qeorge

Nathan, you're really coming out with some great posts. Please continue.

I saw another great post on this topic on the VWO blog recently which suggests reversing your pricing table to show the most expensive test first as an A/B test idea, and relates it to the "primacy effect":

http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/pricing...

I'm testing it now (no conclusive results yet), but I think it makes a lot of sense. I would love to see an A/B test of this on The App Design Handbook's sales page.

1) Use Google AdWords keyword tool to gauge the size of the market. Find something with >10k searches (Local, Exact match type)

https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool‎

2) Build the product. Make a sales page. Offer a 30 day trial on all accounts.

3) If someone signs up, you have 30 days to figure out billing.

Couple of points:

- No, this is not a great method. Getting out of your house and talking to real people is always better.

- Any effort is better than nothing. And unless you have a product in the wild which someone could sign up for, you are doing nothing.

- If you have time to comment on HN, you have time to build an MVP

Also checkout Gumroad.com. Its about the easiest way possible to bill people. Once you've sold a few units, then you can worry about finding a better deal.

Do it!

I highly recommend James Altucher's book, I Was Blind But Now I See. You can get it for $.99 on Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Was-Blind-But-Now-ebook/dp/B005VPXXVM

Its the story of how he built a web design business, exited for ~$12 million, drank himself broke and nearly to death, and then built himself back up (he is a VC now). Its about learning to be happy even though you sometimes feel like you're broken. I drew a lot of lessons from it that help me daily.

Wow, that's a whopper. (the bit about cookie stuffing being normal)

As I understand it, they would do something like this: on every 1 of 10,000 page views (to Digital Point's forums, or other sites), they would embed a page from eBay (as the source of an image), which had their affiliate code in it. The visitor was none the wiser.

Keep in mind digital point gets a ton of traffic. Though only a small percentage had a cookie dropped, it added up to many.

Purely through coincidence, some of these people would later buy something on eBay in the next 30 days, earning them a commission. Its hard to argue they earned the commission, TOS or otherwise.

I've had this enabled for about 2 months, and its been nothing short of amazing. (picked it up from an HN thread somewhere). Cannot recommend this highly enough.

Yes, there's the occasional false positive, but its surprisingly rare. I pop into my "Unsubscribes" folder every few days to make sure nothing is caught, just like my Spam folder. If there's a false positive, I make a new rule in Outlook.

Seriously, try it. You'll be surprised how nice it is, like a clean apartment.

"Make something people want" may seem obvious, but its still an avoidable and fatal mistake that otherwise smart people frequently make. Put another way: product/market fit is the high order bit.

I like simple, profound slogans like "Make Something People Want" or "Just Do It". They're profound because of what's not written. By those being the only words on the poster the real point its made - "make something people want - nothing else matters".

The prints look gorgeous. Can't wait to put mine on the wall!

But those examples are not going far enough to be truly remarkable. They're still not putting the customer's interests ahead of their own.

With Citi, how about instead of making giving your rewards to charity an option, make it the only option? That would be remarkable.

What if KLM instead emailed me saying "we found a cheaper/more pleasant flight than the one you've already booked with us. Click here and we'll automatically change your reservation and refund you the difference, no fees." That would be remarkable.

Its a sad moment when you first have to explain to your mother/client/etc that no, Discount Oakley Sunglasses didn't really enjoy your superb post.

Its a shockingly effective spam tactic. People cannot resist praise.

NNTR is great! Thank you!

I love this. I'm also extremely fond of EOM (short for End Of Message. An email with a short subject and no body).

Often I send EOMs to imply a VSRE. For example, "Grill tonight? Have burgers. Off work @ 6. EOM"

Very interested in learning others.

I respect the honesty of this post, but I didn't like that dig at The Four Hour Work Week!

4HWW is about putting systems in place that remove you and thus allow your company to scale. Until you remove yourself you don't have a real business. Of course when you walk away it dies.

Ironically, that seems to be the existential problem Refer.ly had/has - its only compelling content is the founder's blog.

Oddly enough it doesn't. For example, you can perform a credit check via this API using only a name + address:

http://www.meridianlink.com/creditAPI.asp

I have personally used this API, and it works.

In theory, I've always understood that Math is Programming is Math. Or at least I accepted it as true. But I swear, it only really "clicked" for me a few weeks ago. I've been programming for almost 20 years, and I feel like I just joined the party.

