Additionally, you could hire other people to read them, dividing the task into whatever manageable chunks or even having multiple people read the same parts for agreement.
In the days before good software transcription I saved a ton of time I grad school by splitting up interviews and using mechanical Turk or up work ( can’t remember which one, to transcribe 1 minute snippets, and then took another pass)
I am bootstrapped founder who built a B2B product that lives in the bay area.
I think your intuition is spot on, that living in SF is probably not the best way to save $$. That said, a few thoughts.
1) I'd recommend going somewhere where you can get coffee with your customers, so if you are picking a new location, being able to in person meet up with folks who are using your product and love it ... especially in the early days ... can make a difference between giving up on your dream and keeping going.
2) You can live cheaply in the bay area, but it's kinda of crazy. We did it with about ~30-50K - ignoring opportunity cost - 4 cofounders, no car, and more or less shopping at CostCo until we made enough $$ to pay ourselves anything. Rents have gone up, but I think it's likely still possible to get something off the ground while keeping cost of living low -- probably not living in SF though -- perhaps a suburb, or San Jose.
3) If you do plan on selling to startups, I doubt there are too many places where you'd be able to do as much door-to-door sales as you could in SF.
In short, I'd recommend picking location based on your target customers as #1 priority if your goal is to build a successful business.
If your #1 goal is to not work in tech again, and focus on your own stuff -- there are a lot of other places to live that are far cheaper, think -- a small college town somewhere rural -- you might have a 10-20 year runway if you have 2-5 in the bay area.
Thank you! I'll definitely think on that. Honestly one exciting thing I'm realizing is that my customers could be any business in the 500k to 10m revenue range, which is why I'm having this question about staying in SFBA. At least until I decide to try and chase bigger ones (which might need me to have funding/more capital/people).
We're looking at picking up an entire building in Smalltown, Oregon and commuting to meetings from BC to San Mateo. Glad the country has been farting around instead of building high-speed rail...
Getting out of metropolitan areas to look at old brick buildings reminds me of Hunters Point right before the dotcom boom. Floorspace equals freedom and opportunity, and it's all really cheap if you can plan ahead and swing a hammer.
Many folks on hn live in California in the. San Francisco Bay Area, and enough of them like to drive down the coast on route 1 — a fairly famous scenic road in the us, that we are all excited this section is open again.
Does this kind of news belong on hn.. I guess that’s for the voters
This is a good time to remind everyone that tomorrow, May 16th is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) (https://accessibility.day), and that there are over 176 events worldwide going on to celebrate the process we are all making at improving accessibility in our products -- any plenty of learning opportunities for beginners and experts.
I was really hoping this article was going to about how someone was able to turn their cable modem into a sales development representative (SDR), because of the absurdity :). I was pleasantly surprised by the actual article: SDR (software defined radio).
I still think it's reasonable to have Apple consider building a car. Their core competency is in design, integrated platforms/ecosystems, and outsourced manufacturing.
Assuming that they could use their supply chain expertise to simplify and outsource manufacturing, the cars of the future likely looks more like a software enabled consumer electronics device than a consumer mechanical device, and there are some really neat things you could do in that ecosystem that only apple could pull off (cutting edge design coupled with high end finishes, and a software ecosystem with a self-driving car as a new platform).
That said, it's likely not the right market timing for Apple to bring an electric car to market.
the thing about regulation is you don't get good at it. You get good at a specific area of regulation but that rarely transfers to some entirely different set of regulations from different authorities in different places.
Saying "they're getting good at regulation" is like saying a paleontologist is "getting good at science". Sure some concepts cross, but actual understanding and competence needed to do the new job at hand don't.
Much of the sf area old money comes from folks selling tools into the gold rush, for example Folgers started serving coffee to miners, Levi’s selling jeans, Wells Fargo.
Looks like total revenue in the 990 was 910K, so 910/membership is likely in the 10K/year range assume only 100 members.
"According to Villa Taverna’s most recent 990, which lists the club under a different name, it raked in more than $700,000 in membership dues and $130,000 in initiation fees in 2021, along with nearly $80,000 in contributions."
I wonder how much of these plastics are environmental in general, for example if these plastics are in organic unpackaged fruit — it’s very likely environmental (e.g. microplastics in the water) as opposed to something in the processing for sale.
We should have some data on environmental plastics since the 1960s/70s. Would be interesting to see a graph.
To my understanding it’s very hard to avoid phthalates in food, and studies have found them in fresh produce. That said, since the source of these contaminants is often the final packaging itself, or surfaces of equipment used in processing facilities, the concentrations tend to be increased in highly processed or packaged foods.
The original source article covers some of the sources, and has data tables for the things they tested.
In the days before good software transcription I saved a ton of time I grad school by splitting up interviews and using mechanical Turk or up work ( can’t remember which one, to transcribe 1 minute snippets, and then took another pass)