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dqdo
Joined 112 karma
co-founder & CTO of Paramountdecisions.com Decision-making Software.
- dqdo parentYes. Lots of people have built successful businesses with just a phone.
- You should try to join an established later stage startup. Think about the skills that you have acquired and the experiences that you have been through. Very few people are able to start with an idea an execute a product. If you have experience selling to customers that is also a big plus. Later stage B2B companies are always looking for good salespeople as well as creative problem solvers. Your experience with the start up is a plus if you can frame it properly. Many of the people who I know that are now successful actually failed with their first start up. They were able to bring their learning and determination to help their current company succeed.
- I think that the Whole Foods acquisition now gives Amazon a physical footprint to compete with CVS, Rite-Aid, etc. Imagine ordering online and picking it up at a Whole Foods. After this step, they will find ways to fully by-pass the physical store and ship you medicine directly via Prime. There is a lot of money in the pharmacy business and a lot of opportunities for Amazon to enter this market and disrupt it. I don't think that any of the incumbents have the technological capabilities to compete with Amazon's supply chain. The question is not if they will enter. The question is how and how fast.
- Some things to consider from this article.
1. Olin gives free tuition or reduced tuition leading to almost no debt. There is probably a positive correlation with not having school debt and starting companies.
2. Olin has a very small population size. The best and the worst cases can always be found in small sample sizes.
3. Schools such as Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, etc. have a wide range of students with wide range of interests. Most people do not go to these schools with the sole purpose of being an entrepreneur. There are many people that become doctors, writers, researchers, etc. and benefit society in other ways. Measuring just one narrow dimension may be understating contribution in other places.
4. Olin seems like a great place. It's small enough and independent enough to take chances in how it educates its students. Most older and more prestigious are more conservative in their teaching methods. Since Olin is fully endowed by one person with an open vision, they are able to do things that other institutions cannot.
- They won't do that. The current arrangement with Google is quite good for both parties. It's not smart to start another battle with Google unless there is some to gain. 3 billion in profits is quite good. It's hard to imagine how Apple can make that much profit from their own search engine.
- Sounds like a terrible way of doing work. If you are expected to react to everything sent your way you never get to do any deep and meaningful work. Furthermore, running around and firefighting all the time does not give you the time and space require to learn, reflect, and improve. More people need to think about the long term impact of their work habits.
- He helps resolved complex litigation issues out of court. Litigation can take 1 to 2 years in the court and cost millions of dollars. In a 1-day session, he can resolve 95% of these cases and help both parties come to an amicable agreement. People's lives and time are no longer wasted in long drawn out court battles.
Just a side note, most mediators are former lawyers. After many years of practice, they seek a better way to resolve conflicts. The pay isn't bad either.
One more thing. Randy is actually one of the best mediators in the world. After the 9/11 attacks in New York, Randy was called in to mediate and arbitrate the case with the insurance companies and tenants. After 2 years, they were able to come to an agreement and the resulting funds allowed for the area to be rebuilt.
- The most successful one-man business is not in software. I know of a successful mediator. He charges $18000 to $20000 per day and has always been booked for the last 20 years.
http://www.wqsadr.com/randallwwulfffeescheduleandpolicies.ht...
- >"My startup had to deal with payment processing (at least initially before I pivoted) so I thought I needed it."
You generally don't need a payment processor when starting out. The first ~200k in revenue can be done manually. Payment processing is something that takes time to do and most likely you will need to tweak it a few time as you figure out your business model.
>Paying for dev/design work by hour for a new startup is an insane concept to me now. There are always gonna be bugs, something that doesn’t work, something that needs to be added, etc.
Tech products are very complex. There are thousands of bugs and edge cases that needs to be resolved for a high quality product.
>And ideally, especially if you’re a non-tech founder like me, PARTNER.
