115 karma · joined April 22, 2011
Remember you'll make a 10% employee/advisor pool and probably 10% to an Angel/Seed, making your 51% to 49% become 40.8% to 39.2%
By the way, we're all assuming that you'll both be committing to this 100% and full time. If not then a 50/50 split isn't right
"We need to build a better wizard, the design of the wizard isn't good, we need to optimize the email onboarding, we need one of those tooltip walkthroughs on first sign-in...."
Just having a Skype call with each new signup is 100x quicker, less "expensive" and adds all the other benefits like building relationships with your users, getting extra insight into their problems...
Great post
So general roadmap was usually build up a network of very niche TGP sites (later, Tube sites) and only push around to your own network (so no external crap or popups) until you get a soid audience of bookmarkers (daily returners) and once you're confident you can start producing 10,000+ outclicks a day, THEN add your own paid stuff on top.
Trying to push payments really early just makes people hit the close tab... adult is all about getting bookmarkers
Basically, the "retention" in the Pirate Metrics funnel. Facebook didn't want to put on ads until they'd build years of loyalty and bookmarkers. Once you're totally bought into the service, (one hopes) that you wont mind the new paid ads that start appearing.
2005-2008, TGP's totally died to Tubes. And Tubes generally killed the value in hosted galleries (a key marketing tool for affiliates alongside TGPs). Last I heard of old contacts, they'd either tried to move up the food chain intro production (which mostly moved to eastern europe), moved into niche tube sites, or sold up (as I did) and went into mainstream web. Actually, probably the most money I made was from sale of site network and domain portfolio.
So someone standing and saying "Yeah, I lost some a bunch of money that some old guys shouldn't have invested if they weren't prepared to write it off" is a huge stigma over here.
In the states, you have way more professional tech investors so the "bad vibe" about losing that money isn't as bad.
I think US founders carry it almost as a badge of honour, a symbol of a war fought bravely to the end. Here it;s just like, "Oh, you fucked up last time.... I'm going to stand over here now"
Experiment, experiment, experiment
>The recruiter contacts me and tells me about a company that would be interested in working with me
In over 1,000 recruiter emails I've received over the last few years (of which at least 500 have been in the last few months due to Trak.io spiking in awareness) not once have I ever, ever expressed an interest first. Which means the Word Doc's getting dumped in my inbox are from people who haven't had your experience at all.
So the recruiters who are coming to you (kudos BTW), probably spinning you different shit as they send to employers but equally just as BS.
Think about it - a recruiter earns a commission on your base salary. Not options. Not employment perks. Not company culture. Not product vision. Which opportunities do you think they're going to put in front of you??
Their only job is literally to get the highest salary possible for the developer. They hope you'll pull that salary for 3 months, so that their manager will unlock their full commission.
>This means that a CV would be the only way to show what they have done in those years without breaking their Contracts.
I totally get your point about NDA work, and perhaps finding no time for any out-of-work-projects, but I fail to accept that truly interesting people have NOTHING outside of their job to talk about.
Or maybe there are some people... not seen enough people to truly call definitive judgement on this yet.
A word doc feels so "copy-paste". A personal intro email with a few relevant points, with a follow up Skype call, is going to tell me so much more. Receiving a "pump and dump" CV through a recruiter leaves absolutely no room for this. And I want people who KNOW this.
I want people who know full well that having that first impression of a "pump and dump" kinda developer is not how they want to be perceived.
So I guess my point shouldn't be specifically that they need a Github profile full of fun projects instead of a CV, more that I don't want to get a CV of them via a recruiter as it sending all the wrong signals.
You make an amazing point and on future job openings we are going to be far more specific in order to be fair to developers who want to apply directly.
However, from experience no mater HOW MUCH detail I give, recruiters will still spin me the same shit:
"A company just when bust in your area and I have some amazing developers looking for work, here's some word docs attached"
Also, that's a really good exception RE someone moving to a new geographic location and might not have any contacts or referrals... I think we can work on this by expanding our own digital footprint internationally over time, but it's a special circumstance I guess recruiters might come in...
However, then I think how hard is it to google? If I lost my job and decided to move to spain, building a database of tech companies in Madrid would take an evening. Sending personal emails to the CEO (assuming small teams) in each case would only take a few days.
So no, other than knowing the local salary market (google that too) I still think I'd find better people by circumventing recruiters
>Also, the posting suggests that they are looking for people willing to work long hours for low wages, and who likely won't be pressuring management for raises to match their market worth.
