antongm

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61.
by antongm 16y ago
AdGrok applied at the last minute. I happened to notice the 'apply now' message on the main Y Combinator page (I was trying to find one of PG's blog posts), which was a couple days before the deadline. We did the video literally at 1145pm o
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by antongm 16y ago
Hey serverdude. Happy to talk about it. antonio 'at' adgrok dot com should work. Cheers.
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by antongm 16y ago
I won't comment on the love angle, other than to comment that our current notion of love is a 19th century European invention that doesn't really exist in most traditional societies. There's ways of getting along that don't involve long cou
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by antongm 16y ago
Actually, it sure as hell did fill it up. I'm not big into digital media, so I can't quote the real specs, but my machine is a late model MacBook Pro using the stock camera, filmed with iMovie at what are probably default settings. And the
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by antongm 16y ago
Hahahaha... Really? I haven't had that happen, other than this one time. And this time it was weird, because both ex and I were sailors, and our boats happened to be next to each other in the yard...total fluke. And then of course Girlfrien
66.
by antongm 16y ago
You are SO right. The relationship with Mummy is about the only dicey thing right now. It's good right now, but there have been moments. "You're constantly terrified that they're going to randomly die on you, but the rules for preventing th
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by antongm 16y ago
I agree. Indeed they're different things. Trying to do both now. Babies and startups aren't unrelated though actually. Oh, I feel another blog post coming on...
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How I got into Y Combinator and fathered a child, almost simultaneously(adgrok.com)
106 points by antongm 16y ago|57 comments
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by antongm 16y ago
Oh, God yes. Thanks for reading the sailing blog. And that's about the cheapest, smallest boat one could non-suicidally ponder a circumnavigation in, by the way. And even then owning it and sailing it is like taking a cold shower and tearin
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by antongm 16y ago
Eh, no. I'll echo statistics 101: the mean of a distribution is pretty meaningless when it's a very skewed distribution you're talking about. Those average figures don't apply to me. And I joined GS at precisely the wrong time. Right at the
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by antongm 16y ago
Mdda is right. What was perhaps intended as a cautionary tale instead became a recruiting anthem. After reading Liar's Poker, I wanted to be right there with the Human Piranha hearing him say 'the f ing frogs are going to f ing get f*cked!'
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by antongm 16y ago
Thanks. I haven't seen many published accounts by SecDB. When I joined, there was literally zero. I now note there are some descriptions on Wilmott and the like. Seems like word is seeping out. All of my description is on the Web in bits an
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by antongm 16y ago
Yes! Glad someone spotted it....
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by antongm 16y ago
Marin is a product aimed at large companies with their own internal SEM teams, and >$100K monthly budgets. AdGrok aims for the space below this lofty level.
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by antongm 16y ago
We've sent out some invites, but we're sending out larger waves starting today. Pop me an email at antonio at adgrok.com, and we'll get you in the next wave. HN readers get priority, of course. ;)
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by antongm 16y ago
The plan is to charge a flat rate for smaller spends, and do more of an agency, percent-of-spend model for larger accounts. Your buddy with the $1000/month spend would be in the former category, and pay more like $20-$30/month. I can almost
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by antongm 16y ago
Scott, that's exactly what I was getting at. My only fear about making it as a startup is having to one day answer that existential question myself. I frankly don't know what I'd decide to do.
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by antongm 16y ago
You're exactly right. If I had thought of the poker analogy, I would have included it. I'm glad someone on here agrees with me...;)
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Fuck you, Money(adgrok.com)
186 points by antongm 16y ago|110 comments
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by antongm 16y ago
Thanks, Earl, for checking out the video. Check back soon...the current tool is really the MVP we wanted to get out the door. The GUI has all sorts of UI prettiness on the way, including arbitrary page aggregation, time-series plots for all
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by antongm 16y ago
True, but as (sometimes) thinking members of the startup community, we blog about things only tangentially connected to our product, but that we think the startup scene as a whole might find of interest. The amount of press we got on those
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by antongm 16y ago
Totally fair questions. We're taking a somewhat Radiohead position on it. What would you be wiling to pay for it? I'll tell you our thoughts on it so far: A tiered pricing structure, with a fixed monthly subscription fee. Probably starting
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by antongm 16y ago
The business plan is more along the lines of: 1. Recognize an under-served market segment with huge potential. 2. Build a product which fills that segment's need 3. Profit. Our views on the East Coast tech scene are completely orthogonal to
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by antongm 16y ago
Thanks for noticing. We also got adgork.com. Ha!
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by antongm 16y ago
Paolo, We're putting you at the head of the line. Granted, HN users probably are the best beta users. You should expect a beta invite today, or tomorrow at the latest. Regards, Antonio.
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by antongm 16y ago
Your experience is pretty typical, except you had the hacker skills to hack around AdWords' crappy UI. Most AdWords users do not, hence AdGrok. The devil is most certainly in the details in a product like this, which is why we welcome any a
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by antongm 16y ago
Good question. You can use the tool to drive traffic to any page, doesn't have to be a product page. In keeping with our bottoms-up approach (as opposed to the top-down, Google-centric approach of every other SEM tool on the market), we tho
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by antongm 16y ago
It's a firefox plugin that's inside your browser and pops up when you browse to the website you're advertising on AdWords. You can see a video demo here: http://adgrok.com/features#grokbar
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by antongm 16y ago
The co-founders banished me into a media quarantine to deal with it. I assure you, the entire company was (mostly) not sucked into this. And people did more than bother to look us up. Probably about the number you cited chatted us up via ol
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by antongm 16y ago
That's basically it.

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