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Why don't you use email encryption? | Zarathu: I just use SSL to access the IMAP and SMTP servers. Anything more than that, I couldn't particularly care less. It's not like I send credit card information over email.Email was designed to be a relatively simple way to send basic messages. In itself, it's an insecure platform. If you want security, use so... |
To porn or not to porn? | kwamenum86: If you are worried about ruining your rep by getting into porn and your startups are not making any money then just get a job. |
What do you wish Google Analytics would do? | Harkins: Let me export my raw hit data so I can run my own analyses, or switch to competitors if GA isn't gooing to add features.And track clicks on AdSense ads as my goal. |
Why don't you use email encryption? | jodrellblank: Encryption is all mixed up with PKI and certificates and that whole bundle of (overly)complex stuff that I really don't want to have to bother with any more than I have to.I think I have GPG running somewhere, but know only one person who used it. I like that they pushed me to use it, but haven't needed t... |
Why don't you use email encryption? | smanek: I think the key problem (no pun intended) is that email encryption can't be securely implemented on the server side.Simply put, most of the people who are paranoid enough to need email encryption don't trust Google (GMail) with their PGP private keys. Therefore, they either have to use an offline email client (... |
Stats on freemium services | e1ven: One link I can give is http://nabeel.typepad.com/brinking/2008/09/theres-been-som.h...Overall, Freemium conversion rates are way down right now. I might suspect that users are feeling less wealthy, and not opting to pay for anything that's not absolutely necessary. |
What is an expected compensation for a startup yet to launch a product ? | brk: 1000 options out of what? If it's a pool of 10,000 that's a good deal. If it's out of 10,000,000 then probably not.What do they plan to increase the pool to as part of the funding?What is the estimated pre and post-money stock price? |
Why don't you use email encryption? | stevedekorte: I'd be happy to use it if the only user interaction was flipping a preference switch. |
Stats on freemium services | patio11: Google for SXSW Webapp Autopsy. (Oh, heck, I'll do it for you. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sxsw_web_app_autopsy.ph... ) There is a lot of good in there.Personally I think the data is of limited use even for benchmarking but, eh, your funeral. Users of my downloadable app convert to the paid versio... |
Why don't you use email encryption? | mdasen: Why don't we use HTTPS for everything we send over the internet? Why don't we have locks on on all our mailboxes? In fact, the post is just terribly insecure. Heck, plenty of people who live in more rural areas don't even lock the doors to their house.There are lots of reasons, but when you get down to it, w... |
To porn or not to porn? | theBobMcCormick: Why not? What's more natural than sex?Frankly, I'm tired of all the bogus social stigma against a healthy interest in sex and porn. |
What is an expected compensation for a startup yet to launch a product ? | rw: > "once the product is launched and gains traction to a massive user base."Don't kid yourself, this is hard to do. |
Why don't you use email encryption? | iuguy: My business does. Anything commercially confidential is encrypted in transit and at rest on anything portable (file encryption isn't currently set up on the servers but will be in the next refresh).FWIW the way to use it successfully is to use it to get people to think about the sensitivity of the data (as in 's... |
What is an expected compensation for a startup yet to launch a product ? | iuguy: I would avoid talking about shares till it starts to take off. It might be worth getting agreement on what will happen if it takes off. Otherwise you might feel locked in to something you can't walk away from easily. |
To porn or not to porn? | skmurphy: There is an investment site http://www.adultvest.com/ that specializes in "adult entertainment" startups. It appears to be a legitimate investment group.http://venturebeat.com/2005/12/21/adultvest-investment-commu...http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2...http://www.hedgeco.net/news/06/... |
What is an expected compensation for a startup yet to launch a product ? | vaksel: find out what % that 1000 options make up.But you should definitely look for some cash on the side. Even if its a measly 500 bucks a month |
Stats on freemium services | vaksel: You can't really compare yourself to those guys. Sure they might have ~2% conversion rates...but thats because their users trust that they pay for quality, You on the other hand will be an unknown, so they'll be more hesitant to give up the credit card info. To be on the safe side, put your conversion rate at .... |
