saumil07

Yup, I find the ad targeting for my personal FB account to be actually quite good.

I worked in Search and on Search-related problems for nearly 4 years so here's my 2c.

For most users Google is "muscle memory". It is quite good for most Search needs. The angles of attack that tech-savvy folks think are amazing (category filters, privacy, fancy CoverFlow UX, bigger index - all real differentiators tried by real companies) - most normals don't give a rat's ass about.

IMO the only real ways to compete are as follows:

a) build something specialized that is several-x better in the specialty (Kayak) b) build something on top of data that Google doesn't have (Facebook Search, whenever it stops sucking) c) go head-to-head with nearly equivalent quality and buy your way in on the CapEx and the Ad/Mktg dollars required to change muscle memory (Bing)

Beyond that, most companies have had trouble w/ direct search because Google + Wikipedia gets the job done, by and large. SearchMe? Dead. Kosmix Search? Pivoted successfully before acquisition. Cuil? Dead. Mahalo Search? Pivoted several times away from Search. Qwiki? Pivoted successfully.

The sad thing is that Search is such a fun and challenging space with so much work to be done; I want the space to be more competitive but most consumers like the status quo just fine.

Lastly - a salute to @yegg for taking this one on. He's a far braver than I, and most others on this thread critiquing his work.

1. I like, support and (pay for) App.net 2. One tweet, by one famous media guy (admittedly a board member, yes, but really only known for being a great media executive) does not a strategy make. 3. The title "is pivoting" is extremely assertive and not really backed up by, well, a preponderance of facts or data.

I'd say that's a nice gesture, really. The company's founders have excellent street cred. The game had a lot of hype/visibility. It did not fail for lack of technical prowess. People will (and, I bet, are already trying very hard) want to hire the people that worked on the game. The management team is simply facilitating this behavior. What' wrong w/ that?

Well this is fun - thanks for sharing. Have you found anything that's similar to MagCloud but operates on a push-button API basis? I didn't see an API link on MagCloud when I clicked around for a bit.

Yelp actually does have an algorithm for computing the final star rating. It is not a simple average across all ratings. It takes contributor status on Yelp, age of review and other signals into account before the final score is published. You can, of course, dig into the rating distribution to see the spread between 1 and 5 but I doubt that most users go that far.

LocBox, San Francisco. Frontend Engineer, Rails Developer, Data Scientist, Inside Sales Representative. Relocations Welcome, H1B Transfers Welcome. More at http://www.getlocbox.com/careers and http://www.techcrunch.com/2012/10/31/locbox-series-a/.

Hello Future LocBox Engineer,

I’m CEO at LocBox (http://www.getlocbox.com) and we are looking for passionate partners in our mission - empowering local businesses to generate foot traffic and revenue from their best customers. We want to do it with Data and Design in a space that has traditionally lacked in both but is now heating up.

Most local businesses resort to unsustainable daily deals or boring Email Marketing to acquire and retain customers. We reject that status quo and our hundreds of (paying) customers agree. We’ve also developed a new search/crawl/tech-centric way of acquiring our own customers and disagree with the obsolete feet-on-street Sales model. The company is very small but generating material and predictable revenue; net revenue growth has exploded in the last quarter.

We also just launched with a $5.1M Series A in the press w/ TechCrunch, AllThingsD, GigaOm and VentureBeat (press links below).

Talk to us? I'm saumil at getlocbox dot com and at http://www.getlocbox.com/careers.

Recent Press:

http://www.gigaom.com/2012/10/31/locbox-nabs-5-1-million-ser... http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/31/locbox-pulls-in-5-1m-to-pu...

As I've said in the rather giant tome above I've done 100+ of these so forgive me if it's not on the tip of my tongue. I went back and looked at your submissions and it must have been the fact that you have a lot of Ask_HNs, a couple about RoR but mostly about lots of interesting technology stuff. It's hard to gauge anything after multiple conversations, much less from a submission feed but I generally get along well w/ folks that ask a lot of questions, are very curious and ask for help freely into various communities.

