wj

Have you considered incentives for new subscribers? My experience is that there is no shortcut to growing subscriber base but you can slowly do it by offering a short educational email course, a PDF of 10 tips, or an ebook (which has the additional benefit of helping establish her as an authority--particularly if you self-publish to Amazon through Createspace. "Newsletter name by the author of Book About Topic".)

Create a separate landing page for each. Here are some free landing page templates you can use:

https://www.leadpages.net/the-ultimate-list-of-free-landing-...

Here is a blog post on the ebook option:

http://blog.engagetactics.com/the-step-by-step-guide-to-crea...

Who is we?

I was old enough to have been a young teenager when Netscape was released and connected to the web via a BBS (already had Usenet) and Trumpet Winsock. I would say up until 1998 the Internet boom was met with scepticism by the general public. Most people weren't even chatting on AOL. It wasn't until broadband became more commonplace (2000?) that I think the general public became obsessed with the Internet.

As to smartphones the iPhone (specifically the 3G) was the device I had been waiting most of a decade for after seeing my friend's Palm Pilot with Internet access in 1999 or 2000. I'm probably old enough that I discount the "smartphone boom" as I viewed it as the natural progression of existing technology. Also am slightly disappointed that the original premise of the iPhone was web apps on the phone through the browser but that quickly was replaced with native phone apps.

tldr: I think a very small percentage of people are future obsessed about the AI revolution. In the HN echo chamber it might be more but the majority of people don't give it a second thought outside of, "NO SIRI! I SAID WHERE IS..."

I'm not old enough to say but I imagine the magic behind the beginning of space exploration and the race to the moon could have been the peak of future obsession.

As a former filmmaker I like what you have done. It seems as if you are effectively the distributor? The site looks nice and the movies sound interesting. The refund options are a bit confusing. The biggest question I would have would be about awareness. How am I going to learn about the films and is that going to happen when I sit down to watch a movie?

I imagine that many people are like me and sit down to watch something but aren't 100% sure on what they are going to watch so we browse through are Netflix/Amazon queues. I think Roku might have a combined browse/search feature that would help. Build up the Twitter following and reach out to indie filmmaker to see if they could mention you in a tweet. I could see Mark Duplass liking your site and tweeting about it.

Keep up the good work!

Warren Buffett's annual shareholder letters are one of the better ways to learn about these things. Easier to read than textbooks with plenty of real life examples.

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html

Maybe the other person let LinkedIn/Facebook access their contacts and then the service sees they haven't reached out to you so it checks if you want to reach out to them.

A home may be a private space but it isn't <i>your</i> space. When entering someone else's space you open yourself up to having to abide by their rules, listen to their music, and be captured by their cameras.

If you visit a place of business you are potentially under surveillance. I'm sure there is a distinction but I'm failing to come up with it right now.

I was somewhat radical about privacy in the late 90s (only person I knew that read every EULA) and am still a supporter of the EFF but I don't really understand the issue here.

I honestly wondered when he slept.

Lots of big news in August 1996.

I'm curious as to overlap in the portfolio. It is my understanding that VC firms wont typically invest in competing startups but if you see a competitor in the previous batch does that hurt your chances?

I know you have at least a couple areas where you have had overlap but I believe they were all at least separated by a year or two.

Smell is very subjective. What you consider terrible others might consider intoxicating.

If there is one thing I learned from moving to the American Midwest is "to each their own." Everybody has their own palate, tastes, wants, and dreams. Nobody is "wrong" and keeping an open mind is always the best policy.

StartOpz (http://www.startopz.com):

Workday-lite (really lite) for small businesses. Individual components such as time-off tracking and expense reports all have sites on there dedicated to them individually that seem to do well. This covers all of them and could use somebody who has time to dedicate to (content) marketing.

Moviestud.io (http://www.moviestud.io):

Production management for independent filmmakers. The blog has a lot of epic length blog posts that can use somebody who can spend some time promoting them.

A cookbook is the book I have given the most. Ad Hoc at Home by Thomas Keller is an absolutely great book for somebody that is getting into cooking.

Of the top of my head some books I gave my brother included Salt, Siddhartha, and Shantaram. There were others that didn't start with an S as well.

I'm definitely a bit biased as I'm working on a startup for financial planning but I agree with you completely.

Many people are not going to make big progress towards their longer term financial goals (getting out of debt, buying house, putting kids through college) without sitting down and creating a budget. "You can't change what you don't measure."

Per my comment: "The way a company like Gusto could maybe do this is to store an employee's IRA account information like they do their bank information for direct deposit."

Right now your employer makes a deduction from each paycheck and then one ACH payment (across all employees) to the custodian which the recordkeeper then invests at the participant's direction.

You way involves the employer making a deduction from each paycheck and then making an ACH payment for each employee to the institution of the employee's choosing. For a large company that is thousands of additional transfers. The way a company like Gusto could maybe do this is to store an employee's IRA account information like they do their bank information for direct deposit.

Also, FYI, when buying mutual funds through your 401(k) you aren't charged any fees for trading. Through my IRAs at least I get charged a commission for every purchase. With payroll deductions those would add up.

