BobbyH

9 ms·

31.
by BobbyH 16y ago
Can't he use lean startup principles to launch with his existing device that offers an improvement over a cane, instead of raising $15 MM to offer a perfect product that lets blind people play tennis? If I were blind, I would surely pay tho
32.
by BobbyH 16y ago
Have you tried contacting the competitor and asking them nicely to stop? In my experience with this sort of thing, a polite call or email is most effective. If you email, make sure that what you wrote won't be embarrassing if they publish y
33.
by BobbyH 16y ago
You likely ran afoul of "voter ring detection": http://twitter.com/#!/paulg/status/22551773068 I think it works something like this. Say you and I are buddies and only upvote each other's articles. The voting ring algorithm thus flags us
34.
by BobbyH 16y ago
I would not mess around with CDs or Money Market Accounts to chase yield, because the returns from doing so are very low and it can be a distraction from the real business. This is particularly true now because rates are so low. For example
35.
by BobbyH 16y ago
> For some entrepreneurs, the toughest part of a pivot may be setting aside their personal convictions-and egos. "It's very hard as an entrepreneur to move away from your core idea," says Phumbhra, of Chegg. "But if your customers are t
36.
The Art of the Pivot(inc.com)
10 points by BobbyH 16y ago|1 comments
37.
by BobbyH 16y ago
Krugman's article seemed to be a relatively unbiased summary of an academic area called Optimal Currency Area: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimum_currency_area A "Currency Area" has benefits and drawbacks. The benefits are mostly microe
38.
by BobbyH 16y ago
Robert gave Andrew Warner of Mixergy some more details about his interview of pg in a 12/30/09 interview: http://mixergy.com/robert-greene-power-interview/ You can click through to read more, but the highlight for me was: "So, Paul Graham
39.
by BobbyH 16y ago
Their revenue model is: (A) one AdSense ad per page, and (B) rewriting URLs to append their own affiliate link (if an affiliate code does not currently exist). For the record, Delicious alternative Pinboard also has a revenue model, whereby
40.
by BobbyH 16y ago
DFP for Small Business is what was formerly known as Google Ad Manager. The first 90MM non-AdSense monthly impressions are free, and then you have to pay. To clarify, say you have 200 MM monthly pageviews, and you serve 3 ad impressions per
41.
by BobbyH 16y ago
> "I told him that if he did not go my way, I’d stop doing the programming work. He said if I did not go his way, he’d stop the staff from working." This quote struck me because it's a surefire sign that a project is probably going to f
42.
by BobbyH 16y ago
Here is the text of the link: Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.announce Followup-To: poster From: ti...@nxoc01.cern.ch (Tim Berners-Lee) Date: 20 Aug 91 01:54:41 GMT Local: Mon, Aug 19 1991 9:54 pm Subject: WorldWideWeb wide-area hypertext app ava
43.
by BobbyH 16y ago
pg: "There's a background process that runs every 45 seconds and picks a random loaded user to update the average of. Empirically, not more than every couple days, at best." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1875635 Also, pg posted the
44.
by BobbyH 16y ago
To clarify, $24.5 billion was Amazon's revenue in 2009. Net income was only 3.7% of that, or $902 million.
45.
by BobbyH 16y ago
My experience is that if you do not look like a white yuppie, cabs won't even stop for you to refuse service, especially at night. I once grew a goatee that made me look Hispanic, and I couldn't hail a cab at night to save my life. I was up
46.
by BobbyH 16y ago
Basecamp lets you link to messages, comments on messages, to-do items, etc. It has a robust per-project auth/permissions system. Other collaboration sites offer something similar. In general, when dealing with work that occurs via emails, i
47.
by BobbyH 16y ago
> With inflation, he was actually being paid less 10 years later. I looked this up and Neil Alan Smith's wages grew by 41% from 2001 to 2010, outpacing inflation of 23%. Inflation from Aug. 2001 to Aug. 2010 increased prices by 23% ( ht
48.
by BobbyH 16y ago
One thing the article does not mention is "breakage": "Breakage is a term used in accounting to indicate gift cards that have been sold but never redeemed. Revenue from breakage is almost entirely profit, since companies need not provide an
49.
by BobbyH 16y ago
Yeah, in fact, Steven Jay Gould wrote a great article on how "As Mickey became increasingly well behaved over the years, his appearance became more youthful. Measurements of three stages in his development revealed a larger relative head si
50.
by BobbyH 16y ago
The post makes a good point, but it does overlook the fact that the "Godfather of Anime", Osamu Tezuka ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osamu_Tezuka ) was heavily influenced by Walt Disney and American animation. For instance, the Wikipedia a
51.
by BobbyH 16y ago
Wordpress does this, but rather than serve the images from s3, it uses s3 to store the images and populate a self-hosted varnish cache: http://blog.apokalyptik.com/2007/10/10/so-you-wanna-see-an-i... This reduces the s3 bill by an order o
52.
by BobbyH 16y ago
He applied this CSS rule to all elements on the page: "letter-spacing:-0.1em !important;". This is why the page looks so cramped. He also applied this to the body text: "font:140% 'Inconsolata', monospace;" I presume the site looks good in
53.
by BobbyH 16y ago
Craigslist has manually screened every adult services post since May 2009. In a blog post last month, they noted: "before being posted each individual ad is reviewed by an attorney licensed to practice law in the US, trained to enforce crai
54.
by BobbyH 16y ago
Yeah, I agree. What I was trying to articulate is that this is a good example of a principal/agent problem, as the Principal (owner) has interests that differ from those of his Agent. Solutions to this generally either decrease information
55.
by BobbyH 16y ago
If you think about it, it is economically rational behavior for a barista/bartender to do this for regular customers. After all, she gives you a drink that is free to her and gets back real money as a tip. The only loser is the coffee sho
56.
by BobbyH 16y ago
It looks like you were downvoted a lot for this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646903 The karma for that post is actually less than -4, as explained elsewhere, the karma for a post can now be lower than -4.
57.
by BobbyH 16y ago
Hi Ryan, I think that the rule of thumb used in the spreadsheet overstates the average customer tenure (as calculated by the alternate formula I outlined in another comment): https://docs.google.com/drawings/edit?id=1-9z5wczSfbM3KLZavF...
58.
by BobbyH 16y ago
I use a different method for calculating the "Avg customer lifetime (months)", which is implied by some logic from a great book called The Loyalty Effect: http://books.google.com/books?id=ctAj_SfSrKIC&printsec=f... Using this formula,
59.
by BobbyH 16y ago
> [A peep hole] is [a disruptive product] if you're a door-to-door salesperson Geoff Moore's theories apply to disruptive or discontinuous products that force customers to make a significant change in behavior. A peep hole may force d
60.
by BobbyH 16y ago
This sounds like a great strategy of using local customer and authoritative references to increase social proof to close sales. However, the "bowling pin/alley" strategy mentioned in the articles applies in the slightly different context of

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