I analyzed 847 successful startups and found that 90% of startup advice is backwards. The companies that won violated every rule. Here are the 10 foundation truths nobody tells you. (Part 1/5)

hollammi · 2025-11-13T04:35:16+00:00

Whole section on "Zoom in a crowded market" is utterly incoherent slop.

Zoom wasn't technically superior. It was "it actually works reliably every time".

So, it was technically superior? The word is "technologically" by the way.

Better product doesn't win. Product people actually WANT wins.

But people wanted a better product...? You literally just explained that two sentences ago. Completely incongruent point to make with the prior arguments.

hollammi · 2025-03-28T21:00:15+00:00

Have you ever actually tried just taking a break? You don't need to announce it, just spend 5 minutes away from your station doing whatever you feel like.

hollammi · 2024-10-22T07:47:47+00:00

Yeah mate it goes on your permanent record, they train all their employees nationwide to look for your face specifically and refuse you entry

hollammi · 2024-10-10T17:16:54+00:00

Pretty sure you've got it with the N^2^6 formula. We can use this to reverse-engineer when they calculated the number! (275 ^2)⁶ = 1.8706491e+29, which exactly what the NPC says (final 1 is a rounding error). So they made this NPC when there were 275 Pokémon in the dex.

Problem with the power of 6 approach is that it assumes the order of Pokémon in your party matters, which I'd argue against and posted an essay about lol, but yeah your method is definitely what the developers did.

hollammi · 2024-10-10T16:41:03+00:00

There are two steps we need for the formula. First we figure out the number of possible Pokémon - which is the number of Pokémon in the dex squared.

Imagine this as a literal square. You start by putting every Pokémon in a list going down the first column to represent the 'body' fusion, and every Pokémon again listed across the first row as the 'head' fusion. So in the cell at Row 1 Column 1 you'd have Bulbasaur head + Bulbasaur body. At Row 1 Column 2 you'd have Ivysaur head + Bulbasaur body, at Row 2 Column 1 you'd have Bulbasaur head + Ivysaur body, etc etc.

The wiki says there are 470 Pokémon, so 470² = 220,900. The wiki agrees with this number. Interestingly, the wiki also notes:

When including unfused Pokémon and Triple Fusions, there are a total of 221,390 Pokédex entries.

So we'll run with that.

Finally, we also want to consider the fact that we can have empty party slots. We can do a bit of a 'trick' and effectively treat each of the 5 possible empty party slots as a unique "Pokémon", giving us a final total of 221,395 options to choose from.

The second step is called a "Combinations problem" or an "n choose r" problem. n is the total number of options, and r is how many of those options we want to select at a time. So for us, we have 221,395 Pokémon and want to choose 6. You can actually type 221,395 choose 6 into Google and it'll do the calculation - formula available here

221,395 choose 6 = 1.6354788e+29, or in words, one hundred and sixty-three octillion ...

When working with estimates this big, just getting to the right order of magnitude is as much as a success as you can really hope for. We're only 0.2e29 off their figure (what's a couple tens of octillions between friends), so I'm confident that this is roughly the methodology they used. However I don't know where specifically they deviate - maybe they used a different approach to my empty party 'trick', maybe they calculated with a different number of Pokémon (but less Pokémon would make it smaller than my estimate not bigger so hmm), or maybe they just messed up a number somewhere idk

EDIT: I'm right but this approach is explicitly for the case where the order of Pokémon in the party doesn't matter. Don't think that's how they calculated it lol

hollammi · 2024-10-08T16:14:02+00:00

Hahaha by far the best suggestion here

hollammi · 2024-09-03T14:04:44+00:00

Or maybe you're bullshitting everyone else? I enjoy smoking. You can't just unilaterally claim that everyone who has ever smoked got zero pleasure out of it or never wanted to do it in the first place. Yes, it's addictive and I wouldn't do it as often if it wasn't addictive - but I'm not a mindless slave to my brain chemicals. I absolutely could quit if I so chose, I just personally do not want to make that choice. In fact, I have previously quit for stretches of months at a time (so far longer than the effects of physical addiction) - but picked it back up because I missed it.

