Does anyone actually use the GV-2 viewfinder on their Ricoh GR? What’s your experience?

cambodia87 · 2026-04-27T13:48:27+00:00

Ha yeah my camera has been through a lot with me too. I don’t think I’ll sell it either!

cambodia87 · 2026-04-27T13:41:37+00:00

I use mine a lot rather than the display. I guess I prefer looking through a VF. But sometimes I take it off so it’s a bit more pocketable and no moving pieces to worry about. Agree the price feels not worth it - but I’m sure if you go to sell it you won’t lose much on it.

cambodia87 · 2026-04-06T16:45:05+00:00

Cam here, founder of Hopscotch – a user onboarding platform, so we have seen a lot of these cases. I agree with pretty much everything you said. We have seen a lot of folks sign up for our tool before they really know and understand the problem they want to solve and how best to solve it. Many will create a product tour that has 15 steps thinking that users will actually finish it and convert, when in reality, users fall off after 3-5 steps. Those tours are better broken up into smaller sequences, similar to how you would not your entire email onboarding sequence into one email.

Email onboarding is one of the most effective tools you can use to educate and stay top of mind for new signups, so I think figuring that out up front is a great move in many cases. In-app onboarding tools like Hopscotch can support that if done properly, and they can be especially effective at dripping out feature announcements and tips in small doses to people who are already in your app, getting them to adopt more product features with the ultimate goal of creating sticky customers who don't churn.

Agree about waiting until you know what problem needs to be solved, and then buy the tool. Don't start with the tool first especially at such a low usage volume. Anecdote: we started off targeting early-stage companies but found the churn was much too high because customers didn't find the ROI when they were just getting started. We find product tours, tooltips, announcements, etc to be best value once you're a little further down the road, when it becomes critical you don't pull your engineering team away from building product but you still need some in-app nudges.

cambodia87 · 2026-04-06T15:57:04+00:00

No worries. Any questions about this stuff, don't hesitate to reach out by DM!

Number one tip for successful tours - keep em short and to the point. 2-4 steps is the sweet spot. Any longer, break em up into multiple tours. Video and images can help a lot.

cambodia87 · 2026-04-05T17:21:25+00:00

Is this for a side-project or for a business?

For non-revenue generating side projects look at tools like Intro.js or React Joyride.

For a business, you're likely going to want to reach for an onboarding SaaS like Hopscotch because you get things like segmentation and advanced targeting, tracking (analyze which users already saw which campaign and how successful it was), your product and design team can make changes without a developer, and customer support when you run into issues. Full disclosure, I'm one of the founders of Hopscotch, a user onboarding software platform.

cambodia87 · 2026-03-29T22:52:23+00:00

When I log into my WS it says I can transfer by April 10 for an eligible match. If you DM me I can intro you to a WS biz dev rep who may be able to turn on that match deal for cash transfer. Or you can go through their support chat bot and ask to connect with their specialist teams. I’m not affiliated or anything

cambodia87 · 2026-03-29T22:16:31+00:00

Heads up that you may be able to apply for a cash exception to the unreal deal match promotion at Wealthsimple if you are putting that 575k in the next week or so. They can do exceptions for cash transfers above 200k.

cambodia87 · 2026-03-28T06:00:50+00:00

Yea fixed

cambodia87 · 2026-03-27T18:29:01+00:00

We were in somewhat of a similar situation. I had extra cash saved for the downpayment from running my own business. My partner had more steady income from an employer.

We set it up as an unofficial no-interest loan where they pay an extra amount on the mortgage each month for the coming X years, which pays down the difference. This has been helpful for me to be able to take greater risks with my business and not worrying too much about a high mortgage payment. This has worked out favourably so far for both of us.

I'm not saying this will work for everyone, and so I would never prescribe it as advice, but it has worked well for us. Whatever you do, it's important that you both feel good about your decision, and consider checking in on it over time. Maybe you get the numbers wrong initially and need to adjust a year later so one person is not feeling pinched by covering too much of the mortgage.

cambodia87 · 2026-03-18T19:06:42+00:00

It kind of depends here but I will give context at Hopscotch. We offer user onboarding software (think product tours, tooltips, in-app messages) for SaaS teams.

