pavelgvay

Thank you! It's hard to transfer Notion pages to Github, but I allowed commenting on Notion so everyone can suggest changes and add stuff.

In 2021 I interviewed 100+ founders about fundraising for my side project. I learned a lot and decided to put everything into one Notion page — 8 guides, 10+ templates, and 20+ tools.

I spent 5+ months writing articles and putting all this together. And I will continue adding new things so let me know if I missed something.

Hope you enjoy if you are fundraising!

I use GA on my landing page and Amplitude inside the product.

GA is good at tracking traffic sources, and that's all I need. Plus, there are tons of materials on GA out there, so even a noob like me can install and use it.

What I like about Amplitude is that it's event-based. You can analyze users' behavior with it.

On my first job at an internet provider company, they had no backend. They were using some proprietary software and SQL functions instead. One day the CEO came in and said: "Guys, we need to print a small QR code on mails to customers. ". The team lead responded: "Sure, our intern can do it."

Oh my gosh, that was a crazy task! I built a fully functional QR code generator on pure SQL from scratch! It was very fun.

Check out Wikipedia [1]. They explain how QR codes work really well. Well enough to build your own generator.

I also used ZXing code [2], that Muzani shared below here, as a reference.

[1] — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code

[2] — https://github.com/zxing/zxing

Currently, there is no automated messaging yet, and we're doing the outreach manually. So we just don't work with people who want to get meetings by spamming investors. We only work with the customers who need help with getting intros from the people they already know.

I have 3 anti-spam hypotheses to test:

1/ Daily message limits. Spamming only works if you send large volumes of emails. Strict daily limits should make our tool not suitable for spammers.

2/ Allow the "intro ask" emails to 1st-degree connections only.

3/ Allow cold emails to relevant investors only.

I hope all these restrictions will guide our users to use our tool as intended - for building healthy relationships with investors using healthy methods.

If the restrictions won't work, I'm going to figure out something else. As Michael Siebel once said, startups should choose their customers carefully. We want to build an investor relationships management platform, and there is no place for spammers.

Any suggestions on fighting spammers are welcome.

When I was fundraising for my previous startup, finding investors and getting meetings with them became my full-time job for almost three months. Because I had some experience building chatbots, I thought I could make one to automate investor research and outreach.

After 9 months of idea validation and development, I introduce you to Shizune. It can do two things: a) find investors tailored to your startup b) get meetings with them by automating warm intros and cold emails.

First, Shizune finds all investors who invested in companies similar to your startup. Then it researches all of them, scraping data from over 20+ data sources. In the end, it picks the most active investors in your industry, stage, and country. This approach helps us to make sure that the investors will be interested in your startup and have already invested in startups like yours before.

Once the list of investors is ready, Shizune can reach out to people on your behalf, ask for intros/send cold emails, and schedule meetings.

The outreach part is still in development because the demand for getting meetings was low. Currently, we're experimenting with NLU and text generation platforms to prototype the MVP of this feature.

We launched the MVP a couple of days ago. Now we want to ship updates every 2 weeks, but my partner is part-time, and it slows us down a lot. The current plan is to: a) finish the core features with no-code to monetize the product ASAP b) focus on user acquisition to start making enough money to pay the salary for my partner. Any advice on this situation would be appreciated. :)

Hi HN! There is plenty of VUI design articles without any real-world examples at all. I think that the best way to learn something is to check out real-world examples of that thing.

So I talked with a bunch of popular Alexa Skills, wrote down the best design practices, and compiled them in one article. And I also made a PDF cheat sheet with all the examples put in short.

I'm thinking about writing the next part of the article with more advanced practices, so let me know if you'd be interested in it.

Happy to answer any of your questions!

Oh, my bad. The video was recorded before we paid for the license. We'll re-record the video, thank you!

Creator here. As a VUI designer, I have struggled with understanding how people will talk to my app. To understand it better I was meeting with users and was asking them to talk to my app. They thought the app was launched in production, but it was just me playing texts out loud using just Google Translate.

So my team and I built Tortu. Workflow is simple: you map out the conversation using flowchart and then test it with the in-browser prototype. The flowchart has only two types of blocks: "user says", "system says". The prototype has voice, text and "chat bubbles" modes.

We learned a lot while coding since we have never worked with flowcharts before. We use GoJS for building interactive diagrams. We were considering D3 but GoJS is built especially for diagrams and has features working out of the box such as "undo/redo", "copy/paste", "drag and drop".

For text to speech, we use Google Text To Speech and Amazon Polly. And for speech recognition, we use Google Speech. The frontend code is in Typescript (React), the backend is in Python (Django).

The tool is free and will stay free forever if you sign up while it is in beta.

Happy to answer any of your questions!