iseff

Goodbill | Full Stack Engineer | Anywhere in the US | Remote | Full-time

Goodbill saves people money on hospital bills by identifying billing errors and inflated charges. We're a small, but growing, team and recently raised a seed round from Maveron, Founder's Co-op, Liquid 2, and some incredible angels. We currently work distributed across Pacific and Eastern timezones.

If you like complex problems, lots of data, doing something that's never been done before, changing people's lives, and want to tackle one of the hardest problems in medical billing, you're in luck. Benefits include competitive salary, generous equity, unlimited PTO, flexible work hours (we're all parents), 100% of medical/dental/vision, and a home office stipend or a co-working desk, whichever floats your boat most.

Tech stack: Rails 7, Hotwire

You can email me (https://www.linkedin.com/in/iseff) at [email protected] or apply here https://www.goodbill.com/jobs/apply.

Goodbill | Full Stack Engineer | Anywhere in the US | Remote | Full-time

Goodbill saves people money on hospital bills by identifying billing errors and inflated charges. We're a small, but growing, team and recently raised a seed round from Maveron, Founder's Co-op, Liquid 2, and some incredible angels. We currently work distributed across Pacific and Eastern timezones.

If you like complex problems, lots of data, doing something that's never been done before, changing people's lives, and want to tackle one of the hardest problems in medical billing, you're in luck. Benefits include competitive salary, generous equity, unlimited PTO, flexible work hours (we're all parents), 100% of medical/dental/vision, and a home office stipend or a co-working desk, whichever floats your boat most.

Tech stack: Rails 7, Hotwire

You can email me (https://www.linkedin.com/in/iseff) at [email protected] or apply here https://www.goodbill.com/jobs/apply.

There's almost no clearer indication that the speed of business is quickening at an amazing pace. In the scooter world, the land grab is on, and everyone is looking at ride sharing as the obvious analog, which means raise a lot of money, expand to new cities, and earn market share... quickly.

Whether a couple (or all) of these companies flame out remains to be seen, and is probably likely. But there's also likely to be a winner in this category. And the winner is likely to be worth a lot of money. These companies likely don't "deserve" their valuations based on current metrics like revenue, but the market potential is huge, the growth is high, and the capital requirements are large... so investors seem more than willing to make bets.

Speed is one of the most underemphasized traits of a great VC for founders. While fundraising, a quick yes is the best answer, but a quick no is the second best. Investors who follow this are truly founder friendly: it's easy to stall and wait for more data, but it's actually helping the entrepreneur to just say no. Those are the investors I want to pitch again later.

It's no surprise founders rank speed highly while investors don't. Find investors who care about speed and you'll find a great partner.

This is correct. The vast majority of funds have at least 1% committed by GPs. This is what Fred means when he writes, "The partners at USV make up a sizeable portion of our funds."

We do a lot of crawling various data sources. We spent over 3 years building a really great infrastructure to do this well. This is how we can present rank tracking for you and your competitors over time. The last time I checked, I think the number was actually over 500k... I should update that page!

I'm a founder and CEO at MobileDevHQ[1], a startup focused on App Store optimization. We have been doing this work for almost a year and a half now and have built powerful tools for understanding the App Store, including keyword research and market/niche finders.

Appsleak looks interesting, congrats on launching! The app ecosystem needs more tools to help it mature and advance.

To those of you interested in understanding markets/niches and keywords in the app stores, it is important to note a couple main points:

First, there are large differences between Google/other web search volume and search volume in the App Store. At MobileDevHQ, we do lots of work to uncover those differences and provide realistic pictures of what is happening in the app stores themselves. For example, the volume on Google for "puzzles" likely has little relation to the volume in the app stores.

Also, competition as defined by number of search results is a great start to understanding the difficulty it will take for you to rank highly for a particular term, but it doesn't go far enough. At the end of the day, it is not just about number of results, but also the factors that the app stores use to rank results, and how "entrenched" those factors are in current results. You can only begin to understand this with lots of data, which is why we have been collecting this for years now and have even released a tool we call Sonar to help developers and marketers understand when an App Store changes its search algorithm.

There are tons of things I could riff on about App Store search, but those are the 2 most common thigs I see people missing, so I wanted to make sure I mentioned those in particular.

[1] http://www.mobiledevhq.com

Great point. Engineers sometimes like to see the broken in the world. Leaders need to have the tendency to see the possibilities. Emotional Intelligence is so, so hard (and something I struggle with consistently).

Totally true. In our case, it was after our seed round, once we were able to start selling and we felt as though we have proved the initial idea as being worthwhile to customers.

When that happened, we started hiring, and me coding turned into more of a detriment than an advantage. It was approximately a team size of 7-8 for us/e.

Is it just me, or is half the craziness of this that Jeff Bezos took off 3 weeks to be at sea?

Certainly agree with this. Understanding where your customers are, what they're reading, and how to get in front of them is the most important factor.

But, after that, finding the most authoritative sources within those markets is crucial. So, when people say TechCrunch is irrelevant for mobile/tech startups, well, that's just wrong (at least for us).

Thanks! We've been trying to be very transparent recently, so we'll do our best to do follow-ups and stay transparent. :)

We've been working on a similar idea for a few months now, and have some pretty solid data and sophisticated algorithms which are now giving us quite reasonable insights. We support iOS App Store and Android Market. We want to really focus on how to get better at organic distribution within the app stores (e.g. what keywords should I focus on based on my competition and, most importantly, where the search volume is in the app stores).

TechCrunch wrote about it a couple weeks ago and since then we've been on a tear (thousands of signups representing tens of thousands in monthly revenue): http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/28/aso-app-store-optimization-...

App Store Optimization (ASO) is a big deal today, and is going to be a HUGE deal shortly. The growth of mobile is just too much, too fast for search not to become massively important. You can see Apple bet on this fact with its acquisition of Chomp recently.

Even more broadly, there are too many players in the mobile app ecosystem who are searching for ways to help app marketers get distribution through various paid means, but not enough (virtually none) who are searching for ways to help app marketers get distribution through organic (unpaid) means. Yet this is exactly where the vast majority of downloads come from.

We want to focus on the organic side of app distribution: search, rankings, social/sharing, earned media, web landing pages, etc. All things that help app marketers promote their apps without paying per download. Marketing channels that really scale. It's the SEO/social/viral channels for mobile.

Check out our product at: http://www.mobiledevhq.com/aso

And always feel free to email me with any questions, ever: [email protected]