It made me think - how different would my programming and math experiences have been if I'd "gotten" it sooner?

So if I were you, I would stop focusing on programming for right now, and dive as deep as you can into math. Its another path to some of the same epiphanies, and perhaps you won't feel so much like you're wasting time reaching a point you'd already attained before. Climb a different hill instead.

And don't forget that life is about learning, not what you already know. None of us ever stop learning. There is no beginning and no end, indeed there is no path. Only Now :)

I largely agree with the OP. This reminds me of Loopt.

If I were Foursquare, I would use the metadata (reviews, checkins, etc) to build a Yellow Pages site that's powered by 4sq users gestures. But I'd leave monitization out of the consumer app entirely, and just focus on making it great and popular.

Internet yellow pages is crazy boring, stupidly profitable, and waiting for disruption. Google Places and Yelp are currently passing for disruption in that space. 4sq is in a unique position to do better.

Ditto for the Better Business Bureau.

Just my $.02.

SEEKING FREELANCER. Remote preferred.

Nothing glamorous, but we need a few good folks to help build Wordpress themes. We'd give you sliced HTML, you'd turn it into a theme.

If you're interested drop me a line with your rates (george at ill-k.com). Strong preference for folks who can give an estimate and stick with it (as opposed to hourly/daily billers).

Its not a mystery, its the pesticides. Bayer's been leading the "search for the real killer" in an effort that would make OJ Simpson proud.

My step-dad is an avid beekeeper, and an organic urban farmer. Its been "known" for years amongst that community that the collapse is caused by pesticides. Bayer has done an amazing job keeping this labeled a "mystery".

Foursquare was started in a similar way. (Google bought and shuttered Dodgeball, founders did their time at Google, then quit and started Foursquare).

Andy Rubin has done this successfully as well (Danger, MSFT, Android).

<shameless plug>

If you happen to be in the St Louis area and like pie, my aunt is selling Pi day pies today. Fresh made and delivered.

http://www.itseasyaspie.com/collections/frontpage/products/p...

I can attest to the deliciousness of her pies. ;)

</shameless plug>

I have the world's tiniest violin available for spammers who don't want their email addresses published.

I especially loved this bit: "I was researching Automattic , Inc. and wanted to ask you if there was any gaps/pains within your CMS and website. "

What a bold faced lie! Obviously he didn't spend even 2 seconds researching anything related to Automattic. Acquia harvested Matt's information and spammed him, and they deserve to be called out.

Is it a foregone conclusion that others can't bring a baby to work?

My biz partner brought his newborn in for about 10 months - it was awesome. Given, we are a tiny company and they are Yahoo, but its not obvious to me that its impossible to work it out.

So I'm glad M. Meyer is doing so, I think that's kind of awesome. The kid will probably have a great time. Maybe there's a way to let others do it too.

Whoa - you need to make it clear that I have to bring my own Stripe account. Nowhere is that mentioned on your page. So the 256-bit encryption you're touting on your homepage is really Stripe's 256-bit encryption? Not cool.

Is the "Embeddable Checkout Overlay" really Stripe Checkout too? Which of your features are you actually providing and which are really Stripe?

Right now this looks like a simple wrapper around Stripe Connect that waits X days to bill, plus a basic Bootstrap template you can use. What am I missing?

I'm missing something. Can you explain this to me as if I were five? I'm really gun shy with anything involving my customers CC data, and I suspect others are too.

Some of my concerns:

1) Authorize now but only charge when actually shipping is standard Visa policy. Doing it any other way is not allowed. Your system seems like a workaround for that, which raises my alarm bells.

2) To be clear - you are storing the credit cards in your vault (not Stripe's vault), and then running them through your Stripe account later as normal transactions? And this is cool with Stripe/Visa?

3) What do you mean PCI compliant? Do you think you are, or are you being regularly audited? Where are your servers? Credit cards are serious business; we need to know.

4) I'd expect a ton of chargebacks. How are those handled? What do the chargeback fees look like?

5) Is this Amazon Payments without the branding?

I want to love your product, but I wonder these things. Please help me understand!

The big advantage of a rotating cast of competent VAs is forcing you to learn to write a good spec. :)

Getting good at writing specs is a great way to multiply your effectiveness. Outsourcing is a cheap and excellent way to learn.

