gsaines

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241.
by gsaines 16y ago
Good point usaar333, I don't know if I did a good enough job making that distinction clear. In our case the niche product is a big referral buzzkill. My thinking though was that niche/non-niche aside, it seems like referrals would spread mo
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by gsaines 16y ago
Very true, jscore, referring people to Skritter has no network effect at all. We do offer extra subscription time to both the recommending party and the new referral, and we spent a long time trying to figure out the right mix of benefits f
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Why your Referral System Won't Work(georgesaines.com)
21 points by gsaines 16y ago|21 comments
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by gsaines 16y ago
Sorry to hear it. We had some of that at first as well, which is why we all sat down and basically came up with that one. Luckily, it turns out we work pretty well together, so over time we got good at listening and arguing without marginal
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3 Lessons for Effective Cofounder Decisionmaking(georgesaines.com)
3 points by gsaines 16y ago|2 comments
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by gsaines 16y ago
Found this very interesting, and especially so since I've been evaluating the financial efficacy of owning a car a lot as of late. I own a Green 98 Subaru Forrester with about 150k on it that my father gave me on my college graduation. It's
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by gsaines 16y ago
If anyone would like to see the polls on our site, you can login with an HN account: un: hackernews pass: hackernews You can access the poll archive from the homepage by clicking on the link underneath the poll widget. Also, I'm looking for
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Lean Startup Techniques: In Praise of Poll Widgets(georgesaines.com)
2 points by gsaines 16y ago|1 comments
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Founder Mood Swings: Lessons from a Quantitative Analysis(georgesaines.com)
2 points by gsaines 17y ago|0 comments
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by gsaines 17y ago
Skritter is hiring paid summer programmers. We create a web-based tool to help students of Chinese and Japanese better learn and remember their characters. We're based near Cleveland Ohio and we're hunting for motivated, smart applicants, p
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Be the Startup with the Skull Decal(georgesaines.com)
3 points by gsaines 17y ago|0 comments
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by gsaines 17y ago
Nice work Spencer, great blog post as normal. I think you're right on with the idea of marketing to "normals," or the "target market," whichever term you feel more comfortable with. It's a really tough transition and one that normally comes
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Ask HN: How to determine what's turning people off about your service?
8 points by gsaines 17y ago|6 comments
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by gsaines 17y ago
Yeah, I've seen that episode, and it's exactly what I was thinking. Up until this Toyota safety debacle (at least it's a publicity debacle), I gave myself a little self-congratulating pat on the back whenever I saw someone driving a Cadilla
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by gsaines 17y ago
This is a really well-articulated explanation for the phenomena that have clumsily attempted to describe before. As someone interested in cars, I use the example of Cadillacs and Buicks most frequently, since they used to be symbols of powe
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by gsaines 17y ago
Really appreciated this one. We've been guilty of spending too much time on stupid things, mostly business related to date. Time spent building features, building tools to measure user engagement, revenue, and ways to optimize conversions,
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by gsaines 17y ago
This is pretty fun, I especially liked the iPhone graph.
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by gsaines 17y ago
Sure, shoot me an email if you're interested. I checked out your blog, and you're actually dealing with quite a few of the marketing challenges that we're facing in the educational market. The comment about marketing to students: "Marketing
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by gsaines 17y ago
We're looking for full time paid summer interns in the Cleveland area. Looking mostly for programmers, but if you're a marketing person with a hacker-oriented outlook, shoot me an email (included on my profile). We can fly you out here and
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Does length matter? It does for video(wistia.com)
24 points by gsaines 17y ago|2 comments
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The Statistics of Chow Yun Fat's "Hard Boiled"(georgesaines.wordpress.com)
1 points by gsaines 17y ago|0 comments
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by gsaines 17y ago
Very well done, we have long wanted to build something like this for our site, and it's awesome to see that someone has implemented the idea so beautifully. And thanks a lot for including some real numbers. That kind of transparency is real
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by gsaines 17y ago
It's always refreshing for me to hear about other startup CEOs talking about investing more than 2-3 years in a web startup, thanks for that. We're coming up on year 2 of our venture. We're making money, but we haven't broached 6 figures ye
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by gsaines 17y ago
This is a question I'd be interested in having answered as well. I run a small educational website that has a comparative niche advantage and you're summary of how you thought web startups worked sounds very familiar. So far no expensive ca
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Are entrepreneurs these days playing it too safe?(wired.com)
3 points by gsaines 17y ago|0 comments
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by gsaines 17y ago
Interesting article, but not terribly useful or pragmatic. I was also hoping for a little more self-awareness. The author is essentially railing against the US policy of printing money to get out of crisis (which is a valid point) by advoca
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by gsaines 17y ago
My cofounders were my best friends from uni. I met Scott during freshman year. At Oberlin, students have 5 weeks off in the middle of winter when we're expected to cook for ourselves. I probably would have eaten ramen all 35 days for breakf
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by gsaines 17y ago
This is the story of a young startup that made a "totally intuitive" product only to discover through usability testing that using their creation was as simple as resetting the clock on an old VCR. Here are some of the lessons we learned.
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Field Report: Lessons Learned from 1-on-1 Usability Smackdown(blog.skritter.com)
6 points by gsaines 17y ago|3 comments
270.
by gsaines 17y ago
I'm actually the guy that started the thread, and I really appreciated your well-thought-out response. Since putting that up, things have picked up tenfold for me, I had been doing a lot of the things you mentioned, but our customer base wa

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