Thanks! Definitely sounds like we need to tighten up the message.
This is great. :)
965 karma · joined March 12, 2009
pr@prlambert.com prlambert@learndot.com
This is great. :)
I generally agree with you, but I think this community has an eye for detail we might not find in other groups.
Who did you mean by "their"? We are soliciting feedback on our more B2B channels too. But I'm posting here because a) it's a startup and HN likes startups and b) I like HN and wanted to share. :)
They talk at length about what they call 'veggie libel laws' and other laws introduced by food producer lobbies that limit free speech and surveillance about food productions. There's a long history of this, unfortunately it's nothing new.
If you have amazon prime, you can watch it for free: http://www.amazon.com/Food-Inc/dp/B002VRZEYM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=U...
Learndot builds beautiful learning centers for organizations. We exist to make the world a smarter place. Learndot is leading a sea change in how learning for organizations is created, comparable to the change from waterfall to agile software development.
We are alumni of the GrowLab accelerator in Vancouver. We sell to many happy businesses that love us (Get Satisfaction, Zirtual among them), make money and are growing very quickly.
Both founders are developers and we care about creating great work environments, providing flexibility and autonomy, and helping everyone continuously become better at their craft. We are currently a team of five fulltime. Core technologies: Client-side Javascript (we use Sproutcore), Scala (all server-side code).
To apply email prlambert@learndot.com with [HN] in the subject line. Open positions:
1) App and Web Designer. We are looking for a talented visual designer who wants to help us build smart and beautiful applications for web and mobile. Time would be split around 70%/30% between design on our core app and design for our website & marketing pages. You would work closely with our Chief Product Officer to create solutions for user needs, with your end product being photoshop or keynote exports for our dev team.
2) Front-End (JS) or Full Stack Engineer (JS + Scala). We are looking for a great javascript developer who will work directly with our CTO and Designer in building our core application across multiple devices. Learndot is a thick-client JS app using Sproutcore. Our backend API is written in Scala. The ability or desire to work in Scala is a bonus, but our immediate needs are on the JS-side.
Built from ~6 months of email capture on the landing page + 4 months of active customer discovery interviews.
It's more like this: - We'll pay $300 bucks for 5 warm leads to hand off to sales. - Sales will work the leads to close, spending another $200 of time. One of them will close. - We'll get a customer with a LTV of greater than $2000, for $500. LTV >= 4x total CAC.
In valuing the leads from TechCrunch, it's a mistake to assume they'll all close (in which case their value is beyond $5520), we have to value what they actually are: potential. We have to discount the risk. That value, is about $60, so all 22 are worth $1320.
I like the optimism though. :)
And you're right it's not a great payoff overall. ~$3000 isn't a great ROI for the effort that went into the launch. There were other channels as well beyond HN and TC, but I wanted to keep the story focused on these two.
We've been testing more channels since and there's lot of data there as well and so, so much more to learn. Looking forward to your post!
This is a real world scenario. Many people ask how much traffic we got from being on TechCrunch. This is just data, take it as you want. I do my best to explain the main caveats, including the one you pointed out. There are many.
It's really affordable for personal sites, and for static sites like yours you'll be getting 98%+ cache hits – almost no traffic will ever hit your Dreamhost box, it will all come from their highly optimized Varnish caches around the world.
Learndot's blog is hosted on a ec2 small instance fronted by fastly, our launch article was on HN/Techcrunch/etc... simultenously and we never went over 10% cpu.
tl;dr: Use fastly.
"Paul, come look at this cool new recipe website. This is awesome. It's like a really good recipe sharing site" - Sonia (she points to Punchfork on her screen).
"Oh, I just saw on HN it got acquired by Pinterest." - me
"Wait what?" (Sonia reads the announcement) "'we will soon be retiring the Punchfork site, API and mobile apps'..." What the? I just found this site and now it's gone??"
"Yup." - me
Maybe congratz to the founders who got an early exit, but it seems like another unfortunate case of users getting the short end of the stick.
Maybe we need better business models. Maybe Sonia would have paid $10/month for Punchfork. Who knows. I paid for Sparrow, and that didn't seem to help.
Sigh.
Full-time, Intern, or Remote.
Learndot builds beautiful learning centers for organizations. Our goal is to help make the world a smarter place. We've been creating learning technology for 3 years, are alumni of the GrowLab accelerator in Vancouver, and were recently profiled by TechCrunch as an up and coming player to watch. Our business model is SaaS, we are B2B, are revenue-focused, and growing very quickly.
Both founders are developers and we care about creating great work environments, providing flexibility and autonomy, and helping everyone grow to continuously become better at their craft. We are currently a team of five fulltime.
Core technologies: Client-side Javascript (we use Sproutcore), Scala (all server-side code).
To apply email prlambert@learndot.com with [HN] in the subject line. Open positions:
1) Lead Quality Assurance Engineer. We are making our first QA hire. looking for someone who can grow to lead a QA team, can cultive a processes for quality throughout the entire development pipeline, is exciting about continuous deployment, and can build the infrastructure for high-quality automated and manual testing procedures.
2) Front-End (JS) or Full Stack Engineer (JS + Scala). We are looking for a great javascript developer who will work directly with our CTO and Designer in building our core application across multiple devices. Learndot is a thick-client JS app using Sproutcore. Our backend API is written in Scala. The ability or desire to work in Scala is a bonus, but our immediate needs are on the JS-side.
This was a tough call. We thought it was a clever design that tied together the name mark and the logo. In the post I mentioned I printed it out and got people on the street to read it – that was specifically because some people found the 'r' hard to read!
If it turns out to be an issue for a lot of people, we'll revisit.
You're right, naming is hard.
The thing is, we never say the domain. We say the name of the company. I totally agree that "Learn dot dot com" is confusing. But "Learn dot" isn't. Vast majority of people use Google to find things on the web (that was the theory). Last couple weeks of trying it out has backed that up.
Here's where he discussed the metrics around last time it hit #1 here: http://rigoneri.com/post/25804668500
Airlines?
> contemptible customer support
IMHO better than Google's dogmatic avoidance of any kind of customer support.
(I realize there is a risk of sending a mob by linking to his personal page, but I think there is evidence he is indeed "intelligent" and simply misunderstood this particular piece of the puzzle. He just need a bit more humility.)
And here's the TechCrunch article: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09/salesforce-com-reported-to-...
Come work on the most ambitious project of your life. Matygo is building the flipped classroom platform. We enable any person, school, or college to deliver provably better learning at scale by combining decades of research and the techniques Khan Academy and Udacity have popularized into an accessible web platform. The goal is to move forward how education is delivered around the world.
Having just closed a seed round with some top investors, we are looking to expand our founding team with first hires in Software Engineering and UI/UX design.
Core technologies: Scala, Sproutcore (and Ember.js)
We care a lot about team culture, great compensation, and inspiring workplaces. Learn more and see our openings: http://start.matygo.com/careers/
No remotes unless you are in San Francisco (we travel to SF quite often). Feel free to ping me directly with any questions: paul@matygo.com
Gerald Sussman is one of the professors (coauthor of SICP and father of Scheme). If the first statement is true, this is quite an opportunity.