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HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

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Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#121

Post by marcuslongmuir »

kevin wrote: post #109
marcuslongmuir wrote: post #14

Hi Kevin and Sam, We’re MinoHubs ( https://www.minohubs.com ) and we build commercial and community tools for software projects. The barrier to building a successful software project is high - apart from writing the code, you need to build a community and potentially set up some commercialisation (backing, licenses, support etc.) which isn’t an easy task. We provide customizable hubs that give projects: Commercial to…

Users will always ask for more features. Your job is to curate. When you recommend a book or a movie, you don't tell the entire synopsis to get someone to read or watch. You figure out how to curate the recommendation. No different for a startup. For you guys, the only thing people need to know and remember is that MinoHubs helps me get funding and make my software projects successful. That's the core of the idea. Th…

Thanks again Kevin. We're iterating on our design and how we get these messages across. This is really useful.

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#122

Post by ismail »

cpg wrote: post #89

I built a site to run tennis leagues. We have started in the bay area with 210+ matches taken place since February when it launched. Most other sites that try to do this look like they are built in the 90s and have little support for modern features like communicating via Whatsapp or decent mobile support. It could also be extended to other (racket) sports later. People pay a $20 fee for each league, which is about 8…

Hey, here are my thoughts:

Where do tennis players meet? Where do they hang out? Are there online/off line spots you find them hanging out at? How are these leagues formed? Where are they formed? i would answer these questions and then focus aquistion around the answers.

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#123

Post by [deleted] »

cpg wrote: post #89

I built a site to run tennis leagues. We have started in the bay area with 210+ matches taken place since February when it launched. Most other sites that try to do this look like they are built in the 90s and have little support for modern features like communicating via Whatsapp or decent mobile support. It could also be extended to other (racket) sports later. People pay a $20 fee for each league, which is about 8…

[deleted]

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#124

Post by callmeed »

ljd wrote: post #2

Company: http://PlaceAVote.com Pitch: We're replacing congress with voting software. We are running 70 candidates in the 2016 Congressional elections on our platform, if any of them get voted into office we'll take all bills before congress and put them on our site where each voter in that district gets one authenticated vote. Question: In your experience, what's the most effective way for B2C company to educate user…

I am reading The Circle right now and this reminds me of that.

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#125

Post by ScottBurson »

trsohmers wrote: post #99
ScottBurson wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today, it takes 100 picojoules to do a double precision floating point operation, but 4200 picojoules (42 times!) more energy to move that data from RAM to your registers. This is a fascinating observation. As one of pg's essays asks, "what do you know that know that no one else knows?" [quoted from memory]. It sounds like this is your answer. Interestingly, it's not literally that no one else knows it -- it's that n…

@Scott When designing the architecture over a year ago, we used that fact as the basis of our design paradigm, and while known to some very smart people in the industry, no one has really dared to do any real redesigns in large companies. When I re-read this post ( http://blakemasters.com/post/22866240816/peter-thiels-cs183-... ) and thought about what our "secret" really was, I decided to include that fact in our pr…

That post is probably what I'm remembering. Apologies for the misattribution.

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#126

Post by michwill »

kevin wrote: post #102
mwilkison wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add a bit to michwill's answer: Startups want a JavaScript version so they can use it in-browser. And they are more interested in full-text search than other types of queries. Enterprises are big on integration with existing stuff (Microsoft SQL Server, SharePoint, etc.) and using it as a CASB-esque solution.

My gut tells me to work on the features that alleviates the bigger hair on fire problem for the customer. Usually, startups have less pressing needs for security than large enterprises, but I can actually see how your tech opens up a lot of startups to build quickly in that very lucrative healthcare space that is being thrown up in the air because of the Affordable care act. You should aim to build only enough to clo…

Yes, that's currently the plan!

More than that: when end-user is SMB but paying customer is a B2B cloud software vendor, needs are often the same as for startups.

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#127

Post by ljd »

kevin wrote: post #115
ljd wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a ~10% approval rating for congress and historical lows across the board for most Americans, I'm not sure it's cynicism. I don't think you could honestly find someone that feels like they are being represented in congress. Our lobbying system is an open joke that we wish we could do something about. Also, our PAC is funding those true believers but most people don't realize that it costs thousands of dollars to…

Your language here is what I prefer. You wrote this: "professionals in tech that wouldn't mind making $170k to do literally nothing but proxy votes for their district" This description of your first candidates is what I find cynical. They should feel like true believers. Not opportunistic passive income collectors.

Yeah, I understand your point. I think I'm communicating why someone has a personal incentive to run for congress under our system since they won't be receiving lobbying money. I'm hoping the electorate isn't under the belief that congressional salaries are negotiable. I don't see why people can't feel passionate about this project and also be compensated for improving a system that is rife with inefficiencies.

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#128

Post by ismail »

ksks wrote: post #33

Hi, Kevin and Sam, I am the founder of https://ManualTest.io . My app automates manual testing. It generate and run integration tests by recording and replaying users' actions on their websites. Manual testing is still being used everyday (by developers or not), so this could be a huge time saver for them. My app is recently available on the Chrome Web Store, it only got a few users, despite having quite positive fee…

Hey, who is your market with this? From my POV developers doing testing have quite mature toolsets to do automated integration tests I.e selenium.

So what other types of people would find it useful?

Off the top of my head:

1. Tech Companies that have a testing/uat team that are not developers. For e.g i worked on a contract where testing was handed over from dev to a testing team which was largely manual.

2. Companies that purchase software, that have their own internal testing process which is still manual. For e.g when some projects i worked on we would do our testing then the client would do their testing which was all manual. These are business users with out any programming skills.

3. What about other people doing repetive things? Capturing data, saving data, extracting data?

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#129

Post by tlb »

trsohmers wrote: post #69
sama wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We funded a semiconductor company in the current YC batch (I believe for the first time). I think extreme energy efficiency is a great thing to go after for a new semiconductor company. It fits the "surf someone else's wave" principle well. Big companies are of course trying to do this to, but focused startups beat big companies all the time. Don't worry about being a low-level hardware company. It's a feature for yo…

That's pretty awesome that you guys backed a semiconductor company. I didn't apply as I was skeptical you would invest in one... great to see YC expanding so far and fast though. We're looking at having full simulation capabilities (with physical verification in progress) come the end of this year, with a shuttle run (prototype) tape out in Q1 next year. It's about a 3 month turn around, so we are expecting to have o…

Are you sure the power savings for mobile base stations are worth building chips for?

I don't know the numbers, but suppose for example that there are 100,000 base stations that currently use 100 watts each doing the DSP. That's 10,000,000 watts total, costing about $10M/yr at $0.12 / kWh utility rates. If you can save 80% and capture 1/3 of the savings for the first 2 years (typical of efficiency improvement sales), you make $5.3M. If it costs $15M to design the chips, that's a bad business.

To have a good business doing energy-efficient chips, you'd need to target applications burning a billion watts from the grid, so you can make a fraction of a billion dollars.

The mobile device market values energy efficiency much higher than $0.12 / kWh. That might be a better domain to target.

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#130

Post by ismail »

3Dpuzzlepiece wrote: post #11

Howdy! How would you suggest marketing a new service to a hard-to-reach audience? Brief overview: I would like to market local, weekend yoga retreats to professionals in the oil and gas, energy, and finance industries. No long absences from work or family, and no long-distance travel. The startup is set up in Houston, but can operate in any city in the USA. Lots of different marketing and advertising methods are bein…

Just curious why have you chosen "professionals in the oil and gas, energy, and finance industries"?
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