fab1an

You shouldn't judge decisions purely based on their outcome, and especially not with stocks. If 60k is a significant chunk of your net worth and you don't want to just gamble, it was probably rational to at least sell part of it...

I don't think this is so simple with one person shops, as knowing one's value propositions, revenue/profit numbers & acquisition channels etc goes vastly beyond the concept of the presumably worthless 'idea' that people usually refer to in this context.

EyeQuant | Berlin, Europe, ONSITE

EyeQuant is a machine learning SaaS that makes design measurable, helping hundreds of customers like Google, Canon, RBS to bring data into the design process.

We're hiring for two positions right now:

Head of Inbound Marketing https://eyequant.workable.com/jobs/365604

Machine Learning Engineer https://eyequant.workable.com/jobs/350545

Dawson, just came here to just say that I am super impressed with Logojoy, and especially how the onboarding process is both so fantastically smooth AND it actually IS the product! Very cool.

On the flipside, this surely has the potential to put thousands of cheapo logo designers out of (that line of) work.

EyeQuant | Berlin, Europe, ONSITE

EyeQuant is a machine learning SaaS that makes design measurable, helping hundreds of customers like Google, Canon, RBS to bring data into the design process.

We're hiring for two positions right now:

Head of Inbound Marketing

https://eyequant.workable.com/jobs/365604

Machine Learning Engineer

https://eyequant.workable.com/jobs/350545

First off, you can't talk 'to a company', but will need a specific idea on who's the person / function you want to get feedback from. Companies aren't people ;)

Cold email / LinkedIn should actually work fairly well for this. If it doesn't, your approach might not be specific enough, the person you're targeting might not be the right person OR your problem hypothesis is flawed.

Re: general approach, I've seen great response rates with a template like this one below.

Hi <NAME>

It looks like you’re an expert on <SPECIFIC FIELD YOU’RE SOLVING A PROBLEM FOR> - I would love to get your opinion on something I’ve been working on.

<ONE SENTENCE TEASER>

I’m not looking to sell anything at this point, but would love to understand if something like this would actually help you with your job. I don’t want to build the wrong thing!

Would you be willing to hop on a brief call with me sometime in the next week? This would only take a few minutes and if we’re onto something, you’d be the first to know about it.

Best, X

The important thing to keep in mind here is that the contrarianism of a bet is very obviously not a sufficient condition to make it a success. It's just that being contrarian AND right will usually be a more valueable bet than being right AND doing what everyone else does.

Thus a successful contrarian would invest in things that everyone else considers insane, but where she herself has a good theory on why they are actually not insane.

One shouldn't forget that the Guide Michelin started as (or maybe still is?) a content marketing strategy for the tire manufacturer Michelin!

The original idea (~100 years ago!) was to boost demand for cars and tires in general, and what better way to do that than to provide a list of amazing places you'll only get to visit as a motorized person.

Labor/salaries should definitely be included in your CAC. The standard way to calculate it is to consider your 'fully loaded' marketing & sales spend in a given period, including salaries, which in smaller teams doing b2b sales will usually actually be the largest single item.

Re: wearing different hats, you should still be able to come up with a % of time spend on actually doing marketing+sales and allocate accordingly.

Regardless of your market and product, the fundamental equation you need to get right in SaaS is CAC < CLTV, ie your customer acquisition cost needs to be vastly lower than the lifetime value of a customer (= your monthly gross revenue per customer x # of months you'll retain a customer)

The main tip I'd share for getting started is to think about your CAC first, ie before pricing. Set up a simple spreadsheet to conservatively estimate how much money you'll need to spend to get one customer (this will work with any channel, really). If you have some empirical data based on your own experiments, all the better.

That estimated (or empirical) CAC will help you understand much better how much you'll have to charge per month (or year) to recoup your CAC within a reasonable timeframe (depends heavily on whether you're bootstrapping or are funded), and you can base your pricing strategy on that.

Many VCs will look for ratios of 3, ie your CAC needs to be 1/3 of what a customer will pay you over their lifetime. VCs specialized in SaaS will have more sophisticated ways of looking at this, of course, but 3x is a reasonable lower boundary.

Facebook's strategy here is to build an AI brand before they have the actual technology, which could make a lot of sense. At the same time the interactions between M's team and its users will provide meaningful data to train the AI on.

EYEQUANT | BERLIN, GERMANY | FULLTIME| ONSITE

We're a SaaS startup with a mission to make design measurable using machine learning. Our customers (UX and conversion teams at Nike, Priceline, Newegg, etc) use EyeQuant to get instant, objective feedback on web & mobile designs.

We're currently looking for:

   *Business Development Managers
   *Business Development Interns
   *Customer Success Managers
   *Research Engineers
   *Research Interns
   *Marketing Managers

A few things you should know about us:

[1] We offer a unique chance to work on fundamental scientific questions and translate results into actual applications.

[2] We’re building a supportive and learning-focussed culture where your personal growth matters.

[3] Employees receive generous stock options and a competitive salary.

[4] We do our best work during flexible and family-friendly hours.

[5] We operate a strict no-asshole policy. We have zero tolerance for inappropriate or abusive behaviour. Life is too short for that.

Check http://eyequant.com/jobs for additional details on some of these roles (not all listed yet).

Interested? Get in touch at jobs@eyequant.com!

I don't know nearly enough about macroeconomic trends or basics to have an informed opinion on this, but I do wonder how much of the software giant's cash-generating power is eventually still based on industries that 'extract stuff out of the planet'. Even if that dependency were indirect - say by the amount of oil/minerals/diamonds needed to produce a chip that your software needs to run on - such a dependency would still mean that software can never be as much of a 'primal' industry as oil is/was.

A 'cute feature' does become a company once enough people are using it. In a parallel universe you could have said the same about a shutdown notice of Twitter or Snapchat.

