ashfernandez

Reddit as of today is still recommending Codeacademy and Odin Project, so I'll likely start there.

You have any recommendations for front and backend languages?

Mainly focusing on website and web app development.

Awesome.. will check this out!

Been getting a lot of Codeacademy recommendations on Reddit as well.

Hello community, we just launched our new sales-oriented website and we’re looking for direct feedback to decipher what we can do to improve sign ups. We're getting a great click-through-rate on our ads, good traffic to the site, but low sign ups.

We're trying to see if the following is clear:

1. Messaging on what we’re offering is clear 2. Compelling enough to sign up 3. Something that you trust will help you if you sign up

This is a sales-oriented product to help with researching potential customers.

Any feedback on what we can improve would be great -- thank you!

Everytime I talk with a sales person while doing user research, they drop a sales product I’ve never heard of before. Where do sales people find all these products for their specific niches and use cases?

I’m creating an AI tool to help sales SDRs do research and use that research to perform an outreach task.

Does anyone have recommendations on what platforms help drive real usage of the tool’s functionalities for us to test its usefulness?

I’m not looking for fake users or a high volume of users or reviews. Just ones that will use it themselves to help them with their actual sales jobs.

Looking for sub-reddits or other forums similar to HackerNews and Quora.

Recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

Any recommendations for 3rd party companies that offer this?

Oh.. so there is a way to get profile and company info if you go through their application process?

I've heard it's grueling being an SDR (Sales Development Rep). What makes it so difficult?

1. Finding leads? 2. Preparing all the research for calls? 3. Other?

I've heard anecdotally that people say SDRs are usually 'new grads' who are starting off and want to 'put in their time' before moving into more senior sales roles.

Essentially, it comes off as a role that you just have do, but no one really likes it. Trying to understand why.

Generally, I found qualifying customers takes a lot of time. It can take up to 1 hour doing the research to figure out if it’s a customer who 1) can actually use your product 2) can make the decision to buy your product 3) is actually in the market for your product.

I wanted something that could cut this time down to a few minutes so I could spend more time finding customers vs. preparing calls. The tool should 1) allow me to copy/paste any of my research sources (Linkedin, URLs, previous agendas, general notes 2) be super simple 3) generate an agenda that I could use in a 1st, 2nd, 3rd call with a customer to qualify if they’d purchase.

So I built an interactive sales qualification website where anyone can create these interactive agendas using whatever sources you typically use to qualify a potential customer.

By using this 1) I created agendas in a few minutes 2) I asked new questions that I hadn’t thought of before, making customer engagement much better and purchase intent a lot higher.

This is still in early stages, but talking to a few sales people whose job is to qualify customers, it looks like this is on the right track and what’s missing is auto-downloads (vs. copy/paste) and integrations into commonly used sales tools like Hubspot and Salesforce.

The (limited) data so far suggests people are mostly interested in using URLs. I guess it makes sense for a demo since copy/pasting notes and Linkedin profiles is more time-consuming. But ultimately, it does seem to still generate pretty good customer qualification agendas. It’s even better if you add Linkedin info and other notes, since the response is much more personalized to your specific use case.

I would love y'all's thoughts on it. Does this help you with customer qualification?

Any ideas?

OP here: I've been grappling with a decision for a project I'm working on - curious to hear what you think. It's about the user authentication approach for a SaaS AI agenda tool I'm developing, and I'm torn between two methods: traditional website-hosted accounts versus leveraging Chrome extensions for auto-login capabilities.

For a bit of context, the traditional route means users would create an account directly on our platform. This is the path well-ridden. It offers full control over the user experience and security but also adds friction to the signup process and requires handling more personal data securely.

On the flip side, I'm considering a Chrome extension that would automatically log users in when they load it and they'd be able to use it directly in their calendar. There is no hosting of their accounts on my site. This method could significantly reduce friction and improve the user experience by leveraging Google accounts already used by the browser. However, I'm conscious that it could limit the product's accessibility to non-Chrome users and potentially raise concerns about putting too much trust in a third-party ecosystem.

Here are the pros and cons as I see them:

Website-Hosted Accounts:

Pros: -Full control over the user experience and security -Platform agnostic .. works on any browser -Direct relationship with users

Cons: -Higher friction for sign-ups -Requires robust security for handling personal data

Chrome Extension Auto-Login:

Pros: -Lower friction for Chrome users -Simplified login process -Potentially faster adoption among Chrome users

Cons: -Limited to Chrome users -Dependence on Google's ecosystem -Possible perception issues regarding privacy and security

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. What has been your experience with either approach? Have you seen any innovative solutions that might offer a best-of-both-worlds scenario? Any feedback, experiences, or pointers would be incredibly appreciated!

That's a good idea. The events we're thinking of attending are massive, so hard to do that pre-work ahead. But maybe we should target smaller ones with the right people.

Nice - good way to make auto agendas. In addition to this, my theory is that if you enable all the attendees to give feedback, meetings could really start changing.

I like the idea of declining a meeting if it's not prepared OR 'nudging' them to prepare ahead of time.

What editor were you using to compile code?

Super cool.. will def be using it for fun.

AI guides what we strategize at work through meetings and ultimately directs where the company is going. To be or not to be?

HN Community - Could AI generated agendas be the answer we’ve all been looking for? How do you currently address bad meetings?

Let me explain..

I created this interactive website version for anyone to test this question by making it super easy to use generative AI to prepare a great agenda. Btw, this can also be used directly through a super simple extension inside of your calendar so you can actually create/update meetings with these agendas.

In a previous HN post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39177059), I outlined that I thought the actual reason that bad meetings exist is because few people take the time to prepare useful and effective agendas. It’s easy to not do this because of a lack of experience and time.

Meeting companies that provide AI transcripts and summaries are pointless because, well, garbage-in, garbage-out. Why would you view a meeting recording or transcript if the meeting never should have happened in the first place? They’re just band-aids.

The most effective meeting agendas have:

> A clear title > A single, well-defined objective (“what’s the meeting about?”) > Relevant talking points that lead up to reaching the defined objective

This allows you to invite the correct people who can address the specific talking points and keep the meeting flow on track.

Start with agendas and only then should you use tools like AI recordings, transcripts, and summaries.

I’d love for you to try it and give feedback on if you think this can end bad meetings!

haha.. that's a whole 'nother issue

Great suggestion. Gonna build a landing page directly for a demo vid.. or straight to the extension!

Quick question - do you watch the meetings you record?

Ah ok, will do that next time. Good suggestion!

My theory is that if you enable all the attendees to give them feedback, they could start changing.

I like the idea of declining a meeting if it's not prepared OR 'nudging' them to prepare ahead of time.

Hey -- this is great. We should connect. Would love to pick your brain and understand what you learned. I tried accessing your website, but seems to be down(?).

Let me know how we can chat - my email address is [email protected]

Works for some companies (i.e. Amazon), but many hate doing this.

I'm making it such that if someone preps a meeting they HAVE to assign a responsible person for each and every talking point. When they do this, that person gets a notice saying they have something to prepare ahead of time for.

SO even if they don't have enough time to look at the whole agenda, they can easily identify what exactly they need to pinpoint-prep for.