the_bear

Do you think that Reddit is immoral for allowing many despicable people to hold conversations about despicable topics? This community is normally all about a free and open internet, where companies like Google, Facebook, etc. aren't trying to control what their users can do with their technology.

Trust me, I don't feel good about helping a patent troll. I just don't see any sort of justifiable policy that would allow for us to act any differently.

We will definitely re-evaluate the decision though. This is a tough one, and we're not in love with our current solution.

To be clear, we tell customers all the time that they shouldn't use our software. Each customer is worth $10/month, so it's not worth having people on the system that don't belong. This wasn't about the money at all, it was about the precedent it would set. How do we convince our other users that they can trust us if we're arbitrarily booting users because we disagree with them.

We received an email from the user outlining their entire business. They weren't the most extreme example of a patent troll (where you can't even tell what company it is) but they didn't seem to have any real products, and their use of the CRM would be entirely for managing the victims of their lawsuits.

This is kind of the point of the post though. We hated the idea of letting this person use our software, but is it really our place to make those decisions? Things are rarely black and white.

Having said that, I'm really glad this guy didn't stick around.

(I work at the Less Annoying CRM)

Since a few people have brought up similar points, I'd like to address them here. My gut instinct was to tell the patent troll to fuck off. I still wish we had done that. But that would set a terrible precedent and turn us into something that I hate: the App Store

Pretty much everyone here hates how arbitrary and opaque the approval system is in the App Store. It seems like there's a post on HN almost every day ranting about this. If we don't have a clear set of guidelines for what we will and won't allow, how can any of our customers trust our service?

Another example: many of us are worried that Google might randomly shut down our accounts. This would be devastating. I'm sure that Google normally only shuts down accounts with good cause, but they still are developing a reputation for being a company you can't trust. We can't afford to give our customers a reason to worry about that happening with our service.

So the question is, is there a way to tell the patent troll to go screw himself without jeopardizing our trustworthiness with our real customers?

Thanks, I'm glad you like the site! You make a lot of good points. Here are some thoughts/questions:

Regarding adding social proof to the site, I'm thinking that the non-post pages need a slightly different sidebar with an extra box forsocial buttons. The posts themselves have four social buttons on the left, so you see how many people like the post rather than how many people like our Facebook page. Do you think it would be overkill/confusing to have both on the same page?

I definitely agree that the date archives aren't all that useful for most people. I know a lot of sites have those and I'm guessing that it's so there's an easy way for someone to browse every post from the beginning of the site. This would only appeal to the most obsessed readers, so maybe it's better to just leave that out. To be honest, almost no one clicks on the archives so that's not near the top of my list of things to address, but I'll definitely keep your advice in mind for when I get to it.

As for the CMS, it's a homemade system. I know most people think it's crazy not to use an existing CMS like WordPress, but I like working on little side projects like this. It also made it really easy to build some cool customization like the recipe printing feature. You're right that I made a mess of the permalinks. That format is a holdover from a much earlier version of the CMS that I didn't bother to improve before launching The Yummy Life. I've added that to my list of things to address in the future.

Thanks again for all the feedback!

That's a great idea. It actually solves a big problem that you might not have even thought about. One of the challenges with having the ads scroll with the page is that it means the ads can't take up much vertical space (because small screens wouldn't ever be able to scroll to see the bottom section of the ads). This means that we only show a maximum of four affiliate links per page which sometimes isn't enough to cover the core ingredients. With you idea we could have as many affiliate links as we wanted without losing the ability to find the ingredients after they've scrolled down.

I'd guess this would lower the click-through-rate, but it would probably increase the average orders per click, so it might work out. Thanks for the idea!

Thanks! I've gone back and forth on the scrolling animation. There's definitely a balancing act between trying not to be annoying and trying to make money. At some point I'll have time to do a real A/B test and come to a more informed decision, but for now I'm thinking that the site is so free of the normal distractions (no pop-ups, only one section of ads, no video, no flash crap, etc.) that I'm comfortable being in-your-face with the scrolling animation. I'm on the fence though, so I guess I'll need to give it some more thought.

The first post went up in August 2010. The domain is slightly older than that, but not much.

