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dstik

Re:Ask HN: Best way to get into blockchain development? on Thursday June 02, 2022 @04:56AM (#31592815)
Typing from phone but here are some resources that really helped me:

Blockchain Fundamentals: https://github.com/ethereumbook/ethereumbook

Practical Solidity: https://solidity-by-example.org/

Crypto Zombies is an amazing beginner step by step course to build a blockchain game: https://cryptozombies.io/

Finally, ethernaut is a series of increasingly difficult security challenges to learn about risks, exploits, info sec for blockchain dev: https://ethernaut.openzeppelin.com/

Oh, and any Patrick Collins tutorial video on YouTube (solidity, chainlink, hardhat, truffle, brownie, so much more)

Life imitates art - there was a movie with a similar premise that came out a couple years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guest_House_(2020_film)
Re:Elevator.js (2015) on Thursday February 24, 2022 @04:25PM (#30460515)
This is so fun! Great work
Thank you! I have your product on my list of tasks, so expect one soon!
Very clever - great idea and execution. Embedding positive tweets is something we've wanted to add to our site for a long time but it's so annoying/tedious to put together on your own, this it awesome. Thanks for creating and sharing!
Re:Ask HN: What (side-)project are you working on? on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @05:54PM (#26497234)
We're building Circles for Zoom (https://www.circlesforzoom.com) - to give you more control over your Zoom calls.

It's a fully native MacOS app (swift, not electron/etc) built on top of the Zoom SDK that transforms meeting participants into moveable/resizable circles on your screen and offers additional power tools to get your desktop back and have more control over your meeting experience.

It's just two of us now, working as fast as we can and listening to user feedback to drive priorities on our roadmap.

It's free to use - we would love to hear feedback from anyone willing to give it a shot!

Have you tried reaching out to former colleagues? Often times, many of these companies have internal referral programs and incentives for employee referrals.
If you're truly looking for no-code, check out:

  - ClickSendSMS (https://www.clicksend.com)
  - EZTexting (https://www.eztexting.com)
They also have Zapier integrations so you can do more no-code stuff.

Also, Zapier itself has a outgoing SMS offering (cannot receive sms messages) in case that's helpful as well.

Re:Show HN: Mobile-optimized video platform to enhance SMS on Friday January 24, 2020 @04:21AM (#22136643)
We’re available everywhere! To be clear, we don’t send sms messages. We provide the video platform (creation tools, video player, data + apis) that you use to enhance the sms messages you’re already sending from your phone or another service
Re:Show HN: Mobile-optimized video platform to enhance SMS on Friday January 24, 2020 @03:14AM (#22136340)
Hey HN, we’ve built a mobile-first video platform designed to be used in conjunction with your mobile messaging outreach (like SMS, FB messenger, etc). It’s web-based (no downloads), designed to load fast, offer interactivity, along with APIs + webhooks.

We’ve finally released a free tier to give more people the chance to leverage our platform. We’d love to hear and incorporate your feedback as we continue to build features and evolve the product!

Re:Ask HN: Developer-Focused CRM with a Solid API? on Friday November 08, 2019 @10:26PM (#21489368)
We're really happy with Pipedrive (https://pipedrive.com) and they have a great API (and tons of documentation). They're also more affordable than other CRMs we evaluated with solid APIs.
The best way to start is by tapping your networks (personal, professional, online communities) for conversations. Your first step should be trying to understand how the industry works, what types of partnerships exist (and what the value exchange is for both parties), and understanding the responsibilities of folks with different job titles in that industry.

Start with a single conversation with anyone you know who's remotely related to that industry (preferably someone in the industry, if you can). Look for second degree connections on LinkedIn to folks at companies in that industry and ask your mutual connection for an introduction. Treat these meetings as informational interviews where your goal is to soak up as much knowledge and info as possible - be curious, ask a lot of questions, and listen more than you speak. Always end the conversations by asking for other introductions to people they think might be relevant or helpful.

