the_bear

10 ms·

31.
by the_bear 8y ago
I've picked my fair share of colors for various businesses, and something that annoys me is that you pretty much always end up with green or blue being the main color. I tried to figure out why, and I think it's a really dumb reas
32.
by the_bear 8y ago
I love it, but that's sort of because it's not a real tech scene. I was in SF for five years before moving back to STL and while I love the city, the tech culture kind of wore on me. Things are a bit less like an echo chamber here
33.
by the_bear 8y ago
That's part of it, yes. The other part is that we pay engineers roughly market rate for our area, but we pay support significantly above that. Our philosophy is basically that everyone who works here should make a good living regardles
34.
by the_bear 8y ago
Yes, I think $1MM is enough to pay 7 people, although it depends a lot on the specifics. My business makes $2.2MM ARR and has 17 employees (counting the founders). We're profitable, although we try to put about as much money as we can
35.
by the_bear 8y ago
There are some calculators that help you figure this out. Here's one I just found with a Google search: https://www.optimizely.com/sample-size-calculator/ The idea is that to get results, you need some combination
36.
by the_bear 8y ago
My company is about the same size as yours, although we hire a lot of interns each summer so we've probably onboarded ~40-50 people. Here are some things I'd suggest: First off, I'd suggest that you change your stance on whet
37.
by the_bear 9y ago
I think it's better for 10 different companies to each have 1/10th of your data rather than one company having all of it. Facebook has grown to the point where they're just too big. They have pretty much every person I'v
38.
by the_bear 9y ago
Yeah, that's the one part of the article that seemed off to me. For my low-touch, no-credit-card-up-front SaaS product we get about 25% trial-to-paid conversion rate. I think it's possible we're above average, but we're
39.
by the_bear 9y ago
I hire for a small startup, so maybe this isn't how it works at the big companies, but I certainly wouldn't dock points for this. I think it shows initiative, and at worst I wouldn't care one way or the other. The only way I
40.
by the_bear 9y ago
Do you have to target enterprise customers rather than small businesses? Enterprises have very complicated decision-making processes that can be hard to navigate if you're not experienced, and even harder if you don't already have
41.
by the_bear 9y ago
We just give everyone top-tier laptops (MBPs or Surface Books) and set up a docking station plugged into two big monitors, a keyboard, and a mouse at each desk. This seems to be the best of both worlds. You have the mobility of a laptop, bu
42.
by the_bear 9y ago
Makes sense. I was worried that something like a beanbag would get gross over time, but I'm probably overthinking it. We already have a couple in non-quiet areas and they're fine. Thanks for the response!
43.
by the_bear 9y ago
I'm interested in making it easier for people to nap at my company, but I'm having some trouble figuring out the logistics. I don't mind people taking naps, but I don't want to end up dealing with cleaning sheets, blanke
44.
by the_bear 9y ago
One interesting challenge with this real-time vs. async communication challenge is that different job roles have different needs. At my company, most of our employees have been on the customer service side until recently, and Slack is great
45.
by the_bear 9y ago
Disclaimer: I run my own CRM company, so you can either view this comment as genuine praise/advice, or an attempt to subvert a competitor (but I promise it's the former). First off, this looks awesome. I've heard people compl
46.
by the_bear 9y ago
This seems really aggressive, especially for bootstrapped companies. My startup took 31 months to hit $10k MRR, and now we're at ~$130k MRR. I'm really glad I didn't quit after three months. I barely even had the product bu
47.
by the_bear 10y ago
I personally have experienced two problems with experienced people in the early days: 1) The last company I worked at started out with an experienced founder/CEO and a few entry-level people (including me). The company was in the heavi
48.
by the_bear 10y ago
I ran into this recently myself. I've been doing web development my whole career, but I never got into the complicated toolchain side of it. I just used a vanilla html/javascript setup and I would build out my own tools or manuall
49.
by the_bear 11y ago
Absolutely, I don't think that parental leave will impact someone's decision to have kids. However, giving a benefit to people who have kids without giving that same benefit to people without kids is not that different from the co
50.
by the_bear 11y ago
I've always viewed benefits like this as a way for the company to incentivize and/or reward certain behavior from employees. Offering a 401(k) match is a way to encourage employees to save for retirement. By that logic, offering p
51.
by the_bear 11y ago
I don't think that most companies are designing their offices entirely around sick days. It seems likely that you could find a number of areas where open offices look statistically better, and a number of areas where they look worse. I
52.
by the_bear 11y ago
I read a lot of hate for open offices on Hacker News, but I don't think it's as simple as "open offices are bad." Last year my startup moved into our first office and I did an informal survey of the team (who had previou
53.
by the_bear 13y ago
Almost all conversations about pricing make the same mistake: they assume that we all have the same goals. Your goal might be to squeeze as much money out of your customers as you can. That's totally fine, and completely ethical, but i
54.
by the_bear 13y ago
Isn't the author comparing Google's approach to Apple's? Google has more market share than Apple in just about every software category, so if Google can iterate, than why can't Apple? I think it has more to do with Apple
55.
by the_bear 13y ago
To be fair, one of the greatest "see the future" CEOs has said similar things. Just off the top of my head, I know that Steve Jobs said that no one would want a larger screen than the original iPhone had, and he said that 7"
56.
by the_bear 13y ago
Thanks for checking us out! There are two different options if you want to track campaigns. One would be just make a "Group" for each campaign, and then add the appropriate contacts to the group. Very soon we'll be adding the
57.
by the_bear 13y ago
Chrischen is right. Maybe I'm not using the term correctly, but I think of "plans" as meaning multiple different tiers that a user can choose from. Mailgun previously had plans (i.e. you had to pick which tier you wanted) and
58.
by the_bear 13y ago
This is awesome. Aside from the fact that my bill will be cut in half, I hate plans. Plans are just one more thing to monitor (make sure you don't go over your totally arbitrary limit!), and they generally lead to weird inequity. For e
59.
by the_bear 14y ago
My dad is an accounting professor, and while I don't think he normally involves undergrads in his research, it seems like he could. This is just one small segment of business research, but he tests how rules and incentives impact decision m
60.
by the_bear 14y ago
I would really love for someone knowledgeable to comment on this. I'd never even thought about blocking customers in Eastern Texas. I just compared a map of my users to a map of the texas districts ( http://www.txed.uscourts.gov/images/divi

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