I _need_ to be making $100, so I'm _worth_ $1000. You know, because I'm very unlikely to succeed.
Something doesn't add up here.
That road trip to see your parents (or going out with friends, or stoping to take in the present) is valuable in itself. It gives you time to center and to regain your balance. Thinking that every hour that you take off is costing you a thousand dollars is a great way to burn out.
Saving that $30 on hosting though, that's probably not worth it.
Whenever I find myself down and my productivity low, I stop and think of how insignificant all this is, on a cosmic scale. We're here, and then we're not.
You'd guess that this thinking would make you feel nihilistic: what is the point of what I'm doing? Ironically, I only feel like that when thinking on a human scale, of life, of what I want to accomplish, of how unattainable it all seem in the moment. Then I step back, and I see that we are a spec in time and all this self-doubt and torture is unnecessary. At the end of this game, there are no winners. Enjoying the sport is your personal victory.
Love the fournova logo, something about it is just really aesthetically pleasing. It looked like an airline logo to me before I realized (from the more colorful logo for the app) that it was a control tower. Great job. Who designed it?
The app... I don't know why, but I never realized that I needed this. It's a private GitHub for self hosted repositories, duh. Will definitely give it a try.
I really like GitHub for browsing and reading code, something that you don't get with self-hosted repositories. That's really the feature that I was thinking of. Obviously there is a great deal more to GitHub than that.
What parts of Wordpress do you find superior to alternatives?
I'm building yet another blogging platform (not quite) right now. It isn't going to be Wordpress, but it will be managed and won't cost you $200/mo. A carcycle, if you will.
To carry the analogy to its end: you seem to be only using the car to drive ten blocks to work. In other words, you only serve static content + comments. Which is why I'm curious what, specifically, compels you to stick with Wordpress even though there is an obvious cost (be it money or effort.)
The biggest one is the ecosystem. Can I get a WooThemes-caliber theme done for your CMS at 3 AM in the morning for $70 without talking to anyone? And will it work virtually instantly as soon as I drop it over? And will that play well with e.g. using the blog as a lightweight CMS, with custom menus, static pages, and whatnot in addition to the blog proper? And will that work with the plugin ecosystem when I want to do just-a-wee-bit-trickier things like the What Would Seth Godin Do prompt?
> Can I get a WooThemes-caliber theme done for your CMS at 3 AM in the morning for $70 without talking to anyone?
I know you run a business, so for you the answer may be 'yes', but for most people running a blog: is this really a huge concern?
To borrow an upthread analogy, if I'm switching from a car to a bike, whether I'll be able to get a complete paintjob at 3am for $70 without talking to someone is not really something that's going to make the pros/cons list.
Perhaps not those with traffic problems. Hopefully by then you've found a way to direct that traffic to useful revenue or have enough cash from your business to invest.
In OP's case, he's spending money on hosting a CPU-intensive blogging engine. In theory he could spend the same money on theming an efficient one.
"A version of this article appeared in print on February 3, 2012, on page A21A of the National edition with the headline: A New Resource for Hiring Programmers Has Become Entirely Too Successful."
Bottom of page. So NYT printed a syndicated article? That's interesting.
Yeah, and the publish date at the Bay Citizen site is 9p.m. Eastern yesterday. NYT print must've either snapped this up immediately or had advance notice that it was going out on the site.
Further digging shows that not every BayCitizen article makes the NYT, so I guess there's some editorial back and forth involved.
From what I gather, direct campaign contributions and the way corporations are funneling money into elections are not connected. Corporations are NOT making direct contributions to campaigns. They are making indirect and anonymous contributions to superpacs.
We don't need to "make contributions illegal." Nor do we _need_ publicly financed campaigns. That would be very hard to get.
We can start by having superpacs disclose their donors. Or by setting a limit on individual, and by extension corporate, contribution to said superpacs.
The loophole is that you can't make a large contribution directly to a campaign, yet you can make a contribution of any size, anonymously, indirectly to the corresponding superpac. This is why money = voice.
In answer to your question: "Should the MPAA be disallowed to make a political commercial and pay for its broadcast?" They should be allowed to make a political statement by contributing to a superpac that runs the commercial, but the contribution should not be unlimited nor anonymous. In effect, they'll need other companies in the pool to get enough money for that commercial. Now we can say corporations are people, problem solved.
The implicit assumption is that you shouldn't have the legislator's ear because you have a fat check in hand. Chance are that the check will win over a petition.
If we are to have freedom of speech, then Beck should be able to have his show. That's the easy part.
Beck converts money into public opinion. Arguably, SuperPACs do the same. Hence the Citizens United decision. In practice, SuperPAC donors just tell the legislator why the check was written, or in which case it will be. Nothing wrong with the premise (free speech), plenty wrong with the outcome (money = voice, or rather money = ear?)