Right now there are one or two posts per week. My mom used to post more regularly but we found that it's more effective to focus on quality rather than quantity. It's generally pretty easy to predict in advance which posts will be popular, so she just puts more effort into those and leaves out the filler.

Thanks, I'll definitely check those out. I've used Commission Junction before with the Groupon affiliate program and the terrible UI drove me away, but now that there's real traffic I guess it's worth giving it another shot.

The hardest part is finding affiliate programs that sell the things my mom actually uses in her posts. I don't think either of us would be willing to recommend products that she isn't using. Amazon is great for that since they sell pretty much everything that's ever been made.

There are a two main reasons why I wanted to make the eBook so cheap:

1) Think of the $1 eBook as a minimum viable product. I hypothesized that our visitors would be willing to pay us for premium content, but I wanted to test it first. Given how few people were willing to pay $1, I decided my hypothesis was wrong. I realize that sometimes raising the price can actually increase demand, but I really doubt that's the case here.

2) I didn't know how long the traffic spike would last, so I wanted to get something out as quickly as possible. There wasn't time to create a real eBook worth $30.

I'm also getting a "round peg/square hole" vibe. Google has been telling us for years that the folder metaphor is outdated and we should use search to stay organized. So when I set up desktop sync I ended up with a folder full of hundreds of unorganized documents. This isn't Google's fault (I kind of saw it coming) but it definitely supports your claim that Google Docs wasn't the right vehicle for desktop sync.

Also, what happens if I open an email attachment in Google Docs just so I can view it (I don't use MS Office)? It seems like that will instantly sync it to the top level of my GDrive folder on my computer, so I'll end up with a huge mess of files there. Same thing if I click a link to view a public Google Doc (I'm guessing).

There's a lot to like about GDrive, but forcing it into Google Docs makes it seem like a really messy and inelegant product.

Yeah, this is only a problem if you're sending a notification on behalf of another user, like if tasks/events/contacts/leads are assigned by one user to another. I'm considering fixing this by auto-forwarding any replies, but then that has the same problem as a no-reply address in the event that a user actually does want to reach us.

There's also another problem which is that tons of people have auto-replies for every single email they receive (not just when they're out of the office). I filter them all out, but I'm always concerned that there could be a false positive.

My company sends transactional email from a real address as well, but there are some problems with this approach. As the post mentions, we get a ton of email intended for other people (like if we send "John Doe assigned you a task" and the person responds to us thinking John Doe will get it) and sometimes there's very sensitive or embarrassing information in the replies. I'm never quite sure how to deal with this because if I forward it on to the intended recipient, then they know I just read their personal email.

This is mostly just a problem of perception. I know that it's not my fault that I read an email which was sent to me, and I know that I can be trusted with the sensitive information. The problem is that my customers might not trust me as much as I trust myself, so by forwarding this mail on, I raise unjustified concerns about our security and trustworthiness.

On the other hand, one out of every hundred replies actually are meant for us, and our customers love the fact that it's so easy to reach us. That's why we don't use no-reply addresses, but it's not as easy of a decision as some people seem to think.

I would imagine that the point is to encourage future entrepreneurs to avoid the two trends pointed out in the post. YCombinator and TechCrunch are both trendsetters, so it makes sense to express skepticism if you have a problem with the types of ideas TechCrunch is covering from demo day.

I had the exact same reaction when reading coverage of the demo day. Hopefully the ideas seem underwhelming because of the last part of Paul Graham's essay. In the "tactics" section he says, "If you want to take on a problem as big as the ones I've discussed, don't make a direct frontal attack on it." Maybe these YCombinator startups actually do have ambitious ideas, but they're starting out with something small and seemingly unimportant. Maybe in five years some of these companies will be reinventing education and communication.

In my next blog post, I plan on making up some numbers which strongly disagree with this 90%/6 month figure. That counts as proof, right?

There's no way this is true. I agree with the point the OP is trying to make, but inventing stats isn't a good way to make a point (although it's probably a great way to get people to click through to the article).

Yeah, this seems similar to complaining that Microsoft makes so much money on a PC, but Google doesn't make any money because no one directly pays Google through a Microsoft-owned app store.

