roasm

If you can share, what was the dishonesty you're writing about? I can't tell if you're saying it was fraudulent dishonesty or self-delusion (where you think you're in a better position than you really are).

And do you know if the self-sever market was drying up for Optimizely in 2015? I assume they wouldn't abandon it if it was growing at a decent rate.

In my experience, I agree the core functionality (variant management, remote config, etc.) is relatively small amount of effort compared to the interfaces to make it accessible to those non-technical orgs, like you mention.

However, we found that those interfaces only allow very limited, shallow tests and you very quickly outgrow them as an organization. In other words, once you reach diminishing returns on button color and header text optimizations, you start wanting to test deeper UI experiences and complicated user flows. At that point, you have to involve engineering anyway.

When an organization has engineers who are motivated by business metrics, they have no problem implementing shallow tests (like button colors) while working on tests of the deeper UI experiences as well. And at that point, the non-technical interfaces have little value.

They used to, but they ended it a few years ago. They consciously moved higher market, higher touch, higher cost.

Ultimately, i believe they got squeezed between smaller companies using free or cheaper offerings and larger companies probably building it themselves.

A few years ago, we were a monthly customer of Optimizely for a few hundred dollars a month. Reasonable for a startup.

Then they went to the annual cost of $30K+ upfront and ended all monthly options. They had to move to high cost, high touch to compete with the free/cheap offerings to stay in business. This acquisition suggests that didn't work.

We ended up building randomization, remote config, and logging ourselves, and did the analysis with our existing stuff.

Not me. I had a whole bunch of girls lined up in high school.

To get me to help them with their math homework.

The publisher Metropolitan Books looks like it's part of Macmillan so they're likely a traditional publisher, which suggests he got a pretty healthy advance on the book because of his fame.

I would also guess that even if he sold enough books to earn out the advance, his take on each incremental book is really small as the publisher took most of the financial risk with the advance itself.

Sometimes, my kids will say they're bored. My response to them is that my job is not to entertain them. They totally get it, though sometimes they're still bored...

My daughter invented one version with regenerating pawns. I play regular chess on my side, and on her side, she has the king, queen, and 8 pawns. On her turn, she can choose to move a piece as normal or put a pawn on any square on her half, but only if she's had a pawn captured (so off the board).

It creates a strange desire for her to get her pawns captured so she can plop it down somewhere else, and a strange desire for me not to capture any pawns.

This seems like a great area for disruption. You can imagine a property manager for a homeowner who you call for anything. They can charge a monthly fee plus a percentage on top of any (vetted) subs they use. A single person can probably juggle dozens to hundreds of homes; then scale that.

It's the services of a rental property manager without the rental part.

With adults these days (me included) being more technically savvy but less... handy, it seems perfect.

I believe what I really want is this to be a feature of Slack. Or an integrated 3rd party product.

Does that matter? I would think it would have to do with market share more than any licensing. iOS has ~28% share in the EU.

http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/europe

Non-European here. Does iOS have to do the same thing?

Wow, I don't know if the negativity is warranted here, but for me (and my kids walk to school), getting the kids ready involves making sure the young kids get properly dressed, breakfasted, lunch packed, etc... Transportation is not always the issue.

I'm sure it would cause outrage, but I can definitely imagine a negotiation happening. It's in both Apple and Netflix's best interest to stay together. The rest is just negotiating a percentage that works.

Of course, there is no way they would use that negotiated the percentage for the rest of us.

I think it would take an anti-trust action of some sort to cause a dent here, but I'm not holding my breath.

We have a couple apps and there really is no "discovery" through the App Store. You have to pay for ads, whether in the stores directly or in the many ad networks that put you in other apps or other advertising. Unless you're already at the top of the lists (because of your off-store brand), or you win the lottery in the game of getting featured, the App Store doesn't drive new users.

For the majority of apps, the App Store doesn't provide discovery. It provides a nearly frictionless delivery and purchase interface. That's worth something, but not 30% off the top. That's worth a premium on top of processing fees, like X cents per transaction and Y% of the transaction, where Y < 6, I think.

Edit: I should say, I don't think there's any way this is going to happen. It would take an anti-trust action to make any difference, but that's not likely to happen.

We created Word Genius for iOS and Android: https://curious.com/wordgenius

It teaches facts about all kinds of subjects hidden in a crossword-like game. Free to play, with IAP hints. 4.7 rating.

Another possible reason: you can price something higher with the intention of discounting it to drive sales later (especially after the early adopters pay full price). Generally, in consumer products at least, something for list $649 on sale for $499 will outsell something for list $499.

I'm not saying Google is doing this specifically, but I don't imagine they're as anti-discounting as Apple is.

I'm not defending Roundup at all, but the kicker here is the antibacterial chemicals don't do anything. If they did prove more effective in cleaning hands, I'd guess the FDA would probably look the other way on the side effects.

Right. There are still more "successful" companies that are _not_ YC than those that are. While there are some advantages to YC, there are advantages to other incubators, or other angels, or completely bootstrapping, etc.

You can also click on the "web" link at the top of this page just under the title of the article. That does a Google search for the article and that lets you in.

With the ease of services like AWS, we never installed a database server. Pick a database flavor, version, click, click and you're up. I suppose designing the schema take a little effort, but I find it much easier than properly architecting software.

I back up to a local external drive, and also to BackBlaze. External drives are so cheap these days that the ease of handling your restore yourself is worth it to me. BackBlaze is just an offsite back up so when the house is burning down, I can grab the kids instead of pictures of the kids.

You're right. If she was already on a dated and documented PIP before the report, then you're probably OK. It would be worse if you were just about to put her on a PIP.

A valid reason to give to the victim is that you're not just protecting her but any other current or potential victims (using nicer language than this). That will help her feel good about coming forth with the information; she's not causing trouble for the company but actually saving someone else from harassment.

How do we know that this isn't what Amazon is doing? Maybe they're not doing it with the specific product in the original post, but they're not directly manufacturing all the products under their brand. They're going to some supplier/manufacturer.

Private label manufacturing deals are as secretive as possible so the owner of the market (in this case, Amazon) can change the supplier when it suits them giving them leverage in the negotiation. I'd bet you can find that exact AmazonBasics cable you just bought from the same supplier with a different name on Amazon, too.

I've seen a slide where 1 + 1 = 2, then the 2 is crossed off, then there's a 3, then the 3 is crossed off then there's an 11.

So honestly, after I read that, I thought clearly Hubspot didn't go far enough.

That math slide was followed by another slide with "synergistic" on it.

I find it interesting the article uses "exchange for money" instead of "sell". It's as if the author is bending over backwards to make us more sympathetic to the student.

Well, this is mostly only true of the high margin, hoping-for-viral-growth so loved by the internet VCs.

There are a ton of highly profitable, relatively low margin businesses (at least compared to internet services), like consulting or something with high sales effort, like enterprise products. In those cases, you can easily imagine your growth limited by, and accelerated by, your ability to hire and grow the right talent.

For sure not just Westerners. Pork consumption in Asia is huge, and that's an understatement.

For instance, China has a strategic pork reserve: http://www.economist.com/news/christmas-specials/21636507-ch...

I generally agree with these points. We ended up with an interstitial the same way I hope most everyone else did: we A/B tested it, and the results were clearly positive on engagement and purchase.

We could choose to drop the interstitial as a matter of principal or on the assumption that the difficult-to-quantify long-term benefit will pay off later, but we'd have to make that decision not in the absence of data, but actually in opposition to the data.

Or let Google make the decision for us...