taprun

If you did that, a handful of people would be responsible for a huge number of votes in the electoral college. That might be interesting.

My whole site [0] is dedicated to pricing and monetization.

Noteworthy items include:

a free email course on pricing [1]

a 30 page teardown of Safari's pricing page [2]

a list of common revenue models [3]

a compendium of some common mistakes that I've seen business make [4]

[0] https://taprun.com

[1] https://taprun.com/mailing/

[2] https://taprun.com/examples/safari/

[3] https://taprun.com/revenue/

[4] https://taprun.com/mistakes/

I used http://leandomainsearch.com and found a six letter domain that was made up of two English words. The name has nothing to do with my offering, but it's short and easy to pronounce / spell without any confusion.

Bonus: Since it was available, it only cost 99 cents for the first year (with coupon).

Encrypt both, but only advertise the higher tier as being encrypted. Customers that place a high importance on encryption will buy the better plan. Those that don't will buy the lesser one.

You have minimal benefit for not encrypting all data anyway (more technical complexity and liability). Plus, there isn't a court anywhere that will get upset at you for selling a tier that's better / more featured than advertised.

The Booker is a prize for quality. Many publishers are looking for the ability to sell. As such, this makes sense.

Here's a project for you: Let me input a list of small companies' career pages. Send me a daily email when a new job is added to one of those pages.

I'll just add this link[0], because I'm sure someone is going to mention it.

[0] http://contrastrebellion.com/

The more specific your audience, the less likely that a big company will replicate your solution.

Building a faster database? You're going to get clobbered.

Building a better system for managing small postage stamp collections? You're probably safe.

Whatever you read, you should keep a healthy dose of skepticism. Many economic theories are great as mathematical models, but humans don't always act as you might expect.

Can't you just use an RSS feed reader?

My phone isn't telling my rental car anything. I turned bluetooth off.

Phones can be cheap - I have a $30/month prepaid cell phone with 5GB, unlimited video/music. Paired with a google voice number, it's effectively unlimited everything. https://www.walmart.com/ip/Tmobile-30-Wireless-Airtime-Card/...

I'd like to see some examples of the summaries. If you've performed a few already, it's literally no additional work to post them.

You might want the units you charge by the word summarized. A possible issue might be highly technical texts that require specialized knowledge. You could charge more for those.

Your business model is basically what I call 1:1 - One person pays for a summary and you perform one summary.

It might be more profitable to do a N:1 - A bunch of people pay for the same summary and you perform one summary.

This is how SparkNotes and CliffNotes work. Imagine selling "The top ten daily Hacker News posts/comment threads summarized daily."

Even better would be to offer summaries of things many people want that are relevant for longer periods of time (so you can sell to more people). A site that summarizes famous speeches would be one such example.

Isn't a venture capital firm (even a good one) a business investing in mostly failed projects?

Just because you don't think it's revolutionary, doesn't meet it might not sound revolutionary to someone else. Try getting some press from some news outlets that report "Young scientist builds new 3D printer technology in basement."

Tie this to a small online presence where you offer to print items for others (especially with sites focusing on youth education), and then you can describe yourself as a "Young scientist turned entrepreneur."

Take the articles/blog mentions about you received and get some funding from non-profits / local governments / big businesses that want to be associated with youth and entrepreneurship. Use that money to continue to work on your device and business.

Even if you don't wind up with anything revolutionary, you'll be able to write one heck of a college admissions essay, look great for future job prospects and have a pretty good business network. You could also take my advice, bundle it up into an ebook with your personal experiences and sell that too.

Could you talk to them, maybe show them some screenshots and see what they say?

Actual pre-payments will be worth more than vague promises to pay in the future. Being able to demonstrate real and specific value to potential users will be helpful in collecting dollars up front.

Depending upon the nature of your product, creating a manual method to achieve the same results might save you a ton of development time while you understand customer demand.

What's really odd is to think that there are some animals (whales) that had fins, evolved them into feet and then evolved them into fins - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cetaceans#Early_e...

I think you meant http://feinternational.com right?

I'm not an OS X user, but Wikipedia says that the latest release is 10.11.6, last updated 34 days ago [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_X

Have you thought about either selling ads directly to businesses, or selling your own products? You'll get a bigger slice of the pie that way.

I went out of my way to connect with recruiters because it extends my network. Two benefits:

1) It makes me a 2nd level connection to lots of people I probably do care about. 2) It ups my visible number of connections and makes me look important. People see 500+ connections and assume I'm someone important.

Here's a challenge: discoverability. There are a lot of unknown but talented people in crowded fields (fiction writing, software engineering, cooking).

Write some software to make them easily found that can't be taken over by spammers and fakers.

It's a hard problem, but if you can solve it you will be a hero to many.

I've switched from Google's search engine to a combination of Bing and DuckDuckGo (usually in browser incognito mode).

Google's results are increasingly full of low quality spam sites, so the switch really wasn't painful at all.

I haven't left GMail yet, but I started using my own domain mail many years ago. As such, that switch will be fantastically simple when I get around to it.

Ask about some of the technical challenges that bit them unexpectedly. It's usually a good way to get them to open up.

How is cornering the market outright illegal? And in which jurisdiction?

There are plenty of examples where one company has a strongly dominant share. Diamonds are an obvious example, search engines are another.

I have a todo list. I write down what I have to do, then I do it. Anything more complex will just be a means to delay action.

The answer is in the "about" section [1]. The site seems to be run by the folks at YC. They probably have a leg up on making it to the front page at HN.

[1] http://themacro.com/about/

I wrote my own from scratch.

If it's dictated, it's not culture - it's fiat.

The problem with those calculators is that they are based upon your desires, not on your customers.

If I needed $40K per year to maintain my lifestyle and I invented a cure for cancer, would I only charge $40k?

Similarly, if I needed $100 per hour to maintain my style of living, should I demand $100 to someone who wants to hire me as a doorman? He'd never pay that much.