No it doesn't. Yeah, like all startups we offer a touch below market rate in exchange for options but nowhere do I imply "long hours for low wages"? Maybe the unlimited vacation time was overlooked????
>It's considered normal and there is kind of an unspoken agreement between everyone that a .doc or .docx file is acceptable.
I disagree. Maybe in a corporate world, applying for the paper distribution business in town or the IT support department at the accountancy firm up the road. But in the startup community, don't hackers all kinda share a sense of "innovation"?
>If you ask 99% of employers to telnet into your CV, they are probably going to tell you to kindly fuck off, and so you don't.
Wouldn't you want to work for that 1% who didn't?
>'They’re going to complain about overtime'
Don't quote out of context. There's an unlimited vacation policy at Trak.io.... take all the time out you want and need. But yeah, when the AMS MongoDB goes down and Digital Ocean aren;t allowing new droplet provisioning in AMS, I expect all hands on deck while we spin up on AWS. Because we all care about the product, our customers uptime, their data
>In the real world, people do want jobs. People do want jobs they love, and they are willing to give up a lot for jobs they love, and you might be providing them with one, but you need to come down to earth and realize that this isn't the only job they will ever apply for and expecting to be super impressed by the way they apply for the job is unrealistic, unfair, and I dare say, 'out of touch'. These people also have lives outside of work. Hobbies, family, friends and such take time and if you are hiring people that are willing to give up all of that in the name of work, I'd be really concerned for them.
What can I say.... I've learnt that when you're building an early team, you need a small team of amazing people because the overhead of a few OK people doesn;t even come close to the output of one amazing, passionate person.
I'd happily piss off 99 applicants to find no.100 who's amazing and who actually put at least the same amount of time putting an application together as I'll spend researching him/her online :-)
1) only honouring the promotions we had out there 2) the paid priority access people (Paying $19, then $29, to get access) 3) people from startups who could offer us a good PR boost by association on launch
For the record, we did launch private Beta but we've had to start limiting again as we pretty much had enough, and found we weren't managing support tickets as well with more and more joining.
When we launch paid plans in the new year, we'll be opening up out of Beta. But yeah, there's a very real and very functioning product behind that signup page :-)
Depending on the home country of the company will mean each deal will need customised docs too I guess
We'd maxed out personal credit cards and we were literally on a ~2 month timebomb of personal runway.
So yeah, awesome to see they've now put this "move fast" promise into a transparent offer. Sure there's limits on the cash and valuation but, I guess better to see it upfront.
In our case, the fees were £1,800 (incl 20% VAT) for our lawyer, and €1,136 (inc 19% VAT) for Kima's lawyer.
Honestly, the amount of times I see entrepreneurs flaunting a badge of honour that they work 5am to 11pm, and then they wonder why they're fat, have spotty skin, no girl to warm their bed and only 6 friends to call on when times get bad... Working in a startup takes SO MUCH MORE soft skills and attributes that come from being out there living in the world.
If you're never in the world, how are you going to fix any of it's problems?
Whatever you think you've invented, 9 teenagers are right now, independently making the same thing.
Patents in software startups are a waste of money and a huge distraction. In the UK there will soon be tax breaks, but you need to make a profit to worry about those
p.s. if you have a hardware product that genuinely is a good fit for a patent, get out of the coworking space. Try maker spaces that are more suited and will have better processes in place to handle this
at http://Trak.io we can definitely handle that data volume, all data analysis is done retroactively and in realtime.
Note: However we don't automatically track any events, as we found most people were collecting a ton of garbage event data that they would never use. So you'll need to setup the events to be tracked at the beginning of the integration.
We don't have iOS or Android SDK's, but a raw REST http API (and JS) but we'd be open to discussing what we could sort out to win your business ;)
A/B tests: date vs. date cohort segmentation, event vs. event cohort segmentation, property vs. property segmentation. And groupby (breakdown by) view.
Trends
Linear funnels are in progress, but again for an app this size let's talk about what we could do.
The main way we differentiate ourselves from Mixpanel (and similar) is that we're trying to go for as simple interface as possible. Essentially, if analytics tools or reports are complicated, they just wont get used. So we're sticking to a very design-led product which may or may not suit you, depending on what exactly you're looking for.
Email me on liam@trak.io if you want to chat further :)
Credit card barriers on free trials is effective at 'keeping out time wasters' but you also keep out genuinely interested potential customers. It's a fine line.
We were exploring a similar discussion at Virally over this last week, and we've decided to not ask for the credit card on our free trial signups. If they haven't entered one before the end of the trial, their account downgrades to our free-forever account.