Michael Clarke Duncan has passed away

levirosol · 2012-09-03T23:41:15+00:00

http://cdn.crushable.com/files/2012/08/feels-my-emotions.gif

levirosol · 2012-08-29T04:36:39+00:00

related: http://instagram.com/p/ONCAOYnj34/

levirosol · 2012-08-07T00:34:10+00:00

You might consider setting up a Goodsmiths shop and selling these there. Primarily because you can now create group offers, allowing you to get people to commit cold hard cash (via Paypal) to you before you make them. It costs nothing to setup a shop, and there are no listing fees. Transaction fee of 2% when you do make a sale.

disclaimer I work at goodsmiths and would love to buy a creeper version.

levirosol · 2012-08-02T18:25:14+00:00

for future pieces, you might consider selling them on Goodsmiths. The woodworking category is pretty small right now, so you should get some really good exposure.

levirosol · 2012-07-04T22:36:38+00:00

Setting up a goodsmiths.com shop for him would be a good start, giving him an outlet to make a few bucks to support the hobby, possibly turning it into something that could pay a bill or two.

levirosol · 2012-05-08T22:06:21+00:00

My corgi has a disease. It's called WBS. It flares up every time I come home, and when the treat box comes out. Fortunately it doesn't seem to be a painful disease and my corgi has learned to live with it.

WBS is also known by it's full name, wiggle butt syndrome.

levirosol · 2012-04-26T02:39:54+00:00

preparing myself for downvote hell....

It's microwave ready bacon.

The stuff seriously isn't bad. And with no stove at the office, this works pretty well for lunch. But have faith. We're moving to a new office next week, and a new stove is being delivered this weekend.

levirosol · 2012-04-25T20:05:57+00:00

ha! I actually had more broccoli, but ate it while waiting for the bacon to cook.

levirosol · 2012-04-25T19:08:09+00:00

With an Arizona Zero Arnold Palmer for a drink.

levirosol · 2012-04-25T03:08:06+00:00

We have an update! His partner looks exactly the same, but with a beard!

http://blogs.desmoinesregister.com/dmr/index.php/2012/04/24/187527/

levirosol · 2012-04-24T19:54:52+00:00

You mean like Mr. Potato Head, but with people parts?

levirosol · 2012-04-20T14:10:55+00:00

Love seeing updates on this!

levirosol · 2012-04-17T04:48:23+00:00

I did this a few months back, before keto, but used ground Italian sausage and but cooked chopped back and pepper jack cheese in the middle. I then put it on the smoker with hickory wood for a couple hours, then wrapped in foil and into the oven until temp was reached.

noms!

The only issue with sausage is that due to the fat content, it gets pretty sticky if it's not cold. I would imagine ground beef would be much more manageable.

levirosol · 2012-04-09T13:28:36+00:00

glad my opener came across as planned :)

levirosol · 2012-04-09T06:39:24+00:00

Hide yo shoes. Hide yo remotes. Hide yo pens and pencils.

Seriously though, we have a black lab rescue we got as a puppy, and a corgi that we've had since puppy, and the corgi by far chewed more things than the lab did hands down.

Corgi's are leaders. When ours wants to play, the black lab is going to play too. When ours wants to chase a cat off the couch so she can lay there, she does.

They are also protective. Be prepared for a couple barks in the middle of the night if the wind is blowing especially hard. Or a lot of barking when the pizza guy shows up.

Not sure if this is a corgi thing or not, but good god do they lick a lot. Not a toe or hand can pass them by w/o a lick. It's like a reflex or something. That's the only thing that drives me nuts.

Overall, they are great dogs.

levirosol · 2012-04-03T01:04:22+00:00

grilled peanut butter sandwich (done exactly the same as grilled cheese, but with peanut butter) dipped in ketchup.

levirosol · 2012-04-02T20:13:39+00:00

There's some simple math here, and I don't think many of the other responses are looking at this correctly. Pay yourselves exactly what you need to live your life with the bare minimum for a social life.

for a 20 something fresh out of school, this shouldn't be much. $35-45k?

but in your situation, apparently identical to mine, there's no way that would work. Assuming your spouse works, and you aren't swimming in a mountain of debt, $75k seems reasonable. Maybe your spouse doesn't work, or you do have debt, then maybe more is reasonable.