What do you wish Google Analytics would do? | jyothi: - better funnel graphs. Meaning their funnel logic doesn't work for anything but straight simple navigation - tree like. I would rather need something like what statviz generates.- A drill down upto session level navigation.- A query editor that can expose a view of the db of critical visit data. Could be more ... |
To porn or not to porn? | mhb: The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.Norman Schwarzkopf |
When Does a Startup Need Management? | plinkplonk: The problem is not in having managers. As many posts here point out, someone has to do all that stuff anyway.The problem arises when managers have more power than engineers. In large organizations, by default, managers have more pay, perks and power than even the seniormost engineer/hacker. Avoid this imbal... |
Why don't you use email encryption? | briansmith: Most users will only use encrypted/signed email if encryption and signing is done automatically. If the automatic encryption/decryption/signing/verification is done by the server (e.g. GMail), security gurus will complain that it isn't secure enough.If the encryption/decryption is done in the "totally secur... |
To porn or not to porn? | TooMuchNick: The semi-social, semi-user-generated porn site fantasti.cc was created by a group of popular dot-commers (I know who but I can't tell) who have so far kept their names off the site. One of my partners at Boffery (a pre-alpha visual diary for sex lives) did some work for them, and that partner and I agree t... |
Why don't you use email encryption? | mjgoins: Because when you search through your email, it has to be already decrypted, so why bother?On the other hand, I cryptographically sign all of my email, so those who use the web of trust have a reasonable assurance it came from me. |
To porn or not to porn? | mattmaroon: I have no moral qualms with it, but I wouldn't because it's just not a good investment. In my travels I've bumped into some people who've succeeded at it (one of whom writes a fascinating blog about the industry) and it's not easy.For one, there's serious capital outlay. Producing porn is not cheap. Good fe... |
Why don't you use email encryption? | bayareaguy: Although I get a lot of email, I don't really send much and most of what I send is that I can't meet $person when they want because of $reason and that I would rather meet at $date. That sort of thing
isn't really sensitive.That said, I occasionally exchange details that could be covered by an NDA and for ... |
Favorite Technology Company Superbowl Ads? | anamax: While there have been many good ads that debuted at the superbowl, only a few have been great superbowl ads, that is, that have taken advantage of the context.I think that the best superbowl ad was the e-trade ad at the beginning of the 1999 or 2000 superbowl that had a chimp dancing in a garage.The caption was... |
To porn or not to porn? | astrodust: The trouble with trying to cross-fund ventures like that is it might diffuse the focus of your business. The way you succeed is by doing what you do best, which is ideally better than the competition and something that's in demand.I'd say you're faced with a few ways of raising capital, one of which is inves... |
First startup / cold feet. Any advice ? | lionhearted: Random advice you'll need: Spend as much time as you possible can trying to get money.Just start now. Get some money.Do it. Get some money. Are you spending time getting money? No? Do it! Stop redesigning your website. Get some money.Product's rough? Offer it for 20% of what you'll sell it for later, with ... |
What do you wish Google Analytics would do? | jonursenbach: Ability to see your stats in realtime would be fantastic. |
How does this AddThis.com make money? | tsetse-fly: Is this some sort of ploy to get us to visit that site?It's simple: if you're not selling anything, whether it's goods, services, or ads, then you're not making money. Not all sites on the Internet exist for profit. |
www and non www redirection issue. Somebody help! | sam_in_nyc: This is going to sound blunt, but I mean it politely: Hacker News is not for tech support.I would suggest heading over to StackOverflow.com, or one of many webmaster community forums to ask this. |
Stats on freemium services | timcederman: Where's Andrew Chen when you need him? |
Stats on freemium services | catone: Ryan Carson shared stats for DropSend a couple of years ago on Vitamin: http://thinkvitamin.com/business/will-your-web-app-make-mone... |
How does this AddThis.com make money? | tdavis: I don't think they do, unless they offer some premium plan I am unaware of. We use AddThis and honestly don't have much faith in them; it took over a week to reply to our e-mail informing them of a bug that was keeping us from logging into their analytics. |