By the time you've finally understood the landscape, you've already started building your network in the space. You've likely been building your product during this time - probably by integrating with non-paywall publishers and smaller news outlets. Work your way into the smallest paywalled news source first and start having conversations about the value prop with them and why a partnership with you will be beneficial to them. From there work your way up to the bigger guys. Remember that it will take many conversations and you're building relationships - deals like this are not closed overnight.

Hope this helps - good luck!

Re:Show HN: I'm building a system that automates onboarding on Thursday September 05, 2019 @01:00PM (#20888636)
Great work - this looks very cool. We'd be very interested in exploring it. We started looking into https://www.appcues.com/ but their pricing seems prohibitively expensive. They have a nice Chrome extension that allows nontechnical folks to easily create/customize the onboarding/tooltips for your app -- curious how your snippet will guide users through creation.

Really excited for you!

Streak CRM (YC S11) [https://www.streak.com/]

I think Hunter (https://hunter.io) started as a chrome extension

Password managers like LastPass (https://www.lastpass.com/) rely on their browser extensions for convenience and usability

If your question is whether being part of the Zapier integration catalog will drive new customers / business, then I wouldn't count on it being a major growth channel. Though, being listed will serve as additional credibility and will likely have branding and SEO benefits for you.

On the other hand, we found that building a Zapier integration made customer on-boarding faster and smoother, which helped to speed up our overall sales processes. While slightly different from your use-case, our product requires an API integration, so allowing customers to integrate via Zapier instead of requiring development effort to support our APIs has reduced the cost, time/conversations, and resources necessary for our customers to work with us. It also reduces technical support requests.

Finally, seconding what lpellegr said, Zapier has now introduced Partner Tiers, meaning that you need to get your own users before you can graduate to a listing level of beta and then even more users before you get other benefits like a blog post and potentially featured status.

Overall, I'd look at whether these benefits are worth the engineering effort. If your main goal/priority is marketing then there may be other exciting growth/marketing opportunities that would be a better use of time with better ROI. Hope this is helpful.

Re:Ask HN: Burnout App Feedback on Wednesday August 21, 2019 @01:13PM (#20759174)
I know you're only asking about the name but wanted to share some other helpful feedback as well.

I usually worry about all-in-one tools being a combination of the most popular features of each specific tool but not being powerful enough to perform the job of said tool. To mitigate this, I think having full pages breaking down each of those sections (instead of just paragraph sections) would be helpful. I like these short summaries, but additionally linking out to full sub-product detail pages would be very helpful. I wonder how each of these sub-products compare to their full product alternatives and don't quite understand from the landing page how interconnected they all are in order to make me willing to forego certain features/functionality for the sake of data organization.

As an example: We use Pipedrive as our CRM - it has concepts like: User ACL, Deals, Contacts, Organizations, Activities, etc. It offers visual workflow automation, a robust API, and advanced filtering searching capabilities. I'd like to see all of the features I'd get with Burnout's CRM to help me evaluate the product before I'd consider switching.

Regarding the name: personally, as a founder/engineer, when I hear the term burnout I think of the negative mental/physical/emotional state that I (and friends/teammates) have experienced in the past - so the name puts me off. A suggestion could be something like (warning: bad ideas alert): Startup (another play on words - since this guides you through starting up) or Blueprint.

It looks like you've built a ton of product here and I'm excited to see a live demo and check it out myself.

So happy to see other 2600 subscribers in here. This is the only print magazine I subscribe to. I also don't read the entire thing but it's always a combination of interesting perspectives, articles by true enthusiasts hacking around for fun/exploration, and nostalgia.

Fun fact: they published an article I wrote on hacking AIM profiles + away messages back when I was in high school.

