gsharma

mixmastamyk probably wanted to say mobile check deposit using the phone's camera.

If you haven't watched/read about the real estate agents' incentives from Freakonomics, this[1] video will shed some light. There are a lot of parallels with the recruiters.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jO_w6f8Ck

> 4. We need a way to execute actions on failure.

I am curious to know what kind of actions would they be other than notifying via chat/email?

I believe the author is confusing "Default Alive" with "Self Funded". In fact, raising money for a Default Alive company is a lot easier than Default Dead.

Every Self Funded company has to be Default Alive, but the converse is not true.

The author doesn't mention who the founders are pitching to; I assume he is talking about pitching to investors or other people who might lead to investors. IMO this is the actual issue rather than the "generalised problem."

"Generalised problem" is a by-product of not talking to the right people. Talking with the target customers/users will lead to better understanding of the actual problem.

One more small typo - "SIT BACK AND RELAXED". Should be Relax.

You might want to check out Clearbit Company API. As far as I remember, you can search companies by string using their API. https://clearbit.com/discovery

Edit: Added URL

Small teams will do good with the current grouping. Larger teams will get complicated.

Feature idea: DM @Jack "What did @john @mike @gsharma say for their standup today?"

...or even better IP -> ZIP with an editable zip.

I am always lookout for a good email client (iOS and OS X). I used Sparrow years after it was acquired by Google and had no support. It was a great email client. Surprisingly, the iOS client that works for me now is Outlook.

I just checkout out SlideMail from app store (1.0, I guess?) Looks simple and well designed, but confusing UX. Why 'All Mail' is called 'Done'? Compose makes it easy to pick the recipients, but there is no way to see their email address. It just shows their name and picture. I can't tell if I am sending an email to their work email or personal.

Would be cool to try out v2.

These numbers are great from aggregation/press perspective, but they are not enough to tell if YC is doing good or bad. For instance, last 3 YC batches had ~250 (or maybe 300) companies funded. That is almost 1/3 of the total companies funded by YC. It will take another couple of years to determine what the success rate for these companies is.

What do you use as a broker? We have seen these issues too and use Redis as the broker.

If the goal is to simplify deployment process, why not use something like Capistrano or Fabric? You can run 'Cap deploy <dev|prod>'

Probably scraped Google's cache pages, so they would never touch Craigslist servers.

http://venturehacks.com/ It doesn't get updated anymore, but I think it should have a lot of the basic venture concepts here.

I never used Homejoy, as they were pretty pricey. I have cleaners charging me 1/3 of what Homejoy quoted.

That being said, I talked to several (10-15) people who used Homejoy at least once. The responses I got from most of those people was that the cleaners weren't professional. In fact several of them mentioned that cleaners didn't know what Homejoy was. They were sent for cleaning by their contractors. In other terms, the cohort I talked to had a really low NPS for Homejoy.

I think Homejoy wasn't able to nail down that user experience of their real product (i.e. Cleaning) no matter how amazing their on-boarding/booking experience was.

It must be very disheartening for the founders and the team. All the best to the their next adventures!

Looks pretty cool! You might want to check out the calendar integration.

http://i.imgur.com/iSagoii.png

I connected my Google Calendar, but it doesn't seem to work.

Serious question - What part of their UX do you think is game changer? I use DO and Linode. They both look similar to me. DO does have better UX than AWS, but I think DO is comparable to Linode rather than AWS.

On the other hand, I think DO's content guides as a marketing tool is a great asset for them. I haven't seen any other provider do that. Linode had a few guides, but nothing as DO's scale.

Zappos is a great example, a lot of retailers have good return policies too. However, usually the brands themselves don't have great return policies. Unlike Amazon/Zappos the return policies for each brand are different and the shopper has to keep track of them/figure out individually which is a big pain.

I don't know about Parse, but Flurry and GA track on an aggregate basis, not user basis. Mixpanel (or KISSMetrics) are good solutions to track data per user basis and a lot more in-depth tracking. Flurry tracks retention, but it is not very extensive. I don't think GA tracks retention. Mixpanel does a good job of looking at retention metrics and deep dive.

Mixpanel can certainly be a lot better in data visualization/reporting features and pricing.

>It does not play well with Instagram the top social app as picture is displayed as link and not shown.

This is because of Instagram/Facebook and not Twitter. IG/FB chooses to drive the traffic back to their web property rather than embed the images in Tweets.

We circumvent Mixpanel's limited events early on and stayed under their free tier for as long as we could. This is what our setup looks like:

We collect millions of data points a month and save them on our servers. We do not use Mixpanel's SDK to collect these data points, but have written our own code for that. We save the raw data on our server, aggregate a bunch of similar events to 1 event and then push it to Mixpanel using their API. We heavily use event properties to send as few events to Mixpanel as possible.

This way we get most of the data into Mixpanel and can build funnels, etc. without any issue. There are some edge cases where we aggregated data is a limitation. But for those cases, we end up using the raw data that we store.

Not sure about your use case, but hope this helps.

Not sure how Trulia handles input for its usernames, but at one point I was able to do this http://www.trulia.com/profile/-iframe--home-buyer-loleta-ca-...

WhatsApp actually raised closer to $60M [1]

[1] http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/whatsapp

Here is something similar, but it uses text rather than voice and only has Indian names so far. http://www.howdoyousaythatagain.com/

I think the article's message is same as "Do things that don't scale". Marketing is something used to get users in large volumes (certain groups) vs sales is more of a one-on-one approach. Once you have figured out what works in these one-on-one sessions, you take that message and scale it up as your marketing message.

I ran an e-commerce site focused on Indians living in US a few years ago. Here are a few things that might help you:

1. It seems like your target market is Indian women in USA (guessed based on prices in $) IMO this is still not a niche market. Is your target market Indians who immigrated to US or born here? What age group (working moms vs students)? Why do they need these clothes (casual wear vs Indian parties vs weddings, etc.)? Does your target market live in major cities (like Bay Area) where there are a few offline options available or do they live in remote locations where the nearest Indian grocery store is 50 miles away? Or maybe I am completely wrong and your target market is non-Indian women in US.

2. What did you learn from driving traffic to the site? I see that you listed phone numbers, did anyone call? I would highly recommend using Olark/Zopim and actively chat with people who click on your ad campaigns to ask them what they are looking for.

3. Checkout IndianRoots.com. It is owned by NDTV, the biggest USP they have is free world wide shipping and I know a few people who have already used it. Not sure if you can compete with them on free shipping , but worth looking at.

And as the article says, talk to your users. Running ad campaigns work to drive people onto your site but you'll have to talk to your users to find out what are their pain points and what do they need.

You are right. I have 3 servers with Linode. 2 are working fine, 1 of them is not able to serve content.

It is not down. Just the inbound connectivity has issues. Here is a response from them:

We are currently aware of the a DoS attack that is impacting the resolvers in the Fremont datacenter. Our administrators are currently working to resolve the issue.

Focus groups can be wrong.

"Yellow Walkman" story is appropriate http://www.alexandercowan.com/yellow-walkman-data-art-of-cus...

"The moral of the story is that you need natural behavior for quality observational learning."