Disqus - Friends of mcramer

Re: Windows Live Outsources Blogging, Migrating 30 Million Users To WordPress.com

Kunal Punjabi — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 14:28:02 -0000

What is the reason Microsoft is doing this? If this isnt a financial deal, then why would they kill off one service and allow all their data and users to be migrated over to a competing platform? This is a half-baked story - I would expect more details on the actual deal between the two companies.

Re: The Pleasure Principle: Not All Products Need To Be Painkillers

Kunal Punjabi — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 16:16:51 -0000

While this article may seem to make sense, a startup should always be solving a problem or addressing a pain point, otherwise no one will use it, or there won't be a market for the product. I think the author missed the point entirely.
"Pornography, sports and coffee are, for example, three insanely lucrative industries, and each of them sells the promise of pleasure."
How is your offering different from the competition? There are dozens of websites focused on pornography. Surely, they all have "pleasure-focused" offerings, but why would a porn-addict come to yours? How is your new sports channel different/better than Sportscenter/ESPN? What problem do those channels have that your channel will solve? More engaging content, or more sports with fewer ads, or more sports, less talk, perhaps?
What will your new coffee shop offer than Starbucks, Peets or Seattle's best coffee dont? What pain would a customer experience from going to one of these competing coffee shops versus yours? (Or conversely, what would they miss out on if they did not visit your coffee shop)? Customers can stay longer, perhaps? Repeat customers get more free coffee more often, maybe? Or maybe you offer a wider variety of pastries, chocolate, cake and other snacks in addition to the awesome-tasting coffee you are selling?
The argument being made here is that "Pleasure focused startups" are being neglected. However I believe avoiding pain and seeking pleasure go hand in hand.

I'm not trying to put the author down. If the claims in this article are true, props to her for creating a product people love. However I think she missed the boat when she was asked what pain point or problem her startup solves, and that potentially cost her a win in the startup competition. These are still problems with your competitors, no matter which industry you're in, music included. More likely, she wasn't prepared to be asked that question, or she took it personally. She could have easily listed the problems in some of the competing products, that LaDida solves more elegantly. Proving that others have tried to solve this exact problem (but suck at it, or quite simply you do it better), gives you adequate social proof (and the rest of us, adequate reason) to look at your startup or idea differently.

Building products (or worse, companies) by focusing on "oh, people would enjoy this" or "this would be a cool product" only leads to products no one would use.

-----------------------
Kunal Punjabi
co-founder at EkoTable
http://www.EkoTable.com

Re: WATable - a pretty decent jQuery plugin

Kunal Punjabi — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 15:04:30 -0000

Awesome plugin, thank you.

Re: WATable - a pretty decent jQuery plugin

Kunal Punjabi — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 15:37:49 -0000

Just learned that there's no support for IE8 (by design)...bootstrap works in IE8 though. It would be really great to get this awesome plugin working in IE8 (and maybe I'm pushing my luck, but <ie8 too).="">

Re: Five Ways of Becoming a Respected Product Leader in the C-Suite

Kunal Punjabi — Sat, 14 Sep 2013 15:28:11 -0000

Another thing that is important is understanding what executive stakeholders want and need first. Do they want more traffic? More page-views? More revenue?

Sometimes, not everyone's interests are aligned, especially when there are multiple stakeholders in the room. It is your job to understand their individual positions before figuring out what your goals are, building consensus around those goals, and finally figuring out how to make those goals happen.

Also, you need to pick your battles. Not every project or effort is going to have the same ROI. Personally, being responsible for the bills.com website, it is my job to balance product and feature launches that focus on our Re-Design, SEO, Monetization and Marketing / Growth. Not every project is going to move the needle by the same amount, and not every project is going to cost the same in terms of time and money. Pick your battles wisely.

Re: Validate or Die: Using Validation to Build the Right Product

Kunal Punjabi — Wed, 09 Jul 2014 01:23:54 -0000

Glad it helped, Lidia!

Re: Validate or Die: Using Validation to Build the Right Product

Kunal Punjabi — Wed, 09 Jul 2014 01:28:52 -0000

Valid point - pricing validation is in a slightly different category. I don't think I was suggesting skipping running your own pricing validation tests - but that looking at your competitors' offerings should be one of the factors you consider before deciding how much you would want to charge for your product.

Re: Theme marketplace is coming soon! - October CMS

Kunal Punjabi — Fri, 18 Jul 2014 09:46:55 -0000

Can't wait!

Re: How we were submitted to product hunt and nothing happened

Kunal Punjabi — Wed, 27 May 2015 04:27:54 -0000

That's too bad...35 votes and you didn't make it to the front page. Hope their algorithm sorts itself out in the future, and posts that were submitted in the past get resurfaced on a different day (in other words, if something starts to pick up momentum and upvotes, it should get featured, even if it was submitted several days ago).

One question - how did you first submit growth talk to PH? Were you approved for submissions?

Re: Build a modern web application with Laravel and Vue – Part 5: Creating a simple Trello clone using Laravel and Vue

Kunal Punjabi — Sun, 05 May 2019 15:28:49 -0000

Thanks for the detailed post. I tried to install the source code from the repo: https://github.com/neoighod...
(I always do this before going through the tutorial, to see what I will be building)

But the installation fails at
npm install: https://github.com/neoighod...