In this case, I was rather wrong :) well hell, can't win 'em all.

Excellent! We try to empower local businesses with good software and we like what we do - Local is super-challenging and very broken which in turn makes it fun to try to build stuff for. Plus customers pay on Day One, which is always nice.

Fair enough, agree to disagree on this one. It's not as if you had just heard from the next Nigerian prince or been offered cheap meds at a low price :)

I personally think a Tell HN with an accusatory tone is extreme - could have checked headers, could have talked in private, could have ignored it, could have edited your bio to flame me specifically, could have reported spam on your email client, any number of things - but whatever floats your boat works for me. I did reach out after all so you're free to do what you like in return.

But as I've said earlier, sorry I inconvenienced you so much w/ my little email. Have a great weekend!

Will do! Thanks man.

Disagree with the tacky/tasteless part but yes, as I describe above, it did indeed work for me. Thanks for your feedback.

Hello there - I've tried to respond to almost everyone that wrote back. If I missed you I'll go back and check my drafts because sometimes I have additional questions that I want to ask folks after taking a look at their notes or their blog/website/github and don't want to piss away an oppty to have a real conversation being trigger happy on responses.

That tool would be my very tired but somewhat functional human brain late at night and on weekends. And as I describe above, it's not sad at all. It was actually awesome to be able to speak with so many cool folks.

Thanks Phillip :)

Thanks Patrick :)

Hello all - my name is Saumil Mehta and since I guess I'm the mastermind behind this whole thread it behooves me to reach out and respond.

First of all, I'm sorry to jason_slack for the major inconvenience caused by my email. It was written by me, came from my work email account (saumil.mehta AT getlocbox.com, in case you care to know), was sent 1-1 not en masse (you can check the headers) and was in no way intended to get anyone ticked off.

Secondly, yes. I've emailed well over 100 people personally in the last 15 days. A bunch of the emails have had very similar body copy so that is also accurate. I read Hacker News a decent bit and always search around for folks doing frontend work by using the search box and if I like their submissions/comments and sometimes if I just find their username intriguing or entertaining I poke around for their bio for their email and send them the note you see above. I do it nights and weekends after my "day job".

Thirdly, I work at and run a venture-backed company in San Francisco. It's the best job I've ever had and as everyone knows, learning from and working with good folks is paramount. It is also challenging to connect w/ the same folks.

With that backdrop set, I will admit freely that I like to ask for help. A lot. I ask lots of people. I cold email a lot of people. I do it with potential customers, potential partners, potential investors, potential folks that might be interested in contracting w/ us or joining our team. I always do it respectfully IMHO. Hell, I've even done it to Patrick Vlaskovits who was kind enough to respond in my stead on this page (hey Patrick!).

The outreach I discuss above has actually been excellent. It has yielded lots of fun conversations over email and Skype and several great phone and in-person conversations with folks in the community. I used to be a (decent but never great) developer. I love shooting the shit w/ other developers. A lot of it goes nowhere because most folks are busy at their day jobs or startups or are booked for contracts or don't care to work w/ us after talking w/ us. Some of it has resulted in freelancing contracts that has really helped my startup. That's all par for the course but a great investment of my time and (hopefully) anyone that takes time out of their busy day to talk to me.

In case you care, the response rate that I tabulated manually in my Google Apps account has been well north of 25%. That tells me that folks are, generally speaking, happy to talk to me and that I'm not wasting their time or trying to sell them timeshares.

I have had exactly 2 people tell me to go take a hike over email. That's ok too. When it happens I always apologize for the inconvenience and move on. But by and large the Hacker News community has been fantastic to connect with and learn from.