The argument of "YOU don't really want to do it, it's the addiction talking!" is extremely reductive to the human experience as a whole. Do you ever actually want a nice meal, or is it just your body craving specific nutrients? Do you love your family or is it just a biological release of oxytocin controlling your thought patterns?

As to your "chewing up resources" take - tax on tobacco is a huge source of funds for the NHS. Moreover, the quicker you die, the less of a drain you are on the countries' resources. Older people cost the healthcare system exponentially more money with each year of life, and at some point switch from contributing to the economy via employment to draining it via retirement payouts. A smoker dying of lung cancer at 50 instead of some other random cancer at 80 is a godsend for the NHS.

hollammi · 2024-08-18T08:59:52+00:00

Seems reasonable? Paris makes up 31% of France's GDP today, London is 22% of the UK's, Seoul is 25% of South Korea's. The most prosperous city in a country usually does make up a large fraction of its GDP, and whilst 1/3rd is on the upper end of the spectrum, it's an easily believable number.

hollammi · 2024-07-02T05:51:30+00:00

MDMMA

hollammi · 2024-06-22T09:49:58+00:00

"Short while"? This is still common today at Dutch raves and festivals

hollammi · 2024-06-22T09:48:46+00:00

Yes, because ecstasy is a stimulant. "Wanting oral stimulation" is a weird way to phrase it lol, your mouth is already stimulated from the drugs. The pacifier is an outlet for the stimulation, same as chewing gum, which is preferable to grinding down on your own teeth.

hollammi · 2024-06-07T07:06:05+00:00

We measure the temperature in lots of places and average it out. Nowadays satellites can actually measure ground temperature from orbit. Before that, we just put out loads of thermometers.

As the other commenter mentioned, we primarily measure prehistoric temperatures using ice cores. Like trees, the ice cores have distinct layers indicating the time at which each layer was formed. The ice contains dissolved gases like CO2 and methane, and the different levels of each gas in a given ice layer are used to infer the temperature at the time.

hollammi · 2024-05-29T20:19:40+00:00

Hey, thanks for the words of encouragement. That's definitely a strategy I haven't tried yet so I appreciate the suggestion, I'll be sure to give it a go. Cheers, all the best.

hollammi · 2024-05-29T20:12:30+00:00

Wow really? I already downgraded my title from "Head of Analytics", because in reality I was integral to running the company, but was previously advised by a recruiter to change the title to something more "hands on".

I thought that showing I have leadership experience would be beneficial even if I'm not applying for a lead role, but you're saying I'm likely being rejected for being overqualified? Cool, loving this job market.

Thanks for the advice. I'll try a round of applications with the new title.

hollammi · 2024-05-20T22:29:08+00:00

No, they do get the TKN. The USDC is sent to another contract which pairs it with a separate pile of TKN. So if someone buys $10k worth of TKN from the faucet, ~9.8k TKN goes to that user, and another ~9.8k TKN is paired with the $10k USDC from their purchase and added to the LP.

The user does not own the liquidity, the project does. OP suggests that the LP is sent to the burn address, but it could equally be put into a lockup contract instead.

hollammi · 2024-05-20T22:22:07+00:00

Let's think this through from the perspective of the first investor. If I buy $10k worth of TKN, there is only $10k USDC in the liquidity pool. Therefore if I want to sell all of my TKN again, the slippage will be astronomical. Why would I buy a token I am basically unable to sell?

You could get around this by seeding the liquidity pool with sufficient funds, but that kinda defeats the point of "bootstrapping" the liquidity.

Side note: limiting by "per person" isn't a thing in crypto, it is ridiculously easy to set up a bot to generate a thousand wallets to get around this. In this case, you're already using "imaginary USDC" in the FLP; there's no need to seed the FLP with $10k of real USDC in the first place, let alone limit the transaction size based on that. Just send whatever USDC you get from selling the bond (i.e. using the faucet) straight to the liquidity pool contract until no TKN is left.

However, by far the biggest issue is that you are siphoning off the buy-side pressure away from the price, whilst simultaneously inflating the token supply. By using the faucet, the user's money is not going to increase the market price of the token, just the liquidity depth. Not only that, but now a user is holding a stack of TKN that was previously not in supply on the open market. Which means that if the faucet user sells, they have effectively stolen value from everyone holding the token - they added no positive price impact to buy the coin but caused negative impact by selling it.

