Hi guys, quick intro - a good friend of mine came to me with a problem last year. He was running an incubator, a large tech conference and was involved in a lot of other local events. He was constantly crafting tweets for influencers and marketing partners to promote his events. He'd send people suggested messages, suggested schedules etc. just through email. It was time consuming and tough to manage, partners would often forget or accidentally schedule posts for the wrong time and botch announcements. Moreover, he had very little visibility on how much traffic and conversions each partner brought in.
So the 2 of us and a few more of our friends came together and made a side project out of this. Kiwii lets you create and edit a campaign of social messages and send a single link to all your partners. The partners can choose which tweets to opt in to and adjust the messages as necessary and schedule them directly from our tool. You also get a dashboard to see exactly how effective each of your partners are.
However, we're struggling to find product market fit. We thought we'd target conference and event organizers, but for them, usage is very seasonal, the market is fairly small and social media marketing is often not their top priority.
We actually shelved the project a while ago, but recently decided to give it one more shot. Try to get some visibility on what we're doing and try to get some feedback. We think there is some real value here and hope to find some feedback that tells us how to get to something viable. So, that's why I'm posting it here, love to hear your thoughts on the project. Thanks!
Hi guys, InfluencerNews is a news reader that surfaces content most widely discussed by a list of influencers we consider trustworthy. The idea is that people on our list will generally share higher quality content and effectively filter out the noise.
To build this list of 'trusted influencers' we first scraped dozens of lists like businessinsider.com/100-best-tech-people-on-twitter-2014-2014-11. We figured if a credible source says you're one of the essential people to follow for an industry, that's a good start.
Next, we look at who these experts trust and follow. Those followed by at least 15 of these influencers made our list. To re-iterate, it's not enough to make a well regarded best-people-to-follow list, that effectively only gets you a vote; the people included in our list are followed by at least 15 such people. Our newsfeed is made up of articles most shared and discussed by these influencers.
Another thing that sets us apart from other newsreaders is that it adds some relevant context. You can immediately see influencer reactions to each story as you peruse the headlines.
Anyways, I'd really love your feedback on the idea. Thanks!
Fair enough.
Then I'd argue maybe one headline they're A/B testing is sensationalist, but the article itself isn't, nor does it feel like the article is at all making a point about the 'fall' of Ethereum.
Not sure why the url path includes 'rise and fall' in it, it doesn't look like it's the actual headline in the article, nor is 'rise and fall' mentioned anywhere in the article.
The main point of the article isn't that people are losing trust in Ethereum. It's that there's no platform that truly avoids the need to trust other human beings (as some apparently believe). That code is not absolute law because the community can choose to change it and affect pre-existing contracts. I don't think he bashes Ethereum at all, but is just making the case that, if you believe you can rely on a platform like this to avoid the need to trust in human decisions, you're fooling yourself.
I like Seattle a lot, I lived there for 6 years; I've been gone for 3 years now, but it's still my favorite.
The tech scene is world class - headquarter for 2 of the top 4 largest tech companies (microsoft and amazon) and just about every large tech company has an office there; plenty of promising startups too.
Real estate is super reasonable; not just cheaper than SF, but even significantly cheaper than Toronto.
Food scene and bar scene and music are all really good.
Lots of great outdoorsy stuff to do nearby (cascade range, ocean, etc.). I've actually never lived anywhere where people are as active on average. Several of my former co-workers have summited mount rainier for example, other co-workers have been racers etc. And they're really just typical tech workers in Seattle. Three national parks are within driving distance, and besides those, gorgeous hikes start less than hour out of the city. You will fall in love with the outdoors there.
The weather is always mild, no extreme cold or heat. Yes, it's dark a lot, but everyone really appreciates the sun more and the city parks are great on the nice days.
maybe I'm missing something, but there's a lot here that don't sound right...
"When you employ trunk-based development in a single huge repo, you have only one version of everything. That’s kind of obvious. It’s still good to point it out here, though, because it means that — at Google — you can’t have app FooBar that’s using AngularDart 2.2.1 and another app BarFoo that’s on 2.3.0. Both apps must be on the same version — the latest one."
I don't see how sharing the same repo implies everything uses the exact same dependencies. Why can't apps share the same repository and specify their own dependency versions?
"What if AngularDart needs to make a major breaking change (say, going from 2.x to 3.0) and that change breaks 74 thousand tests? Will the team go and fix all of them? Will they make changes to thousands of source files, most of which they haven’t authored?
Yes."
