I absolutely love Fastmail. I moved off of Gmail years ago with zero regrets. Better UI, better apps, better company, and need I say better service? I still maintain and fetch from a Gmail account so it all just works seamlessly for receiving and sending Gmail, so you don’t have to give anything up either.
I moved from my own colocated 1U running Mailcow to Fastmail and don't regret it one bit. This was an interesting read, glad to see they think things through nice and carefully.
The only things I wish FM had are all software:
1. A takeout-style API to let me grab a complete snapshot once a week with one call
1. hoping to have a JMAP archive format at some point which should cover that. I'd hope that normally you'd be fetching a delta update rather than the whole thing. We've got enough bandwidth for a few people do to it, but I wouldn't want every customer pulling their entire archive every week of 99% the same immutable data; that would be kinda sucky.
2. yeah, I'd love that too - we're keen to integrate with everything else that people are using. We have a basic in-house IdP thing for our own staff to authenticate against our hosted services, but haven't scaled it out. This will happen eventually, though I've been burned enough times I don't want to promise a timeframe.
I use Fastmail for my personal mail, and I don’t regret it, but I’m not quite as sold as you are, I guess maybe because I still have a few Google work accounts I need to use. Spam filtering in Fastmail is a little worse, and the search is _terrible_. The iOS app is usable but buggy. The easy masked emails are a big win though, and setting up new domains feels like less of a hassle with FM. I don’t regret using Fastmail, and I’d use them again for my personal email, but it doesn’t feel like a slam dunk.
This is a fairly silly list really, missing the bulk of what's been good reads for the last quarter century(!). It's heavily biased tothings that have sold well in the past few years. That said, the books on here are quite good. I'd definitely recommend Black Leopard, Red Wolf if you want fantasy from completely different story genetics (non-Tolkien). Priory is more traditional but good fun.
Not on this list that I thought were particularly excellent, [goodreads rating in brackets]:
[4.26] Between Two Fires by Christopher Buhuelman
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13543121-between-two-fir...
Horror-Fantasy. Absolutely loved this book, a travelogue through France in the grip of the Black Plague...inflicted upon humanity by Lucifer in the war on Heaven. See the sights as God abandons his children and devils in both man and mythic form ruin His creation. Takes on a hallucinatory, Book of Revelations, William Blake on bad acid feel and builds to a tremendous crescendo while retaining deep heart and complex characters.
Christopher Buhuelman is one of my favorite "new" authors, his new fantasy series The Blacktongue Thief[4.22] and The Daughters War[4.3] are both excellent as well. His horror chops enable him to to make what might be more traditional fantasy stories much more impactful. For example, The Daughters War is about an desperate existential war against goblins that is fucking horrifying, which is impressive for a critter traditionally deployed for comic effect or disposable fodder for the heroes to kick about. Even though you "know" that humans win in the end because of the chronology of the series (this was book takes place before the The Blacktongue Thief which was published first), it doesn't feel like it ever. Which is the magic of good horror writing, and is often missing from fantasy which can feel like there are no real stakes sometimes despite the epic scales presented.
[4.22] Piranesi by Susanna Clark
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50202953-piranesi
Labyrinth-Fantasy. Another book I adored, this novel has a sense of place so tangible that I am convinced that it actually exists and Susanna has been there. Piransi lives in what amounts to a pocket dimension, an infinite labyrinthine house containing amongst other things an ocean whose tides rage through the halls, flooding and revealing them in turn.
[4.3] Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718-children-of-tim...
Alien Encounter-SciFi. Omitting this from any best of list shows the list isn't particularly serious, this novel is exceptional. On a distant exoplanet being terraformed for future humans, a disaster leaves the scientist in charge alone and cut off from humanity, and rather than seeding the new world with monkeys to be uplifted, she uplifts instead a small species of jumping spider. We experience its evolution across millenia and as its society reaches the space faring age, until it's encounter with the last desperate remnants of humanity, fleeing a doomed civilization and descending into barbarism. The narrative techniques to tell a story of this scope work exceptionally well and the whole tale moves quickly and with surprising emotional heft. To bring the audience to understand a world and society entirely unlike ours, and make it relatable and poignant is truly impressive. I really don't like spiders, but by the end of this book I was rooting for them... at humanity's expense.
