121–130 of 285 posts
I was a cofounder of a fashion and consumer startup, it was sort of like a focused Pinterest. We had a very enthusiastic user base before taking on SV money, but unfortunately never grew much beyond that. I was the engineer (and briefly CTO), and the foremost thing on my mind was marketing and promotion. I was constantly told that word-of-mouth and natural virality was how things worked in the Web 2.0 era, so put it…
Would it be ok to email you to find out more?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A game where bots turned out to be real players would have been fascinating though.
I don’t remember which iteration it was, but there is a game in the Dark Souls series where one of the bosses is a player that invades your game to be the boss. It’s a cool twist on the PvP of the game where you can be invaded by a player at almost any time but you can usually opt out of the PvP but this particular encounter is needed to progress.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A game where bots turned out to be real players would have been fascinating though.
I played a game like this before. The whole journey took about 6 hours to complete. Realizing who I was interacting with was one of the best moments I've had playing a video game. Edited to add: I think I've played two games where the bots turned out to be people. The second game was much longer, and I never finished it - I only learned that the bots were people from a YouTube video later on. This is a good idea, and…
Sometime after 2009 I started working on a data mining app that allowed a user to enter medications and cross reference drug interactions. At the time opendata was one of the main information sources, now I think those datasets are managed by openfda. I brought one person in to work on that with me, they proceeded to buy a domain for the top product name we were considering (canitake.com) within the first day. It was…
I understand this may be a meme, but did you actually take this as a serious red flag, and is this why you stopped working with them, or were there other factors?
https://www.quidsentio.com A private social network (“private” in the sense that is a journaling web app that you share with close friends, not as “e2ee privacy”). Zero interest on HN or Reddit or wherever. The few people who tried (including friends and family) never came back. The one paid user that I had tried to use the “import Facebook status” tool and it wasn’t working. I didn’t know how to fix (it worked in my…
But I can see writing for folks with the same interests in tech, business, books or what not. So I am willing to open up my personal journals, but only to complete strangers (anonymously).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This probably means a lot less if you live in a developed country. Malaysia probably has some of the most expensive cars in the world. They're like student loans in the US. People here get very emotional about them because they're "necessary". You can live without a car, but it limits your opportunities by a lot. A car often takes 9 years to pay off, the prices are artificially high thanks to bad government policies,…
I learned a LOT from this reply. Thanks for your patience in writing it out; it seems to mirror what I witnessed elsewhere e.g Australia, and it's starkly different from our situation in the US. Given the context, I can't blame you for assigning significance to a car. What indicators are you looking for to avoid making the partnerships you described?
I think the best model is personality + incentive. It's probably worth a couple chapters to discuss. But basically incentive is the time domain - can you continually incentivize them on such a slope to act in your interest?
Personality is what kind of incentive they expect. Some people would lose their jobs for an affair. Some just want to appear successful. I know a guy whose life was changed by meditation, so he gave up his whole career and traveled the world helping people with stress. Everyone is a mix of things and place different weights on different things.
So you want to model people and see that they align with whatever your specific venture is. Someone suited to one venture may not be suited for another. And there's a time component too, so someone great 5 years ago may be unsuitable now.
I ran a solo branding and web, product, etc. design shop, prematurely took it full-time and bet my livelihood on it, and effectively dead-ended my career. The small number of clients I got were—according to them—happy with my work, but the only word-of-mouth inquiry that ever came in was a coke-addled soi-disant "tech visionary" with little money and no plan. Everything else came through exhaustive outreach and prosp…
Anyway, I appreciate your candor.
I wanted to gather cool and unpopular places from a neighborhood, like old castles. I started this project in 2015 and I’m still maintaining it, and from time to time I’m doing fixes.
What I learned?
Technical: SPA got terrible SEO, only a few crawlers executes JS on page to actually read data from the page (or at least show the place image instead the app image from og:image) I tried many times to add some pre-rendering and make it hybrid, but I failed. Eventually, I converted app to NextJS and I added dynamic og:images (using my other project: https://bannerly.io) and number of impressions and clicks increased mostly thanks to sharing places by people on social media. I also plan to use no-code automation tool (probably https://integromat.com it’s cheaper than Zapier and probably more powerful) to post places to Instagram every day.
There is no money/revenue in this project but I like to play around with it anyway. It would be cool earn at least for maintenance costs on it but I don’t have any idea. I was thinking about selling tickets online for places where the tickets are required but no one is interested in this idea.
Non-technical: There is a very small subset of people who would like to use travel apps. It’s easier to use Google or local guides to find great destinations.
The project consisted of a frame on an alt/az base to hold the lens, arms from teh frame to position it's focal point on can that had been crushed vertically and then slid down a rack on a couple of steel rails. And the whole thing held over a bucket of water to catch the melting aluminum and make aluminum "drops".
Unfortunately, the aluminum oxidizes way faster than it melts and so my contraption basically turned cans into a crushed can with a black dusty hole in the middle!
It wasn't until I saw the King of Random video on making a smelter out of a bucket that I actually had something that could melt aluminum in a reasonable way (at the cost of a few gallons of propane)
I tried to build StackOverflow for flashcards (i.e. spaced repetition with collaboration as a first class feature.) After working on it on nights/weekends for ~2 years, I realized my architecture was shit. I started out with Blazor + F# + PostGres, but eventually I realized that syncing offline client DBs to the cloud was a very nontrivial problem. So I moved to event sourcing. Turns out that's not much better - I st…
If I may, could I suggest Firebase as something to consider? It has automatic offline sync over indexdb, and you can subscribe your app to data changes to sync all devices etc.
It takes about a day to get your head around how it works, and given your use case you probably just need the Hosting, Firestore + Auth modules.
I use it a lot now in my side projects and it has been life changing in terms of taking away all of the boilerplate code and letting my just write app code.