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morsanuon How product teams should set deadlines

Arbitrary deadlines are only valuable as checkpoints to review work done and plan ahead. Using them as a timeframe to finish some tasks shows that you don't really understand estimates.

morsanuon Ask HN: Do you consider Hacker News to be a positive/useful use of your time?

I'm browsing HN everyday, but only once. I look at the first page, open the titles that seem interesting in new tabs and that's it. Sometimes I go into the comments and read some opinions about some topic.

I also read the good titles I missed during the week in the newsletter on Saturday morning.

I keep up to date about new technologies and directions, I think that helps me adding context to my managerial decisions.

morsanuon A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

Of course we are trying to promote our business, writing some case studies is one way to do it.

But I shared this here not because I thought we will get clients from HN (probably we will be getting some competition instead) but because I thought it's an interesting application of technology that people would enjoy reading about.

Maybe we don't see things the same way but even learning about the manual process of counting pearls was interesting for me.

morsanuon A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

We iterated through different ideas and numbers. It's not an easy task, I can tell you that.

We also try to have a good variety of choices: enterprise license, yearly, monthly or even packages of 24h.

And we also have some free demo counting template, you don't need a license while using them. Including one to help people involved in the vaccination process: https://countthingsqanda.com/?p=1587

morsanuon A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

Our CEO is from the US.

morsanuon A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

It really depends on the city and the type of business. Bucharest wages are higher.

Btw, we are not an outsourcing company. Everything is done in Romania: development, sales, management.

morsanuon A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

If you have the skills, you should definitely try it.

We have a full team working on this for about 7 years. Constant improvements to our algorithms, new challenges, new technologies. A ton of other functionalities besides counting (e.g. forms, reports, integration). A lot of work on the backend, UX. Also, a lot of sales and marketing involved.

morsanuon A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

I'm working on this from Romania. Everything is ok.

morsanuon A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

Thanks for the idea. Getting the app in front of companies that need it is one of our challenges.

morsanuon A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

No, it's actually a pretty good question.

We are a custom ML & computer vision software company and about 7 years ago we got several requests in a short time period for counting items in images. We thought it was a great idea for a product and kind of started our journey as an internal startup.

morsanuon A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

We are working on this product in-house for 7 years now. We are an internal startup from a company that does custom computer vision and ML software.

No mturk, no tricks, a lot of work in ML and in UX as it is not a very straightforward task.

morsanuon A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

Besides the cost cutting, keep in mind that the employees that don't have to manually count are not getting fired. They are providing more and better client services.

morsanuon A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

After you complete the challenge, I'll give you the correct answer.

Hint: not that many.

morsanuon A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

For most of our clients, we get to 100% accuracy. For some more difficult scenarios, a lower accuracy is ok for estimations (e.g. estimating the crop in agriculture).

It's also super easy to correct mistakes or to add items that are not visible in the image.

morsanuon A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

Yes, we should be able to count them if they are visible in the picture. Please email our support with a couple of sample images. We are also doing classification for some of our templates/clients.

morsanuon A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

Our app is mostly targeted to businesses. Besides counting, we also have a ton of other features (e.g. forms, reports, integrations, etc).

morsanuon A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

It really depends how much time they are losing while manually counting. For most, the price is not high, the employees doing the counting can now focus on other more valuable tasks. We also have pack of 24hour licenses that they can activate when it's inventory time, for example.

morsanuon A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

You are totally right. We usually work with businesses that have a counting need and we create a new template for their use case.

morsanuon A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

Hi, there! I'm one of the project managers at CountThings, I'll try to respond to comments here but I guess you can AMA.