qeorge

On previous projects where geolocation/locali[s/z]ation was a high priority, we've had to rely on either a hodgepodge of VPN credentials or poking someone on Skype! This is 100x better. Great work!

As a result, we use the plugins themselves quite often, including on the website itself. Its definitely a great motivator to fix bugs!

If all the calls are going to Uber, the drivers will too. If Gett/others have no drivers, they won't be able to build a base of customers.

I believe this is what the OP was referring to with network effects.

Internet yellow pages, www.ablocal.com, doing quite well. Can't disclose metrics, but it makes more than you probably would guess.

Domain sales - again can't disclose specifics, but in the $xx,xxx range this year from domains. Not a huge portfolio, but some good ones.

And we just launched Gold Plugins (last Friday), a membership club for our premium WordPress plugins. Hoping it will become a good vehicle, although we do pride ourselves on awesome support, so not that passive. Previously, we were selling these plugins separately, for about $1k/month. No stats on the membership system yet.

Gold Plugins: http://goldplugins.com/

I have some others, but nothing that's making enough money to be interesting! I'll add more if I think of them; we have a bunch of random properties.

Its a neat way to think about game themes; a useful list to have.

Relevant interview w/ Alexander Larsson: http://opensource.com/business/13/11/docker-fedora-red-hat-c...

I think we have a tendency to want to use our Special Talents to help people, when that's not always the most effective thing to do. For example, I prefer building websites for non-profits any day of the week to running anti-virus, but that's often not nearly as helpful as just upgrading everyone's copy of Internet Explorer and removing all the toolbars (speaking from first hand experience here; I've done both). Also, if you only have a day or two to offer, you need to be realistic about what you can finish. No one benefits from work half-done, and everything needs maintenance.

So instead of waiting for the perfect storm of Your Skills meets The Perfect Charity, just go down to the office of a charity you care about and offer to help with IT stuff. Its not glamorous, and you might not self-identify as an IT person, but you'll be more able to help than you might realize.

You seriously won't believe what you'll find. For example, new laptops purchased from a big box have so much crap starting up that they make the laptop run poorly. It might seem obvious to you what programs should be uninstalled and easy for you to do it, but that's not true for other people.

Just email them and say you'd like to setup a chair in their office X day(s), all day, and anyone with any computer problems should come see you and you'll do your best to help, no job too small. I think you'll find your offer well received and useful, but there's certainly no harm in testing it out.

As a computer person, you're in a unique position to help and you can have a big impact. Don't dismiss this idea so easily!

You may not be an IT guy, but you are computer savvy. You'll be invaluable for jobs like:

    - cleaning crapware off computers
    - removing spyware/viruses and installing antivirus
    - fixing email issues
    - networking printers
    - answering questions about Excel, Word, and so forth

--

If you're more able to giving money than time, please visit and consider donating to http://greensborohousingcoalition.com - this is a non-profit in Greensboro, NC, which does amazing work both in preventing homelessness and making sure that safe housing is available for low-income families.

My stepmother is the director of this organization, and I can speak to her and the GHC staff's incredible hard work and dedication. They manage to run at only a 15% overhead, which is truly incredible. Your money will have an impact here.

That said - my data is largely qualitative. My AdWords experience is primarily in selling local services online, and my customers tend to offer premium services (at higher prices) than their local competitors. All of this could be a factor.

"otherwise, there could be several explanations."

Absolutely, that's our own special kind of hell. :)

It could be that customers who see our ads in top spots recognize the brand from other channels, and so they aren't bothering with the other ads, whereas customers clicking on lower positions are meeting us for the first time. Or it could be that our landing pages speak to one type of customer (e.g., one who wants to hire the best, and is less concerned about price) but is leaving another type cold (e.g., those who want quality, but put a premium on value).

I'm just saying - don't forget to segment visitors based on their ad positions. :)

PS: thanks for the great discussion - its always wonderful to hear another perspective, and re-evaluate assumptions.

Regarding the article you shared: I assume Google is making that judgement based on AdWords' conversion tracking, which does not account for offline behavior, but rather tends to track actions like form submissions and calls. That's an incomplete picture for any business with a sales funnel that includes on an offline component (e.g., speaking to a salesperson on the phone, touring a college campus, or coming in for a test drive).

In my experience, customers who click on lower positioned ads might be as likely (or more likely) to fill out the contact form and ask for more info, but they are not as likely to convert into customers. YMMV.

You'd be surprised how differently a visitor who clicked through to your site from the first ad spot behaves compared to visitor who comes from the 7th or 8th ad spot. For one thing, people who are clicking the lower ads tend to be more price conscious!

So if you have e.g., $20 per day to spend, it might be better to buy 5 clicks at $4 each than 20 clicks at $1. You could very well convert half of the expensive clicks and none of the cheap ones!

