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neilrahilly

41 karma · joined December 22, 2010

Co-founder of atomiccontacts.com.
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neilrahilly··on A guide to product analytics tools for startups
Disclosure: I work at Mixpanel

We updated our packaging/pricing a few weeks ago. Our Free plan allows for 100k MTUs now (100x more volume), and our Growth plan is cheaper. https://mixpanel.com/pricing/

We wanted to make a big improvement in both these categories for customers:

- "How far you can get without paying"

- "Paid Plan Affordability"

Just an FYI since that change happened since this Satchel review was published in May.

neilrahilly··on Decision nightmare: enterprise e-commerce analytics
Hey - I'm the the VP Product at Mixpanel. Happy to help if you like. Send me a message (neil at mixpanel) and I'll connect you directly with someone technical/non-sales.
neilrahilly··on Canada's Start-up Visa
The best thing the Canadian government could do for Canadian tech entrepreneurship would be to work with the US government to make it easier for Canadians to work in the States and Americans to work in Canada. That, more than anything, would help the skills, knowledge and resources required to build good software companies flow between Toronto and SV.
neilrahilly··on My U.S. Border Nightmare
This is one of those instances where it's useful to clearly separate descriptive arguments (the way things are) from normative arguments (the way things should be). I agree that the best strategy to deal with the border, as it is, is to expect and prepare for the worst. But I sympathize with the author that, in a better world, it wouldn't be this way.
neilrahilly··on E-mail is the Universal Platform
I made a REST/HTTP/JSON API for accessing IMAP mailboxes: http://imappr.com. The idea is to make email, as a messaging platform, as easy to work with as the Twitter or Facebook APIs.
neilrahilly··on 200+ Labels Withdraw Their Music From Spotify and Other Streaming Services
They had to do a study to find out streaming is a substitute for other forms of music distribution? Of course it is. Raise the price, but please don't make me go back to less covenient systems (e.g., iTunes, bittorrent, CDs, etc.). It would be like insisting that you're only releasing 8-track. Fine, but I'll find something else to listen to that doesn't force me to deal with an antiquated hassle.
neilrahilly··on Stop misusing "Disrupt"
From the perspective of a startup, the most interesting aspect of Clayton Christensen's concept of a disruptive business is that incumbents will choose not to compete with it (at least at first). Disruptive businesses are either "new market", in which case they don't steal the incumbent's existing customers, or "low-end", in which case they take the incumbent's worst customers and the incumbent doesn't care. An example of the latter is the early PC market. Incumbents like Digital Equipment Corp chose not to pursue it. High-end mainframes had higher margins and prices. They were happy to cede the bottom of the market to newcomers, whose products seemed hopelessly cheap and crappy. Of course, the low-end quickly improves and takes more and more of the market. By the time DEC recognized this problem, it was too late. Same with the Japanese cars and electronics (which were junky at first), or minimills in the steel industry.

Sustaining innovations are incremental improvements that fit within the incumbent's business model. The incumbent can easily and lucratively apply them to their existing customers.

The disruptive/sustaining distinction is important for startups because, "Incumbents almost always win battles of sustaining innovations. Their superior resources and well-honed processes are almost insurmountable strengths. Incumbents, however, almost always lose battles where the attacker has a legitimate disruptive innovation." (http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/3374.html)

Christensen's disruptive/sustaining distinction is mostly lost in the press about innovation, where "disruptive" is used to describe either. That's life in the English language.

Incidentally, I think disruption is more about business models, which often, but not always, apply new technology.

neilrahilly··on Twitter Bootstrap v1.4.0 Released
I know what you're saying. I think the intent--read it in the issue tracker or mailing list--is to put more controls into variables.less and have more of the internal stuff key off what users set in there. As it stands, for instance, you can't even set the base font family. I hope the project moves in that direction. That said, the grid, mixins and forms are a great starting point to work from already.
neilrahilly··on I want to pay for TextMate 2
What would people like to see in TM2? I'll start:

- window splits - better inline search (i.e., from hitting /), so that the find/replace window isn't covering up the editor window

neilrahilly··on Not Sharing Is Caring
I used to enjoy the way many FriendFeed entries were side-effects of actions friends were taking elsewhere, e.g., adding a movie to their queue on Netflix. And often these would spark interesting conversations.
neilrahilly··on If TV Companies Released Authorized Torrents With Ads, Would You Download Them?
No. I'm tired of waiting for downloads, dealing with external hard drives, re-encoding video files, syncing my phone/tablet/TV, etc. Streaming is such a superior experience. Search, hit play, watch. Happy to watch an ad or pay a subscription for that convenience.
neilrahilly··on Death to the 'noreply' mailbox
That's what we do, using the Reply-to header, in case people hit reply. But the From header (which is what users see) still has to be one of ours. This is a requirement of SendGrid, AWS SES, etc., and it'd look pretty spammy otherwise.

Also, I just checked the latest notification I received from Facebook (someone posted on my wall) and its headers were

    From: "Facebook" <notifications+{code}@facebookmail.com>
    Reply-to: noreply <noreply@facebookmail.com>
neilrahilly··on Death to the 'noreply' mailbox
I thought sending notifications from help@atomiccontacts.com and ending them with 'Any problems, just reply to this email!' was a good idea too.

However, I've had to introduce noreply for a lot of transactional emails for a reason I didn't expect.

If you send an email like:

    Subject: X has requested you become friends/posted a photo/tagged you/sent you a message
...even if you mention that replying to the email will come to you, not X, many users will instinctively reply. E.g.,

    Hey X, So glad you got in touch. Love the picture. Want to grab a coffee soon?
Then you feel bad that you're intercepting personal emails.

I switched to noreply and put a help email link in the signature (which is ridiculed as the height of too muchery in the article).

If anyone's got a better solution, I'd love to hear it.

neilrahilly··on Ask HN: What do you use: SIGN IN or LOG IN?
Sign In. Like you, I was ambivalent. I went with Login. Surprisingly, a couple friends, who don't take a particular interest in tech stuff, mentioned to me that they'd prefer Sign In, so I switched it. I still don't think it matters much.
neilrahilly··on Everyme (YC S11) Launching Private Beta of New Address Book
Hi. Please check out atomiccontacts.com. I've also tackled this problem and FWIW applied to YC S2011. My name's Neil Rahilly and I'd love to hear feedback from HN readers. Comment here or email directly me at neilrahilly@gmail.com. Thanks!