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HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

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Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#131

Post by RyM21 »

snowmaker wrote: post #123
RyM21 wrote: post #107

Hi Trevor and Jared, WordBrewery ( http://wordbrewery.com ) teaches languages by scraping real sentences from news sites around world, then processing each sentence with an algorithm that estimates (on the basis of word frequency and other variables) how likely the sentence is to be useful to learners at different levels. We are now a member of 1776 and participating in Microsoft BizSpark, so we are on the right trac…

I like the idea for WordBrewery! That's a clever model for optimizing language learning. Yes, you will need to incorporate your company to raise seed funding. A really easy way is using Stripe Atlas: https://stripe.com/atlas - they will do all the paperwork for you to get a company legal structure. You're probably at the stage where it makes sense to apply to accelerators. Any major accelerator program will help you…

Excellent, thank you! We will be adding many features in the next few months, but my favorite is individualized but automatically generated language courses. We will use the technology you see on the site's front page to present users with sentences on an individualized basis depending on what words they already know. If a user knows the 500 most common Spanish words, for example, we will show them an authentic sentence that uses one or more of those 500 words plus the 501st most common word. As the user demonstrates knowledge of more words, the set of possible sentences for that user will gradually increase. This will reinforce existing vocabulary while building new vocabulary as efficiently as possible.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#132

Post by chejazi »

snowmaker wrote: post #122
chejazi wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People use us over Bitly because they earn rewards. What we know from the feedback we've received is users don't like seeing blatant ads (ex. banners) on the page. Our response has been to syndicate other content the user has shared; so far the design has received a some praise and nobody has complained (whereas w/ ads we received complaints), but the change hasn't been live for long (less than a month ago we were sh…

I see. OK, so the goal is to get publisher content because it's less intrusive than blatant ads. What you said about CPMs and minimum ad buys is true. The solution, it seems to me, is to simply go to smaller publishers. There are a million small blogs out there that might pay you $100 for some content marketing. The thing to think about is what your unique value proposition can be that will get them to spend their ad…

Ok. Our takeaway is to start going after customers now instead of punting on it. Thank you!

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#133

Post by alantrrs »

snowmaker wrote: post #60
alantrrs wrote: post #39

Hi! I'm building a platform for scientists to run and share their experiments (anything computable) including their whole research environment. I want to make scientific research easily discoverable and replicable. First, what are your thoughts on this market? Also, some advice: I'm currently building the prototype based on my own experience as I'm my own user. That's the only thing I've been focusing on, I haven't l…

I think that's a great market. The lack of reproducibility in scientific experiments is an elephant-in-the-room problem. I feel like I read a new story about it every week. Even though you are your own target user, it's dangerous to build a full prototype without talking to actual users. It's likely that you will find that what you thought people wanted does not match 100% with what they actually want. Do you have mo…

Jared, appreciate the feedback!. Any chance you could introduce me to some people in the Open AI team? I think this would be a great fit and I'm very interested in their thoughts.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#134

Post by parisi »

Hey Trevor and Jared,

I am in the midst of creating a new platform as a service product while working at a large tech company. I am not quite willing to reveal the platform to the world yet, but it is a new take on backend-as-a-service platforms that I think will be very intriguing to developers.

My question is not specific to my product and instead pertains to the situation of trying to develop a startup while working full time at a large company. I have done 0 work on the product on my employers time and am not concerned with that aspect. I am more interested in your thoughts on when would be the ideal time to leave my current post to work full time on the startup? My biggest concern is leaving the financial stability of my current job when I have no capital lined up to support a startup. I have already launched a closed beta of the platform and am getting feedback from a small set of users and plan to open the beta up to the world in the coming months. In your experience have you ever seen VC's or Angel's be willing to make a deal with a startup founded by a full time employee of a different company. If I were able to secure funding, I would be absolutely be willing to move on and work full time on the startup but making that leap without funding would be a difficult decision. Any words of wisdom you can offer here would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#135

Post by alantrrs »

danieltillett wrote: post #126
alantrrs wrote: post #39

Hi! I'm building a platform for scientists to run and share their experiments (anything computable) including their whole research environment. I want to make scientific research easily discoverable and replicable. First, what are your thoughts on this market? Also, some advice: I'm currently building the prototype based on my own experience as I'm my own user. That's the only thing I've been focusing on, I haven't l…

