kunle

Don't think strict currency activity was affected by this, but one of the main reasons this is important is that it's really really difficult to convert large amounts of RMB into any other currency. BTC provides an alternative to going through the banking system which I suspect drives some of its popularity in China. A lot of light is made about the problems BTC poses for the dollar - it's much more of a threat to anywhere that currency is controlled, because it's a straight bypass. The volatility is obviously a stumbling block but when you have no other alternative, it's pretty attractive.

> I first assume that your target is people that want to learn how to code an iphone game with no programming knowledge (I think I can safely assume that every programmer knows that you are using objective-c to develop native iphone applications).

I think the target is more likely to be people who don't have Macs (given that you can only use XCode with a Mac, not a windows PC or Chromebook).

Just checked out www.multyvac.com, which has webvan, boo.com, etoys and lehman brothers listed as customers. What's the joke? Not sure I get it.

Surprised Yahoo didn't buy them

No particular reason - hustler is just and has always been my preferred compliment for folks doing awesome stuff, whether in code, offline or anywhere else.

I meant it in the most positive way possible:

"an aggressively enterprising person; a go-getter."

Hope this helps.

The Hackpad team are serious hustlers. I use it all the time as well and love what they've built.

For years I've thought this was the ultimate troll headline. And now someone actually wrote it.

Hard to see how this doesn't end poorly. In addition to being a likely HIPAA violation, its hard to see how the patients won't view their privacy as having been violated, and the doctors won't see their trust/business relationship as having been violated. In both cases (of doctors and of patients) there's plenty of potential litigatory fuel, which, even if Practice Fusion wins, is a really poor use of ~140m in venture funding.

> However if you need to build something that's never been built before, you tend to need a government, a tyrant, or a Rockefeller.

Well said, well said.

> believing in your idea is certainly important

Not just your idea - also important to believe in yourself and your team. In many ways this will supercede the idea because the idea is just one manifestation of a solution to a problem that you're solving. With time and experience your understanding of that problem will evolve, as will your solution.

Thanks. It's pretty easy to focus on optimizing your app rather than optimizing your business (I see this a lot actually), and it's a bad way to go. Similar to PG's thoughts on raising money as quickly as possible and then going back to work, you should tell the best story you can in your app and then get back to work as quickly as possible. Whether you get into YC or not, your business will still be there waiting, warts and all.

Makes sense. Knowing those reasons you don't think it will work and attacking those specifically is actually a really good way to debug. Dave Friedberg (Founder of Climate Corporation) actually has a really good approach to this that he talks about here (3 minute video): http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2796

He basically says to lay out the unknowns, and systematically work towards making them knowns. Good luck!

> 3. You will pursue this even without getting an investment"

Makes all the difference in the world. If you're doing a startup contingent on getting into YC, its worth re-thinking. YC helps, but startups are still hard regardless.

Thx. There's lots of good advice out there from other founders as well. This was just a limited view of what I keep seeing over and over again.

For disclosure - Jason and I were in the same YC batch and I've gone to him for advice a couple of times. The one thing I'll say about blogging this way, that perhaps a lot of folks don't appreciate, (particularly the incredibly candid way that Jason does it), is that it is really hard to be that honest. It's hard to be that honest with yourself (most people simply aren't, and I know personally that I spent a long time not being so, and in some cases I'm that way today) and its several orders of magnitude harder to be that honest with strangers, in a forum as public as this one.

Insofar as the HN community remains interested in discussing startup related topics, this personal candor/honesty about when things aren't going well is completely under-discussed; it happens all the time that things aren't going well (actually it's what mostly happens) but usually the only times you learn about it are in a post-mortem or a takedown piece. A founder whose currently building his company and willing to discuss these things is extremely rare and valuable to other founders and would-be founders (I on occasion give talks at my alma-mater and I try very hard to portray the unglamorous side of things. The audience always appreciates it).

Congrats guys. Great outcome for a solid team.

I pondered this, but I don't think it's that simple. Economic demographics are a part of the story, but I think the underlying architecture of each really is a lot of the difference. By the time you activate your iPhone for the first time, you've already given your credit card to Apple. Most users of Google products, by contrast, do not ever give Google their payment information.

