kareemm

These are genius. Thanks for sharing. I'll definitely be sharing w/ my kids when they get old enough. What's your take on the lower bound where kids are generally capable of figuring these out?

Agreed. But I go to https://beta.monicahq.com I get redirected back to the login page. They're missing an opp to communicate what the product actually does beyond "personal CRM that's broadly different from our old one".

The login page makes it clear Chandler is different from Monica so presumably Monica's feature page doesn't accurately describe Chandler.

I’ve had “personal CRM” in my ideas file since 2003. In fact, I failed to convince a buddy to apply to the very first YC batch with it.

Love the concept. But I’d love the landing page at beta.monicahq.com to describe what Monica (or in this case Chandler) actually does. A short video, some screenshots, anything… right now it’s not clear to me why I’d click “signup”.

I evaluated Bullet Train last year when building an MVP for a client. Ended up using Jump Start Rails instead. Main reasons:

1. The hybrid approach to iOS and Android apps with JSR were better than what BT had to offer

2. There was a lot less to learn about the mental model of how JSR was built via Bullet Train. It was basically pay, pull down, configure, and get going with JSR. BT has things like SuperScaffolding, an abstraction layer on CanCanCan, etc. I didn't want to have to ramp up on those to decide whether they were better than the alternatives.

YMMV of course. JSR is a paid app and IIRC BT was at the time too... but looks like maybe not anymore?

Funny, I was at the O'Reilly conference in 2005 (Etech) when Google Reader was *launched*, and wrote a blog post about it[1].

Here was my take on the launch:

> At first I wondered if this would be the product that pushes RSS aggregators to the mainstream, but I'm beginning to think that a full-featured RSS reader won't ever cross the chasm from early adopters to the mainstream. A product like My Yahoo suits the purposes of a huge percentage of the mainstream audience, so unless their needs change significantly, there's no incentive to change to another aggregator.

Sadly this seems to be true: My Yahoo didn't make it, but the FB/Twitter/Insta/TikTok/Google News algos serve as curated feeds where non-nerds prefer to get their news. There was a lot of anger amongst the digerati when Google Reader shut down, but in retrospect it seems to have been the right move.

1 - https://www.reemer.com/archive/v1/2005/10/07/web_20_google_a...

There are lots of companies where talking to customers is a requirement for a PM to have continued employment. I’ve worked for more than a few. Seems to me that’s a pretty significant incentive.

> I've never heard a PM say they learned something surprising and are reconsidering their initial idea.

You have never worked with a good PM then. I hear unexpected things from customers pretty much every single time I talk to one.

Funny to see CWB here. I ran into CWB's founder Moshe Cohen[1] at FOO Camp back in the 2006[2]. His performance there was sweet and funny. I had a coffee with him post-FOO too.

IMHO there are few nobler acts than going into high-conflict areas to help people reconnect with the inherent humanity in shared experience and laughter. The work CWB is doing is beautiful.

1- https://moshecohen.net/about-2/

2- https://www.flickr.com/photos/dionh/226434543/in/photostream...

I think it depends on expectations. I can't imagine how anybody raised in the west would expect exclusivity a) after a couple of dates and b) without a conversation.

Yep! Happily, with kids.

A good left-brained friend of mine was dating heavily in the late 2000s as he was in "wife finding mode".

He had a spreadsheet -- called girls.xls -- where he kept track of important details about each woman he went on a date with.

We were sitting around musing about how hard it must be to keep track of the key details given all the dates he was going on, and he let drop that he had a spreadsheet.

He never showed it to anybody and it didn't sound creepy - it was genuinely a tool he used in good faith given the volume of info he was trying to keep track of.

And, he ended up marrying #42.

Which shades did you get? Looking hard at these - love sleeping in a blacked out room.

Do you have a source on the claim about tires? Genuinely curious.

100% agreed with this. It's not clear to me why you need my contacts. My mental model of the software is "put my todos onto a calendar". Maybe that's wrong? But if not you need read access to my todos, and read access to see slots on my calendar that are booked (you don't need details of those appts and you don't need delete access).

Downloaded the app and got to the Oauth Google Cal part of onboarding and bailed. Sad, too, because I already timeblock daily using paper. This seems like an easy buy for me if it does what it says on the tin. But not with a perms model like that.

Depends on what you're optimizing for. This post is about being at the beginning of your freelancing career when you're trying to figure out what's going to keep you going. I found that after 13 years of consulting I finally pick a niche. When I did marketing, sales conversations, and execution became a lot easier, and effective hourly rate skyrocketed.

Picking a niche is smart if you know it'll sustain you on the dimensions that matter (emotionally, financially, intellectually, etc).

I dunno. If you taste olive oil from a trusted source (like at the grove where the olives are grown and perhaps pressed), and compare it with $random_storebought_brand, there's a major difference in taste.

The difference doesn't make it objectively better for you, or even better tasting.

But in a world where the phenomenon of olive oil adulterated with other oils is well documented[1], it's a legitimate question to ask why the small batch oil tastes different from the big box version.

1- https://www.epicurious.com/ingredients/seven-ways-to-tell-th...

Stripe used to help you migrate away. Not sure if they still do.

I get around this by cashing out the original currency to Wise and then doing the conversion at much friendlier rates using them.