This is just the tip of the iceberg with DynamoDB's pricing issues. Based on my understanding of how their pricing works, here are two more major issues:

-You have to provision throughput for each table individually, so you basically have to pay for the maximum throughput you expect for every single table all the time (you can only reduce your throughput once per day as far as I understand). This means that adding a new table can be pretty expensive (even if your total throughput isn't increasing at all).

-Each unit of throughput gives you one 1kb write/read per second. If you exceed your throughput for a second, the call fails. This means that if you want to support the ability to write 50kb (like a "notes" field or something), you need to constantly pay for 50 write units even if you won't ever realistically use that much. And you have to do that for every single table

As the OP points out, it's all about FUD. I'm so terrified of exceeding my throughput allotment that I'm forced to pay for an order of magnitude more resources than I will actually use. This seems to go against everything AWS is about.

We do have an API, but it's very basic right now (https://www.lessannoyingcrm.com/help/topic/API). We're more focused on serving traditional small businesses rather than startups, and most small businesses don't even know what an API is. We'll need to build it out soon, but it hasn't been enough of a priority yet.

Good luck with Wishery!

In the post it says that Wishery helps focus on relationships rather that just sales, but it seems like all it does is send Gmail contacts over to MailChimp. Isn't an automated email blast the opposite of a real relationship? Are people really sending drip email campaigns to investors? I've never raised money but I was under the impression that you're expected to have personal relationships with investors.

Disclaimer: I make my own CRM product, so I'm certainly biased.

I don't see why you'd need to use a third party at all for this type of thing. Postmark is designed to increase email deliverability, but if you're only sending emails to yourself, that shouldn't really be an issue. It seems like good ol' sendmail would do the trick.

Agreed on the pricing though. Doesn't seem very honest.

I don't see any pricing info on their site. If this is intended to be free for life, then I guess it's pretty nifty. But it would take about 30 minutes for any web developer to duplicate this functionality, so I hope they don't plan on charging for it.

In a sense I have the same experience as you. I regularly use little bits of the theory we studied in college, except that I only understand that theory because it was re-taught to me by more experienced programmers at my internships/jobs. Nothing I learned in college really stuck because it wasn't taught with any context or application. Computer science was part of the engineering department at my school, so I think it's reasonable for me to expect at least some understanding of how the theory relates to real-world situations.

I graduated from a pretty good CS program in 2007 without having ever written a single line of HTML, CSS, or javascript. I also didn't use a database at any point in my college classes. I know that computer science is supposed to be about theory, but that theory should be taught with relevant technologies.

I learned exactly one thing in college that has helped me as a professional programmer. That is that I enjoy programming. Everything else I learned through internships, freelancing, and side-projects.

Agreed. Pricing is too important to let someone else set all the rules. I'm not saying that Stripe did a bad job with their subscription system, but I think it's a mistake to let someone else make all the decisions when it comes to such a critical aspect of your business.

For example, I personally don't like prorating costs. I want my customers to be able to make changes and play around with the new features before deciding to pay. I also don't like the idea of having a few plans and forcing every single customer into one of them. I want everyone to use the software how they want, and pay based on that usage. These are important business decisions that would be impossible (or at least very difficult) if I used a pre-made subscription system.

Luckily Stripe makes it incredibly easy to roll your own subscription system.

One of the most important and easy ways to avoid frustrating API docs is to check them periodically to make sure nothing is out of date.

Last year I started using Amazon's Flexible Payment Service (FPS) and their docs were so out of date that they linked me to a PHP library that was over three years old and already deprecated. I spent weeks getting my billing system working and then as soon as it went live I got an email from Amazon telling me that I was using a deprecated library that was being phased out in the next few months.

I also had the same experience with Twilio, although luckily with them the old library didn't work at all so I didn't waste time developing with it.

Updating basic things like links to helper libraries can save your customers countless hours of headaches and frustration.

Regardless of whether it's true that MVPs need more polish, it's just not true that it's difficult for a product to stay under the radar. The reason Instagram and Path make good examples of companies gaining publicity right at launch is because they happen to be the companies that gained publicity right at launch. You can't really make a counter-example because by definition we haven't heard of the thousands of companies that are still under the radar.

I'm sure there are plenty of people on Hacker News (including myself) that would love to have the "problem" of too many people discussing our product on Twitter.