lylemckeany

Are you suggesting that he has something to gain financially by tweeting about PH a lot? This comment makes no sense to me.

I know Jeff and can confirm that he was a huge fan of Ryan and Product Hunt before ever meeting him. Jeff is the epitome of a super fan. He networked hard and moved to a new city (SF) to make the connections he has and to get his job at Meerkat, as well.

He also doesn't angel invest, so he doesn't have anything to gain by posting the products he posts or tweets.

Here's the other thing, there are a ton of other people around the world just like him. They're a big part of the reason why PH has been successful and has struck a cord with product fans and makers all over.

This reminded me of Hipchat's 30-day free trial that I recently discovered. I was mistakenly under the impression that they limited the trial to 5 users. I reached out to them on Twitter, since I couldn't find an email address for them anywhere, and they told me the trial can be for an unlimited amount of users. I think this is genius. With a product like Hipchat, 30 days provides a decent enough amount of time that companies will feel locked-in as long as they use it a fair amount. Great strategy.

The situation I provided was hypothetical, but one I've thought of previously. I would agree that #2 should be the focus, for sure.

I think it's better to mention the tangential ones than to omit them because it shows that you've really thought through the competitive landscape.

Competition is also not a bad thing. If there are a few startups vying for attention in a certain space, it means there's obviously value there. You have to prove to investors and customers that you're going to do it better and ultimately win the lion share of the space.

>An investor or friend shouldn't be the first one to tell an entrepreneur about someone new in their space.

This line resonated with me. I know the stomach-dropping feeling of someone mentioning a potential competitor that I've never heard of. I usually play it off and say, "Thanks, I'll definitely check it out" and then immediately Google it on my iPhone as soon as possible. Luckily, in my research I haven't found anything all that similar to what I'm working on.

This brings up a corollary question: Assuming I have a pretty well-informed view of the competitive landscape and I can't seem to find anything that solves the problem in a similar fashion, how do I sufficiently answer the inevitable question from investors about my competition? I've often heard people write and say that business ideas ALWAYS have competition, the tricky thing is that the competition isn't always immediately obvious. Answering that a startup doesn't have direct competition leads to skepticism, therefore creating distrust right off the bat when it may not be warranted.

I had a similar idea I called Readminder. It would be a mobile app with push notifications setup for the time you want to read that particular article, similar to the way Mailbox does it for email.

Very cool idea. I would change the functionality of the commenting system. I'd like to see the comments on the same page as all the videos, rather than clicking through to a new page. I think it would have the nice side-effect of more engagement with the comments. They're also not super obvious at first as I found myself looking around for a comment button of some sort.

Their main pricing page, http://mailchimp.com/pricing/, is much better from a marketing and sales standpoint. I'm surprised they even provide a link to the "all" page since it probably doesn't apply to 99% of their potential customers.

Are you referring to actual data on the "Colbert Bump?"

>The truth is most CRM systems available today are more useful to the sales managers and executives because they use the CRM systems to gain insight on overall and individual sales performance. The CRM systems doesn't necessarily help sales professional to increase sales, though.

This part is flat-out wrong. Modern CRM systems are very useful for sales professionals. They provide analytics, pipeline analysis, and other powerful features.

I think wearable tech will eventually end up playing a minor role in an outside sales professional's daily routine. I could definitely see some of my reps using it for accessing their calendar and locating information on the client for their next meeting when they're out and about. However, it will never completely replace the computer and mobile versions.

On a related note: Raising money at insanely large valuations sounds sexy and exciting, but can lead to serious problems down the road. The expectation with any VC-backed startup is for the proverbial valuation pie to expand after each round of funding. If the pie is already spilling over the sides of the pan after the A round, then the company is almost certainly destined for a down B round unless they can grow massively. That typically smells of desperation and failure, or a rotten pie, to continue the analogy. Damn, pie sounds really good now at 1:15am.

I think it was a year well spent! Nicely done. This is an important step in the right direction for independent musicians that don't have the benefit of large distribution.

Quick question: How do the various services handle categorizing the uploaded music? My concern as a musician is my music might not be as easily discovered via Spotify Radio or on related artists pages.

>The larger slogan, "Never lose touch with friends and family", is vague. The smaller one, "Send photographs through the mail with just a text message", is specific. It makes clear what you offer and also that there is a concrete service here instead of just another smarmy social site.

This is an excellent point. However, I don't agree with your second bit of advice to drop the first line and just use the "clear" copy. Instead, I suggest coming up with a better tag line that maybe even ties in nicely with the name Pigeon (love that name, btw). Maybe something like, "Send photographs to anyone on the wings of a text." OK, that's probably lame, but I think you get my point.