One of the worst idea is to have non-technical people try to create a tech business without a strong technical co-founder. Imagine starting a dentistry office without any prior knowledge or a partner who is a dentist. Imagine trying to start a restaurant without a chef, etc. Creating a tech business is not a get rich plan. It takes a lot of skill, knowledge, and luck to get a business off the ground. Unfortunately, the media stories that we read make creating a great product or fundraising millions of dollars super easy. The reality is that running a start-up is probably one of the hardest things that one can do.
- Depends on what you want to do. Each language has an advantage in its own domain.
If you want to build for the web then I would recommend learning Javascript. You really can't avoid Javascript on the web so it is a good thing to learn it well. You can even learn Node in order to make it easier to set up a backend for your web app. The quickest way to get started with the web these days is to learn Javascript and use it with a Node server on the backend. There is a lot of noise in the Javascript community with tools such as React, Angular, Webpack, Typescripts, etc. that are very good for advanced production code. For a beginner, I recommend that you just stick with Jquery until you have to write a large codebase (>50,000 unique lines of code).
Python is just a pleasure to work with. I personally use Python to write code that solves math problems and to build small personal projects. Some people say that there is a problem with Python version 2 to 3 transition. As a new programmer this should not be a problem for you. Just start with Python 3. If there is a package that you want to use, it will probably be ported over soon. If you start with Python 2 then you will need to update your codebase for the transition which is neither fun nor worth your time as a beginner.
Ruby is a great scripting language. I think that many of the things that you can do with Python you can do just as well with Ruby. If you are already good at Ruby or know some people who can help you then you should go with Ruby. If you are new to both Ruby and Python, I would recommend learning Python since there are way more applications for Python (i.e., data science and machine learning).
- Software development takes a long time because of the users. If you think about every piece of software that has ever been written, they have been created to solve a human problem or resolve a human concern. As we build more impressive systems, our expectations also change. A state of the art website just 5 years ago is unacceptable today. Think about all the work that we now have to do in order to make things mobile responsive. Features such as chat and video, which were revolutionary in 2004-2005 (when Youtube and Facebook were found) are common requirements of projects today. In additional to an increase in user expectations, we have to understand that when we undertake a project it is to solve a new problem whose implications cannot fully be understood from the beginning. In most software projects, the problems only becomes clear after spending months building it. Once we have the software as an artifact, we will find new ideas and new extensions that we could have never imagined before. Additionally, a large part of our software has to interact with other artifacts in the real world. These artifacts are built by other people and continuously change. A large part of maintaining a project is ensuring that is still compatible with all the programs that it depends on.
- My brother reads on average 0 to 1 book a year and he is a better code than me. I personally read about 50 books per year. There is nothing about programming that requires you to be a good reader. If you are an avid reader, you will get some more interesting ideas to make your life and work more fulfilling. If you study another language, you will find many similarities with the grammar structure of a "human" language and the grammar structure of most programming languages leading to much cleaner and more well formed code. As a programmer, as long as you can think clearly about your problem, understand your users, and have a good understanding of the documentation of the tools that you are using you should be fine. Reading more exposes us to ideas that we would usually never think of ourselves but in my personal experience there are few ideas that come through this way. Most things come to you the old fashion way -- trial and error. As long as you are persistent and dedicated to your craft you can become a good programmer regardless of where you start and how often you read.
- Someone should do an analysis of past companies on these metrics. It would be interesting to know how Microsoft and Google's business comes out of the equation. On the flip side, we should also look at companies that have folded as well. We might find a minimum threshold of viability in terms of business models.
- I wrote a paper on how to control the project cost escalation that is relevant to this discussion. Typically 90% of construction projects are completed over budget with median being 28% over. http://leanconstructionblog.com/Target-Value-Design-as-a-Met...
- I think that the data available here is a good start. To make an informed decision about which school to attend, it would require the students to identify the factors that are important to them. Check out the link below for an example of how one might choose the right school for themselves. https://paramountdecisions.com/education.html
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- They also have very high overhead costs. Most law firms have very nice offices in very prominent parts of the city. This is not cheap so they need to charge a very high price to just remain in business.
