matthaughey

This article isn't for you. It was written for people that have never soldered in their lives or built anything from parts.

I actually went 5V and it’s fine. I forgot to stress that in the post but I’ll update it.

I get that you both thought maybe I was soldering my own strips raw but the DIY in the title is about setting up your own strips, not just buying a bunch of LIFX or Hue strips.

This is rough back of the envelope calculations, but we only have 62k paid users, only about 12k come back every day, so subscriptions would need something like 25%-50% of the daily userbase paying, not just 2%.

My problem was that everything you need on that page is along the left-hand side. The number of contacts pre-selected is pretty small, and off to the right. I was breezing through this, trying to find old friends (and it worked! The first contact suggested was someone I've known for ten years), and I just missed that little number line on the upper right.

Ideally, it should throw up a warning for trying to add anything over maybe 50-100 accounts, like a simple "Are you sure Y/N?" before allowing you to continue adding that many.

I wish I took screenshots, but honestly my memory is I only saw six invites to review and in tiny 10px text below the "connect now" button was a thing saying (and also 1,132 more).

For what it's worth, a designer that works on this feature tweeted an apology and said they should add a warning, as it was way more common than intended.

Last I checked, about 400-500 had accepted. I put the blame squarely on me for not reading carefully, but also on LinkedIn for not warning me, but Google as well. Turns out Google has a group in your contacts for everyone you've ever emailed and it's at something like 6,000 for me, so I guess about 1/5th of those were on LinkedIn, who got invites.

Some of the invites went to people I'd banned from my sites for spamming, an old accountant I haven't talked to in ten years, and PR flacks I had arguments with over sending me press releases I didn't want. My LinkedIn account used to be a pretty well-curated list of people I'd actually interacted with in person before and done some business with, and now it's just a random hodge-podge of a bunch of internet strangers I crossed paths with at some point.

I mentioned that specifically because I've invested myself in a few startups and typically I only get 1% at most for sometimes much more money than what Ycombinator offers.