I really like Dan and have been following his stuff since the mid-2000s, but it's hard to apply this advice generally.
#2 and #3 are only effective if you're Dan Cederholm. He already had a reputation which put him in a very luxurious position to essentially choose his first users and have them actually use it. The same goes for #3 – imagine if all of the "people you want on your platform" got tshirts and postcards from every startup that wanted them?
Don't take it so literally. Can you find 100 people (or a few dozen) in your circles that could be first users of your product? Start with them. If you have trouble gaining traction with those folks, you may have trouble getting others to pay for your product.
The caveat being that you have to make sure the people you're inviting fit somewhere in your customer profile. You can get discouraging feedback if your initial invitees don't fit your product.
This feels like this fills the void between people who don't care about calories and people who really care about calories. I know people (read: myself) who are too lazy to measure everything down the milligram and just want an order or magnitude sense of calorie intake.
I agree that this can be useful for this use-case. Right now I'm bulking so it's more important for me to have a general "good estimate" of my calories and macros over a week, rather than a hyper-refined daily view, where I need a granularity of 100 calories or I haven't lost weight that day.
For my situation, it's more about "damn, I ate 1000 calories over last week, oh wow lol it's because I got super stoned on friday and ate half a pizza, ok, so next week eat 2 eggs instead of 3 for breakfast to make up for it." This app definitely wouldn't work for a cut, though, because I need my measuring cups and spoons to do that right.
> there isn't enough money to be made to satisfy VC investors. Mailbox and the like could have lived quite comfortably as paid-for apps with comfortable
I'm not sure that's true (see: Sparrow). I just don't think there is enough demand for people to want to pay for an email client. I imagine for a huge majority of people, default mail client's work fine enough for personal use.
Not to mention, if you're old like me, you remember paying (I think?) $100 and then eventually $49 for eudora / upgrades for eudora. In approx 1990 dollars. We now live in a world where people pitch tantrums about paying $10 for an app, and expect perpetual upgrades for that price! So simultaneously expectations have skyrocketed and prices have plummeted.
Part of the problem is, unlike say Pinboard, an email client doesn't feel like 1-3 devs worth of work. The protocols are horrendous, you have to understand the quirks of lots of servers, etc. Plus all the UI and backend and search work. I'm not sure it's approachable as a small indie company.
There's also, of course, bad behavior by large companies such as mozilla: Thunderbird made it very difficult to build an indie email client because you have to compete on merits and against free, but they eventually got bored and just quit making it. Not to mention competing with free/ad-supported. And the semi-annual YC/vc supported email client company.
Not to mention what is coming close to active sabotage of productivity apps by the ios and mac app stores (lack of trials, lack of upgrades, etc).
Pegasus mail was pretty good, even if a bit enterprisy. I just searched and wow... it's still being developed! The website even still lists the msdos version. http://www.pmail.com/
I'm sorry, I apologise in advance, but this irks me.
"We now live in a world where people pitch tantrums about paying $10 for an app"
Where do users/customers get these expectations? Call it market forces, race to the bottom, whatever... do a little root cause and not blame joe public please.
Yup. I still don't see why everyone complains about current mail clients. Mail.app on OS X / iOS, Outlook on Windows, works for me.
To make me switch, you would have to show me why the new thing was so much better. Like how Google search results were always better than Yahoo! (IMHO, no objective measurements used) so I switched. You would also have to explain it in a sentence I could immediately understand, whereas all the recent clients I've ready about either (a) claim to make things better but don't tell/show me how before I get bored of the page, or (b) use manager speak that I can't understand or is vague and abstract promises to increase collaboration or something. Therefore I've given almost no attention to any recent attempt to change email.
There's a big distance between "works for me" and "delights me."
I use Thunderbird on Linux and Windows. It "works for me," in the sense that it's stable and predictable and doesn't lose my data. But it also has lots of niggly little problems that annoy me, like UI decisions that made more sense ten years ago than they do today and limited tools to support people like me who have a ton of mail.
So while I use and recommend Thunderbird, I also would love to see something come along that is so much better that it makes me fall in love with it, instead of just shrugging my shoulders and resigning myself to this being as good as things get.
How much are you looking to pay for this? How many people are looking for delight in their email client? Do these numbers multiplied add up to a few tens of millions?
"I'm not sure that's true (see: Sparrow). I just don't think there is enough demand for people to want to pay for an email client."
Yeah, this is definitely what I saw with Sparrow. For it to become popular it has to be adopted by a substantial number of people. However, I find that only really tech savvy people cared about Sparrow and its streamlined interface. When I showed it to other people, they were reluctant to use anything else because they were afraid to move from their Apple Mail. I'm guessing if Sparrow had existed for windows it would've been the same thing with people using Outlook.
And then there's people who don't even use e-mail, who think it's outdated and prefer PM messaging as a form of communication. It's easy to see why a lot of these promising mail client apps don't really take off the way other apps and services do.
Nevertheless, Sparrow will always have a home in my Mac, as long as it keeps working on OS X.
Same. Sparrow is still my favorite email app on the Mac. Sadly had to give up on it with iOS as it just got super wonky. Will use it as long as it works on OSX.
We're looking for iOS and backend (Golang) engineers. You can read more here: http://timehop.com/joinus
We've got millions of daily active users who love using and opening the every single day.
For iOS, we use a MVVM architecture for our app and use ReactiveCocoa in a bunch of it.
On the backend side, we written a ton of Golang using DynamoDB to access and play around with our > 160 TB of data.
Timehop is building the place online to connect with friends around the past. Whereas Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram focus on the real time, Timehop focuses on anniversaries and bringing meaning and relevancy to old content. We have millions of users opening the app every day and signing up a user ~every second.
It should offend you because that statement is suggesting that your utility and your worth is merely a function of your gender, not because of your skill. That the only value a woman brings in this case is "fundraising as well as getting authenticity with parents" - not their skill or any perspective that you wouldn't have.
It is this kind of "not my fault" attitude that slows down progress in gender equality.
source: I'm an IC