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see the Florida tag on Fark

http://www.fark.com/topic/florida

"Have you ever been to Florida? It's basically a criminal population. It's America's Australia." - Jack Donaghy, 30 Rock

jeremybenckenon How to get your first 10 customers

If you're targeting a vertical, using one example customer, lookup who bids against them for the same keywords in Adwords on SEMRush. Adgooroo and Spyfu also support this.

If you're selling a horizontal product targeting customers where their existing technology they use could tip you off (e.g. companies that use Marketo and Mailchimp), LeadLander and BuiltWith are useful.

Once you get a list of target companies, the next trick is finding the right person to sell into. If you know their title, search Google like this:

site:linkedin.com "Company Name" "Title"

That works well since it lets you plow past Linkedin's limitations on searches outside your personal network.

Once you figure out your customer's company, name, and title, head over to email-format.com or data.com to look up the email format for the Company. With Rapportive for Gmail, you can take a few guesses and usually find the right person. Or read this post: http://www.distilled.net/blog/miscellaneous/find-almost-anyb...

jeremybenckenon Show HN: govuptime.com

The budget process is also a law.

jeremybenckenon Best Notepad in your broswer

kind of cool, but the data disappears with the tab.

jeremybenckenon A litmus test for your idea

It's more than teaching... it's a test of your passion for the customers.

The worst thing is to get into a market and realize you really can't get excited about your customers' issues. Better to discover that about yourself earlier.

jeremybenckenon A horrifying startup accelerator story

TheFunded does this for vc... they could easily include accelerators.

anonymous rating & reviews are a good way to go, even if the reviews have to be vague to avoid a backlash

jeremybenckenon Groupon sales rep threatens restaurant with negative Yelp reviews

This isn't a story about Groupon except insofar as they hire unprofessional, immature sales reps.

The sales punk didn't like how he was treated, so he gets revenge by (threatening) to leverage his own personal network.

It's pretty unlikely this is some organized practice at Groupon.

jeremybenckenon This coupon code is a slap in the face

actually, no, although that's an interesting place to do it. as a few others have commented, merchants like Newegg and Gap use something like a HelloBar to highlight their coupons in the header nav.

jeremybenckenon This coupon code is a slap in the face

"cheat code" is a perfect way of describing it... I think that's definitely part of the ethos of couponing. It's retail hacking for many.

jeremybenckenon The big, ugly affiliate marketing scam

"woefully uneducated" indeed. why didn't he tell the affiliate network "no coupon sites, no trademark bidding, and approval required for all new affiliates."

Those are three of the most utterly basic things any new affiliate program would do.

His real complaints should be that he lacks knowledge in this area, didn't hire people who have it, and got poor customer service from his affiliate program.

jeremybenckenon This coupon code is a slap in the face

I suspect that people don't trust a merchant-supplied coupon.

A also suspect this is why when you Google "landsend coupons" the #1 site is a UGC coupon-sharing site and #2 is the merchant's own site. By every traditional measure, the merchant's page should outrank the coupon site.

Why would you trust a coupon sharing site more? The merchant has an incentive to only give you some token discount, whereas the "crowd" has no such incentive. So you're more likely to trust the crowd in this scenario.

jeremybenckenon What you need to know about employee stock options

When a startup grants stock options to its key people...83(b) has no bearing on any of them except for one special case. If options are granted to key people who are given the right to exercise them early...

http://www.grellas.com/faq_business_startup_004.html

jeremybenckenon This coupon code is a slap in the face

Fair enough. Ideally, we could look at multiple A/B tests to avoid the bias a single site's user base might have or other idiosyncratic effects of their UX.

jeremybenckenon This coupon code is a slap in the face

There's a professor at Vanderbilt who published this paper on the topic (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6205769) in the Journal of Product & Brand Management.

Providing a code and its attendant price reduction clearly had positive effects on perceptions of fairness and satisfaction when compared to the control group.

...prompting for a code in the absence of having one had negative effects on fairness, satisfaction, and completion when compared to the control. As would be expected from these findings, the three groups were ranked in the predicted order (code > control > no code) for all dependent variables, including intention to repatronize and recommend the online store.

