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HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

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HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#1
Starting at 11 am PST today, Trevor Blackwell and I are going to do online office hours. If you'd like help with your startup, please post a top-level comment with a one or two sentence description of what you do and the first thing you'd like to talk about.

Update: We've gotta run, but this was great. Thanks so much and enjoy the weekend.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#2
Hey Jared and Trevor,

BugReplay (http://www.bugreplay.com) is a bug reporting tool in the form of a browser extension that captures a screencast of the user’s actions synced with network traffic, javascript errors and other browser data.

What's the best way to grow your early user base? Ideally we'd like people who are going to use BugReplay at their jobs and open source endeavors, but we want to keep it relatively small until we feel like it's ready for the widest possible audience.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#3
I am founder and CEO of Exivest [http://exivest.com/]. We help startup employees value their equity, help match them with direct buyers or arrange synthetic liquidity.

We've talked to many startup employees and they all have given positive feedback. One concern that comes up is that startups are not OK with changing the cap table for tiny transactions. In that case, we have plans to offer synthetic liquidity solutions via derivative transactions.

We'd like to hire your thoughts on the problem we are solving and our approach so far.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#4
Hi Jared & Trevor,

Do you think that marketplaces for services is too mature of a market? I'm working on a site called bid2mow.com to help new lawn care companies find work. It seems like everyone is focused on come to my app/website and I'll get you a price versus an ebay model. I know task rabbit had that model and went away from it. Ebay may not be amazon but it's no business to sneeze at either.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#5
Hi Trevor and Jared,

http://weavesilk.com is a side project of mine for many years. I put out a brand new version of the iOS app this month and am thinking about developing it further but find it very hard to decide what direction to go.

The website is popular, and people love Silk, but for different reasons: some find it relaxing and meditative, others like that it closes the gap between their artistic ability and taste.

It's been used as an inspirational sketching tool for artists (http://bit.ly/1Qlm1kA), to make album art, and has been on exhibit at the Children's Creativity Museum. Some teachers use it to teach kids about symmetry.

I've made something compelling but don't know what to do next, or how to figure it out.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#6
post #3

I am founder and CEO of Exivest [ http://exivest.com/ ]. We help startup employees value their equity, help match them with direct buyers or arrange synthetic liquidity. We've talked to many startup employees and they all have given positive feedback. One concern that comes up is that startups are not OK with changing the cap table for tiny transactions. In that case, we have plans to offer synthetic liquidity soluti…

I click on the "Value Now" button under Equity Value Calculator and I go to Heroku Welcome page...

Edit: all three buttons go to same page

https://exivest.herokuapp.com/

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#7
I founded a small nonprofit (~$250k budget this year for underpaid staff of me+3 art types) that serves an annual audience of 1 million unique visitors for the last few years with hi-res documentation of contemporary art; we are nearly ubiquitous within our field, academics have hailed our project as transformative, but we suck at fundraising and are tiny.

Problem: in the midst of running everything, I do all the coding slowly by myself, and the urgent coding todo list has exploded while some of our sites age. What should I do?

Thank you!

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#8
Hi Trevor and Jared, we have been building financial predictions on data from marketplace lending platforms. Curious to talk to you about where you see the business models of prediction going, examples other YC companies who are selling prediction and ML as a service, pricing strategies etc.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#9
Hello Jared and Trevor,

We're developing a publishing network. Individuals and groups can start magazines. Users can read on a timeline and interact like in a social network. What's new? Now anyone can get publishing infrastructure as good as a well funded online magazine. That means lots of unique publications in verticals that well-funded magazines & newspapers cannot do.

What's the best strategy to lure in people to use the service? How do we make money?

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#10
Hello and thank you for taking the time to help other entrepreneurs. I am working on creating a new cross-platform premier Linux distribution that uses containers as the core init process. The goal is automatic cross-compilation between multiple targets and using the built-in kernel sandboxing for applications instead of what XDG App and others are trying to do. I'd like to also target a new window manager built on Wayland with eventual Vulkan support. Would love to get some feedback on how to handle the contention that already exists within this space and how to get the funding I need to make something like this successful.
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