How do you get the project running?

Re: Build a modern web application with Laravel and Vue – Part 4: Creating Vue applications in Laravel

Kunal Punjabi — Sun, 05 May 2019 15:33:36 -0000

I tried to install the source code from the repo: https://github.com/neoighod...
(I always do this before going through the tutorial, to see what I will be building)

But the installation fails at
npm install. See https://github.com/neoighod...

How do you get the project running?

Re: Build a modern web application with Laravel and Vue – Part 3: Testing your application’s API endpoints

Kunal Punjabi — Sun, 05 May 2019 15:34:10 -0000

I tried to install the source code from the repo: https://github.com/neoighod...
(I always do this before going through the tutorial, to see what I will be building)

But the installation fails at npm install. See https://github.com/neoighod...

Re: A package to control the flow of time - Freek Van der Herten's blog on PHP, Laravel and JavaScript

Kunal Punjabi — Mon, 17 Jun 2019 01:05:10 -0000

Neat package, thanks Freek!

Re: 12. Testing Email With Custom Assertions in PHPUnit Testing with Laravel ...

Kunal Punjabi — Wed, 19 Jun 2019 14:22:48 -0000

I don't get it...doesn't this test the core email sending functionality? Does this test any application code?

Re: Introducing laravel-websockets, an easy to use WebSocket server implemented in PHP - Freek Van der Herten's blog on PHP, Laravel and JavaScript

Kunal Punjabi — Sat, 22 Jun 2019 14:07:00 -0000

Awesome work, Freek. The Laravel community owes you for the work you are doing.

One question:
After going to the dashboard and clicking 'send event' I see this: https://prnt.sc/o5bmrm Any ideas?

Re: Ilya Sakovich

Kunal Punjabi — Thu, 17 Oct 2019 20:37:55 -0000

Ilya Sakovich I have the same error as zxprince

But I am not even using Guzzle yet. I am using POSTMAN to make an API request. I sent a POST request to http://localhost:8000/oauth/token with:
grant_type: social
provider: google
access_token: (what I got back from Google)
client_id , client_secret: from the oauth_clients table for the Password Grant Client

```
This is the error I get back.
{
"error": "invalid_credentials",
"error_description": "The user credentials were incorrect.",
"message": "The user credentials were incorrect."
}
```
What am I doing wrong? Please help!

Re: Creating a Stripe Subscription with Laravel Cashier + Laravel Passport

Kunal Punjabi — Sat, 09 May 2020 01:29:11 -0000

Thanks for this! You explained things so much better than any other source I've found. More Laravel + Nuxt tutorials would be great!

Re: Creating a Stripe Subscription with Laravel Cashier + Laravel Passport

Kunal Punjabi — Sat, 09 May 2020 01:30:04 -0000

agreed! that's a bug, I was struggling with the same thing at first.

Re: Refactoring - Hackin’ and Tinkerin’

Kunal Punjabi — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 11:22:17 -0000

Glad to see you revive this, @Mark Cramer!

Re: Scammers Replacing iPhones With Clay

Mike Wertheim — Mon, 20 Jun 2016 17:22:46 -0000

I wonder how many new users Amazon onboards each day relative to the number of existing Amazon users. So many people have Amazon accounts that it seems amazing that there's anyone left who doesn't have one.

Re: Object-Oriented DynamoDB API

Mike Wertheim — Sun, 10 Jul 2016 02:04:41 -0000

I'm developing a new AWS/DynamoDB Java app and have a quick question about how to set up jcabi/dynamodb.

When I'm running the app in my dev environment, I want to be using a locally running DynamoDB. In production, I want to connect to the regular AWS DynamoDB. To facilitate this, my app has this code:


	private static DynamoDB getDB(boolean useLocalDB) {
		AmazonDynamoDBClient client = new AmazonDynamoDBClient(new ProfileCredentialsProvider());
		if (useLocalDB) {
			client.withEndpoint("http://localhost:8000");
		}
		return new DynamoDB(client);
	}

I'd like to move this over to using jcabi/dynamodb. However, it's not clear to me how to implement this logic while initializing a com.jcabi.dynamo.Region.

Could you show me how to do that?

Re: East Bay restaurants offering curbside, no-contact pick-up or in-house delivery

Mike Wertheim — Thu, 19 Mar 2020 15:48:18 -0000

Thanks for the list! Once correction: Longbranch is in Berkeley, not Oakland.

Re: Refactoring - Hackin’ and Tinkerin’

Mike Wertheim — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 22:36:32 -0000

I found it interesting that the Irwin Hall technique, which used RND instead of SQR and COS, should have made the code faster but didn't. I'm wondering why it didn't work. I'm guessing that perhaps Applesoft BASIC has reasonably efficient SQR and COS routines but has a really inefficient implementation of RND. (If you care to follow up on that, you can view the assembly listing of Applesoft BASIC and actually look at the implementations of SQR, COS and RND.)