zmitri

They are heavy buyers of Facebook ads so I imagine a fair bit of traffic comes from those + the fact they have a sense for "viral" content. Although Peretti says they are profitable in his internal memo, I am quite skeptical until they release some real numbers to back that up -- I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook buys them.

I didn't mean don't pay -- I mean't don't pay as much as Google. Google internships pay more than big bank internships.

They often don't for internships (vs Google), but for salaried employees they quickly surpass Google a few years out. More boutique firms and quant funds do have very high paying internships for Masters and PhDs however.

links:

http://tap-pad.herokuapp.com

example grid:

http://tap-pad.herokuapp.com/661621

code:

https://github.com/dmitric/tap-pad-web

https://github.com/dmitric/tap-pad-ios

That does occur on HN all the time. The titles of blog posts are targeting to entice people to click through. It's a psychological thing -- can I get someone to click on this before they have a second to really think about it. I agree it's very unfortunate.

Here's a couple notes from a Canadian founder who's lived in the US for 3 years but has been back for a while due to visa issues. To be fair I haven't dug in that much to the tech community here, but I've checked it out a bit.

Developers in Toronto are very cheap compared to large cities in the US like NYC and SF. A lot of really good Canadian developers move to the US because they get paid 2-3x as much.

There is very little "startup tech culture" in Toronto itself which is good or bad depending on what you want. That being said Kitchener/Waterloo, although very small, is actually closest feeling I've seen to SV with regards to engineering focus and community. It's about 2 hours outside of Toronto.

Most early stage startup investing in Canada is done by BDC (or Business Development Canada). Even with incubators like Extreme Ventures, the company she is working at in the article did Extreme, the majority of the money they invest is from the government of Canada. Canadian founders I know who have taken Canadian money always say that you are better off taking money from investors in the US.

Canadians, in general, are more risk averse. Even Americans who wouldn't start a company understand what entrepreneurship is about as it is kind of baked into the American raison-d'etre -- but this is not the case in Canada.

I wasn't disagreeing with you, they do try to sell sex and publish silly articles often, but I do think some of those are interesting and telling of an industry that no one else really hits on.

The article about Prim for example I think makes a good point. Also note that TechCrunch gave them a 1000 word review -- that's quite telling to me as it sounds as though YC might have an arrangement with TechCrunch.

The personal profiles, while tacky as hell, do also show you that folks who are all for disruption and who some look up to, are also just regular people. I also noticed this on the Path article -- http://bioischanged.com/user/davemorin which is actually quite interesting to me.

Again, I totally get the ban, and I agree they publish filth, but I have to say, they do cut through a lot of other valley red tape that others don't.

I understand why they are banned -- a lot of their stories are sourced from hear say and aren't written with professional courtesy -- that being said, they actually do publish a lot of interesting articles that others just aren't willing publish because of their ties to the valley and partner relationships. That guy Sam Biddle digs really hard (sometimes into the dirt) and sources a lot of stuff others don't.

When you drill down to it, the fact that PandoDaily's investors are also investors in a lot of the companies they report is a pretty big issue -- perhaps one that makes them disreputable? What about the fact that sometimes articles on TechCrunch are essentially large snippets of what a founder has just wrote to the writer in an email? There's a lot of bias in tech news, it just depends who's side you're looking at it from.

And even that is absolutely fleeting. You're probably better off writing it on your own and submitting to Hacker News as the potential reach is much greater.

That Rap Genius domain name has so much SEO power. I think it's actually extremely smart on their part to leave it like that for now because any content on their site is going to pop up in search rankings.

For what it's worth, I read this recommendation a year or so a go and it helped a lot despite my initial skepticism. It's mostly a mindful awareness thing.

Not a fan of Che(e)ney are we?

I think it depends on the person and the industry. Some ideas require a lot of insight, research and connections to execute well, and some don't.

I started my own company two years after graduating (paid off all my student loans first) and probably got more "experience" in the first 2 months running my own thing than 2 years of working for someone else.

I did get some experience working a job, but to be honest, most of the learning I did was on my own time and not on the job. Coworkers generally do not have that much time to mentor you or guide you no matter what they say in the recruitment process -- they want you to fill a pretty specific role and probably aren't going to make a special job just for you.

I don't know you, so it's hard to say, but if are concerned about things looking bad to employers on a resume I don't know if you should be focused on building your own company right now.

Would using Google Analytics work? I know it's not as easy as Mixpanel but they have a lot of tools. They also have an Objective C SDK.

There's a YC company called Heap Analytics that offers pricing based on monthly unique users. I've never used it but it's the only other thing I can think of.

