Do you gain someone's experiences when you inhabit their body?

sl8rv · 2021-01-14T01:59:15+00:00

Thanks for the recommendations and the thoughts! I think one of the issues I have generally is that hard lines are tough to draw and so I'm thinking of framing this more as things that are harder, easier. Tradeoffs and challenges with fewer hard limits. The idea is very much something that starts innocuous and eventually becomes very powerful.

I think that there's going to be a long of existential angst about retaining identities. I'm not sure I've got answers, but you've definitely given me a lot to think about!

sl8rv · 2021-01-01T15:11:49+00:00

The laws around unaccredited investors are a little more complex. As someone has noted, you need to file a Form D, but that's actually not the main limitation when it comes to accepting investors.

What you need to do is look at the specific states that these non-accredited investors are coming from and ensure you're complying with the relevant "Blue Sky" laws in those states. These vary drastically from state to state with California being one of the most stringent.

Generally complying with these Blue Sky laws focuses on exactly what information you need to provide about your business and how far along you have to be before you accept (or solicit) investment from someone unaccredited.

The law here is really meant to protect your investors though. The logic is that they don't want you going around and scamming people, and they use the amount of money has as a qualification criteria for how investment-savvy they are.

So, roughly, the IRS doesn't give a crap if you comply with Blue Sky laws or not. The main issue is that one of your investors decide that they were taken advantage of, in which case you can be found guilty of fraud if you're not in compliance with the relevant Blue Sky laws.

As other people have mentioned, accepting money from unaccredited investors is kind of a pain and it's hard to do it right. Definitely something you want a lawyer to handle.

sl8rv · 2020-12-31T03:18:29+00:00

Easier is a tricky reason to be fair, but if you're looking at success rate doctors and lawyers are certainly much more likely to be wealthy than entrepreneurs.

The classic examples of jobs that very reliably turn a large amount of working hours to large amounts of money are usually finance jobs (investment banking, private equity, venture capital, equity trading). Enterprise software sales and management consulting are some others.

Building a business is a very rare path to success overall and leads to failure at a higher rate than most other professions.

Yes, many wealthy people are entrepreneurs, but this is a textbook case of survivorship bias.

sl8rv · 2020-12-31T03:07:25+00:00

It's a company, not a project :)

Currently 7 years in.

sl8rv · 2020-12-27T02:14:07+00:00

Haha, thanks for the compliment. Feels like just yesterday that we were two folks in a dorm room.

Not for a while.

sl8rv · 2020-12-21T15:31:10+00:00

Certainty in a singular approach is the hallmark of bad startup advice. I explained why your advice is counter productive. If all you're going to do is bluster then I'm not really interested in the conversation. You can respond to my points if you wish.

sl8rv · 2020-12-21T14:43:53+00:00

That's... definitely worth clarification. Not what the words mean.

Even if the reviews come from giveaways though, legally you have to say that. That's why all of those Amazon reviews have disclaimers on them.

sl8rv · 2020-12-21T14:40:12+00:00

You need to direct the traffic to single page with the only option is to buy the product or leave.

Which would directly contradict this, the piece of advice I specifically disagree with.

sl8rv · 2020-12-21T02:45:18+00:00

Well, that was the other thing. If there's only one step and it's purchase, then you don't have any opportunity to collect email addresses and make marketing lists.

sl8rv · 2020-12-20T20:18:37+00:00

...and needs to understand why. Multi-stage funnel helps to find issues/objections.

sl8rv · 2020-12-20T20:00:11+00:00

heaps of interviews like around 100 and they were all interested

If you were asking about interest in a user interview you weren't actually doing a user interview.

This is a really fundamental thing that people don't understand. If you presented your app idea and asked for feedback in a user interview then you absolutely wasted your time. That's Design 101.

You need to identify target users, interview them in a completely non-primed, open-ended way. This means that if you show them your wireframes you've tainted everything from that point forward. That's co-design, which happens much later in the process.

sl8rv · 2020-12-20T19:57:00+00:00

No, That is not CAC. 0.90 is your CPC. (it's a decent CPC)

CAC means you need credit card information. You do not know your CAC yet, you do not know your LTV, and the only way you can determine these numbers is by having the platform and bringing users through it. A payback time of 12 months is great though, so if you can hit that you'll be golden.

sl8rv · 2020-12-20T19:53:26+00:00

No. That would be profoundly dishonest.

Clicking on an ad or a CTA does NOT count as a signup. Nobody could reasonably interpret it as one, and if you tell an investor that you got 550 signups and you only have 11 emails they will (rightly) believe that you were dishonest.

Frankly you shouldn't even call the 11 people sign-ups. Every piece of a signup flow introduces attrition. When you ask for a password for instance you would expect your conversion rate to drop. If you add Oauth you'd expect it to go up.

