Whether you believe in Lyft or not, it's amazing that in just one year transportation in SF is a solved problem. And soon it will be in many other cities as well. I remember waiting on the phone for Yellow Cab to confirm my taxi and it would sometimes take hours. I would have to plan my night ahead. Now with Uber, Sidecar, Lyft, and Flywheel I can be out the door in 5 minutes.
I live in San Francisco. Its an awesome city and I love living here, but it is by no means a prerequisite to starting a successful business. People have problems everywhere that need solving.
This is pretty marvelous. I have always wanted to create something like this, but the details have always seemed daunting to me. I couldn't think of a way of merging recipes I liked with nutritional facts and then assembling building blocks for meal plans automatically without a ton of manual labor in data entry. Are these recipes crowdsourced? Have you just been taking copious nutritional notes for a while? If you figured out a way to integrate something like Epicurious or AllRecipes complete with pictures and reviews, it would make using this site so much more fun. Right now it feels mechanical which is great for people who see food as just fuel intake. But for me food is more than just fuel, its an experience meant to be enjoyed and savored.
- "Idea people" telling them what to do and taking all the credit.
- A non-technical manager setting unreasonable deadlines.
- A non-technical manager trivializing a complex task.
- "Oh we'll just get him/her to write some code".
- Being treated as if their talents are a commodity.
- Being treated as if they cannot communicate like other humans.
- Putting in blood, sweat, and tears into a project for little or no pay.
- Studying like mad in college while everyone else seemed to be partying
(or this could just be me)
There is a clear value add for people coming into a city who don't want to rent a normal rental car. But I'm not sure the same value add is there for people renting out their car, unlike Airbnb. If the maximum you can obtain for renting out your car is < $100, is that really what your emotional peace of mind (your car being ticketed, trashed, and scratched, loss in blue book value) is worth?
I don't think Apple will approve an app that blocks a user or slows them down unless they install a 3rd party app. What usually happens is an advert pops up during normal app usage, the user has to exit or let the ad go away, then they can continue using. It's a normal advertisement. Its not unlike when the NYTimes does a full site takeover for some Buick commercial and you have to minimize the ad before you can continue reading. But going out and buying a Buick certainly doesn't decrease your access time to NYTimes articles.
Just to nitpick a little. It's not that those organic users are so valuable that everyone who can promote does just to get them. It's that organic users + incentivized users lowers your eCPI and can make your app (usually a game) profitable. But you can totally be profitable with just incentivized users as well...you just need to make sure your retention and revenue per user are higher than your costs in acquiring them :)
Personally, I'm glad you did. I'm a male engineer, but there are two women engineers in my family (mom and sister). They always bring up these situations to me that few seem to notice. And honestly its really difficult for them at times to be in this industry. More discussion is good.
Can you put your email in your signature? I'd like to ask you more questions about your analytics needs and have you check out a project I'm working on.
I'm not sure cheating helps as much as it used to, and even so is a poor tactic and will possibly get you banned.
That said, Apple's App Store is an absurdly tough market in the U.S. When your game goes live, it needs to be at its best, and even large gaming companies have trouble getting games out there that do well, even with significant legitimate ad spend.
Here are some ideas, based loosely off of the experience I have had:
- Start contacting other indie-devs with relatively high dau numbers and arrange for X-promo via notifications and features.
- Stage your ad-spend when your metrics are known. Ie, if you beta test your app in some country like Brazil or New Zealand and improve your metrics so you have a known LTV, you can spend accordingly when you launch in a big market like Canada or US.
- Start with Android first because it is an easier ecosystem to iterate upon and attain an niche audience.
- There is a growing body of proof that burst spending on launch day is not the best strategy. There are games that launch early and are unknown but gradually improve their grossing metrics and buy audience in batches over time. I believe Rage of Bahamut was one such game [1]
I love your food. I've had it a few times between I think Off the Grid (?) and when you've catered at GREE. Its definitely a long shot, but please feel free to e-mail me (email is in my profile) the best way to contact you and I can put you in touch with some people at GREE who handle our food. Maybe we can extend a lifeline. I'm sure many who work at GREE would be more than happy to have your food more often :)
The bigger problem is that you don't have any way to measure the success of a daily deal. Yes, of course you are going to lose money when doing the promotion...that is your "cost". If I want people to see my website and I pay an ad-network for clicks, I will get a bunch of costly low-quality users who did not discover my site organically. But the difference is that I can track people who come to my website and see how much they spent not only on Day 1, but on Day 365. And there exists some customer lifetime value that should in aggregate be more than your acquisition costs. Unfortunately you don't have that data and the best you can do is guess, which doesn't put much faith in the daily deal sites.
That's why I'm curious what sort of questions they are answering with this tool. If the bulk of their questions are a variant of SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT user_id) FROM table, then yes, this would be convenient to have. But if their questions start to revolve around transaction cohorting or path analysis where there are potentially hundreds of millions to billions of transaction_ids with some gnarly JOINs thrown in for good measure, I would be surprised to see this scale.
I do agree that PostgreSQL would be nicer for interactive queries. Waiting for a M/R to spin off is a bit of a buzzkill.
With regards to your usecases, what sort of questions have you found yourself answering the most? Do you have analytics applications running off of this?
This is pretty cool but I'm struggling to see what the use cases are, atleast for analysis. There might be quite a bit of benefits for running application code that I'm not aware of. With regards to analysis though, their own example question is "what happened last night?" but then they go on to say that it is a near real-time data store. Does it matter that it is a real-time mirror then?
I've always liked the paradigm of doing analysis on "slower" data stores, such as Hadoop+Hive or Vertica if you have the money. Decoupling analysis tools from application tools is both convenient and necessary as your organization and data scales.