I'm speculating that this change is the result of analyzing their users' behavior. Over the past couple of years I made a switch to asking questions, especially when trying to figure out some obscure Excel code I needed or something like that. I almost always found some forum response that would answer my question relatively quickly. I'm curious to see how this change will effect the results compared to my past experience. This might prove to be a boon for sites like Quora, as well.

I use unroll.me and that way I only see one daily digest of my LinkedIn emails and any other spammy things I signed up for at some point for some reason unbeknownst to me now.

Warning: A little shameless self-promotion coming.

I wrote a blog post called What Street Artists Can Teach Us About Marketing, http://www.lylemckeany.com/2012/11/05/what-street-artists-ca...

When doing some of the research for it, I came across this great quote from Banksy:

>We can’t do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles. In the meantime we should all go shopping to console ourselves.

Like some others have mentioned, the title is somewhat misleading. There is no feasible way that Google ends up owning the entire market. And I'm not talking about the actual cars, because they're definitely not getting in the car making business. Even when it comes to the software, they could only be the only provider in the market if it becomes a government regulated monopoly.

As a side note, I think the resistance to driverless cars will be a big psychological stumbling block. I can't ride in the passenger seat of a car without hitting the "brakes" and pressing my foot into the floor. It will be tough to break habits and to trust that the software is safe.

I'm a huge advocate for the Lean Startup approach, which is more often than not the best approach for deciding whether or not to develop a mobile application. That being said, I think it's a bit of a stretch to expect a blog from a company that provides training for learning coding to write about the customer development process.

I completely agree.

I tried it out a few months back when I had an interesting exchange on Twitter with Jason Evanish (@Evanish). Check it out here: http://branch.com/b/who-will-pave-the-way-for-future-human-s.... Being able to import our back and forth on Twitter into a discussion was pretty slick since Twitter isn't very good at managing a back and forth when another person wants to get involved.

Everything seemed cool up until that point. I then invited some folks who I thought might want to chat about and have something to say on the subject matter, a couple of my co-founders and Hiten Shah who works with Jason. The invitation process seemed so spammy to me though. It sent a Twitter @ mention to everyone and without any context, it just felt forced. A few people asked to join the conversation and I approved them in order to see if we could get something going, but none of them ever responded at all.

Perhaps if I had a larger network of people in the know about Branch it would've worked better. I definitely like the idea of it and the execution is close, in my opinion.

True, but I'm trying to measure how many new followers I can acquire on Twitter with a very simple CTA.

Plus, I thought it was funny.

I guess I got a bit cheeky with the title. I'm a marketer, so I can't help it. :-)

So what happens when I forget what the Google Effect is and I have to Google for it?

I like Kippt because you can set it up to automatically save any link you share on Twitter. Since Twitter has yet to let us access our archive of Tweets, Kippt makes it super easy to find that link you shared months ago. I've yet to use it to follow or be followed much though. I may consider ditching Pocket for Kippt completely, as well.

I don't think the possibility of the Big One precludes too many skyscrapers from being built. Skyscraper building techniques are such that this is of minor concern and the large skyscrapers would most likely fair better than most older, shorter buildings these days.

I like how you can toggle between the normal Google map and the census dots. It's fun to try to guess what the large white spots are in areas I'm familiar with, such as the Crystal Springs Reservoir near San Mateo, CA.

I don't think any recruiter or HR person looking on LinkedIn places any weight on the recommendations whatsoever. It seems to be an overt attempt to get people to engage with the site more, thus making LinkedIn's active user numbers look better. LinkedIn is one of those networks that is only really useful on an occasional basis when you need it to find a particular person or connection at a particular company.

I'm not sure if you're entirely correct here. True, VC has had a long history of exits and failures. However, PG & co have generally had a better history of Black Swan-type events in their portfolio (e.g. Dropbox).

Taleb's Black Swan theory and approach to hedge fund management is similar to VC.

From his Wikipedia entry: "As a trader, his strategy has been to safeguard investors against crises while reaping rewards from rare events, and thus his trading career has included several jackpots followed by lengthy dry spells."

His fund steadily and intentionally loses money or breaks even on a normal day, but vastly outperforms other funds on days when the market swings wildly in either direction. The strategy is not for the faint of heart.

I don't foresee this project playing out at all like the ISS did, at least not with the way it's being billed thus far. Sounds like this is a very NASA-centric project, so therefore wouldn't require cooperation from various countries around the world to make it happen. Also, my guess is that it would be physically smaller.

As I read this, the conspiracy theorist in me keeps thinking that Ford built Building 4 to optimize failure rates so they occur immediately after the warranty is up so they can cash in on service visits afterwards.

With stories like this and the recent Rdio announcement (http://www.engadget.com/2012/10/02/rdio-artist-commission/), I kind of wish I was still a professional musician.