This just doesn't sound reasonable. I could see forcing framework devs to fix mission-critical stuff on some google's biggest projects, but every single one? Hundreds/thousands of projects?
"One of the cool things about having a sound type system is that your tooling can be much more useful. In sound Dart, tools can be sure that a variable is of a certain type, for example. For refactoring, that means that many changes can be completely automatic, with no need of confirmation from the developer."
I'm sure a good deal of API changes can be fixed with automated refactoring, but plenty can't! How do you automatically go from factory pattern to builder pattern for example.
More importantly, I'm assuming developers don't have all 86TB of the code checked out locally and loaded up in an IDE... So how is this automated refactoring done?
You seem to think a cleaner UI makes a product better, it doesn't. Right now your value prop is super unclear and it won't matter how much advertising you do.
For a product like this, the community is the ESSENTIAL part of the product. The best product in this category is the one with the highest quality network of listeners/people-with-problems and good matchmaking. You will probably also need something more specific to focus on.
For starters, think about where you can find potential users and where you can find people trying to tackle similar problems as you.
It's literally a listing of hundreds of organizations with pre-built networks of (trained) volunteer listeners and (hopefully) real demand from people with real problems. Maybe you can try messaging these organization to see if they need technology help. You can also ask about their experiences around building up their volunteers network and how they spread the word for their help line. If you craft good messages, maybe several out of those hundreds will talk to you. You should be able to get some good ideas with enough work, and maybe even a few potential partnerships.
Think about what else you can search for. Think about how to find relevant users on community platforms like reddit, google groups, fb groups, meetup etc. I'm sure there're lots of communities out there where people have problems and look for advice or want to talk things out. Segment the potential users and try to gauge the level of demand. Think about what exactly different types of users need and how to craft the right pitch for them (and if you can deliver on it). If you get it right, you could also leverage those communities to seed your initial network.
If you get specific, you'll have an easier time creating value by seeding the network correctly, doing better matchmaking and having a clearer pitch and value prop.
You're going to find that you will change frameworks and tech stacks fairly frequently over the years. Focus on proving you can learn quickly and solve large problems. Best bet for long term roi is probably to learn patterns, web architecture and vanilla js.
With that said, react/redux are good bets for library/frameworks to learn for now. And node.js if you want to avoid picking up another language for backend development for now.
I'll comment on career growth. First of all, make sure you can learn from the team you're joining. If you get an offer, ask if you can grab a drink or lunch with the team before you decide. If a manager says no to this, that's actually a pretty big red flag. When you hang out with the team, probe their experience and get an idea of their communication style. Understand what you can learn from them and understand how different people might mentor you. You should also make sure your manager is strong and will do regular one on ones with you. Groups that do occasional skip-level 1on1s are even better.
When you're working, look to take the initiative when you can and always try to over deliver. Work hard and find opportunities to take leardership roles on something. Good managers will encourage this. But don't be annoying, look for real needs you can fill.
Talk to your manager very explicitly and figure out your career path. You can and should talk to your manager about exactly what it takes to get to take the next step in your career; a good manager will define this very clearly. Then, I'd say every 2-4 1on1s with your manager, check in on your progress. This is also a good opportunity for for him/her to point you to additional learning resources to get there. You should do something similar with other members of your team, especially those you respect the most. It also doesn't hurt to ask everyone what they're favorite books and blogs are.
Being on strong teams and working on complicated problems is key. Once you feel like you're not learning a lot anymore, make a career change. Early on in your career, I think your rate of learning should be the main factor in changing jobs. Change a few times early on (1-2 years a job), I thinks is also very healthy since you get exposed to some different environments/perspectives.
So the 2 of us and a few more of our friends came together and made a side project out of this. Kiwii lets you create and edit a campaign of social messages and send a single link to all your partners. The partners can choose which tweets to opt in to and adjust the messages as necessary and schedule them directly from our tool. You also get a dashboard to see exactly how effective each of your partners are.
Our first 'big customer' was Traction conference in Vancouver, and the tool seemed to be helpful, raising their social traffic by 15x as compared to the year before: https://medium.com/@getkiwii/case-study-how-traction-confere...
However, we're struggling to find product market fit. We thought we'd target conference and event organizers, but for them, usage is very seasonal, the market is fairly small and social media marketing is often not their top priority.
We actually shelved the project a while ago, but recently decided to give it one more shot. Try to get some visibility on what we're doing and try to get some feedback. We think there is some real value here and hope to find some feedback that tells us how to get to something viable. So, that's why I'm posting it here, love to hear your thoughts on the project. Thanks!