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cschmitt

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Ask HN: Bad Beta Expereinces

Posted by cschmitt on Wednesday May 08, 2013 @03:24PM
from the ask-hn dept.

I am in the process overhauling my company's bets program. I have previous experience managing betas, so I know what I should be doing. But I am very interested in your experiences. What are examples of bad beta programs you participated in and why were they bad? (lack of transparency, feedback went into a black hole, no communication, etc).Thanks in advance for taking some time to help me...

( Read More... | no comments | on HN )
Re:Ask HN: Share your startup ideas (May 2013). on Tuesday May 07, 2013 @06:58PM (#5671420)
yes.. I have checked out prefinery. I think it is okay. But I wanted to go deeper into the management of the beta to increase participation. So I ended up developing a new platform for my day job. Now I am thinking about launching it as a new service.

What are you using for your stuff.

Re:Ask HN: Share your startup ideas (May 2013). on Tuesday May 07, 2013 @09:18AM (#5667944)
I am playing around with the idea of developing a new beta platform. I have been running beta's for my current company and am frustrated with the current state of beta management services.

Let me know if this is something that you need, or what you use instead to run your betas?

Re:Ask HN: How do I improve my decision making skills as a young profe... on Friday April 26, 2013 @09:37AM (#5612816)
slow down and don't jump the gun on your decision, get more information, talk to other people and get their opinions.

Ask HN: Where do I learn customer discovery skills

Posted by cschmitt on Friday March 08, 2013 @01:31PM
from the ask-hn dept.

I love building web apps and can build MVP's with the best of them. My problem is that I suck at customer discovery. So I tend to build web MVP's that go no where with little to no feedback.What tips do you guys have for weekend entrepreneurs like me who want to build web apps but suck at customer discovery?

( Read More... | 1 comment | on HN )
Re:Show HN: Share your side projects on Wednesday March 06, 2013 @11:47AM (#5332075)
Thanks for the comment yolesaber.. I had the same reaction when I started using rapportive. Any additional information to help me decide if this person is legit or not would save time and money for new leads. I am kinda shocked there aren't more tools like that out in the wild.

No traction so far. I would love your thoughts on why you might think that is. Feel free to shoot me an email ([email protected]) if you have any other thoughts, suggestions or just want to see what your sample report would look like.

Re:Show HN: Share your side projects on Tuesday March 05, 2013 @08:29PM (#5328727)
I love the submissions so far.

Here is my latest side project: http://www.getkontxt.com. Think Rapportive for content and Stripe for the api. My thought was adding additional data to signup/contact forms to provide the users with additional context on the person. I would any feedback you guys have.

Re:Show HN: Kontxt (Side Project, Looking For Feedback) on Thursday January 31, 2013 @09:48AM (#5145188)
I recently launched this beta site to generate feedback and see if this idea resonates with potential customers. My goal was to provide businesses context about who is interacting with them. I envisioned this as a cross between wuffoo (cheaper and minus the form editor) and rapportive (but with more information).

Thanks in advance for checking it out and letting me know what you think.

Re:Ask HN: What is the best time to launch your beta on Friday January 11, 2013 @09:02AM (#5042664)
Thanks for the link.. I will definitely check it out.

Ask HN: Best development platform for games (minimal graphics)

Posted by cschmitt on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @12:14PM
from the ask-hn dept.

I have a new idea for a game. The game is mostly text based and doesn't require heavy graphics. The game centers around social competition through a series of random challenges (mostly word based). This got me thinking, what is the better development platform. Facebook or an android app. I choose those platforms based on my skill set, rails and java.Any advice/thoughts from you guys...

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Re:Show HN: My 2 evening project - Twitter Playback on Friday November 30, 2012 @09:51AM (#4853432)
You should checkout the jQuery timeline plugin. I could see that being a very effective with the horizontal scrollbar to control playback at a macro level.

