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Ask HN: What's the mission of your company and why does it matter?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the mission of your company and why does it matter?

#21

Post by outericky »

pmiller2 wrote: post #18
aldoushuxley001 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with it being a Canadian company?

I live in the US, specifically the Bay Area. Based on past experience, it’s unlikely Mixnode could pay me a salary anywhere close to what I could earn here, even after factoring in cost of living. Emigrating is also not practical, even if getting a visa wasn’t a problem. I live in the East Bay. Here is a cost comparison between Oakland, CA and vancouy, BC: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou.…

If you are remote, you don't need to be in the bay area. While a harsh reality, the bay area is a crazy expensive place to live, and I would say do so if you have to, not because you want to. And if you do want to, work where it makes sense.

Re: Ask HN: What's the mission of your company and why does it matter?

#22

Post by rickycook »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #19

I'm the founder of FormAPI [1], and my company's mission is to help developers fill out and sign PDF documents. It truly matters to my customers, because they're paying me money. And it truly matters to me, because if the company continues to grow, then I'll have lots of money and freedom. Honestly it's mostly about the money, but I really enjoy building things and solving problems for people. [1] https://formapi.io

the truly matters part i think needs at least 1 level of “but why”... okay they pay for it, but why do they pay for it? that’s the important thing... okay, it pays your salary and gives freedom, but why do you care about the product? what if it paid you nothing (but that didn’t matter); would you still work on it? why?

i’m sure you know these answers; you wouldn’t have gotten to “paying customer 1” otherwise

Re: Ask HN: What's the mission of your company and why does it matter?

#23

Post by Theodores »

franze wrote: post #16

"To make all SEO agencies - including our own - redundant!" Why? Because SEO is the ultimate digital snake oil industry of our era. Sucking away ressources and f###ing up websites, wasting (life)time of users and developers alike. http://www.f19n.com

Tried to learn more from the link - I know you want to sell the book/courses etc, however, I need more to go on. Is it all about web performance, speed?

Re: Ask HN: What's the mission of your company and why does it matter?

#24

Post by d0m »

Fixing healthcare in the US. Sounds grandiose and having been in the industry for 5 years I would have laughed a few years ago if someone told me that it was their company's mission.. but there's actually a real way to fix it and we're building that solution. Feel free to email me if interested. (Our stack is Rust / React)

Re: Ask HN: What's the mission of your company and why does it matter?

#25

Post by nathan_f77 »

yunyu wrote: post #20
nathan_f77 wrote: post #19

I'm the founder of FormAPI [1], and my company's mission is to help developers fill out and sign PDF documents. It truly matters to my customers, because they're paying me money. And it truly matters to me, because if the company continues to grow, then I'll have lots of money and freedom. Honestly it's mostly about the money, but I really enjoy building things and solving problems for people. [1] https://formapi.io

Quick side note: the main graphic on your website displays "Upload template", "Set up fields", etc.. in the default serif font on my computer probably because I don't have the Avenir Pro font installed. You can probably fix this by converting the text to outlines in Sketch.

Whoops, thanks so much for letting me know! I just converted the text to outlines and pushed the change. Very scary that I didn't catch that before. I should use a browser testing service, or take some screenshots during my CI tests.

Re: Ask HN: What's the mission of your company and why does it matter?

#26

Post by nathan_f77 »

rickycook wrote: post #22
nathan_f77 wrote: post #19

I'm the founder of FormAPI [1], and my company's mission is to help developers fill out and sign PDF documents. It truly matters to my customers, because they're paying me money. And it truly matters to me, because if the company continues to grow, then I'll have lots of money and freedom. Honestly it's mostly about the money, but I really enjoy building things and solving problems for people. [1] https://formapi.io

the truly matters part i think needs at least 1 level of “but why”... okay they pay for it, but why do they pay for it? that’s the important thing... okay, it pays your salary and gives freedom, but why do you care about the product? what if it paid you nothing (but that didn’t matter); would you still work on it? why? i’m sure you know these answers; you wouldn’t have gotten to “paying customer 1” otherwise

Sure, they pay for it because it solves a specific problem, and it saves a lot of time. I care about the product because I put a lot of work into it, and it's a "creative outlet". I enjoy making all the decisions and having the freedom to work on whatever I think is important.

I'd keep working on it for a while if I didn't need to worry about money. But I also really like the idea of a "finished product" that doesn't need any more work. That's what I'm aiming for, although I'm probably a few years away from that.

I wouldn't keep working on it if it failed and no-one was using it. I would just move on to the next project.

Re: Ask HN: What's the mission of your company and why does it matter?

#27

Post by sgk284 »

Co-founder of Banter, https://banter.fm. We make podcasts easier to share and have conversations around.

We've basically built a BYOC (Bring-Your-Own-Content) social network. Publishers host an RSS feed and remain in full control of their content. We don't try to assert copyright or anything over it. We don't even host it. We just enable conversations and sharing of that content (we even generate videos for sharing on other platforms that don't support audio well: https://twitter.com/stevekrenzel/status/1040746982615076864)

Some of the best content being produced today is in podcasts. Everything from comedy to news reporting. They're a great way to help people stay informed, learn new things, or just get a laugh. So if that counts as "truly mattering", then that's why it truly matters.

Re: Ask HN: What's the mission of your company and why does it matter?

#28

Post by contingencies »

At Infinite Food[0] we are automating the production and retail of personalized meals through robotic service locations supported by modern logistics and electronic supply-chain.

We believe this field of innovation matters because by 2050 the world population will be 9.7 billion[1] increasingly living in high density urban environments after loss of agricultural land and clean fresh water, potentially less reliable yields due to climate change, increasing concerns about pollution, and reduced biodiversity. Therefore, we urgently need the ability to feed more humans more reliably using less resources.

[0] http://infinite-food.com [1] https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Publications/Files/Key_Findings_...

Re: Ask HN: What's the mission of your company and why does it matter?

#29

Post by portobelln »

enjayz wrote: post #2

I'm a co-founder of Mixnode and we want to "make web-scale data affordable for everyone". Having access to trillions of data points from the web is a super power reserved for only a handful of companies; what if anyone could access and analyze these data points without having to hire 25 experts in distributed systems and raise VC... Imagine the explosion of innovation this will bring about. We want that explosion to…

I worked for 2 years on the crawl infrastructure team of a well-known SEO/analytics company that was pulling in over a 120 billion web pages a month. It was definitely one of the most difficult projects I've ever worked on and we did have a team of 6-7 very incredibly smart people -- not "25 experts in distributed systems" though :P

This is a very lofty goal and I'm not sure how you are going to tackle it with 3 people, however I'm rooting for you and would love to get my invitation soon. Best of luck.

Re: Ask HN: What's the mission of your company and why does it matter?

#30

Post by tixocloud »

I'm the founder of Orchestra (http://orchestrahq.com) and our mission is to "accelerate the world's adoption of machine learning and artificial intelligence".

Most if not all of the machine learning models in the world never see the light of day. They never get productionized and embedded into web and mobile applications. We believe that web and mobile applications can be so much more smarter with machine learning and AI capabilities. By building a platform to make it easy to embed models into web and mobile apps, we hope that this will drive adoption.

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