When Does a Startup Need Management? | known: Give engineers right tools to do their job. They will manage themselves. |
www and non www redirection issue. Somebody help! | RobGR: Are you using some kind of hosting company's graphical configuration ? It sounds like you should not have made www.abc.com forward to itself, and that you are probably ok now, but it's hard to tell.To really know what is going on here, we would need to know more details -- for instance, by "domain forwarding" d... |
First startup / cold feet. Any advice ? | smwhreyebelong: Thanks for the invaluable advice, everyone. Really appreciate you guys taking out the time to reply !!I've made the decision ... it's going to be a startup. If nothing else, it will be one dandy adventure !thanks again! |
Stats on freemium services | pierrefar: Don Dodge from Microsoft had this post a long time ago: http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/05/freem...Money quote: "The average is less than 3% conversion." |
When Does a Startup Need Management? | vikram: Management is to general. What specifically do you want this person to do? Build plans? Make decisions? Make sure the office is clean?If it is shape our business. I would say you need someone with a background in what you guys are working on. I think it'll be difficult to find this person out of your core group... |
To porn or not to porn? | SystemOut: I'm the head of software engineering for a decent sized porn company so I know a little about this. I personaly wouldn't worry about your VC concern but then again I don't see myself ever doing a project where I need VC money. That's just the reality of me disliking the large VC firm approach. I doubt ang... |
Stats on freemium services | zokiboy: To cheer things a bit, here are some higher numbers:Flickr: 5-10%
Ning: 3%
Online free-to-play games: up to 25%
TurboTax Online: 70% (!!)Source: http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2008/11/freemium-math-...My opinion: it depends on a lot of factors. From my experience without much effort you can get 1% user... |
Does anybody have the link to the trading systems post? (couple months back) | MaysonL: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=390413 |
How does this AddThis.com make money? | bemmu: Seems difficult to make money with this, but here's a few ideas.They could charge new link sharing sites for the privilege of being available in their widget, or for better placement.They could start their own link sharing site / link aggregator based on the data they gather from the widgets, then of course also... |
Stats on freemium services | Jem: Not flickr or last.fm, but... 16 out of 757 users on one of my sites. I work that out to be 2.1%-ish? (The site opened in November 08) |
To porn or not to porn? | mroman: From recent, direct experience:9 out of 10 people you come across in that industry are not people you want to deal with.Trust me. |
To porn or not to porn? | greyman: >>> My question is this: Would you (startups/entrepreneurs/VCs/funders/anyone in the industry) do business or be associated with someone in the porn industry?No. Don't do it. Your name will get associated with porn and you will not be able to get rid of it completely in the future, even if you will want to. Ju... |
When Does a Startup Need Management? | paulsb: I don't think you are looking for managers, but rather advisor's. At your stage you need people who have "been there and done that". I imagine that you and your team are technically focused (building the tech and filing for patents), but you need advisor's to help you shape the business.My experience is that I ... |
How do you get tech bloggers to review a startup? | pclark: I'll give my thoughts. I'm a nobody though.* very slow to load* Awesome logo - did you make it?* I don't know what it is. "s3mer is a complete dynamic digital signage solution designed to be easy to use, cross platform and feature rich."Does this mean digital code signing or advertising signs? The image with th... |
How do you get tech bloggers to review a startup? | Harkins: Who is the audience for your homepage?People without offline advertising experience don't know the phrase "digital signage". If you're lucky they will leave through the Wikipedia link and learn the term, but that page only tells them "Ah, this is something I don't care about" so they won't return.People with o... |
How do you get tech bloggers to review a startup? | sanj: Have you considered working with someone in PR?I used to be dead-set against that advice, but good PR folks act as a quality filter to many of the big-name tech bloggers. |
How do you get tech bloggers to review a startup? | Maro: Even after browsing the site, it's not clear what it's about. It has to do with playing ads on a screen, but what's the concept? Do I get payed for playing someone else's ad? Is this a piece of software for creating ads for myself? You mention a downloadable application, but in the movies everything is happening ... |
