Hacker News Reader

dkycon Zoom CEO sold all of his common shares

This is complete nonsense. He sold about $23m worth of stock [1], while he owned about 22% of stock at the time of IPO, worth roughly ~$10b in total.

[1] https://www.gurufocus.com/news/1135874/zoom-video-communicat...

dkycon The Lesson to Unlearn

"Growth" in the YC definition ("revenue growth with positive unit economics", or the closest proxy to that) seems a pretty objective test to me.

dkycon Open-source apps removed from Google Play Store due to donation links

The “30% cut” only applies to digital goods like apps, software or music. Physical goods like a book ordered from Amazon (or an Uber ride, for example) are exempt. Amazon-owned properties that sell digital goods are subject to the rule though. That’s for example why you can’t buy Audible audiobooks from within the app.

dkycon To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public

> Yes, Google has a huge index, but most queries aren't in the long tail.

I'm not quite sure about that. 15% of Google searches per day are unique, as in, Google has never seen them before. [1]. That's quite an insane number.

[1] https://searchengineland.com/google-reaffirms-15-searches-ne...

dkycon Teenager beats Tetris game older than he is to become world champion [video]

I parse it as: This post includes a video of a teenager beating a tetris game which was released before the boy was born.

dkycon Web Design Museum

SpaceX (https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/spacex-2002) is the one that really struck a chord with me. Not because of the design itself, but because it shows just how old the company already is, while only stepping into mainstream spotlight fairly recently.

dkycon Ask HN: How to launch an algo trading side project?

"Once (if..) you've made some profit, take out your initial investment and now you're gambling with free money."

I never understood this sentiment, and I'm surprised to see it so often on Hacker News. It's irrelevant whether the money came from profits or initial investment - money is money? There is no need to distinguish the both, it's purely psychological.

dkycon How One Jira Ticket Made My Employer $1MM/Month: 7 Metrics That Actually Matter

I think this is meant in another way: sales and marketing should never discuss future features with potential customers. Meaning, they should not try to win deals by promising features not yet rolled out, rather than not being involved in internal priorization discussions.

I happen to agree with the author to an extent. Selling future things rather than what's presently available makes sales a lot easier (which is why reps are often eager to do it), but the true value is created when sales sells what is already there. My father always put it this way: You have to sell what you have.

dkycon Going Global with Your Startup

I think my sibling comment's experiences are somewhat dated. Running one-time payments has been absolutely no problem with ChargeBee for us. It's obviously geared toward subscription businesses, but it has full support for one-time charges as well. No need for any hacks or weird work-arounds.

Regarding what pain is left: I'm approaching this from an end-to-end perspective, so answering the question "Even when using ChargeBee, what additional work do we have to do compared to a similar business based in the US?":

- You still have to code in UI-level support for multiple currencies. ChargeBee handles the backend.

- ChargeBee gives you a nice UI for keeping track of paid and unpaid invoices. Nonetheless, for payments via bank transfer [which your EU business customers will want to use], you still have to manually confirm in ChargeBee that you've received payment.

- You still have to supply quarterly MOSS tax returns to your local tax authorities (though ChargeBee does all it can to make that process quick).

dkycon Going Global with Your Startup

Running a Germany-based SaaS startup at some scale, so I feel confident to chime in.

To put it bluntly, you're right. We have to do more work just to get started accepting money than our American counterparts. Yes, the insanely complex EU-VAT rules actually need to be followed. Yes, a lot of your customers will want to pay via bank transfer and not through credit card. Yes, the American folks will still want to pay in USD and not in EUR.

We use ChargeBee (https://www.chargebee.com/) to abstract away most of the pain. I would greatly suggest using such a service (Recurly and Chargify are more enterprisey alternatives). We had a selfmade implementation before switching to ChargeBee, and one EU rule change caused us to have to re-issue all customer invoices for one quarter. Not fun. ChargeBee prevents you from doing the biggest blunders in taxation, and also allows you to keep track of invoices paid through credit card or through bank transfer (and specify the Dunning rules accordingly). Overall, I'd greatly recommend it.

dkycon Going gray for smartphone addiction

Took me a while to get what this app does, maybe it would be a better idea to link to their homepage: https://gogray.today/

> What was bright and shiny was now dull and boring. It's like turning your favourite dessert into broccoli.

This fantastic analogy it was sold me on signing up, good copywriting:

dkycon YC World – Explore YC Alumni by Country

Interesting map! German here, surprising to see only 3 German companies have made the list. I don't know what I expected, but 3 YC companies seems like a really low number.

