visakanv

51 ms·

451.
by visakanv 12y ago
The best use case for ads, I think, are in retargeting– meaning you only hit people who've already visited your site before, and you hit them maybe with an offer they might be interested in. But you have to be sensitive to the context,
452.
by visakanv 12y ago
IMHO, the worst startup ideas are the ones that seem like GOOD ideas, but turn out to be bad. A horrible idea that's clearly bad will never go anywhere. Ideas that seem good end up getting funded, offices are rented, people are hired..
453.
by visakanv 12y ago
+1 to this. One of the most powerful books I've ever read.
454.
by visakanv 12y ago
I really liked this idea– I think by Robin Sharma [1], but by many thinkers, really– that your subconscious is way smarter than you (where you = your conscious, thinking self. The spotlight of your mind). It has more bandwidth than you. It
455.
by visakanv 12y ago
I like to believe that if you have discerning, evolving taste, and you seek to fulfill it, over a long enough time with enough iteration you will make things that other people want, too. Maybe the timeframe for some things is far too long f
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by visakanv 12y ago
It always blows my mind to listen to songs from my childhood, which was before I learnt to play music. When I was a kid I was effectively tone deaf– didn't recognize pitches, harmonies, bass, etc. Now I hear the nuances, and it's
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by visakanv 12y ago
Marketing guy here who's passionate about real conversations. Just want to remind everybody– tools, tricks and tactics should help you remove the tedious "bookkeeping" aspects of your marketing/sales job, but PLEASE, PLE
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by visakanv 12y ago
^to take that a step further, the marketer shouldn't respond with "try product X", but with further inquiry into the nature of the problem! I've initiated contact with people that way and subsequently built lasting relat
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by visakanv 12y ago
Especially when those sort of numbers might be used to justify the price of advertising on the platform. That said, I wouldn't say that it's in their BEST interest– too much spam and real users start getting turned off. So spam up
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by visakanv 12y ago
There's a writer from Esquire who's basically made a living doing experiments like this. He's written things like The Year Of Living Biblically [1] (self-explanatory), The Know-It-All (he read all of Encyclopedia Britannica)
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by visakanv 12y ago
I love books a lot, and I like to think that I like them "deeper" than most people– I reread almost everything I like at least 2-3 times. But yeah, 100 re-reads is something you only do if you're goddamn hell bent on deconstr
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by visakanv 12y ago
That sounds identical to the opening chapter of Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers! [1] 'What Wolf slowly realized was that the secret of Roseto wasn't diet or exercise or genes or the region where Roseto was situated. It had t
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by visakanv 12y ago
Breaking out of each box, one box at a time. :-)
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by visakanv 12y ago
Reminds me of Shopify's Tobias Lutke– also German, also took an off-beaten path. I transcribed a Keynote that tobi once did.[1] Let me dig up the relevant bit: > Within my little world, within this school, the most obvious/prof
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by visakanv 12y ago
Are you familiar with The Overview Effect? It's a reported experience that many astronauts have after viewing the Earth from space: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect http://vimeo.com/550
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by visakanv 12y ago
Lots of people care, actually.
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by visakanv 12y ago
The part where he goes "There it is, gentlemen, the fastest car in the world!" is so unadulteratedly cheesy, nerdy and ALMOST cringe-inducing. It's kinda heartening to know that Musk used to be a little odd like that- it make
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by visakanv 12y ago
+1 to this. I'm a relatively early employee at my team, and while my founders don't really mind whether I'm in the office or not, they do know that I give a damn and that our work is on my mind 24/7. And I don't mea
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by visakanv 12y ago
I hope you're right! But I think it's important to prepare for the worst case scenario. Even if we had 200 IQ humans working at max cognitive capacity, people still need to sleep, eat, poop. There are all sorts of limitations we h
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by visakanv 12y ago
I remember the point Alan Watts used to make that I agreed with strongly– it's ridiculous to think that LSD is a magical perfect good thing for everyone, because nothing is. The point is that it's a tool, like a car or a chainsaw.
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by visakanv 12y ago
> So does this mean that we need to come full circle and become worse and being better due to claiming to feel worse? Usually when people begin kicking up a dust, the solution is to stop kicking– in this case I think that means to avoid
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by visakanv 12y ago
I'm reminded of this single story on Twitter where a woman unknowingly livetweeted her husband's death in a road accident- and then later found out it was him. I went to find her Twitter account, and saw that she basically spent e
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by visakanv 12y ago
> The moment the first human casualty occurs do to some software/hardware failure, there will be serious ramifications for the self-driving world. Just want to add to the discussion a reminder that this is said about literally every
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by visakanv 12y ago
From my POV of Tesla's mission, I think Tesla would be happy to bow out of this fight and probably go into battery production/innovation. Giga-factory and all. I think for ME as a consumer, I will prioritize price over convenience
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by visakanv 12y ago
That was what I was thinking. I already use Google Maps like crazy. Add a "get picked up by driverless car now" button and I'm probably sold. (I don't use Uber though, I'm too broke for that right now.)
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by visakanv 12y ago
> There is enormous brand value in thinking "I'll get an Uber" as a synonym for "I'll get a taxi, but right what I need it, and it probably will smell better." There is value of having that app on the phone,
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by visakanv 12y ago
+1 to that. It didn't even have a monitor, keyboard or casing: http://andrewchen.co/apples-minimum-viable-product/
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by visakanv 12y ago
I appreciate your enthusiasm! Sorry you're getting downvoted, Hacker News is a pretty tough community to crack. The secret is to always add value to any conversation by introducing some relevant perspective or piece of information.
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by visakanv 12y ago
Yup. Here's a much better blogpost that's precise about real experience, by Andy Dunn- CEO of Bonobos, talking about his real experience building a company: https://medium.com/@dunn/get-one-thing-right-8939024
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by visakanv 12y ago
I don't know the details very much, but maybe things were different back in their time when the market wasn't yet saturated? (My tech business history is pretty sketchy, so I'd welcome any clarification!)

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