sherm8n

www.goodaudience.com — curate and grow the right followers on social media.

I worked on an email application for a year that was on top of imap. It was slow as hell. How does switchboard get around that?

On another note, I think context.io provides a decent paid solution. How is this project different?

It seems that people in London are interested in building cool shit more than money. Many work for peanuts. That's another reason to love the community here. Talk to any engineer in SF and salary is a major factor in their decision to work for a startup.

Good Audience (Techstars London 2014) — London/San Francisco — Full-time/Intern/Remote

About us:

We're a couple of hackers (ex Google/Yahoo, yes we have death matches) that started this company by accident while selling t-shirts. Having a need to find people to buy our designs, we turned to social media. It ended up being a great customer acquisition channel. We turned that into a service that can be used by startups and small businesses.

About you:

You love growth hacking, working your way around system limits, analyzing social media data, jamming out to your favorite tunes, and hugs (lots of hugs.) Oh, you probably should be a product designer (visual/ux) or a developer (iOS/Android/Rails)

What a typical day looks like:

Hanging out with DJs and musicians that come by for customer development. Startups come by too, but it's much more fun having impromptu dance parties with emerging artists ;) You'll probably dance while you code too. We love life and enjoy every moment of it. Our company motto: We live to fight another day!

How to apply:

You'll figure out a way to find me or http://www.goodaudience.com/contact

http://goodaudience.com is a domain I just won in an auction a few weeks ago. It makes your target market aware of your existence on social media and converts them into fanboys/girls (lead generation).

I started Instagram integration as a side project and now you can increase your reach to over 150 million monthly active Instagram users.

It's common for larger blogs to syndicate content, but they will always credit the original author with a link back. Even then they ask for your permission. Looks like they didn't do that. Email the editors to state your case.

I agree! Most entrepreneurs are focused on short term results these days. So when they're reaching out to people for help, all they do is send a link and call it a day. But I believe in building high quality human-to-human relationships. I think the marketing game is all about helping each other to create win-win situations.

It's quite easy to build your audience. All you have to do is search for conversations you're interested in and insert yourself. So let's say "lean startup" example. Find people who are talking about that now and engage.

The hard part is doing this at scale while still preserving the human-to-human relationship.

Facebook marketing works. But I think you have to look at it from a different approach. Social media is about building human-to-human relationships. That's why ads don't work too well. But there are companies who do get good conversions with FB ads. Depending on the creative, the product and demographic.

There are 3 things that I've done to make social media work for me.

Actively sharing content - I use a combination of Feedly/Buffer to post content. So it automatically posts 5 times a day. My followers like, re-share, and comment.

Be engaging - If people message me or comment, I always respond. I believe having a high quality one-to-one relationship is important above all else. I NEVER ask them to try out my product on the first conversation. NEVER. Most of the time I get turned off when businesses do that to me.

Audience building - I think this is the hardest and most important part. If you have no audience there's nobody there to read the content you're posting. And in turn there's nobody there buy the products you're selling. You need to actively find people to engage with.

I like the sentiment. And for the most part I do agree with you that many wantrepreneurs are looking for funding. There are a few who really can bring that vision to life though. Many of my friends have gone on to get funding without having any revenue. It's how well you can convince someone that the vision is possible.

Dude, you don't need to wait to live your dreams. Email me! blog.goodsense.io/contact.

Freelancing, consulting, contracting, it's all the same thing in my opinion. It's just how you want to present yourself. Obviously, going at it as a consultant will net you the most amount of money. But it's only because of how your client will view you. Brennan from Planscope has successfully addressed all these problems and helped people make a ton of more money: http://blog.planscope.io

I can only speak in the context of software companies. But there are many companies who have completely distributed teams and thrive. My favorite is Buffer's story: http://joel.is/post/54284926855/questions-i-ask-myself-about...

Well, as a contractor you can start selling outcomes instead of selling time. So for example, you're able increase sales for a business by 9% in a month. That's a whole lot of freaking money. Suppose it only takes you 5 hours of work. Maybe you're an expert at conversion rate optimization. Your client won't blink if you tell them it will cost $X0,000. That's way better for you than charging $200/hr for 5 hours.

I agree there are many benefits to having a job. I met and worked with some of the smartest people at my job. They all left to start their own company.

That doesn't mean there's no value in continuing to have a job. I just want to be clear that there are other options. In fact, 88 out of the 95 developers I know who have jobs are looking for those other options. I wrote this article for those 88 people.

Jeez, what's your schedule like?

Thanks for pointing this out. I do need more copy there stating exactly what the system will do.

In case you didn't catch my response to someone else, the "social etiquette" on each social media channel is different to begin a conversation. For Twitter, it can be as simple as a "favorite".

No, I'm sorry! The "social etiquette" on each social media channel is different to begin a conversation. For Twitter, it can be as simple as a "favorite". The system doesn't tweet or follow people.

Thanks for signing up for the newsletter! I couldn't figure out which person you were based on your HN name. So I couldn't email you screenshots.

Email me here! blog.goodsense.io/contact

Sorry it's so confusing. If you created a campaign then it is already working. There's nothing else for you to do inside the product.