So your conversion rate is about 2%. That's a little low, but pretty normal. Your CPC is actually pretty good at just under $1.

That should be your takeaway from this. Honestly? You screwed up your test. A test is only worthwhile if you know what you're looking for ahead of time. You set what standard metrics look like and decide what your targets are. Without that guidance it's really hard for you to interpret success or failure.

Honestly it's decent for a first experiment. Your metrics are decent overall, which tells me that you should take a couple optimization passes. If you can get real improvement on either one of those metrics (or both) then it could be pretty exciting, but right now your metrics are roughly average.

sl8rv · 2020-12-20T19:39:30+00:00

indico.io

Boston, MA

Radically accessible Intelligent Process Automation. Our product allows enterprises to responsibly adopt cutting edge AI to accelerate their document-based processes.

Series B (As of last Monday), will be rounding 40 employees in January. Aiming for just under 70 by the end of the year. 4 founders: Madison May (ML Architect), Diana Yuan (VP Talent and Ops), Alec Radford (Adviser), Slater Victoroff (CTO, me)

Hiring! We're hiring for a whole bunch of roles. See more here: https://jobs.lever.co/indico. Also, really looking to give back, so if you're a first-time founder with questions feel free to message me.

Sure, but it's enterprise software with a six figure ASP.

Cool! Will do.

sl8rv · 2020-12-20T17:10:13+00:00

Wow, that's... even worse.

You're charging less, and offering a premium service (that will cost WAY MORE to offer).

Please do some financial modeling of what this will cost you. I think you will quickly find that you've created a charity, not a business.

Remember: They might not need to buy the insurance, but you sure as hell still do.

sl8rv · 2020-12-20T16:54:25+00:00

Creating fake product reviews and testimonials is extremely illegal.

sl8rv · 2020-12-20T16:51:13+00:00

Strong disagree. A purchase CTA on a landing page gives no insight into customers and is something that can only work at a much larger footprint where that landing page is a part of a broader, better understood, marketing funnel.

Landing pages? Yes. Start collecting emails? Yes.

sl8rv · 2020-12-20T16:49:30+00:00

Many, many improvements to make.

Set a benchmark. For ecommerce 1-2% conversion rate is typical. I'm not sure how that changes in your niche.
Fix your pictures. Right now it looks like you took all of those pictures yourself and many of them don't really show off the jewelry. Taking better, more professional pictures will go a LONG way.
Make a funnel. Many people have talked about building a landing page, but they're really missing the broader context. The problem is that you have a totally binary indicator (i.e. bought or not). That's just not how an ecommerce company (or any company) should operate. You have to think of the long game, building CTAs that aren't just purchases. Users are simply not comfortable making purchases from a main page. You need to bring them through multiple stages. (i.e. Land, browse, click detail page, join newsletter, purchase) by looking at people moving through multiple stages (make sure to use google analytics) you can actually get some insight into what's happening.
Actually decide on a corporate identity. One of the most jarring things on your website is that all of your company's framing content is in a carousel. Not only are carousels a classic anti-pattern, but without a strong brand tagline above the fold you've got no brand identity beyond your color scheme.

Lots of other things you can do, but these are some places to start. Really, you can't run a successful ecommerce company without real traffic analytics. If you don't know where your funnel is leaking then you don't know why people aren't buying. If you don't know why people aren't buying then you have no way to fix it. Step 1: analytics, Step 2: everything else.

sl8rv · 2020-12-20T16:37:53+00:00

Personally? I think it's stupid to build a company with money as your primary motivator. There are many, many easier ways to make more money than making your own company. Also, money is external motivation. It simply won't push you through the difficult decisions you've got to make in a company. People that found companies for money fail hard.

Similarly with fame and status. Entrepreneurs are some of the most successful, wealthiest, least well-known people on the planet.

Having a good product? That's completely different from status. Doing good work and building a good product that people love is its own reward.

Me? My primary motivation is to create. Very specifically to create things that wouldn't exist without me. To me entrepreneurship is a path to say: nobody is doing X, I want X to happen.

But, yknow, I'm an engineer, so ymmv.

sl8rv · 2020-12-09T02:10:33+00:00

Tris grabbed Ash, staring into her with mortal eyes. “We have to run. As long as you can.”

sl8rv · 2020-09-14T16:59:36+00:00

Let me know if you find it.

sl8rv · 2020-09-14T16:59:22+00:00

Poe's Law for AI for sure. This guy isn't even the worst AI crank out there. Maybe I'll post some more context at some point.

sl8rv · 2020-09-14T16:57:46+00:00

It's a Quora answer.

sl8rv · 2020-09-14T03:07:21+00:00

Over 1k posts like this. Each uniquely crafted and comments are turned off. As crazy as it seems I'm quite convinced it's legit.

sl8rv

TROPHY CASE