(Micro-nitpick: The color scale is a little bit confusing. Darker = more startups; but USA [1,062 startups] and Canada [62] both have #597b9f as color, even though there's a one-thousand-company difference)

dkycon Ask HN: Why do we let people take advantage of us?

Hi there. Is there a way to contact you in some way other than your UpWork-profile (linked in your HN profile)? It's a good idea to include your e-mail address there.

I was in a similar situation a while ago, but can't share all info publicly.

dkycon Don't Be a Free User (2011)

My experience running a project/company like you describe:

1) Not the geeks, but the big multinational companies with disposable developer time end up using your open-source solution. Exactly the types of users I don't feel sorry for and would rather extract money from.

2) The "payback" in the form of bug reports and patches is negligible, because nobody likes to do work if they're not being compensated (either through money, or, more commonly in the open-source world, fame)

3) The users of the hosted version don't want to pay anything because "it's open-source, after all".

4) People that do not have the necessary technical capabilities to host your software, but also don't like to pay, harass you on GitHub and other support channels because "your software doesn't work", and it "throws error messages".

The key advantage is that some people (journalists, bloggers) tend to present you in a more positive light if you describe yourself as an "open-source solution" rather than yet another commercial app.

dkycon Why does Siri seem so dumb?

"It also can’t distinguish between the question of “who is” a person and a request for that person’s contact card. For instance, I have a contact card for Apple CEO Tim Cook. When I ask, “Who is Tim Cook?” Siri shows me the contact card, not his bio."

Tech reporter humblebrag of the year.

dkycon News Feed FYI: Further Reducing Clickbait in Feed

There is none! It's a redirect, afaik. Fun fact: They paid over $8M for to acquire the domain from the "American Farm Bureau Federation".

[0] http://mashable.com/2011/01/11/facebook-paid-8-5-million-to-...

dkycon Dropbox Project Infinite

At first I thought "Well, Dropbox storage is 5x as expensive as hard drive space, so what's the point?". What I didn't see was the team use case: It's actually brilliant to have access to every document of all of my colleagues at all times, without saving all that stuff locally, or taking forever sync. This is really amazing.

The problem with our current shared team folders is that you need to make a deliberate effort to share something with the team. That means when you want to pull information from the shared space, you're very likely to get an outdated copy. Thanks to 1.) no storage constraints and 2.) deep OS-integration, all files can actually be always up-to-date with Dropbox Infinite. That really sounds cool.

dkycon Why Tesla Motors Finally Acquired Tesla.com

"Uber is reported to have traded 1% of company stock to acquire Uber.com."

Wow, if that's true, that has to be the deal of the century.

dkycon Valentine's Day Special: Bye Bye Tinder, Flirting in the Support Channel

Hm. Of course it's unprofessional to hit on a support agent, but the way this blog-post is shit-talking about their very own customers (even joking that one of them is probably too poor for champagne because they are on the free-side of their freemium plan) seems absolutely bad to me.

Edit: Especially since the product focusses on being "end-to-end-encrypted" and privacy minded, and they just purposely "leak" their customer conversations like that.

dkycon Funding Django is not an act of charity, it's an investment

I think this comment by patio11 is very relevant here:

"We don't donate to OSS software which we use, because we're legally not allowed to.

I routinely send key projects, particularly smaller projects, a request to quote me a commercial license of their project, with the explanation that I would accept a quote of $1,000 and that the commercial license can be their existing OSS license plus an invoice. My books suggest we've spent $3k on this in 2015. My bookkeeper, accountant, and the IRS/NTA are united on this issue: they don't care whether a software license is OSS or not. A $1k invoice is a $1k invoice; as a software company, I have virtually carte blanche to expense any software I think is reasonably required, and I think our OSS is reasonably required.

I would do this more often if OSS projects made it easier for me to do so. Getting me to pay $1,000 for software is easy; committing me to doing lots of admin work over the course of a week is less easy. Take a look at what e.g. http://sidekiq.org/ , which is an OSS project with a commercial model, does. Two clicks gets me to a credit card form. If I actually used Sidekiq, Mike would have had my credit card on file the day that form went up."

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863939)

dkycon Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending

I try to, but there is all kinds of scenarios where I revert back to cash: I have to have cash in my wallet anyway for things like parking tickets, so sometimes when I'm in a rush I use it. Or for example when I purchase something via card, and split the cost later on with somebody. He pays me back in cash, and it's back in my wallet.

dkycon Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending

This looks great, really good UX/UI from a first glance. My bank has a pretty modern banking app, so some of the features (like spending graphs) are familiar to me (though not as pretty as in Penny).

Two things that I dislike with my banking app:

- No real differentiation between fixed, monthly cost and variable expenses. It would be nice if the automatically separated monthly expenses and one-time expenses.

