telecuda

A $30,000 car today often has a far better screen/user experience than a $300,000 boat. iPad/tablet apps for boaters attached to mounts are common, though lack communication with the boat's sensors (without something like Signal K), and are hard to see in full sun. Compound that with the Coast Guard being a defense agency where getting new data typres in and out is "a process."

Shameless but relevant plug -- I was annoyed hearing radio traffic of boaters trying to share their location with the Coast Guard, so I built a free tool for them (i911) that allows USCG to text the boater a link to share their location. The vast majority of distress calls are made within cell phone range (<15 miles from shore), so tapping that link isn't as much of an issue as you would think it is. It was the fastest tech to graduate from their R&D site to nationwide sector adoption.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF1pi2-ygXU

Excited to dig into Signal K to see if something there can help improve that response even further.

Yes, as AnhTho_FR said, some * notating “fair usage” or “unlimited for advertised use-cases” gives you a fallback in the event of a dispute. It ultimately depends on what you’re selling and who your customers are. If a customer is legitimately consuming way more than planned - so much that it’s not compensated by other customers who use it way less - then just reach out to them and talk person-to-person about why they love your product, what it accomplishes for them, and your situation on cost. A genuine customer will welcome that feedback. A customer trying to game your unlimited system should can be unwelcomed for renewal - you can fire a customer if need be!

I’m not suggesting it’s easy, but the trick is to play with pricing a lot in your early days while learning what those costs are. Start a little higher than you think you need - it’s easier to adjust down later than go up. Outliers can be caught with a small amount of code (hey, Slack me if a customer who I thought would use this thing once a day uses it 20 times so I can reach out to them to learn more about how they’re using my product).

Agree. I never paid attention to it while building the business, but then later saw how much weight potential investors gave to predictability and how much customers wanted it too. Even my electric company gives me the option to pay a fixed monthly amount that grows by x% per month versus having to budget for variability.

Great question. So yes, while our suppliers charge us for usage (and that made us initially think we should too!), our customers didn’t use the product any more or less once it became unlimited.

If you’re solving a problem that a typical customer experiences let’s say 3x per week (perhaps routing an inbound sales lead to a CRM), you could charge per use, or ask “If we made it unlimited, would they use it 5x per day? 10x per day?”

With many SaaS products, usage is self-limited by the customer’s actual need, not by a transaction cost. Same goes with most telephony use cases - a typical user will only make so many calls per day, making it relatively easy to arrive at an unlimited monthly price.

Congrats! We built a usage-based telephony (voice & sms) billing system for our customers and appreciate the pain. Not to take anything away from your launch, but founders / product managers should carefully consider if usage-billing (even with a tool like Lago) is best for your business and customers.

We started as usage-based then learned a few years in (once we understood customer usage trends - key) that customers would gladly pay ~20% MORE per year for unlimited access because the customer wanted a predictable bill. We essentially rode the same trend of pay-as-you-go mobile to unlimited plans.

Later in our history we found investors (and our accountants) liked the predictability as well. It's easier to show "up and to the right" when not dealing with a few large customers varying down in usage in one quarter (even if the business was on the upswing).

One-size doesn't fit all -- usage billing has its place for sure -- just carefully weigh your model as it's a huge lift to flip it midstream.

Persona definitions are super helpful training for new hire onboarding. Nothing beats F2F time with a customer, but it’s a great start to learn who you’re building for or selling to.

Thanks! If you're looking for an easy place to start, look to tabular reports.

Ask a stakeholder (e.g. contract renewals team) to create an ideal report with maybe 5 rows of sample data in Google Sheets / Excel. A good example may be a list of customers, when their next renewal date is, who their sales rep is, etc. Ask a developer to turn it into a real-time (or nightly updated) internal web page, then once again, each quarter see if it needs to be made better. Sure, Salesforce and the like should have a lot of this data, but odds are you need a hybrid of info that leverages your own DB (e.g. usage, # of users). If a new vanilla Salesforce report comes out of that monthly meeting instead, hey, still good stuff.