The relevant quote is from Philosopher of Mind John Searle (of "Chinese Room" argument fame):

_Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard. (‘What else could it be?’) I was amused to see that Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought that the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electro-magnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill, and I am told some of the ancient Greeks thought the brain functions like a catapult. At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer._ (John Searle, Minds, Brains and Science, 44)

While intriguing, it's important to remember that humankind has always compared the mind to whichever recent technology was available - the catapult, the mill, the steam engine, and eventually, computers. While Deep Neural Networks -- unlike mills -- are of course inspired by what seems to be the actual biology of our brains, and the results are fascinating, it's humbling to keep the above in mind.

Sounds like it's time to move on. Keep in mind that you (as in you, the person) matters a lot more than your (or any) startup. Don't ever equate a failed business with a failed life. There are many successful founders that hadn't even thought about starting a company at your age and you'll probably get many more shots at this over the course of the next few decades.

It does sound like you've reached a point where the best course of action is to call it quits and start something new - contrary to popular opinion, startup companies are just _one_ instance of the many things you can do with your life.

Enterprise is a subset of B2B cos. While this isn't an exact science and the very concept of 'Enterprise' has been disrupted by companies such as box.net, I would say that typically: Enterprise = B2B cos with annual contract values > $100k, which usually means a different sales model, too.

_Absolutely_ love the insight of news being "the short tail of a very long string of events". Along with the promising execution this could well be one of those tremendously successful ideas that look trivially logical in hindsight.

BERLIN, Germany - @EyeQuant - 1. Research Engineer / Data Scientist and 2. Senior Researcher

We're an ambitious technology company teaching computers to see the web like humans do. We're hiring a Research Engineer / Data Scientist (Entry Level) and a Senior Researcher in Berlin!

You have a background in cognitive science/neuroscience and love science, but would like to work on real products in a collaborative team? Then this could be a great opportunity for you.

We have some experience in getting work visas for non-EU citizens.

Learn more and get in touch with us at: http://www.eyequant.com/jobs

Ah, one of my favorite topics.

The article correctly points out how there are no simple rules of thumb on this. The human visual system is very much driven by context and contrast, which makes it basically impossible to validate statements such as "red just works better than green".

That _does not mean_ that there's no system, though.

There is growing evidence that fast ("System 1") human decision-making tends to favour salient (i.e. visual pop-out) choices over less salient ones - for example, a recent PNAS study [1] found that the pop-out effect of a food item has a sizeable influence on it being picked up when consumers are in a hurry - going as far as even overriding prior brand preferences.

Disclosure: the software to quantify pop-out used in the study was build by my company (http://eyequant.com)

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/110/40/E3858.full.pdf

I've reached out the guy who runs berlinstartupjobs.com and asked him to ping his database of employers. Do check it out as well. All the best.

Seeking asylum in Germany is terrible, agreed, but it is so much easier to get a work permit visa here when you do have a job offer - good luck trying to get the work permit in the UK. In OP's case the best scenario would be to get a job offer from a Berlin based company and have the company apply for te work permit - it's a streamlined process that takes around 4 weeks.

The resulting law is nevertheless an attack on free speech, regardless of alternative underlying motivations.

Thanks Noel, EyeQuant co-founder here - (not the author, though)

Yes, the concept of an A/B test is used fairly liberally in our post and should probably not be interpreted in the exact same way for someone looking to run an actual A/B test on their website - though one hopefully gets the general idea. The article is just trying to point out that some of the most well known pieces of art were the result of an iterative optimization process that can be somewhat "reverse engineered" by creating alternative versions and measuring people's psychophysical response to those. And if this helps some companies out there to embrace both creativity and analytics to make their own websites better, all the better!

Very sound advice by someone who's accomplished A LOT in this field.

#6 strikes me as particularly important:

> 6. Make sure you’re talking to the ultimate decision maker. > It’s often not the person you’ll be directed to. It’s frequently the PM.

I'd also add that 'it's not necessarily the person with the fancy title.' You'll lose a lot of time by focussing on the wrong person(s), even if their title suggest that they're very important. We lost a deal in which we spent several weeks conferencing flirtatiously with BD and Corp Dev (both EVPs) only to have the proposal rejected by a 'regular' PM, who ultimately owned the product and wasn't very pleased to be brought into the process at a later stage. Instead, we should have asked early on who is going to be involved in the decision process 'given we find a great strategic fit'. Getting a soft Yes, that'd be him/her/me on this also helps the general sales process.

Hey Peter - thanks! We'll be in touch soon!

BERLIN - EyeQuant (http://eyequant.com) - we hire internationally and are experienced in getting work permits for US-citizens in Germany.

* Lead Designer / Front-End Engineer: http://berlinstartupjobs.com/design-ux/lead-designer-front-e...

* Python Engineer: http://berlinstartupjobs.com/engineering/e-g-senior-python-d...

EyeQuant is the world's first scalable neuromarketing web service that instantly predicts where users will look on a screenshot or website. We help companies and advertisers to optimize designs for dramatically higher conversion rates and improved usability faster and more efficient than ever before. Our customers include Google, Spotify, Groupon and some of the world’s best conversion optimization agencies. And we’re just getting started. In 2013, we are going to release a product that you’ll want to tell your grandchildren about. Hint: it’s not a photosharing app.

The memory grandmaster who trained Foer, Ed Cooke, runs a phenomenal startup that brings described techniques online to help you learn vocabulary: http://memrise.com

Highly recommended for anyone looking to expand their vocabulary in a variety of languages, including Mandarin.

Sent you an email and would gladly have you over for lunch tomorrow. Our focus is weirdly related to "online mapping", (http://eyequant.com), happy to chat more tomorrow.