oisino

Wouldn’t index to much on Apple just meeting with Bing as a sign of Bing being a realistic solution. If I was apple I would off course try to create the sense Bing is viable alternative to extract as much value from Google in negotiations

Not sure how much this makes google look non monopolistic. Doesn’t seem like a competitive market when Apple passes on Bing 7 times over a decade.

I have interviewed and hired a couple engineers from Invison over the years. Internally they saw Figma coming but they got stuck in legacy tech dept. They did the cardinal sine of trying to rewrite big parts of their tech from scratch instead of shipping quickly in the direction they needed to go. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

My current sass startup I bootstrap to 20 million arr in 4 years before raising money. This my third software company bootstrapping to millions in arr. Shoot me a message down to give you whatever advice I can and intro you to other people who have been on this journey. Gmail account is Oconnoroisin

You should be charging a % of revenue as people scale. That way you align with taking value as more value is driven. If you look at companies like Shopify over half of their revenue comes from processing fees. Maybe price is a good place to start to get people in but probably not best model long run.

10 years ago out of college I helped set up some microfinance banks in Coffee producing communities in Honduras. At first your taken aback that people are paying 40%+ annual interest rates on small loans for these banks. But when your in the communities talking to people you realize their opportunity costs are like 400%+. Example is in most coffee producing communities in Central America farmers have to sell their products before they even grow them for 4-10x bellow the market rates if they just waited and banded together as co-op. Their issue is no access to financial products and they are substance farmers with no option but sell to coyotes to get money for food. In this world micro finance is a game changer in their quality of lives for it creates options

Public reputation is a funny thing its not binary and its lagging. By the time people tell you stuff to your face usually its way too late for they have been building their beliefs around who you are way before.

Curious signaling as a VC to be involved in something so negatively publicly. The best companies/ entrepreneurs are super picky on who to raise money from and I have already heard a couple companies mention this as a reason they didn't talk to Khosla.

Curious why Y Combinator doesn't open this up to all startup companies just not the small % that went through YC already.

Talking to people behind self driving car companies the issue is not the self driving technology or laws it's more infrastructure around extremely low latency internet to make self driving cars work in the general wild. This article assumes mass adoption really quickly but who knows how quickly our general infrastructure will be updated to enable this especially in third world countries that are ramping up in traditional cars consumption but are notorious for bad mass scale infrastructure (Brazil/ India).

The fact that airbnb is negative for rental rates and hurts locals is Airbnb biggest existential threat. In reality renters outnumber home owners that do Airbnb thus when it comes to regulations people will vote for more regulation long term.

Personal referrals that this person was amazing. One huge challenge of remote team members is training is a lot harder. You end up hiring very experienced people due to this and not junior talent. Helpscout another remote team has a bunch of articles on how they have this issue also

I run a mainly remote team with over 30 people that also has a small office in LA. I am blown away with the level of competition for remote roles we hire for vs a role in our LA office. On average job boards will drive 5x more candidates for the remote role and the overall level of candidates is way higher. My last remote dev job post had 300+ candidates and a customer success role has 700+ and this all from one post on Stackoverflow or WeWorkRemotely. That said we might be outlier for we pay really well and have a remote first culture. The overall lesson I got though is their a lot more qualified people are looking to work remotely than their is awesome remote jobs.

Curious how Sam would overcome his lack of relative charisma vs people in politics to win. Paul graham essay on this is more than ever true in the world of social media http://www.paulgraham.com/pow.html

Having friends who have had startups that relied on contractors the death blow is being forced to treat contractors as employees. The mass market model doesn't work when you have to charge 40% more just to cover the additional costs in benefits, overtime, taxes, hr etc. link to good article of friend who experienced this in his startup https://medium.com/@kaleazy/theres-no-magic-in-venture-backe... So the real question from all this bad press will it sway states and cities to start forcing uber to make this change? If so it will definitely hamper who they can service and their valuation.

I was at a dinner last year for the Shopify conference and a dev asked Tobi about a new update to the Rails templating engine and why Shopify hadn't adopted it yet. I was blown away to hear Tobi talking how he personally figured out the extra hardware costs of implementing the update. He is one of the few tech CEOs I am confident has balanced the costs regarding sticking with Rails. That said would love to hear his thoughts on this.

I run ReCharge we are made up of 22 people that are all remote. From my experience weworkremotely.com has the best remote jobs. Companies that are actually completely remote post their. These companies usually pay the best but even more importantly they value remote employees more and give you challenging things to work on. If anyone anyone is looking check out our posts their were always hiring great people.

