vishalchandra

Opportunity to learn a new word?

True

In a similar way it’s possible to quibble over the definition of the word democracy.

If the ability of women to vote is considered essential for democracy, then the world’s oldest democracy is New Zealand and not the US.

But rather than going by dictated definitions, if we go by popular perceptions of the words, then Nalanda is a university and US became a democracy before New Zealand.

Nalanda was multi-subject and other than theology, they also taught medicine, mathematics, astronomy, meta physics, grammar, etc. That sounds like a university to me.

You can always try to create definitions to suit your preferred narrative. But Nalanda was multi-subject beyond teaching religion.

that's another way to make the platform lose relevance... imagine if HN tried to always keep PG essays on the top of the feed

MIT license builds the trust to use it and contribute to it, or at least use it freely.

But that also enables someone to use your software as a starting point for their own competing SaaS solution.

Which is what encourages companies to at some point of time shift to a BSL license, as you might also at some point of time.

The goal is of course to build Enterprise features which are hard to replicate for others, but these imply more complex engineering challenges are being solved.

That could be plugins to integrate into other Enterprise tools like Snowflake or Salesforce for e.g.

Another interesting observation is that in next 4-5 years we could expect a robust open source MIT licensed stack for pretty much everything.

But it only feels like that, because we will start to have quantum computing and then all software will need to get rebuilt.

Cloudflare has non-transparent pricing, unlike AWS, which will charge you for every thing with detailed usage tracking.

When ever there is non-transparent pricing, it's scary to try and use an infrastructure related service.

The sales teams can't go around saying that you are not a profitable customer, and they can't argue with the marketing team to be more honest about pricing on the pricing page.

So, end result, let's bump of these small free loaders. Large enterprise deals is what gets us the bonus anyways.

I like fly.io pricing in that sense. And I am sure there might be others offering a more transparent pricing, otherwise like me still stuck on AWS.

FIFO: https://fifo.im

Medium for developers and other tech folks. Or like dev.to, but "hopefully" better UX for driving discussions etc. Also supports live audio sessions.

Demand = Num of companies hiring remotely / wfh

Supply = Num of people in nearly same timezone interest in wfh

Currently supply >> demand, so if your company is embracing remote work, you need to now be good at your job when compared to a larger pool of people.

The advice may be related to product, technology, sales, marketing, fund raising, hiring, operations, etc

Probably distracting while you try to work. But good to have this just as World Cup starts.

Uber is being banned for skipping the process of police verification which would have prevented this incident from happening. If verification had been done then that driver would have never gotten hired. Other cab companies are following this process, so why should Uber skip it ? Companies which are negligent in their duties towards their customers will face repercussions.

Step 1. Make sure that I am disagreeing in the right spirit and communicating in the right way. See disagreement diagram: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_... Typically this should ensure that the following discussion is done in the right spirit because I would guess developers tend to be logic driven.

Step 2. In the scenario that even this does not work or cannot be applied easily, then ask that "If we wanted to test out which option between these two, three approaches will work better, than what test could we conduct ?" Focus on defining a test to validate assumptions, rather than arguing for or against an option.

One approach is clarity.fm, though not as sure as to whether they are getting enough traction.

1. Well defined tangible deliverables (project requirements) are a must for any fixed cost projects.

2. Either the client prepares the requirements document and you review it or you bill the client to prepare a requirements document.

There are three different things, 1. MLP, 2. MVP, 3. MSP which kind of come in order.

1 MLP is Minimum Learnable Product i.e. anything which helps you learn something about what product you should be building. It can be an email that you send out pitching your product or a landing page.

2. MVP is Minimum Viable Product i.e. by viability we imply usability. If it is not usable then it is not viable. So landing pages, wireframes are ruled out. Mailers might work if you start to provide a service (which will get eventually productized, automated, etc) via the mailer. So an ugly looking product would also do as long as users find it usable.

3. MSP is Minimum Saleable Product i.e. the product based on which you can start making revenue (if you so wanted)

Cassandra works best. E.g. Say as the backend for email storage.

We respond to ads (of brands primarily) not because it strikes an emotion inside us, but because we want to conform to the image presented by that ad.

