Disqus - Latest Comments for jamiequint

Re: Portland Restaurants To Open Some Indoor Dining, While Schools Remain Closed to Most Students

jamiequint — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 15:00:19 -0000

What was the point of vaccinating educators before the elderly (who are at least an order of magnitude more likely to die from COVID) if school openings are still going to be substantially delayed.

Re: Coronavirus Isn’t a Pandemic

jamiequint — Thu, 19 Mar 2020 11:23:02 -0000

China did exactly what this article is recommending we not do, they locked down all of Wuhan and locked most of the rest of the country inside for weeks.

Re: Why I Don’t Celebrate Income Inequality

jamiequint — Mon, 04 Jan 2016 15:37:13 -0000

I'm confused on where you guys are in disagreement with the essay. The core argument of the essay is exactly that 'inequality [is] more of a symptom than a disease' and that we should treat the disease not treat the symptoms. Do you actually disagree with that or do you just not like the tone?

Re: We Made Our Book Free – Here's What Happened

jamiequint — Tue, 24 Dec 2013 03:21:02 -0000

I can't check now since the old link (free.discovermeteor.com) is down, but I suspect the reason you're seeing so much direct traffic is because that page was not https and as a result you lost referrers from HN's https site. I would guesstimate that 90% of your "Direct" traffic was actually referral from HN.

Re:

jamiequint — Sat, 30 Nov 2013 14:06:39 -0000

What lead? When Facebook Messenger launched WhatsApp had already been in the app store for over 2 years, was ranked #1 in Social Networking and #12 overall.

This doesn't actually address the reasons that FB Messenger "fell behind". In my opinion this is mostly because Facebook needed to make the app work within the existing Facebook ecosystem. This created friction in the signup process (needed to create a FB account) and stunted the development of group features that had made Beluga (pre-FB acquisition) an early success.

Re: What’s an Active User worth?

jamiequint — Thu, 14 Nov 2013 18:27:11 -0000

There is absolutely nothing to suggest a universally accepted value per social media user. Equity value is perception, yes. However, you don't even show that stock price is correlated to number of users in any meaningful way. You have no statistical basis for saying that there is any sort of universally accepted value for a user. I could just as easily say that there is a universally accepted value for each square foot of office space at company HQ, or the number of words in the company's TOS if those numbers happened to be close to each other. Does that make it true?

Re: What’s an Active User worth?

jamiequint — Mon, 11 Nov 2013 13:21:56 -0000

"This consistency suggests a universally accepted value per social media user."... Uh, only if you have no understanding of statistics. This is a very very weak argument for correlation, much less causation.

Re: Some thoughts on mobile

jamiequint — Sun, 02 Jun 2013 17:36:21 -0000

With respect to monetization on a per-platform basis.The newest Monetate Quarterly eCommerce report (Q1 2013 - http://assets.monetate.com/... has Android Phone Average Order Value (AOV) slightly ahead of iPhone now and Android Tablets with only about 4% lower AOV than iPad. With Android phone shipments far exceeding Apple, and tablet shipments following the same trend smart companies should be strongly considering going Android-first now.

Re: Uber Drivers Protest Outside the Company’s San Francisco Headquarters

jamiequint — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 22:02:55 -0000

If they hate Uber so much why don't they stop using it?

Re: The product lens

jamiequint — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 21:09:31 -0000

Yep, saw that, thanks. Great comments on that post.

Re: The product lens

jamiequint — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 20:47:43 -0000

Hey Chris, curious what you think about the alignment of the product/finance lenses when it comes to eCommerce (not necessarily just on mobile).

Re: Lookcraft: Optimize The Growth Of Your User Base – with Jamie Quint

jamiequint — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 16:48:51 -0000

Rarely does adding links to a page improve your conversions. I intentionally make links on a page that I need to include for purposes of ad networks or otherwise blend in to the page (e.g. grey on white instead of black on white) to keep them from distracting users.

Re: The Depressing Day After You Get TechCrunched

jamiequint — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 16:22:36 -0000

This is just false. You can sign up users at well over 30% conversion (with real email addresses) to email on a homepage with just a value proposition that resonates with users and a page that is set up correctly. I've seen this done with multiple sites. It is possible.

Re: How do I learn to be a growth hacker? Work for one of these guys :)

jamiequint — Sat, 12 May 2012 01:27:49 -0000

I'm moving to NY this summer for my new company.

Re: One in Five Facebook Employees Has No Imagination Whatsoever

jamiequint — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 12:56:12 -0000

This is an awesome post and I completely agree. I think the only argument against this is that - at least until recently - Facebook was basically handing out $0.5M-$1M+ in stock to new hires, that's hard to turn down when comparing against the expected value of doing startup. FB is really a unique opportunity to get in on pre-ipo, doesn't come around often and I think people can sense that (and know that their older friends who joined Google pre-ipo all got rich). Even if you can go to Facebook if you fail options grants are only decreasing from here on out.

