palidanx

I'd also recommend reading Aaron Ross's updated book

https://www.amazon.com/Impossible-Inevitable-Hyper-Growth-Co...

for software engineer's approaching marketing for the first time.

Is it worth calling a senator who doesn't represent you? For example, there are some proposals being pushed by senators in NC I don't agree with, but I don't live in NC.

Hey Jason thanks for the thoughts on your blog post. Just curious, how long did it take you to write the angular on rails book? And I'm assuming it is a PDF?

I made Menutail (https://www.menutail.com) which creates nutrition facts labels for food vendors. Up time is definitely important, but if things go wrong, customers are understanding if you communicate honestly with them on what is going on.

The other thing to be careful of is feature creep to ensure it is valuable for your customer base. If one customer complains that they want something which would be super difficult and applicable to only one edge case, I'd take some pause to evaluate the feedback.

The other thing as ovidiup mentioned, marketing is the absolutely hardest. I would even consider it soul draining if you like coding, but it is super necessary. I would recommend reading this book to help think about your sales channel

https://www.amazon.com/Impossible-Inevitable-Hyper-Growth-Co...

In addition to the exercise advise on this thread, I would dropping soda, alcohol, fruit juices and drink water in lieu of that. While you exercise, you will lose some weight by cutting these drinks out of your diet.

Are there any downsides to Amplemarket with your experience with them so far?

Thanks for the article hkissinger! I'm going through some of the same growing pains on cold e-mailing. For amplemarket, did you have any concerns of leads acting on behalf of your company in a negative way?

I use cacoo.com

I second this comment. My business (nutrition facts labeling), is totally dependent on US federal government regulations. For example, the government will be mandating new nutrition fact label designs for all food companies which is going to help open up my market greatly when the final rulings are issued.

Interesting. I'm guessing some of these bots aren't built on natural language processing, but instead keyword parsing?

Also note with SES, you have to write some code to handle bounces and complaints programmatically. Unlike Mandrill and Sendgrid, there is no UI dashboard to manage any e-mails.

Have you done any mock interviews with friends to get some feedback on your interviewing skills and techniques?

At least for b2b, my 2 cents is that charge for your product upfront. Putting that paywall in front of your product can help you immediately assess how interested they are.

I've integrated Braintree for monthly recurring subscription services and for digital product purchases. For my own purposes, I built my own cart in Rails as I needed a degree of flexibility in check-out.

So far I haven't run into any problems. The only thing I really needed was to customize customer e-mails, so I used Braintree's webhooks to my server to send out my own e-mails.

Support wise, I was on the phone with them quite a bit in the beginning, and they were nice and knowledgeable. I used them pre-paypal and post-paypal i haven't noticed any differences.

Fraud wise, my customers tend to be reliable ones so I haven't had to worry about fraud yet.

In the Southern California market, we have two big NPR stations (KPCC and KCRW). Both stations actually produce a lot of their own radio shows, and supplement some nationally syndicated content.

When I visited Oregon, I noticed most of the shows were nationally syndicated, and I suspect that might have to do with how much money they can get from their local regions.

I created a site where anyone can find foods highest in any given nutrient given one serving size.

http://www.getnutrient.com

It is based on the usda-sr database, and a lot of manual work was required to determine one serving size.

The people who use the site are mainly registered dietitians, but some power consumers have occasionally used it.

How did you come with the idea with watermark-image? Looks like a cool site!

To me, the closest to a mental model would be a combination of

+ domain model diagrams (illustrates domain objects and cardinality relationships)

+ sequence diagrams (expressing flow in between systems)

+ state diagrams

But what I found in the real world is not many people use these UML diagrams except in really large companies.

I totally agree that the current ways of forming mental models (through watching tutorials, reading docs, writing code, and taking notes) is super painful.

Just curious, were there any new changes made to branch creation and protected branches? I'm getting a

Branch creation was rejected by Git hook

When trying to create branches via my gitlab instance and it seems to take a lot longer to process the request. Pushing via a command shell seems to work well.

--update I just rolled back my version to the older version and see that all of the branch functionality via the gitlab site works okay.

I just upgraded and the diffs are WAY faster now. Thanks so much for all of the hard work!

I've been using Braintree as a processor before they got acquired by Paypal and have been a customer for about 3 years now. Customer service has been stellar, and I always can get someone on the phone (note that they are on CST though).

Post paypal acquisition I really haven't noticed any differences.

I created a site which encourages good habits by weekly text message reminders

For example you can say

* Every week Monday, Wednesday, Friday 8pm - go to the gym

* Every Tuesday and Thursday 5am - walk the dog

* Every Sunday -10am - Call my parents

What happens is you get a message and you are forced to reply yes or no.

How this differs from other apps is the greater precision in the time of the reminder, and the fact that responding is done via your phone messaging app.

Sorry, at this time, only US mobile providers are on the list. If you are from another country and are interested in trying out the service, leave a comment, and I'll be sure to add it by end of the week.

For me personally, I found the site helpful as a reminder to take my fish oil for dry eyes every morning at 8:45am, and to read at 8pm. I'm not sure if it is due to the constant bugging, or the dreadful awareness my phone is going to ring and I have to respond. But it seems to work for me.

Sign-up is free for one habit. Lastly the technology stack used is Rails/AWS/Delayed Jobs/MMS e-mail gateways.

Feedback is appreciated!

http://www.vhabit.com

I'm pretty familiar with the USDA SR dataset, and here are my thoughts (examining data with one of my experiments diarytail.com)

1) People in the enterprise space will be willing to deal with the weird nuances of the USDA-SR data. For example writing 'beef cooked' vs' 'beef raw'.

2) In the general consumer space, there is a huge problem in getting the general public to find ingredients they use. I found lots of people typing in brand name ingredients not matching what is in the USDA data set.

To me, the problem is partially solved with My Fitness Pal's huge dataset of user generated data. However the flip side is it is missing most of the micros as they are entered via a nutrition label.

Another solution might be to reference nutritionix.com 's dataset (I think the joyapp.com uses it also)

USDA SR-28

http://www.ars.usda.gov/Services/docs.htm?docid=8964

Actually everything is supposed to be based off one typical serving, so if anything is off, it is wrong and I need to fix it :). If you take a look, the gram weights are different for each item.

I checked and it says 6 oysters weights 84 grams. How many oysters are eaten in a typical setting?

I have been pretty familiar with a food dataset I have for my enterprise app for a while, and thought it would be neat to have a query engine based on nutrient.

Standard stuff, hosted on Rails, EC2, RDS. The only funky thing is I had to make extensive use of memcached as the core queries were getting unwieldy and took lots of time.

I think the behavior depends if you are marketing a consumer based product or enterprise based product. In the beginning when I launched my enterprise SAAS product, it was vastly underpriced. I gradually increased the price to market rates (about 4x higher) and the subscription rate has been the same.

Over the holidays I built a site which returns foods with the highest amount of a given nutrient. So for example you can get all the foods highest in potassium, vitamin d, iron, etc.

http:/www.getnutrient.com

Awesome idea! How did you initially advertise the site?

You can do 3 free tests with peek - http://peek.usertesting.com/