
Jake Gold is "staunch". After 4 years, no longer anonymous on Hacker News. - staunch
http://jakenbake.com/no-longer-anonymous/
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tirrellp
Im interested to know the story of how you acquired your domain name (and at
what price).

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staunch
We spent the first couple months (while we were raising money, getting the
company incorporated, working on prototypes, etc) emailing dozens of domain
owners.

Fell in love with a bunch of different ones and even met in person with some
people to negotiate. They all fell through over price/terms.

We ended up working out a deal with the owner for Get.com. We're not 100%
clear on whether it's wise to disclose all the details yet, but we definitely
will as some point.

Aaron Patzers idea's behind acquiring Mint.com were a big inspiration for us.
I even grabbed him at a conference so I could get his opinion.

We knew we wanted to build a real consumer brand and believe that a great
domain makes that a lot more likely.

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nikcub
you paid in stock?

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staunch
That is what Patzer did for Mint.com. I think it was around 2% of their series
A, which I think was a great deal for everyone.

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nikcub
Ye that was why I am asking. I remember Mint was a stock deal. I think it is a
great way to get a good domain name.

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enduser
I went to your site and signed in with Twitter. Now it is asking me for my
email address and to choose a password. If I wanted that, I would have chosen
the "sign up with e-mail" option. Could you fulfill the promise of single
sign-on?

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staunch
The problem is Twitter doesn't provide first name, last name, and email like
Facebook does. I'm going to try splitting on space for name and people change
it if it's wrong. Won't work for many names, but should make it a _little_
better.

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SwellJoe
For what it's worth, I couldn't see anything to click other than "Sign up" or
"Sign in", so I closed the tab. I don't sign up to sites before I play with
them. So, if I can't tinker with something before giving up anonymity, I can't
imagine I'll ever use Get.com.

~~~
staunch
I hear you, and I'm soo conflicted about it. On the one hand it's made it so a
lot more people try out the site and have a good experience. On the other hand
it drives a lot of people away instantly.

We did make it so you can sign up with email (not just Twitter/Facebook) and
we made the form as simple as possible.

We're still not sure what's best overall. I'm positive we'll take down the
sign up wall at some point though.

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anigbrowl
If it's like a store, you've got to let people browse the merchandise before
you can make a sale. My PII has value to me, and also to you - so tempt me a
bit first, then ask for it.

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staunch
I fundamentally agree with you that that is the right approach. We'll get
there. Thanks for the feedback.

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anigbrowl
A simple but seductive business model, and one whose utility is seen on here
regularly...not to mention an impressive domain acquisition. Lots of luck!

~~~
staunch
Thank you. We worked so hard to pick a problem interesting enough, and big
enough, to keep ourselves interested in the long term. Now we just have to
continue to work our asses off.

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83457
How do you plan to handle the quality of answers over time as products change?
For example someone asks for recommendations on the best android phone. Today
there may be a couple best answer but in the near future those best answers
would likely be different.

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staunch
We're still testing this out with real data, but it looks like it's actually
quite useful to have duplicates in the database. The key is how to return
results to someone coming along later. We're working on that now.

We committed upfront to not letting the site become overrun with "Yahoo
Answers" style duplicated/low quality stuff. We'd much rather delete useless
stuff than get an extra page view or two.

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joshu
get is a neat product. similar target space that we're working on.

they made a variety of design decisions that are good ones and we are still
working through. (categories, leaderboards)

i didn't really love the autotweet when i signed up, though :(

good luck!

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staunch
Really sorry about the unexpected tweet! It actually shows you that page
before it tweets, but I checked logs and you were on an iPhone (which we have
barely tested, to our shame), so it might have been easy to miss.

Thanks for checking out the site Josh. Like I said on Twitter, I'm a fan for a
long time, so "neat" is high praise!

Good luck on Jig as well.

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nikcub
I signed up in a desktop browser. Please uncheck the 'follow' and 'tweet' as
default options, I completely missed them as well.

It isn't worth the extra users you get to have users cursing your name out
loud

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bitops
Who the heck is Jake Gold? (seriously)

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staunch
It's just my real name, I'm not actually anybody you should know :-)

Actually there is a famous "Jake Gold" now though, a Canadian Idol judge
apparently. He's my Michael Bolton.

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mhartl
Congrats on the launch. I bet the Canadian Jake Gold is a no-talent ass-clown.

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staunch
Thanks. It's true, he's the one that sucks.

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joshu
congrats! i like three-letter domain names.

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jrockway
Isn't it six letters, or do you not have to type .com anymore? (If I type
"get" into Chrome, I get the jquery docs. Heh.)

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rokhayakebe
Write get than do CTRL + ENTER