Because of shifting demographics in the book buying market, readers looking for good yarns outside of the current trend of romantasy and/or cozy scifi/fantasy may feel a little left out, but there are tons of great authors that may be forgotten from these lists for a while. I heartily recommend:
Anything by Joel Shepherd https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/215710.Joel_Shepherd, ex Spiral Wars series (scifi space opera with fascinating AI) [4.27-4.56], Cassandra Kressnov series (cyberpunk) [3.88-4.0], A Trial of Blood & Steel series (fantasy) [3.9-4.26].
Pierce Brown's Red Rising sci-fi series is excellent and magnificent in scope and scale.
Anything by Joe Abercrombie for gritty low fantasy with buckets of blood, humor, populated with legendary characters. The Bloody-Nine, Dogman, Black Dow, Caul mfing Shivers anyone? His latest series https://www.goodreads.com/series/211497-the-age-of-madness [4.45-4.6] was fantastic.
And of course the other books mentioned by other commenters, particularly anything by Ian M Banks.
No disrespect intended, but what is the point of using terminology like “moonshot” coupled with tiny amounts of funding like $3m. If moonshot is taken to be a loose reference to the Apollo program - which I imagine it is otherwise the name is poorly chosen - then the funding amounts are off by several orders of magnitude. In 1960 the US government got its feet wet with a 900 million (in 2020 dollars) spend on the Apollo program and ramped up to a high of 40,000 million a year by 1964. The total spent on the Apollo program between 1960 and 1973 was 283,000 million or almost one hundred thousand times as much as the 3 million investment under the moonshots fund.
Sure the 3 million is a seed round but the US spent 300 times as much on its exploratory “seed” round in 1960.
It is unlikely until he extreme that any real “moonshot” will achieve significant impact without the combined talents of a large percentage of the world greatest talents driven by goals of the highest social priority funded by limitless pockets and organized by the very best managers and leaders that society can produce.
Can confirm. Most government agencies have the SBIR program which funds 6 months of work for $100k. A phase II is $750k for 2 years. The Phase I is typically TRL 3/4 (though I've had a TRL 2 contract before). You'd be surprised what you can get done on such a small budget.
I also wonder if a $15mio valuation (20% for $3m) is a good deal for founders that have a moonshot idea and a first step that is reachable within 2 years and a plan of how to get there.
I mean if I had a plausible 2-year plan on how to fix the image processing part of self-driving cars and autonomous drones, just the knowledge of how I consider that possible might be worth more than $15m to Google, Uber, Skydio, or the DoD.
So to me, this looks more like a glorified way for teams without connections but with a great prototype to get introductions to the "real" investors that'll pony up $100m+
But, say, 250m will achieve nothing for true moonshots (like the ones mentioned on the site) without political will? Honestly, the example moonshots listed on the site NEED political will to succeed at all.
Typically seed funding is to prove the concept. Series A is to start scaling it. With Apollo you need to already have a proven concept ("We expect you to have a big vision and a “Tesla Roadster”—a concrete first step") before Apollo will invest. That's what makes it a Series A.
Oddly enough I just implemented my own one of these in 34 sloc using flask and weasyprint. I chose to only have it accept html in a post rather than a url so that it could render non-publically accessible urls. You can also pass it a base_url (which it passes on to weasyprint) for resolving relative urls for static assets in the html, which are usually publicly accessible. Runs on heroku for simplicity.
Your medium article is 50X better than your website. Your website is useless for promoting your product. I don't like the headline font for your site, the lack of screenshots, basically the lack of focus on a product that will live or die on its usability and interface. I'm not a fan of the Z in openloopz. Combined with the comic sansy looking headline font it doesn't feel polished.