I thought some more about it and I think the issue is that the value proposition of your product is not strong enough to get traction. One of the ways you can improve it is by converting it into a monetization channel for app developers.

So say a free game app has a 100K users playing the game and you know the location ( enable GPS in your SDK) of these users and the times when they are active (start tracking that too) etc then those users could answer a quick survey for larger brands (who pay per survey completed). So the survey is not about the game users are playing, but about a new movie that is launched or a new Xbox Game title that is launched etc. The free app could continue to be freely used if the user answers 1 survey every 20 times he or she plays the game. Survey can even allow you to show a relevant targeted ad next time or promote some other app game too.

I got an answer to the third question on problem-solution fit, but not to the first two questions, i.e. ~

1. What are the alternative solutions (can be dev coding it themselves) and what do they lack in and how much more value (approx. time saved in coding this functionality as a percentage of time taken to code the rest of the app) does your offering create in comparison to the alternative ?

2. How often do your users face the pain-point (i.e. how often do they need to create a different type of survey) ?

Checked out your product. It looks like a really good implementation of a "poll and survey SDK for mobile developers".

There are tens of thousands of mobile developers building all kinds of apps, which group of devs actually need to add different polls / survey in their app every week ?

You made it to scratch your own itch.. but what exactly was your itch ? And how frequently did you want to switch the poll, survey that you conduct ?

When a user has a pain-point then we need to evaluate the following as well i.e. a user with a pain-point by itself is not sufficient, we have to check for problem-solution fit as well ~ 1. What are the alternative solutions and what do they lack in and how much more value does our offering create in comparison to the alternative ? 2. How often do users face the pain-point ? 3. When do users face the pain-point ?

If you are working, it is like a parrot getting free from its aviary.

Not sure what level you are at, but for HTML, CSS basics, this is an ideal resource. Little more than the basics, and not too extensive either.

http://learn.shayhowe.com/

Make a presentation on what you have read. Present it to a group or at the least put it on Slideshare.

More than just taking notes (which are more effective than not taking notes), when you try to present something (or explain to others) is when you really capture the knowledge in your head for a really really long time.

Wow ! I think it is great to see the comments on this thread. Thanks jwillgoesfast for asking this question.

I have actually been working on building a Product/Market Fit (Customer Dev) as Service product for the last 12 months and before that I had been advising (mostly on shaping up ideas to get the product definition right) / helping out two new startup teams every month, for about 7 years now. This happened primarily because I enjoy meeting startups and because I was part of a large alumni network which would reach out.

The key assumption for the P/M-F service is whether something like this can be scalable and work in a self-serve mode (i.e. where I am not in the room)

So I have kept iterating on the framework, took inputs from the founders I had advised in the past. My key question to them was "How did I help you even though I was not really a expert in the marketing you were targeting?"

I also conducted lean canvas workshops with startups in US and India (and across sectors including one 7-year old pharma company trying to launch a product) till I could start standardizing (so that it could then be coded into software) the P/M-F process and build a self-serve tool. The tool has now taken the shape of an "intelligent" software which asks startup founders questions and assigns them tasks to do.

There is a lot of complexity in the tool. And it needs to be much more intelligent as well. We have explored using machine learning at the backend, but so far the intelligence is based more on a decision tree structure, rather than any machine learning.

Currently in private alpha, testing with some startups and an accelerator, and will release this soon for others, hopefully by end of this month.

http://www.uberstarter.com

More relevant question might be what APIs or libraries are starting to look attractive of late ?

I would say wit.ai looks very interesting.

The dev stack is the same as always ~ Sublime + AWS

Static website: S3 on AWS, Web app: Digital Ocean (can support multiple apps too, run Nginx on the same machine)

More interested to know about exits in the $200K - $1M range. It will be interesting to note exits at the lower end of the spectrum.

I decided to use spaces instead of tabs and convert a tab to two spaces because while typing I sometimes alternate between using the space bar and the tab while indenting something or editing code. So it is much easier for me to be consistent as an individual dev with spaces.

Independent of what you ask for, get a signed formal agreement which captures the terms of your understanding in detail.