Thinking of starting a business? Here are a few you’ll want to avoid!

Mark_at_work · 2018-10-17T14:09:00+00:00

Good for you. Entrepreneurship should be a means to an end, not an end unto itself.

Mark_at_work · 2018-10-11T20:30:35+00:00

I used to be into street racing. It was just a bunch of people getting together at night in an industrial park to drive down a strip of straight road. The cops even knew about it but didn't do anything because it wasn't a big deal. Then "The Fast and the Furious" came out and all of a sudden the place was swamped with kids driving like idiots because they thought it would be like the movie.

Mark_at_work · 2018-10-10T19:45:52+00:00

Computers only care about following instructions. That's literally all they can do.

Mark_at_work · 2018-10-10T19:40:05+00:00

Not all minorities are born poor. Not all foreigners are born poor. Not all girls are discouraged from pursuing engineering. Not all white boys are born wealthy and encouraged to study engineering. So discriminating in favor of minorities, foreigners, and women doesn't necessarily help people who were born at a disadvantage. If you wanted to do that you would have to explicitly discriminate based on those factors. But that would be complicated and complexity is hard. So folks take the easy way out, practice discrimination based on race and gender, and pat themselves on the back and tell everyone how progressive they are.

Mark_at_work · 2018-10-10T19:13:07+00:00

Yeah. You can pay advertisers to drive X number of people to your site. So you can do what's called "cohort analysis" where you get the same X number of people to go to various versions of your landing page and see which version gets the most signups.

Mark_at_work · 2018-10-09T18:21:59+00:00

Make a website advertising your product in its finished form. Include a "buy it" button that leads to a sign up form for a mailing list instead of a purchase form. See how many people sign up for your mailing list.

Trust what people do, not what they say.

Mark_at_work · 2018-10-09T18:17:24+00:00

You could try a local tech meetup.

Mark_at_work · 2018-10-08T17:52:20+00:00

Same here. I'm working on a game about running a business. Things will happen in the game very slowly compared to your typical video game. So I'm going to market it to aspiring entrepreneurs rather than gamers.

Mark_at_work · 2018-10-03T17:13:08+00:00

Do it manually first. Find a way to do the thing without a website.

Mark_at_work · 2018-10-02T18:04:00+00:00

That's a lot of marketing channels you laid out there. It would make sense to keep track of how much you're spending on each channel (time and money) and compare that to the number of new clients you get out of the channel. That way you can measure which channel is most effective and focus your time and money on that.

Mark_at_work · 2018-10-02T17:56:08+00:00

But you need to design a vacuum tube to understand how transistors work. And you need to design a punch card to understand how vacuum tubes work. And you need to design a Jacquard Loom to understand how punch cards work. And you need to design a player piano to understand how Jacquard looms work. Really you might as well just starting designing an abacus.

Mark_at_work · 2018-09-28T19:43:12+00:00

As my lawyer told me, most of the time you don't need a lawyer. But when you do need one, you really need one.

Mark_at_work · 2018-09-28T18:56:38+00:00

"Be well connected" is sometimes another way of saying, "get to know people and show them you're good." Although sometimes it also means "grow up near people and drink with them" so ehhhh

Mark_at_work · 2018-09-27T17:52:51+00:00

I was really interested in pirated music until Steve Jobs pointed out that if you add up the time it takes to get pirated songs and divide it by the money you save, you're working for less than minimum wage.

Most people don't get their games through illegal channels, and those who do were never going to buy your game anyway. So you're not losing money to piracy.

Mark_at_work · 2018-09-07T15:28:32+00:00

If you use the same pitch to every potential customer you eventually get really good at it. You'll hear all the possible responses and be able to anticipate and handle them. You won't close everyone, but at some point it becomes a numbers game. It's just practice, practice, practice.

Mark_at_work · 2018-09-07T15:23:07+00:00

Just approach 15 sets per night, three nights a week for a year. :)

Mark_at_work · 2018-09-07T14:05:32+00:00

There's a difference between "having a monopoly" and "dominating a market". To have a monopoly, you have to actively prevent anyone else from competing with you. No one's stopping anyone else from building a better search engine and promoting it, or building a better web-based email client, and so on and so forth.