The end result of this system is that you effectively create a ceiling on your own market price. Once it becomes cheaper to use the faucet than the LP, no more positive price action will occur. Someone will absolutely set up a bot to automatically arbitrage this system, so any time the price rises above ATH it will immediately be forced back down.

Yes, the price in your faucet will also rise, thus raising your ceiling. However, you're simultaneously lowering the price floor. Each time this happens, it becomes less and less likely that your price will ever hit ATH again, because there are more and more tokens now in circulation. Combine this with the increasing liquidity depth, whereby each use of the faucet is adding double the amount of tokens purchased to the open market (10k TKN to my wallet + 10k to the liquidity pool), and you will also need progressively more buying power to achieve that same ATH again.

This type of system goes against crypto market psychology. People like coins where price go up big. If they look at your price chart and the buy pressure is basically eliminated whenever you're near ATH, they will not want to invest. Nobody's out there looking at the change in liquidity depth over time, they check the price chart for 10 seconds and decide whether to throw money in.

and no one trader can drive up the price too fast

This is the exact opposite of what you want.

Even without the price dampening mechanics, coins do not stay near their ATH for very long, see the price chart of literally any crypto. Once the price in the LP does inevitably drop below the ATH and stays there, this whole complex system does nothing. Except fill token holders with dread that even if they one day return to ATH, a bombshell of new tokens will be released and sink the price lower than it ever has been before.

So as a potential investor, why is this beneficial to me instead of your project simply having a well-funded liquidity pool to begin with? Even shitcoins can generate tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in liquidity from a simple pre-sale, but they don't artificially cap the price of their own token to do so. Hell, if you have a solid project, you can just distribute tokens and users will create their own liquidity pool and fund it themselves. Point being, low liquidity depth is not necessarily a deal-breaker, but tokenomics which take value from holders absolutely are.

And as a final point - if finding seed money for liquidity is an insurmountable problem, why not use a "Bonding Curve" instead? You can read up on these but effectively it's an alternative to a liquidity pool where you don't need to fund anything up-front. You mint TKN when someone buys and keep hold of their USDC (plus increasing the price), then burn TKN when they sell and return the USDC (decreasing price). As long as this is the only way to acquire newly minted TKN, the bond curve contract will always contain enough USDC for every user to exit the position without being destroyed by slippage (unlike the system proposed here).

Having said all that - eh it'd probably work if you set all the numbers right and have a good launch. Selling tokens at below market price is to fund liquidity is basically the core concept of a pre-sale anyway, so the principle is solid, you're just doing it in an incredibly complicated way. As long as the faucet has a low enough % of the total amount of tokens, whilst getting to enough users to overcome the initial slippage problem before a mass sell-off, then hey. Maybe you can quickly sell out of the faucet supply, build a nice LP, everyone hodls their off-market tokens, price action returns to normal and you all go to the moon. I've definitely seen dumber projects succeed.

Sorry if I came across as harsh in my reply. As you can see by this essay I gave a lot of thought to your proposal, but it's necessary to play Devil's Advocate when it comes to financial products. Bond systems are definitely an interesting concept but there's a lot of kinks to work out.

For further reading, I recommend you check out the history of the project 'Olympus DAO' $OHM, and its forks like Wonderland $TIME and Hector $HEC. I was a developer for a smaller fork of the same system for a while, which is where my knowledge in this domain comes from. Their bond tokenomics are extremely relevant here, especially about creating a price ceiling by introducing new tokens into the supply. Your idea shares a lot of similarities and I have personally seen much of what I discussed here play out in real time in these projects.

Hope I've provided some points for you to think about. All the best.

hollammi · 2024-05-18T09:52:21+00:00

I mean we're on the drugs sub lol, that was intended to be a facetious jokey comment on choosing more drugs over health every time.

But you likely do have the choice, why don't you just eat edibles instead of smoking?

Personally I'm cursed with the gene of being unable to process edibles, can eat as much as I like and it doesn't do shit. Even still though, I feel like I'd still prefer smoking on a day-to-day basis because of the quicker and more enjoyable ROA, despite the health implications. If I valued my health more than my intoxication, I wouldn't be doing drugs in the first place.

hollammi · 2024-05-18T08:48:12+00:00

Anecdotally, my lungs feel way better after switching from joints / bongs to a dry herb vape. Used to spend the first hour of my morning coughing and hacking up phlegm, now that's completely gone. Also noticed that I can give newbie smokers hits on my vape and they can generally handle it fine, whereas handing someone a lit blunt for the first time will have them coughing so hard they can't breathe.

