Seriously. I kept thinking about YouTube when reading the story. What Hardbound tried to do is get VC money for an early stage YouTube channel. That's just silly. The business model for a YouTube channel is to start with nothing, make a video, nobody watches it, so then you make another video. Thousands of videos later you have a few people watching. You get a few of those people to give you a couple bucks on Patreon. You invest the money in better equipment and polish your videos up a bit.
It's just a long, slow grind. It requires direct communication with your audience. You have to listen to what they want and meet their needs.
You're right -- it takes a long time for most media companies to get off the ground, and it's often near-impossible to raise money in the early days. But how many youtube channels that get ~7,000 weekly unique viewers are able to convert ~1,200 into paying monthly subscribers?
Consider this: you might not already know everything there is to know about my business by skimming one blog post!
A piece of friendly advice: I get that you're in a pretty low place right now, and that this is your baby, but don't take comments on HN so personally.
You're coming across as pretty defensive, which is understandable, but probably not helpful. People here can see this from a perspective that you can't, and if you're defensive, you're missing out on learning something.
Otherwise, why are you bothering to interact here?
I was in a really low place a couple weeks ago, but I actually honestly feel pretty fine now. I've given myself the space I need to process it. I definitely wouldn't have been able to publish this post when it first happened.
Also, I totally get that it seems like a total waste of time to engage with the comments here. A lot of people have told me the same thing on Twitter. But the thing is: I think it's really special that someone on the other side of a computer screen read this thing I wrote and is thinking about what they would do in my shoes. Even if they express it in a way that's kind of rude or condescending, it means something to me!
I'm sorry if it seems like I'm being defensive. When I think of what the word "defensive" represents, I think of someone who is totally unwilling to consider other points of view and is trying to shut out the world. I don't think that's what I'm doing. Nothing is more important to me than learning from what happened and growing into a better, smarter person. I totally appreciate the fact that I am just too close to the thing to really understand what happened. I need help from objective third parties to learn the most from this.
That's actually why I'm replying to the comments. There's the naive DHH-cheerleading reply to anyone who is "yet another dumb unicorn chaser". But I want to go one or two levels deeper than that. I don't think those replies are particularly helpful, but I think the people that write them totally could be helpful. They just need to actually have a desire to understand in more detail what my business is/was doing. I accept that most people here will never care enough to really dig in. But I think the probability is high that some people here actually might really care. So I'm engaging here while it's on the front page of Hacker News, because I won't get another opportunity like that for a long time.
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to think that through more. I hope it answers your question.
I'm sorry. It's all too easy to play backseat driver on an internet discussion board. It's far tougher to actually go out and build something with your real life and your relationships in the mix.
I've been part of a failed business that's left my father with a mountain of debt in his late middle age. I am in the process of retooling my life to go back to school and earn a degree. I recognize what it's like to face a crossroads in your life. It's not something that can be casually dismissed.
actually today i just discovered how cool DuckDuckgo is. i queried "is HN down?" it automatically searched on those kind of sites and showed "no, HN.com seems up for us. We got a reply from <IP> in <Time> "
I thought, ooo! This looks interesting! And i tried "is news.ycombinator.com down" and it said yes, we got no reply, so that is down.
I tried the samething on google, apparently they are too stuck up to ask other sites to do this (though they did provide links to them). But I apprecaited the automatic answer more, just like i appreciate when google automatically converts currencies and fetches timezones and solves expressions.
yes as far as I know you got it right, you somehow keep track of when the form was presented to the user and compare that with the current time when a response comes in
Reminded me of this quote by Steve Jobs (talking about Gil Amelio): "Apple is like a ship with a hole in the bottom, leaking water. And my job is to get the ship pointed in the right direction."
Yes, the fact that a reasonably well-respected writer and English professor doesn't understand the inner workings of Google's infobox means that her blog post is terrible.
This arrogant and dismissive response highlights the problem even better than her mild and humorous complaint (which, for the record, I didn't see as whining).
Perhaps she did understand that editing her Wikipedia page would correct the problem but also understood that Wikipedia's policies frown on editing one's own page, even to correct factual errors such as birth and death dates. Or perhaps she was entirely ignorant that she could even edit Wikipedia. Or perhaps she knew but didn't care and only wanted to write a humorous and potentially thought-provoking blog post.
Why are you so quick to defend an algorithm which produced a wrong answer and detract a reasonable and intelligent human being?
For the record, I didn't find her post funny or even particularly well-written.
I guess if there's something that can be taken from this article it's "Program or be Programmed". The author didn't understand the inner workings of the Google Factbox data, so she assumed computers control her identity and her online information. However, with a little more computer knowledge, you can figure out how to control this data yourself.
Humans control the computers; it's not the other way around.
The Google algorithm took the results from the middle of the text, even though the birthdates are always right behind the name. I guess they did something like take the first dates instead of just focusing on the part behind the name. This way the algorithm was more flexible but on the other hand as we see more likely to make mistakes.
"Wikipedia's policies frown on editing one's own page, even to correct factual errors"
Indeed, Wikipedia editors have informed notable people that they are not authoritative sources for information about themselves and should not correct mistakes on the site about their own lives.
I don't understand how the engine in my car works.
I might complain to my mechanic that it won't start. To him, diagnosing a bad spark plug and swapping in a new one is a simple matter of five minutes, but to me it might as well be heart surgery. That doesn't mean I was wrong to complain.
She knew something was wrong, but admittedly didn't understand all the details. She complained to bring it to the internet's attention, after which it was swiftly fixed. This doesn't mean she's done anything foolish or wrong - she was simply pointing out a problem.
Actually it's a great article for exactly the reason you give for it being a bad article.
She has no idea how to tell Google to stop saying to the world she is dead. There are "this is wrong" buttons that she clicks that don't do anything, apparently.
This is actually the point of her article. She doesn’t know how to fix the problem and Google (the robot) isn't providing tools to fix it.
Yes, you and I know that if she goes to a high traffic site such as wikipedia, google will scan that very quickly. But that's a hack, albeit a very simple one, but still a hack requiring a lot of knowledge of how Google, and the web, works.
No, this is what a normal person would do because they don't understand google indexing.
Normal people look at the piece of the world that is wrong. If given the opportunity, they click on that same piece of world (the "infobox" in this case) to fix it. Google doesn't provide an indication in the infobox where they are getting their "facts". Other than talking to people (something not available to everyone), how would a person know what to do to change this?
Second, it was my understanding that editing your own wikipedia entry is not acceptable.
I was confused, the header says "Release Date: August, 2000" but it definitely sounded like 1910 English (also, seemed weird to talk about people living on 1£ a day). Thanks for clearing that up.