How do you get tech bloggers to review a startup? | riklomas: I immediately clicked on the video because I didn't understand what the concept was. You should make the video larger (I don't want to full screen) and maybe do a commentary soundtrack with it to help get across what you're doing |
How do you get tech bloggers to review a startup? | markessien: Start of by explaining what the software does. It's not explained on the frontpage. Secondly, people don't cover technology, they cover human interest stories. You have no angle at all. Create and angle and retry. |
How do you get tech bloggers to review a startup? | ryanwaggoner: Is this software that's designed to run on flatscreens in coffee shops and retail stores? Who is the audience for the site? |
How do you get tech bloggers to review a startup? | damienkatz: I had no idea what your site or product page did until I found this link, then it instantly made sense.http://www.s3mer.com/tour.phpI suggest you change your homepage to be a lot more like the tour page. |
How do you get tech bloggers to review a startup? | ssharp: Spit in their face.I deserve the down mod. |
How do you get tech bloggers to review a startup? | RiderOfGiraffes: You need to tell me what problem it solves, and only then tell me how marvellous it is. Don't give me loads of buzzwords - the "Ginger Factor" is very large. Tell me the situation where it is useful. I, like others here, don't really know what you're providing.And again, the video is too small, and ... |
How do you get tech bloggers to review a startup? | enra: If you can't get big guys talk about you, try to contact some smaller and local ones. Atleast we at ArcticStartup are happy to know about new startups but actually very few contact us directly.And if you contact them use some to explain what the startup does, why and how are you etc. |
How do you get tech bloggers to review a startup? | arthurk: Here are my thoughts:* Slow load time (I'm located in Europe)* It's not clear what your startup does. At first, I thought it would be something using Amazon S3 because of the name "s3mer". The "What is s3mer?" section is also very unclear to me.* Why the Adobe Air, Mac, Windows XP and Windows Vista logos? If i... |
How do you get tech bloggers to review a startup? | bendtheblock: If this is what I think it is, I like the general idea of the product. It's for big screens in train stations, taxis etc. right?People usually understand things better with examples, so I would try and get some images of it in action (on an actual screen, in an actual public place) on the front page.Kudos... |
How do you get tech bloggers to review a startup? | gravitycop: For the past few weeks I tried to get bloggers to review my startupShow it to people they trust, who are easier to access. The reason is: startup bloggers get flooded with nearly-identical requests. They are more likely to pay attention to you if you first pass the screening test of a trusted friend of thei... |
How do you get tech bloggers to review a startup? | Mystalic: You simply have to have a compelling product. You have to have an easy-to-understand product, You have to have a very simple two line pitch.I throw all the press releases away. I care a lot more about a good two sentence pitch.Butt really, you need to email them that quick pitch to the appropriate email, or... |
How do you get tech bloggers to review a startup? | aditya: Peldi has some good advice on this,
(Startup Marketing Advice from Balsamiq Studio) http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/?p=198 |
Business and programming? | pj: The two are not mutually exclusive. You can do business while learning programming. Programming /will/ help you in business because with programming you can find answers easier.The first thing I would do if I were you and I know what I know now, I would investigate Platforms as a Service. These services allow yo... |
How do you get tech bloggers to review a startup? | racerrick: I think it's best to focus on one site/blogger that you really really want to get a review from and then create a campaign to get some coverage.This takes weeks or months, not days.Start by commenting as much as you can. It's best to be one of the very first commenters and make thoughtful comments. Always m... |
How do you get tech bloggers to review a startup? | alain94040: We debated that question (of how to get coverage) at the latest TheFunded event. I'll give you a quick summary. Issuing a press release will not be picked up by anyone. Writers will write about you if you contact them and manage to actually interact with them. Phone is best.Everytime geeks hear the word pho... |