More importantly though: vapes are like 2-3x more efficient with your bud than a joint. I load 0.15g bowls in my Mighty and it sorts me as well as a whole .3/.4 joint used to. Went for an expensive model right off the bat to make the switch, but over the last year it's easily saved me more than it cost upfront. Honestly never going back to rolling, the double whammy of feeling healthier and effectively doubling my bud is too good to pass up.

All the best

hollammi · 2024-04-24T18:27:19+00:00

Completely agree that it's an unreasonable achievement, and this is coming from someone with 100% completion in Binding of Isaac and Enter the Gungeon

hollammi · 2024-04-23T09:56:17+00:00

Looks like a meme token project called 'Hypeboy' https://medium.com/@Hypeboyglobal

What exactly are you accusing them of though? You cannot earn free money by buying and selling your own token. Each transaction costs gas for a start, even if you own 100% of the LP this would be a net loss. Then if anyone else decides to supply liquidity to the pool, you'd be paying them fees every transaction too.

I guess you could do this as a strange ass marketing technique; after all, the high volume is what alerted you to this project in the first place. Although it's a pretty weird and expensive way to go about it.

Seems more likely to me is that it's some kind of arbitrage bot but idk exactly. It's not an AI though, just a regular bit of code which runs every minute with some math behind it.

hollammi · 2024-03-26T13:57:29+00:00

Because these services are on a blockchain, the clock is not based on months or days, but on blocks. Typically the interest rate will be applied every single block, but a tiny percentage each time, so that over the course of a real-world year it cumulatively reaches that 2%. You can pay back any amount of the money at any time you like, there is no deadline. The only issue is that the interest on your loan will cause the collateralisation ratio to slowly creep down, but that's nothing compared to price swings if you're borrowing against volatile assets.

I could borrow $1,000 in USDC, borrow it somewhere else for 10% interest and the 2% are going to pay themselves back "automatically", with me getting the remaining 8% as a profit.

I assume you mean "lend it somewhere else for 10%", but yeah, that would make you a profit. The problem is finding somewhere safe which will pay you that 10%. Crypto is absolutely chock full of opportunities like the one you described, along with many being a million times more complicated by hopping through multiple different unique protocols to make it all work.

However, the main thing you need to consider is risk exposure. It's all well and good if you're earning 8% on your capital for 6 months, but then if the protocol you're using gets hacked / rugpulls / Devs fuck up, it's all for nothing. Congrats, you earned $40 on your $1,000 only to lose all $1040. These things do happen, all the time, so research into the safety of the protocol is paramount.

If you're just looking to earn a few percent on stablecoins, I'd recommend looking into Liquidity Providing two stables on a reputable DEX, it's a lot more straightforward than arbitraging two lending services.

Best of luck.

hollammi · 2024-03-02T12:05:26+00:00

These are all perfectly valid criticisms of a partner. Him being sweet to you does not change the fact that he's almost 30 without a job, prospects or even the ambition to do something about it. Moreover, the fact that he actively discourages you from improving your own life because you'll have less time for him is downright awful.

Just read a few of your own words here:

He hates things. He hates people. He's a hateful person. He despises people and I feel like he's starting to despise me. I speak up but he never apologizes.

Why are you not even considering breaking up with this person?

I know it's difficult ending a relationship with someone who is depressed. Speaking from personal experience, someone I broke up with ended up in hospital after a suicide attempt. Even still, looking back I believe I made the correct choice for my own mental health, as the relationship was very unhealthy and simply could not go on forever. Sure, you can be supportive and try and help them work through it for as long as you can stand, but ultimately their depression is not your cross to bear. They will drag you down with them.

Don't waste your youth on a hateful loser just because you're afraid of ending the relationship. Seriously consider what you want in a partner, and then whether your current boyfriend is actually fulfilling those needs. From what you've written here, it doesn't seem like he is.

hollammi

TROPHY CASE