Viewing profile — sydneyliu

This is epic! Just subscribed to a few of my faves!

For this example, let's pretend the product is Twitter. Since I think everybody knows enough about to Twitter to think about the scenario. I worry that questions like "What could w…

For example, pretend you run product at Twitter and you want to learn from the people in your target demographic who don't come back regularly to Twitter after signing up. What wou…

For consumer products, what are the best questions to ask users who signed up and eventually didn't retain? For most of them, I'm having troubles getting them on the phone (underst…

we meet a lot of users during the week (and also sometimes have other meetings) so weekends are a really great time to focus on the product and build slightly larger changes to tes…

I think Sam is saying that without YC, there are some companies that may not end up succeeding or being able to raise and continue on (without YC's network, advice, speed, focus et…

Sam also just tweeted that 300 YC companies are no longer around. Amazing how much transparent they are and how great YC is at picking and training. So many really crazy ideas that…

I thought this tweet from Twitch is pretty relevant and funny: https://twitter.com/Twitch/status/609429653271384065

Magic blew up a little while ago and I feel like the topic has been a bit more quiet. Magic as a service is still going strong and there have been some more texting services that h…

A question I always ask myself for products I'm building and products I'm thinking about is: "If I removed this product from my life or my user's life, how hurt or upset would they…

I think traveling and staying in 1 place or area is a great way to learn and immerse yourself in a new place. I don't think I'd need 15-20k to do it. I'd spend all 4 weeks in an ar…

Facebook's usually really good about fighting spammers and multiple accounts from what I've seen. Early community was facebook was filled with spammers but it's much harder to find…

Congrats to Andrew Chen! Heard him on the Product Hunt podcast and have learned a lot from his newsletter and Tweets.

This article is fantastic. Thanks so much for the share! Will definitely be studying this and thinking about this when meeting with our users.

Really great to see this. I was a heavy Coursera user in high school (took 6-7 courses at a time) and loved it. It taught me a lot about what I was interested in, what I hated, and…

There seem to be 2 types of user interviews: (1) where you talk to somebody with the problem in the target demo and learn about the issue and how they deal with it now to figure ou…

This is from what I've heard. I use SO all the time but don't really post, so don't quote me on this. The community can be fairly tough on people who are wrong or missing part of t…

Something I've always thought about with IoT is the fact that everything is hackable. There are very few things that the best hackers can't get to. With more and more things being …

Venture Deals by Brad Feld is great for how to fundraise and he does go over most of the basics and how things work. Mark Suster, from Upfront Ventures, has a really great list of …

I could see a future where there is an automated restaurant or cafe. In those cases, if optimized a bit more, you could have cheaper/better long term returns and also scale to loca…

I believe YC read applications as they came in for the fellowship (just as they say they do for most batches). This means that they likely spent a bit more time on the earliest app…

Congratulations to all of the startups who launched!! A lot more health, bio, and food related startups in this batch. Tea and sandwich making robots makes me think that one day YC…

Congrats! I always see these guys working, working, working. Even during the time we were hanging out they'd be on sales calls, sending out emails, etc. Keep killing it.