going_to_800

It's from 2017 but even more valid today. GA is blocked by most ad blockers thus no company can rely confidently on it anymore. uBlock blocks also a few other tools like MixPanel that helps companies understand their users behavior and how they use their product.

I can't believe how ignorant people that say "use server logs" are. They clearly haven't done any online marketing or run an online business, yet they want better and cheaper products - even free if possible.

How do you think a company gets to improve and optimize their product? By surveys? I think many assume the entire analytics required for a business is just reading a few GET requests from the server logs and categorizing them by user agent.

I'm really sick of all that "your keywords are too complex" or "people don't understand what you're saying", most of the times coming from people that know nothing about that niche or industry.

If those people are not your target market, don't give a shit about what they say related to the landing page content. You're not selling to them. If they don't understand the terminology used and they are not potential clients, you don't have to make a "less complex" landing page or change the wording just to make them happy.

Any advice (books,blogs, etc) for someone looking to hire the first people?

Well put.

Almost the same age as you. I've failed on about 20 projects in the last 12 years until I found the one that started my company.

My mistake was that I always tried to have some new, innovate ideas.... that's super hard to make it work. I switched to looking at what works well, has a great mature market, but it's not working well for a specific niche.

Build something that serves that niche much better and your chances of success increase 10x.

If the product is great(not only the software, but support, vision, market fit, etc), you need a minimum base of users until it takes off, doesn't matter is B2C or B2B, people will talk.

It's not that easy as you may think. Also, small companies won't benefit from that, nobody will submit an ad to websites with lower traffic. Besides this, there's the issue with the tracking server and so on.

I worked in ad space 7 years ago. Companies that provide content need to get paid for the content one way or another, either paying a fee or ads, nobody can argue with this.

There needs to be an organization that imposes ad guidelines(like only specific formats, not being intrusive, etc) for both websites and ad companies. They should verify the ads/websites based on user reports and if they find something, to kick the company out.

All companies that follow those guidelines should be whitelisted by ad blockers, probably something implemented at browser level.

Otherwise is just a useless chase.

It doesn't work like that. Feedback doesn't provide you usage patterns for ex. so i can make that feature easier to use.

Individually maybe it's not your problem, but taking that as a larger group becomes a big problem.

It's not about having access to server logs, you need tools to make business and technical decisions and no tool will use server logs to show you how users interact on your app or website.

What's the privacy concern if I'm tracking on what pages my users visit? I'm not sharing those with anyone.

Small business owners like myself are hurt by these things, I can't afford to pay 4-5 figures to a developer to build a tool to analyze my server logs and won't give even 5% of the quality of data analysis Google Analytics or Mixpanel gives.

uBlock is too aggresive, I stopped using it. As an example it's blocking live-chat widgets like Intercom. Also, as a website owner, I don't see how web can work without any sort of tracking like uBlock suggests, simply you won't see any high quality services if all tracking, even safe one is blocked. You can't optimize a service from both technical and business perspective if you are blind/have no data to base your assumptions on.

Postmark is the best in my opinion. Stay away from Sparkpost as much as you can, the worst service I encountered.

They're shutting down accounts without any notice. It doesn't matter how many emails you sent, that you have 0 spam complaints, extremely low bounce rate ... on the first issue they're banning your account.

We used them to notify our customers when new people sign up on their portal so we included details about those users, including the website. We got JUST ONE, SINGLE .tk domain in the email content and they blocked our account completely. We were also on their Premier plan.

No notice before-hand, no warning, nothing.. they simply blocked the account and haven't activated it back even after numerous requests. They couldn't point to any document that stated their policies and what rules we should follow or why they banned us.

tl;dr. Stay away from Sparkpost, they ban your account without notice.

If that zombie startup gives you freedom and a good salary, why shut it down? This is not for bootstrappers or those who pursue life-style businesses, it's for VC backed startups.

You're getting downvoted for a good reason, your comment has no place here, this is not a react vs vue debate.

Not a fanboy, just that I support Tesla and what they achieved in a short time. There are 2 main reasons in my opinion: 1) lots of short sellers which are very vocal online 2) many people hate Musk thus they hate Tesla as well.

I don't argue with hard-core haters or fanboys since most of them seem brainwashed.

Still, I haven't heard any good reason why someone should be against Tesla as a company.

I used most of the so called IDEs for 10 years, switched to vim+tmux 3 years ago and won't go back.

In those 3 years I spent 3-5 hours in total configuring my .vimrc to make it work exactly as I want.

I can compare directly my productivity using Vim and other IDEs and I'm like 50% more productive using Vim.

Used Atom and other IDEs for 5 years. 3 years ago switched to vim + tmux and love it. I'm very productive with my setup and I can't imaging going back.

I also love that I can git clone my dotfiles + an install script and I have my full dev environment on any machine in 2 minutes.

Lol. Grow up! Not buying a car because of one of the company's board members?

Good idea.

It doesn't work like this. Not sure how many bootstrapped and small companies you know, but most of them have that kind of competition and are doing fine years later(mine included). Not having investors and very few employees works in your favor in this case.

Oh man...this is cringey.

So it's nothing wrong when somebody is talking with you like that? Doesn't give you a hint how much that person respects you? Maybe some of you guys here are just used to be pushed around...but if that's ok with you, fine.

"Your crap is crap, get outta my sight"

So this doesn't offend you? If someone is able to talk with you like that at your workplace that's really bad...constantly or not.

Lol. Does this thing happen in real life and are there adults taking this crap constantly in their work environment?

You don't need "comeback" words, you really just need to report this bullying behavior immediately to who's in charge(if that's not your boss) or simply quit for fucks sake.

No offense, but if everyone thinks like this we better not use email at all.

Not biggest players, but your competitors to make your life a hell. I already have competitors that are butthurt and spread shit about me since their clients come to me and they lose business.

That's what I'm afraid of, not getting randomly picked by the regulators.

I'm a small business owner and this is my concern at all. What stops a competitor to just pay a lawyer to sue you or report you to GDPR authorities. Even if you are 100% compliant(which I doubt), you'll still have lots of issues, stress and wasted time with the audit.

This article is not totally accurate.

For ex. you can track anon visitors fine if you generate an ID identifiable ONLY on your DB. So if you store only an ID in the DB(awaiting to be matched when a conversion is made with consent given) is totally fine because even if someone hacks your DB can't be able to match that ID to any person, even if they have other data from Facebook, Google etc.

In case of an IP it's a different thing. If you get an IP, you can actually identify a person if you have a DB with the IP+other personal information about it.

I agree...how do you cross a street like this?

How can you expect and trust that a driver to see you/stop for you? Maybe he's not paying attention, maybe he's texting, etc...

Sorry, but wtf is wrong with you? You even made a username IH_dead for this?

Seems that you are a troll...

Your points are also no valid at all. Of course at the beginning everyone is grinding a lot until it takes off, now it has enough recognition to get people asking for interviews. Of course when a community is new the founders are more active until it takes off.

Influencer and affiliate marketing channel works in markets where there are many potential influencers... that's it.

For advertising and marketing related tools(SEO,PPC,social media, marketing automation,etc) works better because their main clients are marketers, many have an audience and know how to market a product.

However, it also works for sales tools and CRMs for ex., there are lots of influencers in this space.

Works amazingly well for e-commerce, which is where influencer marketing is most used, everyone with a good following on Instagram can become an influencer.

If your space doesn't have too many influencers, start a referral program.