We call this team "Ops" for short and more formally the "SaaS Operations" team since they satisfy all the internal bits that get help us run an efficient SaaS business. For reference, while we have a small team, it's 20% of our headcount (and a great place for interns/co-ops). Happy staff with the right tools stick around longer, are better at serving customers, and have more free time to work on more important goals.

This has been our approach as we scaled from customer one to acquisition by bigco a decade later, and I'd still point to it as being a key driver of our success:

- Set a monthly meeting with a co-worker from each functional area (e.g. finance, support, sales). The meeting should be run by whomever has the best horizontal view of needs across the business, along with whoever is running point on development to clarify things.

- Go around the room and ask the question, "What's one thing (report/tool/insight/data/etc) that would make your job easier?"

- Track those requests on a shared document or board, giving stakeholders an opportunity to reprioritize their list (should never be more than a "top 3") each meeting

- PUNCHLINE: Commit to addressing one item from each department's top 3 every quarter. We did this starting early with engineer #2, but if you can't devote a FTE, divide and conquer among your current team.

10+ years later we have dozens of internal tools that have automated so much of what I see bigco still addressing by throwing people at it. It's never too late to start and it's a great way to build a love affair between your non-technical departments and developers!

Would this be classified as a "tiny home" by most jurisdictions? Not at this price-point, but we've been looking for prefab housing related to a transitional housing grant, where many cities in Florida do not allow tiny homes.

We did this a lot in our early days, and while we didn't correlate it with spending, customers occasionally would acknowledge the note in future conversations.

To me, it falls in the category of "do things that don't scale" as you try to grow your business. An over-emphasis on customer service is rarely a bad idea.

I walk on a nesting sea turtle beach each morning here in Florida and chat up the local researchers who pass by daily. There are around 300 nests in the 1/2 mile zone I walk, with around 100 eggs per nest. Every few feet there’s a yellow wooden marker in the sand indicating a nest. They’re just starting to hatch now and yes, it’s adorable. I’m not an expert by any means, but take an interest and have some personal experience if you have any basic questions!

Related, glucosamine treats had a quick positive impact on the mobility of my aging dog. I recommend these: https://stratfordrx.com/products/max-strength-joint-support-...

100%

Not only state and regional conferences, but nationwide competitions among agencies.

Speaking to technology used by HNT/CNT teams, in the past, they would break a window and toss in a “throw phone” (Pelican case containing a phone with a cord running out to the negotiator) in order to talk with a barricaded subject.

Today, negotiators use the platform we created to negotiate over mobile, allowing secondary teams to monitor the calls and texts (e.g. so an analyst can research something said), along with other special capabilities.

If the topic interests you, we’re hiring a senior dev on our mobile hostage negotiation product now!

Typically these things will ship deconstructed and require minimal cooking/assembly, like a weekly meal delivery kit. For example, you might receive a roll in one type of packaging and the sandwich contents in another, boxed with a few freezer packs.

I’ve used GoldBelly to ship Philadelphia tomato pie to Florida for an inflated price. Same idea. It’s great for special occasions and gifts.

Highly recommend “In their 20s” - YouTube channel / podcast by Landon Campbell who interviews successful people to ask what they were doing in their 20s https://www.intheir20s.com/

Tip if you're looking for a quality pen as branded swag/supplies for your business:

When you find a pen from another vendor/restaurant/etc that you LOVE, take a few minutes to find who ordered them and get the same supplier/SKU. They'll gladly share that info in my experience.

Bulk pen quality is so over the map, even when it claims to be the same model number, I've found it to vary among suppliers.

All that being said, I've lost who we got ours from and can't recommend one myself!

One way we make our support replies stand out that wasn't obvious when we started:

If you provide phone support, email your customer a summary of what their problem was and how you solved it on the call along with links to user guide articles where applicable.

The customer can now easily send follow-up questions via that thread, while your team has better documentation of their support history.

