thinkzig

This is spam. I read HN in hopes of finding new and interesting topics that were thoughtfully considered and submitted by other HN members.

I don't read HN to read InfoWorld articles blindly submitted by an IW employee. If I wanted that I'd go to InfoWorld and subscribe to their RSS feed.

This type of submission behavior should be expressly discouraged on HN. It is selfish and not in the spirit of the site.

I loved this post because it spoke directly to the difficulty my software developer brain has wrapping itself around marketing.

The answer to almost any marketing question is "it depends" and getting to the "right" answer for your situation can take lots of time and testing. This can be very frustrating when you're used to the relatively instant feedback that you get when developing an application.

The code either works or it doesn't, and you know almost right away. Not so with marketing, and that can be a tough pill to swallow.

Great post by Rob and thanks to rwalling for finding this and sharing. Using "marketing is design" as a mental model is a great idea and will hopefully keep me from beating my head against the desk a few less times in the future. :)

I'm currently using a combination of GA and StatCounter. I use SC to see what's going on in real-time and use GA for long-term trend analysis.

As someone else mentioned, the downside of real-time is that you have to constantly sit and refresh to see what's going on.

I'd like to see a package that notifies me when a significant action happens on my site. Like if I were to start getting hits from a new referrer, or see a statistically significant spike in page views for a certain page. Does anyone know of a solution that does something like this?

It feels like we're talking about two different things in your two posts. In the first, I thought you were saying "people have been assholes to me before but I learned to deal with it because they were giving me feedback that I ultimately appreciated even though they left me feeling angry and humiliated."

My point above was that being able to give constructive criticism is a strength, but giving people feedback that makes them feel "angry and humiliated" is not. There are lots of people that give feedback and do it in a constructive way without being an asshole, and it's not that hard to do.

Your second post above seems to be more about people who can't take criticism regardless of how it's given and your friend's boss, the micro-manager.

I certainly agree that you can't always be direct and constructive without offending some people. Some people are just not ready to to hear what they need to hear, and in some cases the criticism might be unjustified.

In either case, you're better off giving your feedback in a way that doesn't belittle the other person. The other person may not agree with what you are telling them, but at least you haven't added insult to injury by humiliating them in the process.

I don't regard that type of behavior as a strength at all.

There are also lots of people who do great work that are not complete assholes in person. They have the same intolerance for crappy work and same ability to give feedback as assholes, but are able to do it in a way that doesn't leave the other party feeling humiliated and angry.

It's not hard to be direct and explicit about what you want without being an asshole. It's just that the assholes don't bother. That's why they're assholes. :)

I've been usign Google Apps for the past year or so for my email host. Though I have my registration and DNS with GoDaddy, I'm terrified of Google shutting me off one day and having no recourse other than to reroute everything and suffer the downtime.

I realize this was a registration issue, but when I keep reading horror stories about people being shut out of their accounts and having no one to talk to at the Big G, I think it's time to look elsewhere.

Does anyone know of a good email-only host that has a good admin interface, support, etc?

Good read. This reminds me of the "start with the end in mind" philosophy that David Allen espouses in Getting Things Done. His point is that your brain is much better at starting from the end and working your way back, though that's not the way most people are taught to tackle abstract tasks.

Most people jump in and start "planning" rather than stopping to think about what their goals are and then planning accordingly. I'm guilty of this at times too, especially when it comes to site design, so it was nice to read this article as a refresher on how to do it right.

I usually love Seth's stuff, but I think the only thing getting stretched here is the analogy. I'm not following the sweatshirt thing at all.

I understand the point about the edges changing all the time, but I have a hard time visualizing that in terms of an aging sweatshirt.

I found this article interesting because my parents just moved to a new house after 20 years. The move unearthed photos that hadn't been seen in decades and prompted hours of fun memories and discussions about good times past.

Those discussions happened because the pictures were there in huge boxes and in our faces as we sorted through their stuff. It's hard to imagine that same thing happening if the pictures had been locked away on a DVD or hard drive somewhere.

I know archive.org is doing a good job of cataloging the history of web sites, but what about all the un-archived pictures that people take and leave on their hard drives until they crash? This article makes an interesting point.