As a former academic I will share my thoughts here. I agree that there is a great need for this, but not demand from those with the data. In science you are effectively discouraged from sharing data since doing so means you lose the ability to rehash the data and publish a new paper. The second problem is scientists as a general rule won't pay for software or any sort of saas. Can I suggest an idea for a related prod…

Daniel, thanks for sharing your thoughts. My initial focus will be in public datasets (e.g. Imagnet). People are already making their code and results available online through different mediums. However, I'm hoping having a specialized platform where you can share your whole environment will improve discoverability and reproducibility which should have great impact in collaboration as well.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#136

Post by thekonqueror »

snowmaker wrote: post #108
thekonqueror wrote: post #52

Hi Jared and Trevor, http://nestify.io founder here. We're improving PHP CMS hosting (WordPress, Drupal) with better scaling, on-page optimizations, better security. We have paying customers and ~100 die-hard users that will be really sad / lose revenues if we shut down. Should we focus on building our brand while scaling or switch to whitelabel and API services and partner with hosting providers?

I remember reading your YC app :). About your question on whitelabeling: I wouldn't be too dogmatic about this either way. It's easy to make it a question about your company's mission, but it's more of an ROI decision. If you're seeing strong demand from companies who will pay you well for a white-label version, and your software is written in a way that makes it easy to build one, you should do that. Otherwise, it m…

Thanks for your insights. Our early customers also mention that prices are too low.

We are now adding tiered pricing plans and charging for based on usage. I'll make sure to add that in our current YC application too.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#137

Post by edibleEnergy »

nradov wrote: post #116
edibleEnergy wrote: post #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…

Maybe you should target corporate software engineering and QA managers who lead the teams building their own commercial web applications. It should be fairly straightforward to target those people through conferences and online forums. Corporate QA groups waste a lot of time manually filling out bug report forms, and those often end up missing key data which prevents developers from reproducing the bug thus wasting e…

Thanks for the feedback. We plan on targeting QA managers but haven’t figured out the best approach. I won’t pretend to be a QA expert but I think our service would be very valuable for exploratory/ad-hoc testing. We hope our service will save time for QA professionals when filling out bug reports so that they can spend that time providing value in other ways.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#138

Post by danieltillett »

alantrrs wrote: post #135
danieltillett wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former academic I will share my thoughts here. I agree that there is a great need for this, but not demand from those with the data. In science you are effectively discouraged from sharing data since doing so means you lose the ability to rehash the data and publish a new paper. The second problem is scientists as a general rule won't pay for software or any sort of saas. Can I suggest an idea for a related prod…

Daniel, thanks for sharing your thoughts. My initial focus will be in public datasets (e.g. Imagnet). People are already making their code and results available online through different mediums. However, I'm hoping having a specialized platform where you can share your whole environment will improve discoverability and reproducibility which should have great impact in collaboration as well.

Another suggestion might be to collaborate with an established academic to put in a grant to develop this platform. The funding agencies are worried about this problem and they may fund a good application to build this. You could then concentrate the commercial effort on the front end.

I wish you luck with this project as it certainly is needed.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#139

Post by exolymph »

nradov wrote: post #130
downandout wrote: post #19

Hi Jared and Trevor, I am working on a marketplace through which publishers and journalists can sell the ability to be quoted and linked to in an article to the highest bidder. A realtor, for example, might be willing to pay to be quoted and linked to in an article about how a city's real estate market has been accelerating. My question is how to get started with marketing it. While the growth hacking crowd would say…

Mainstream publishers and journalists would consider it unethical for their sources to pay for placement in editorial content. That's a clear conflict of interest. You would be better off targeting bloggers.

Agreed, no journalist worth their salt would use this service. Some bloggers definitely would. Even then, without disclosure your users would risk running afoul of FTC rules.

Re: HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

#140

Post by yurivish »

snowmaker wrote: post #72
yurivish wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, Jared! Some of the things I've thought about: - Expanding the expressive range. The new app has a "silk eraser" and I have ideas for at least one new type of brush. - Continuous undo (as if it's a movie), or at least more undo levels. - Making a better Alchemy: http://al.chemy.org/ - Unifying the experience of the website (2013; JS/Canvas) and the new app (Swift/Metal) - The website lets you share replays of…

It sounds like you have engaged users who are giving you useful feedback. I like the idea of a gallery - that will help you grow as people show off their work. You don't necessarily need live replays to do it - you could start with static and add those later. One thing to think about is how you can make it grow more. Your users won't generally bring you growth ideas, but it's important to always be thinking about how…

Good feedback. Thank you so much.
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