marc

Server went down. Up now :)

OP here. You make a great point.

I've clarified payments are handled through Stripe. Hopefully that alleviates at least some concerns.

As for the transaction cost, I actually negotiated a lower fixed fee and higher percentage. Also, if the fees would be higher than the revenue Stripe is smart enough not to process the payment.

Hi all. About 2.5 years ago I created Highscore Money. I was looking at pay-to-play games and wondered what would happen if you'd take it to the extreme. The result was just a leaderboard you'd pay your way into. Whatever you pay, that's your score.

Today, I'm launching a new social experiment. A chatroom where you pay for every message you send. Normally chatrooms can get messy quick, because there's no cost to sending a message. Expensive Chat changes this dynamic.

These are some great points. I appreciate you taking the time to write them down. I'll see which of them I can implement.

a) Comparison with previous years will be totally doable. As a quick hack you can simply compare with https://startup.jobs/trends/2017 – but I understand ideally you want the graphs to show the comparison.

b) Jobs by Startup. This is indeed something I'm planning to add to the Startup pages like http://startup.jobs/@carvana

c) I agree salary information would be super interesting. Unfortunately very little of that is public information so I simply don't have it.

d) Data goes back to mid 2016 so we don't have a ton of historical data. But for next year I could look into historical line graphs for top 10 companies.

e) I like the idea of cross referencing sector/skill and remote work. I do have the data to compare e.g. engineering jobs versus communication/PR jobs in terms of remote job openings.

Thanks again!

I double checked our database and there were indeed no postings for West Virginia. There were 2 in 2017.

Some good points. We don't concrete criteria for which companies we consider startups, but it's something along the lines of "is this a technology company that is disrupting the marketing, and/or rapidly evolving its business model"?

I do think that's the case for Netflix, even though technically it was founded a while ago.

LinkedIn is a bit harder to defend as its business model seems to have stagnated.

Developer of Startup Jobs here. We use a pretty broad definition of the word startup. In future analysis I'll see if we can differentiate between early-stage, later-stage, etc.

…aanndddd we're back!

Afraid so. The 404 is happening because the server cannot find a 50x.html file.

I'm adding caching as we speak. Expect the site to be back up in a few minutes.

The deal concerned only the domain name.

I think it was about 2 weeks. We communicated via email and once we agreed on a price we used Escrow.com for the transaction.

The way it works is that the buyer (me) wires the money to Escrow. Once they have confirmed they received the money, the seller transfers the domain to the buyer (me) and once I confirm I have received the domain Escrow releases the funds to the seller.

It's a pretty safe way of doing business. I believe Escrow also verifies the identity of all parties involved.

I'm not sure how the previous owner got it, but I simply acquired it.

The site that was using it before seemed somewhat neglected so I reached out with an offer to buy the name which the owner, after some negotiating, agreed to.

Photos are manually chosen by me. Ideally I would automate it somehow by sourcing a feed, but not every image is suitable for captioning. Some might just not be that interesting, while others might depict things we don't want to joke about.

I haven't figured out the right approach yet, so I'm open to ideas.

As for battles between human caption makers and AI: I'm not sure that would be a fair battle. As far as I know AI isn't advanced enough yet to understand comedy.

Yes, but in that hour you could also make something that does not exist yet which would help hundreds of people. This would arguably be worth a lot more than $5.

Invite the bot into the group :) (and send /start to get the webhook URL)

We're only a 2-(wo)man team and already on Telegram so it was a pretty easy switch. We also didn't have too many integrations and the ones we did are now migrated with Push More.

We switched from Slack to Telegram a few months ago for our team communication at BetaList. Some of our website notifications (new signups, certain errors, etc) still were sent to Slack though through a variety of integrations.

I made a simple service that accepts webhook requests and posts them to Telegram. You can interface with the bot directly (@pushmorebot) or add it to a group to have notifications show up there.

You can use it in multiple groups and have different notifications for each.

One caveat right now is that that the webhook URL is visible to anyone in the group so be careful when using it in a public group. (If there's enough interest I'll add some privacy controls.)

:D

Hi HN,

Today, I made a Telegram bot that turns your voice memos into a podcast RSS feed. Every voice memo you send to the bot (@telecast_robot) is added to your personal podcast RSS feed.

It also generates a simple webpage with all your memos:

https://telecast-production.herokuapp.com/@marckohlbrugge

Podcast RSS feed: https://telecast-production.herokuapp.com/@marckohlbrugge.rs...

I often use Telegram voice memos to share with quick thoughts with friends. Thought it would be nice to easily share them publicly, so that's how Telecast (working name) was born. It's a very quick way to create a personal 'podcast' with short episodes.

Ah yes, some more information on each emoji might have been useful. If I choose to continue development on the site I'll consider that.

Thanks

There are definitely both pros and cons.

I personally wouldn't use them for a website where users would have to repeatedly enter the URL. They work better for advertising campaign as a redirecting link (e.g. on a billboard), or in situation where the URLs tend to be clicked instead of written.

Yeah the domains went quick after launch. 🇸🇾 and 🇨🇿 are nice though!

You're welcome :)

I recently discovered .to domains allow for emoji like .ws and a few other ccTLDs.

While they have some (technical) downsides I figured they'd be interesting to experiment with so I was curious if any good ones were still available. Manually checking them one-by-one was kinda cumbersome, so I wrote a simple script to check availability for each possible single-emoji .to domain.

Turns out many were still available (about 70% at the time). I registered a few and decided to publicise the list. That was my weekend project ~2 weeks ago. Today I finally launched it.

I wrote more about the timeline and how I built it here: https://medium.com/@marckohlbrugge/get-your-own-emoji-domain...

Disclosure: I worked out an affiliate deal with my registrar so I get a 10% commission for each registration. Of course you're free to use your own registrar of choice.

Yep, looks like they completely ripped of our design, including some content. They possibly scraped much of our content too which I'm looking into right now. (we incurred very high CDN fees because of this)

As for BetaList allow allowing pre-launching startups, that's a policy we're about to change since many startups skip the pre-launch phase and launch an MVP on day one.

Wow you completely copied my site including, design text and everything :/

https://betalist.com

Please take down the site immediately. Filing DMCA requests now.

I happened to be working on the same idea, but for startup jobs. Shameless plug: http://betalist.com/jobs/trends

It's different from Stack Overflow in that it shows trends in market demand for programming languages/skills, but similar idea overall.

Curious to see if SO will launch something similar for their own Jobs section as well.

Been using this for a few weeks. Simple app that does the job.

What's your long-term plan for this? I noticed you didn't use the word Stripe in the product name. Are you planning to add support for other payment providers down the road?

I've seen some companies use Trello for this. There's voting 'power-up' which enables people (not just admins) to vote on cards.

Today we launched BetaList Jobs: https://betalist.com/jobs

We're aggregating all the job openings from startups across the world in one place where they are easily searchable browsable. You can think of it as an Indeed.com for startup jobs.

Rather than scraping other job boards which would be morally questionable considering we'd be competitors, we fetch our job listings direct from the source: the startup's own careers/jobs page.

If anyone here is looking for a job I'd be curious to hear what you think about the user experience.