Outstanding talk and q/a from a startup grandmaster. Kevin reveals wise strategy and insight repeatedly. In particular I liked the simplicity of everyone storing their self authored todo lists on the company dropbox and using these lists to hold one another accountable. Another point that hit home was the idea of respecting one another's time and what that means if you think it through. From the q/a I wonder what the other two YC companies are that have the same sort of disciplined remote working style that Wufoo has. Since only 3 YC companies have made remote working work, if Kevin Chris and Ryan had it to do all over I wonder if they would choose the remote approach again. My impression is yes, because of the efficiencies gained when remote work is done well.
To be honest, there certainly might be more than 3 (it's hard to keep track of 700 companies!). The Zapier guys write a lot of great stuff on remote working on their blog.
i really enjoyed this one too, but just for clarity's sake, this talk could have been called "great customer service with a sprinkle of product on top". it was all about how to organize a company with the goal of making customers love you, which leads to benefits like having no sales & marketing spend (not sure if they literally had no s&m costs or not).
the anecdotes, research and techniques that kevin used and drew upon were impressive. had to try very hard not to feel dishearted about how clever you need to be to succeed.
> I don't need work done for free - I am happy to employ someone ...
Then you want a contractor not a cofounder. One trades time for cash, the other for equity. To hire a contractor, google "hire a coder" then describe your requirements and cash reward on the sites that appear in the search results. If you really want a technical founder, become one: http://blog.samaltman.com/non-technical-founder-learn-to-hac...
Agree with the author it's lamentable how mobile dev is almost totally focused on native apps. Solid UX is possible now on the mobile web but unless the user adds the site to their home screen (on iOS) the top and even the bottom of the browser window takes up valuable screen real estate. App stores provide a better monetization and distribution scheme than browsers do on mobile, which makes it hard to justify spending time on a mobile web site.
The big gripe I have with mobile web support today is Safari on IOS 7 where it is now impossible to permanently fix an element at the bottom of the window.
The sort of startup that makes money the fastest is not a startup, it's a clone. Unless you have a brilliant idea and solve a hard technical problem, your best bet is to copy a business that you know is successful and has few competitors. Startups are for dreamers who aim at a billion dollars, clones are for realists who aim at a million. Every day this becomes more true because the number of startup ideas with big potential decreases over time. Distribution is getting harder because noise is getting louder, and the low-lying fruit is already being harvested. Not that you were really aiming for a startup anyway, affiliate marketing and solving business needs for people you know are in clone not startup space. Every warm blooded mammal at a keyboard wants to make passive income, be the one who does market research.
You can clone an idea just add your own twist to it. Don't just copy someone else's idea blindly. I believe in niches. Find a niche that you can stick with and start working at it.
"The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity — even under the most difficult circumstances — to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not."
I requested removal from Quora last week. 27 hours later someone from user operations emailed me confirming it was done. Perhaps they did improve the process recently.
It irked me that when I deactivated my account, it wasn't immediately obvious that it hadn't been deleted. I only found that out when I saw the page was still live on Google.
I then contacted their customer service to find out why it hadn't been deleted. Their customer service team was responsive and helpful, and it was deleted within 24 hours.
We’ve deleted your account information from our end.
However, if you are already in a search engine like Google’s search index, they won’t know to drop you from it until they try to re-crawl your page, and unfortunately we don’t have any control over when that will happen. The best thing to do in the meantime is to directly request removal from Google itself here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals. Once you have submitted your request(s), you will need to wait for Google to reindex the pages — this often takes a few days.
Because Google will remove it from their index when they revisit the page organically. If Google provides a way to programmatically send removal requests, I'd be happy to hear about it and I will pass it along to the team that deals with account deletions so we can make it part of our flow.
Right now, I am only aware of the Google webmaster tools where you have to input each individual link you want removed, and even that request is queued and takes time, with no guarantee that they will reindex the content.
I'm not sure how they (or anyone really) prove that they actually removed all information, other than running something like 'select name from users' and sending you the results so that you can see that your name isn't there.
If they send you all info that they have about you, that doesn't prove that account has been removed, it only proves that they have all your data.
I count 18 instances of the word "tweet" and 7 of "Twitter" in that short post. For the love of language please stop referring to the medium. She makes a fair point, and I agree with her in the case of the man whose full name was revealed, but who is harmed when a story about "Diane" or "a couple in Brooklyn" is published?
And in case of "Diane": You have a bad day, some depression or are socially incompetent? Shame on you, I am the Punisher and the world will now mock you for your failure!!1!
Author asserts Meteor scales poorly, which inspired his script "demeteorizer" which helps only if the project is deployed to author's hosting service "modulus.io"
I don't get it. There is the "meteor bundle" command, which as far as I can tell does the exact same thing. "meteor bundle" turns your Meteor app into a regular Node.js app. It does not bundle Node.js itself and it does not bundle MongoDB.
The author mentioned that Demeteorizer allows a Meteor app to be able to run on any Node.js hosting provider. "meteor bundle" does that too. In last week's announcement about the Phusion Passenger app server + Meteor support, I documented how one can use Meteor bundles with Passenger. If you look at the instructions[1] you'll see that the instructions for deploying a Meteor bundle are the same as deploying a Node.js app.
So how is Demeteorizer different from "meteor bundle"?
Demeteorizer uses "meteor bundle" internally. What it does differently is generate a package.json file from all of those bundled dependencies. It fixes the case where your development platform is different than your production platform. The native modules need to be recompiled. Using a package.json and npm install makes that really easy. Checkout the big red text in the Meteor docs on deploying[1].
I never did get Demeteorizer to work so I can't compare them but yes the meteor bundle command gives you a Node.js app that can be deployed like any other.
As I understand it the former was created before the meteor bundle command was available.
As pointed out by another user, I was annoyed as you reading the article, but the script can be used outside of their PaaS and the source is on Github [0], even though the author did not link to the repo. Typically, I have noticed the prevalence of Github and free repo hosting means people link less and less, and expect you to auto-magically find their code via Google search, or by just clicking one of the social buttons (even though the nerdier you are, the more you hate them and refuse to use them).
I think the author was only talking about how to make Meteor scale on any hosting service by making it into a raw node.js app, something that more people have experience scaling. The NPM package demeteorizer, which was written by the modulus team, can actually be used to turn any meteor app to a core node.js package, which can then be hosted as you would any other node.js apps and can use any node.js hosting service (nodejitsu, heroku, appfog, modulus.io) or roll your own on bare metal (dedicated/aws).
