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francescopnpn

19 karma · joined March 22, 2017

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francescopnpn··on Ask HN: 250MM Acquisition Instead of $10MM?
A $250mm sale is lottery type sh+t. u can't plan it. 1:1mm odds. you're naive. $10mm is realistic while still highly unlikely. like 1:100 odds. just build a SaaS that makes $3mm a year (e.g 5k customers paying $49 a month or 300 that pay $1k a month).
francescopnpn··on Micro Investment Plan – $20k
I told people to buy btc and decentraland here on HN 2 years ago and now you'd be up x100.

now I'd tell you, trading NFTs should be your full time job

francescopnpn··on Ask HN: How would I make 3 millions euros in two weeks
Buy a weekly option on a company it's going to announce a merger or predict any other many-sigma event with week/month-precision always using weekly options
francescopnpn··on Stripe’s payments APIs: the first ten years
Extremely unhappy too with Stripe's support. Patrick Collison never answered my emails (not that I expected to). They disabled and re-enabled our Stripe account multiple times thinking it was a forbidden business. With another company we received 2 chargebacks out of 20 transactions and balance ($6K+) has been blocked for 90 days. Not to mention that the chargebacks arrived much later, and the reason it has not been paid out early (weeks earlier) prior to the chargebacks (weekly schedule) was because of an unknown bug or something. Basically the payout date moved to the next day every single day the payout was supposed to happen. or so it seems, who knows! no emails, no nothing. Stripe's support that bad.

I emailed Stripe and the chat support 10+ times and all I received is 10(!!) days later was a copy paste "sorry can't do anything about that" - referring to the fact that by then the chargeback rate was 10% because of 2....so statistically insignificant... chargebacks. which again, happened much later, after the supposed payout date.

Oh. And to add to it, we requested 10+ days ago for a migration of our data to Braintree / Paypal and they never got back to us. again. it's just a shitshow.

Very sketchy and nonsensical business practices, if you ask me.

if someone from stripe is wiling to actually fix this shitshow (aka perform the migration and payout our money or at least explain why prior to any chargeback the money hasn't been paid out), you can email me at: arturaregnante90 at gmail

francescopnpn··on Magic mushrooms are changing the lives of terminal cancer patients
different people have different tolerances. clearly your sweet spot was "half a dose" dude.
francescopnpn··on Ask HN: Where to meet non-technical cofounders?
As the solo founder of a profitable $1MM ARR company I'd say you can do it on your own and there's nothing they can add anyway. Just pick a domain you're deeply obsessed with in the first place.

Remember, in software in 2020 the only important thing is distribution. Work backwards from distribution. The biggest SaaS products aren't that great, they just have a great way to get sales/leads. The best consumer products, aren't that great (or weren't that great) - they just found an hack. 99.9% of startups thinks they need to make a great product and then raise VC and throw millions on FB and G ads -being highly unprofitable- (since PPC is a game for established deep-pocket companies with ridiculous CACs)

Literally just hacks: Airbnb, spamming Craiglist. Dropbox, referral incentive-based storage + a viral funny video for hackers. Stripe, they happened to be in an early YC batch. Facebook started with the most exclusive place in the world: Harvard. Hotmail: adding "sent with hotmail" at the end of the email. etc.

If you find a way to for ex. post on Facebook Groups at scale, then you should work a product backward from there since not all channels are suited for all products. If you have many friends in the intel community, probably you should make a product for the US Defense. Get the gist?

in 2020 any decent dev can create any product and/or copy your idea. what's impossible is getting tons of customers at a reasonable acquisition cost as to be profitable and have to spare to re-invest in growth.

Hardware/scientific breakthroughs are obviously different. Making the product is h hard part and distribution is easy: if you inventhe the transistor, the customers will be there.

so yeah a sales cofounder will add nothing as he wont happen to know which temporary weird thing on the internet allows in a very specific way to get a ton of customers at a very cheap price (ideally free). If he did, he would hire anyone in the world as a contractor to build a prototype and distribute it through the hack he found- 99% of the work is already done when you found the well. If you'll attempt to methodically find a well (usually one just stumbles upon it), know that before you'll find find 1 you'll have to go thru 100+ dry wells.

The alternative I guess is you could make software for a super niche kind of business. like Insurance. Software for insurance agents. Maybe an even more narrow niche. That's because you can reach these people via phone or email. which is free.

francescopnpn··on Ask HN: What is your favorite motto?
Memento mori. Unus sed leo.
francescopnpn··on Airbnb Plans to File Confidentially for IPO in August
Same. Sometimes I use Airbnb and it's a mixed bag. Same thing happened with me once a year ago: I left a bad review for the host, the host a bad review to me, both have been removed.

so much for trust. Why not completely remove reviews and manually inspect each property with some regularity? Might as well do that since they're completely fake.

Sure, there'll be less properties but the quality will go up so much which translates into higher retention and $.

francescopnpn··on Fire your bad customers
I always think that the best business to build or own is the one with the highest margins which usually means catering to wealthy customers. Apple, Tesla, Gulfstream. One exception is if your business accepts payments which can't be reversed such as wires (investment products, some hardware subscriptions). The bottom of any market is shit.
francescopnpn··on Fire your bad customers
I agree. But amazon has AWS too which is high-end.

I always think that the best business to build or own is the one with the highest margins which usually means catering to wealthy customers. Apple, Tesla, Gulfstream.