- Lots of "-$100 Cash" transactions whenever I use an ATM. This is my main concern actually. It's really hard to have some sort of insight about my finances without seeing the biggest part of my non-expenditure spending: The stuff I pay for in cash. Especially since it distorts the monthly overviews: If I retrieve $500 from my bank account on July 31st, it's not helpful to add that to my July spending, since 90% of that money will probably be spent in August. This is really a data-entry/UX problem, no API will solve this. One thing that I would suggest: Make an extension that makes it really simple to "scan" receipts. Just one glance of the camera, some OCR and the data is in there. If it's simple enough, it may become part of my "muscle memory" to scan receipts with the app whenever I buy something, so I get meaningful analysis results.

(By the way, if you want to build something like that, check out this API: https://scanbot.io/de/sdk.html - great product & company, I'm not affiliated in any way)

dkycon Govtech: The $400B Market Hiding in Plain Sight

Check out this awesome interview with Marc Ende of SeamlessGov ( http://www.seamlessgov.com ) that was released just last month: http://blog.close.io/how-to-sell-to-governments

Specifically about B2G sales.

dkycon I analyzed 250 SaaS pricing pages

Actually, slider-pricing is often a bad idea for B2B-SaaS tools. Simple reason: Almost every purchasing process in almost every company (other than software startups) is expecting a fixed, monthly rate. Put yourself in the mind of your champion: Do you want to push a deal like any else through management, procurement, etc (which is already hard enough), or do the same process every month for a slightly different price point?

dkycon Amazon Beats Analyst Expectations with $25.4B in Sales

You got that first one wrong, the 78% figure was yearly growth. AWS grew roughly 14% quarter-over-quarter:

"Amazon reported net AWS sales of $2.085 billion, up from $1.169 billion in the same quarter a year earlier. That’s a 78% jump in net sales for the company’s AWS business, which it started breaking out earlier this year. It’s even a big quarter-over-quarter jump: Amazon $1.82 billion in net sales for AWS in the previous quarter."

dkycon Ask HN: What are your opinions and experiences coding on a 13“ or 15” laptop?

I just upgraded from a 13" MacBook Pro w/ Retina to the 15" version. Key Reasons:

- Display Space: Even when set to the highest possible virtual resolution, there is still noticeable more space on the 15" version. It's still way worse than a 27" display, but the difference makes me more productive.

- RAM: Retina eats RAM. I could run several browsers, VMs, editors etc. just fine on a 4GB MacBook Air. When I upgraded to a 13" MBPr, I was constantly running out of RAM, the machine began swapping and became barely usable. With the 16GB 15" MBPr, it's a very noticeable difference. I easily run into >8GB RAM usage. In addition, when there's available physical RAM, OS X caches some stuff from the SSD which speeds it up further.

dkycon Ask HN: Best books or videos to get better at sales?

Y Combinator Sales Summer School: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-K2DHi99oI&list=PLb1c0oEEXW...

This is basically Sales 101. Lecture by Steli Efti, YC founder of the close.io CRM. Insanely valuable.

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Y Combinator "How To Start A Startup" Sales: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHAh6WKBgiE

This is held by one of the founder of YC startup Clever, with an emphasis on the earliest stages of sales in a startup.

---

Tons of specific sales advice on http://blog.close.io , you can find the best by googling "site:blog.close.io" and follow through the links. There is a ton of things I learned from Steli Efti (the guy behind www.close.io CRM and the Sales Summer School), be sure to attend their webinars as well if you're curious.

dkycon Show HN: Forms – Easy custom database applications

"You need to align your pricing to scale with your costs"

I strongly disagree with that. You should align your pricing with the value the user receives. To do this optimally, you need to have a good grasp of who your user is, how much value he receives from the software and how the typical purchasing process looks like. For an early stage company, all these questions may not be answered yet, so it is best to wait and learn what the users do with the product before prematurely optimizing pricing at an early stage.

dkycon YC Stats

I have no inside info, but I think YC Fellowship could be a startup lead generation system: when you get a Fellowship grant and your company begins to work out, you will probably apply to YC and get accepted. Then YC receives equity (and only the equity of the huge winners matter financially).

dkycon SaaS Pricing: Our Big Free Plan Mistake

They are not affiliated, and are in quite different stages.

Hubstaff currently nets some $40k MRR (you can see their live metrics here [0], pretty cool), whereas Hubspot has $115 million dollars in annualized revenue [1].

[0] https://hubstaff.baremetrics.com/ [1] http://marketingland.com/hubspot-2014-earnings-report-revenu...