Now all you have to do is interact with the people that are starting to engage with you. It's not an instant thing. Our system detects when relevant conversations are going on using fancy algorithms based around machine learning, sentiment analysis and POS tagging.

A legit way to get more followers on social media. Helps you build high quality one-to-one relationships with new people. Pick a keyword like "startup school". Our system will detect when "startup school" type conversations are going on in real-time and performs sentiment analysis. That's a highly targeted opportunity for you to start engaging with that user. And we deliver that user to you on a silver platter. It's up to you to keep the relationship going (put them in your sales funnel).

It was a bitch to manually get followers on Tumblr to sell t-shirts to. I had to seek users out, make sure they fit my target audience, and insert myself in the conversation. All without it looking like self‑promotion. That's a lot of mental energy just to reach out to one person. Once I built a fairly large sized audience boat loads of t-shirts started selling. Then I figured startups and businesses on Twitter would find it useful. And they did. Paying customers tell me it works 100 times better than Twitter ads.

If you're interested: http://audience.goodsense.io

It sounds like you know what you want to do. All I can do is share with you my experience. I haven't had a "job" in 2 years. It's been the happiest time of my life physically, emotionally and financially.

I knew quickly after getting a job that I wanted to do a startup. I read TechCrunch every day so I thought I knew something. After a couple of jobs and 6 years later I was still super comfy at my corporate job. But I hated it. I came to realize one day that life is meant to be lived right freaking now. So I left, all of a sudden, one day.

Initially, doing a startup with no money really sucked. You just watch your savings go down and to the right. But it taught me an important lesson really early. How important cash flow is. It forced me to think about making money as soon as possible.

So, I wouldn't look at it in terms of taking a pay cut. In fact, you can decide for yourself how much you want to pay yourself. To supplement that income, assuming that you're now good at sales, you can do a consulting engagement when you want a nice bump in cash. It's great when you want to go work on your startup when you're in a different country for a little while.

To get to that step wasn't easy for me, however. It was a lot of god damn work. Before turning things around I drained my savings and built up credit card debt. I made many mistakes and lost lots of money before having any small amounts of success.

Totally agree with this one here. Life is fucking short. Yeah, it's fun to work on a startup. But you should enjoy life at the same time.

My favorite investment is in something that has no monetary value. But it is priceless! I have it in a Bank Direct account that gives airline miles monthly. I get almost no interest.

It forces me to think hard about traveling, however. I can fly free for life. Since I'm not going to waste free flights, I take several international trips a year. Sometimes I work. Sometimes I don't. It allows me reset and really observe life.

I'll start with this. Fuck the past. You can have whatever life you want, now. I've known people who quickly turned their life around. When only a few weeks prior they were broke.

I think you have to change your mindset. If you think your life is terrible it's going to be terrible. Take things one small step at a time. As humans we're impatient and what to see immediate results. But that never works. It's more important to make consistent progress over time.

Give the founders a break. They're probably first time founders who haven't figured out how to get customers yet. There was a time when I thought it was a good idea to email people and ask them to check out my product.

The results weren't great, but more importantly I learned my first lesson in sales/marketing. Don't ask for the sale in the first conversation. It completely turns the customer off. Instead build a high quality relationship with them. Ask them what their problems really are. You can figure out quickly if your product will solve it for them. When you establish enough trust they have a higher chance of buying from you.

Man, I've been in your exact position before. It sucks. That's just an understatement. I hated it. When all you're holding on to is the comfort of money then I'd say it's over. My suggestion is to be open and honest with your client. Maybe they know you feel that way too. Since you're the only developer they know they need you. But I think if you both enter a conversation on how to improve the situation, you'll both be happier in the long term.

The best thing that has worked for me when I'm just spinning my wheels is to travel. Enjoy life and appreciate what it has to offer. Changing up your routine will allow your mind to do that. Think hard about what you want to do and live your life now. It's short.

Are you trying to grow your audience on Twitter? You have to be consistently active on there. So that means logging in every hour, do some stuff to look active and then doing it again in another hour. It's not rocket science. It just takes a lot of god damn work.

There are tools like bufferapp.com or crowdbooster.com where you can queue up a bunch of articles once. They then tweet out the articles for you throughout the day. That will at least make you look like someone who shares content consistently.

But of course if you have no followers there's nobody there to even read what you're tweeting. So I would argue that building your initial audience is the hardest part.

You mentioned organic growth, but a lot of established businesses do cheat in some way. They'll pay $25 on eBay for 25K followers just to give it a nice kick start. Having that audience really is powerful.

For those of us that want to do it the legit way, you can pay for Twitter Ads to make you a "promoted" follower. Although, the conversion rates on those aren't great.

I'm working on another non-manual legit method of growing your audience that I think your community manager would love. Just check out my profile if you're interested.

Let me know if you have any other questions about social media growth. I'm happy to help.

Yes! You're worth whatever they are willing to pay for you. Since you do you have a ton of experience you should be paid more than other new grads.

Here are some stats about how much developers are making these days http://blog.goodsense.io/2013/04/02/are-you-an-underpaid-dev...

Maybe Denis is a really nice guy who just wants to help startups out. With the pitch deck he can help summarize your company to show to his network of investors/advisors.

Or he's looking to screw you over. Who knows? The internetz is a crazy place.