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Jake Gold is "staunch". After 4 years, no longer anonymous on Hacker News.
- anigbrowl 15y agoA simple but seductive business model, and one whose utility is seen on here regularly...not to mention an impressive domain acquisition. Lots of luck!
- staunch 15y agoThank you. We worked so hard to pick a problem interesting enough, and big enough, to keep ourselves interested in the long term. Now we just have to continue to work our asses off.
- enduser 15y agoI went to your site and signed in with Twitter. Now it is asking me for my email address and to choose a password. If I wanted that, I would have chosen the "sign up with e-mail" option. Could you fulfill the promise of single sign-on?
- staunch 15y agoThe problem is Twitter doesn't provide first name, last name, and email like Facebook does. I'm going to try splitting on space for name and people change it if it's wrong. Won't work for many names, but should make it a little better.
- SwellJoe 15y agoFor what it's worth, I couldn't see anything to click other than "Sign up" or "Sign in", so I closed the tab. I don't sign up to sites before I play with them. So, if I can't tinker with something before giving up anonymity, I can't imagine I'll ever use Get.com.
- staunch 15y agoI hear you, and I'm soo conflicted about it. On the one hand it's made it so a lot more people try out the site and have a good experience. On the other hand it drives a lot of people away instantly. We did make it so you can sign up with email (not just Twitter/Facebook) and we made the form as simple as possible. We're still not sure what's best overall. I'm positive we'll take down the sign up wall at some point though.
- anigbrowl 15y agoIf it's like a store, you've got to let people browse the merchandise before you can make a sale. My PII has value to me, and also to you - so tempt me a bit first, then ask for it.
- staunch 15y agoI fundamentally agree with you that that is the right approach. We'll get there. Thanks for the feedback.
- smokinn 15y agoYou can sort of get past that. I didn't want to sign up either until I could see what it was I was signing up for. If you click the "Learn more" link you get brought to the about page but it has the proper header that lets you navigate the site.
- ktsmith 15y agoThe reason I picked twitter is because I didn't want to provide that information.
- staunch 15y agoTotally understandable. We're doing the recently-controversial thing and encouraging real names (or at least first name last initial) to encourage trust. Since people's biggest concern with getting product recommendations is that they're biased it's a big plus on our site. I know it's super unpopoular position for some, but Yelp has been doing it for a very long time with great success.
- ktsmith 15y agoIt might make more sense to simply remove twitter as an option for authentication. It doesn't provide the information you are looking for and it's confusing to someone that's signing up to be prompted for name, email and a password after authorizing the app.
- staunch 15y agoWell I just added the feature where it tries to fill in first/last name so you only have to do email/password, but yeah, it is definitely not saving a ton of time right now. We're going to do some more Twitter integration stuff though, so it might still be worthwhile.
- tirrellp 15y agoIm interested to know the story of how you acquired your domain name (and at what price).
- staunch 15y agoWe spent the first couple months (while we were raising money, getting the company incorporated, working on prototypes, etc) emailing dozens of domain owners. Fell in love with a bunch of different ones and even met in person with some people to negotiate. They all fell through over price/terms. We ended up working out a deal with the owner for Get.com. We're not 100% clear on whether it's wise to disclose all the details yet, but we definitely will as some point. Aaron Patzers idea's behind acquiring Mint.com were a big inspiration for us. I even grabbed him at a conference so I could get his opinion. We knew we wanted to build a real consumer brand and believe that a great domain makes that a lot more likely.
- 83457 15y agoHow do you plan to handle the quality of answers over time as products change? For example someone asks for recommendations on the best android phone. Today there may be a couple best answer but in the near future those best answers would likely be different.
- staunch 15y agoWe're still testing this out with real data, but it looks like it's actually quite useful to have duplicates in the database. The key is how to return results to someone coming along later. We're working on that now. We committed upfront to not letting the site become overrun with "Yahoo Answers" style duplicated/low quality stuff. We'd much rather delete useless stuff than get an extra page view or two.
- joshu 15y agocongrats! i like three-letter domain names.
- staunch 15y agoThink how much less typing we'll have to do over a few years!
- jrockway 15y agoIsn't it six letters, or do you not have to type .com anymore? (If I type "get" into Chrome, I get the jquery docs. Heh.)
- rokhayakebe 15y agoWrite get than do CTRL + ENTER
- joshu 15y agobackstory is i spent a few months getting a domain for my own project and ended up with a three letter (not including the .com thing)
- joshu 15y agoget is a neat product. similar target space that we're working on. they made a variety of design decisions that are good ones and we are still working through. (categories, leaderboards) i didn't really love the autotweet when i signed up, though :( good luck!
- staunch 15y agoReally sorry about the unexpected tweet! It actually shows you that page before it tweets, but I checked logs and you were on an iPhone (which we have barely tested, to our shame), so it might have been easy to miss. Thanks for checking out the site Josh. Like I said on Twitter, I'm a fan for a long time, so "neat" is high praise! Good luck on Jig as well.
- joshu 15y agoEntirely possible. It's hard to build a site AND do a mobile version.
- nikcub 15y agoI signed up in a desktop browser. Please uncheck the 'follow' and 'tweet' as default options, I completely missed them as well. It isn't worth the extra users you get to have users cursing your name out loud
- bitops 15y agoWho the heck is Jake Gold? (seriously)
- staunch 15y agoIt's just my real name, I'm not actually anybody you should know :-) Actually there is a famous "Jake Gold" now though, a Canadian Idol judge apparently. He's my Michael Bolton.