filip01

We're remote and side project friendly. Send me an email, filip at aevy dot com.

Hi Davies! Founder of Aevy here. Incredibly sorry for this. I used your name and image as an example when sketching the front page internally. I intended to replace you before going live, but completely forgot! I understand that you're upset, will get this fixed and deployed as soon as possible. Again, sorry!

Could someone explain why "signals of growth", or as in this case "momentum", would be relevant to anyone? I understand that actual growth stats might be difficult to get hold of, but I think I'd rather have 200 of those than 200 000 "weekly growth of web traffic, mobile downloads, inbound links, employees, and social media".

Agree - to assume based on analogy seems risky. Taking the Musk "first principle" road and then navigating based on feedback the "lean" way is what makes the most sense to me.

I'm guessing: There will always be people who think they know why your idea won't work. It's in the nature of the game (http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html etc). Founders who take these people's opinions seriously are more likely to give up.

Agree. He seems to struggle with how to interpret the "want" part of of "make something people want". The point of this sentence as I've learned the hard way through sales, pain points etc is that "want" and "should want" are not the same things.

Even though Francis Pedraza's intuition says that people should want something, it's not certain that they actually do (and will pay for it). For example, my intuition tells me it'll be really difficult to build a business around his Everest app but if there's something to learn from Lean it's that intuition rarely is sufficient. (And I'm sure the Everest team proves my intuition wrong with good growth and feedback).

Though, in general, I love visionary startups and founders but I don't think that a grand vision should be an excuse for not validating the value and growth hypothesis.

And of course he has a good point in that startups often need many iterations to find the exact product that their customers want and since these iterations can be painful it's very helpful, if not necessary, for founders to be vision driven.

You might have a point there :)

Alright, perhaps ordinary web cams on the faces of the employees involved? Just seeing the hard work and stress in their eyes would be pretty soothing. That might be an idea for any site: "We're currently down, but here are the faces in real-time of our engineers trying to fix it".

I'm just joking. (But who knows, maybe people would take lighter on the downtime if they could see the team working really hard to fix it).

Wouldn't it be a good idea for Github to set up a video + sound stream from their office when these things occur? I for one would watch. Can't really work anyway (at least that's what I persuade myself to think).

Why?

It's bizarre that this type of essential advice is news to so many founders (including me). It's understandable from the VCs perspective though. Since they're mostly in it for huge exits it's rational for them to prefer companies with zero revenue, but good traction, over profitable (or close to profitable) companies with the same traction. Simply because the close to profitable company will have much more leverage than the zero-revenue one. In fact, a zero-revenue company who has been aiming at a VC Series A will often be forced to accept the term sheet at one or another VC whereas the profitable or close to profitable always can downsize, get a loan etc if they're not comfortable with the terms they can get at a VC. All this is because profitability isn't to the VC that much of a hint of long-term mega success as some growth metrics might be.

Related to this, it's a shame that the VC terms are often not well understood among first-time founders. If they were, I'm sure more people would try the revenue-route.

For a founder, it all boils down to how much this possible revenue will harm overall growth. In some cases (Instagram etc) it really does. In most other cases, it does not (or very little). But the zero-revenue route is easy to decide on since it's less work. "Yeah, let's take sales and all that later on" is easy to say especially when endorsed by the VC industry.

Put this in your user key bindings and then you can auto-indent with cmd+shift+g:

{ "keys": ["command+shift+g"], "command": "reindent", "args": {"single_line": false}}

They probably interpret your use of "emotional" as "irrationally emotional".

Agree, Github Issues allows this as well and once you get used to it this upload process seems a bit complicated.

Would be great if you solved it. I think you can just create a made up organisation to test. Think it's pretty common to not only work on individual private repos. If you would like to email me when/if you're done it would be appreciated!

OT:

Your hotfix project actually seems interesting. I tried it out but it couldn't find any of my repos since they're tied to an organization I own (via my personal github account) and not directly to my personal account. Am I doing anything wrong?

Great post but author really should have said up-front that this text was a way to promote his new project "willthisfly.net". Probably doesn't affect the value but it does affect the credibility. Is an outsider's opinion valuable for startups? Maybe, but as founder of an outsider-opinion-service, you're biased, which is fine, but I would want to have that in mind reading the article.