Hey there - OP here. Sorry you feel this way.

I spend several hours a week talking to our customers and interviewing the people who run mobile for large retailers, as well as mobile startup founders. The opinion I stated is definitely mine, and it's a logical conclusion based on the data gleaned from my interviews and informal/off the record conversations with people whose business it is to sell real products (hotel rooms, shoes, shirts) every single day via mobile apps.

People simply don't transact on Android - thats not an opinion. That's data. Happy to discuss more/share more off the record if it suits you, and if you know someone who is successfully selling products to Android customers, I'd love to talk to them because they know a secret that literally every ecommerce company in America is DYING to know.

As to the dozens of links to Hipmob - that's where we publish our interviews and it's the original source of our content. Believe me, if we could publish elsewhere, we would, but its the sort of content that only customers/potential customers of ours find interesting, and as such we make it available to them on our blog.

Hope that helps explain things.

Chris and Dave are a class act. Sad to see em go.

Agreed. The apps are getting better though (and have to - a lot of businesses are seeing 30 - 50% of usage/revenue coming via mobile). It's not a preference for businesses because they've spent a decade investing in the web and now mobile is coming along, but its driven by end users. If you don't adapt, your competitors will, and they'll eat your lunch as a result.

What I meant was - most emails don't include deep links. Take LinkedIn for example - if you click a CTA from a LinkedIn email, it takes you into a browser (even if you have the app on your phone).

Most emails still function this way. It doesn't work because while the user might be logged into your iPhone app, they're likely not logged into your website in mobile safari/chrome.

Emails are a good way to notify you, if you want to still go search/navigate. They don't take you right to checkout though, which is negative for conversion.

Understood - for flash sales though, a large portion of the demand is driven by the fact that the items are only available in limited quantities. As a result these pushes generate huge spikes of traffic - it's spammy if you don't care that the selection quickly shrinks, but if you're a compulsive shopper (true for a large swath of the shopping population) then you depend on it.

> The "unless you use deep links" parenthetical kills the entire article. Not providing a call to action that allows your customer to make the purchase is just bothering the user to no effect!

Not exactly - deeplinks done well take you right to the check out page, where all you have to do is confirm the purchase. Most push notifications for the moment open you into a random page into the app, which, I agree, doesn't really add value.

Agreed - bad practice. Not advocating that in the least.

Depends on your business and the core reason why carts are abandoned. This example was just demonstrating what a business could potentially do with push notifications; most businesses already do similar things on the web, to reasonable success.

Agreed - definitely not real productive time. Most of the time it's just entertainment (which makes sense if you consider that no one ever has any idea how long they'll be waiting for whatever it is they're waiting for).

I think this speaks to something really important that's rarely touched on directly; people hate waiting for software. I despise it. Many ordinary consumers use their phones as a way to solve "waiting" in general (just look what happens when you have a bunch of people in line: they take out their phones to pass the time).

To date, the way most developers solve this (Aside from optimizing for performance where possible) is to use loading indicators of some kind, but that's a bandaid at best. Some work will definitely have to be done to manage the battery drain concerns that can arise from this, but more time spent in your app actually doing stuff, and less time waiting for the app to update will be a huge gift of time back to users (basically 2 - 5 seconds every time you open an app is about to be given back to you). Add that up over many app opens every day over many days every year; its substantial.

You're a designer. Designers solve problems by trade. Find a problem to solve. Someone will hire you to solve it for them. If you're unable to deliver, they'll fire you, but that's another story . . .

Agreed on this. I'd also add a couple of things - first, deeplinking is a partial solution that a ton of (even really sophisticated) products have yet to adopt (I'm looking at you LinkedIn). Second, push notifications for iOS are still a massive pain to implement. I see sophisticated dev teams struggle getting this set up all the time. Layer to that all the different ways people use emails (marketing emails, lifecycle emails, transactional emails etc) and try to turn these systems into generating push messages, at scale, and you have an even bigger challenge. Times will get tougher before they get better.

EDIT: Focused on iOS because, as of today, that's still where the money is. From what I understand setting push notifications up for Android is far more straightforward.