physcab

I couldn't edit my comment but you're right. I meant $5M-$10M per month. But the mobile gaming industry as a whole is a huge revenue driver, probably 20%-30% of FB's quarterly rev.

Here's an exercise. Go to the App Store, click on Top Grossing. Out of the 150 apps displayed, how many are gaming-related? I counted 113. Thats 75%. I don't have the charts but you can compare this to a year ago period. My guess is that percentage has grown. This is not an accident.

Supercell, like most big mobile gaming companies, make their money on in-app purchases. Someone leaked SC's internal dashboard 2 years ago [1]. At the time they were making $5M a day in rev just in CoC. You can get App Annie estimates of revenue for other companies pretty easily, but last I checked SC was able to dramatically increase LTV of users over the years so this has likely grown.

[1] https://recodetech.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/supercell-hac...

If you run a gaming company, you're most likely tracking everything you possibly can about who is spending in your game.

If you are running a facebook campaign, you will buy either on volume (don't care what the price is, just give me the user, ie Uber), ROI (make sure the LTV of the user is less than the CPI), or profit (make sure we're still making money even after apple's cut)

Facebook allows you to form a closed loop feedback system. If Uber knows the LTV of a customer is $100 and CPI's on FB are $10, go to the bank and get as many of those customers you can.

Here's the thing that most people don't know unless they are in the "industry":

* The gaming industry is most likely driving a lot of this growth. I'm sure Machine Zone and Supercell are doing between $5M - $10M a day on FB alone.

* FB is re-defining attribution. They want to bring in big brands and are re-defining last-click to "Multi-touch". Their end game ofcourse is to say the reason why you decided to make a trip to Macys is because you first saw Macys content on FB.

* FB requires developers to send them analytics when they want attribution for Ads. This means that not only does FB have info about the install, but they have all the data about the usage, in addition to all their demographic data.

* FB still is the only reliable source for advanced targeting of ads. This has massive impact on ROI for performance marketers.

* FB by far has the best tools for advertisers with so many bells and whistles that resellers like Nanigans can make a healthy margin just by managing the optimization.

* FB allows any performance marketer to form a closed loop feedback system. Are CPI's on FB high? Yes. But if you know the LTV of your user (now possible with proliferation of analytics tools) you can afford to bid very high at volume (eg Uber) and still get a great ROI.

Amazon handling its own logistics is going to be a big problem for UPS. I have a friend who works for the AP and recently visited a large distribution facility for a story. He said UPS does over 1M packages a day and anecdotally he said it seemed like every other package was Amazon or Zappos (an Amazon company). I wonder how UPS will react.

I was in awe hearing about the incredible efficiency of the operation. Apparently the delivery of 1M packages happens between the hours of 1am and 4am and over 300 planes fly in to be loaded before heading out later that morning.

Thanks for putting this together. I peruse HN pretty much everyday and I haven't heard of half of these products. Pretty neat.

It wasn't immediately clear to me that I had to bring my own database. That makes this product less appealing. I would love it if I could instrument Segment and get a redshift endpoint to query my data, but didn't have to set it up myself.

> The problem is with a big trend in society that we want to be listened to and watched, because it makes life more convenient on a personal level.

I would argue that it isn't convenience that attracts people, its narcissism. Society has been surrendering their privacy for years with Facebook. We are comfortable with it. We have seen a direct connection between sharing more (location, pictures, videos, etc) and getting more (food, taxi rides, sex)

So of course the next frontier is not having to share anything at all. The next frontier is listening and deciding. Its concierge services that bring you an array of options, specifically tailored to you. You are the center of their world, so as long as you keep making purchases and supplying them with information to better serve you.

There is a lot of bad advice in this thread so let's start with the beginning:

1. Why did you create this app and how is it different than your competitors? Do you know what your competitors metrics are?

Taking a quick look at your app, it looks very similar to The Hunt. So I would research who the hunts customers are and go after them. I would also research (i.e. App Annie) The Hunts downloads and revenue numbers and keywords.

2. App Store is very difficult for discovery. How do you envision users finding your app? Is it intent driven or not?

This will help you refine the marketing channel. If you want to buy ads, be very precise and use it to learn more. For example, spend $1-$3 per day and use it to figure out search terms, demographics, intent or not, etc. At this stage you are doing customer research and not performance marketing.

3. Seeding content.

You're going to have to do a lot of work to make it not seem like a dead zone. So invest tons of time on content creation.

4. Once you have the content, expose it. Look into deep links, referrals, etc. You can connect SEO efforts but it will take time to start ranking and you'll have to have a plan and think long term.

It should be no surprise that decreasing the tutorial from 6 pages to 2 will increase number of users "registered" from 40% to 80% (or more). In my experience, tutorial dropoff follows a power law, that is, every new hurdle you place before the user can use your app gives them one more chance to bail. You can try all the fancy design tricks you want, but the end result is still the same...you're creating friction points.

In reality there's a delicate balance. Train users to use your app early and take the hit in registrations. You should end up with more engaged users who retain better. Or let everyone in and teach them as they use your app and risk retaining them because they don't understand what the hell they're doing. There is no silver bullet.