How do you get tech bloggers to review a startup? | flexterra: I'm overwhelmed by the amount and quality of responses. After reading them I realized that most of you are right. In the homepage is not clear what problem we fix. That's mainly because we were aiming the digital sigange industry and they already know what "ds" software is. Now we are aiming small businesses... |
To porn or not to porn? | lst: Even if you succeed, you will not be happy. Peace and porn are not friends. |
How do you get tech bloggers to review a startup? | mrtron: Digital signage is a pretty unique industry in terms of the sales cycle. There are some industry blogs that you could probably get on.(I used to work in the industry and sold a few of my own solutions) |
Anyone offer 110% guarantee for their products? | timf: The price of the product probably matters a lot.e.g. I don't plan on prorating monthly subscription cancellations but this won't result in any severe amount of money gone if someone tried to abuse unless there was some giant, coordinated scam. In the latter case, whoever's credit card got stolen would likely do ... |
Anyone offer 110% guarantee for their products? | tjic: I offer a 120% guarantee at SmartFlix.com.I've only had one customer ask for it. |
How do you get tech bloggers to review a startup? | raffi: Rather than beat up your site, I'll take a stab at answering your question:I highly recommend reading: http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/?p=198Peldi's advice and the links he give are dead on. I pitched bloggers before reading this and got a zero response rate.Then I adjusted tactics. I added a phone number to my ... |
which way to go for bulk image uploading? | hs: ftp? it has resume built in lest u got disco while uploading |
which way to go for bulk image uploading? | jupiter: You cannot do client side resizing with flash < v.10 |
How do you get tech bloggers to review a startup? | webwright: Be worth talking about and it'll happen. Not saying that PR effort isn't worth it, but it gets a lot easier if you're interesting/clear.Read the book "Made to Stick" and ask yourself how sticky your story is (you don't HAVE a story-- that's the problem).Look at Balsamiq-- that guy had a STORY that people wa... |
How do you get tech bloggers to review a startup? | jtuyen: Question, do you guys support h264 with AAC? I'm in the DS industry myself and tested over half a dozen apps based in the NA market. |
How do you get tech bloggers to review a startup? | jhickner: The demo video takes a long time before you see what the end result actually looks like. It's sort of a how-to video, and I think you need a straight demo video that lets you see the goods up front. |
How does the White House prevent Obama's emails from being forwarded? | quoderat: Probably Information Rights Management in Outlook (Office):http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA101029181033.aspxI have no inside knowledge, though, but I doubt they built their own system.And you can still take a screenshot with a third-party program, and myriad of other ways to get around it. If you rea... |
How does the White House prevent Obama's emails from being forwarded? | DanHulton: I doubt they implement or worry about technology to absolutely prevent anything the president ever emails from ever leaving the office. Copy + Paste into a new email solves that pretty cleanly.The issue however, is what if someone unknowingly or accidentally forwards something the president wrote? There's ... |
which way to go for bulk image uploading? | bl00m: Millions of Facebook users indicate that it might work with ActiveX/Java (tho I don't find it cool either). You're also inclined to trust a big and established site more when it comes to installing software on your computer. |
Is PHP more scalable than Ruby or Python? | eatenbyagrue: I assume you're asking about scalability in terms of pages per second or whatever, but what you should be more worried about is the scalability of your development effort. As other posters have said, speed of the platform is not the issue.Rather you should consider what platform you think you can get the ... |
How does the White House prevent Obama's emails from being forwarded? | jaxn: I bet they told the handful of people who have his email address "Of you every forward a message you will no longer be able to email the President".That would probably work well enough. |
Anyone offer 110% guarantee for their products? | chris11: The request rate for 110% cash back might be similar to the rates for rebate offers. People have said rebates get returned anywhere between 2% and 60%, but it sounds like the industry average is less than 10%. So I doubt many people would ask for the 110% cash back.And as for customers taking advantage of it, ... |
How does the White House prevent Obama's emails from being forwarded? | mdasen: It's never impossible to forward an email. Heck, you can simply take a screenshot and forward that along (or even write down the contents and re-type it). A forwarded email is just as suspect as a screenshot that can be photoshopped.I think the way that they prevent it is that you'll get fired if you do it. ... |
