dshipper

Fixed!! Thanks for finding that

To your latter point I did actually two tests with my girlfriend: I asked her to respond "as I would" rather than with what she thought the truth was, and then did another test where I just asked her to say what she thought. She improved when I told her to predict what she thought I would say—and that's the data I used in the article. But she was still significantly worse than the best GPT model

Re the information: I don't think so. The version of GPT that had access to only my most recent tweets performed better than she did, and she reads all of my tweets. In general, I think she has much higher fidelity data on me as an individual than GPT does.

OP here. That’s fascinating! Can you tell me where I can read about this? I don’t have any conscious fears of infidelity…

Very satisfied Muse user. It's great for compiling lots of research, reading PDFs, and basically getting a good visual map of what you're learning.

Snowflake is a software Dracula. It latches onto its customers and drains their bank accounts dry, but their victims are happy throughout the process. They are a world-class company at “net revenue retention”—a crucial metric for SaaS businesses that describes the tendency for customers to increase their spend over time.

How and why early-stage startups sacrifice power for growth

I don't personally, but a lot of this stuff is relevant for B2C. I would say, though, using Google / Facebook ads to drive traffic to a landing page in B2C is an excellent way to start (even though I recommend against it in this article.)

You'll get a lot of the same benefits of cold calling (which is harder to do with b2c products.)

It's a pain in the ass, but worth it :)

Thanks for reading :)

Glad you enjoyed it! Usually anything you can do to help fake the supply-side of the marketplace is usually a good place to start.

I'm very interested in reading more about your last point. Where did you hear about this shakeout? Will it affect companies had invest in solar projects like Wunder?

Haha! I feel your pain...rush hour on the L is terrible. Sorry if the title got your hopes up :)

Firefly - http://usefirefly.com - Philadelphia, PA node.js | socket.io | backbone.js

We’re a bootstrapped startup in the mid-six-figures in revenue and profitable from day one. We expect to more than double in revenue this year.

Over 7,000 small and medium businesses, 7,000 financial advisors, one US state and a top-ten US retailer use our software to help their customers. We power Olark’s cobrowsing.

Our cobrowsing software allows you to remotely connect up to a friend's browser see what they're doing, and collaborate in real time. It runs with pure javascript - no downloads, no installations, and no java applets. It’s not easy.

We typically sell in to big organizations in customer support, healthcare, insurance, and financial services. We’re looking for a head of enterprise sales as to help us scale. Previous experience is highly preferred. Compensation is a mix of base salary and commission. Email me (CEO) at dan[]usefirefly.com.

Firefly - http://usefirefly.com - Philadelphia, PA

node.js | socket.io | backbone.js

We’re a bootstrapped startup in the mid-six-figures in revenue and profitable from day one. We expect to more than double in revenue this year.

Over 7,000 small and medium businesses, 7,000 financial advisors, one US state and a top-ten US retailer use our software to help their customers. We power Olark’s cobrowsing.

Our cobrowsing software allows you to remotely connect up to a friend's browser see what they're doing, and collaborate in real time. It runs with pure javascript - no downloads, no installations, and no java applets. It’s not easy.

We’re looking for a lead engineer as we scale, harden, and secure our stack. Email me (CEO) at dan[]usefirefly.com.

This was mentioned in the article, but if you're looking for a TogetherJS-like tool that takes a different approach to collaboration you should look at what we've put together at Firefly: http://usefirefly.com.

It works all the way back to IE 8 :)

Glad you liked it!

Yes, I totally agree. I don't want to make it seem like phone / email are not legitimate tools for doing this type of stuff. I'm based in Philly so I'd say those two are REALLY important for what I do - we can only go out and meet clients in person a few times a year.

I think email is helpful for starting conversations (via cold emails). But what I was trying to say is that at some point you need to actually start talking to people on the phone or in person. You can only learn so much from watching your Google Analytics graphs.

Appreciate the perspective, thanks for allowing me to clarify.

You can definitely talk over the phone. But real business seems to happen more quickly in person, even today. Email certainly doesn't cut it.

The problem with the thought experiment is that it assumes infinite knowledge. It's very hard to imagine what things would actually be like if you had a trillion dollars and you wanted to build a flying car. You can definitely come up with things that you think are likely, but I've found that often times you know much less than you think, and the actual problems are MUCH less obvious than they seem.

It's kind of like a non-engineer imagining what problems he would run in to if he had to build the Golden Gate Bridge including design and construction. You can definitely foresee certain things, e.g. you need a lot of materials, pens and paper, but there's still a ton of uncertainty and real gritty problems that only come out when you're in the thick of things.

Yes definitely. In general as long as you're not mass emailing 1000s of potential prospects, you target specific people that you think would be interested, you tailor each email individually to them, and you're respectful and up-front about what you're doing things work out fine.

Not sure I entirely agree with this. For any sizeable niche (or even smaller niches) you should be able to find places where these people hang out on line and get in touch with them. If you can't then you don't know your target audience well enough.

You could certainly use advertising to collect email addresses, and then call those people to figure out what they want. The reason I don't like that as much is it puts another layer of specialized skill between you and your prospects. You have to dump a bunch of money and time in to learning how to write correctly targeted ads that convert before you even know who you're trying to convert, or what they care about. That's a tough problem to get around for most people.

Thanks! I've actually heard that a bunch but haven't used it for that purpose. Much appreciated.

This is very similar to what we do at Firefly (http://usefirefly.com), except we support all the way back to IE 8. Kudos to these guys for putting this together - especially if it works well. It's a lot harder than it looks.

Kazuo Ishiguro is a favorite: Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go

Thanks! I totally agree. Glad I could get you back on the philosophy kick, I think it's really useful for entrepreneurship.

Great presentation, thanks for sharing!

"Practice is the only way to get comfortable, and practice will make you better."

Totally agree with this.

"I believe that my previous two ventures failed mainly because of the founding team (which I’m included in). How do I know? Because companies with almost identical products and value propositions succeeded afterwards."

This is a dramatic and flawed oversimplification. There's no one reason why one company fails while another succeeds. The founding team may be part of the issue here, but I almost guarantee that there were probably plenty of other things going on than just that.

Thanks! Glad you thought so

Generally they just get a limited, non-exclusive license to use the code for their own purposes. e.g. they can't resell it so someone else, just use it the way they would have had the escrow not been triggered.

Nice post, and the home page is well designed but it's hard to tell what the product does without a screenshot or walkthrough of some sort.

It sounds reminiscent of HelloBar although you say in your post that it isn't like HelloBar at all - bad sign. I'd also recommend saying explicitly a few of the customers you're targeting e.g. bloggers, companies with large audiences etc etc.

Good luck!