I think poshmark is something similar that works well for clothing http://poshmark.com

I also found it especially interesting how much interaction the religious leaders have on Instagram for the size of Kuwait. For example, http://instagram.com/mishari_alafasy is the grand Imam of Kuwait. 15K likes for his following size is very impressive when compared to other Instagrammers with similar following sizes.

PS. He shared his profile from my app on his Instagram profile and our app immediately shot up to the top 10 apps in the Kuwait app store, and number 2 in photo and video. Users thanked him, and thanked Allah that he had shown them this new app.

I believe twitter didn't start seeing crazy growth until 2009 once they focus on activating their users and moving away from the idea that everyone needs to tweet to use twitter.

Google trends seems to confirm 2009 was when it started to really work too http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=twitter#q=twitter&cmp...

If you have any cool stories about those places to go along with the pictures, post them to backspaces and I'll make sure they get seen. I build the app with a friend.

It's also unknown whether or not he survived the jump -- and I think the "falling introduction" ties in well with this idea.

Do you think that exposure makes the marketplace more attractive or actually has a role in helping make hits?

Even though app search services do exist -- like Quixey https://www.quixey.com I'm not sure if they make sense for most consumers. How do you currently search for apps? Is it by functionality or because you hear about it from a friend?

The reality is, people are taking millions of dollars to build an app, and it takes them many months to push it out. With only one dev, me, my cofounder and I lived off of < 25K for a year, and built up an app with +70K users. That's a lot of wasted time and money on the people who took millions in funding and haven't hit millions of users. I don't know what 1999 was like, but it's true that tons of startups raised money, were slow to validate, and are now are dying.

With regards to Highlight I imagine they will likely die before doing that or give up on the original hypothesis. Statistically speaking that is most likely. I was trying to be helpful, and as you mentioned you can just as well list off a list of startups so I'm not sure focusing in on one example is that useful as I can just as easily name more.

I feel like what you are saying here agrees with the article.

I've had a banner feature on the photo and video section of the app store. It only drives a couple hundred downloads a day. The reality is, the front page in the US is the only section that drives substantial downloads ~50K in a week is possible with 1st or 2nd position. Neither of those things drive great users which is again what Andrew mentioned as building PR hype.

Also believe it or not, our banner feature was more or less dumb luck. I mean, we make a great product, but getting their attention was a lot of luck.

Pretty impressive answer, and I agree for the most part.

I do believe there are a lot of apps that do get Apple's approval and get showcased, but never really make it -- which you do address. A great example in the video space is Vyclone which go promoted very much, and still gets front page promotions quite often, but they never really went anywhere.

Depends what you mean by real. It's very real for a two man team to build something into an app that brings in a few hundred thousand a year (and there are examples of those for sure), but building a huge company is an entirely different discussion.

As someone who builds an app, he was essentially noting that:

Lots of investors made pre-traction mobile-consumer bets in early 2011. Some even built up teams of 5 or 6 people before having launched a product.

In late 2011 and early 2012, savvy investors quickly noticed that many consumer apps started to stagnate around 300-500K total users. Although their total user counts continued to grow, their active user count did not (often only reaching a few tens of thousands monthly active users) – some even had exponential decay.

Good examples would be something like Highlight (Sorry guys) or Mixel (Very well done app, but never grew that big, and got acquihired) or Cinemagram (Fellow Canadians, raised money, but with Vine and Instagram for Video are now getting trounced).

Another poignant statement is his closing statement on the closed garden App Store model, which seems to be having problem creating big hits now, or as Marco put it the other day, "the rich are getting richer." For example, Apple has been promoting video apps like crazy, stuff like Vyclone, or Directr get lots of love from Apple, but you just can't control the masses.

Here's my take on the situation as someone who bootstrapped a mobile app, got some traction, and did not end up raising a seed round (We even had a YC interview). I tried to use some real numbers/examples:

http://blog.zmitri.com/startups/2013/06/14/you-need-a-millio...

I can give you lots of specific examples if you send me an email, but I feel bad calling them out in public, because it's a grind and I don't think it's my place to do that.

You guys see so many companies that you probably have a fantastic, if not the best, take on this. I scoured around looking for data and statistics to figure out what was going on, but you can just ask your companies I imagine.

We're still going either way.

What's become a little more clear from this article to me, is that many big US schools are actively pursuing expansion because of all the students from China willing to pay full tuition and still value having a degree. Who knows what kinds of deals they are going to need to make with China to keep these relationships up. I also wonder, are Americans making these deals directly, or do they hire people in China who are used to dealing with the Chinese gov't?

Random sampling is such a simple, but nice touch. I've built up large tables/collections and only after realized I needed random samples I had to go through and generate random seeds for entries.

Once I was looking for the number of the person I was going to stay with in the USA and they asked to have my phone. I said it's okay, I'll find it for you.

They do sometimes ask to see your phone.