Lastly, a philosophical point. We all know startups are hard and millions of dollars of funding does nothing to change that. The only way to hack it after being at it for 18 months, I've found, is to ask for help very proactively, even of folks I don't know. It has stood me in great stead in every endeavor - fundraising, contracts, partnerships, customers, office space leasing, personal sanity maintenance, you name it. I hope you will agree and if you don't, feel free to email me or call me at (415) 322-9308 and flame me over the phone in the middle of my work day :)

Thanks all and good night!

LocBox, San Francisco, Frontend Engineer, Rails Developer, Data Scientist, Relocation

Dear (Future) LocBox Engineer,

It’s only October 1st and this thread has become so noisy that you’ve either a) resorted to keyword searches OR b) gone back to the 10 blank check offers you’ve received in the last 6 minutes OR c) rightfully concluded that YOU are the world’s most interesting man/woman.

With that in mind (and after this author has cried quiet tears about the cooler job market when they graduated MSCS ‘05), let’s get the relevant keywords out of the way: Ruby, Rails, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Information Retrieval, CoffeeScript, Backbone, San Francisco, product/market fit, Local, Offline-to-Online, Predictable Revenue, Not-A-Game.

Now that generic recruiter-style keywords are published, let me attempt to stand out from the crowd - I’m CEO at LocBox (http://www.getlocbox.com) and we’re rethinking the way local businesses generate revenue and foot traffic from their customers.

Most local businesses resort to unsustainable daily deals or boring Email Marketing to acquire and retain customers. We reject that status quo and our hundreds of (paying) customers agree. We’ve also developed a new search/crawl/tech-centric way of acquiring our own customers and disagree with the wildly obsolete feet-on-street Sales model. The company is small but generating material and predictable revenue.

We’re venture-funded (2.5+ years cash in the bank), are working on interesting technology problems and pride ourselves on working hard, drinking bacon-flavored vodka and keeping bureaucrats out. And if you care about it, yes, we have a super-nice office with Bay Bridge views and non-mandatory Halo parties.

Talk to Us? http://www.getlocbox.com/careers, saumil at getlocbox dot com, http://blog.getlocbox.com

Try sellercrowd.com. Also, are you a salesperson?

Interesting post. I guess I "agree" with the headline that you can raise without a prototype. Should you? Unclear.

I can only speak to this from my own experiences with fundraising (2x) - I've seen entrepreneurs raise bigger rounds with zero code and I've seen entrepreneurs struggle to raise with product in the market, customers, traction, the whole nine.

At the end of the day, all definitive conclusions are suspect. If you're a single founder first time out of the gate (I was), you increase your chances a great deal with a working product in the market IMO. If you're like my former bosses (angel investors in FB, 1 big exit to AMZN back in the day, several smaller exits as investors to GOOG), yes, you can raise without a prototype.

Or a PowerPoint, for that matter.

Or an idea, for that matter.

Maybe even if you lose your voice in the pitch meeting and just kind of sit around for an hour and then ask for a check.

The point is, every situation is different. On balance, I'd rather go into any pitch meeting with a prototype.

This makes me sick - I'm no M&A expert so it's unclear what Goldman's exact due diligence responsibilities should have been but clearly they screwed up if they helped execute a transaction against a company that basically didn't exist.

The article lets the founders completely off the hook, however, which I believe is also unfair. A $580M all-stock deal at the height of the bubble? Signing away your life's work without calling your acquirer's customers? Come on.

I hope the founders get paid (on Goldman's dime) but they have to carry some of the blame here.

Most succinct and best comment - the original post is a tempest in a teapot. Craigslist is free to optimize their lock-in on their marketplace and web-savvy users are free to bitch about the effects thereof (I did on Twitter twice over), most likely to little effect in the short to medium term. Maybe enough complaints and CL will get its act together. Maybe it won't. But that's fine! Let's continue speaking out against CL's uncool behavior and hope for the best.

Indeed. The Meebo Product/Eng team by all accounts was excellent. Same for the exec team. At the end of the day they were bitten by the same things Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger figured out a long time ago. Monetizing IM is hard.

But at least they had the gumption to "go for it". Respect.

Congrats CT team!