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colinloretz

150 karma · joined February 5, 2010

Building software and community at @Discord. Formerly of @MadeyByMechanism @OrbitModel @cloudsnap and @NumerousApp

Founder of @renocollective Coworking. Community builder & TechStars Cloud alum.

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colinloretz··on Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work
not likely, subscriptions are very mature on YouTube and still only make up a tiny percentage of revenue. MKBHD did a good video breaking this down across other social networks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1qsF0WQy8c
colinloretz··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2022)
Orbit | https://orbit.love | Remote in USA, France, or UK Orbit unlocks the power of communities through the Orbit Model, technology, and data. Our community growth SaaS platform helps companies identify, measure, and boost their community members’ engagement, all while focusing on creating value instead of merely capturing it. For more info on our values, check us out on Key Values, https://www.keyvalues.com/orbit.

Hiring for:

* Site Reliability Engineer: https://orbitlove.recruitee.com/o/site-reliability-engineer

* Engineering Manager: https://orbitlove.recruitee.com/o/engineering-manager

* Solutions Engineer: https://orbitlove.recruitee.com/o/solutions-engineer

* Software Engineer (Remote US): https://careers.orbit.love/o/software-engineer-remote-united...

* Software Engineer (Remote UK): https://careers.orbit.love/o/software-engineer-remote-united...

* Software Engineer (Remote France): https://careers.orbit.love/o/software-engineer-remote-france

More open roles here: https://orbit.love/careers#open-roles

colinloretz··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2022)
Orbit | https://orbit.love | Remote in USA, France, or UK

Orbit unlocks the power of communities through the Orbit Model, technology, and data. Our community growth SaaS platform helps companies identify, measure, and boost their community members’ engagement, all while focusing on creating value instead of merely capturing it. For more info on our values, check us out on Key Values, https://www.keyvalues.com/orbit.

Hiring for:

Site Reliability Engineer: https://orbitlove.recruitee.com/o/site-reliability-engineer

Engineering Manager: https://orbitlove.recruitee.com/o/engineering-manager

Solutions Engineer: https://orbitlove.recruitee.com/o/solutions-engineer

colinloretz··on What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App
If you're not already in the Shopify ecosystem, I'd look at Stripe Subscriptions with Checkout which requires a small amount of development that lives in something like a lambda or netlify function. - https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/checkout - https://www.netlify.com/blog/2020/07/13/manage-subscriptions...

If you want something out of the box, there are tools like Memberful, Gumroad, etc that take quite a vig on top of the payment processing.

colinloretz··on What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App
Are you thinking for digital products like a PDF or purely for membership access?

When you create a billing attempt against a subscription, it creates a Shopify order that is tied to that subscription. You could definitely have the order be tied to a digital product.

While you could definitely make it work for a membership system, I think I'd recommend literally anything else. Happy to elaborate or answer any specific questions you might have.

colinloretz··on What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App
We just built our own subscriptions on the Subscription API and it is extremely thin. Just a few gripes that I had to build around: 1. The "SubscriptionContract" isn't much of a contract at all. You can set a subscription to cancelled but still bill against it for example. 2. It keeps track of a "next billing date" but it does not bill the customer for you like Stripe does, you have to keep track of the next billing date and attempt to bill against the contract yourself.
colinloretz··on GitHub is now free for teams
Read his comment again. They are supporting the free plans with Github Enterprise.

> We've wanted to make this change for the last 18 months, but needed our Enterprise business to be big enough to enable the free use of GitHub by the rest of the world. I'm happy to say that it's grown dramatically in the last year, and so we're able to make GitHub free for teams that don't need Enterprise features.

colinloretz··on Ask HN: In the current crisis is starting freelancing doable?
Definitely. With such an economic contraction, you're going to see companies hiring contractors for a while because they don't have to commit to the full overhead of an employee. We saw a huge influx of freelancers in 2008-2009 and as the economy grew pre-covid19, more and more freelancers took jobs at companies because of salaries, benefits, etc. We will very likely see a repeat of that.

Things to make sure of: make sure your rates take into account your overhead. You're going to have to pay for your own insurance, pay withholding taxes, business licenses, account for some time off/sick days, etc.

After years of freelancing, attempting to set aside money for taxes and never paying into retirement, I started using an app called https://www.catch.co/ to track all of this and it allowed me to focus more on freelancing and less on the overhead.

colinloretz··on 6 months in and $1k MRR: my biggest mistakes so far
I've tried YNAB and use Mint alongside Lunch Money and I'm super sold. I started using it when she first launched on HN and have been in love with it so far because it's super speedy and not as manual as YNAB. The way she handles recurring expenses is what made it for me. I set a task in my todo app to reconcile my transactions every day (usually only happens every week).
colinloretz··on What happened to Mint?
LunchMoney has been amazing and the quality & speed of new features has been impressive considering it's being built by one developer!
colinloretz··on Some WeWork Board Members Seek to Remove Adam Neumann as CEO
WeWork has a "Powered by We" service that companies like Amazon use so they don't have to manage a new building. They allow WeWork to deal with everything from top to bottom. https://www.poweredbywe.com/
colinloretz··on Ask HN: As a freelancer, what's the best app to track finances?
https://Catch.co

For tracking and putting aside money for freelance withholding, retirement and planned time-off.

colinloretz··on Fintech startup Plaid raises $250M at a $2.65B valuation
That was the goal but they were acquihired by Silicon Valley Bank. https://www.svb.com/news/company-news/api-banking-startup-st...
colinloretz··on All about whiteboard markers
As a coworking space operator, I thank you for this treasure trove of whiteboard marker research.
colinloretz··on Ask HN: Who is on your shit-list of frustrating Enterprise Software?
That's the biggest issue with their growth right now. Salesforce has done a great job in marketing that it can "do anything"... provided you can build it yourself and get around all the developer platform limitations. I used to do Salesforce consulting and custom development, won their hackathon in 2009, worked with many companies on internal tools and apps and am so happy to be out of that game now.
colinloretz··on Tesla selects Nevada for battery plant
Apple also received/is receiving additional incentives [1] for their new iCloud data centers which are being built near where Tesla is planning to put the gigafactory (the plot of land is already graded for the factory).