Creating an image of a Macbook, to install a dev environment | wmf: http://www.macenterprise.org/macworld-2008-slides/imaging-tr...Found here: http://www.macenterprise.org/system/app/pages/search?q=imagi... |
How do you get tech bloggers to review a startup? | ahoyhere: Being exceptional and interesting is the way to getting covered. (Read Purple Cow. Seriously. And then read every other Seth Godin book.)Being famous/well-known is another. (Sounds tough, but you can really reach people by teaching.)Before you redesign your front page which -- I agree with everyone else -- is... |
Glad the override feature is gone? | run4yourlives: Nope, I waited my requisite time and then turned the no-procast option off. So now it doesn't matter at all.I'm actually not too happy pg did this without some sort of warning. Last time I checked, he wasn't my mother. At any rate problem solved now. |
Framing other sites has always seemed scummy to me. Am I off-base? | tokenadult: Yes, it is scummy. I sure don't set up many outlinks to sites that frame other sites. I don't recommend them actively in online discussion either. I would never set up framing like that in any site I administer. |
Why don't you use email encryption? | izak30: Because it's not default. |
Glad the override feature is gone? | cperciva: Nope. I don't use noprocrast, but I imagine that the set of people who do are heavily skewed towards the more senior members of the HN community -- so removing the override and keeping them locked out is likely to have the effect of lowering the tone of discourse here. |
Framing other sites has always seemed scummy to me. Am I off-base? | chris11: That's why I've never really liked about.com. Looking into it, it seems like all the content has been paid for by about.com. But content on their sites has appeared elsewhere, and it looks like they frame content, so it's just distasteful.I do think it can be done well though. Isitfunnytoday.com
frames conten... |
Framing other sites has always seemed scummy to me. Am I off-base? | callmeed: I don't think it hurts your SEO–since it's framing your page at the same URL. Google is smart enough to know that the frame comes from your site/blog.Honestly, I don't think you should be too concerned about it. After all, RSS readers, blog search engines, news search engines, meme aggregators, and other site... |
Framing other sites has always seemed scummy to me. Am I off-base? | inerte: 1 - It doesn't hurt SEO. Sure, a directly link would be better, but a framed one is better than nothing. If it creates duplicate content problems, it's for the framer, not the framed.2 - No. Why do you think it might do?3 - No, I hate them too :) Except isitfunnytoday.com, because, you see... that's the problem... |
Framing other sites has always seemed scummy to me. Am I off-base? | chris11: "Facebook frames the destination pages for all links shared on it."Where does Facebook do this? I just checked it with a site for a food drive that I'm advertising on my news feed, and it wasn't framed. |
Framing other sites has always seemed scummy to me. Am I off-base? | anotherjesse: stumbleupon is now doing this for their non-extension based experience. |
Glad the override feature is gone? | raamdev: No, I was quite annoyed. I only turned it on to help remind me when I might be wasting time, not prevent me from reading HN. Without an override, that feature is useless to me. |
Glad the override feature is gone? | shaunxcode: I am fine with it being gone, though I must say I was finally starting to exercise self control myself. Maybe he can add an option for "allow over-ride". |
Pricing Models for Subscription Services... Your Experience? | walesmd: 1. Monthly - I like the thought I can cancel whenever I want without a big hassle w/ refunds, pro-rating, etc.2. Monthly subscriptions are really hitting their popularity peak right now. It seems to be the way to do business now - I've never attempted to offer an annual, not sure how it would perform. I would ... |
Pricing Models for Subscription Services... Your Experience? | ctingom: It depends on what I'm buying. I like that when I buy Flickr I don't have to think about it every month I can just buy it and know I've made a choice for a whole year and it's done.But on apps like Basecamp or Freshbooks I like the monthly since it isn't a huge chunk of money up front. |
How to write financial projections? | Alex3917: www.alexkrupp.com/projections.xlsI just added this for you. It should do the trick. Just use the tab labeled "income statement_b" at the bottom and ignore the stuff in the other tabs. Then you can just swap in your own numbers.In terms of figuring out sales, just figure out how many units you can sell per day... |
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