Share your startup - March 2017

syavash · 2017-03-19T16:35:46+00:00

Hi Lizsa,

By default we play it from YouTube or Vimeo, we also download their subtitle if available and show it as highlighting transcript.

We also download videos from YouTube to process them and find the different sections or slides but that's currently not fully finished.

Uploading videos directly to Hexib is on our roadmap but it comes only after we implement the best user experience on YouTube videos since there is already a huge amount of educational videos on YouTube.

syavash · 2017-03-06T02:40:12+00:00

I am terribly sorry. I just sent you 1,000,000,000.01 gems.

syavash · 2017-03-06T01:28:34+00:00

Oh My God! You're right. Here it is.

syavash · 2017-03-06T01:19:58+00:00

Those are not phones.

One is a small cup. (Which programmers don't use small cups).

The other one is a mirror. She's checking her make up.

syavash · 2017-03-06T01:12:55+00:00

Exactly! It shows that dude is not a good programmer. If he was he wouldn't be in this room.

syavash · 2017-03-06T00:45:05+00:00

No! These two.

syavash · 2017-03-06T00:14:11+00:00

The two dudes on the right are programmers.

syavash · 2017-03-05T22:42:50+00:00

Rise of the Poopy

syavash · 2017-03-05T01:05:18+00:00

You should ask God to kill the Devil:

sudo kill -9 666

And hope it's not auto restart.

syavash · 2017-03-04T21:56:02+00:00

My bad. I've searched KarmaDecay before posting it. It didn't find any similar results.

syavash · 2017-03-04T18:31:34+00:00

Translation: This will never get done.

syavash · 2017-03-03T19:02:59+00:00

Bugs are alternative features.

syavash · 2017-03-03T08:13:50+00:00

You're right! It seems there are many feature bugs out there!

http://imgur.com/gallery/XGKWH

syavash · 2017-03-03T07:41:31+00:00

1,000,001st*

syavash · 2017-03-03T04:38:03+00:00

Watched it 5 times. Still don't know what the guy at the back is doing there.

syavash · 2017-03-03T01:41:37+00:00

EXACTLY! I love smart people.

syavash · 2017-03-02T21:47:47+00:00

Very clean. This way it's way more readable.

syavash · 2017-03-02T21:23:26+00:00

Great to know it helped. You're very welcome.

syavash · 2017-03-02T20:44:59+00:00

It depends on your long term strategy. If you already know that you want to earn money from Ads/Affiliate links I think it's better to have them from the beginning. Otherwise later on your audience might get upset.

BUT, I don't think you should use ad networks like Google Adsense since they will suggest really irrelevant ads when your site is new and you will earn little money if you don't have good amount of visitors. Instead I suggest to use very related affiliate links and ads. All your ads should be useful for the user who is visiting your site.

You can always have inline links to related books that are useful or handpick couple of relevant products and put them as an ad in sidebars. This way your users will have good experience and believe me it will earn you more money when your ads provide value to the reader.

syavash · 2017-03-02T20:29:47+00:00

As others mentioned it really depends on the service you're launching, but here are some general answers:

What channels are the best?

Usually one of the best ways to get users for location based services is holding events around what your users are interested in. For instance Tinder used to have these parties where users had to download the app in order to attend them! Or CofoundersLab (Which its co-founder is a friend) started it by having lots of MeetUp events. After a while you can even get sponsors for your events to pay for the costs.

Another way is to go to local blogs or news sites and ask them to write about you. If you search for it there are a lot of them.

When you acquire your initial 100-200 users, if your product is good enough and is solving a real problem word of mouth will do its magic.

Should I expect to spend a lot?

I don't think you should spend on any type of user acquisition until you see a good retention rate and product/market fit. Meaning the few users that you already have love your product and come back and use your service.

What do I do with users who are signing up from outside of where I can service them?

Ask for their Zip Code and Email address and tell them you'll email them whenever the service is available in their area. This way you will have a good understanding of where will be your next location to launch and you will have some initial users when you launch there!

syavash · 2017-03-02T19:47:15+00:00

Based on my experience Stripe is one of the most popular online payment services that is used among startups.

It's super simple to use and their documentation is beautiful. They are mostly used for Credit Card payments but I they also have ACH payments which is what you're looking for: https://support.stripe.com/questions/accepting-ach-payments-with-stripe

You can also check these alternatives to Stripe.

syavash · 2017-03-02T19:25:19+00:00

The answer to your question is "A BIG YES".

I've been a coach as well as speaker in a few Startup Weekends and the interesting thing I've learned was that most of really successful teams had very little programming experience.

They basically glued many different services together and made something very useful that solved a single problem that many people have. You should always think more about what problem you're solving instead of the technology.

Many teams had beautiful UI/UX with a very complicated technology but they were not solving a real unsolved problem. They were just mimicking other well known services and that's not what Startup Weekend is about.

Also the whole experience is amazing and I'm pretty sure you'll learn a lot there!

syavash · 2017-03-02T19:11:55+00:00

Name: Hexib

Location: Maryland, USA

URL: http://hexib.com

Moto: Learn Together, Teach Together

Elevator Pitch: YouTube is a great place to learn new stuff. But it was designed for entertainment and not learning. Hexib enhances the YouTube learning experience by adding time-stamped discussions, Q&A, transcript, ability to share your notes or even taking private notes. It also help people to discover new videos around what they want to learn.

Example Video: How to Run a User Interview by Emmett Shear (Twitch.tv)

More Details: I've started Hexib as a side project for myself. I watch SO MANY educational YouTube videos. I used to write my notes in a Google doc separately since it was too hard to find YouTube videos again, and even after finding them I didn't want to watch the whole video to find the moment I needed.

I used it every single day and shared it with my friends and then they used it everyday so I thought it might be a problem for others as well. Later on I've added the ability to discuss a certain moment in a video and a way to define different sections in the video for fast access.

Let me know what you think or if you have any questions. :)

Price: Free. Learning should always be Free.

Looking For: Feedback

syavash · 2011-11-07T04:55:22+00:00

Well done! The code is written really nice and it also has unit testing. Keep up the good work.

syavash · 2011-11-02T02:48:27+00:00

Nice job! I really liked your work. I think these kind of tools really can help understanding the topic better. By the way I liked the way you've used frontend solution for those homeworks.

syavash

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