The inventing of a new words ("loops") is to be avoided unless absolutely necessary. You are now not only trying to tell a (very) mildly interested reader about your product you need them to learn a new language in order to understand it. This is an unrealistic cognitive burden for a sales pitch for a todo app. I strongly suggest that you use the simplest possible terms in plain language to describe the focus of your product, how it fits into the users life, and what problems it solves for them.
Your post here is more focused on your personal suffering than on your product. We are all eating shit to try to launch our companies, but too much focus on that makes for a downer intro to your product. I'd try to separate your moments of sharing the struggle and the moments of sharing the product. Do you want people to be genuinely excited about it, or pity you? Which emotion do you want to be a stronger first response?
Scanning further over your medium article (It's longer than a casual browser will give it time, ie 5 seconds) I suggest you take whatever the salient feature of your product is, maybe the hashtagging to create inline tasks and put that front and center in a huge picture and font. I'm still not sure what problem you are solving or who you are competing with, is it todo lists, slack, what? Where does this tool fit in my life? I suggest you take a look at the way that slack conveys information https://slack.com/is/team-communication (notice even the url hammers home their function).
I think that honest feedback is very imporant and that your main problem here, which is something that affects us all, is that you are too close to the product. You already understand it, you speak its language (invented words and all), and you are now longer able to communicate it to the passing man in the street. I suggest workshoping your pitch and language with fresh ears constantly until you are able to get someone to understand the basics of what it is and how it helps them in 10 seconds or less. All that said, I'm rooting for you, best of luck!
Ditto all this. I haven't read the Medium post, but just looking at the website: I have no idea what it is or what it does for me, and I'm being asked to sign-up first thing. Further reading still doesn't answer any questions.
Honestly, it'd be a miracle for anyone to look at the website and decide they need to sign up. Not because the product isn't amazing. But because I have no idea what it is and I'm not in the habit of signing up for services if I don't know what they are. That's how you get Cat Facts.
EDIT:
Also, you need an Editor really badly. I don't mean to be a dick about it. But this is your family's welfare on the line. Find someone hyper-critical to tear your writing.
ie:
> What is OpenLoopz?
> OpenLoopz makes it easy to manage and share your digital content online, as well as helping you get things done quicker and communicate better!
I've just tuned out. That sentence is as empty and as much bullshit as they come. A very direct question was asked and you disrespected my time. You could be describing Facebook for all I know.
If you want your site to be compelling: Be Brief. Every word needs to tell me something useful and important. Your broadcast is all noise and no signal right now.
Anyone saying the Medium post is good: Don't believe them. It's better. But that'd be difficult not to do. It's still completely useless for moving units. People are just being kind.
Get an editor. If there's one rule you need to follow, it's brevity. Brevity. BREVITY. It's not rocket science. This isn't beyond you. You aren't doomed to failure. Be brief. Be critical. You've failed at communicating your product's worth. Now try again. Not tomorrow. Today.
And don't let perfect be the enemy of good. It's not going to take you a week to fix this. Limit yourself to 400 words, and some screen shots. Fix it today. After that's done, keep iterating. Revise revise revise until you have the perfect 400 words and can't think of how to improve it further. Then find someone who can.
Wow, this is fantastic feedback, thank you for taking the time to write it.
Apologies if my post came across as personal suffering - I certainly don't want any pity! I didn't intend for it to be too negative - I was just being honest and got a bit carried away! This has been a very, very hard slog and I realise most people on here are going through the same thing. I would never write something like this on a more mainstream site - it was written for hackers in the same position as me so I felt I could afford to be more down to earth. Having said that, I take your point - it was probably too much for a "Show HN" where the main focus is to sell the app.