Cool project. The sample you have makes it easy to see the uses. It would be cool if people could submit "fun" or good examples of great timelines. I think that would bring the social aspect into the project. Most people won't have the time to put together the criteria to produce the "query" so having a set of samples would be helpful in gaining traction

Re:Ask HN: Should I lower my rates for small startups? on Thursday November 01, 2012 @02:26PM (#4728928)
I totally agree.. In the end all you are doing is devaluing your service. You are basically saying.. sure I want $64/hour but the work is really worth $20/hour.

Take the extra time you would have spent on those clients to beef up your skill set so you can start offering more services or charging more.

Re:5 Lessons Learned From My Last Failed Startup on Friday October 26, 2012 @01:13PM (#4703158)
No problems, I left at lot of the details out because I didn't think it was relative to the posts. The contract was a fixed price to deliver the system and only gave me 18 months of income. This was the first large contract for both of us, so the language was not as crisp as it code of been. Finally 2 months before our release date they switched almost the entire executive management team and everyone I had spent the last 17 months building relationships with. The new team wanted additional capabilities and looked to build out an internal team. I then got a small retainer from them for 3 months worth of support why they transitioned support and enhancements to inside developers. After that I struggled for the next year of so picking up the odd client here and there. The loss of money came during the last couple of months when I tried bootstrapping my own idea (which ultimately failed) and increased advertising to find new clients. So it was a little of both.

Thanks for the question.. I would love to know if you have any other feedback for me. As you can tell I am somewhat new to blogging.

Ask HN: What do you use for cloud hosted contact forms?

Posted by cschmitt on Thursday October 18, 2012 @04:53PM
from the ask-hn dept.

I am starting a new project and I am curious what you do for hosted contact forms? I really don't want to go through adding a full backend just to support a contact form. I know of services like mail chimp and contactology but they are more for list management. And sites like wufoo are really expensive and I hate online theme designers.Any suggestions? Thanks in advance for the feedback

( Read More... | 2 comments | 5 points | on HN )
Re:How I Interpret Jeff Atwood’s: How to stop at sucking and be awesome. on Wednesday October 17, 2012 @07:25PM (#4666860)
Thanks for the advice. I didn't want people thinking I was just link baiting so that is why I included a description.
Re:How I Interpret Jeff Atwood’s: How to stop at sucking and be awesome. on Wednesday October 17, 2012 @10:24AM (#4664541)
Clickable link: http://oakcitylabs.com/2012/10/17/how-i-interpret-jeff-atwoo...

How I Interpret Jeff Atwood’s: How to stop at sucking and be awesome.

Posted by cschmitt on Wednesday October 17, 2012 @10:22AM
from the self-post dept.

I missed the original post on coding horror but came across a video of Jeff giving the presentation at the 2012 Atlassian summit. After watching the video I wrote up a new blog post about my thoughts on Jeff's talk. I am new at blogging so I would love any feedback you guys have.Link To Blog Post: ...

( Read More... | 3 comments | 7 points | on HN )
Re:Ask HN: What do you use for persistent chat? on Tuesday October 16, 2012 @05:12PM (#4661876)
Not off the table just yet. But I was looking for a hosted 3rd party solution.
Re:Ask HN: What do you use for persistent chat? on Tuesday October 16, 2012 @05:12PM (#4661874)
good thought.. thanks for the comment
Re:Ask HN: What do you use for persistent chat? on Tuesday October 16, 2012 @05:11PM (#4661871)
Depending on the monthly cost of outsourcing I have thought about running a jabber server. Can you setup your jabber server to pass through authentication over to gtalk?
Re:Ask HN: What do you use for persistent chat? on Tuesday October 16, 2012 @05:10PM (#4661865)
I was looking at hipchat and I do have some past experience with it. Thanks for the comment
Re:Ask HN: What do you use for persistent chat? on Tuesday October 16, 2012 @05:09PM (#4661857)
Here is the simple criteria I am using: 1. Must use gtalk 2. Must have persistant history for at least 48 hours (searchable is a bonus) 3. Must be accessible from adium or other chat clients 4. Must be private for our org.

So far I have identified, Jaconda, hipchat and campfire (although I think it is out due to the lake of gtalk integration)

(Sorry for not posting this right up front)

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