One thing that kept coming to my mind while watching the video: "Why the hell does this guy try so hard to balance himself on that huge thing?" Hoverboards in back to the future are are small like skateboards so that's why they have to stand on it, but this one is more like a magic carpet than a hoverboard, and if you watch Aladdin, this is how they ride a magic carpet: http://www.animationsensations.com/media/catalog/product/cac... Instead of half-assing the skateboard metaphor they should just own that magic carpet direction and go all out.
Yeah, like another guy said below, who said they get "nothing" but experience? Also you seem to think "experience" is not worth much (maybe because you lack experience of getting experience?), but if you ask me, I would always take a valuable experience over petty money. My time is worth more than a couple thousand dollars per month
Did you even read the article? People who don't want risk can go to Google and make tons of money. There's nothing wrong with it. This guy is saying if you're working for a startup you shouldn't do it for the money since a much better choice in that case would be to go to Google. I guess no matter how good a piece of advice is, you aren't able to take advantage of it if you're not ready for the advice.
Would you say that about angel list too? I'm as much annoyed as you about their opaqueness and it would be nice if they were more transparent but it is what it is. It's your responsibility as an entrepreneur to make sure you don't mess up the launch of something you've invested so much in.
Just a simple google search will show you tons of articles and blog posts giving you more than enough tips really. People complaining about this just shows that they didn't do their homework before submitting.
The problem with these criticism is that they seem to be coming from people who have no idea how Product Hunt works. If you have ever actually had your product featured on PH you would know better than this. Here's how Product Hunt works:
1. There are many of those so called "Insider" users.
2. Then there is a 2nd tier group of users who can comment.
3. Then there's the rest.
The tier 1 group is not as small as you think, and they are pretty diverse group of people from all around the world. When they post something, it goes up straight to the featured page. There is no censoring. They are definitely not paid by producthunt the company to submit these new products, they're merely users sharing what they discover. Their main incentive for posting on product hunt is to be the "first one" to discover a cool new app and share it with others. Now if you understood this, think about how ridiculous all your speculations are.
Can you give a transparent answer to this scenario?: Let's say I posted a "Show HN". I would email my friends who are HN users, telling them "hey guys i posted something on hacker news, please go to the front page, find a post titled * and upvote!" I just can't think of a robust way to detect this.
Yes theoretically it shouldn't work, but I see it work everyday, you just need to email your friends and tell them not to visit the direct link but go to the front page and find your post and upvote. But anyway my point was exactly this, most people aren't even aware of this "black magic" going on in the background, which is worse than the process being opaque. Because at least on product hunt people know how to hack their way into being featured whereas on hacker news most people don't even realize it's possible. Also my point was not just about asking for upvotes. I was trying to point out how on hackernews if you already have an audience--say your email newsletter subscribers or blog readers--it is likely that your post will go up to the front page. Therefore newbies regardless of how great content they have don't get to play on level field as already famous people. What I found great about PH was you are judged by what you build, not your existing reputation. I'm not saying HN is more corrupt or anything than PH. PH is better at this since HN is more general purpose whereas PH is just about products.
In my experience, the OP is correct about one thing, it's waste of time to post on upcoming on PH. However this is nothing compared to how opaque Hacker News is. If your product is novel enough and reach out to these "insiders" beforehand (or even afterhand), I don't think you have trouble getting to the front page on PH, whereas on HN I see tons of people reaching front page by asking for upvotes from friends. The only difference is PH is--ironically--transparent about its opaqueness, whereas HN is opaque about its transparentness. To elaborate, on hacker news everything looks transparent, and to certain degree it is (you can find the raw stream under "new" tab), but the ones that reach the front page are not always there because 100% of the community decided so, there are many hidden things going on in the background that most people don't even know. Whereas all you need to do to get featured on PH is to reach out to these "insiders", to guarantee you reach front page on HN you need to get people to upvote you. I feel that PH is much more democratic than HN since everyone gets same chance whereas on HN the people with already existing audience wins.
I would argue this was on the wrong track the moment it started out with QR code. "Why don't we bring two geekiest technologies--QR code and Augmented Reality--together? Sure! That will make it mainstream!"