I agree with everything you say about the word "loop" and me being "too close to the product" and not knowing how to sell it. I will spend as much time as I can going following this and all the other advice on here to learn how to sell this thing. It's all new to me, but I am determined to learn it all.
You've got this, these are all problems we've all had before, and there are solutions to them ;) We will all be here to give feedback, commiserate, and help you succeed. You have a great attitude in this response. An ability to take honest (often unpleasant to hear) feedback and use it to improve your product and pitch is the single most important thing you can do for yourself. Keep on crushing problems and I look forward to your next showing!
Hate to be another person to do the +1 thing but this does sum up pretty much everything I feel. Especially the Z.
Also your HN post had a very big air of uncertainity, lack of confidence etc. If you want your product to succeed, you'll need a lot more confidence in it & yourself. Don't put yourself down like that. I agree there might be less choices up north than say London & SF. But at the same time, living costs are far lower. So it's swings & roundabouts - there's never an ideal situation. This stuff is hard - that's why everyone isn't doing it and making millions.
If you're Joel Spolsky you can release a piece of software with any name you care to choose and people will still take it seriously because you have earned the respect of your peers. Other people who don't have decades of experience producing exceptional software don't have the same luxury.
Fogbugz is a terrible name and if an unknown developer had released it there's a good chance too few people would have looked at it for it to get the necessary traction it needed to succeed. It really isn't an example of something people should follow.
FogBugz was released in Nov 2000. How big was Joel Spolsky then? (It's before my time.) It looks like Joel was hardly blogging when FogBugz was released ( http://joelonsoftware.com/backIssues.html )
To be fair, as early as 2004 he had this to say on the name:
"Yeah, it's not an ideal name... But the brand equity is already worth significantly more than the cost of having a yucky name... (There was a period for about 6 months when "Z" was all the rage. Antz, Dogz, and Atomz come to mind)."
Names don't matter if you have a good product, unless you create brand confusion (Windows Live Messenger, anyone?). I thought "Google" was the stupidest name, and I still don't find it attractive.
Seriously, I would kill the content on your website and replace it with what is in the Medium post. It's 50x clearer. I read your website copy like 3x and still had no idea what openloop is.
I hope whenever I submit something to HN that 1) someone cares enough to be this critical\constructive and 2) I am adult enough not to take it on the chin and not get sulky. I'm most worried about #2
I am the OP and I would hate it if I had a few "this is cool" comments and no constructive criticism. I really appreciate it. When I first read some of the harsher feedback on here, it did feel like a punch in the face - I won't lie ;-) But then I took a deep breath and read it again objectively and actually tried to take it in. And 99% of what's here is excellent feedback. I wasn't expecting any responses, honestly - I can't believe it! ;-)
I like Simple and I wish them success. I don't like them because of their fantastic app and website, or excellent human customer service, but because after many years of abuse at the hands of Bank of America I wanted a bank that does not aggressively pursue Non Interest Income (ie fees, usually overdraft) as a major source of revenue.
Simple states very clearly on their faq[0] page that they make money off of interest and interchange fees, not punitive and arguably immoral fees like those imposed by the large mainstreet banks. Head over to this reddit thread[1] from this morning that discusses what it's like to work for these banks: "[the customer who was mistakenly charged the fee] struggles from week to week with finances, and needs every dollar more than the rich customers who treat us like shit yet the managers kiss their asses. It wasn't the customers fault at all yet they have to suffer".
All of the large banks are ruthless predators on the weakest of our societies, gouging their customers with an ever evolving scheme of fees and debt incentives to ensnare, entrap and exsanguinate those who can least afford it.
They are involved in price fixing scandals of the highest order, are beyond the reach of the law no matter the transgression, and seem to hold the sum total of our shared societies in contempt. Apparently there is very little that can be done at this point, the horse as long since bolted, but at the bare minimum I'll be god damned if I give them a dime I don't have to. Simple enables me to bank as usual without continuing to participate in that abusive relationship, and for that, I like them.
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