I like this rant. Seldom do I see the need for a real-time system and sometimes I think engineers and program managers gravitate towards the concept to better answer questions of "why" a problem happens. But analytics problems most of the time can't be solved in real time. You have to put on your thinking cap, take a step back, do some background research, and be patient. And as an analyst it is bad for your credibility to jump to conclusions. Unlike engineering, it better to be slow and right on your first try than "move fast and break things".
It took me a while to figure out what this was. At first I thought Codecademy was providing lessons VIA API. I thought, "wow, they've essentially built a framework for education...pretty cool". Then I went to the actual website and saw that it just teaches you how to program OTHER APIs. Maybe their title should more accurately be "Learn How to Program APIs" instead.
It makes sense that data points correlate to your growth, but what's interesting is that data points do not necessarily mean higher value for your customers. If there was a metric that only required one data point to measure and that metric could be the basis for a successful company, people would probably use less data points and gain more value. But most people don't know what to measure, so they default to measure everything. Thats good for you, but doesn't necessarily mean its good for them.
The truth is that there is no one single metric that rules them all. You have to look at a suite of metrics to fully understand how users are using your product. It might be nice for YouTube to measure numbers of views a video has, but what if the majority of those views come from the same person? What if that person doesn't come back to YouTube? It might also be tempting to just measure the retention of users. But that doesn't give you the whole picture either. Is a user who comes in on Day 1 and drops $99 but never comes back again worse than a user who uses your app everyday but never pays?
For real businesses (read: those with actual business plans) the closest single metric of importance is Customer Lifetime Value. And the equation is very simple. Make your cost of customer acquisition less than your LTV and you will be making money.
I may be one of the few and perhaps I've just been desensitized with all the social network invasion, but I don't find this stuff that reprehensible. At worst, its moderately annoying because its one more email that I have to archive but its definitely on the lowest totem pole of annoyances. Recruiters have been cold calling and emailing me for years based off of my LinkedIn and Github profiles and all I have to do is tell them "no thanks" and my life goes on.
The notion that teaching programming at an early age will somehow degrade the software engineering profession is simply preposterous. The fact that I took Spanish for 4 years certainly doesn't devalue the translation profession. Learning how to code is like learning a foreign language-- it takes time to master and is best learned when being fully immersed in it. But that doesn't preclude from introducing it earlier. In fact, it will probably have the opposite affect that you imagine. After my years of failing to learn Spanish, I have a profound respect for those who can speak it so easily. And because I know good bilingual speakers are hard to come by, I would probably pay a premium for their talents if my day job required me to interface with Spanish-speaking cultures.
It strikes me that whoever solves the App Store Discovery Problem can apply the same solution to music. Right now all the biggest gaming companies are solving this problem by signing up (paying) companies with high DAU games to join a sort of gaming social network, sometimes unbeknownst to the user. The network then lowers the cost of user acquisition for all participants. Makegameswithus seems genius in the sense that making it extremely developer friendly will help them win the mindshare of developers and in time, will produce quality high-DAU games for their network.
Labels are essentially big gaming companies, pouring an immense amount of resources for those couple home-run hits. So maybe in the future Makegameswithus will spin off a Makesongswithus and make it easier for any amateur artist to promote their music on iTunes but with all the producer work outsourced like it currently does for art.
This show is pure mind-rot television. It's as accurate in portraying startups as The Real Housewives portrays real families, or The Hills portrays real friendships. If you have never worked in a startup before and you're looking to see what its like, you are being misled. And if you have worked at a startup before, this show comes off as entertaining at best. Personally, I really like SharkTank. While I've never had experience pitching an idea, the investors always give sound feedback and I enjoy the backstory and follow-ups that they do with the companies.
Silicon Valley is not a place. Its a figment of your imagination. San Francisco, San Mateo, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Santa Clara, San Jose are places. But no one wants to read articles and watch crappy TV shows called "The Real San Jose". To me, what people do in "Silicon Valley", they can do anywhere else. Start-ups, Self-employment, Big Companies exist in many other parts of the world. All it is is regular people making a living. And for some of these people, work defines who they are. For others though, work supports the life they live outside the office and nothing more.
> Is there white resentment about having too few white players in the NBA?
This is like saying is there black resentment for lower graduation or employment rates. There's quite a bit of evidence that the stereotype that white men can't play basketball significantly reduces ther chance at succeeding at the professional level. If the resentment is there, it manifests itself at a subconscious level that no one, not even the "victim" is aware of.
I'd love to use this opportunity to do a little promotion. My sister and I just launched a site to connect women in industry with girls taking math and science called Girls Love Math (http://www.glmclub.org).
It would make my day if women like nerdess became mentors. I have a feeling that lots of girls are looking up to them.
After reading this article http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4463875 a couple months ago, my sister and I (both engineers) wanted to do something proactive. We both identified with the people in the article. Me being the older brother who always heard things like "I don't think I'm smart enough" coming from my sister as she took engineering and math courses. And for her, having successful women role models in her chosen career were extremely important to helping her succeed. We both want to do our part to closing the gender gap, so we created Girls Love Math to pair girls taking math courses with women in industry. We would both appreciate your feedback and word-of-mouth promotion!
It makes the problem more real though, doesn't it? Unless you live next to an Apple factory, most people are abstracted away from this dilemma. If an Instacarter dropped off a package of light bulbs (sticking with the theme), what type of assumptions would you make?
I urge you to think deeper about this. You are saying these people chose to list their time, but why do they consider it in the first place and why don't you? Alternatively, think about the array of choices they have to make money and yours.
I'm not saying its an immoral service. I'm implying that "distributed labor" startups are problematic for me to participate in as a customer because I find the notion of spinning up people like we do servers to do tasks that I can buy my way out of to be problematic.