Its interesting reading about their decision making process with regards to their business model.

Then we tried a subscription model. It was super easy to understand, which enabled us to sign up 10,000 paying pros—great! But in the long run, it meant the cost to the pro stayed the same each month no matter how much new business we brought them—not so great. We needed our revenue to grow in lockstep with the value we create.

Cue the pay-per-introduction model we have today. What matters to pros is flexibility and a profitable return. So we made sure that’s what they got. It was simple. Plus, it let us guarantee our customers high-quality quotes from pros who were serious about providing a great service.

Based on my other comment [1], I wonder what would have happened if they stuck with a subscription model and then augmented it with value added services to their larger customers, something akin to LinkedIn. That seems more fair to how their system currently works.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10294811

So a little story about Thumbtack. My girlfriend is a chef and she and her chef friends have all turned to Thumbtack at one time or another to seek out private clients. There's a ton of them here in SF since lots of people have money in the city.

One by one, they all dropped off. I've overheard them talking about their experiences. Private client posts gig, asks for bids. Chef buys credits, uses them to bid. Private client opens email, never responds, drops off the face of the Earth. Chef loses money. My girlfriend probably spent $100 without any return. She has since gone on to other much more profitable sources for leads.

Thumbtack of course reaps the reward, but at some point their user acquisition flywheel is going to have trouble turning.

SF absolutely needs to build more housing. SF also needs to build taller (more skyscrapers).

I have trouble believing AirBnB helps SF. Anecdotally, I know a few people who rent their places on AirBnB. All live in rent controlled units and effectively re-rent at market rates. One actually reduced hours at his job because income from AirBnB was so lucrative.

I like this idea. I took the Triplebyte quiz mostly out of curiosity and then decided to stop when I was prompted for a phone interview. I like the idea of "pre-qualifying" myself for a job even before I'm ready, so that when the time is right, I can pull the trigger and switch easily.

With a phone interview you have to commit, which is no problem if you're in the market. But if you're not in the market and you still want your options to be open, interviewing on your own time makes a lot of sense and reduces the mental burden and stress of switching.

Really glad you got to see Josh, Travis. I too remember "this too shall pass" and all the optimism he shared. I'm a bit jealous you got pitched by Josh to join Grooveshark because by the time I joined, I had to pitch him! And he somehow convinced me that working at Grooveshark was a privilege (it was) and I would be happy being the intern until my employee status was granted. I'm pretty sure I bear hugged Josh the day he told me I was going to receive a paycheck! ha! Among all the lessons Josh taught me, the most important one was that persistence pays off. And without a doubt, Josh had determination in spades.

Such a sad day.

I was laid off once, and although it was a horrible experience, I do not think I would feel as bad if it happened again. The reason is that the first time you get laid off, you think to yourself you are absolutely fucked and there is no way out of the tunnel, especially with bills looming. But in hindsight, it was never as bad as it seemed. I was able to hook up with a recruiter and I was back in another job within 20-30 days. So here I am telling you I survived and everything turned out ok!

Having said that, if I were about to get laid off there are some things that would ease the transition and make it more bearable. First worry is income. If you could guarantee a months severance, that would go a long way. Second is health insurance. If you could have all those resources prefigured out by the time I left, I'd be much happier. Third is promise of future income. If you could have recruiters on standby so that if I could make the choice to begin the job search, it would be great. Lastly, this is sorta extra credit, but experiencing job loss is quite tramatic. You can make counselors / work therapists available to be there in the time of need.

Basically what I'm trying to say, if you are going to let people go, make the only thing they have to worry about is getting over the shock of getting let go. That is unavoidable. But if they know they are being taken care of and empathized with, they'll get over it quickly.

This is a naive question, but what's the difference between GitLab and Github?

Purchasing domain names is the most frustrating experience. Why there is no transparent market is beyond me. Mehta's tactics are clearly abusive, but if someone was holding onto a domain name for 16 years and not doing anything with it is more infuriating to me. There really needs to be a use it or lose it policy.

You can get Abbyy OCR Cloud SDK and its $0.10 per page (goes down with volume).

http://ocrsdk.com/plans-and-pricing/

I tried using Tesseract and could not get it to work reliably. I tried a bunch of different pre-processing techniques and it turned into a very frustrating experience.

When I compared Tesseract to Abbyy, the difference was night and day. Abbyy straight out of the box got me 80%-90% accuracy of my text. Tesseract got around 75% at best with several layers deep of image pre-processing.

I know you said open source, and just wanted to say, I went down that path too and discovered in my case, proprietary software really was worth the price.

This is an aside but I like the author's writing style. Not only is he clear but also describes why he's doing what he's doing and how it's important to him and others. Really helps me give the ideas more thought!

While I don't really understand the differences between CBT and DBT, I've been seeing a therapist who has prescribed a lot of the treatments the author mentions. It never occurred to me that I suffered with anxiety but through a series of events I started having panic attacks and sought help.