From an economic perspective, you can imagine that a lawyer can typically bill 2000 hours per year. If the lawyer's salary + benefits + retirement contribution is 150k per year, they would need $75 per hour to cover this cost. Since the lawyer is working for a big firm which has high overhead costs and a goal of returning profit to their partners, the amount that they bill typically 3X their hourly salary (3X $75 = $225). This is why it is so expensive to hire an attorney. For large corporations, this fee is reasonable since they have millions of dollars at stake in an M&A transaction, IPO deal, or patent litigation. For regular working folks, this is often unaffordable. Due to the bifurcation of the potential clients (big business vs. everyone else), there is also a bifurcation on attorney salaries.
- Yes. There is no academic requirement for publishing research papers. Anyone can submit a paper for the peer-review process at most journals. However, as an outsider it would be better if you collaborate with someone familiar with the journal and the research publication process. There are lots of esoteric rules that the journals take very seriously (e.g., formatting, common research terms, language, and tone) that is impossible to know unless you have experience with the publication process. You should also note that each journal is different in terms of what they specialize in, the types of topics that publish, and their target readership. The more inside knowledge you have about the journals, the quicker you can get your paper approve for publication.
- Since no one else is respond to this post, I will offer some very quick advice.
Firstly, what you are suggestion is very doable. You might want to look at Jquery UI draggable elements https://jqueryui.com/draggable/#scroll. There is nothing technically challenging about this concept.
Secondly, your specification is too vague for anyone to actually build. Programming is an exact art since the computer is the most unforgiving thing to work with (computer = fast + stupid). I would suggest that you work with a UI/UX (user interface/ user experience) person to refine your specifications. It would be helpful if the UI/UX person has some experience with programming to validate your concept and turn the idea into build-able specs.
Usually programmers work with UI/UX designers (and sometimes visual designers and marketers) to vet out the concept before starting to work on the code. The reason for this is that coding is a big investment in time and just the slightest change can have profound effects on the underlying code because fairly simple things can turn out to be very complex when you factor in everything.
The way that you have your description right now, most competent programmer would not be interested in this project because there seems to be a big gap between what you want and what you know from the technical perspective. My advice is to narrow this gap by enlisting the help of a UI/UX designer first.
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- I would say that the main job of any CEO or top executive is to continuously learn and self improve. As a CEO, your job is to think strategically and with a long-term vision. Most of the daily problems should be delegated to the functional managers as you will be buried in work if you try to do everything yourself. Only in situations when the rest of the company cannot figure out themselves or when there is a lot at stake should the CEO intervene. I believe that a sign of a good leader is someone who is able to delegate work to others and trusts that they can get it done.
Given how fast we are moving in the world in terms of technology and business, there are new break throughs and developments everyday that can change the landscape of entire industries. As a CEO, your main role is to understand this landscape and have a vision for the next 2 to 5 years in the case of technology companies. For older and less turbulent industries this could be 5 to 10 years.
Keep in mind that what I am saying applies to companies with +100 employees. For early stage start-ups, the CEO will have to wear multiple hats and have to take a hands-on role otherwise the company will not have enough revenues to survive. Once you have pass the threshold of survival (~100 employees), you need to reorganize your company for growth. This is a difficult transition for most start-up CEOs and the dirty little secret that VCs keep from founders is that few founder CEOs make it through this transition.
One of the best way to ensure growth in your organization is to learn about the ever changing world outside of it so that you can help the rest of the organization continuously grow and thrive. One way of doing this is to look beyond your own industry and explore how other industries are dealing with their problems. Different industries are more advanced in different area so use this to your advantage. You can "steal" the best ideas and use them to improve internal operations. Remember that at this stage in your company, you are not really building anything new. Instead you job (which is just as difficult) is to improve on whatever already exists.
One reason why you should use your spare time to learn is that some companies actually march towards a wall because they are too busy pursuing immediate profits. This is the argument behind Clayten Christensen's book the Innovator's Dilemma. It is a great book and I would highly recommend it to all CEOs whether in start-ups or in large organizations.