I think you're assuming a lot of things about mainstream users. If AR was that intuitive, it would have already been mainstream. Many apps tried to port existing good old text based interface into AR but none have yet to gain traction. You need to remember the mainstream users do know how to use computer and do know how to access websites and enter forms. But they do not know how this geeky augmented reality technology works. Also my point here was not criticizing AR itself, I'm just saying his approach makes things needlessly convoluted for the sake of making it look cooler. Read my comment about how someone would drag and drop his chair in his office to his car.
What new possibility does this bring to the table? Connected devices concept has been around like forever. Sure it looks cool (like flying cars, or those impractical UIs from minority report) but how does this make things more convenient? I just was put off by how this guy makes it sound like he came up with all these concepts. "Imagine you could ... " ==> all the things he mentioned with this phrase are nothing new. The only thing that's novel in the video is the UI and I was pointing out how he talks as if it's his new UI that makes all these imaginations possible, but in fact in my opinion it's actually worse than existing solutions (just looks cooler).
Someone please enlighten me, maybe I'm missing something, but I don't get why this augmented reality interface is better than having a centralized web page where I can manage them using the good old textual interface. It feels like a very convoluted rube goldberg machine approach to me. For example, the guy says something like "the car knows because I connected my chair to my car." Imagining how he would have done this makes me doubt the convenience. I can imagine he would have started dragging when he left the office and kept his thumb on the screen until he got to the car and finally connected it to the knob. He could have just opened a web page and connected these two devices without having to go through all this trouble.
I didn't remove FF because of it either, but these things pile up slowly--makes me think WTF were they thinking?--and if I see several more of these I will probably stop using it. As I mentioned in another thread somewhere, I agree a lot of people don't care or not aware, but if asked directly "would you rather have this Pocket extension come pre-installed or not?" I am sure majority of them would say they don't want it. Just because people don't complain doesn't mean they're fine with it. People live with shitty customer service from comcast but that doesn't mean they have good customer service.
I realize this conversation is going nowhere since you decide to interpret things in ways that fit your argument just to fight, which is why I said you're just word-playing. I will go ahead and answer but you will probably disagree anyway: I didn't say I'm ok with them implementing Instapaper, and I definitely never said Instapaper is more popular. Go back and read again. I just pointed out how picking a single 3rd party service--NOT developed by Mozilla--and promoting it to the entire user base when there's a whole industry of read-it-later service ecosystem out there is a "non-trivial" issue, just like you even wrote. Therefore it would have been the same if they implemented Instapaper only, just like they did with Pocket only. And like you admitted, it is a "non trivial" feature, and in my book, when a feature is shipped and it's non-trivial, it was "pushed hard". This is again where you decide to disagree based on your own definition of "pushed hard". Your interpretation of "push" is intentionally narrow to only fit your interest. The original commenter and I simply pointed out how a non trivial feature like this was "promoted" (pushed) to users in an unusual way. Any decision to highlight a 3rd party product inside your main product (such as Firefox featuring Yahoo or Google as main home page) is a big deal, and just like how I would consider FF implementing Yahoo as homepage "pushing hard", I consider Pocket bookmarklet incident "pushing hard". You probably know what I'm trying to say but are just arguing based on semantics of these words.
> since the feature made it all the way to production versions which rolled out to every firefox user
...like most other features. Doesn't require pushing. That's how it works.
==> Do we really need to define what "pushing" means? I'm sure you know what I mean by pushing, you're just doing wordplay. That's not how it works.
> obscure 3rd party service
Apparently it was a rather popular addon in Firefox?
==> What do you think the ratio of (# of pocket extension users / # of total firefox users) is? It's totally fine if FF had supported it as a pure "extension" (doesn't come preinstalled but required users to search and "pull" themselves if they wanted) but the criticism came from the fact that this 3rd party extension came preinstalled and was "pushed" to users.
What's not true at all? When you say something is not true at all, you need to specify what exactly you are referring to. I mentioned several points in my comment. "Extension" is something that you extend your browser with and doesn't come pre-installed.
