174 karma · joined October 3, 2014
Not to mention their recent move to close Comments being a cynical strategy to get people using their forums.
Realise that's OT but wanted to get it off my chest.
I imagine a lot of investors looked at Airbnb and thought, "cute". Then someone coined the phrase, "sharing economy", in the wake of its growing success and a lot of other "cute" ideas raised money.
From my experience, what investors often lack is an understanding of the vision. I remember someone describing Airbnb to me back in 2010. I said it would never catch on for XY&Z obvious reasons, including it sounded like a bad experience. That's because I wasn't pitched the vision correctly. I bet the Airbnb guys took a long time to figure out the right way to pitch it.
Investors like to be objective/data-driven and therefore don't spend too long building an emotional relationship with the product. Again, there's a reason for that, but sometimes founders have products that don't look like anything that exists elsewhere, so it's super important to convey how it really works.
I used to think my cash cow (freelance management consulting and putting together pitch deck presentations) was pretty awesome. But examples like this dwarf it in terms of ROI ratio.
Can you give more detail on what it is this business actually does? Or else, do you have other examples of high ROI side projects?
1. Felt a little strange signing up without understanding anything about your process. How are you planning to match me with other people? You don't know much about me yet.
2. I would definitely be interested to meet with a bunch of HN-type people over dinner and chat nerdy stuff.
3. How are you planning to ensure a good turnout? I would hate to show up to find that most people had dropped out at the last minute.
Creating super-silky UITableViews is a surprisingly nuanced task. Definitely recycling images is one of the top performance enhancers.
The system won't change meaningfully until the world around it changes first. That is to say, until private sector alternatives/supplements start making an impact in education without the help of the state. But that's entirely possible.
The issue is that nobody has really built anything all that special for the education sector yet. The best we have are MOOCs, which are, for all their production values, just static resources and not a new way for a child to learn.
The author asserts, "this is the community where experimentation ... to educational approaches is happening the fastest", and I am finding that to be true. The parents are more open-minded and the students are more self-driven.
In fact, it feels likely to me that any dramatic change to the education system as a whole will start with the homeschool community, if it ever comes at all. So, my advice to other education entrepreneurs is that this is a good market to start with.
The author's big conclusion - an impending unbundling of education - is really interesting to me. It aligns with my own prediction (and the basis for my startup), which is that students/parents will have a stronger say in who the right teacher is for them, for any given subject. And, with tools enabled by tech/internet, the best teachers will be able to scale up what they do and reach many thousands of students.
Slightly off-topic, but this reminds me of what Electric Objects are trying to achieve: essentially, this same app, but hanging on your wall. The future of art consumption for the masses.
1. How are merchants charged for this? (e.g. flat fee or per points awarded or not at all)
2. How exactly do merchants benefit from this? I am assuming it's not going to influence more customers to walk through the door, and therefore the value for merchants is in the data/insights. And, if so, what are the best examples of how that helps merchants increase revenues?
3. Does Thanx collect and sell the data to third parties? (I'm just interested)
What are you trying to achieve with this? Why would people use this instead of a) keeping a private pen & paper diary, b) using one of the well-known blogging platforms? Not a criticism - I want to understand exactly what the use case is.
For my purposes (private diary solution), I'm trying to figure out if anything digital could ever be as good as the offline experience - just getting a nice LeuchtTerm notebook and putting pen to paper.
Because: why do I want to write a diary? For me, a diary is catharsis, and the process of writing helps me force clarity. It's also a personal project that will delight me later on, once I have enough material to browse through.
So, what could a digital solution offer me that's better? Indeed, two of the most important features of a diary are made worse by this solution: I'm dubious of your privacy standards (are entries saved in free text?), and it's less personal to me. Organisation features (e.g. tagging) are of no interest at all - I want my diary to be a massive end-to-end mess that I can only dip in and out of, not "search by tag". Finally, if this was ever going to work for me, the design would have to really stand out - e.g. something super minimalist, absolutely no frills.
Sorry if some of this is disappointing to hear! It may be that I'm just not the right user.
No problem - I'll put table tennis into the next version, so look out for an update on your iPhone in a couple of weeks.
+ Currently works for tennis and squash
+ App is centred around 'networks' which are created by users. This might be your workplace, or perhaps an extended group of friends
+ The app automatically manages a leaderboard for every network
Our big question: would you ever use something like this? If so, what changes/improvements does it need?