For those interested, Katie Fehrenbacher from Gigaom did some great coverage last month of what is happening out here RE: Tesla and Apple.[2]

1. http://www.areadevelopment.com/newsItems/8-3-2012/apple-iclo... 2. http://gigaom.com/2014/08/10/the-changing-face-of-reno-why-t...

colinloretz··on Ask HN: What are some Bay Area startups that don't use an open office plan?
Check out the various levels of headphones on The Wirecutter. http://thewirecutter.com/leaderboard/headphones/

I use the Sony MDR-7506 which are rated as the best $150 Over Ear Headphones (actually $90ish on Amazon) and they are very popular with audio pros. Not noise canceling but they are comfortable enough for wearing all day and if you're listening to something, you don't have sound leaking in or out.

colinloretz··on A Request for a Startup: Gmail 'Waiting For Reply' Tab
Here is a code snippet that does the opposite of what you want. To achieve what you are looking for, just change the conditions around to mark the email messages as you desire.*

This one will mark any received emails that you have not responded with an "AwaitingReply" label.

As I mention in my Gist comment, I used this a lot to make sure we didn't have any emails slipping through the cracks.

https://gist.github.com/colinloretz/9299685

* I know you're volunteering first month "payment" but since I came across this somewhere on the web and can't find the original source (I'll keep looking), here it is. Hopefully it will help you or someone else.

colinloretz··on Ask HN: It might be time to shutter my startup
Don't create more work for yourself. If the site is running well on WP-Engine and the cost is bearable, it sounds like time is the limiting factor.

You have been doing this because it is something you love, I think it might be time to find a small community of other people who also love the topic area and get them to contributors! A friend of mine runs a news/blog type site (The New Artemis) and she accepts submissions, reviews for gear, etc. She currently does most of the work but has a plan for bringing in new folks who are also obsessed EDC/survivalist fans to create and edit content.

colinloretz··on Salesforce.com Announces Two $1 Million Winning Teams for Hackathon
I also competed. We had from when the hackathon was announced (October 25th) to November 17th to build our submissions.
colinloretz··on Salesforce.com Announces Two $1 Million Winning Teams for Hackathon
They reached out to all the teams for their permission to publish their submissions. Not all of the teams have agreed to do so yet.
colinloretz··on Mint sucks, so why aren't there any real competitors in that space?
Yodlee gave them their initial connections and I assume many of them were built as one-offs afterwards.

I'm looking forward to seeing what companies like Standard Treasury (http://standardtreasury.com/) can do to modernize this area.

colinloretz··on First Bitcoin ATM
It doesn't seem like the scanner is required for these machines and it does so using palm-vein scanning, not fingerprints. They are doing so to prevent any single user from withdrawing over a legal limit in a day.

"If enabled, the Palm Vein Scanner can limit a user's daily transaction amount by taking a unique, anonymous (no fingerprints) infrared picture of a customer's blood vessels to assist in AML compliance."

colinloretz··on Bitcoin ATM Robocoin Makes Money Laundering Easy
They don't want to bear the legal risk of operating these machines. Instead they are selling them as hardware. If these enable money laundering, the buyer incurs the direct risk as the operator.
colinloretz··on Belkin Buys Linksys from Cisco
Not sure about Linksys but Cisco did acquire Meraki a few months back. http://www.meraki.com/company/cisco-acquisition-faq
colinloretz··on Inbox Zero for Life
I used to use my actual inbox as my to do list. As the author mentions, we all are guilty of it on some level. The issue for me was that the original couple items I "marked as unread" that needed later action soon were being buried by new email and even with triage, 4 unread/actionable emails turned into 10, then 20 and so on to the point where I'd have to do deep email triage or declare inbox bankruptcy and start over. This was tedious and mentally exhausting.

The shortcuts in the post are a huge help. I always knew they were there but never thought about how they would work in a process as described in the OP. I'm going to try using the web UI with those now instead of Sparrow.

colinloretz··on Wireframing Tools Suck
What about wireframing in HTML itself. Like http://jetstrap.com lets you do with Bootstrap? Fluid, exportable and could probably be versioned pretty easily. Your post also reminds me of Jason Santa Maria's post about "actual web design tools." edited to add link to JSA's article: http://v4.jasonsantamaria.com/articles/a-real-web-design-app...
colinloretz··on Pinoccio - A Complete Ecosystem for Building the Internet of Things
Super excited about this. I have a couple ideas I've been rattling around that would be much easier to pull with boards that already have wifi/mesh over trying to get a bunch of xbees/arduino parts.
colinloretz··on Migrate Your Instagram Photos to Flickr in One Click.
We rolled this out last night! You now get the locations and proper "photo taken at" timestamps if the data exists in Instagram.
colinloretz··on Migrate Your Instagram Photos to Flickr in One Click.
Haha, definitely agree. It was mostly a fun exercise for us to build for the community so people can send a copy of their Instagram photos over to Flickr. We love data portability and we also understand both Instagram and Flickr are businesses and they want to make money. This gives users the freedom to move, don't move, use both, etc.
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