One exception is if your business accepts payments which can't be reversed such as wires (investment products, some hardware subscriptions)

francescopnpn··on Oatly: The New Coke?
what about just drinking water and eating berries? I kid you not, you will feel so much better.
francescopnpn··on Launch HN: Sidekick (YC S20) – A hardware device to connect remote teams
This is peak YC
francescopnpn··on Launch HN: Yotta Savings (YC S20) – Behavioral psychology to help people save
I guess people eventually could win twice in a short span if they're unlucky and they'd be out of money
francescopnpn··on Launch HN: Yotta Savings (YC S20) – Behavioral psychology to help people save
How much does the insurance cost? Was it hard to find someone wiling to insure that?

Finally, you pay 0.2% but Ally pays 1% yet you say your rates are as good.

francescopnpn··on Berkshire Hathaway buys Dominion Energy natural gas assets in $10B deal
true and sad-reflective of the world's state (last 50y)
francescopnpn··on Bangalore has 12M residents and only 385 Covid-19 cases
Reporting and testing across different countries is not equal by any means. I'm always amazed by these headlines that mean literally nothing. Statistics 101? The conclusions you can actually derive by the deviation in deaths YoY https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps#z-scores-by-country are that the least densely populated countries are the ones faring better. Germany being the outlier. Taiwan did great because @n95s for every citizen.
francescopnpn··on Stanford researchers confirm N95 masks can be sterilized in oven
check the last article I submitted.
francescopnpn··on Ask HN: How do I find investors?
I don't?
francescopnpn··on Ask HN: Getting a good SV job in one’s 40s from the other side of the globe
Given the immigration situation, probably not. If you just want disposable income, go to Zurich.
francescopnpn··on Ask HN: Books to read when you are down and lost
1) get a better job 2) get a partner 3) do smth rewarding such as non profit work
francescopnpn··on Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?
1. BTC's ATH is $50K and it's still the dominant cryptographic assets & will overcome gold as preferred store of value

2. There's a recession, SPY drops 40%+ in 1Y

3. First Electric Planes

4. We go to Mars

5. First somewhat general intelligence robots wandering the streets and homes

6. No 5L autonomy in sight

7. x10 space companies

8. in 2030 AR/VR will be iPhone 1 level

9. I will have preserved countless acres of virgin land and be on my way to space

10. in 2030 there will be the first migrations due to rising temperatures.

francescopnpn··on AirPods Are Becoming a Platform?
wasn't the Bill Gate's something line along the lines of "It's not a platform until businesses that make $1M+/y can be built on top of it"
francescopnpn··on Product Zeitgeist Fit
just the age old question "Why now?"

repackaged as nonsense

francescopnpn··on Bill Atkinson: Reflections on the 40th anniversary of my joining Apple
Remember that his experience is just an anecdote. You should not base your reasoning upon someone else's experience. You should research and keep in mind that yes, bad trips exist and also that we're talking about banned compounds and as such their purity varies. God knows what he took. The only way to know for sure is to order from a (legal) EU lab, which makes a similar compound or something. With that said, my personal opinion is that it doesn't make sense to take something under researched, artificially isolated. As such, imo, you're better off growing your spores, again, ordered from and consumed in a legal place, such as, Holland. There was a thread about them both those things here on HN, with some great comments. You might wanna use HN search and sift thru the comments. But as far as spores, I think it's pretty accurate to say that what you'll experience is a dissociation from your ego, which, is a totally abstract concept, and quite unimaginable. Mhh, I'd say what happens is you see everything from the outside, you realize everything is a mental construction and feel like everything is connected. I recommend reading a piece on Santa Claus and the spores. Gives much more context than anything for what their use should be, and was, imo. Don't expect to turn an apple into a Macintosh.
francescopnpn··on I spent 22 years in prison for a crime I didn’t commit
Another nightmare that could even come close, I can not imagine.
francescopnpn··on Launch HN: Vouch (YC S19) – Business Insurance for Startups
Very much appreciated & good luck with this. I edited my original post and added a fifth question.
francescopnpn··on Launch HN: Vouch (YC S19) – Business Insurance for Startups
It would be interesting to know a few technical/regulatory details.

1- You say you're live in 8 states. Which ones? 2- Did you have to obtain 1 license per state? 3- How much time did it take to obtain each license? What it entailed? Was a prerequisite being a US citizen or being a US company? 4- are/will your employees that deal with the sales legally required to be individually licensed agents? 5- "Pricing depends on a variety of factors including policyholder location". Could you elaborate on the regulatory aspects, if any, of this?

francescopnpn··on Ask HN: How do I understand the results of my job search?
Leetcode+Referrals/cold app Series A,B,Seed companies
francescopnpn··on Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival
This is the worst attempt I've ever seen at building a social network. 3 out of 4 of the major social networks were started by 20-22yos, 4 out of 4 were initially for teens only, 3 out of 3 in the last 10 years were mobile-only, ios-only

I could go on forever but the point is it doesn't even get the basics right. If you're interested in how one builds a successful social network check Nikita's tweets (sold TBH to Facebook 2 years ago for $100M) https://twitter.com/nikitabier

francescopnpn··on Just did the Y Combinator interview: here are my notes
is this satire? because if not, you wanna short it to 1 to 2 sentences.
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