patrickambron

I read about this in the past, and I think it's a really interesting conversation. Would you consider this spam?

Personally I lean towards no. Yes, you are emailing a stranger, but in a relevant way and presumably only one time.

That's a really interesting point. I think a big part of anything like this is how prepared you are. For example, Florida routinely gets hit with much stronger storms, but they are much better prepared. New York doesn't deal with many Hurricanes, so our infrastructure--that millions have learned to depend on--failed. To your point, it's amazing how places and people can adapt to different conditions. I'd love to hear more about running a startup in Lebanon

I'm not sure I'm following

This is so awesome. One it's cool to see a company care so much about it's customers and its reputation. Two, it's amazing how much fuel they need to fun

I actually wasn't aware of this. Sounds cool Can you elaborate?

Yea that was really surprising to me. It's another reason I feel lucky to be in this industry. It became obvious people love what they do more than any other industry.

This is such a good comment, and something I've wondered about too. I think there are three parts of the equation

1) StartUp people, especially founders, have a heightened appreciation of Time. Big organizations build in redundancy and shared responsibility. If something doesn't get done, it's not your fault and it's not the end of the world. The business goes on. In a startup, the buck stops with you, and if you don't get it done, it doesn't' happen. Time can not be wasted

2) Startup people generally love what they do. They aren't looking for a day off. Contrast that with most people. A day off is welcome.

3) The tech industry has an "us vs the world' mentality that separates it form othe rindustries. Even my friends who wanted to work--because they had deadlines, etc--were left with no recourse. Our industry wants everyone to succeed. It's empathetic. Most people understand the pain and joy of building something, so they do everything they can to help others succeed as well. That doesn't exist (in my experience) in other industries, and it creates a community that other industries don't have. I think that's part of what we saw last week.

Absolutely. It was pretty amazing to see how the whole city came together, especially leaders – from Obama to Bloomberg to Governor Christie to Sterne to many others.

Definitely agree. A few simple changes and you can make it really easy/fun to go through lots and lots of quotes :)

Really cool idea (and nice design). I know it was a weekend project so I bet most of my feedback are things you've already considered, but here it is:

1) It's a little hard to tell the source of the quote from just the thumbnail, unless you recognize the cover. I think there should be a title above the quote that includes Book and Author (in addition to the thumbnail of the cover)

2) It's such a cool concept, but I'd like to be able to browse by books (business books, psychology books, fiction, literature, best sellers, etc).

3) Make the page more dynamic, so you don't need to refresh the page every time you call for a new quote. This will make it much nicer/enticiing to quickly scroll through quotes. The refresh creates a bit of friction

4) Make it easier to tweet/share it out. You have a tweet/pin button in the corner, but I would integrate it into the quote box. If it's a good quote, I want to post it to other places

Just started using Confluence. If you're willing to use their hosted version, it's one of the best project management softwares I've used.

I would gladly use more products by them

He's talking about the "jack of all trades, master of none" type person.

Just because you are the absolute best at one thing does not mean you are incompetent in all other areas.

To take your example: of course you wouldn't want to promote someone who only knows the code of one project very well and of course you want to promote someone who understands how all the parts of the product work together. However, the person who knows how all the parts work together and is the absolute best at shipping code, get a lot farther than the person who knows how they all work together, but doesn't execute any given function well enough to handle on his own

In this case it means that the first result is actually about them, and it's content they control

That's a good point Danso. The BrandYourself software actually guides you through all of that. If you submit a LinkedIn for example, but haven't gotten your vanity URL, we guide you through the process until you have. If you submit a personal website and haven't applied a custom domain (yourname.com) we guide you through that too. Basically the service helps you make any profile or link as search engine friendly for your name as possible

This infographic is more of an interesting look into where different profiles generally rank on their own, left to their own devices. Since we track the Google results of over 130K people, millions of results and hundreds of thousands of profiles, we thought it would be cool to see where profiles generally rank.

Does that help at all?

That's a good question. LinkedIn ranking high makes sense but we were really surprised by about.me. Here's a high-level answer

1) LinkedIn tends to rank high because, not only is it a well structured page, but people tend to take the time and fill out all the information. From Google's perspective, the more relevant information about someone on a page, the higher it should rank. Think about it: Twitter gives you 160 characters, and most people barely fill out their FB profiles beyond status updates. On LinkedIn however, people carefully fill out their bio, their headline, all of their education and work experience. They post their resume, get reccomendations, plaster their name everywhere, etc.