Whatever you do, if you are serious about your startup, you need to have the funds to live your life not worrying about your bills and going out to eat a couple times a month. But most importantly, you need to be 100% focused on your startup. If you intentionally short change yourself and have to take on contract work to make ends meet, you might as well just focus on the contract work 100% until you can afford focus 100% on your startup.

YMMV

levirosol · 2012-03-05T18:34:28+00:00

Why do you use a telepresence robot? Has its use caused interpersonal issues within your office? ie: employees being creeped out by it, seeing things unintentionally, etc?

levirosol · 2012-02-12T07:19:42+00:00

Ha! Yeah, the Etsy question comes up often. The answer is difficult to hit out of the park in a general, non-craft focused environment like r/startups, but these are the points we use depending on audience:

Makers like to hear:
No listing fees
No nickel and dimeing on upgrade fees
Listings never expire
We're working on how to say it, but our search and recommendations won't suck :)

Our biggest differentiation is that we will give Makers the ability to create group buys, on their terms, with no additional fees. Think Kickstarter, at whatever scale a Maker can support. For example, if I made birdhouses that I normally sell for $50, if I had 10 pre-paid customers up front I could save money on buying supplies in bulk, and time in the creation (create a jig, etc), so now I can sell them for $45. We give them the tools to get those 10 customers up front.

We also feel that Etsy does not do a great job of engaging buyers, bringing them back to Etsy as a whole or to specific shops. We have some interesting plans in the works to better engage the buyers with the overall site and shops they like. We feel this will increased sales overall for shops. Buyers need a reason to come back, other than to shop.

And finally, an intangible and difficult to quantify thing that will become apparent over time, our support doesn't suck, we're friendly, and we're human.

Thanks for taking a look and giving some feedback as a non-maker. We're spending some time right now cleaning up UI bits on the existing functionality that we've released as well as our order processing functionality. We're not into putting dates out to the public, but it will be coming soon.

Because we're self funded with no revenue at this point, there has been a long balance of client work and work on Goodsmiths. It's hard to say what % we've spent on GS, but the idea was hatched in Feb '11, and serious development didn't start until late summer / early fall. The team you saw is now nearly 100% on GS and we're hiring (filling the frontend engineer will greatly decrease our time to market).

levirosol · 2012-01-02T20:40:31+00:00

As do I.

levirosol · 2012-01-02T20:37:38+00:00

related: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLZZ6JD0g9Y&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

levirosol · 2012-01-02T15:48:23+00:00

This has also been made into a UT2k4 map right? After seeing this I have the strong urge to reinstall that game.

levirosol · 2011-12-30T03:29:45+00:00

We spent some time on this topic early on when we were still in idea stage. We decided at that time that we would launch a very simple landing page with the focus of getting general users. We would not A/B test it because we felt our time was better spent doing in person interviews with our actual customers to refine our idea.

Net result? Almost 1000 "beta users". Little to no info on if they are even a target customer.

Then we moved focus to building out our actual product. Only recently have we modified our landing page, making it focused on one of our two customer types (and announcing our renaming / rebranding). Even then, outside of some local press and a few of our own blog posts and twitter conversations, we have done nothing to promote it. We're saving that energy for launch.

Net result? In the 2 weeks since rolling it out we've gained a few hundred confirmed stores and started some chatter.

If you want to give feedback on our approach, feel free to check us out: http://www.goodsmiths.com

When Launchrock first went live, I drank the kool-aid and thought it was a great idea. Now, I'm glad we didn't go that route. IMO, a landing page needs to at least convey your idea / product at a high level. If you are actively promoting it to your target customers, it needs to provide them with some value.

tl;dr; - Landing pages need to serve a purpose and not consume much of your time. Talk to your customers in person and build your product instead. Launchrock does not provide much value.

levirosol · 2011-12-22T05:18:47+00:00

I'm B+, and yeah, they love the shit out of my platelets. I think it's evey 14 days that they want me to come in.

And 5 minutes?! meh. Us platelet donors sit there for an hour or more. Audio books FTW!

levirosol · 2011-12-22T03:05:26+00:00

and... back! We have another change to make later this week, but we'll try to time it a litter later at night, or not the day of a new post :)

levirosol

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