From my experience the most common customer service requests fall into the following:

* Enrollment

* Distribution

* Rollover

* Loan

* Panic due to market movements

* Asset allocation/rebalancing

The top three on that list are when you enter or exit a job so if you have been with the same company for those six years you likely would not have used customer service.

I do encourage you to sign up for a meeting with your 401(k) advisor if they come to your office and do those. It is good even as an excuse to look over where you stand.

A short answer is that they are replacing employer pension plans so that is how the tax code was constructed.

What you first propose would create a lot more administrative overhead for the employer and payroll company. However I could see that as a genuine business opportunity in the future, or at least a feature for a company list Gusto to implement.

One of my biggest problems is that what you say is true in the way you mean it but it isn't really true. The way an employer gets at it is passing along all plan costs to the employees who then have their accounts debited every quarter for those costs. I think making employees pay for the benefit really lessens its effectiveness as a benefit (particularly if the plan has no matching).

Another way this is a problem is that the fees are typically debited from the employees based on their balance in an account. So if a 20 person company has five employees with very large balances and fifteen employees with very small balances then the five employees with the larger balances are subsidizing the other fifteen. You end up penalizing the people who have been the most dedicated to saving for retirement.

It seems like Guideline and OctaveWealth (mentioned in the comments) combat this by charging a recordkeeper-style per-participant fee rather than the percentage of assets that are typically charged by advisors and custodians.

I don't know how I missed you having been in the 401(k) industry for so long as well as following the YC graduating classes. I'd love to talk to you for a few minutes sometime.

Congratulations on launching! I'm particularly impressed you are doing the recordkeeping in addition to advisory. I look forward to crossing paths with you someday.

I'm also starting a company in the 401(k) space though focusing completely on the educational aspect. While making it easier for both the employer and employee is something to strive for I believe education is a component that many overlook and is of particular importance for the less highly compensated employees who don't contribute enough to their 401(k). "Financial wellness" is the industry buzzword but for me that means getting people financially prepared for all of the big life events between the day they start work and the day they retire. A participant with a budget, emergency fund, and a plan for their financial goals is going to be less stressed and more able to focus on the long-term goal of retirement.

Totally surprised at this news as it seems like Drip is growing its customer base by leaps and bounds. They have a great product.

If you are referring to Cosmos I just double-checked and it is still on there. I only watched the first four episodes so I would have been really disappointed if they had already been removed.

I think a lot of people like the parent assume that there are large amounts of people like themselves that would pay for a dedicated of niche content. I really don't think that is true. As every indie filmmaker and SaaS entrepreneur knows: the number if people that say they would pay is a magnitude more that the people that actually do.

A lot of industry observers are speculating that a la carte cable would be the doom of a large portion of the smaller niche channels that are bundled by the content companies (like Discovery Networks) with their more popular channels when they sell them to the cable companies.

Just got an invite in my mailbox. Thanks for following up! Love what you guys are doing.

I haven't done it yet but I just found that Gust offers a similar service to Atlas with a notable difference being that Atlas opens the back account for you.

But, based on Patrick's comment, maybe Atlas is now open for everybody.

I was turned down. Have you opened it to everybody?

Yup. I believe it was EFNET #doom and I remember the release was delayed at least a few hours while they were uploading it to their server. I think I stayed up just long enough to start the download which probably took all night on my 56k modem.

Also, I recall the main news site covering it had a brick background but cannot remember the name.

I also grew up in the Portland area and had a "TAG" program for the fourth and fifth grades. Due to a state law that changed the way state funds were allocated amongst districts it was discontinued prior to the sixth grade (along with the sixth grade trip). I went from being challenged to completely bored and starting getting in a lot of trouble which was something that lasted through middle school.

My oldest child is still a year away from kindergarten and from the conversations I have had with elementary school administrators it sounds like they don't really have any formal plan to handle kids that are more advanced in certain subjects. They definitely don't use the terms "talented" or "gifted" anymore. Not sure if my child would be qualified for a program like that in the future but it would be good to know that it was be available.

Regarding your point about "the Netflix or Hulu of podcasts" it is important to remember that by far the majority of their content is at least a full season old. They are able to secure the rights to it for less than the cost of producing it because the networks are receiving ad dollars the first time around.

Most of the podcasts I listen to aren't timely so listening to them a year after they "air" isn't a big deal. I'm not sure if I am in the majority there though.

My suspicion is that podcasts are going to borrow from the music industry in the form of podcasts being something they give away in hopes of making money through merchandise, events, additional media such as books or subscriber-only episodes, or more likely, broadcaster access in the form of communities. (Off of the top of my head I can think of four entrepreneurial podcasts that have their own membership communities: Startups For the Rest of Us, Tropical MBA, Entrepreneur on Fire, and Chris Ducker. I imagine there is a lot of audience overlap but not membership community overlap and maybe a different method would be to have a single entrepreneurial podcast membership community that shows can join for a portion of the subscription fees. A smaller piece of a bigger pie...)

And like music some people will still create them out of a labor of love.

I asked a former oil trader about this and he said, "Every oil trader/broker is on it globally. It replaced a large percentage of the voice traffic. It always shocked me that Yahoo never tried to charge for it. Even just a penny per message would be massive."