garrettdimon

It still creates non-trivial day-to-day overhead for customers where they now have to think about who to invite and what permissions to grant them in conjunction with costs.

We'd much rather that 90% of the cases, customers can just invite anyone on their team without fearing ballooning costs. Then they can think about permissions purely from a permissions/access perspective and not have to factor cost into that decision.

There has to be some sort of limit because "unlimited" can easily lead to customers using far more resources than they're paying for.

However, by moving away from per-seat pricing, customers who have switched to the new pricing have now added many more users who can benefit from having access to the Flipper Cloud UI but were not worth paying for individual seats before.

So based on customer behavior and reception to the new plans, it has made things much more flexible for them in practice.

I don't have a singular, one-size-fits-all better option, but I explicitly included several options that I've seen work well either as the applicant or from the hiring side. I just wasn't going to presume that there's one perfect replacement that will work for every team or role.

I added that after-the-fact in response to this comment. So that's on me for not including it originally. It's a great idea and one I wholeheartedly endorse because it forces the company to put some skin in the game and helps limit the number of applicants that they would request perform the take home test while also recognizing that applicants' time is in limited supply.

That’s not always accurate that the company doing the hiring contributes nothing. (Also good companies could offer to pay for that take-home test time.)

Having done take home before from the hiring side, it was incredibly time-consuming for us. We had someone anonymize the three finalist submissions, and then we had three people each individually review and comment on each one, and then we got together to discuss and choose the final candidate. Once we agreed on one, only then was it de-anonymized.

All-in, it took way more time than a single developer doing three live coding interviews. But my guess would be that most companies wouldn’t be willing to be that deliberate with take home.

I don’t have any trouble with the three bottom thumb keys in the cluster, but the top three aren’t very useful. I’ve remapped them to media or macro shortcuts that I don’t use while typing.

We have three TCL Roku TV’s, and while they’re all blocked now, they were responsible for about 98% of the requests on our network according to Pi Hole. Now they’re blocked at the router level as well because it’s hard to trust them at all. Pi Hole doesn’t block them by default, but the endless requests to Roku domains are easy to blacklist.

We've been doing 4-day/32-hour weeks at Wildbit for over a year now, and it's been great. We're a remote-first team of just under 30 people spread across quite a few time zones. It's a mental hurdle at first, but the company has continued to grow and be as productive as we were before.

We're all just much more mindful of how we each spend our time these days. We also strive to reduce meetings and lean more on asynchronous communication in order to reduce interrupting each other. That lets everybody focus more and get more high-quality work done in fewer hours.

Our initial write up: https://wildbit.com/blog/2017/05/31/experimenting-with-a-4-d...

The follow up with what we learned and what we adjusted: https://wildbit.com/blog/2017/10/19/4-day-work-week-update

As a Grammarly user, the thing that's been most surprising is that there's no option for an API to integrate with other tools. I guess with the growth they've experienced, there's not a lot of pressure to expand it, but it seems like a world of opportunity. I'm sure there are some good reasons, like the editing experience or API abuse, but their tool simply isn't the best overall writing experience.

To be able to use Grammarly within Sublime text or other editors would be incredible. As it stands, because you're forced to copy and past content over into their editor, the workflow is the biggest drawback. It's really handy in textareas on the web, but I've struggled to integrate it into my writing workflow because of the copy/paste process. Writing mainly in Markdown doesn't make it any more elegant either.

We don't hesitate to use chat or video if it makes sense. In fact, we use it frequently. We all trust each other to think about what medium makes sense for a given discussion. That way, people don't just reach for what's in front of them. It makes everything much more deliberate, and it helps reduce interruptions.

The more I read about others' experiences with remote work, the more it seems that it depends heavily on whether the company embraces remote work, accepts it, or merely tolerates it. The resulting experiences really need context. Unless a company is truly committed to remote work, it's going to be an uphill battle.

Much of this advice is true in every context, but much of it reads like it's coming from a place of fear and having to prove your worth and presence. I imagine that if you're one of very few remote employees of a primarily centrally located team that makes sense, but it feels really unhealthy.

Half of our team at Wildbit is remote and across many time zones that make meetings difficult at times, but it doesn't feel anything like this. Even the half of the team that's based out of HQ spends a lot of time working from home.

We also activley promote disconnecting and not being constantly available to get focus work done. And everyone's encouraged to not be constantly available because that makes it nearly impossible to get the most important types of focus work done. So in many cases, team members are explicitly unavailable. We even promote email as one of the best ways to communicate because it's less disruptive and let's people stay focused until they're ready to come up for air and respond.

Another thing that makes a difference is that we strive to incorporate the remote team into the daily life around the office. We have team retreats once a year. Everyone regularly spends some time in Philadelphia at HQ. And we have someone who spends a lot of time dreaming up ways to incorporate the remote team so we're not so disconnected. It's a constant effort on everyone's part to ensure we're supporting and fully embracing remote work as a single team.

It's definitely doable, but it has to be remote-focused. At Wildbit, we have 12 in Philadelphia and another 14 in 14 different cities around the world. They keys are in the small things.

When we do video chats, the folks in Philly call in just like they were on a home computer. They don't all get together in a big room and call in. We also make a point to run all of our conversations through group chat and project management software. And plenty of the Philly folks work from home regularly as well. Remote work isn't simply tolerated, it's put first.

