mfrye0

11 ms·

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by mfrye0 4y ago
On a side note, I don't know if you've already acquired any AWS credits. If not, Product Hunt Founders Club is a decent deal that will give you $5k in AWS credits. Between that and the no Stripe fees for 1 year, it paid for itself
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by mfrye0 4y ago
I started off using Lambda as well and made the same sort of mistake. I can't remember exactly how much my bill was, but it was enough that it would have drained all my savings and effectively kill my startup. AWS was kind enough to wr
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by mfrye0 4y ago
Yeah, good point. In my case, I tried starting a company and failed. The learnings I gained helped me secure my next job. Leading up to the company failing though, it was more a less a year of misery. Based on the original post, it sounds l
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by mfrye0 4y ago
I was in a similar position in 2008. The key thing you need is experience, as people fresh out of college take awhile to ramp up and actually be productive. I'd avoid small startups and focus on larger, established players. Unless they
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by mfrye0 4y ago
I run a data aggregation company that has a fairly advanced scraping infrastructure for collecting data across the web. Having built the scraping side, I'm pretty familiar with most of the strategies for avoiding bot detection. Coming
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by mfrye0 4y ago
Seems like an interesting project, but so far the UX isn't great. The searching UI for companies has no loading or success/failure indicators. A note on performance - waiting an extra second before firing the search request can he
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by mfrye0 4y ago
I'm an engineer running my own business. In my case it's an API as a service, and I've mostly bootstrapped the company. So I've been able to automate most things and keep the business type of work to a minimum. There ind
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by mfrye0 4y ago
This looks great. I've had a similar idea, as we've had to build many of these utility tools internally for our team (address parsing / geocoding, Google search, proxies, etc). I wished there was just an easier, off the shelf
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by mfrye0 5y ago
Seems that you're getting the HN hug of death right now. The site is unusable.
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by mfrye0 5y ago
Upload is a pretty good series on Amazon Prime right now that explores that. It's both amazing and horrifying.
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by mfrye0 5y ago
Congrats Jeff. Funny seeing you pop up here after all those years back at Ambassador together.
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by mfrye0 5y ago
Like other people mentioned, starting to market is the main one, but I think the bigger one was charging more for the product. I was charging close to nothing for our original product, and I can't tell you how many people would argue w
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by mfrye0 5y ago
Sure. michael <a t> bigpicture.io
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by mfrye0 5y ago
A company DB can be expensive to buy and rapidly gets out of date. API is easier to integrate if you're building an app with company data, and easier on our end to keep the data fresh. I'm still debating on what I want to do, but
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by mfrye0 5y ago
I'm not sure if this is the best thread, but I'm potentially looking for a partner. I'm the founder of https://bigpicture.io/ . The primary product is company data and IP data as a service via API. I'm de
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by mfrye0 5y ago
I tried to start a language learning app that would use product placement within lessons to make it free. The idea was to have VR style real world lessons such as how to order a beer - "I'd like a Heineken please". I took it
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by mfrye0 5y ago
Yes, this is how a lot of large companies work - I've worked at several like that. As far as what to do, it depends on your comp. If you're still vesting, mentally check out and rest/vest until you make enough to feel comfort
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by mfrye0 5y ago
While I get the argument for Rails, I find I'm much more productive when working in one language (Javascript) across both the frontend / backend. As to the low level nature of Node/Express vs something like Rails or Django, I
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by mfrye0 5y ago
This. While I respect lawyers immensely, I think half the battle is deciding when to use a lawyer vs handling it yourself. With that said, this guy definitely needs to consult with a lawyer.
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by mfrye0 5y ago
Yeah, I was exaggerating. While my situation sucked, it definitely wasn't as bad is this.
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by mfrye0 5y ago
My experience exactly, though they also asked for the same document multiple times.
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by mfrye0 5y ago
I was tempted to do the same to my business partner. After he bailed on me the day before we were going to close a funding round, among other things. I think about that quote from Elon sometimes, that starting a company is like eating glass
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by mfrye0 5y ago
I bought a place with Better.com last year. While really cheap, I don't think I would use them again. It seems like the model is to have a slick UI and hire contractors from India with second rate English skills handle the grunt work.
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by mfrye0 5y ago
I can't comment on Stripe, but I had a similar experience with a B2B $XB company, but a bit worse. So I can sympathize going anon. I agree that the public has a rosy view of a lot of these $XB founders, when in reality it's lies a
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by mfrye0 5y ago
I believe I read somewhere that mail is trickier. Being that the spam mail essentially subsidizes USPS.
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by mfrye0 5y ago
I agree with most people here. Definitely keep it simple. With that said, I run a semi resource intensive operation, so I've invested a bit into dev ops to keep our costs down. My setup is currently on AWS, primarily using ECS, RDS, El
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by mfrye0 5y ago
I've been thinking about doing the same. Seems like most of answers here are BTC. Anything available in ETH yet? Or maybe XLM? A Stripe for crypto would be awesome.
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by mfrye0 5y ago
A friend introduced me to localblox.com a couple years ago to get some company data, though it looks like they have already closed up shop. These guys seemed to have everyone's data. The demo started off by showing me the company data
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by mfrye0 5y ago
Yeah, we're on Postgres, ElasticSearch, and Redis. Interesting. I'll definitely have the team check you guys out.
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by mfrye0 5y ago
Hey everyone. Author here. There's been some recent posts on HN around this topic, which I've commented on to share what we've learned. A few people suggested I convert it into a blog post to provide more detail. Open to any

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