Equity theory, then, becomes an alternative explanation for reactions to code provision and non-provision... the Web buyer without a code experiences the additional impact of the inequity perceived if others are imagined to have a code, are selectively provided one, or are simply viewed as "special" in some sense.

jeremybenckenon This coupon code is a slap in the face

This may not be rational, but there's some research showing this is a widespread phenomenon. Mostly, it has to do with a sense of fairness. Coupon codes can make consumers feel like the merchant is being unfair, which leads to dissatisfaction.

The solution: don't show the coupon code field or make it extremely easy for consumers to get coupon codes. I've noticed more and more stores put their coupon codes right in the header while you're browsing. So it's impossible NOT to get a coupon.

http://www2.owen.vanderbilt.edu/mike.shor/research/promo/jpb... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6205769)

jeremybenckenon The Massachusetts Software Tax

'data processing' is still unclear for many. I'm in Austin and last month I had a graphic designer/front-end programmer add sales tax to an invoice because he thought he had to.

jeremybenckenon Taken

And Institute for Justice. They fight more of these on a pro bono basis than the ACLU does. http://www.ij.org/executive-summary-2

jeremybenckenon A search engine built by the crowd

Great idea, but I think Google already uses this data.

Google Toolbar and now Chrome report this data back to Google, and most search pros believe "serp bounce back" and "time on site" are key signals Google uses.

PageRank and DwellRank are not either-or choices.

Here's my theory: Google uses PageRank to decide what pages to "try out" for a query (i.e. display a page in the SERP for a sampling of queries). If the page gets clicks AND has good "DwellRank" then it gets progressively better and better rankings. If a new page enters that beats it, it falls.

This approach is very Googly -- they love to test. They love to decide if product features are good or not by giving them a sampling of traffic. It would be insane of them not to extend this approach to search.

So the upshot is, use "PageRank" to decide which pages deserve an audition, and use "DwellRank" to decide the winners.

Since 40% of the clicks go to #1, 10% to #2, 8% to #3 etc,Google can audition pages using DwellRank without affecting the experience of the majority of their users.

jeremybenckenon The Destruction of the Web

Are we really worse off today than we were in 2001? Google isn't perfect, but spam and SEO existed before them. They've beaten it back pretty well in my opinion.

Can I get more detail about the "new protocol" solution? The only anti-spam protocol solution I've seen discussed is authenticated identity for every packet. So no more anonymity, but much better reputation/authority/trust. I'm not down with that. Got something else?

jeremybenckenon The Destruction of the Web

The way to solve this problem that's been discussed before is to require authenticated identity in the protocol layer, so every packet can be traced to a real, live person.

But then that breeds new problems:

1) The NSA might like the ability to tie every packet to a person, but privacy and anonymity are generally good things.

2) Just because you have a reliable way to track/measure "real" reputation/authority/trust, will that stop people from abusing it? Did the offline version of this stop Paula Deen from building an empire on unhealthy eating only to later reveal her own diet gave her diabetes? No.

Human nature is driving a fair bit of this stuff, and has nothing to do with Google, the web, protocols, or spam. We always try to eliminate the "flawed human" from systems, and it never works.

3) The fact that reputation/authority/trust is unreliable might actually be a feature not a bug. For one thing, it allows some dude with no social capital to get a toehold and get his stuff in front of users. Generally Google allows this to happen, and if the content sucks, it falls away. I don't mind a bit of spam if it's the price for more diversity and opportunity for people outside the "lucky sperm club" to rise.

Overall, I don't buy this "destruction of the web" stuff. If anything, Google has made both the web AND search are way better today. It's possible that Google's anti-spam strategies will hit a point of diminishing marginal return, and the spammers will catch up and the balance will swing in their direction again, but so far that's not been the trend.

I think the equilibrium we're seeing is that Google allows a very small amount of spam tactics spam to work for a while, but they use other signals that keeps that stuff from getting major traffic (e.g. eHow). So gaming the system can get you in search rankings, but if you suck, you won't stay there.

But more importantly, I don't want to trade off privacy and anonymity to eliminate what amounts to a very small amount of spam.