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Instead of reading or replying to things as soon as they come in, I just silence everything on my phone except phone calls. That way, I check emails, texts, tweets, etc. at my convenience. It interrupts me only when necessary.

Why do you need to re-order labels? And do you mean in a conversation or in the sidebar?

Neat. I wonder what OtherInbox makes of this? Their organizer feature is basically this.

This post was the biggest surprise of my day. I like the sentiment of good enough products market themselves but it also reminds me too much of "build it and they will come." And we know how often that works out...

I've had luck converting people tweeting about the problem my product solves to beta users. I'm sure it depends on who your customers are and how likely they are to express themselves on Twitter and other social media.

Isn't that a problem for Quora to solve? I'd hate to think keeping anyone out is the answer, especially with a challenging UX.

(Copy & pasted from a feedback email to Dave because I thought others might like to elaborate and discuss):

Great job on starting HackerBuddy. I was impressed with how quickly it matched me up with someone!

Ideas as they came to me:

1. Cool icons and good tooltips for areas of expertise!

2. I like my profile but you should allow vanity URLs like hackerbuddy.com/artvankilmer

3. Are you pulling pics from Gravatar? Nice bit of personalization.

4. Twitter and HN icons would be a natural addition :)

5. My Twitter and HN usernames are probably my HackerBuddy username. Could suggest that automatically instead of making me type it in.

6. Browse Users isn't prominent enough!

7. How I can give feedback isn't prominent enough!

8. Browse Users can't just be a dump of profile names. I need to be able to slice & dice by expertise, general availability (don't suggest folks that have already been paired with a bunch of other users), etc.

9. Some kind of reputation / recommendation / feedback system would really help. Why not pull in a user's HN karma or StackOverflow score to help seed things a bit? Even feedback on a user's profile of how helpful they were would help.

10. "CSS" is painfully missing, esp. since you have "Design", "HTML", and "JavaScript". CSS != Design (e.g. I think Photoshop, Illustrator, wireframes)

11. Logged out home page is a good start but you need more to hook folks. Try imagery of hackers helping hackers, appealing to folks obsessed with HN karma / SO scores / Twitter followers, and just nailing your value prop. "Free karma for helpful hackers" doesn't do it for me.

Keep up the good work!

I like most of these questions but am not sure about #1:

"Is this a core investment or something in which you have interest but would walk away from if things get difficult?"

Isn't this something you would know based on who the firm has invested in before? How can you get more specific than that?

Good luck to everyone who's applying!

"Every week, the teams have two meetings. One in which to brainstorm, to forget about constraints and think freely....to "go crazy". Then they also hold a production meeting, an entirely separate but equally regular meeting which is the other's antithesis. Here, the designers and engineers are required to nail everything down, to work out how this crazy idea might actually work."

It seems like a great idea to separate brainstorming and refining into two meetings. From my experience, doing them in the same meeting is hard. You don't know when to cross over from free thinking to critical thinking. Tension arises when some folks end up drilling down into one idea while others are still brainstorming new ones at a very high level.

"the best thing right now would be to have a boss that is not yourself" I love this but..

"..then get out of the way so that you could just focus on the code" ...completely hate this.

At first read, the idea of a boss that is not yourself struck me as great because it helps give you a very different perspective on things. But having that boss simply "make all the decisions about what you should do" takes away all the duties of a founder. Figuring out what to do is the real hard work of a startup. Unless your technology is curing cancer, then you still need to understand everything you can about the problem you're solving and who you're solving it for. You can't just focus on the solution.

I think people's backgrounds create a strong bias in what they think qualifies as progress or a solution. Business people want to tweak the deck, the sales pitch, the marketing, the business plan, etc. Designers want to improve the UX, the typography, the color scheme, the layout, etc. Developers want to write more features, add more tests, refactor, obsess about performance, etc.

The way I currently summarize this is: What’s the simplest possible thing you can do today to learn what you need for tomorrow?

Thank you!

Will do! Always appreciate feedback. Just tweet @slipstre_am or email feedback at slipstre.am

Cool. Hiding checkins is a very popular use case.

Definitely but I want to hit some other big milestones before charging for anything.

Thanks, I'll consider it. Always more to A/B test :)

Thanks for sharing. I actually got more out of your post than the presentation.

Founder here. Thanks for the mention and happy to take feedback! Was planning on doing an Ask HN post soon.

I did. That's how I got the original output.

$ heroku logs --tail

! Realtime tail and filter are not available with basic logging, please upgrade to expanded logging

:(

Exactly, thus my comment above about attendees paying $1,000 for a learning experience: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959654

25) Use a thick marker during design since you can only focus on the key things.

More info: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/466-sketching-with-a-sharpie

Maybe these bits are "out of context" or "need fleshing out" because you can't always summarize learning in a series of tweets or a blog post. Maybe that's why the event is $1,000 - you're paying for a learning experience, not just content.

> If you asked someone to draw the screen of say http://godaddy.com from memory, they'd likely mainly remember the lovely lady wearing a 'godaddy' t-shirt. Is that the most important thing?

That's exactly the point. Isn't that something the GoDaddy designer(s) should know and take into account? They want people buying domain names, not drooling.

Again with GoDaddy, do you want a sexy brand image, a lead gen wet dream, people to quickly buy domain names in bulk, etc.? I completely agree that "important" isn't specific enough but it's up to you, as the designer, to figure out the balance.

I asked William Gibson if I could help with the fact that following 87 people is more than he can take in (http://twitter.com/#!/artvankilmer/status/9127501972381696).

Just wanted to extend that offer to everyone here as well. I too have the overload problem and am passionate about the value of Twitter, which is why I'm building something that will help. Happy to share & discuss further: http://slipstre.am/

I loved reading this in Do More Faster but I preferred the original chapter title: "Usage is like oxygen for ideas." If you enjoyed this post, the book is full of similar goodness. This was the best though :) Nice job, photomatt!

I enjoyed this: "The fastest racecar can’t move if the gas-cap gets stuck; your product is only as good as its worst component." It reminds me of Dave McClure's "something in your product sucks, find it, kill it" (paraphrased).

Thank you. I was hoping someone would bring attention to this. Complete misuse of "GTD."

I see your point but single founders aren't completely alone either. I think of hosting my Ruby app on Heroku and letting them do sysadmin, leveraging awesome open source code to get to a product faster, and having great advisors as my equivalents of having an agent, an editor, or a publisher.