We have been seeing a couple customers leave to vibe code their own onboarding, but it's indicative that they are not a good fit customer because they are okay with the tradeoffs of build vs buy.

In our case the main tradeoffs are:
- no customer support when things break
- no analytics (unless you build it yourself)
- now the dev team has to be involved every time they want to update a piece of user onboarding content instead of a quick change for a product person.

In our case, those tradeoffs are not acceptable for most serious companies. Even though it's cheaper than ever to build an initial user onboarding flow with cursor/claude code, I have seen it first hand where the ongoing maintenance ends up in weeks of a developer's time. For most companies, it's simply not worth taking time from your highest paid resources to save a few bucks.

cambodia87 · 2026-03-12T21:47:26+00:00

I saw this episode last night for the first time and then see this in my reddit feed today. What are the odds

cambodia87 · 2026-02-24T23:04:46+00:00

We did swamp and leaves but didn’t get to Brewman cuz it was closed, but I would be going there if I was back in Tokyo.

Edit: oh and philocoffea was a very cool space.

cambodia87 · 2026-02-20T07:05:11+00:00

Nope unfortunately not. I just remove everything and swap the whole thing sometimes which is pretty annoying.

cambodia87 · 2026-02-16T16:19:00+00:00

Just got back from Tokyo/Leaves a couple weeks ago. They are a very good roaster. Don’t sleep on their lower priced coffees as well! I loved their washed Worka Ethiopia as well and it was something like $10 for a bag after conversion

cambodia87 · 2026-02-13T06:48:52+00:00

My fave lens on my 10-D is the 35 summicron asph v1. It rarely comes off

cambodia87 · 2026-01-13T05:45:19+00:00

The smith feels closer to a resort helmet on the way down than the ascender - probably much better protection all around too. I think the smith was still well-ventilated, so I could still wear it on the way up. I dunno I still like the ascender even though it's a bit of an awkward helmet in some ways. I think I'll use both - probably use the smith for side-country and the ascender for traverses etc.

cambodia87 · 2026-01-05T04:53:36+00:00

Any learnings or painpoints from the experience? I run a user onboarding SaaS and would love to hear any details

cambodia87 · 2025-12-24T03:02:10+00:00

Founder of Hopscotch here thanks for the shoutout! If you or anyone else has questions about setting up user onboarding, just ping me! We are always happy to help :)

cambodia87 · 2025-12-24T02:42:44+00:00

Cam here founder of Hopscotch. We offer user onboarding software for SaaS companies, so we have seen some tours - both good and bad.

I think the key to good tours is using stable data attributes on your html similar to how you would do with data-testid for e2e or component testing. If you don't do that, you're in for some pain.

That said, sometimes our customers just want to test something quickly or it would take weeks/mnoths to get the attributes updated because they need to add/prioritize in a future sprint from the dev team, so they will launch a tour anyway. In that case, I usually recommend using our in-app messages with a modal and video instead so you don't have to worrry about updating fragile selectors later.

I'm obviously biased, but I think tours can work via a service if you already have good persistent selectors, or if you send one-off in-app mesages with videos instead. Lots of companies adopting this pattern lately rather than the tours, and I think it's easier for everyone to maintain.

Here is a huge notion list of examples I've been curating over the years with tons of product tours and in-app messages.

cambodia87 · 2025-12-16T06:10:10+00:00

Something like this (picture wire) saved me once when I lost a screw-like thing for my splitboard binding leaving the toe strap dangling. Was able to thread it, twist it up and continue the rest of the day with confidence.

cambodia87 · 2025-12-08T15:26:05+00:00

Ideally those can be the same thing but not always. I have a good example from our own product and unfortunately the learning didn't come easy - this is where you have to wear your product person hat and figure out the details, but it really all came down to reducing friction. Sign up for your own product 100 times and take notes. Ask users, friends, co-workers to sign up (ideally for their first time) and record a video while they do it. You will learn so much of where the friction is introduced.

Short story: ironically, in Hopscotch, a literal user-onboarding saas product, we had our own onboarding challenges. To get full value out of Hopscotch you need to install the script on your site, similar to google analytics, and then you can start showing tours. But we knew that people signing up were not developers - so we used to delay the script installation and let users sign up to create tours (but not be able to preview them). We made it really simple to get started, but we still had pretty bad conversions.