Now that I ran this circle, I can see how publicly financed campaigns might be the only answer. Thank you for asking a difficult question to answer. I'll definitely think about this more.
In practice, SuperPAC donors just tell the legislator why the check was written, or in which case it will be.
If it were not a check, but merely using influence, would things be better? I.e., if Krugman were to offer to endorse Romney only on the condition that Romney expands Obama/Romneycare, would that be acceptable?
Or how about if some rich person stated he would buy a newspaper and use the newspaper to push Romney?
How about capping the donations? I really don't like how a few entities/persons can have such a dramatic impact on elections because of how much they donate to that politician.
The vote is equal in a democracy, but donations aren't, and in a way donations are like a parallel vote, which huge discrepancies between each donation. Obviously the politician will listen to his biggest donors first, even if 10,000 of his normal supporters want the opposite thing.
Thank you. I cherish learning from such insight. These nuances can only be discovered after you've done something. I appreciate you sharing.
The "validate your ideas" advice is sound, yet throwing up fake landing pages, day in day out, until I hit gold, is just something I can't get excited about. My version of validation has been build a prototype and show it to people or, the much more dangerous, "I know people will want this because [insert something that has changed]." I'm certainly taking more risk by spending more time on each idea to, arguably, get worse data, but at least I'm enjoying doing it. Taking what you've said into account, there is also less of a chance that I end up with a product that I am not passionate about.
The "validate your ideas" advice is sound, yet throwing up fake landing pages, day in day out, until I hit gold, is just something I can't get excited about
Desperately trying out different ideas with fake landing pages is something that MVP/lean movement added later, but it wasn't described by either Steve Blank or Eric Ries in their early texts. As far as I've understood Blank's customer development model, it can be described as below.
Founders have a strong vision of a problem and product, but they don't necessarily know who are their best customers. Basically, they are unsure of their business model and target market. They get some funding and start developing the product (traditional 90s bubble model) but at the same time they start visiting and talking to customers, showing mockups, trying out different price points etc. (Blank's customer development model). There is parallel tech & customer development going on.
Note that under Blank's model pivoting doesn't mean that you start to execute on a totally different product, but that you adjust your product vision when you learn more about customers and possible target markets.
As an example, you start with a vision of cashflow estimation software for small 10-employee consulting companies (founders' vision, a self-identified need), but when you start selling and learning about markets, you noticed that bigger companies (let's say 100 employees or so) have similar problem. But what those bigger companies need from user interface and database integration are quite different than needs of small companies. However, this new target market is more profitable, so you adjust your product vision and business model to serve it instead of the original vision.
This is how I've understood customer development model.
Founders have a vision, start building product and finding a target market and scalable business model for that vision. It doesn't mean desperate random attempts in totally different products.
So it's really targeting people who are already mad keen to execute their exciting vision, and saying: hang on, before committing too much, just test out your assumptions in a low-cost way. It's validation, not search.
I think Ries has a story of three years building a fantastic exciting product that nobody wanted... and wishing to avoid that.
The rapid iteration/pivot approach makes more sense if you start with something you are passionate about. That's the key. Maybe try only testing your assumptions about your market? Try to describe someone who would use your product and then find someone who matches your description. If they are not interested it's only one aspect of your idea. If your passion for this idea wilts after one encounter like this then either you aren't cut out for this gig or you weren't that passionate about it. Probably the latter, because if you have the guts to make a phone call to some random stranger you're already doing something 99% of people won't.
Every year I would come back to renew and it was getting more and more difficult. Eventually, it became ridiculous. The checkout process was finding the "No I don't want this shit" link (yes, link), listing through five pages of "GoDaddy girl" and special offers.
Speaking of the GoDaddy girl. That's how I knew they completely lost touch with their business. I remember their newsletters (were they newsletters?) about "seeing the GoDaddy girl in the shower" or something. I mean, wtf?
I still have a couple of domains there, for complicated reasons, but all others, I've transfered out of there long ago, new business goes to Namecheap.
Thanks for that. I actually remembered their color scheme/design, but couldn't find the website back when I was looking for a new registrar. It looks like they have a much larger selection of tld's compared to Namecheap. That will come in handy.
I've always thought of a "product guy" as a competent hacker who can can switch hats as he's working to think about business, the users, the design, the ease of use, the infrastructure, etc. A jack of all trades, one step away from entrepreneur. Never did it occur to me that "product guy" means something entirely different to others.
Something doesn't add up here.
That road trip to see your parents (or going out with friends, or stoping to take in the present) is valuable in itself. It gives you time to center and to regain your balance. Thinking that every hour that you take off is costing you a thousand dollars is a great way to burn out.
Saving that $30 on hosting though, that's probably not worth it.