tswartz

Hi HN,

I started this newsletter almost two years ago a side project. I’m fascinated by how products evolve to meet the needs of their customers. So much of startup and tech culture is focused on celebrating launch day. We often forget about all of the hard work that goes into iterating the product after launch to find the proverbial product market fit and sustainable growth. The year following a launch is usually quite challenging, and most products don’t go gangbusters with exponential growth. Instead there are countless tweaks, features developed then abandoned, marketing techniques tested, and long nights spent stressed about the future.

This newsletter is dedicated to that first year.

I've done 31 interviews and have some good ones lined up for the start of 2023. Hope you find them useful. You can read the full archive here: https://www.readoneyearwiser.com/posts

I started this newsletter in March of last year. So far, I've done about 20 interviews. You can find all of them here: https://www.readoneyearwiser.com/posts

I decided to start the newsletter because so much of startup and tech culture is focused on celebrating launch day, but the hard part comes after launch!

Let me know what you think.

Hey All - I've started to interview founders and product makers one year after their product launch to hear about their journey and what they've learned along the way. A lot of tech focuses on product launches and I think the hard part comes after launching when you are struggling to find product market fit and grow.

For my newsletter, I recently spoke to Phil Libin about his video startup, mmhmm. Let me know what you think.

I recently interviewed the co-founder and CEO of Fairstream, a virtual events platform that helps companies recruit and hire candidates from diverse communities.

Some good insights on being a founder, but I especially liked when he walked me through how they realized that the first iteration of the product wasn’t the best one and how after their virtual career fair concept went viral they only had 3 weeks to put the event together.

I really like the layout and think this would be super helpful. Obviously it will provide more value once the community grows and their are more upvotes. So far all the categories I looked at all had 0 votes.

One thing you may want to try out in the early days to make it look like there is more activity is to create a bunch of different logins for yourself and friends. Reddit had a super admin tool that allowed them to select from a "user" dropdown anytime the founders wanted to post a comment. That way it appeared there was a lot more dialog and activity.

Looks like a great product! I like that you are making group travel easier and helping people hash out the details and vote.

One bit of feedback. I found it very challenging to scroll down you landing page (Chrome on Macbook). The page doesn't scroll at first and then quickly jumps to the next section, but then it kept going and was really sensitive. Then it was challenging to scroll back up to the next section.

I built an app a few years ago that does this for bars. Bar Roulette. It's free in the app store...give it a try. I've had a lot of fun using. http://barroulette.cool/

As someone trying to build my own apps, I really enjoyed your write-up on how you grew Habit Streaks.

A brief, but interesting post on how viral products are simple and can be easily described in one sentence.

>The format of both descriptions is the same: “You do X and Y happens.” X is the input and Y is the output. This input-output pair matches our intuition about how software works. Simplifying the product as a straightforward input and desirable output creates the sense that it’s an ingenious idea.

I think it's important to have a simple product and using a feature to explain it makes sense. However, this brought to mind the sales and marketing idea that it's better to sell benefits, not features. I'm not sure where I sit on which approach is better, I suppose they each have their purpose. I definitely find myself pitching my side projects based on the feature, not the benefit :)

What did you find interesting about it? How does it compare to Optimizely?

Good point. It's often stipulated in the contract or made clear during the interview process what the expectations are, which is good. The unfortunate part is that employers may not realize that their policies are actually decreasing productivity.

I agree that forcing the same strict work hours (9am - 7pm) is not always effective. The author explains exactly why that doesn't work for them and why they are much less effective.

However, I've found that when people all have different hours (especially over different timezones) it's difficult for the one-off meetings when something needs to be hashed out in person or skype. I suppose this problem may actually be a side effect of our office having strict working hours so we don't know how to operate on the days when most of the office is remote and working on different hours. Companies like 37Signals have clearly figured out how to build a collaborative and productive company across multiple timezones.

A long, but interesting article about a deaf tennis player excelling in a sport that puts a value on hearing. I can certainly understand how hearing is an important part, as described by Andy Roddick in the article, "that his first reaction to an opponent’s shots comes from his hearing, as does his initial information about the shot coming toward him." But I agree with the author that this may be a case of the majority of players and coaches being able to hear and thus the sport puts more value on that then being able to predict (based on visual cues) where your opponent is going to hit the ball.

Kudos to Lee Duck-hee changing the sport.

>>People who were born deaf or hard of hearing may have a stronger sense of intuition in general, and tend to see subtle clues in a person’s face or body language better than people with normal hearing,” Stringer said. “They are more visual, because when one sense is compromised, other senses are heightened to compensate. If my hypothesis is correct, people who are deaf or hard of hearing may have an advantage in tennis because they can pick up visual cues faster and better as to their opponent’s plans, and may have better reflexes because they see things sooner.

Hi Dawson - What is your background? What's your team consist of?

That's super interesting to hear. Can you provide any links to good articles on the topic? This type is reform is something that I think would improve the banking system.

In theory, this keeps CEOs from pleading ignorance as an excuse.

haha, fair point. He is probably going to go into consulting and make some extra money for those green fees.

