sampl

I made an email-only todo list called Dobby [1]

You send your tasks to dobby@dobbymail.com, and it'll send you a todo list every morning. You can reply to complete, postpone etc.

The point is to not have a separate place for seeing and managing a giant database of todos. You only ever see what's relevant now, and in the place you already look for everything else (email).

1. https://dobbymail.com/

For anyone interested in this, I highly recommend the book The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, a psychiatrist who studies PTSD.

He writes about this clearly and elegantly—must read for those dealing with anxiety, and certainly with any traumatic stress.

OP here. I’ve been building my startup and recording the whole process on video.

Playlist link: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFP8wPiIB7kz7pbYCnjIc...

Hi all, solo founder of Shuffleboard here.

Basically my philosophy on synchronous meetings is

1) they should happen as little as possible, especially in remote teams

2) when they do need to happen, they should be structured and timed, and everyone should be able to contribute without having to unmute.

Shuffleboard was built live on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFP8wPiIB7kz7pbYCnjIc...

It's a studio apartment in an old building :)

I do--it slows down the work because of the effort of finding big blocks of time to record, but when I'm recording I know I'm on the clock to hit my goal.

Basically I know I need to have a worthwhile video title, so I can't fiddle for more than a minute or two!

I'm making all these remote meetings suck less with a real-time collaborative idea board.

The idea is that you can set up a meeting agenda, get everyone to add ideas, then discuss, vote and get consensus quickly:

https://getshuffleboard.com/?betaApproved=1

Also I film all my work on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFP8wPiIB7kz7pbYCnjIc...

Thanks! Yeah it's almost an insane amount of video, but I've made it fairly easy to skip to the interesting parts if you want to see them. We'll see how it goes :)

Yeah, it's normally a pretty basic task--in this case I was working with Firestore, which required a special nested structure to be able to write the security rules I needed. A week is a bit of an exaggeration anyway--it's a couple hours a day for a few days.

Hey HN,

Having been part of a fast-growing YC startup, I wanted to show what the early days of making a product are actually like—so I'm building a startup product myself and video recording the entire process.

Literally every minute I spend working on Shuffleboard is recorded and uploaded to YouTube. Each video is a couple hours long, and shows both my face and my screen as I work. There are about 30 sessions and about 70 hours of work so far.

All videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFP8wPiIB7kz7pbYCnjIc...

See the live product: https://getshuffleboard.com/

What I've been doing:

  - Talking about who my customers are and what value I'm trying to create for them
  - Designing the basic UX
  - Interviewing potential users
  - Running usability tests
  - Designing a brand
  - Maintaining a product backlog
  - Reading documentation
  - Writing code
  - Fixing bugs
  - Learning how to write unit tests
  - Spending days trying to figure out Firestore security rules
  - Prepping for a mini-launch (including writing this HN post)
  - Getting stuck/bored/tired
  - Making lots of mistakes

Next steps:

  - Sales
  - More usability tests/interviews
  - More features
  - Improving the visual design
  - Subscriptions with Stripe

Tech stack:

  - React + Create React App (with styled components)
  - Firebase for the db (Firestore), plus Firebase auth and hosting

Like in any startup, there's a rollercoaster of ups and downs. The visual brand was designed in a couple hours, but figuring out how to finally secure the Firestore database took almost a week. There are moments where I'm having a blast, moments where I want to give up, and lots of hours where nothing much happens at all.

Would love to hear what you think :)

Sam

Very late, but Designing for the Digital Age - Kim Goodwin

https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Digital-Age-Human-Centered-...

Funny how we say Goldman "is ensnarled in scandal" rather than "perpetuated a vast fraud".

Almost makes it sound as if the real news isn't their reprehensible actions, but the fact that they got caught! (Or even that the government is slowing them down with annoying charges).

Exactly. The issue isn't that he made a choice, it's that he made a different choice first--not too long ago--and made it public.

Sure, walk back a commitment if it's the right thing to do--but your employees/investors will be right to ask why you made the commitment in the first place.