If you ran a survey to every firefox user asking "Would you prefer this Pocket bookmarklet show up by default or not", I'm sure this wouldn't have been a "vocal minority" group. Most people (in terms of ratio) hadn't heard of Pocket and to them it's just a spammy new bookmarklet. Most people are not "vocal" about it because they don't know where to complain. Just because you don't see vocal people doesn't mean it's all fine.
"Pushed hard", since the feature made it all the way to production versions which rolled out to every firefox user. This is a significant business decision which can change people's perception towards Mozilla. It definitely did for me. It IS a big deal that a popular browser supports some obscure 3rd party service as primary bookmarking service when there are many other 3rd party bookmarking services in the market such as Instapaper.
Even before getting to security issues, why would anyone prefer typing in emoji instead of numbers? I can imagine people struggling to find some random emoji from the keyboard before the notification banner disappears. (Normally I don't switch back to the message ui but try my best to finish typing in the auth codes before the notification banner disappears, and even 6 digit codes are annoying because sometimes it disappears before I type them in. Most people will have probably only typed in one emoji before the notification banner goes away). This guy should build it himself and realize how out of touch this solution of his was instead of telling the users to build it and let him know. Personally if I ever came across any app that implemented this scheme, I would feel offended because it feels like the developer is trolling me.
Please don't try to use wordplay to get your feminist ideology across. Nobody calls a girl "Him" in real life, just like nobody calls a guy "Her" in real life. That's what I pointed out, not some interpretation of "guys" (I can go on forever talking about the semantics for that term too but that's not even what I was talking about)
There are certain cases where it feels very ridiculous. For example, some authors use "her" to refer to even a group of people generally known to be predominantly male oriented. While it definitely won't be criticized by any feminist group, it really is distracting from narrative point of view because most readers feel it's unnatural. I remember thinking "This guy is clearly talking about dudes, why is he using female pronoun?" I also think it's stupid to have to use female pronoun just to be safe, because this in itself is sexism--it implies that they are afraid of feminists accusing them but not afraid of masculinists (if it even exists). When I say it's annoying I am not saying these people are annoying, I'm saying the reality we live in is annoying. In some non-english cultures they don't have this problem because they have ways to refer to people without being gender specific.
Tell me, where did I say that? This behavior of yours (putting words in people's mouth and accusing or insinuating them of sexism/racism/elitism etc.) is exactly why this stupid "singular they" phenomenon has arisen.
You see it in notifications from social apps. "Jenny has started following you. Follow them back", etc. Because a lot of apps don't ask people to enter their gender they just resort to "them" instead of "him" or "her". It's really as annoying as people just using "her" everywhere just to be safe.
Most people live their lives just fine without financial independence, because they put higher priority in other activities in their lives. Entrepreneurs are different types of people, they put higher priority on being able to control their own destiny and because of that they can push through the comfort zone. If you're not motivated enough, of course it would be hard to do this. If entrepreneurship was that easy and rewarding for everyone, everyone would be doing it.
Since you bring this up, let me tell you what really happens. You are right there is a burnout factor. In fact it does happen and I have grown to live with it. But the cool thing about burnout is it doesn't last forever. If you have lots of ideas and you like to build things, chances are your motivation will come back soon enough. I personally think working passionately for a few months and taking a break for a week and going back and forth is much more productive than doing it half-assed and wondering how others "find time" to work on things. Also, this is a subjective thing, I'm giving my point of view based on how i think and you're writing your advice based on how you think but neither of us are absolutely correct because every human being is different. Some people put higher priority in socializing and enjoying life's other activities when it comes to living a life. Some people put higher priority in building something that they will be proud of. Most people belong to the former group and that's why it's hard for them to find time to work on stuff. Sure you can live a well-balanced life like 90% of the population and live a normal life, or you can be different. Most people will think the latter group of people are heartless and idiotic, etc. but those people have highest ratio of success statistically. Lastly, I have been doing this for years and I am not "totally turned off by programming". I do get burned out time to time but after a couple of weeks of taking a break i'm fully energized and back at it. Like I said, it's just a difference in mindset. If you have something that you feel is meaningful enough to build, nothing else matters.