- A 5% conversion rate for site visitor seems quite high to me. I actually don't recommend you optimizing for conversion rates -- this may sound counterintuitive so I will explain.
Your conversion rate depends on the marketing channels that you use to bring your users to your landing page and how relevant your product offering is for the customers. You should track the conversion rate of your different marketing channels to optimize your marketing spending mix (e.g., spending on X brings Y number of leads per month with Z percentage of them converting). Different marketing channels and marketing campaigns can bring in radically different results so you should focus your spending on the ones that bring the most bang for your buck.
The more money you spend on marketing, the lower your conversion becomes. This is due to the fact that over time, you start getting lower quality leads to your website. This is analogous to mining in less resource rich areas. As a company, your goal is not to maximize your conversion rate (the effectiveness of your spending) but rather to maximize your profits. If you think carefully, it may make sense that the conversion rate (effectiveness of your spending) can decrease while your profit increases. You can find more about this argument in the economic concept of marginal vs. average cost.
For SAAS products, the most important metrics are: Life Time Value, Acquisition Cost, and Churn Rate. You just need to make sure that your (LTV - Acquistion Cost) > Profit + Costs and that your churn rate is not unreasonably too high. A high churn rate (>5% annually) limits the potential growth of your company in the long term.
- I really depends on your product. The first thing that you need to consider is the possible strategies: (A) Freemium, (B) Paid subscription with a short trial, (C) paid subscription with a long trial, and (D) No trial but money back guarantee.
The first strategy (Freemium) is only appropriate for a very very small segment of saas applications. This model relies on huge network effects (aka your product becomes more valueable as more people use it -- think Dropbox) and often times 1% of the paid users cover the cost of the product. Most companies that follow the Freemium model often burn cash very quickly and rely on VC money to stay alive in the first 5 years of operations. This is not a recommended strategy for most Saas products and should be avoided unless there is clear evidence that your product benefits from the network effect and that it is more valuable to monetize later on. The other situation where this strategy might be appropriate is if you think that there is a high probability that your users will convert to paid customers in the near future.
The second strategy (Paid subscription with a short trial) is the most common strategy of Saas products. The reasoning behind this strategy is that it gives the users a way to evaluate the software at a very low risk for a limited amount of time. If the user finds value in the software, then they would convert to purchasing it. For most Saas applications, there is almost no difference between 14 days, 21 days, or 30 days of free trial. So optimizing for the time period of the short subscription is usually not the best use of your time.
The third strategy is the paid subscription with a long trial period. This strategy is applicable for big business applications where it may take a very long time to train and get everyone onboard the software. This strategy should be used in the case where the number of users for the software within an organization is very large (100s to 1000s). The risk of using this strategy over the paid subscription with short trial is that you give the users too long consider the purchasing decision. By giving them 2 months, some users might forget about the software and why they were looking for it in the first place. A situation where this strategy is ideal is when there is a very high cost of switching to alternatives. For example, AWS offers 1 year of free tier EC2 because they know that once you start using their product, it would be relatively difficult (time consuming) to move your web product to App Engine or Rackspace.
The fourth strategy is the money back guarantee. This is effective in separating the people who truly want your software from the people who are just shopping around and it makes the buying decision very close to the beginning of the experience. The risk of this strategy is that some people may be reluctant to give you their credit card information at the beginning unless your product is very known.
TLDR: there are four different types of strategies that you can use in this situation. For more established companies who have well known brand recognition, I would recommend using the money back guarantee. For most saas companies, a subscription with a short trial period is the recommended strategy unless there is evidence to suggest that a longer trial period would be more suitable for your software.
And finally there is one last thing to consider. Certain markets have existing expectations for pricing and pricing strategies which you really have no choice but to follow. The example that comes to mind is the database as a service market. Both Parse and Firebase (as well as any other saas company in this segment) offer users an unlimited time free trial. They expect to make their money after the user's data usage increases which would naturally convert them to paid users.
One last comment before I go. Remember that "strategy is choosing what not to do". Out of these four strategies, you will need to determine which bucket your product fits in and use the appropriate strategy.