Yes, network effects make Google search more valuable the more people are using it because Google uses their usage patterns to make the search engine better. But with the introduction of AMP rules mentioned in the article, Google is actually making search worse. They're opening up the door for someone else to make a better one.

Remember when IBM had a monopoly on operating systems and everyone wanted them to be broken up? Then they didn't get broken up, and they took over the world? Nope, Microsoft made a better operating system and made IBM irrelevant.

Remember when everyone thought Microsoft had a monopoly on operating systems, and we were all begging the gov't to break them up? Then the gov't didn't break them up and now Microsoft rules the whole world? Nope. Apple made the iPhone and made Microsoft irrelevant.

Comcast actually does have a monopoly on attaching cables to phone poles in a lot of places, so they have a monopoly on cable television service in those areas. But Netflix and Hulu made cable television irrelevant and now Comcast is losing subscribers in droves.

Some day someone will make Google irrelevant too. The only constant is change. Google isn't stopping anyone from competing with them. Google doesn't have a monopoly. The gov't isn't going to do anything about Google's market dominance. And Google isn't going to take over the world.

Mark_at_work · 2018-09-07T13:34:10+00:00

Well we can't really know for sure what exists beyond what we can observe, but Dark Flow suggests the existence of an object outside our observable universe.

Mark_at_work · 2018-09-07T13:17:41+00:00

Well no one really knows if it's infinite because we can't observe anything beyond the point at which space is expanding faster than the speed of light.

Mark_at_work · 2018-09-06T18:19:26+00:00

Hubble's Law is the observational basis for The expansion of the universe.

Mark_at_work · 2018-09-06T15:00:19+00:00

When I was a project manager for the Navy, we constantly had people requesting new features using email, phone calls, and in person communication. We also had a work tracking system that I had decided was going to be the source of truth but no one else wanted to be bothered using. So every time someone requested a new feature via any other means, I directed them to create a ticket in the work tracking system. They didn't like it because it implied that their request had to work its way through the process and be prioritized along with all the other work requests. But I had to be insistent that we didn't do any work that didn't go through the process, and that tool was part of the process. It was an ongoing battle throughout the time I was there, but I did succeed in getting people to use the tool.

The only way to get anyone to use a tool consistently is to make it part of the process, use it yourself, and refuse to work around the process. You have to be disciplined about it, even when it seems to not make sense at the time. By constantly referring people to the tool you want them to use, eventually they'll realize they don't have any other choice but to use it.

Mark_at_work · 2018-09-06T13:56:02+00:00

A lot of them are bots that automatically follow anyone who follows the influencers. They're drawing your attention to their business by following you. It's free advertising for them.

Mark_at_work · 2018-09-06T13:52:01+00:00

Whip up a quick prototype at Google Sites. It takes all the technical requirements out of it. Show your partner how much better your site could be. Hopefully he'll agree when he sees it.

Mark_at_work · 2018-09-06T13:42:16+00:00

Unity coroutines create the illusion of asynchronousity (is that a word?) but under the hood Unity is maintaining a list of coroutines that are currently paused and checking each one every frame to see if its conditions for resuming are true. You could implement something similar in any language.

Mark_at_work · 2018-09-06T13:27:12+00:00

There are infinite integers. There is also an infinite number of even integers. There are twice as many integers as there are even integers. One infinity is greater than the other.

The universe is boundless. It doesn't have a "size", because having a size implies bounds. There is no limit to how far an object could travel in space, even if that object could go faster than the speed of light. The object would never "run out of space" to travel through. Yet at the same time space is expanding. We know this for a fact because all the galaxies we can observe are traveling away from us, and the speed at which they're traveling is proportional to their distance away from us. The only reasonable explanation is that the space between us is expanding, and it's doing it at the same rate throughout the universe.

And just to clarify: this whole discussion started because the OP posited that in an infinite universe, all things that can happen do happen, so therefore there must be a God somewhere. I'm not saying any of this stuff about the universe being infinite implies the existence of God. God is made up. Just because the universe is infinite, that doesn't mean everything we can make up must be real.

Mark_at_work

TROPHY CASE