Doesnt need any of these things for it has: 1. Huge loyal fan base built up since 90s 2. People post their Pokemon Go experiences naturally on FB/ Snapchat/ Twitch due to the visual nature of the content (i.e. Pokemon are cool looking when imposed on real world things) 3. When you see people walking weird with their phones out you automatically know its Pokemon Go. Great constant real world promotion

As someone who has built a lot of saas products off Shopify this makes total sense. Square, Amazon, and PayPal have already gone down this path and proved its highly profitable. I would be curious if Shopify is white labelling a banks offering or if they are making loans a core competency. If the later then its really dangerous for this area is starting to become regulated and is shifting quickly. This risk is one the reasons Square moved away from doing it themselves to actually using third party banking partners to make loans. Also as many of those in the industry already know large loan providers are starting to anticipate a shift in the economy and are moving to invest in collection services rather than sales. If you don't have a competency in making good loans/ collections then you can get in trouble in a down market. That said I do love how companies like Shopify are figuring ways to empower more entrepreneurs to start and grow their businesses. I personally would have though it would have been better for them to open store processing data to qualified third party lenders and provide them an easy way to evaluate, price, and sell loans. This competition would have driven down the price of loans for businesses and Shopify could focus on making great software and just taking a cut off an area that isn't their core focus. Similar model to what has worked for them in other areas outside their core focus (i.e. apps/ theme/ experts market).

I help run ReCharge a billing platform for ecommerce stores. We have thousands of ecommerce stores using a variety of processors. From their experiences I have seen the following.

If you process less than 80k a month: Use Stripe their API is the best and they just innovate faster than everyone else. Love these guys!

If you process 80k - 250k a month: At this level support becomes a bigger factor and unfortunately Braintree just kills Stripe on this side. The below forum post alone shows how much people hate Stripe support. I know their fixing this area but its really hard for medium size business to work with a processor without phone support. Braintree literally picks up the phone in minutes while sometimes Stripe takes days to get back. This is killer when your dealing with thousands of charges a month.

https://ecommerce.shopify.com/c/payments-shipping-fulfilment...

If you process 250k+ a month: I hate to say this but I would seriously look at Authorize or one of the traditional processors. They just provide the best rates and you have to factor how much the cost savings is worth with the increase in implementation pain.

I want to emphasize my feedback changes depending on the type of business your in and how quickly you need innovate/ change your processing. Stripe is really moving fast on new innovations which is awesome. But you have to realize basic merchant processing is a commodity so your paying a premium for non commoditized things like a great API. Also things like a great API are becoming commoditized. Stripe is smart and their launching new non commoditized features like Atlas/ Platform Functionality/ ACH etc. The only thing you have to ask yourself do you need these new innovations or just traditional merchant processing.

The fact Apple Music has 1/3 of the paying customers that Spotify has already shows you the power of distribution. The ability for them to build it into their on boarding flow for all new iphone purchases gives them an amazing edge especially in upcoming markets like China.

I built 6 apps for another ecosystem (Shopify https://apps.shopify.com/partners/socialproof-it) and had very much the same experience as you. We did the low fidelity approach like you and also found that has diminishing returns as the app market matures. Once we started focusing on one app for Shopify https://apps.shopify.com/shopify-recurring-payments we found the returns quickly dwarfed what we made before. For it allowed us to be the best for thats all we did. I would recommend not focusing on two apps but just doing one really well. Doing multiple apps means your mediocre in different things takes all your energy to be the best. PS: Love the idea your going to focus on Apple Watch no one is the market leader/expert so great place to be.

Not the sexiest stock but as someone who has built their company off Shopify I cant say I have worked with a better product/ company in my life. The way they handle third party developers, designers, and stores is exceptional. They really get what it takes to build a platform. I have no doubt thats Tobi vision of building the platform for all commerce will come true. As a developer building off Shopify excited to see what they do next.

I did this successfully with my agency http://bootstrapheroes.com/ https://experts.shopify.com/socialproof-it we grew from a team of two to 10+. The biggest lesson I learned is if you want to create an agency you need to become one of the top experts in a specific area that is relatively new and growing like crazy. In new areas their is no experts so very easy in the beginning to become one or fake it until you are one. For me it was becoming one of the top Shopify app development experts. If I had tried to start an agency in a mature market like development for Magento/ Drupal sites I would have had a way harder time for their is lots of agencies with great track records in these areas.

Host Gator gets around this by putting a fake coupon in its signup flow to make you think coupon has been applied https://www.evernote.com/shard/s151/sh/0189a90d-cf03-426e-88...

Huge pain point!!!! Waste to much time resizing images.

Great article.. Setting up CDNs in China is extremely hard without government support and local business being lead investors.

You guys are doing amazing!! Just wish your % cost on transactions was competitive with some of the big guys.. At a certain processing level I am forced to work with dinosaurs that take weeks to integrate but in the long run save me allot of money.. I am sure your high % is temporary cant wait to one day use your service on all my projects

Great to see tools coming that help beginners learn programming.

super helpful article