I've since learned that anxiety is often a front for emotions that cannot be adequately expressed or processed. For me, it's all the "unhealthy" emotions - anger, sadness, shame. The tools I've been able to deploy in anxiety fits include mindfulness: simply concentrating on my breathing and realizing how my body is reacting to stimuli. Often just meditating for a few minutes helps lower my anxiety, get my breathing under control and stop my heart from pounding.

There's also journaling my emotions several times a day. I built an app that sends me an SMS asking me how I am feeling and why and logs the response for later analysis.

It's not easy building new skills. It's also not easy re-training your mind after a lifetime of negative thinking. But so far its been working, and I've been able to do it drug free.

"By that measure, Slack is a real and large innovation. It is not as eye-catching as self-driving cars or implantable chips — it is not basic research-y kind of stuff. But, for organizations that adopt it, there will be a dramatic shift in how time is spent, how communication happens, and how the team’s archives are utilized. There will be changes in how team members relate to one another and, hopefully, significant changes in productivity."

Slack is cool and all, we use it, I know lots of people that use it. It doesn't suck and doesn't make my computer crash. But let's be honest here -- there hasn't been a dramatic shift in communication or how my time is spent for the better. I can set up channels now and put gifs into my chat, which I then promptly disabled because it was annoying as fuck as everyone in the company began doing the same.

Personally I'm getting a bit overwhelmed with all the chats I have to maintain. There's Slack, because its pushed on me by my IT department. There's Skype, which I have for legacy co-worker interaction. There's GChat, which all my friends and family use. There's Facebook, which all my non-friend acquaintances use. In any given day I have 5 windows up, not counting the distractions from SMS and E-mail itself.

Nothing gets replaced...I just have to maintain more. Now I feel like its having the opposite effect. All this communication is actually making me anti-social.

I'm wondering why you've chosen such a competitive category. You're in the same league as Runkeeper, Nike, Fitbit, and all the other fitness trackers and they make their income through the sale of devices so they can afford to put their app up for free.

How about picking a niche that doesn't have their need satisfied yet and charging money directly for that? Maybe designing a grader for teachers, or a tool for gov workers to submit reports, or a business expense tracker. There are lots of categories looking for a design overhaul and with just a little bit of research and effort you can make your app stand out from the pack of existing shitty solutions.

I love Robinhood because it has made trading so accessible to me. I started out by putting in $100 and as I gained confidence and started doing more research, I started adding more funds. I've tried many services in the past - Schwab, ETrade, Scottrade, and they all felt a bit too "heavy-weight" for me. I don't have significant amounts of income invested, I just want something low friction that I can use as a learning tool. I have friends who are more "serious" investors and they don't use Robinhood, but I see Robinhood satisfying a different use case at the moment.

Grooveshark, I want you to know I loved you. As a user. As an ex-employee. You taught me so much. I remember my task as an intern was to turn Autoplay into something more beyond office employees voting on their favorite genres of music. I remember my first attempt at an algorithm, everyone got Coldplay as their recommended artist. I remember when we discovered Hadoop for the first time and our analysis on TBs of data took minutes instead of weeks. I remember when Ed accidentally dropped the Artist table on master, then quickly stopped the replication process before all hell broke loose. I remember when Nate made it so every image on any website I visited on my laptop showed sexually explicit material when investors came for a visit. I remember when Skyler met his (now) wife. I remember learning about advertising and meeting Less Than Jake. I remember learning not to run a Group By on mysql when it had 8 billion rows in the middle of the day during peak use. I remember going without a salary for 6 months because we had no money. And yet we persevered. You guys and girls gave me excellent real world experience at a time when I shouldn't have been trusted with a computer. Thank you for all the good times and the great culture you instilled. Hope the Atlantic gives everyone free tallboys tonight.

This idea became much more palatable to me when I went to a restaurant after work to grab some take-out for dinner. I walked inside and saw no one sitting down but the kitchen staff were furiously working and cooking. I thought it was so strange and wondered who they were cooking for. And then all of a sudden I saw: 1 postmates courier, 1 doordash courier and 1 caviar worker all walk in with giant bags. I realized how this new trend is going to change restaurants and make them more 'lean'. No need to spend crazy amount of money for location, no need for a huge seating area, no need for expensive storage machines. Just a kitchen and distribution.

I was there for that pitch and I remember it only because it was entertaining, not because I had any judgemental thoughts. If anything I had (and still have) so much respect for people who talk on stage because public speaking is the bane of my existence and I need to practice speaking 50 times before I'm not going to have a breakdown. So kudos for getting up there and kudos for proving "everyone" wrong.

As a fun thought experiment I tried thinking about this issue as if it affected my profession (software development). Imagine if electricity was going scarce. Yet prices are pretty cheap in the kWh such that I don't really notice it. I just pay my monthly bill (actually it auto-pays itself) and I go on my merry way. But what if the electricity problem was real such that at a certain point we wouldn't have any light. Would I change my profession to "do my part"? Probably not. This is why you can't expect almond farmers to stop pumping ground water. This is their livelihood. They have families to support too. They need to pay their rents and buy food and maybe have some fun from time to time. That raises the question...who is going to be first? How does the government even begin to regulate? What a mess.