The one thing I have always wondered -- how would these companies scale ? These models work well in areas with a high population density (eg: SF, NYC, major city downtowns etc.). How well will they work when they spread out to the suburbs ?
I'm married too (no kids yet) and have a long commute. Most of my colleagues are single, male in the 23-30 age demographic and live in the city. They obviously go out way much more than I do. Family is important to me, but every once in a while, I make a conscious effort to socialize outside of the work environment. I do think that socializing every once in a while is important to build camaraderie among colleagues. Of course, when booze is involved (more often so than not), people tend to loosen up a bit and chat more openly. Even if you have a family, I would suggest making time once a month to socialize (be it a social events@work or other professional meetup events).
A lot of these awesome things (weekly standups, together lunches, socials etc.) are feasible when the team is still small. As the team scales, this starts getting more and more difficult and ultimately, silos form among the different functions (sales/support/eng etc.). Probably this might not be felt to such an extent given that stripe is (and will be) engineering heavy (I presume). But I've witnessed this first hand at the startup where I work. Things were awesome when the team size was about 20-25. As we grew to ~150 folks over the last 2 years, a lot of the things start to break.
The app is great.I can easily see myself using it daily. One feedback though -- while the ios app is incredibly fast and slick, some of the gestures and menu is not intuitive enough. Like - where are my settings (twitter/fb etc.) ? Can I change my email / password ? I guess others are providing similar feedback below and I hope that some of these 'small' things improve in the next version. Great app though !!
its not always fear of failure. Sometimes you have to pragmatic too. For instance, doing a startup in Bay area with a family is not practical for a lot of people, especially given the current rental/living expenses.
While I'm not a target customer I'm sure you'll find early adopters thanks to YC&TC. Launching is hard, so congrats on that. That being said, I am still trying to wrap my head around the whole 'limited sharing' trend. Path got the ball rolling and has gotten pretty popular. Then came the sharing between couples - Pair, cupple etc. (seriously?) And now no sharing but just journaling for yourself ? How do you guys make money ?
For starters, micro-app might be what you're preferring to call it, but as a reader (even with a tech background), I couldnt understand what it meant. I think you should put the use cases way up top on the page -- and probably provide one elaborate use case to help the reader better understand. Plus, i think the description needs to be completely reworded:
'Engage with your fans and users by creating micro-apps that allow you to interact in a much richer way than tweets, ads, or email' gives me no insight into what it does and how.
Actually, I was wondering the same thing last week. I happened to accidentally land on their site while searching for something and was greeted with the nginx msg. As per their Wikipedia article, they sent an email sometime last month notifying about the shut down.
I think you should make this clear somewhere on the site - that only the initial 64 feeds are free and then you need to upgrade. If its already present in the FAQ section or such, its not very obvious / easily accessible.
This could avoid scenarios where the user might be surprised later on. That's just what I think. I'm pretty sure you'll get mixed feedback on shoving/not shoving the pricing in the user's face.
provides you with different types of moods - related to anger, excitement, happiness etc. You can post the moods to Facebook as well as send your 'mooed' via sms to friends. Its actually pretty cool
completely agree. Chef and puppet could be overkill for several small to mid sized environments. The learning curve for both is relatively steep as compared to fabric. With the parallel exec feature, fabric more than meets our requirements for a small setup (<10 instances).
1) I had the same problem that citricsquid mentions below. I would say provide the user with a select option from like 5-7 colors.
2) Add game mechanics to show a leaderboard to see where you stand
3) This idea could be pretty attractive to brands -- helps in brand engagement and brand building without the negative connotation of advertising
note that these are for famous/important legit people with integrity -- they're not looking to earn some quick cash by making their assistant to click through each msg. Their priority is more to control the inbound flow as opposed to make a quick buck.
mention to his audience that he will entertain unsolicited inbound mail only through such a service (not guaranteeing a response, but higher probablity that he will read). he of course cant go removing his email from all the existing places, but instead going fwd try to use such a service as his incoming channel for unsolicited, inbound msgs.
Well, fred could determine what the worth of his time is -- which obviously is not $5.
>>The problem is it really doesn't solve any problem for Fred. He will still get a shitload of email.
Yes, but if he redirects all unsolicited, inbound requests through such a service, then it might make a small dent in his inbox (how small/big hard to say, but even if it is a 1-5% improvement, its huge).
probably you're right. I could have left out the ignorance part. But in the last couple of weeks, this is the 4th instance where I read someone just jumping to some conclusion and making a rash judgement about something that they have no experience about. I refrained from commenting the earlier 3 times, but this time, it just really irked me.
The interviewer wasnt terrible. If the interview was being shown where the primary audience was geeks your argument makes sense. Given that the audience of that video could be a mix of geeks and non-geeks, I think it was just appropriate. After all, if he starts talking in terms of Markov chains, how many people in his audience are gonna understand that ?
Do you plan to overnite / express mail the ingredients ? Because the recipe can contain produce / meat (perishables), you have to make sure the ingredients reach the customer within 1-2 days, else the perishables might go bad. Besides, you need to consider what impact the weather might have when shipping perishables (given the 100+ temps recently in east coast), even a few hours longer and they might spoil. If you do plan to overnite / express mail the ingredients (which can get expensive fast), will the cost be borne by you or passed on to the customer ?
I do have a thick skin - so I wasnt offended. I have been researching this idea for quite some time -- I've tried several other ideas / side projects over the years - some (like my earlier blog) have been successful, some not so much. After my research and some basic prototyping, i quit to pursue further and not create any conflict of interest with my job.
I dont get what point you're trying to make with the relation between the quoted line and the title of the blog.
As an aside, arent you being too quick to judge ? I quit my 6 figure job and have been working on my product for the last several weeks. Still a few more weeks away from launch, but I'm 100% invested in it.
The problem with Groupon and other local deal companies is that they have to manage fluctuations on both the consumer as well as the merchant side. Even if one side of the equation wobbles a little, Groupon will feel the impact. I think at this stage, Groupon is fighting a dual (losing) battle:
1) Merchants perception of the whole daily deal market is very negative. Repeat business is quite low and it mainly attracts the spendthrifts who are looking for a deal. Given the margins that most local businesses have, running a daily deal means taking a hit on those margins.
2) From a consumer perspective, the novelty of the daily deals market has really worn off. Consumer fatigue has set in and more and more people are tired of having their inboxes flooded with emails. Personalization is still a joke and ticks people off even further.
It wont be long before the whole local deal market implodes (think of it -- the 2nd largest player - LivingSocial is not yet profitable). Groupon is well aware of this and so is trying to ramp up its technology platform via acquisitions to eventually evolve into something more. Its just a matter of time that the whole thing comes crashing down.
I agree. It shouldnt take more than 1 or 2 clicks for a user to review all your products. Ecommerce sites tend to not pay close attention to this - but look at how much significance Google pays to this metric.
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This is an interesting case. It seems like the group designed, built and shipped a pretty slick ratings app all in a bid to gather data. Rather than mine existing databases or pay other companies to license their information, they were able to garner attention via the app launch and gather their own.
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if this is indeed the case, they should have been upfront about it. This is like taking users for a ride. 'Now that we have enough data, we're going to shut this thing down'
Let the haters hate. Just like you might have shrugged off other, bigger downs during the 7 years of running Loopt, just shrug off the haters and savor the success, no matter how small or big it is. Very few people can lay claim to running a company for 7 years and coming out successful on the other end. Congrats and good luck for whats next.