Agreed. I have a copy of Fireworks 4 (back when it was Macromedia Fireworks) that I still use to this day to do basic graphics and picture clean-up stuff. I'm not a graphic artist by trade - something we should all be thankful for :) - but it gets the job done for just about everything I need to do.

I couldn't agree with this more. It goes back to the "should Twitter be taking usernames from people?" discussion we had here a week or so ago. Twitter is free. You're not paying for it. It doesn't owe you anything. Plan accordingly.

On the flip side, this begs the question "When is Twitter going to start charging to use the API?" It seems clear that there is some demand for it.

Congratulations on your launch. The concept sounds like a good one. Here are a few comments...

1.) Tighten up your USP on the home page - It's not obvious what you're doing at first glance of the home page. The big blue block of text in the middle is too wordy and hard to read. Try to distill what you're doing down to a pithy tagline.

2.) Emphasize benefits more on home page - I like how you've split up the home page to cater to your two audiences, publishers and recruiters, but the text underneath seems to be more of a feature list or a "how it works" list than a benefits list.

Try to focus more on the "What's in it for me?" question your core audience is asking. "Get access to the smartest and most engaged people" is probably the only sentence there that really speaks to that question.

3.) Emphasize sign-up more - My guess is that your main goal right now is to get account sign-ups. The hand pointing to the button is clever, but I think you could do more to make this stand out. Also the big green "place a job now" image under the recruiter section seems like it would be a button, but it's not. I'd turn it into one.

4.) Building trust - I think my first question as a blogger/publisher would be "What keeps JBH.com and the recruiter honest? How will I really know that my referral was the winner or not?" I'm not sure how you overcome this, but that was my first question/objection and I didn't really see anything on the "how it works" page that helped allay that fear.

Overall I think this is a good concept and I wish you well. It's a tough market right now but there's no time to start like the present, right? Hopefully we all have nowhere to go but up from here.

Best of luck to you.

Whoa, a post from the future!

What's 2009 like? Is it awesome? :)

Happy New Year, HN! I hope you all have a healthy and prosperous new year.

Why wait until the new year?

Why not push away from the keyboard right now and go spend 15 minutes on something that will move you closer to one of your goals?

You'll feel a lot better, and you'll be 3 days ahead of the game. :)

I'll start by saying how cool it is that I think you're doing this for your class. I wish someone had turned me on to the possibilities that entrepreneurship brings when I was in high school.

Hard to go wrong with some Seth Godin. Here's a link to Seth's best from the past two years.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/09/best-of-the-...

I also like this series from Mark Cuban called "Success and Motivation"

http://blogmaverick.com/2007/12/24/success-and-motivation/

I've had an Amex Gold Business Card since starting up in 2001. Their customer service is the best and their web site keeps getting better each year for tracking my transactions, etc.

I've also had them go to bat for me a few times over disputed charges and I've always been very happy with the outcome. I'd highly recommend them.

If I think back on every significant business deal or job I've landed in my career, it's happened as a direct or indirect result of me putting myself out there and meeting new people.

More often than not great things are not going to just fall into your lap while you're sitting at home. You've got to get out there and interact with real live people to make things happen, scary as it may seem sometimes.

Great article.

Agreed. It's a sad commentary on what passes for journalism these days.

Sounds provacative? Run with it.

Facts? Who needs 'em. We've got ads to sell.

Sad.

A few other tips to add here beyond the other great ones already mentioned. I had to learn about these the hard way.

1.) Massage.

You may not think it's the manliest thing ever, but if you can afford it you should find a good local masseuse and get yourself an hour session. Even if you go once and never go again, you'll get an education in just how kinked up your back and shoulders probably are.

I tweaked my back lifting a lawn mower out of my car a couple years ago and didn't think much of it at the time. Over the next few weeks I started to have all kinds of shoulder problems and other various pain to the point where my arms were getting tingly and I couldn't sit and code for more than 30 minutes at a time.

Long story short, I went through a few doctors before I finally just decided to see a masseuse and see if it helped. I was lucky to find someone that knew what they were doing and helped get me straightened out. It took about 5 sessions over 5 weeks, but I've never had problems since.

2.) Trigger points.