If Google would only show Southwest Airlines ads when I searched for [southwest airlines], I might agree. But they won't - they'll let Delta, Orbitz, or anyone else buy that spot (if Google's behavior with other flavors of AdWords is any guide).

Its an ad. No need to rationalize it away as actually being a good thing for the user. Its just a (huge) ad, which hopefully (for Google) won't damage the utility of their product enough to drive too many users away.

There are plenty of terrible developers available for cheap right here in the USA too.

You get what you pay for.

As others have said - you need to learn to live cheaply. Savings dwindles amazingly fast when you have no income.

Personally, I dropped my cell phone & cable TV, and got rid of my car. It took about 3 years to get back to "normal" - would never have made it without slashing expenses.

We found a great remedy: answer their calls with a soundboard. We like the Mr. Rogers soundboard [1]. Its fun, harmless, and they'll stop calling very quickly.

[1] http://www.ebaumsworld.com/soundboards/play/1866/ (warning, autoplays some sounds)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6163397

It details 19 A/B test ideas that have worked for us in the past. I hope HN finds it useful!

https://watsi.org/fund-treatments

Do it.

I totally agree with you that this is crazy. Not only is the cost trivial, but you've potentially spent a ton of money to get them using your app! Recovering this sale is unspeakably cheaper than acquiring a totally new customer.

The counterpoint could be that by asking for a trial extension, they've clearly signaled that they value the product. Perhaps with a nudge they will get out their credit cards.

But if the app is doing its job, they'll be more engaged at the end of 2 months, so it should be an easier sale and one month's revenue will come out in the wash. This seems to match UserVoice's experience, where conversions from this group were 2.5x higher.

http://cdixon.org/2012/07/08/how-bundling-benefits-sellers-a...

Making it easy/quick to create walkthroughs for any screen in my product would be very useful. Right now we are making one-off Javascript based tours, which work well but are time-consuming to produce and brittle.

Suggestion: as an alternative to the YouTube-style embed, perhaps there could be a small tab on the bottom of the screen (like a Live Chat or Feedback widget) that says "Help With This Screen". When clicked, it could reveal a ribbon with several tutorials for the current screen.

This would be helpful for complicated screens, which might have potentially several tutorials. For example, GoDaddy could make 10 interactive tutorials to go with the 1 screen DNS manager - one for changing an A record, one for nameservers, and so on - and have them all available on the DNS manager screen without taking up a lot of space.

Nice work!

In sphinx's config files, its super easy to split an index up into 4 parts, and then assign each partial index to one core.

Doing this, we find that all 4 cores are utilized nicely (>50%) almost all of the time. I feel like we're getting a really good value out of that machine.

AirBnB has a good writeup on this config: http://nerds.airbnb.com/how-we-improved-search-performance-b...

Flickr wants to be the place where people discover and share amazing photos. But they charge their most engaged users extra money for storage, discouraging them from adding the very content which makes the product valuable to new users.

Metered billing is like a usage tax. Taxes discourage behaviors. Don't discourage your users from taking the very actions which make your product valuable.

Thoughtful post Fred, thank you.

From the horse's mouth (Mixergy interview):

"Andrew: What does SEOmoz mean?

Rand: When we started up, we were looking for a name that was short. That had the word SEO in there so that people would know what the blog was about. And, I was a big fan of the Mozilla Foundation, with DMoz and ChefMoz. What was the other ones that they were doing at the time? There was, like, MapMoz, there was a bunch of them at the time that were coming out. That were based around this open source, weird transparent.

[...]

So, that was SEOmoz, was taking SEO and combining it with the moz ethos. There you go."

Source: http://mixergy.com/seomoz-rand-fishkin-interview/

Thanks!

I feel that assistants aren't really there to help me; they're there to maximize profits for their employer.

Help me find these employees! I joke, but seriously - I usually get great recommendations from the staff, often brutally honest. I find people don't give flippant recommendations, as its a reflection of themselves.

Couple of things:

All ideas I have seems already made by someone else

This is a good thing! This is validation of the market! And there's something new about your idea, right?

Even better - competitors can acquire you!

You want competition. Be scared if there isn't competition.

Each time, I have no traction, negative feedback

No traction - this is the problem. The advice I like is "do things that don't scale" (pg I think?).

Example: blog and submit your posts to HN. Repeat until you get one onto the front page. Don't stop.

Re: negative feedback - you have feedback at all! Someone tried it out! You're ahead of the curve.

Negative feedback is also your customers telling you what to build. This is the good stuff! If the only thing that comes from your idea is advice on what to build next, that's a positive!

Finally, consider the Helsinki Bus Station theory:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/feb/23/change-li...

In a nutshell - all routes start out the same. The first 3 or 5 years on an idea are about getting out of town. It gets interesting after that.

So pick a route, and stay on the fucking bus.

:)