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chresko

83 karma · joined May 7, 2012

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chresko··on At what time will be the YC S16 invites/rejection emails sent?
I would clarify the problem and solution. At first I thought your product (based on the description) was a soup to nuts IoT platform (i.e. building out the hardware as well). I might possibly rephrase your product as 'We're like Facebook Connect for Nest.' Or 'We're like IFTTT for IoT.' I think you want to drive home the point that you're connecting devices from different manufactures and adding additional functionality. The social network aspect is probably less important (I used the Facebook analogy since they were a developer platform at one point).
chresko··on At what time will be the YC S16 invites/rejection emails sent?
Might be more interesting if you did something like 'rent for a year.' Right now the problem with Airbnb is that you're limited to 90 days as the renter. If you tweak your idea to 'I want to live in that home for a year' with the option to buy, that might become more interesting and useful (you now have multiple audiences - long term renters, long term tenants and possible home buyers).
chresko··on At what time will be the YC S16 invites/rejection emails sent?
Good luck everyone!
chresko··on Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company
I think had Google taken the approach of 'what do we have that Facebook doesn't?' vs 'what does Facebook have that we can obtain?' would've resulted in a better product (as far as value proposition goes). There was a lot of opportunity to create a unique experience, and that simply didn't happen.
chresko··on Ask HN: Step by step guide to landing a SME client?
Hey Steve, I was referred to you by our mutual friend John. He mentioned that you were using X for booking off time. My startup has a similar, but better product that just went live. We spent four weeks in beta, and saw a 25-35% decrease in operating costs per month. We plan to launch this as a paid monthly service, but I'd like to offer it to you for free. It takes less than 10 minutes to migrate. Can you hop on a call this week and we'll get you started?

Thanks!

Me

chresko··on Ask HN: Step by step guide to landing a SME client?
If you sent me the email you drafted in #4, I'd ignore it. If you sent it again, I'd mark it as spam. Don't do this, it's a bad approach.

If you managed to get me to meet for lunch, didn't have anything built, but asked me for $1000, I'd ask you to pay for lunch and get back to me when you've built something that I could use for free for a month. Caveat - if you're the former founder/co-founder of Dropbox, Square, Twitter, etc... this rule doesn't apply. You want to be in the position where someone offers you money (without you asking) because the product is so great.

chresko··on Ask HN: Step by step guide to landing a SME client?
Not to trivialize the process, but here's some step-by-step suggestions:

1) First and foremost, verify that you're solving a problem that's truly a pain point for some significant number of people. Don't ask your friends, they'll almost always say yes. If you don't have direct access to someone who would potentially use your service, use an online survey (SurveyMonkey, for example) to sample your audience. The most important question you should be asking yourself right now is "Why would someone want this?" You're not your own customer.

2) Use your network and get intros. The chances of someone responding to you are much higher when you're connected by a mutual (and trusted) 3rd party.

3) You should have two pitch decks. The 1-2 minute pitch, and the 5-10 minute pitch. The 1-2 minute pitch deck gets attention. The 5-10 minute pitch deck tells what, why and how in more detail. You should also highlight yourself, and why you're the expert in this area.

4) If you don't have something built, at the very least have very detailed and polished wireframes. Ideally something that's interactive.

This is basically a mashup of how to raise money and how to pitch and sell your product (since you seem to be focusing on acquiring a client who will pay you to build this solution vs pitching to a VC in order to build a company).

If you (or you and some friends) can build an MVP, do that and give it to someone you know to use (most startups are more willing to try out these types of products, especially if you know the founders). If it's a good idea, and it works, you now have 'proof' that's actionable (mainly, numbers/metrics and user feedback).

Also, you should be able to explain how this is going to help company X. Are you going to increase productivity by 50%? Are you going to lower costs by 25%? You should be able to explain, with fluency, what you're optimizing and the analysis behind that (that may be in the form of P&L analysis, for example).

Most engineers going into this get hung up on the how. Companies rarely care how (although again, this should be in your pitch deck) you're going to build this because they have little or no technical background. They just want to know why your thing is better than the thing they have, or the things they thought about using/buying.

BTW, don't say you _think_ you can help employees save the company time/money. Say that you can definitively save the company time/money by making process X for their employees Y times easier/cheaper. Use real numbers that show real gain. Make a very simple to understand chart/graph.

chresko··on How to add live chat to your Parse-powered app with Hipmob
I chose to use it because I'm not a very good backend developer (my bad) and needed something up and running quickly. But I agree that it's probably not a good longterm solution.
chresko··on How to add live chat to your Parse-powered app with Hipmob
Doesn't seem like there's an easy way to do p2p chatting without hitting your server (often) with a new list of 'friends.' Any chance of supporting something simpler?
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