Disqus - Latest Comments for ikirigin

Re: How does caffeine affect my RMR?

Ivan Kirigin — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 13:24:28 -0000

Does this RMR measure normally change within a single day? You should test on a coffee drinker too -- both at their normal routine and with both surplus & deficit caffeine.

Re: An Enormous List of Referral Tactics

Ivan Kirigin — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 12:30:47 -0000

We're working on a post about the technical side of many of these questions here: http://blog.yesgraph.com/ho...

Re: Problems in the Recruiting Market

Ivan Kirigin — Mon, 25 Jul 2016 13:36:52 -0000

If I were to bet, it probably won't be a direct attack as a professional network. Maybe online education tips with better certification. Maybe a freelancer site is the place to find talent. Maybe slack becomes the most important professional identity. Maybe mobile somehow changes everything because most of the internet isn't on desktop web. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: If you’re building a referral program, you must read this first.

Ivan Kirigin — Tue, 29 Mar 2016 13:12:43 -0000

The link tracking can be fast -- but things like contact importing and managing all the sharing channels is pretty painful.

Re: Growth Teardown: Telegram

Ivan Kirigin — Thu, 17 Mar 2016 19:59:18 -0000

That is one of the kookiest apps I've ever tried, and I've tried quite a few ;-P

Re: Growth Teardown: Telegram

Ivan Kirigin — Wed, 16 Mar 2016 15:39:05 -0000

Sounds right! Got a link to your app?

Re: The Top 5 Analytics Tasks for Your New Startup

Ivan Kirigin — Wed, 20 Jan 2016 18:00:07 -0000

Mixpanel is great at looking at funnels, formulas, and time series data. Amplitude is better for cohort analysis.

Don't focus on visualization, focus on analytics questions and getting them answered.

Don't focus on a metrics dashboard too much at the start. An email sent weekly is enough.

Re: A YC Company’s Public Product Roadmap

Ivan Kirigin — Mon, 28 Dec 2015 12:58:13 -0000

I love the idea of having a process to put user feedback into your roadmap. (#2)

I'm a bit skeptical of getting too quantitative here because some things are very hard to estimate. Judgement is required.

Re: Growth Step #3: How To Triage Your Growth

Ivan Kirigin — Mon, 14 Dec 2015 13:14:14 -0000

There is nothing mutually exclusive with a Facebook login and an SMS or email invite flow. If you're requesting the user's email from Facebook, you could remove them from the list of email contacts.

Facebook isn't a good invite channel, but is good to bootstrap a social graph.

YesGraph can help here with combining data by the way. If you input users and address books, we can show contacts that aren't current users. https://docs.yesgraph.com/

Re: Capital Is No Longer Scarce

Ivan Kirigin — Thu, 10 Dec 2015 16:01:41 -0000

Regulation is an interesting dimension. What if the space of possible investments is artificially constricted? You'd expect to see over-investment in some free areas and an overall surplus of capital.

It could also be a function of the time to yield returns. Hong Kong's GDP is $275B. How easy would it be to raise $10B to build a new city seastead? The returns might be enormous... after a few decades.

Re: Why We’re Ditching Traditional Coding Interviews

Ivan Kirigin — Wed, 15 Jul 2015 14:18:14 -0000

You should make the problem relevant but structured enough to be obviously no working for free. That is a matter of basic trust with candidates.

For example, with a problem focused on machine learning, you can provide labeled data and instruct people to make a predictor of those labels. So you already have the answer and it's clear the work isn't for profit.

If you have someone work on your core product as part of a trial day or week, then you could pay them. That is very reasonable, though some people might be willing to just do work for a day or two for friends. It depends on the relationship

Re: The Top 3 Actionable Metrics for Any Viral Flow

Ivan Kirigin — Wed, 08 Jul 2015 18:16:33 -0000

In the yammer example, there is a form with 5 entries, but the average input might only be 1.5

Re: The Freelance Economy

Ivan Kirigin — Tue, 02 Jun 2015 20:52:58 -0000

I wrote about a related topic with the future of digital work here: http://blog.kirigin.com/dig...

I think it is a huge opportunity.

Re: VC Partner Sweet Spot: The Always-Sometimes-Never Rules for Pitching the Right Investor

Ivan Kirigin — Tue, 12 May 2015 12:23:46 -0000

You should certainly not be rude to junior members of the team.

But it is actually disingenuous the way many associates behave. They do outreach that is actually market research, founders think they might get investment, and then nothing comes from it.

Ignoring almost all inbound interest not through an intro is a good way to avoid wasting time.

Re: The Valuation Boost Needed to Justify YC Will Surprise You

Ivan Kirigin — Tue, 28 Apr 2015 15:32:38 -0000

No, it is your company. Many join without having a company, and then they just make a vanilla C corp with stock structure good for a startup. YC is an investor, meaning a preferred share holder. It isn't their company or anything like that. They don't join boards.

Companies can change ideas all the time. It doesn't matter with respect to the corporate structure. The cap table and the idea aren't coupled.

Re: What Changed at Y Combinator After 7 Years

Ivan Kirigin — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 17:58:32 -0000

Thanks! I'll remove it I think. I don't think the prompt is effective anyway.

Re: Why You Must Store Your Own Analytics Data

Ivan Kirigin — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 14:57:54 -0000

Let's say you have a social app. How does having more friends affect retention?

Unless you've thought to continuously update each user segment with their friend count, most hosted apps can't solve this question.

This is literally the core retention question that helped Facebook win.

Re: Why You Must Store Your Own Analytics Data

Ivan Kirigin — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 14:56:40 -0000

Nice, though csv might not be the best choice.

Re: Why You Must Store Your Own Analytics Data

Ivan Kirigin — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 14:56:10 -0000

Self hosting is harder than it sounds. Hosting data is easy.

If you can, use hosted tools. Where they fail, you need access to the data.

Re: The Valuation Boost Needed to Justify YC Will Surprise You

Ivan Kirigin — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 11:44:39 -0000

Glad to help!

Re: Radical Transparency: Here is YesGraph’s New Content Marketing Strategy

Ivan Kirigin — Fri, 30 Jan 2015 12:23:55 -0000

We haven't launched yet :-D

Re: Radical Transparency: Here is YesGraph’s New Content Marketing Strategy

Ivan Kirigin — Fri, 09 Jan 2015 12:56:03 -0000

Yeah, there is a lot to cover there:
- where to share on social media
- how to recruit friends to help spread the word
- social news sites
- formats, like text, audio, and video, and platforms for then: itunes, youtube, soundcloud etc

Re: Why We’re Doubling Down on Content (Plus, a Big Announcement)

Ivan Kirigin — Thu, 18 Sep 2014 11:47:29 -0000

lol at seeing my mug unexpectedly in a blog post. Love this blog :)

Re: Taking YesGraph in a New Direction

Ivan Kirigin — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 11:56:35 -0000

Thanks Greg!

Re: Taking YesGraph in a New Direction

Ivan Kirigin — Tue, 09 Sep 2014 13:39:07 -0000

Thanks!