And some feedback to willthisfly.net:

For it to have a chance to fly it need (more obvious) incentives for people to comment. Something along the lines of having to comment on three projects before you can submit your own perhaps?

What does this mean? That Hans (in this case) needs to be investing his personal assets in order to get a E2?

Great, thanks. Do you know of a more formal way of expressing this "flip"? (Don't get any good Google hits).

Thanks a lot! Could you perhaps explain this a bit more in detail:

"The investment has to be made by the people applying for the visa."

Let's say that we're a 2 year old company in a treaty country (EU) with ~$400k in the bank, founders have ~50% of the company. Not having a US company yet. Would this situation require some tweaks before applying for a E2 visa?

Also:

"Your employees can also move to the US under this visa."

Under which circumstances can the (EU) employees transfer? The same time frame as the E2 holder? Would it be sufficient for only one of the two founders to get the E2 visa and let the other move as an employee?

I like the idea. Some feedback: I started filling out the form but once I realised there was ~10 input fields and not ~2 I just quit. Also, something tells me that you're more likely to actually deliver good matches if you make everything simpler. Not only will you be able to handle the data in a good way but you'll probably have more people join.

Why even verify their email address? It's already been done by Facebook?

Very impressive, but searching for Stockholm to "Somewhere warm", "any friday" gave me a list of cities and images but "no flights". Why? Is Stockholm not yet supported?

Exactly. Since he's not suggesting any other actual methods, IMO this is more of a sensationalist way of saying that startups should base their ideas within an area where the founder is comfortable and knowledgeable.

Really love it when I stumble upon a new service that isn't only cool but also really useful. It's not common for me to add an app that I'll actually use daily or even weekly. It's also rare to see so many App Store reviews actually being lyrical.

Some (UI/UX) thoughts for you Bradford:

- Someone said that Flipboard looks better, I disagree. Flipboard (as well as Summly and others) might be a bit more "sexy" but Prismatic has better functionality + algorithm. Your funnel is really great.

- The flashing Facebook/Twitter/Google buttons are really annoying. It also makes me think that I'm accidentally hovering these buttons. Does this dramatically increase conversion?

- Someone mentioned here that your growth is not great (25K weekly). Do you think that only traditional sharing options will be enough to achieve growth corresponding to the goals this Series A indicates? I'm also thinking that maybe it would be smarter to focus on only one platform (i.e Facebook only) until you've figured out how to grow virally.

- The iPhone experience was much better than the desktop one. This may be because:

1. Your visual design is very different on desktop compared to iPhone. It's impossible to tell that it's the same service.

2. The desktop layout is confusing:

- The images are unnecessarily large (at least the really large ones)

- There's something about the font that's not great (take a look at Scala that the Stockholm/Berlin based Readmill is using)

- Seeing zero stars and comments on almost each article is a bit boring, it's not clear where the "home" button is (since it's located to the right)

- I can't see why there's such a distinction between "home" and "world news" - why not just get rid of "world news" and have a much more logical right menu

- "Your suggestions" in the right menu are great but it doesn't make sense to scroll horizontally.

Etc etc. (Should probably write you an email with screenshots + arrows instead...)

- The iPhone UI/UX has some flaws as well IMO. The menu is not always logical:

1. Since you've selected lots of topics in the funnel in order to add them to your affinity algorithm it's confusing that touching the suggestions in the menu takes me to a separate page instead of adding them. To add them, I apparently need to click the plus icon to the right. I'd suggest you to add an arrow to the left of each suggestion to solve this issue.

2. There's not a clear way to my "home" screen. "Home" is located under "Your activity" (why?!) and has some sub-categories; I'm still not sure why (in my case) Programming, Startups and The New York Times are located below the home-button.

3. The headlines are not too pretty (too bold/too big) and "Search" is slightly less bold which is not too nice (but obviously these are just details).

Well, thanks a lot for building a great service. :)

EDIT: Just saw that your designer Mikael is also a ~22yo designer from Stockholm, no wonder I'm a fan.

Yep: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/01/23/travel-like-the-1-top-10...

Aevy

FWIW: IAmA founder of a startup in Stockholm (sharing offices with Wrapp), AMA.

Do you play soccer? For someone with a real appreciation for the game, I'd say there's a huge difference between a trash/string ball and a proper soccer ball. Or maybe I'm just narrow minded.