRogers/status/162925050782170317...

This was a life saver when I was traveling in Europe and had limited data to use! Thanks for making and keeping it running.

Pretty cool, love that it keeps track of your score at the bottom. One comment is that the user feedback when answering incorrectly displays the name of the correct country, not the incorrectly guessed country.

Example: Flag is Brazil. Finland is guessed by user. Message to user: "You guessed Brazil incorrectly".

I’ve heard this called “um carioca” in Portugal where they will pull a second shot from an already extracted espresso puck.

Similar thing happened to me, but my card on file had expired . Zipcar sent me an email threatening to send me to collections. I sent them a polite message on April 11th and they finally got back to me on May 30th that the charges would be removed.

A few ideas that I've seen out in the wild: - Engage with your most consistent readers and find out what makes them such big fans. Use that to create premium/paid content. - turn into a paid newsletter (or paywall for the blog). Keep some content free but write additional content for paid subscribers. - add a premium content tier that could include: slack community, monthly "mastermind" or guest events, job board access, etc - turn each article into a podcast episode, youtube video, twitter thread, etc. to earn more advertising revenue and/or grow audience

Re: labor of love, according to AA's Form 990 for the year ending 2019[1]

Revenue: $11.3M General Manager salary: $352k 7 other execs making ~$150-200k

There are lots of impact accelerators out there who might fund solutions like this. Saving people's lives comes in different forms and there is a big societal economic benefit created, there could be different ways to capture a fair share of that. Maybe it's solving another problem, like job placement or sober housing, that creates a revenue stream down the road.

[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/13167...

Looks fantastic. What did you use to build this? Any interesting changes/user insights since you posted to HN in July?

I love the low-friction approach to signing up and getting started right away with a cohort. I have a family member battling alcohol addiction, and while I feel the group accountability/support of AA can be helpful, AA often focus too much on the 12-steps with a heavy dose of religion. When my family member entered an in-patient rehab program, one of the "highlights" was the close connections with their intake cohort (phones weren't allowed, so staying connected was up to them - so higher friction to staying in touch for support).

Lockdowns during the pandemic have likely exacerbated conditions that lead to and enable alcohol addiction, with less physical interaction with others to detect warning signs or get access to traditionally "in-person" services.

In my limited experience, no-code tools are really great for idea validation & prototyping because you can get to the core of your value proposition faster than starting from scratch. As things scale, maybe you can't rely on V1 as much, but that can be a good problem to have.

One company that started on Bubble is Qoins. https://bubble.io/blog/bubble-app-qoins/

Qoins have raised $2.3m according to Crunchbase https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/qoins/company_financ...

Is this tongue-and-cheek? Seems like you are creating value for people and should be compensated. Or is there some monetization of user data?

Pretty cool! How long did you spend building before you launched? Did you target any specific niches at first?

How would that happen?

Simple's Safe-to-Spend® feature was ahead of its time and today is still a really unique feature among digital banks (standalone budgeting apps notwithstanding). I wonder if a challenger bank could buy that IP from BBVA.

They were, but then they hit funding issues in spring 2020 and appear to be scaling back their US expansion.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/09/monzo-to-shutter-las-vegas...

Varo Bank offers 2.8% on up to $10k in your savings account if you get direct deposit and use your card 5x/mo. Not the rich features of Simple, YNAB, or even Virtual Wallet...but when they earn next to nothing for interest, that's how those features get paid for (they need your cheap deposits).

https://www.varomoney.com/savings-account/

The "Show Labels" on the color options is a nice touch. I am colorblind and was clicking on purple instead of blue, etc., until I saw that feature. In fact, since this is targeted towards men, who are colorblind more than women (a quick google shows 1 in 12 men vs 1 in 200 females), it could be really helpful.

Have you heard of Van Westendorp's Price Sensitivity meter? It could give you numerical insight into how you might raise prices further (vs. guess and test).

my $.02 - Sales is similar to finding product-market fit. Exhaust your network doing pain discovery interviews. Ask lots of good questions. You can't pitch a solution until you really know what their problem is. Circle back to prospect 1 after you've talked to prospect 100. Hack value for the customer before you hack growth for yourself (ie branding). Do a great job for one client and ask for referrals to others who have similar problems. Repeat customer pain discovery.

fyi still showing the word "feedbacks" in

Collect multi-channel feedbackS In-app, Website, Interview, Emails We make it easy.

Overall this looks pretty cool! I'm excited to test it out for my team while we're bootstrapping through the next few months.

One other awkward sentence I wanted to let you know of: "Products your customers gonna love are now built and shipped faster" sounds like you meant it to say something like "Products your customers are going to love..." You could still say "gonna" if you like how that sounds, but sounds a little more natural with the verb "are" in front.

They had me at: Register Now, Add Funds, Get Profit. I can't give them my money fast enough....

Sounds like loan repayments (ie principal + interest) are suspended indefinitely. This is the risk you take when you are expecting a 10+% return on property dev and payday loan investments.

I'm in the same boat (or, house...boats are not great investments)

The justifications/case for home ownership can often be over-hyped. Everything works out well in a rising market. When shit hits the fan, sure my landlord can raise my rent, but I can move to another city for a better job with a very minimal hit. The stock market has created higher long term gains than the real estate market and is a hell of a lot more liquid.

The fact that people say your house is an "asset" is abuse of the definition and IMHO drives people to buy more house than they need. Sure it's an asset, but you also live there. Your liquidity is greatly reduced and your options become very limited.

Rental properties are another story. If you know what you're doing and can afford it, then I don't see issues with using that as an investing strategy. Just maybe don't buy all of them in the same city, or the same type of property. Just like with stocks and side hustles, diversification is important.

I am careful about giving financial advice to someone asking about timing the market. Things that might be helpful to ask first.

1. What is it about ETFs that makes you ask the question? Do you know what an ETF is, what it does, and what other financial products are out there that do similar things and how much they cost (fees)?

2. There are so many resources on the internet. I would say it's good to understand concepts like: Dollar-cost averaging, portfolio diversification, investment horizon, risk aversion. Most introductory investing resources would cover these things.

3. Think about what your short, medium, and long term cash and liquidity needs are to help determine how much you need/want/can invest. Remember, you can probably sell and get some money back, but it could be at a loss.

In summary, one could argue that it's always a "good" time to invest. The questions I would ask are "in what", "how much", and "how long".

I was thinking something similar. Maybe with some randomization to it, so different profiles across (social) media wouldn't link together through Clearview et al. but still all look like you to humans.

I like this idea. You shouldn't have to pay to access your own bank data. Looking forward to the near future when banks either have an API or die a slow death.