You make a good point about how hard it is to properly incentivize a large group of people. Stumpf and leadership made a best estimate for what goals and incentives were necessary to reach performance. However, the key is that when employees began voicing concerns over what was being done they were ignored and in some cases intimidated and blacklisted from working in banking. That is why they should be held accountable. It's because of their lack of positive action when the negative outcomes from their incentive program began appearing.

http://fortune.com/2016/10/09/wells-fargo-work-culture/

I appreciate that Warren didn't let Stumpf talk his way out of taking any responsibility for the actions of his employees and made a clear argument as to why he should be held accountable. Unfortunately, it seems the primary reason he resigned was because the public outrage was loud enough. It seems that until CEOs are personally held accountable via fines or prison (as Warren suggests) we won't see a very big change in their actions. He benefited personally from the policy he implemented, but ignored the negative consequences. The bank is fined, but he is not and keeps his bonuses.

This post had some great advice. Her fourth point really resonated with me. This is something I've struggled with a lot when asking for help from friends and family.

>People are really bad at being helpful. Even when people ask to help you, they usually don’t follow through with it or do it in a way that is actually helpful. A lot of people would ask me how they could help me with Winnie and I’d say things like “I’d love your feedback on the app!” and I’d hear back… nothing.

>It turns out “give me feedback” isn’t actionable enough for most people. Now when someone asks me how they can help I will give them something very specific to do.

An interesting thought exercise and an explainer on how the U.S. election process works that a lot of Americans (including myself) probably didn't realize. I appreciate that the author caveats most of their statements with how statistically unlikely each of the steps for McMullin to win are. I think FiveThirtyEight coverage of the election has been very good.

A side point that I took from this article is that some people talk about the potential for the U.S. to shift from a two major party system, however our election process strongly discourages it. As a result, it's highly unlikely to ever happen. Since the process for electing a President and VP go to Congress if candidates fail to win at least 270 electoral votes, I feel that the American public would be less likely to vote if the chances of Congress picking the President, assuming 3 major candidates are likely to split the electoral college vote. However, maybe that would make people pay a lot closer attention to the down-ballot races for Congress...

I really enjoy using Hipmunk too.

More recently, I've begun using Google Flights in more of an "explorer" capacity. Enter my starting city and travel dates. Then I use their map to see how much it is to fly to different places in the world. Perfect when I don't have a plan

https://www.google.com/flights/

We took a slightly different approach. Have a 3 month emergency fund, then pay every extra dollar towards the student loan. Paid it off in 3.5 years instead of the 20year plan NelNet wanted. Now we are building out a 6-12month emergency fund and putting money into retirement. Maybe in the short term we are behind in retirement saving, but now we have a lot more cash every month to put into savings and investing. I would still recommend this approach because it emotionally feels wonderful to pay that last f*ing payment :)

But sometime emotions get in the way of financial strategy.

That ignores risk and also financial burden. If you owe $2k every month to NelNet or another institution, it's much harder emotionally and financially to quit your job to travel the world or start your own company. We had Federal Loans and the interest rate was still 6.5%

Yeah that's a very good point. Interesting how they aren't easily discharged via bankruptcy. I may have to do some research on how exactly that got put in place and who was behind it...

Paying off your debt early also builds really good financial habits which will help in the future. You learn to live below your means, make a budget, etc

It's such a weight off of the shoulders to have paid my wife and my student loans off a few months ago. Instead of the 20 or 30yr plan we put every extra dollar towards it and paid it off in 3.5 years. It feels fantastic! It's bizarre that student debt has become the norm and students who have potentially low-earning majors such as History are still given similar amounts of money from banks as a CS major.

I like that they've done this. Are there examples of companies that have done this and users or the media noticed when they removed it?

Full Stack Developers | Tripping.com | San Francisco, CA | ONSITE

Tripping.com is the world's largest site for vacation rentals. We work with top sites to offer 8 million vacation homes in over 100,000 destination worldwide. We’re venture-backed, growing FAST, and having fun playing in a $100B market.

Qualifications

1. Strong knowledge of a modern language - Ruby, Python, Go, JavaScript

2. Strong understanding of MVC and frameworks

3. Strong knowledge of big data, database design and/or search algorithms

4. Experience with RDBMS and NoSQL

5. BS, MS or experience in quantitative field (e.g. math, engineering, econ, etc.)

For more info or to apply, you can check out our posting: https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Trippingcom/1055231514

Email me any questions at tyler.swartz[at]tripping.com

Too bad. This seemed like a great idea with a big opportunity. I used it a couple of times and I loved it. It was so much easier to get rid of furniture (and make some $$) than using Craigslist or carrying furniture to a local store.

Here's the TL;DR

After studying over 180 google teams they didn't find any evidence that the composition of the teams mattered (i.e. friends outside of work, male/female, introverts, extroverts, intelligence). Instead what they focused on were the “group norms” or unwritten rules of how the groups interacted with each other. There were two norms that were most important to a successful group.

1) Members spoke in roughly the same proportion, what the researchers call, ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’

2) Members all had “average social sensitivity”. They could understand how other team members felt based on non-verbal queues. The underperforming teams had low sensitivity amongst the team members.