Technologies: Experienced product/GTM/business/design generalist (10 years banking, 5 years B2B software). PostgreSQL and MySQL, Python, and Javascript in light capacity (querying, scripting, scraping, webhooks and API calls). Postman for API testing. Front-end web/devtools for QA. Miro and Figma for design and prototyping.
Resume: linkedin/in/douglas-c-rogers/
Email: douglasc.rogers [at] gmail
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Hello, I'm Doug, an experienced software business generalist looking to be one of your early non-technical hires. I've worked on product, sales, marketing, and ops for three B2B startups, including one for a year as co-founder. Previously a capital markets banker doing marketing, account management/sales, and multi-stakeholder deal execution. Adjunct instructor in digital service innovation.
Pretty cool, love that it keeps track of your score at the bottom. One comment is that the user feedback when answering incorrectly displays the name of the correct country, not the incorrectly guessed country.
Example:
Flag is Brazil. Finland is guessed by user. Message to user: "You guessed Brazil incorrectly".
Similar thing happened to me, but my card on file had expired . Zipcar sent me an email threatening to send me to collections. I sent them a polite message on April 11th and they finally got back to me on May 30th that the charges would be removed.
A few ideas that I've seen out in the wild:
- Engage with your most consistent readers and find out what makes them such big fans. Use that to create premium/paid content.
- turn into a paid newsletter (or paywall for the blog). Keep some content free but write additional content for paid subscribers.
- add a premium content tier that could include: slack community, monthly "mastermind" or guest events, job board access, etc
- turn each article into a podcast episode, youtube video, twitter thread, etc. to earn more advertising revenue and/or grow audience
Thx for sharing the ideas. I'm new to blogging, I don't think the premium subscription will work in my case. Maybe turning the articles to YouTube videos would be good in my case.
Looks fantastic. What did you use to build this? Any interesting changes/user insights since you posted to HN in July?
I love the low-friction approach to signing up and getting started right away with a cohort. I have a family member battling alcohol addiction, and while I feel the group accountability/support of AA can be helpful, AA often focus too much on the 12-steps with a heavy dose of religion. When my family member entered an in-patient rehab program, one of the "highlights" was the close connections with their intake cohort (phones weren't allowed, so staying connected was up to them - so higher friction to staying in touch for support).
Lockdowns during the pandemic have likely exacerbated conditions that lead to and enable alcohol addiction, with less physical interaction with others to detect warning signs or get access to traditionally "in-person" services.
To be completely honest, this is a labor of love and I don't see any ethical way to monetize it so I haven't been marketing it. I'm planning to post it a few more places to try to get an initial core group of users, but it'll need to spread thru word of mouth to stay alive.
Totally agree on AA. I don't see the need to involve religion in order to quit drinking and it's off-putting to many people.
Re: labor of love, according to AA's Form 990 for the year ending 2019[1]
Revenue: $11.3M
General Manager salary: $352k
7 other execs making ~$150-200k
There are lots of impact accelerators out there who might fund solutions like this. Saving people's lives comes in different forms and there is a big societal economic benefit created, there could be different ways to capture a fair share of that. Maybe it's solving another problem, like job placement or sober housing, that creates a revenue stream down the road.
This is pretty cool, have you thought about also implementing it to help quit smoking? I believe the same cohort approach can be used...would just have to divide into smokers cohorts and drinkers cohorts.
In my limited experience, no-code tools are really great for idea validation & prototyping because you can get to the core of your value proposition faster than starting from scratch. As things scale, maybe you can't rely on V1 as much, but that can be a good problem to have.
Not sure if you meant this, but I think a lot of no/low code products can fill most propositions however the costs are prohibitive. Currently Bubble, Adalo, Airtable etc would bankrupt me fast if I ran off them (I mean; they are free or cheap to get going but when you gain traction, the price flies up). I cannot build scale or momentum with their pricing. There is also the problem that it is not open tech, but that is more a personal thing, not a financial or tech problem.
If they were open source, I probably would build 90% of whatever I am doing in them, but now it is more like 1% and indeed for demos only and that is 100% price, for me. The open source solutions are not good enough. I understand that; only techies care about open source and they can program. This is another market.
I recently got a quote from a big no-code company, for the yearly price they asked for a few thousand users I could hire two competent full time developers.
I thought it would be EU were open banking (psd2; and most we integrated have easy read/write) is mandatory, but this seems US. Bubble allows easy API integration, but programming low level banking messages would be painful with Bubble (maybe impossible) so I would assume they did that with a microservice or something, exposing a REST API for Bubble.
Our biggest competitor bought a nocode provider so their banking software is easier to customize.
It’s been a question for a long time whether go freemium or just paid with a trial. We went along with freemium since biggest competitors offer that too so we are in a similar position.
We don’t collect user data so we can’t sell it
Remote: Yes, hybrid preferred
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Experienced product/GTM/business/design generalist (10 years banking, 5 years B2B software). PostgreSQL and MySQL, Python, and Javascript in light capacity (querying, scripting, scraping, webhooks and API calls). Postman for API testing. Front-end web/devtools for QA. Miro and Figma for design and prototyping.
Resume: linkedin/in/douglas-c-rogers/
Email: douglasc.rogers [at] gmail
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Hello, I'm Doug, an experienced software business generalist looking to be one of your early non-technical hires. I've worked on product, sales, marketing, and ops for three B2B startups, including one for a year as co-founder. Previously a capital markets banker doing marketing, account management/sales, and multi-stakeholder deal execution. Adjunct instructor in digital service innovation.
Example of a side project I worked on for creators/consultants to change Google Drive file permissions (Apps Script) based on a successful Stripe payment (Webhooks). https://twitter.com/DouglasCRogers/status/162925050782170317...