dyim
Our place was originally listed at $7,550 [1], but the leasing co used pictures from a shittier unit within the same building!
Naturally nobody was interested, so the pricing system automatically ratcheted the price down to $6,050, at which point we checked out the apartment & noticed the discrepancy between pictures and reality.
As people figure out the balance between "AI" and "common sense," I bet there's going to be tons of mispriced crap out there in market.
[1] (Numbers changed by ~5% so as to not doxx our apt #)
> Well, firstly, here’s what we DON’T want to make. We don’t want to just create a fan service game that repeats jokes or plots that people already are familiar with.
> Elaine reminds him that the publicist was supposed to get them all tickets to the opening night of the new movie “Rochelle, Rochelle 2”
You can't have both!
Anecdata, but I interviewed for a marketing role at a 10-person startup in 2013. I asked questions #1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20 - and the company was more than happy to 1) answer immediately, or 2) say "I don't know, but let me find out." I should have asked the other questions (especially the relo package!), but I was young, naive, and not tactful enough to ask tougher questions in a "cooperative" manner.
IMO it's insane to work for a company if they're evasive about the value of your equity (#4-8). That's tantamount to lying about comp. You can usually find out how much they've raised on Crunchbase, and you can napkin-math their burn by eyeballing the team (#9-13; payroll is the dominant expense for most startups). #14 seems like a weird question to ask, but YMMV.
I would take their answer to the product-market fit question with a heaping pinch of salt (what are they going to say, "no"? and PMF means something different to everyone), and listen closely to the "feedback from customers" answer.
I was in the hospital in February, and I asked the nurse how much it would cost to drain a subungual hematoma. Nobody knew!
Maybe it would've been free; maybe it would've cost $1,000 - it definitely doesn't feel good to decline a procedure because you have no idea how much it'll cost.
Which warm intros should I ask for? There are ~1,000 companies in my ideal customer profile. I've got ~500 friends who I'd feel comfortable asking for warm intros, and say these friends each have ~500 friends. After deduplicating, that's ~100,000 second-degree connections, some of whom are decision-makers at companies I'd like to sell to.
I'd want someone to go through my LinkedIn/Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/etc., and tell me something along the lines of: "Ben might know decision-makers at Companies A, B, C, D, and E." And, conversely, I'd like to know all the possible warm introductions that could lead me to Company A (e.g. "Ben, Max, and Jennifer could possibly introduce you to Alice, Bob, and Cameron at Company A").
All of this information is available to me; it's just a total O(N^2) pain to clean and aggregate it. Like, I can certainly spend an hour listening to podcasts and looking through Ben's LinkedIn connections, Facebook friends, Instagram followers - and seeing if any of them are COOs at CPG brands. But I'll run out of podcasts eventually, and then it's not a very high-leverage use of my time to repeat that process for Max, Jennifer, Nate, Christy, et al.
My dad's in the environmental field too, and that sounds about right. He spent about 20 years working as a jack-of-all-trades-CTO-type guy for a Western Widget Company, made a six figure salary, and was home every day by 5 PM. I know a lot of my friends' finance-sector parents didn't get to spend nearly as much time with their kids. There's a lot of very good advice in this article.
"I want you to think of landing page optimization from the perspective of desire:
Conversion = Desire (Increase this) - Labor (Decrease this) - Confusion (Decrease this)
It's less work to reduce a visitor's labor and confusion than to increase desire."
And here's our landing page: https://www.loopsupport.com/
My co-founder and I are both technical. For the first year of our company - as we built and sold things - we were constantly thinking "damn, life would sure be a lot easier if we had a killer idea. We would pay millions for an idea that we could execute on."
It's super important. Everyone has ideas, but most ideas are frankly not that great. Our ideas certainly weren't.
Then we found a better idea, got some traction, etc. Life's good. But if great ideas truly were a dime a dozen, we would've had much more fun in 2016 :)
Furthermore, if you take on a co-founder, here's what you get: one founder can focus on building the product, while the other founder focuses on figuring out what variation of the product is most needed by the outside world. It is very difficult for one person to do both. These require two fairly different skillsets, and both benefit from having technical experience - the former for obvious reasons; the latter because it's much easier to know what's buildable if you've built stuff before.
You can also hide posts from your bitcoin friends and your boring VC friends ;)
Even the best apps have two unknowns - 1) you don't know if it's going to be useful, and 2) you don't know how to use that app; you need to learn how it works. The former issue can be obviated by word-of-mouth praise, but it's soooo tough to get over the latter.
Like you I am a startup founder, which probably means that we are both pathological novelty-seekers when it comes to tech. And yet... I worked at an amazing B2C startup for two years and, to be completely honest, I never really got into the habit of using the product daily. The app is targeted at my demo and I didn't use it daily.
That's why they say that the crux of building a great B2C company (e.g. an app) lies in changing the public's consumption habits. It's tough, and it seems like such an impenetrable problem. I have a lot of admiration for B2C founders.
Our attitude was to work on something, anything, no matter how stupid. Which requires a pretty deep font of enthusiasm - it's not easy to get people excited about a self-consciously ridiculous idea. Take the startup seriously, but be willing to drop it if a better idea comes along. Here's what we worked on in 2016:
- Retro-Zine: subscription service for Playboy magazines from the '60s and '70s
- Fruit Mistakes (https://twitter.com/fruitmistakes): pre-sliced fruit subscription for startups
- Rat Dog Capital: trying to buy friends' lifestyle SaaS businesses
- Panel Ninja v1: admin panels as a service (think a SaaSified version of https://github.com/sferik/rails_admin)
- Panel Ninja v2: productivity analytics for enterprise customer support teams
Thanks to YC, Panel Ninja v2 eventually turned into Loop Support, our current startup. We're solving a real problem now (customer support as a service for high-RPU B2C companies [1]) - and like you guys, we had very little to show after a year in the woods.
All the same, I'm really glad that my co-founder and I spent a year eating quail and manna - we got really good at working with each other in a lower-stakes, lower-stress environment. Like training wheels and flight simulators. So don't get discouraged :)
[1] If you work at one of these companies, you're likely stressing out over holiday customer support. 1) Get back to work! And 2) I would love to help! My contact info is in my HN profile.
To me, it makes Dropbox seem like a place where people are encouraged to care about their craft!
Whenever I'm seriously considering purchasing an enterprise B2B product, I mostly know what they do before visiting their website. I've heard of them already, either through word of mouth, or by explicitly asking friends for recommendations. I suspect that I'm not too different from most purchasers.
If a company's targeting a landing page for someone like me, perhaps they shouldn't optimize for clarity; they should optimize for signaling reliability. So, the "Web 20.17 parallax-ed boots[t]rap-ed responsive home page" serves a purpose - it reminds me of all the other Web 20.17... B2B services I've happily used in the past.
I'm probably ascribing way too much significance to the semiotics of B2B homepages [1]. But I find it tough to believe that (e.g.) Optimizely hasn't, well, optimized their homepage for something.
[1] Also, take what I say with a huge grain of salt. My business' homepage needs a lot of work...