This article equates “exciting work” with “9-5 job at BigCo”.

After going independent, my impact has only gotten bigger and my work more interesting and engaging. Write and share what you’ve learned, consult, do OSS, be an “emeritus”, work part time... these require the ability to self-manage, but it’s a skill that can be learned like anything else.

Why a financially independent person would spend most of their waking hours chipping away on Amazon’s problems is baffling to me.

> It’s also a great article that reminds me of what I actually like so much about the internet. A guy, who’s passions are almost incomprehensible to me in some ways, who has this incredibly specialized knowledge that he wants to share with the world. So he makes a website and shares it.

Is there a blog/website/YouTube channel that aggregates this kind of content?

I love diving head first into this kind of stuff to, but it’s hard to search for.

Not really convinced firebase is “covering it up”.

The official status page breaks down availability by-service with descriptions of each outage and updates with timestamps.

https://status.firebase.google.com

> Sales to your own employees are only going to be a trivial amount of revenue for any reasonable business.

So true. But I wonder if locking in a steady “home base” to the overall market of price-conscious general consumers makes it worthwhile strategically.

Selling to employees isn’t sustainable long-term, but as a strategy for bootstrapping/sustaining word-of-mouth among your customers it might be very smart.

I’m sure you can, I could never figure out how on the device I had

I used an old-style phone a few years back. Some things I had forgotten about:

- syncing contacts to the phone is near impossible - typing on t9 is slowwwww - setting up MMS etc is a PITA - no apps even for things like driving directions, simple web searches, voice recordings, Spotify

Nice. Love stuff like this.

Reminds me of The Uncomfortable, a more recent project. I really enjoyed these!

https://www.theuncomfortable.com

A million times yes.

Apps do the same things everywhere. Why do we still need completely different languages, codebases, etc (not to mention teams of experienced hires) to deploy any little CRUD app?

Maybe we aren’t interested in fixing this because it means there’s less engineering to be done.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

I’m just going back to Gmail. It has most of Inbox’s best features.

> I know people have used LinkedIn to find jobs. I never have. I know people use LinkedIn to sell products. It’s never worked for me... In short, I know people like LinkedIn. > I think it’s hot vomit in a paper bag.

In other words, "I'm throwing a tantrum because I don't like this thing other people like." This is the attitude that keeps me away from otherwise mature, smart people on Twitter too.

Yes, LI is spammy, but a lot of people say they find my content on LI. It's a professional network, it's not really supposed to be fun.

If you don't like the show, just change the channel.

Agreed, the UX of paper is still so much better than kindle. Nicer to read, no lag, easier to organize and share, nicer taking notes in margins. I bought a kindle and went back to paper.

Amen. I’ve been waiting for a React web animation/gesture lib that does exactly that.

The gestures and animations in that video are a million miles away from the best I’ve seen on the web.

It’s better than saying “you can build a nuclear bomb if you just wish it hard enough”.

> a bad idea can fall apart with millions of VC ran by MIT grads and an amazing idea can come to life with a few hundred bucks with a high school kid.

This is a actually really wonderful thing!

Unless you’re an MIT grad with no ideas about how to help customers hoping you could cash in by riding solely on your credentials I guess.

Is it all that different from the original votes map? The Delta, Black Belt, and southern Texas trends are pretty clear there too.

Not trying to be difficult, just curious what you see.

I think it's fair to say "taking steps". As you say, admitting the problem is literally the first step in 12-step programs like AA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-step_program

> Given any talented team, they an take any concept and evolve it to fit the market.

I’ve come to view great teams as “necessary but not sufficient”. That is: without a great team you will fail, but even with one you still need to build something a market will pay for.

If an objectively great team was all you needed, venture investors wouldn’t be satisfied with the dismal likelihood of getting returns on startup money (compared to other forms of investing).

Re: giving concepts time—fair point, but I think you also have to consider your own time as an investment. Sure a failing project could work with 2y more effort, but is it worth two years of your life to find out if it hasn’t already worked? What if you spent that time on giving another idea a chance?