2020 M1 Air 16BG/1TB. Still running OS X 11.3 - looks like I should upgrade...

    === START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
    SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

    SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
    Critical Warning:                   0x00
    Temperature:                        42 Celsius
    Available Spare:                    100%
    Available Spare Threshold:          99%
    Percentage Used:                    28%
    Data Units Read:                    1,704,591,506 [872 TB]
    Data Units Written:                 1,502,526,446 [769 TB]
    Host Read Commands:                 6,434,009,809
    Host Write Commands:                5,290,485,916
    Controller Busy Time:               0
    Power Cycles:                       207
    Power On Hours:                     2,500
    Unsafe Shutdowns:                   89
    Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
    Error Information Log Entries:      0

Cool idea. Looks like there’s a problem with the data though. The last cat 2 hurricane was Fiona, which has just petered out in the North Atlantic after ripping through my city five days ago.

> Showcase tiered features in your trial

Story time. When I worked on ESPN.com's Fantasy Football rebuild in 2003, showcasing an upgrade was by far the largest converter of free users to paid. You could play with your N buddies where everybody was playing for free, but you could also individually upgrade.

Some context: during NFL games on Sunday your team of players would be playing someone else's in your league. As players on your team did things in the real-world NFL games, your fantasy football team would accrue points. There were two ways to see how many points your team had scored: you could wait until Monday morning when the weekly job ran, or you could pay to see your team's live scoring updates as they happened in real time on Sunday afternoons/evening.

Here's what drove the most individual upgrades. Someone on my team got the bright idea to show some players' live updates on your roster as a "teaser". You might have 20 players, and two would show live scores. There'd be a big CTA to upgrade to see the other 18 players' scores. It was admittedly pretty cool - you'd watch an NFL game, see one of your players score a touchdown, and then seconds later see his score change in your fantasy league.

I don't remember the exact conversion rate but IIRC it was 15%+ (2% is incredible conversion for free to paid).

That's one reason why, in my SaaS trial to paid consulting[1], I recommend scattering in-app CTAs to upgrade where contextually relevant. It still converts like crazy (which makes sense - you're trying to do a job, the path forward is right in front of you, and you can pay a few $$ to get the job done).

1- http://www.trialtopaid.com

I had a decent network when I niched down so emails to friends + family generated some jobs which resulted in word of mouth referrals. But email everybody who you think might be helpful - a lawyer friend of mine referred his friend that makes software for lawyers who needed my help. 2nd degree referrals can be great!

Content has also worked but production has admittedly been anemic. Mostly because I've been so busy.

I niche down and understand what my customers want. I set reasonable prices for the size of customer I want ($1-$10M ARR B2B SaaS) and the kind of results I can deliver and post them on my site[1].

When I get an inbound request we're not even talking price because anybody who contacts me has seen them. I'm leaving money on the table but I don't want to spend time negotiating, it lengthens the sales cycle.

I don't do custom work until a second phase. The phase 1 service I offer goes through my standardized process so I know how long it'll take to deliver. There's very little variance which makes it easier for me to know my cost to deliver.

Phase 2 (wireframes) can be custom but by that point I have a lot more context on what I need to deliver, how long it'll take, and how much it's worth to the client. If they're asking about phase 2 it means I've proven myself and the negotiation is short because we've built trust.

I tracked time for the first couple of projects because I wanted to see how long they took to deliver. So now I know my effective hourly rate.

1- https://www.reemer.com/services/

https://www.trialtopaid.com (https) doesn't work right now but http://www.trialtopaid.com (http) redirects to my consulting site https://www.reemer.com.

If you're using an extension that only does https you won't get redirected.

Haven't bothered setting TTP.com up properly yet. Shoeless cobbler's kids, etc.

I've moved my effective hourly rate from $250/h to up to $1k/h by billing on a project basis. I did this after I ran across Jonathan Stark's book Hourly Billing is Nuts[1] and implemented a lot of his advice.

The two best things I've done to increase my effective hourly rate and my topline revenue in my solo consulting practice have been 1) taking his advice to ditch hourly billing and 2) niching down to focus on Trial to Paid conversion[2].

1 - https://jonathanstark.com/hbin

2 - http://www.trialtopaid.com

Some light theory and heavy practice is the best way to improve. Credentials: been doing UX work for 25 years and I run https://www.TrialToPaid.com where I'm well paid to improve UX to grow trial conversion revenue.

Here are three steps you can take:

1. Read Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug, User Interface Design for Programmers by Joel Spolsky, Refactoring UI, and (optionally) The Design of Everyday Things (this will get you paying attention to UX and UI in the real world). The core principal of good UX is Spolsky's maxim: "A user interface is well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would."

2. After reading, go do 10 hallway usability tests on an interface you know well.

3. Then redesign the interface using the principles from #1 and run usability tests on that. Later, rinse, repeat.

The main idea here is:

1. Get some decent grounding

2. Learn from where users stumble over an interface

3. Try and improve the interface

4. Get feedback on your improvements (did they help? what other problems did they cause?)

Don't worry about the haters. The throwaway's response is verging on trolling and isn't worthy of your concern.

I was impressed by your project and will consider paying down the road. I think an app like yours plus human feedback is a killer combo to help people learn to write better. This kind of writing isn't even really about writing - it's about self-editing.

Good stuff!

Agreed, the one exception to my take on purpose-built tools is if you're the only dev and working with non-technical folks.

Having workflow enforced in the dev tool is important when it comes to a team of devs imho... especially if you're managing the team.

Awesome, nice to see a former customer here! =)