Viewing profile — Rakathos

Slightly off-topic, but I wanted to expand on anxiety quick: > Anxiety, though, (and I'm speaking from experience here, having had some light anxiety attacks caused by too much reg…

As someone that has a Windows Phone and uses Cortana, yes. Everything he was doing is a pretty standard response or action from Cortana. I mention this every time, but I think the …

FYI, it looks like the mobile site has some issues in IE on Windows Phone. The white text is a bit hard to read with the background image [1], and refreshing the page results in th…

Oh I agree, it shouldn't be advertised as a headline feature if it's not fully functional. I'm just pointing out that Microsoft considers Cortana to be in beta, and it's only avail…

It's important to note that the Cortana app itself is in beta. I think the most interesting news about Cortana is that, unlike Siri and Google Now, it can be extended by 3rd-party …

Just bought a makeup bag from her Etsy shop that my girlfriend is sure to love. Good luck!

A few people were upset that I called it a failure after 4 months. You're right, 4 months is nothing compared to most other startups or software businesses. Let me clarify that I'm…

I'm a very proud person, and I'm proud of what I've accomplished. That being said, you're right about coming off as negative or ashamed. I don't actually feel that way about myself…

If there's one thing I've learned from Rob Walling and Mike Taber's podcasts[1], it's that marketing and customer development are by far the most important parts of building a succ…

My entire site design and copy have been a source of downright embarrassment. In fact, this week's "challenge goal" is a brand new home page, landing page and sales page design. Th…

> There was a lot of hubbub before about calling the whole thing a "failure". I should have made it more clear that I wasn't calling it a failure because I spent 4 months and only …

Not harsh at all! You're right, but in my defense "Iron Conversions" was just going to be a massive dunning email generator. It would have hooked into a user's Stripe account and r…

> I'm interested in knowing why you think it's worth doubling down? There's a bunch of reasons for me to try it again. The most persuasive one has been all of the great feedback I'…

> The flipside is that a lot of developers don't have enough hobbies to draw from with which to start a business. This was (is?) definitely me. I have a grand total of three hobbie…

(Blog post author here) I wondered where the random burst of traffic came from. For those who haven't read the more recent posts, I received a ton of great feedback from HN and oth…

I sell Inventory Management software, and I priced the three plan levels by guessing. I went for $29/$59/$129 across three different plan levels. Many trial users have told me that…

You're right, the online inventory management bidding for AdWords clicks averages far more than I spend per click. I haven't checked recently, but $3-$6 sounds about right. I start…

By a fluke I noticed that "mobile inventory management" and variants brought me tons and tons of clicks from AdWords for incredibly cheap. Attempting to capitalize on that, I did m…

The entire backend of Rakasheets is built in C#/Asp.Net. For the real-time technology I'm using SignalR, which I highly recommend. It's like websockets for .Net and it's very simpl…

You're somewhat correct, I'm building Iron Conversions as a way to boost my trial-to-paid conversion rate for Rakasheets. Without going into too much detail (I'm not 100% sure this…

I'm still here! HN is throttling my comment submission rate though, so I can't reply to very quickly right now. I agree, this advice is priceless.

Thanks for your feedback! 1) I've quickly learned this point but for a long time I resisted adding any other "features" to the app. I considered it a waste of time, if I couldn't g…

"Small business owners aren't hackers" is what I've learned recently, and I wish I learned it months ago. In hindsight I know I went about finding my problem-to-solve in the wrong …

This seems to be a common theme so I'll post this here instead of replying to each comment with the same thing: I probably should have named the blog post "I've lost interest in my…

Great advice. I admit I had no plan of action when I started building my product. My line of thought was: "Okay, I'll build it. People will somehow hear about it and start using it…