623 karma · joined March 27, 2009
"Evolution, so far, may possibly have blocked us from being able to think in some directions; there could be unthinkable thoughts."
Which prompts today's startup idea:
1. Use Silk Road imitators to send hallucinogens to Amazon Mechanical Turk workers
2. Ask workers to solve impossible problems
3. Pass responses into machine learning algorithm
4. Gain godlike insight
5. Rescue humanity from self-destruction
"...We didn't get the data from them anyways. We're finding it from other sources which have already indexed it like Google, like Bing, like other search engines that are out there."
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Blocked a frame with origin "http://s.codepen.io"
from accessing a frame with origin "http://codepen.io".
Protocols, domains, and ports must match.
How is localStorage a significant privacy concern? My understanding is that websites only have access to the keys stored by that particular domain.
Most product pages I have seen on Alibaba are confusing. It's not clear what the product is, what the price is including shipping, and what the end-to-end process for me will be including how defects and returns are dealt with. What strategy do you recommend for approaching this problem?
One product I searched for was custom playing cards. I was thinking of ordering 100k decks or so, with a custom design printed on the front and back of each card. A lot of suppliers on Alibaba are listed in this niche. So I thought, great, I have a custom request -- I want to design the front as well as the back -- so I should be able to do a request for quote and send it to all of them, right? Wrong, there is no standard form I can send out to all of them, I have to contact each of them individually. I also wanted to know how much it would cost just to buy the cardboard boxes that playing cards come in, but again it seemed I would have to contact each supplier separately which struck me as a suboptimal process. Any thoughts on that, I would love to hear.
Also I would like to know how samples work. If I request a sample of something relatively expensive, does the supplier eat the cost of the item or do I have to pay for it? I assume I have to pay for the shipping. Are there any ways within Alibaba that I can fill out one form and get a bunch of samples sent to me, or is this something that I have to set up supplier by supplier?
Which product categories offer the best savings versus what would be available in, let's say, the United States?
What tips can you share on shipping?
I have read that Alibaba is not the best website for outsourcing manufacturing to China. However I have not come across strong viable alternatives. What are your thoughts on the competition? Specifically it would be helpful to know if there is anywhere online that you know of where suppliers are vetted for legitimacy and integrity, as these are routinely cited in forums as problems for Alibaba.
I signed up for your crash course. Thanks in advance. Good luck.
Learn python, but maybe not now. You are taking on plenty with git, ruby, rails, html, css and js.
The best way of honestly representing your expertise is, in my opinion, web application developer.
You browse Craigslist posts using the direction keys on your keyboard. I stopped when I realized I did not know how to solve the image hosting problem.
I would pay $40/day for that.
According to SPS' FAQ customers receive product within "4 to 10 business days." Let us assume the partner in China ships directly to the end customer. SPS has one shipping price for all orders - $6 - which seems cheap for international so for simplicity let's assume SPS makes no profit on shipping.
Their cheapest products -- Mini Squares and Prints -- are both $15 for a set of 48. Each is roughly the equivalent of 4 sheets of 8.5" x 11". If the cost per sheet of glossy thick 8.5" x 11" cardstock is about $0.05 and the cost to print, cut, package and prep for shipping is $0.05 then the cost to print an order is ~ $0.50.
Let's use $10M for their annual revenue. If their average order is $25 (including $6 for shipping) that's 400,000 orders.
$25 (gross revenue) - $6 (shipping) - $0.50 (printing & prep) = $18.50.
x 400k orders = $7.4 million
Let's say each employee costs $100k/year. They have 10 employees, so now SPS is left with $6.4 million.
Their next highest costs might be: marketing, office space, servers, employee computers and professional services e.g. attorney. Add to that other costs of doing business like chargebacks and returns, and call it another $1 million in annual expenses.
Even if I am now overestimating actual profit by an order of magnitude, the founders or investors of SPS are still doing well. This in a market I would have bet was oversaturated. But most startups competing in this space probably do not think to run their supply chain and distribution from China. Not to mention the other areas of the business that SPS appears to be executing nicely on.
Sad to read this founder's story. Even sadder that it by far the rule, rather than the exception. Good advice, learned the hard way.
If the test is worthless, as the author of this article suggests, how would he explain people like me who upon reading the profile for their archetype in the book attest "yes that is a shockingly accurate description of me" and upon reading others' profiles react "no absolutely nothing about that resonates with me"? My own view is that MB, while hardly perfect, is surprisingly revealing for many individuals and can help one understand and be more tolerant of people whose profiles are in sharp contrast to one's own.
That said, I have taken other personality tests which highly intelligent people have recommended to me and found absolutely no value in those results. But I would not make the claim that those other tests are therefore universally useless, because after all I am but one data point.