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benfwirtz

17 karma · joined January 23, 2011

I help companies take their products and PM processes to the next level. Ex Senior Product Manager for @JIRA at @Atlassian and 3x entrepreneur.
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benfwirtz··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2013)
Unifyo | Cambridge or London, UK | Full-time

Unifyo is the next generation relationship management tool. It’s clever technology is helping successful businesses to stay on top of their ever growing number of customer and contact relationships in a social world. Instead of company data being scattered across multiple applications and employees wasting time on searching for the right pieces of customer info, Unifyo provides instant access to unified customer profiles, without any complex setup or integration work. Less time spent on searching, more time spent on business.

We are adding two people to our team of 7:

1) Online Marketing / Growth hacking – responsible for user acquisition and overall growth. If you have great communication skills, you love to experiment with user acquisition techniques and you are into measuring what works and what doesn't, then we'd love to hear from you.

2) Sales / Customer Success – convert users to paying customers. The likes of Yammer and other "free to sign up" services didn't scale by simply cold-calling companies, but by making sure that people and companies which did sign up got the most out of their products, converted into paying customers and made sure every employee is using their products. Little cold-calling but lots of selling by making sure our users use Unifyo successfully - if that sounds like a plan to you, get in touch.

We’re a small, fun team, with an emphasis on enjoying our work and learning. We are a Seedcamp funded company (Europe's biggest startup accelerator), so you'll have access to a huge mentor network. Getting involved will be a great way to learn and gain loads of experience really really fast. We’ll also offer a competitive salary and stock options so you can share in the company’s success.

Contact me directly: ben@unifyo.com or check out https://unifyo.com/jobs

benfwirtz··on Work harder on yourself than you do on your startup
Funnily enough, I listened to Jeff Atkwood from Stack Overflow yesterday who made the same point implicitly - he and Joel Spolsky had a big community around themselves when they created Stack Overflow and got the initial traction that way.

So that's +2 then ;)

benfwirtz··on Social Collaboration Platform For Classrooms Edmodo Opens API
If they manage to get as big as they hope for, that could get pupils to even start developing apps themselves. In any case, much better efforts than in the early 2000s, where governments experimented with computers in classes, just for the sake of using computers in classes.
benfwirtz··on You don't need a better tool for managing e-mail
Apologies motoford, we are currently building this thing and are opening it up to other people in phases. To make sure we are not just building yet another nice-to-have tool but something that actually improves the way people communicate, we wanted gather people's genuine feelings on this issue - not just collect email addresses.

Of course, I'm happy to remove you (and anyone who signed up by accident) from the mailing list - send me an email to ben at zeninbox dot com :)

benfwirtz··on Show HN: Best times & channels to follow up
Thanks Tyler :)

Screenshots and more info will follow soon

benfwirtz··on Ask HN: Startup development infrastructure - ec2, cloud services or own servers?
Good point, considering the capabilities. If you do everything with EC2, you should stick with it. Otherwise, if your developer box is Linux, you are probably able to admin a dedicated Linux server (for the build environment) as well, no?

On the other hand, it makes sense to develop Cloud skills at some stage as well, and you might want to screw it up with the test&build server first, before setting up the production server ;) Probably depends as well then on how much time you have?

benfwirtz··on Ask HN: Startup development infrastructure - ec2, cloud services or own servers?
Good analysis, but why production on a dedicated server and development on PaaS? Intuitively, I would do it the other way around, to make sure I don't have to do the admin on a production system (source of failure) and can scale the production system with the click of a button (which I'm happy to pay slightly more on). Where is my mind going wrong? ;)
benfwirtz··on Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (November 2011)
Cambridge / London, UK - Full Time - http://handyelephant.com

Handy Elephant is building a productivity app for business professionals who have to maintain a large number of relationships across multiple channels (e.g. Phone, SMS, Email, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook).

We have been accepted into a Silicon Valley based Startup Accelerator and are now looking to extend our team of 4 (Android dev, Web Dev, Web & UX Designer, Marketing) with a Web Lead Developer - more details here: http://handyelephant.com/lead-web-developer-wanted/

Why work for us?

- Exciting technology, which sits in the intersection of Social Networks, Mobile apps, Data Warehousing and Social Psychology

- Beautiful Location, as our office is in Cambridge with an awesome view. Cambridge is well known for it’s vibrant startup, investor and developer community – and a great place to live. And the best thing: No London Tubes, it's all bikes here!

- Spend 10% of your time on “building relationships” like all of us do. That could mean being active in local developer groups, stackoverflow, contributing to an open-source project or writing a blog – it’s your choice.

- Optionally , come with us to Silicon Valley next year, to join the start up accelerator, and explore the start-up capital of the world.

benfwirtz··on Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus with Honeycomb AND Phone?
The tablet spec seems to be Honeycomb / Android 3.2, but the screenshot clearly shows the icon of the phone app - and the first Galaxy Tab (7 inch too) was a phone. What do you guys think, will the next Galaxy Tab come with phone functionality again?
benfwirtz··on Google Buys Motorola For $12.5 Billion
Google shares already lost 4% on the Frankfurt Stock exchange ( http://www.boerse-frankfurt.de/EN/index.aspx?pageID=35&I... ), and Google didn't answer any questions on how they came up with this extraordinary price. I don't think $12.5bn is justifiable...
benfwirtz··on Google should buy RIM
Guess it won't happen now, Google just bought Motorolla for (about) the same price they could have bought RIM: http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/15/breaking-google-buys-motoro...
benfwirtz··on My thoughts on the Seedsummit Term Sheet
Agree with the impression that it's not an actual "seed" term sheet. But most European VCs like to advertise themselves as "early stage" investors, although they mostly do later stage investments of a few million Euros.

But at the very least, there is now some kind of reference startups can look at. For seed investments, there is also the HackFwd term sheet: http://hackfwd.com/#tools

benfwirtz··on Moving from Java to Scala - One year later...
Great review, thanks :)

In terms of Scala in enterprises, I think the question is not only if it is or can stay the "better" programming language with long living support, but also how popular it will become, i.e. how easy it will be to find (and afford) skilled developers for it (and the numbers you found don't allow too much optimism yet).

And I think that is not only true for enterprises - also startups should ask themselved if they can easily get talent for the technologies they use or how much time they will need to spend on getting people trained.

I look forward to the next review - in another year? ;)