2) Why does about.me rank so poorly? On the other end, about.me is structured pretty poorly. You aren't encouraged to publish much content and the page remains relatively static and sparse. Compare that to twitter. Sure on twitter you only get 160 characters in your bio, but it's constantly updating with new content, which Google loves. About.me basically has the worst of both worlds: Not much original content, streams duplicate content from other places, which Google doesn't favor

My impression was since he didn't have any college degrees, he was being turned away from jobs. He contemplated the idea of simply lying, but instead, thought of another way to draw attention to his credentials that would help people overlook the fact he hadn't gone to college. Rather than make up a degree, he highlighted the fact that he was in Mensa, which ended up working

You're describing a great CEO, not necessarily a great StartUp founder. In the beginning the founder's job is not to hire people (you're not ready for that yet). It's to execute and demonstrate some sort of traction--the traction you can use to hire great people. Ideas are a dime a dozen. If you want to hire great people, you need to show that idea can be executed before you can hire "the best people in every field"

I've always thought the person running the development team should understand marketing, and the person running the marketing efforts knows how to develop. The two are so intertwined, but at the same time, it's important to separate the effort. Just like in engineering, the devil is in the details not the conceptual idea. You want a marketing person who knows how to get everything just right, to get in front of customers, sign people up, etc

I fall right in the middle with the lawyer advice.

You should not incorporate without seeking very good legal advice from someone who knows what they are talking about in your industry. Yes, incorporating a business is easy and standardized, but as MattMarron pointed out, you can do it in a way that is bad for your type of business. For example, as a tech startup, you shouldn't structure yourself life a restaurant. You need founder shares to vest overtime, etc

On the other end, some people just blindly pay and trust lawyers to know your business for you. Lawyers should not be decision makers. Rule of thumb: Do not pay lawyers to tell you how to do things. Figure out how you want to do them, then pay lawyer to make sure that's actually represented in the fine print.

Find a lawyer who's worked with similar companies, seems trustworthy and doesn't charge you for every 15 min phone call

Really good post. We're in the process of doing something very similar, moving from Upstate NY down to NYC. There are pro's and cons to each. Upstate was great when we were building product. It was good to be isolated from distraction and do absolutely nothing but build. Now that we are launched, there are media relationships, mentorships and capital that just don't exist upstate. It's figuring out what your company's priorities are where you need to be to execute them best

That would definitely be interesting from a startup founder's perspective.

From a purely consumer standpoint, I would use something like this to create my FB lists, if you made that easy. It's also useful when planning events. So, while I would personally never use it to send an app invite, I would use this if I was planning a party, and wanted to quickly see who I should invite and message, etc

I personally just don't like app invites. I don't use them, and I literally never pay attention to ones I get.

That said, the clusters are really impressive. All of my clusters were basically just groups of people from different times/events of my life (highschool people/friends, college friends, colleagues, people I knew when I lived in Syracuse, etc). It's an obvious way to separate my groups of networks, and it was fast. That's useful in so many contexts

I do think there is a big business there, but it's also crowded and more complicated. People don't realize how big the individual market is, and we want to be the ones who own it. But reach out to me, I'd be happy to show you how to use the product, and give you some additional tips for the business front--pambron[at]brandyourself[dot]com

Hey, email me at pambron[at]brandyourself[dot]com. I'll figure out why you can't log in

My cofounder Pete, was being mistaken for a Drug Dealer and sex offender in college. It was where the inspiration came from

Thanks again everyone, I'm truly flattered. We had some great discussions (have some catch-up to do today, had no idea I'd be spending so much time on HN :)).

Since so many people were curious to see the affect HN would have on our signups, I think I'm going to do a follow up post next week.

Can't say I blame you, actually. At the time of Launch, it looked like our widest reaching "crediblity booster". I think we should go ahead and change that now

1) We happen to have a value proposition that appeals to almost everyone. Almost everyone has Googled their name, and thought about improving their results in some way or another--maybe there's something embarrassing, or maybe someone else with their name owns all the results, or maybe they have certain things they just wished showed up.

2) We worked hard on our home page --we explain what it does, who we are, and how it works in as little words as possible, and lead you right to sign up (we tweaked this language so many times I can't tell you) Everytime it seems clear enough to us, we would put it front of random person. If they didn't completely understand what we did and want to sign up, we went back to the drawing board. We did this over and over again.

--For those who need more validation we lead you to more info: our company story/mission, our press, testimonials, et. I call these "credibility boosters"

3) We give a lot away for free. People like free stuff

Hey, thanks man

Our view is pretty simple on this: Whether you like it or not, people are going to Google you, and they expect to find you. 75% of HR depts. are now required to Google candidates before searching for them, 30% of all daily searches are for someone's name. If you don't show up, you miss an opportunity to mold that first impression.

You might as well be proactive and make sure you have some relevant content well optimized. Otherwise you might be represented by something negative posted by somebody else, or something irrelevant, or mistaken for somebody else all together--my cofounder Pete couldn't get an internship in college because he was being mistaken for a drug dealer

In other words, if you don't define yourself, something else will.