The federal government disability program pulls the rug out from under people the moment they start making progress? I read the whole thing but missed that part of the reporting. Maybe I read it wrong. Where is it?
600 karma · joined May 25, 2012
Nevermind that it's a sure path to continuing the cycle of poverty for one's family and their kids' families. Sigh.
When I got to the "$12,000" I immediately felt tricked. Sure, it is in one sense pocket-change for a "bestseller", but it's not "nothing".
"The average players, they discovered, spread their work throughout the day. The elite players, by contrast, consolidated their work into two well-defined periods."
"This isolation of work from leisure had pronounced effects in other areas of the players’ lives. Consider, for example, sleep: the elite players slept an hour more per night than the average players."
Instead you spell out through which methods you will gain and keep customers and how many you will gain via those methods. For SaaS, that could look like “We have x visitors to our website. We have shown with previous products and experiments a y percent conversion rate. From this, we estimate x * y customers at $d/month. With your funding, we should be able to increase the number of visitors to the product site by z% while maintaining or improving our conversion rate."
These numbers are not a factor of market size.
p.s. The only thing market size can tell you is what the upper bounds are for a product niche. But unless it's a very, very small niche; why does it matter what the upper bound is. If you hit that, you've got a good problem on your hands.
I don't know that Kickstarter can be any more clear to backers than they are that when you back a project you are not buying an item and you are not guaranteed a successful result.
"we have closed $150 million in our 4th fund...now you know why I’ve had many nights away, many airports and much time on the road."
"Raise money. Need money. More money. Yes, please give me money. "
"I mean you never know if your investors are REALLY going to keep backing you. "
"If I told my VCs would they then lose interest in our next round? "
Your slides are from Seedcon which is all about VC.
Almost nothing about making money from paying customers. Almost no worry about if customers are really going to keep backing you, or keep interested. Almost entirely about keeping VCs happy.
So many people get stressed out about the dumbest things that don't matter. Especially in IT, people like to tell war stories about their stressful job and all the hours they put in and how they don't sleep because there is too many fires to put out. Yuk. Harper Reed has it right. Do what you enjoy, have fun. Go nerds!
But when it comes to playing with other peoples' plans, emotions, money and lives; then for "the rush" seems like a thin reason to live every day wearing a game face for employees, creditors, and family.
Glad to have Amy Hoy pointing out that Suster's view of the world is far from the only definition of entrepreneur!
An email that says "can you pick up some eggs on the way home?" is someone putting "pick up eggs" on your todo list via email. To me, it seems clear that for at least a few people email is a todo system. It's probably so for more people than we imagine.
If email is not a todo list, then how/why do tasks even get in there in the first place such that you need to move them out of there?
In which nothing worse has ever occurred in all of history:
"one of the most shameful and despicable acts of legislation in American history"
And in which we are the type of people who matter most:
"second-time entrepreneurs...they’re the ones who matter most."
Maybe this myopic view is presented for effect. Or maybe not.