Re:Team for Hire on Monday August 13, 2018 @01:51PM (#17752053)
You should check out Elevator (https://www.goelevator.com/) - this is their model and they've successfully placed many teams into excited roles and companies together.
Hey bdagnino, we definitely need to work on that :)

Tape is a video-based communication tool for remote teams using the story-format for consumption. Starting a tape is as easy as sending a snap (with a subject line), replies are threaded inline (think email meets stories) which results in clearer communication and better team chemistry as you get more "face-time" with your remote colleagues.

Currently, organizations with remote teams use Tape for elements of agile (stand up, retrospective, sprint planning) as well as meeting replacement (time shifting meetings to asynchronous video instead of struggling to coordinate live calls across time-zones) and for overall communication. It is deeply integrated into Slack which fits into most workflows.

I'd love to chat more about how we can help your team! (dave [at] trytape.com)

Author here. Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions…

Our team built a visual communication tool (think video stories for workplace communication) and one of the surprisingly effective ways one of our pilot customers began using the tool was as a quick team builder. Someone would send out a really simple question over video and teammates would respond on Tape. Simple questions like “What was the last country you visited” turned into easy ways for people to discover they had overlapping interests/experiences.

The experience was way more effective than expensive happy hours or offsites which are nice but generally just let friends at work hangout with each other rather than building new connections. The only problem was it required everyone to download our mobile app (https://www.trytape.com/app) and someone had to come up with a question every week. Because of that, we decided to devote a quick sprint to productizing the interaction and make it dead simple for any team to take part in the program.

Watercooler Questions:

  - No app installation required (done 100% through email/web)
  - Fully automated (we send your team a new question every week)
  - Super effective and time efficient (Spend just 30 sec a week answering a question and learn more about your teammates)
Check out a fun example here: https://www.trytape.com/t/E1efYE42xr10

Looking forward to on-boarding more teams and continuing to iterate on it. Excited to hear feedback!

Re:Remote Only on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @07:48PM (#17252116)
I completely agree that the most effective way for remote teams to communicate is via asynchronous video messaging instead of real-time video conferencing. Some of the difficulties I've experienced coordinating meetings with remote colleagues include:

- Difficulty scheduling a time that fits for all participants. Some team-members are inevitably stuck with a non-ideal timeframe. Often times it's the same employee suffering each meeting, which leads to resentment.

- Interruptions during productive hours. See the Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule (http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html) - reacting to interruptions can be disastrous.

- Frustration from choppy/laggy video that results in loss of important parts of updates and valuable information.

I'm actually building an app called Tape to address these kinds of issues and to improve communication and collaboration across teams by integrating into existing workflows not against them. If any of you guys are interested in learning more or trying out our product, I'd love to connect: https://trytape.typeform.com/to/pKe6X5

Re:Ask HN: Most clever business models? on Thursday May 03, 2018 @12:33PM (#16987445)
I've always been impressed by Duolingo's strategy - offering language education while distributing text translation.

Traditionally, language learning software like Rosetta Stone has been very expensive. Duolingo offers a free language learning service. As students improve/advance, Duolingo starts to use real sentences for teaching / translation. Because the other side of their business offers language translation services, the app can surface client's text to students and once enough students have attempted to translate it, their software compares and returns the best match to the client. [1]

Equally interesting, its founder previously started Captcha, which cleverly took the "prove you're a human" opportunity to have humans OCR books and street signs. Since the Google acquisition, I think ReCaptcha is now primarily used to improve Google Maps data.

I believe Duolingo has started exploring other revenue opportunities as this hasn't been as profitable as originally expected, but the idea is/was clever.

[1] https://unicornomy.com/how-does-duolingo-make-money-business...

Ask HN: How are you onboarding and managing your remote teams?

Looking for leaders of remote teams (engineering or non-engineering) to share advice/experience on the following areas.Onboarding: What do you do upon hiring to help new team members ramp up? How do you ensure they feel like they’re part of the team/culture? How do you provide support and direction as they figure out their role and the codebase/responsibilities?Management: How do you support...

( Read More... | 14 comments | 32 points | on HN )

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