hsuresh

CGPGrey did a video on this subject recently https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU. But even this video isn't too optimistic about the number of jobs left to humans.

Who is your target customer? You mention churches and non-profits, but why do they build/setup a website. How is your product helping them address this?

Check out Wysihtml5. We've been using over the last few months and found it ok. We had a strict requirement on good quality HTML, and so far, Wysihtml5 seems nice.

http://xing.github.io/wysihtml5/

What other type of emails are you looking for? We'll try to add them.

Have you seen Zurb's Ink templates? We use them, and they are quite nice.

http://zurb.com/ink/templates.php

Clickable link:

http://nudgespot.com/nudges/schedule-a-demo?tag=saas

You are right about how our service compares with Mandrill. But, there are a bunch of companies that we've spoken to, who do send a lot of emails, and they've found the abstraction we provide to be useful.

A big reason for the abstraction is to support SMS/push notifications. I'll drop you an email, but can't find it in your profile. Can you update it or drop me an email?

Thanks, Suresh

Thanks Colin! We've been fans of Customer.io, hopefully we can offer something that is both different and at least as good as Customer.io :). I'm taking up your offer and dropping you an email. All the best!

Make sure you do some research on shared office spaces nearby. Unless you have already worked from home for extended periods before, that might be one of the biggest challenges you'll face. With a shared office space, you also get to meet and talk to like-minded people.

Also, get some good headphones, for hangouts/skype calls.

Also, i see that you've been part of IFTTT. We hope to build something more like IFTTT actually, but for processing events. Is it ok if i can ping you offline?

It is, at the moment. Our focus is to make it easy to create any kind of rules for triggering emails. There are definitely overlaps with customer.io and intercom.io.

Intercom.io is similar. Intercom.io is seen as a service to help retain your customers. Though there are overlaps, our focus is to build an API that makes it easy to configure any kind of rule to trigger messages.

We hope to make it easy to configure rules like "send an email if a customer's total order value crosses $1000" or "Send a reminder if a customer's activity over a week is lower than their average" and so on.

Clickable linke:

http://www.nudgespot.com/developers

I am glad that we still have email, and i don't wish any other way. Predicting the death of emails is a trend these days, but unfortunately, none of the replacements are based on standards. Think of all the services that want email to be dead - FB, Twitter, WhatsApp, Asana - none of them are based on open standards.

GMail is a great example, especially when it launched, that you can still innovate within the boundaries of standards. Twitter is a great example of what a great protocol/standard it could have been.

> That's a 38% discount: significant, but it doesn't seem like a game-changing difference to me.

That's because it doesn't take into consideration the biggest cost into consideration - the cost of human capital. A larger manufacturer cannot cut down the costs drastically, as the human capital at bigger companies is much larger than a small scale business.

Dehumanizing - maybe, but the bigger issue in marketing imho is that it seems to be centered around finding more and more personal info about individuals. Most marketers seem to think that finding more personal info about customers can somehow turn into better sales.

That is why i like posts that just present real life anecdotes, experiences and such. I like to take out lessons on my own.

Agreed. That's been our experience as well. As an early stage startup, you have to take your product where the customers are, before they start finding you and coming to you. Id blogged about it here: http://blog.nudgespot.com/2013/08/our-experiences-from-hacki...

Vimeo is terribly slow, at least from here in India.

I just went through the Getting started tutorial. Thanks for a great intro into Docker. Is this tutorial open sourced too? What would really help is, include a few lines on how the commands can be used in real world.

Edit: The website/tutorial is open source too. https://github.com/dotcloud/www.docker.io

I really like Daniel King's game reviews. You can find them here: http://www.youtube.com/user/PowerPlayChess

A better alternative is to send an email for verification. If the email bounces, you can mark the account as unverified and ask them to verify their email again.

Well, it is not a great question to start with. From the article:

>> But asked whether giving the planet an internet connection is more important than finding a vaccination for malaria...

You cannot spend all your resources just on one problem. Governments spend on space exploration while spending a much bigger sum on poverty eradication, health and so on. Also, internet penetration can be a great tool in fighting some of the problems mentioned.

Do not rely completely on Time Machine backups. I learnt the lesson in a painful way. My MBP crashed a few years back, and Apple decided to replace the motherboard. Unfortunately, Time Machine detected this as a new laptop, and won't let me restore from the backups.

These days, i backup only user data and i don't worry about the base OS. In fact, i prefer this over TimeMachine style backups. Photos go to Google Drive, work related documents to Dropbox, all code goes to BitBucket/Github, and thats about it. Videos and other personal stuff get backed to an external disk.

ISRO's budget is 950 million usd. Roughly about 0.33% of the total Indian budget for 13-14. While there are other pressing issues, it does not mean that you don't do anything else.

I am not even going into numerous benefits from ISRO, something demonstrated just a couple of days back with Phalin cyclone.

Yup, i thought the animation was brilliant. Pretty much summed the blog post. The equivalent in HN is the wall of text - breaking down the message into paragraphs, and keeping the content crisp makes posts/comments a lot more readable.

In fact, wouldn't data-to-ink ratio apply even for text?

I made the mistake of authorizing LinkedIn to fetch contacts from my Gmail account ages ago - atleast 4-5 years back. If you are like me, here is a link to delete the contacts that you have not explicitly added on LinkedIn:

http://www.linkedin.com/people/contacts?sortAction=lastName&...

I had to raise a support ticket to find this link.

Why do you think it is a bold move? Since you have a handful of customers in the beginning, things can never get out of control. Even if your customers don't like the service/product, you can still do something about it - you cannot do it if there are hundreds.

Nope, actually do everything to get the first few to pay. Once you do that, you can at least be certain that there are people willing to pay for your service/product. You can focus on growing your customer base after your paying customers give you great feedback.

First of all, i don't know enough about your service and target market, so take this with a grain(actually, plenty) of salt.

Since you have a beta ready, first get a handful of customers pay and get value from your service. This is to iron out any issues that you might not have thought about. Most importantly, it will also validate if your target customers will really pay. Think of this as a dry run. Zero marketing.

Next up, is to take this from handful of customers to say, a bucketful of customers. I am guessing you can do this again, without much trouble, given you know about your target audience. This might be a good time to put up a website and include pricing details.

As to how you should market your service, you don't have to necessarily spend it on ads. You can try to reverse engineer marketing (aka growth hacking). I blogged about it here:http://goo.gl/zVw0Hd).