update: it's called OpenOats now
49 karma · joined May 8, 2014
@yazinsai on the big blue bird
Hosting your own email servers sounds good, until:
- Gmail and MS fling your emails in junk, despite ranking 10/10 on mailtester.net
- You have to search for old emails through RoundCube's byzantine UI (and eventually giving up)
> Stepping down from TSLA effectively immediately. Focusing 100% on SpaceX. Life's short.
This could easily be worth $100m's
Never again!
Check it out, and if you have any questions about "Validate" at all, please let me know!
Full Disclosure -- this is only 20% built out at this point
I have an ultra-specific use-case that I describe in detail here https://yazin.org/experiments/lose-100g-a-day/ (essentially, I use it to track calories). Google Form's web interface gets tiresome when you have to use it 10+ times a day, so I wanted something quick and that works offline (I've had to resubmit that damn form countless times).
Not anymore.
Head on over to the site and sign up for an invite once it's ready. I'd also love to know how YOU use Google Forms in your business or personal life.
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One would think the "ideal" programming language would be so intuitive that it would have a much lower questions asked to usage ratio.
The two might not be that strongly correlated.
You're partially right. The biggest issue medium to long-term would be getting a bank to back you. That doesn't have to be a show stopper from day 1 though (assuming you're willing to assume some personal liability, as you will be in violation of the ToS of any service provider you use).
It all comes down to your risk appetite. Essentially, you could run your own API that would wrap Stripe/Braintree's API and kickstart your business that way. This would require a US entity, but with Stripe's Atlas this is a non-issue.
This is fine if you're processing $10k or even $100k/mo. It gets icky when you try to get past that. As volume grows, there's increasing pressure to make sure that your setup is air-tight, something you can only get by setting up locally (Visa/Mastercard regulations prohibit cross-border processing so it's the only 100% legit way forward).
Herein lies the challenge. Banks in the Middle East (which I presume is where you are targeting) vary greatly in terms of what volume actually deserves their attention. For some that's $10M/mo. For others it might be less. Once you've got $100k, and have a strong upward trend, you can start having these discussions.
In short, you want to start it like you would any other business: by focus on making something people want. The bank issues can be delayed until after you've got a decent customer base. Historically, there's a 95% chance that your company would not survive (startup stats still apply). If you get past that, hit me up and I can provide more specific advice.
(As if the guy on the front page didn't give it away)
Adam, I don't know you -- I came here from the Buzzfeed article criticizing the ethics of the study that linked to this post, but it appears we do have a friend in common.
I just have to ask - you honestly had a hypothesis that amounted to 'perhaps we can make people more depressed,' and decided to test it on a group that hadn't consented to the experiment, with no way to track its impact on their actual lives, only on the language they used in their Facebook posts? And you ask us to trust that this passed an internal review so it's ethical?
Please take a moment to step back and consider that. That appears to have been the train of thought that led to this.
That's appalling. Completely appalling. The Atlantic piece is right -- there's absolutely no way this passes APA deceptive research standards.
Beyond that, you'll never know what impact this actually had on depressed people. You can only measure what they posted to Facebook, which isn't a particularly meaningful or realistic indicator of their emotional state.
If this passed an internal review board, that's only proof that Facebook's internal review standards aren't what they need to be.
You're in a position of extraordinary power, with access to more subscribers than any other field study in history, a larger population than most nations, and subject only to how you review yourselves. You could deceive yourself into believing you have informed consent because everyone clicked 'accept' on the Terms of Service years ago, but there's no way even you think that's a meaningful standard.
I trust you're a reasonable person who doesn't set out to cross ethical boundaries. But on this one, I think Facebook needs to admit it did and make some changes. This study was unethical by any reasonable standard. There's nothing wrong with admitting that and figuring out a way to do better.
There's a lot wrong with going ahead with anything like this, ever again.