We're a small business of <50 employees that does 60+ trade shows per year. I feel the pain and am happy to see that you're tackling this.

We currently use Trello for task assignment, GCal for scheduling, Certify for T&E and Salesforce for lead tracking -- without a great way to measure ROI. I'd pay $100/mo for your enterprise plan if it integrated existing CRM and T&E systems.

Curious to hear from CircleCI how their FedRAMP authorization played into what was (or wasn’t) compromised and if it improved their response.

https://circleci.com/blog/modernizing-federal-devops-circlec...

Therein lies my gripe with Glassdoor.

Once we started hearing Glassdoor mentioned by candidates during interviews, we created a Company Page then shared it with current employees. Yes, we got a few positive reviews, then immediately staff started receiving daily recruiting emails along the lines of, "You could make $10,000 more at the same job in your city. Apply here."

As the employer on the account, we of course were not getting these emails. It's not that I have an issue with employees getting solicitations - it's the natural process - it's just a bit deceptive to employers who think creating a company page is all positive, then immediately their staff gets recruited harder.

After a host made a suspicious/creepy comment about our stay, I started logging into host routers (creds usually printed on the device) and look at what other devices are connected. The camera may not be on that network, or not networked at all, but it’s a little peace of mind.

Callyo | Full-Stack and Mobile Engineers | St. Petersburg, FL | ONSITE | http://callyo.jazz.co/

Callyo builds innovative, meaningful tools within reach of all in law enforcement to combat crimes such as human trafficking and child exploitation. Callyo is 7 years old with 25 employees serving 100k+ officers, GovTech100 company, high NPS & CSAT. Minutes from Gulf beaches.

Pardon my ignorance, but do DNS leaks impact Tor anonymity or are we strictly talking VPNs?

As a neighbor and local supporter of Iron Yard Tampa Bay (St. Petersburg FL), losing our growing economy's only code school was a big letdown this week.

In my experience, admittedly Iron Yard graduates were often too green to join our small engineering team (and we don't utilize .NET or Ruby). I'd like to say we have better training and mentorship for junior devs, but we don't yet. However, when we listed an iOS position, it was The Iron Yard's campus director who spread our ad through their national network. She found an Atlanta Iron Yard graduate who spent two years at a large company, receiving on the job training that now qualified her for our role.

The Iron Yard St. Pete was meaningful in that it provided a starting point for people in our area to make a career change and offered a meeting place for tech (located in the same building as our co-working space). The closure for us here locally is less about losing a code school and more about losing an anchor in our developing startup ecosystem.

15Five is excellent. 15 minutes each week for a team member to submit feedback / 5 minutes for a manager to review. I find people bring up concerns in their 15fives that I can address quickly before they become larger problems.

My friends at Intrinio (https://intrinio.com/) here in St. Pete FL are responding to this question with a lower-cost, developer-friendly way to pull financial data into Excel, Google Sheets or your own application.

While the Parse team did an excellent job open-sourcing the platform and providing ample notice, it was still a costly learning experience.

Seamlessly transitioning a large user base on iPhone and Android to our self-hosted Parse with minimal service interruption or missed push notifications required significant engineering and coordination. The transition involved more hours than the initial build.

While we did our best (email campaigns, push notifications, etc.) we still have a sizable number of users who use the app daily, yet haven't updated it and are still pointing to (the old) Parse. We didn't plan on Parse going away back then, so those are not graceful failures.

Users who did update the app were signed out (couldn't maintain the session in the switch), resulting in a lot of "I didn't get my forgot password email" questions to support and an unknown number who won't bother troubleshooting it.

With the information at hand over a year ago, I still would have went with Parse. It really did help us get off the ground quickly. Maybe we would have missed our window of opportunity without it.

Can an OU easily be transferred to another Organization down the road? For example, if I put a client's data in their own S3/OU within our AWS account, then they want to assume ownership of that later, can the OU be transferred to their account without much hassle?