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12 years ago @ Gabriel Weinberg'... - The real Filter Bubble... · 0 replies · +1 points

I think the sidebar or something similar makes a lot more sense than true fine-grained control. It would create an interesting A/B test, too.

Greater control sounds good in theory, but in practice it's too much work for users without enough benefit. Most people just don't care enough, and I'm not sure that amount of development effort is worth it for the few that do... for most companies. Of course, that creates opportunities for players like DuckDuckGo.

13 years ago @ Gabriel Weinberg'... - A mobile first strateg... · 0 replies · +1 points

Having a distribution strategy is the first step, but it just gets worse from there. The hard part is making it successful. Most distribution strategies are a commodity (e.g., SEO), which means you have to be much better than the average bear at executing them. The rest (e.g., partnering with a large company) can be real differentiators, but getting those relationships is also extremely difficult. So you either need to be one of the first with a good twist (Dropbox with two-sided referral incentives) or you need to be great at execution. Either way, having an awesome product makes everything much easier. I think we're closer than ever to a situation where the "better mousetrap" strategy actually works.

13 years ago @ StartupCFO - Turning off the devices · 1 reply · +1 points

Making a public commitment is a great first step. Maybe this is also a sign that the meetings themselves can be improved? It's easy to get lazy in managing meetings and take up more of people's time than is warranted. As soon as participants perceive low value over time, it's that much harder to avoid multitasking.

13 years ago @ Feld Thoughts - Founders 2010 #3: Be F... · 3 replies · +1 points

I haven't watched a TechStars video in a while, but this one was excellent, both in terms of the theme and production. A+

The "don't let fear run your brain" theme is a great one, but "fear is useless" is kind of wrong, isn't it? As in the rest of life, fear is a great signal to pay attention. Maybe you need to get smarter on a topic, maybe you need to delegate, or maybe you just need to figure out why you're scared and spend some time addressing that issue. It's a crappy analogy, but the BP engineers obviously should have been more afraid of a well problem. You can't shut down because of fear, but you can't just ignore it either.

13 years ago @ StartupCFO - The SaaS Certainty Pre... · 1 reply · +1 points

I'm a little skeptical about this analysis. While SaaS does have lots of advantages, a 2x premium seems quite high. Is this normalized for growth? I couldn't tell from the links, but since most SaaS companies/products are newer, it seems fair to assume that they would also be growing faster.

Apart from growth differences, I think the points you mention in your comment are more relevant than revenue certainty. The packaged enterprise software model requires lots of sales and marketing and lots of integration/customization, which leaves a smaller share of the pie for profit. On the other hand, I haven't actually looked at company margins. Are companies like Salesforce higher margin than traditional firms at the same size?

13 years ago @ Gabriel Weinberg'... - Twitter RT Test Result... · 1 reply · +1 points

So I'm curious, how much time/money would you have to spend on your other marketing activities to equal what you got out of those tweets? How's the implied ROI on tweets versus something else?

13 years ago @ Feld Thoughts - Web Sites and Books fo... · 0 replies · +1 points

I've been doing some of the same, spending a lot of time on Google, StackOverflow, and whatnot. I also got good value out of O'Reilly's Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript and CSS Cookbook. Lastly, just getting started on the CodeIgniter docs now.

Regarding books versus the web, I don't think the programming book is dead. My main issues with them are 1) crappy search/indexes and 2) incorrect assumptions about what platform you're on. Even something as trivial as Ubuntu versus Red Hat can derail you in the intro chapter of a book, and yet publishers seem to make all kinds of assumptions about what platform you're on. But these are not difficult pain points to solve. What I really want to see is an e-book with Google search, a synched/linked online forum, and content that is parametrized so you can plug in your environment (OS, web server, and versions of everything) and have it customized to your situation.

14 years ago @ StartupCFO - The Goto Market Plan · 1 reply · +1 points

Thanks for breaking it down to the basics. There are a lot of good resources out there on go-to-market planning these days, but the process can be overwhelming unless you know what kind of dashboard it should boil down to. The other thing to keep in mind is that nothing will actually go according to the plan. Some channels will work better than expected, some will work worse. So while the customer acquisition costs by program are something of an educated guess, they at least give you signposts for how to adjust once the real results come in. At that point, you have to be ruthless about ignoring sunk costs and cutting or killing your pet programs if they're not working.

14 years ago @ Feld Thoughts - Beware the Hockey Stic... · 2 replies · +1 points

I'm a little surprised that startups, with inherently unpredictable revenue, don't rebudget on a quarterly basis as a matter of course. It wouldn't be that hard to do analytically, and I would think the board would demand to see that thought process (e.g., "revenue was 30% over/under forecast, what does that mean for the hiring plan?").

Also, what does everyone think of using contract resources to adjust expenses? It seems much easier to scale those costs up and down faster. These days, the search and transaction costs seem pretty manageable. The trick is finding non-core areas where you don't need all the learning to be in-house.

14 years ago @ Feld Thoughts - The Metaverse Is So Ve... · 0 replies · +1 points

It is a funny feeling to be almost simultaneously in awe of what we can do and hugely frustrated by it. Human nature. Louis CK nailed it on Conan a while back ("It's going to space!"): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN0MpBQG3-E

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