Re: Life is 10% How You Make It and 90% How you Take It

jamiequint — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 02:41:38 -0000

Thanks for this Mark! After failing in a giant ball of flames at one startup its so easy to look around in the Bay Area and feel like you're hopelessly behind. Remembering the examples of those who didn't hit success on their first try is a great motivation to get up and try harder next time, and to have more fun along the way.

Re: My Ideal Phone System

jamiequint — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:40:02 -0000

Onsip.com can do everything you mention here (phone agnostic, etc). Their online interface is great, its flexible and its easy to do pretty much anything you can think of without having to go read an FAQ.

I also suggest pairing your phone system with an Edgemarc router to prioritize voice traffic. Its basically just a packet shaper with a focus on VoIP features and works very well. In fact it is what DISQUS uses since we sold it to them when we shut down Snaptalent, and even on our crappy DSL line in that office we never had a problem with voice quality.

Also, I have transferred numbers to them in the past, and while it is a pain - I think you have to fill out some paperwork to do it - I think that is mostly a result of the backend system for transferring numbers rather than a problem with any provider.

Re: Open Angel Forum San Fran – Team Calacanis Raises the Bar

jamiequint — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 13:18:32 -0000

What is your take on the differentiation between Thumbtack and their competition (ServiceMagic, Yext, etc)? It seems that the only company that has seen success in the "service directory" part of that market lately has been Yext (Redbeacon's traffic is flat after their TC50 win) and they've done it by picking off top yellow page categories one at a time, and generally avoiding ServiceMagic's space, whether intentionally or on purpose. It seems like Yext and ServiceMagic have a firm grip on their parts of the market in the top categories and have figured out how to drive traffic and monetize effectively.

Is offering small business software (online appointment calendar, accept online payments, etc) enough to give Thumbtack an advantage here?

Re: Some Thoughts On Email After Dealing With 500 Emails

jamiequint — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 12:02:37 -0000

Paul Buchheit commented on this too in his article:

"Some of the most interesting ideas (such as automatic email prioritization) never made it out because we couldn't find simple enough interfaces."

Re: The American Express Blues

jamiequint — Mon, 04 May 2009 13:23:24 -0000

I had a terrible experience just signing up for an account. We got a business gold card which was approved quickly, and we set up a bunch of recurring charges on it. After 6 weeks AmEx decided to freeze the account for no apparent explanation. They told me they needed more data to confirm I was creditworthy. I explained to them that I had already been approved for the card, but got the same response parroted back to me from multiple support agents. "From time to time we review accounts and have to request more information, blah blah blah." Not only is this ridiculous because I had *already* been approved, but also because I had faithfully made a payment to effectively prove it.

After this they tried asking me for all kinds of personal information to prove my income (3 years of tax returns), etc. I flatly refused told them I would be happy to send our business bank statement (recently venture funded) and had to go through 3 levels of customer service before I they finally accepted that. Next time I think I'm skipping the hassle and going with someone else.

Re: Scott Rafer's Blog

jamiequint — Sun, 03 May 2009 19:01:34 -0000

I think he means execution of plan that is not based on or being constantly modified by greater customer knowledge. e.g. Achieving a Failure http://startuplessonslearne...

Re: Startup Founder Evolution

jamiequint — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 19:23:59 -0000

The customer development process is different than the waterfall model, in fact its contrasted directly against it. I haven't read any of Eric Ries' stuff, but I didn't understand Customer Development as a marketing first process. As Venturehacks mentioned Customer Development was first laid out in Steve Blank's "Four Steps to the Epiphany." (excellent book - http://www.amazon.com/Four-...

I think for consumer internet startups the "throw an early version of a product at users" model tends to work well because it lets your target customer find you. A lot of what Blank describes in the early chapters of his book is similar to what you advocate. He suggests finding a market for the product you have developed rather than the focus group approach of trying to develop a product for the market you have identified.

For non-consumer-internet startups that are B2B or requires sales processes and purchasing decisions that may not rest with the end user it is sometimes not as simple as throw it out there and see what works. You may have limited resources to target sales calls, and you may not even know how to best sell the customer. Learning who your true visionary customers are and how they state the problem they have *before selling them* is what he advocates. However, his disclaimer is that you find a market for the product you have created, rather than modifying the product you have created to fit a certain customer set. It is only when you don't find any market or visionary customers for what you have created that you reanalyze the product itself.

A purely market first model seems to be a contradiction of Blank's book, although I haven't looked at his new slideshow in depth, so perhaps the Four Steps have changed.

Re: Trends, gaps and trends

jamiequint — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 03:00:19 -0000

Great article on following trends. Joe Kraus really hammered this idea home as well when we heard him speak. I wrote a little about the economics of virtual gifts a little while before that TC post thinking about it economically. You should check out one the one comment on the post (http://blog.jamiequint.com/... as it has interesting stuff to say about the economics of virtual gifting that makes it make a little more sense.

Re: Testing

jamiequint — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 22:57:33 -0000

cool! I like, I like.

Re: Trying out disqus.com (Scripting News)

jamiequint — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 17:42:46 -0000

At least people are held accountable for what they say now. Seems like it my even cause less (irrational) anger :D