Learn what they are and how you can fix them. This was my problem that the masseuse turned me on to. Trigger points are essentially little micro-knots in your muscle fibers that can add up to cause big problems for you. For me, lifting that mower was really just the straw that broke the camel's back. It just exacerbated all the trigger point problems I'd been creating over years of coding and not stretching out my back and shoulders properly.

If you know where the common trigger points creep up and how to get rid of them you can save yourself a lot of pain and downtime (not to mention massage bills).

Buy these two things: The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook (http://www.amazon.com/Trigger-Point-Therapy-Workbook-Self-Tr...) and a TheraCane (http://www.amazon.com/Thera-Cane-Theracane-TheraCane/dp/B000...)

The book will show you how to identify and treat the trigger points all over your body, and the TheraCane will help you reach the places on your back that you can't reach yourself.

3.) Yoga.

Once you get all your issues straightened out, yoga and/or a good daily stretching regimen can help keep you kink free.

Hopefully some of this advice is helpful. I was really messed up for a while until I figured all this out. Again, echoing what others have said, please take care of your body. It's the only one you have.

An interesting take-away for me here was the importance of offline social networking in first getting TechCrunch off the ground. Networking is so important, and while the interwebs are a great place to connect with new people online, nothing can really replace getting outside the office/house/whatever and connecting with real, live people.

I need to be better at doing this myself. Great read here. Thanks for posting.

Another good one from Seth. I'd add that one of the best ways to meet the kind of people who want to help you is to be helpful yourself. It's the whole "giver's gain" thing. The more you put yourself out there and try to help folks, the more they'll want to help you too.

FogBugz rocks. I've been using it for almost three years - the last year using the Fog Creek hosted version - and I couldn't be happier.

As mentioned, you can give it POP access to your support account and it will auto-respond to your customers (optionally) and also create a new "case" for you to track the issue. It makes it dead simple to follow a thread all the way through until it's resolved.

You can also see the history of previous cases opened by the same person which can be very helpful. FogBugz also includes a wiki to help share information internally, the same forum software that runs the BoS forums over on Joel's site, and some pretty cool project mgmt features that I personally don't use, but could see the value in if I had a bigger team.

I know not everyone drinks the Joel Kool-aid, but FogBugz is pretty slick. I'd say it's worth checking out, especially if you quality for their free plan for students/startups. http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/StudentAndStartup.html

By "right to a name" I'm speaking specifically about Steve's right to own the Twitter username celtics. From a "first come, first serve" perspective, I suppose he has a right to use the username... until Twitter deems otherwise.

The terms of service said they could come and take it, and Steve's not paying them any money for exclusive use of the name, so from that standpoint I don't feel he has a right to use the username any more than the Boston Celtics do. It's Twitter - who owns the service - that I think has the right to do what they please.

I'm not saying that I agree with how they handled it and I can see why Steve is pissed off, but I don't think they have any obligation to let Steve keep the username.

I agree with the New Egg suggestion. I would combine Search and Browse into the same function, call it Search Netbooks, and ditch the Compare menu item from the top nav as it's confusing.

Your new Search Netbooks page would then have the faceted search in the left hand column like New Egg does and allow you to drill down into manufacturer, price, etc. Each result line item in the right hand column would have a compare checkbox that you could use to set up comparisons.

I'm also assuming you're targeting peeps who've already decided they want to get a netbook and it's just a matter of which one, so take this with a grain of salt: I'm one of those guys who doesn't quite get the netbook thing or understand why I'd want one, so perhaps some content related to what they are and why I'd want one would be cool.

I'd also consider trying to aggregate some of the review data for each model like Consumer Search does for TVs (http://www.consumersearch.com/hdtv). It's one thing to see the specs, but once I've narrowed that down it would be nice to see some review data too.

Overall a good start, I think. Good luck!

I'm siding with geius on this one. To the extent that no money changed hands and Steve wasn't paying them to use the celtics usename, then I think Twitter can do whatever they want whenever they want.

It may not be good karma for them to take the names without warning, but Twitter's job is to pay the bills and keep the lights on, not turn down good exposure (and perhaps some coin) to keep one guy happy who didn't have a true right to the name in the first place.

Perhaps they are getting some cash from the Celtics to use the name. So what? If you're one of the tens of thousands of people like Steve that are using Twitter for free to promote a business, then Twitter getting some cash to pay the bills another month is only a good thing.