tommizzle

Location: London, willing to relocate, Full Time.

Resume: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ut1wm0n1nvrwlzj/Tom%20Layfield%20-...

Contact: me at tommizzle dot com

About: Product Manager and ex-startup founder. In my most recent role, I lead Product for a small SaaS startup. See my resume for more details.

Location: London, willing to relocate, Full Time.

Resume: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ut1wm0n1nvrwlzj/Tom%20Layfield%20-...

Contact: me at tommizzle dot com

About: Product Manager and ex-startup founder with 4 years of experience. In my most recent role, I lead Product for a small SaaS startup. See my resume for more details.

Really? Assessing demand before diving into app development is considered a bad thing?

coincidental

What problem does this solve that Quora doesn't? Seems like you might have a hard time competing.

SimplyBusiness

FULL TIME (London)

Front End Dev, Senior Java Dev, Senior Ruby Dev

http://www.simplybusiness.co.uk/about-us/careers/

Our business is now at an exciting new stage of its life, as it looks to increase its rate of customer growth further, build a strong recognisable brand profile, and develop a comprehensive customer contact strategy to deliver incremental revenue from its growing customer base.

We are building an innovative and dynamic culture around Agile. Our view and culture is web, not insurance. You will take part in shaping the future direction of this business from both a technology and cultural perspective, while helping to architect, design and refactor our systems.

The company has a dynamic team of 50 people in London and a passionate customer care team of 100 based in Northampton.

Salary is commensurate with experience. Excellent flexible benefits package including private health insurance, life assurance and season ticket loan.

Email careers [at] simplybusiness.co.uk with your CV/Resume and an explanation as to why you'd want to work here. Make sure you mention HN in your email!

We have the relationships with the merchants, the users don't. We take a small cut of each sale.

I launched the beta of my app in mid-November, although I must admit I did start mid-October so I'm hoping I still qualify!

I decided to build a revenue generating URL shortener. This was one of the first full projects where I basically did everything myself - research, design, development etc, which was a bit frustrating a times. It's ridiculous how unproductive my design days were compared to my development days, but I guess I'm just going against the grain there (I'd be interested to know how many people have 'mastered' both design & development.) That said, I learned quite a lot about the whole process, so definitely a good result.

I decided to launch before a lot of the esential functionality was complete (conversions, payments etc) just to get a feel for what people wanted, and most importantly if it was worth persuing the idea further. I'd probably do the same again next time, although I must admit I felt a bit helpless in the first week of launch when bugs were being uncovered/features were being requested and I was still working on the core.

I'm now onto marketing my app with my business partner. The market we're trying to is obviously insanely saturated, so it's a little frustrating at times, but I'm super motivated to get this out so lets hope we get some traction sometime soon :)

The URL of the app is http://shrtn.co

We're currently working on a REST based API with authentication. Release should be in within the next two weeks.

We made a concious decision to keep the revenue share margins under wraps, but rest assured it is - and always will be - in the users favour.

There is currently a very basic api in place @ http://shrtn.co/api/*your-url*

Custom domain names are a great idea. Thanks for the feedback!

At the moment most of the merchants are added via CPA networks, so the dev time is fairly minimal. I expect this will change when we exhaust all of the top merchants on the affiliate networks and go looking for more 'premium' merchants.

There's no location detection just yet, but it does work with .com/ca/co.uk, you just have to put the relevant URL in the first place.

I used to be a confidence/game coach a couple of years ago, and a common theme would be that socially awkward people generally had a higher tolerance to rejection, and vice versa for more socially 'lubricated' people. In my eyes this was down to socially awkward people's lack of understanding of the whole social matrix (e.g. social norms, how you should act etc.) The catch-22 was that as they faced more rejections - and more importantly more interactions - their confidence & social skills improved, and their rejections started to hurt a lot more.

What I'm trying to get at is that in my experience the actual getting rejected part doesn't really help on it's own. Sure, it's great to understand that getting rejected doesn't matter, but beyond that the only thing that is really helping you are the skills you're learning along side the rejection. So in my student's case, a much more productive thing for them to do was to throw themselves into more challenging social situations.

The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur by Mike Michalowicz. Only about a third of the way in, but it's awesome so far.

Thanks for the feedback! Interesting idea about not calling it a shortener. I'll have a think about possible alternatives :)

Sure - It isn't aimed at professional affiliate marketers for sure, but even JoeNobody might get a sale every now and again, so it still could attract that user base.

Nope - don't need to sign up to anything except shrtn itself. Whenever a sale is made via your link then your account will be credited with the appropriate commission.

In my eyes the value proposition is that people can replace their usual URL shortener with shrtn, and potentially earn money without having to sign up to multiple affiliate schemes etc.

Completely Agree with the exercise part of this - I exercise before work most days, and it's unbelievable how much of a difference it makes. I also try to go for a walk around lunchtime rather than staying inside to eat.

In terms of diet, I try to eat smallish meals every 3-3.5 hours. A nice mix of protein, complex carbs, vegetables, fruit, healthy fats like nuts etc works for me. I found the best way to avoid eating unhealthy stuff was simply not to buy it - sounds stupid but it's crazy how long it took me to do.

Also you should apply 'cursor:pointer;' so people know that it's a clickable link.

Hah - The things James Bond has done for our country...

From the comments:

"I don’t find any companies interesting. They’re just companies. They make things, move things, process things, sell things–bleh, no thank you."

Pretty obvious that he's lacking passion for the jobs he's applying for. Not really that suprising that he had such a hard time obtaining one in the end.

Best Google Doodle of all time?

Wow, so people are getting upset that content is causing a greater emotional response, with a direct influence on the graphic's creator? To me that seems as if the designers and marketers are doing their job properly.

I really don't 'get' this anti-infographic movement - What's the difference between text-based content and graphical content? Gaming sites like Digg etc is always going to happen regardless of the format.