Postini.com (Google), Forefront (Exchange), and Barracuda Networks are some products/vendors in the space - its a whole industry. Just Google around a bit for "server side spam filtering" and such.

Anecdote: we use hosted Exchange from Microsoft. I tried to setup a cron job to email us all at 4:57 with the subject line "Get The Fuck Out". Those don't come through either.

It could be server side spam filtering (not all spam messages make it to your spam folder with any provider - the worst offenders are often just thrown out).

Just saying it is possible that this is an over-aggressive spam filter vs. Apple taking such an invasive measure. Although, Apple has done similar crazy things before, so who knows.

I like the concept. We're just starting to use VAs effectively, and it would be nice to have a utility-billed VA service instead of having to go to fiverr or oDesk.

I don't like the pricing model. I was hoping for an a la carte VA service; I don't want to pick a plan!

But if you stick with plans, I have 2 small suggestions for the sales page:

1) "Starting at $6/hour" threw me off. That's the price of the biggest plan, which is 40/hours a week! If I have 40/week of VA work, I'll just hire a VA from oDesk!

Instead I would list the price you expect me to pay (with the most popular plan). It looks like that's $10/hour here. Otherwise I've anchored at $6/hour and its going to be an uphill battle to sell me on a 2x increase.

2) Make one of the plans the "default"! The pricing table has 4 options, but none are highlighted as the most popular/suggested/default. The little flag actually makes Ultra look like the default at first glance, which I don't think is the intention.

Hope that helps! It looks like a very compelling service.

I'd want to know if the OP ever had a Spotify account before, with the same email (m*@gmail.com). I suspect he has, and that Spotify account was previously linked to the FB account.

Another strong possibility is that he has an existing Spotify account which was created using Facebook Connect. Creating an account with FB Connect would provide Spotify his email, and Spotify would likely have created a user record for that email (this is the recommended behavior from FB).

If either is true, then I think this is what happened:

- Spotify has an old user record in their database, associated with his Facebook account. He might not realize this, especially if his Spotify account was created via FB Connect.

- When he created the new Spotify account, Spotify had a bug/feature which linked the new Spotify account with the old Spotify account.

- Spotify then sent a "logged in via FB Connect" signal to Facebook, which caused his Facebook account to reactivate. This is normal behavior for Facebook - FB interprets any login gesture as a signal that you want to reactivate your account (be it a 3rd party login via FB connect, opening the FB app on your phone, or logging into the FB website)

This seems plausible to me, and wouldn't indicate any malice. Whereas Spotify's engineers writing a screen scraper to login to Facebook and secretly install an app seems exceedingly unlikely.

Some banks will let you generate single-use credit card numbers (e.g., Chase). So you have one CC # for the power company, a different one for Netflix, and so forth. Then if e.g., Netflix gets hacked you can just cancel that one card number. You can also generate cards with hard spending limits, cards that only work for a specific merchant, etc. And of course you can delete them anytime. Its a pretty good system.

That said, I agree with the author. Signature based debit should have long since been replaced by something more secure (e.g., Chip and PIN), yet its much higher fee structure creates a perverse incentive to maintain its use.

This article feels intellectually lazy. This passage particularly bothered me:

"A five-year study, issued in 2011, tracked 51,000 students enrolled in Washington State community and technical colleges. It found that those who took higher proportions of online courses were less likely to earn degrees or transfer to four-year colleges. The reasons for such failures are well known. Many students, for example, show up at college (or junior college) unprepared to learn, unable to manage time and having failed to master basics like math and English. " (emphasis added)

How is that conclusion supported by the facts in the article? Its also possible that those taking online courses are also the ones with the least time for school in general. But who knows!

Similarly, if I found that students attending class at night performed worse than those attending during the day, I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that learning is harder at night.

correlation != causation and all that.

Securing your network / software is perhaps non-obvious, and doesn't always make the lists.

Example: you're not keeping the server up to date, and someone injects Javascript into your payment page. You could be liable.

As I understand it (admittedly not well), PCI is kind of like HIPPA/OSHA, in that there's some explicit no-no's (e.g. not using SSL, leaving patient info lying around, or not wearing hardhats) but the more important point is about maintaining a "culture of compliance".