ccantana

7 ms·

1.
Why you should share your ideas online(stewfortier.com)
3 points by ccantana 6y ago|0 comments
2.
The 10 Yard Rule of Creative Work(stewfortier.com)
3 points by ccantana 7y ago|0 comments
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My Friends Trained a Computer to Speak in a Completely Humanlike Voice(stewfortier.com)
6 points by ccantana 7y ago|1 comments
4.
by ccantana 7y ago
Typo aside, that does not materially affect the point. “Management” in this case appears to be every other team at the company ...
5.
by ccantana 7y ago
> What's wrong with the UX of IRC? One sentence later: > ...we scrapped it because only our software developer used it and other people in the company preferred something else (they used a mix of email, Google chat/hangouts,
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On the brink of bankruptcy, this startup's CFO got creative(techloaf.io)
11 points by ccantana 7y ago|4 comments
7.
by ccantana 7y ago
I run a popular weekly newsletter that makes fun of the tech industry. Think: The Onion meets TechCrunch. Newsletters can generally charge a much higher CPM than a social media accounts or even podcasts in some cases. You can start making b
8.
by ccantana 8y ago
Hey, that's my newsletter! Glad you're a fan, and always excited to see my extremely lo-tech baby get love on HN. I'll send you some swag - reply to any of the emails. Proud you're standing with The Loaf in this crowded
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by ccantana 8y ago
"...aged for 12 years in Mezcal barrels to give it a smoggy aroma and a robust gunpowder-magnesium chloride finish." That is legitimately brilliant.
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by ccantana 8y ago
+1 on your point about marketing. I also deeply undervalued how much goes into a great/thoughtful marketing plan, all the way from choosing the broad messaging and distribution channels through the “tiny” details like nailing the copy
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Show HN: My low-tech, 1997-style site helped me adopt thousands of subscribers
11 points by ccantana 8y ago|2 comments
12.
by ccantana 8y ago
Absolutely. Beyond the “obvious” stuff like getting an early look at what people in the heart of the tech universe are working on, I’ve found the community to be very supportive and willing to help on promising ideas. For example, I shared
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Genius can’t be taught(stewfortier.com)
28 points by ccantana 8y ago|12 comments
14.
by ccantana 8y ago
I realize this would probably be a last resort, but I’ve heard success stories of companies rallying their user bases to personally email the App Store on behalf of the company (“hey, I love x app. It makes my experience with Apple products
15.
by ccantana 8y ago
They’re one and the same for us; our core product is a weekly newsletter.
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by ccantana 8y ago
Thank you! Nice to see a few early supporters on here :)
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by ccantana 8y ago
Exactly, we have the luxury of being able to show a single, clear example of essentially the entire product. I realize that most SaaS companies probably don’t have that luxury, as each customer’s use case will be slightly different.
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by ccantana 8y ago
A couple for you that I found invaluable as I taught myself programming: 1. Team Treehouse. They now have a huge library covering just about anything he could imagine wanting to learn, mostly geared towards beginners. Much of their work is
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by ccantana 8y ago
Bradfield is an excellent resource and Oz and his team are fantastic. The only caveat would be that a lot of Bradfield’s curriculum assumes that students have some programming background already, so it might make sense as a secondary resour
20.
by ccantana 8y ago
You should come write for us :)
21.
by ccantana 8y ago
For what it’s worth, we’ve had a lot of success with a strategy not mentioned here: hosting a site that’s intentionally mysterious, if not slightly provocative. About 35% of all visitors to our site end up subscribing. We’re not a SaaS comp
22.
by ccantana 8y ago
100% is. We’ve mostly done super targeted, smaller scale marketing. When we have something get huge on Reddit, for example, conversion drops off because it’s a general crowd. About 50% of visitors click either the “preview” or “archive” lin
23.
by ccantana 8y ago
Open rate: 60% (+- 5%) Click through: 7% (+- 2%) Unsubscribe rate: <1%
24.
by ccantana 8y ago
Glad you dug it :) And agreed, conversion numbers are highly dependent on how thoughtful our targeting is. We generally shoot for almost laughlibly small, but super targeted, outreach. Certainly factors into our unusually high conversion.
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by ccantana 8y ago
Great insight. Only caveat would be that our core product is the email newsletter (not sure if that was true of rent.com back in the day).
26.
by ccantana 8y ago
Exactly. And if somebody subscribes, you have the chance to reach (and thereby help) them many more times in the future than a fairweather fan who forgets you as quickly as their feeds refresh.
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by ccantana 8y ago
Good catch, thanks :)
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by ccantana 8y ago
I wish I had saved them — but, essentially, our early landing pages were feeds of content that were restricted after x stories at which point you were prompted to subscribe. They were very similar to the CNN or NY Times home pages, but with
29.
by ccantana 8y ago
Exactly. It’s also kind of jarring in a world where content is unlimited, free, and available on every channel. It piques some people’s curiosity to land on a site where it’s semi-restricted.
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by ccantana 8y ago
Couldn’t agree more regarding his point on landing page optimization. At TechLoaf, we experimented with a lot of different, elaborate, shiny landing pages that expounded on how amazing our newsletter was, etc... And after falling flat on ou

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