gsaines

28 ms·

271.
by gsaines 17y ago
Both of these techniques are drool-worthy. As a designer who spends a lot of time using the creative suite, I want both features YESTERDAY. Nice post.
272.
by gsaines 17y ago
I agree with you Tichy, it often seems hard to believe that what people spend their money on, but the numbers are nothing to scoff at. I'd be interested to know if the sales numbers for a hit and run product cycle are linear or asymptotic,
273.
by gsaines 17y ago
That's not a bad idea gruseom, I hope that I can come back with excellent examples of all these ideas being put into practice.
274.
by gsaines 17y ago
Hey idlewords, since you are indeed in our target market and you didn't dig Skritter, would you mind sharing why exactly? Perhaps you could give us some information about how to make it better. Feel free to email me personally (george at sk
275.
by gsaines 17y ago
Hey encoderer, thanks for spending the time to reply in such detail. I guess our demo video IS useful for something other than distracting people from our conversion actions! That last bit about the gaming aspect has been a thought we've be
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by gsaines 17y ago
I wish. I tried that really hard in college, but I was terrible at it. Granted, they start off with Java at Oberlin (stupid in my opinion), but it wasn't the syntax that got me, it was the logic. So I scrapped that. If only my brain were mo
277.
by gsaines 17y ago
It would seem we have some competition. We welcome it, hopefully it'll make use better!
278.
by gsaines 17y ago
Thanks for the picker-upper. I've actually been personally emailed by one HN member to thank me for the frankness of this post, and responding to everyone has been very therapeutic. I'm the pessimist of the group (always have been), and I t
279.
by gsaines 17y ago
Nicely written. Thanks also for synthesizing the above posts. In response to 1), that's one of the reasons why we're trying to address this. Even if I'm passive, it bugs Nick and Scott to keep me occupied, and that's not fair to them. As yo
280.
by gsaines 17y ago
Heh Heh, you can actually check out our partnership announcement with ChinesePod at our blog ( http://blog.skritter.com/2009/08/teaming-up-with-chinesepod.... ). Glad to hear you like it.
281.
by gsaines 17y ago
Thanks for the reinforcement. As I mentioned above, sometimes it really gets me down that Nick and Scott are blazing away at programming and I sort of have to wait for stuff to happen. I should talk to Nick about having me keep up with all
282.
by gsaines 17y ago
Thanks losvedir, we (of course) always like ot hear that we're creating value for people!
283.
by gsaines 17y ago
It's great to know that someone else has experienced this, and hopefully I'll have the same problem you're business partner did! Sometimes its really frustrating and downcasting to feel less valuable than my partners because I can't be cons
284.
by gsaines 17y ago
Video is something we hadn't thought of, thanks for suggesting it. I'll do a proper ROI calculation and figure out how many uniques we'd have to get to make that worth our while. I also majored in Cinema Studies, and have a lot experience m
285.
by gsaines 17y ago
Good idea here, I actually just talked to Scott, and I think I'm going to start taking over all the web implementation stuff. Up till now I produced a mockup and handed it off to him, but it would ease his workload substantially if I could
286.
by gsaines 17y ago
Thanks for the input. It's actually really frustrating to hear about the airplane use, because everyone and their mom wants an iPhone version, but Nick and Scott are seriously tapped out right now making features we've all agreed need to co
287.
by gsaines 17y ago
Point taken. Our pricing is actually really cheap, between $6-11/mo for an account, and it's a lot less for institutions. We were torn about this, because we wanted the front page to be clean and clear (right now it's like a landfill of acc
288.
by gsaines 17y ago
This is a really valid concern. Right now it's really tempting to use my time inefficiently essentially building up unsustainable expectations from our user base. To be fair, I've given in many times, and I write personalized thank you card
289.
by gsaines 17y ago
"I don't know what a full-time business person is supposed to do at a webapp which teaches Chinese. What were you anticipating?" Nicely put, to be honest, I wasn't entirely sure. I guess I had these visions of high-powered business meetings
290.
by gsaines 17y ago
Good distinction. Thanks for that.
291.
by gsaines 17y ago
THIS is very helpful. Thanks a lot for providing insight into how you spend your time. Scott currently does a lot of our accounting and Nick has been handling feedback, but that's all sort of shifting as each task is taking more and more ti
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by gsaines 17y ago
These are good points, thanks a lot for spending the time to generate them. Nick was actually monitoring this thread, and read me aloud your comment about "Facebook, Frappr, Blfousajf" and I thought he was kidding around, nice one. I actual
293.
Ask HN: What's a Non-Programmer to do?
152 points by gsaines 17y ago|78 comments
294.
by gsaines 17y ago
I agree that this is hard and necessary. Whoa. When we were developing the first version of the product, we were always torn between releasing it and letting people see our steaming pile of half-finished code and tearing it apart and waitin
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by gsaines 17y ago
Interesting article, as a non-programmer I don't have a firm grasp of whether his weekend hacking test is legit or not, but I can say that our startup is already using wave, and when Google lets regular plebes like me on, I'm going in head
296.
by gsaines 17y ago
It seems that you and trefn both reacted similarly. I didn't really take into account a specific audience when I was writing it and I actually only posted it to HN as an afterthought, never thinking it'd hit the front page. Next time I post
297.
by gsaines 17y ago
Hey trefn, sorry about the flowery language. I've always thought that high Victorian prose sounded humorously formal and stiff, so whenever I'm writing for fun, I use that style. The lack of a tutorial is something we haven't overlooked, it
298.
by gsaines 17y ago
I wouldn't mind discussing it. Right now our conversion rates are fairly low, even considering our space: around 1-2%. That could be due to a lot of bad design we have on the front and try it pages, and the lack of a tutorial. All those thi
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by gsaines 17y ago
We started building an application to help students of Chinese better learn and remember their characters 12 months ago. This is the story of what we've been doing in the interim, some of the trials we've faced, the fun we've had along the
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Our Story: 1 Year in the life of a startup(skritter.com)
33 points by gsaines 17y ago|12 comments

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