91–100 of 118 posts
I'm often thinking about building a better Meetup, it's so expensive for organizers these days. But then I acknowledge the network effects and I give up. And they own Eventbrite too! Savvy people.
I made one for in person board game events in the Washington DC area at https://dmvboardgames.com/
I'm often thinking about building a better Meetup, it's so expensive for organizers these days. But then I acknowledge the network effects and I give up. And they own Eventbrite too! Savvy people.
I see a lot of people using https://luma.com/ . I'm sure it's not as big as Meetup but it does have a decent community of users, and you can set up pretty much anything with their free plan.
Since Bending Spoons purchased Meetup, I have noticed the UI becoming more cluttered and hard to use. Also, I consistently get ads asking me to buy an organizer subscription to host events, even when on the page for a group I'm an organizer for.
After seeing this emphasis on "impact" cause Meetup's UI to degrade, I'm skeptical about the company's long term future.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They didn’t burn Evernote to the ground to my surprise, but I jumped ship the day they bought it. It turned out that I have grown out of Evernote anyway, so no big loss.
I really liked Evernote but they raised the price too much for me. I used it mostly as an archive for long term storage where I could find things easily and it was pleasant to use. When it was $36 / year it made sense for me. I probably only used it a dozen or two times every year so it cost me roughly $1 / session. Then they quadrupled the price for me and paying $4 to dig out my TSA known traveler number was too mu…
I'm old enough to have been acquired by Computer Associates at a company that acquired my company. CA's business model was to buy companies and then fold their products into an omnibus license, all of their customers, including the ones they just acquired, becoming involuntary licensees whatever the cat dragged in this quarter. It turns out a lot of corporate IT has no idea how to switch vendors in case a product the…
> It turns out a lot of corporate IT has no idea how to switch vendors in case a product they use gets acquired by a company with this business model. This always shocks me. I moved a company off of Salesforce in 45 days without a big issue. Day 1 was a bit slower but by day 2 folks were back at full speed. I've pulled off EMR migrations, ERP, accounting, etc. Moving is scary but doable. Sometimes the execs will just…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh yes, I've had proposals rejected for terrible reasons. "I like bragging we can afford Salesforce." "We're special, other companies can't do what we do and other platforms can't do what Salesforce does." "I go back years with Salesbozo, he's giving us deals no one else gets, I trust him." (meanwhile they're paying 10% under list, not a good deal at all). One of my absolute favorites was, "well, our Salesforce consu…
Yeah I hate the double standards here, if someone lower level recommends someone that they know or heaven forbid related to HR acts like they must quash this awful nepotism and scheming ha.
I looked at the Bending Spoons employee handbook, and they openly admit that employee performance is evaluated on "making an impact". To me, this means adding pointless features for the sake of getting better ratings. Since Bending Spoons purchased Meetup, I have noticed the UI becoming more cluttered and hard to use. Also, I consistently get ads asking me to buy an organizer subscription to host events, even when on…
I worked at a company that was all about impact. Take the site down, that's a lot of impact ... If they wanted something else, they should have been more specific.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious what did you move them into from SF? SF is usually treated as this infallible perfect piece of software by non-tech folks, especially those looking to pad their resumes.
SF has worked very hard to cultivate that reputation, and at the end of the day they're mostly an overpriced application host. Once you communicate to the stakeholders that what they have in SF is just another application, and not actually "special", the conversations become a lot easier to have. They feel like Salesforce has them over a barrel at renewal time and helping them understand they CAN move makes a lot of…
Unfortunately this is what I meant by the braggarts and resume padders. It's usually only after these people leave that the company takes a serious look at their books and then decide that they want to move away from SF.
Salesforce is the most bloated piece of any software I've ever seen, and I've seen Azure. Apples and oranges, yes, but Azure is far more navigable than Salesforce.
Once when planning to buy some property, I watched for 10 minutes as the real estate sales agent painstakingly took about 10 minutes to navigate through and book an apartment for me. Enough time for me to start second-guessing about buying the property. Had SF been faster, I would've been stuck with some really illiquid shit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why was the board involved in that decision to begin with?
That is both an excellent question and the root problem at that company. The PE firm was a majority shareholder, drive the board, and there were two board members who were HEAVILY involved in the company. Too heavily, they kept making decisions about them and not the company, and that's why I left. Several months later the PE firm was tired if waiting for results, fired those two board members and sold their share of…
ah, can stop there
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I'm not a huge fan of the Bending Spoons model, Vimeo sure got improved quickly.
What exactly? From what I’ve heard, most of what was released in the months after the acquisition were features that were already in development/behind feature flags.