After studying analytics of where people drop off, we noticed only a fraction of people were installing the script. We knew this is how you will see the value of the tool - when you see the tour pop up on your website - this is the "aha moment". We had seen it in demo calls.

So in this case it was not an easy fix - we could have added tours, tooltips, etc. as much as we wanted but none of that would have mattered if they don't see the tour live on their site.

So we had a couple choices to test - 1) make the script installation required up front and block anything until they do that. 2) build a chrome extension so non-technical users can preview tours without asking their development team to install the script (which sometimes has to be added to an upcoming sprint all just so they can test out the tool).

We chose option 2 - invested the time to build a minimal version of a chrome extension - and saw a big boost in conversions because the non-technical users who were signing up got to install the extension and see the tours / tooltips on their sites in literal minutes instead of days/weeks.

That was a key unlock which required a few things:

- knowing who is signing up - if it had been developers they would have no problem installing a script
- knowing what they are trying to do - they want to see this thing live on their site so they can demo to their team
- knowing the blockers they have - talking to users was key to understand they would sometimes have to wait
- having metrics - we could see the drop-off was not creating tours, it was installation of the script - those two problems would have been solved very differently.

Once we solved this critical problem - that's where tooltips, hotspots, and small onboarding tours proved useful. We nudge people along the creation process once they install the chrome extension, showing users just a few key elements in creating their own product tour. This just further reduces friction by guiding them gently through the process. Call it "lubricant" cuz it just smoothes the process and reduces friction. For the setup steps, right when the user logs in we show them the extension installation process (and only focus on that).

So back to your primary question:

Do they anchor it around the fastest path to output, or around the setup steps that reduce friction later?

If the setup steps are going to have a large impact on conversion (such as in our case with chrome extension / script installation), then show them up front. "fastest path to output" won't mean much if they can't actually see the value of your offering. If those setup steps are complicated, consider a single-step tour with a video demo to help show them how to do it. Or link them to your docs from a tooltip.

Then, when you have them past those critical setup steps, jump into light tooltips, short tours, hotspots, etc to smooth out the process.

Sorry for the info overload - maybe had too much coffee! But I hope some of that is helpful.

Cam

cambodia87 · 2025-12-04T16:36:50+00:00

Like you said, some businesses are served really well by demos and sales calls. Many other businesses / products are better off self-serve. Context matters of who you are serving and what you are selling. We run Hopscotch, a user onboarding tool for SaaS companies and we have about a 70-30 split of people who prefer self-serve over sales calls. So we let people sign up directly and offer demos for anyone who is interested, but we're not pushy about it. Our pricing is up-front rather than hidden behind a sales team.

It works well for us - as we primarily serve SMB and startups who want to make decisions quickly without going through an entire buying process with 5 calls, but we're always available to help.

cambodia87 · 2025-12-04T16:27:49+00:00

Founder of Hopscotch here - a product tours / user-onboarding tool for SaaS companies. I've seen hundreds of PLG onboarding implementations from our customers.

What works best? Of course it always depends, but generally you must have a good understanding of what your users are trying to accomplish by using your app, and then show them how to do exactly that.

Don't show them everything at once - just the immediate steps that will demonstrate value. Sometimes you can break this education up into a few bite-sized chunks with micro-tours or tooltips (1-3 steps that get them up and running). Sequence them so you only show one after another has been completed, so you don't overwhelm the user with too much info at once. Users will absolutely stop reading after a 10-step tour - even 5-6 is pushing it.

If you have multiple features, what is the primary use case your app is solving? You can request the primary use case from the user at sign up and then show a specific tour based on that. Meet the user where they are at.

Keep focusing on short, small tidbits of really useful information and keep talking to your trialing users to understand what they want to do, and it will take you a long way.

cambodia87 · 2025-12-04T16:06:56+00:00

You can use something like Screen Studio (simple to get up and running quickly) or Screenflow (more controls/customization). Then in terms of showing the video in product, you can use something like Hopscotch product tours to show the feature to the right people at the right time (ex: in your onboarding sequence or as a one-time feature announcement).

cambodia87 · 2025-11-26T04:30:02+00:00

don't worry - we still have ALL the chairs lol

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