The remote folks (myself included) miss out on some of the office benefits like family-style lunches and get togethers, but we all make regular trips there and get to partake. It's not purely about location either since we're spread across numerous time zones. It just takes more deliberate communication.

There's always going to be water cooler chats, but those can just as easily happen via email where nobody would see them. We have to make a point to capture and share things to the right people.

The price change itself isn't enough reason to leave them, but the way that they've handled the price change and their responses to customers is definitely pushing me that way.

It feels like a very tone-deaf response from Betterment that, while people are disappointed in the price hike, the loss of trust is coming entirely from the way Betterment is handling it and responding. It's hard to trust a company with your retirement when they literally seem like they don't care at all about the loss of trust.

A lot of the comments here seem to focus on socialization and feeling like you're in a community, but closed offices don't preclude this.

I work at Wildbit (the company referenced in the article), and we have family-style lunches around a big table and plenty of common areas where socialization happens in the mornings, during lunch, when people make coffee, and plenty of other times.

The key is that when folks are working, they can do so in their office and stay focused. It's a balance of the two. Quiet space when folks need to focus and social space for other times. Having private offices and half the team working remotely doesn't affect socialization. We just tend to have better separation between the two so that they don't blur into each other or impact others who are trying to stay focused.

Founder of Sifter here. Happy to discuss and answer questions.

While I can't speak for the entire team, this was a process that felt both intense and highly rewarding. It's often not easy for teams to find time to commit to working through a process like this, but internally, it feels like it's made a big difference in our momentum and confidence in the ways we're addressing customer feedback. It's a process that I'd highly recommend to any team that feels like they have an overwhelming backlog of improvements.

For folks looking for alternatives, there's a good list here with some indicators on the quality of delivery as well.

https://www.inboxtrail.com/compare

Plasso (formerly Spacebox) I've been incredibly happy with both the service and the support.

http://plasso.co

Stripe is only the payment processor. Plasso also handles distributing digital downloads for you.

I self-published by selling online using Spacebox and Stripe. I only created a PDF, but am working on adding epub and mobi versions, mainly due to requests for a Kindle-friendly version. The book included about a dozen custom diagrams the tied into the text.

Along with the book (http://startsustain.com), about starting and running your own web app, I included a simple project task list and a rather involved spreadsheet for helping to estimate revenue and expenses and easily adjust them to see the impact on revenue. My results might be moderately misleading because this spreadsheet was a significant component of value justifying the price.

The book was all new content, rather than repackaged blog posts, and I sold the package for $99 with occasional sales of $79 and $59. Prior to launch, I built up an announcement list of about 1,600 interested people. I did a poor job marketing to those people beforehand, but instead just sent out a single launch announcement.

It's been available for about 9 months now and sold over 500 copies for a total of about $45,000. I spent about $3,000 up front for cover design and editing.

We use StatusPage for our app, and it's been great. On the surface, it may look like something that easily be replicated by a simple blog or Tumblr account, but that's definitely not the case.

They seamlessly integrate the status history as well as letting us easily post to Twitter when there is a problem. They also provide a feed and reliable infrastructure separate from our own that integrates with monitoring tools.

When your app is offline, it's a huge relief to be able to easily update Twitter and have a central location for clear status information without having to go to Twitter and Tumblr or wherever and tie everything together.

It's certainly not cheap, but compared to building, hosting, and maintaining an equivalent service, it's a great deal. Some of their more advanced features, like allowing customers to sign up for text alerts are great as well if you need it.

The service is way more than just a hosted Tumblr account, and I'd definitely recommend them if you're looking for something like this.

Technically, you may be able to, but legally, the license doesn't allow for it.

This couldn't be further from the truth. We have well over 10,000 active users. If our service is down, they care. However, finding time to build something this robust would take a significant amount of resources away from our product.

It's a matter of priorities. I can spend the time to build and maintain a tool like this or I could spend that time improving our service for our customers. Paying someone else to manage this for us is a complete no-brainer regardless of the size of our customer base.

It's a design term. You'll generally hear people refer to "design comps" or the like.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_layout

Not sure yet. I figured I'd give it two or three days to give everyone a good shot at picking it up at the lower price.

Definitely. Unfortunately, I won't have a way to push updates, so I'd only be able to send the updated package to people that requested it.

I may add one if there's incredibly high demand, but my initial attempts to create them left me with the impression that it would be a significant amount of effort for marginal additional benefit.

The short answer is October 25, 2012 to March 18, 2013.

The spreadsheet is something that I've been fine-tuning for the last five years with Sifter. It took me a couple of days to clean it up and make it more user-friendly.

The book was about 1.5 months of full-time writing and editing. But I've been working on it about half-time since October doing research and working out all of the logistics.

We also hired both an illustrator for the cover and an editor to reduce the amount of effort I'd have to put in. So that probably shortened the timeline a bit.

EDIT: Added a table of contents and a more obvious link to the sample chapter. Thanks!

Working on adding a table of contents now. The sample chapter is available here: http://startingandsustaining.com/StartingSustainingSample.pd...

It's linked further down the page. I'll see about making it more obvious.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm sorry to hear that you're disappointed about the price. We've considered selling the book separately, but it's all really a package deal as there are quite a few references to the spreadsheet throughout the book.

Ultimately, we chose to price the book based on value. It's less about whether you're paying $79 for a book than it is about paying $79 to cut hours, days, or even weeks of pain and mistakes from the process of launching an application.

As far as the money back guarantee. I stand by it, and fully plan on processing those requests immediately should any come in.