I like imagining the other end of this. Walmart notices guy starting to gain some traction with a competitor. They use their private army to "convict" him and hold him prisoner. Which private army fights to get him free?
In order for Walmart to do business within a jurisdiction and/or with a certain party, it would have to agree a priori to certain requirements: to use certain courts or arbitrators, and for the rulings reached by said parties to be enforceable by certain armed groups.
Thus the private army which fights to free him would be agreed to beforehand.
And presumably Walmart would lose access to some of their markets as a result, and be fined, and/or and/or etc.
> In order for Walmart to do business within a jurisdiction and/or with a certain party, it would have to agree a priori to certain requirements
Agree with who exactly about those requirements?
The term "jurisdiction" itself implies some governing entity from which to exercise jurisdiction.
I'll assume you mean "the local commune", and when Wal-Mart ignores the rulings of the local commune and opens a shop anyways, what is the commune going to do about it?
Eject them by force you say from the local commune's militia? Wal-Mart will have a bigger army, because they can pay for it.
Eject them by force with a coalition of regional militias perhaps? That might work, but a regional coalition of actors with the right to use force isn't an anarchist commune, it's a government.
We can think of problematic occurrences in every social system.
For example:
If you've got this one 'government' controlling everything, what happens if it just up and decides to start enslaving tens of thousands of people and sending them to die in horrific trench warfare? Who's going to stop this 'government' from doing that?
What if this 'government' starts outlawing certain plants and/or alcohol, and punishing people harshly for using them? Who's going to stop the 'government' from doing that?
What if this 'government' enacts racially discriminatory laws?
> We can think of problematic occurrences in every social system.
Don't turn the question around.
And don't forget that the one proposing to change the status quo is the one with the responsibility to prove that their proposed change is better, not simply "just as bad".
Basically anything around 8% is considered very good. We spent ALOT of time optimizing our sign up flow. We did hundreds of usability tests. I think the key was making it clear what the product would do and why they needed to complete each step. We tweaked language until nobody in a usability test seemed confuse. We removed any step that people didn't actually need.
We continue to focus on this. Even as we've grown we've maintained a free sign up rate of 15%
I think it depends on your business model and audience. As a b2c product, any press is good obviously. However, I think it's more important to understand who your audience is and how to relay your story to them in a way that's digestible and understandable.
I think this was the key takeaway. Making a product people want is the first step. The second step is boiling it down into a message people quickly understand. If we described our product as "DIY SEO tools to improve your personal SERPS" people would quickly overlook it. However, by emphasizing the story/benefits, people see how it relates to their life. "Improve what shows up when employers, clients or even dates Google your name". That's way easier to understand
My name is Patrick, I'm the CoFounder of BrandYourself and I'm the one who made this presentation. I read HackerNews everyday, and was literally knocked off my chair when I saw my own presentation on the front page. Thank you
I've gotten some great feedback. Some of you have asked some great questions so I'm going through now to answer as many of them as possible.
In the meantime, some of you mentioned this would be more consumable in a blog post. Here's a link to the original blog post I wrote about this--it actually includes a lot more data
I heard Pete's story on NPR a while back and how it helped your company grow. It stuck out since when the reporter tried to verify the story they found no results. The reporter comes short of accusing you or your co-founder of telling a fake story to sell a product. I'd like to hear you or Pete's take on this story (URL below).
Thanks man. I remember that interview (it was a headache). The interviewer seemed to have an agenda going in. Before the interview he kept saying he thought it was "foolish that people would use Google to research people in the first place" and that "nobody should believe Google results anyways".
When Pete was in college there were several criminals who all shared his name and his results were a mess. One of them included a story about someone suspected of dealing drugs. At the time we never thought to save or bookmark those results because we had no idea we'd be starting a company and being interviewed by NPR years later.
We couldn't find an exact article about a drug dealer (perhaps it actually was taken down). We WERE able to show him several other results with about criminals with his name. We linked him to them. When he asked us about it, we told him we couldn't find it, but we offered to redo the interview and be less specific "Pete was being mistaken for criminals with the same name" since we could show results for that.
In his article he claims we simply did not respond to these requests. When I asked him about it afterwards he apologized and said "he must have missed that email". He didn't update the story though. It seems like he wanted to tell a story about how online reputation management helps people permeate lies and that's why you shouldn't trust Google.
All that said, we learned a valuable lesson. We no longer use the term "drug dealer" we use "criminals" and we link to specific articles we're still able to find so people can't question the validity
If you were having trouble finding articles, what's with the Google screen grab on slide 6? Was this something you created specifically for the slides? If that is the case, showing a fabricated screen grab without noting it as such seems a bit disingenuous. It's a bit like selling a diet with a doctored "before" picture.
I agree, it is disingenuous, especially in this context. That slide was specifically made for an in-person presentation that was later posted online (it was posted by somebody else about a year ago). For the sake of a presentation, we thought that image got the point across much better than putting two hyperlinks on the screen. It was basically a design decision. In retrospect we should have put a disclaimer on the image since it looks so realistic, but we honestly had no idea the presentation would live beyond the room I spoke to. That was a mistake
We used to use a similar type image on our about page, but for the same purpose now only link to exact articles or results we can still find. https://brandyourself.com/info/about.
Thank you for answering my question. I was afraid you'd skip it if there was truth in what NPR had presented.
I'm probably not the only person who felt that you and Pete are misleading people with the story of Pete's online profile after that interview. In some ways it may have done more harm than good overall.
Have you done anything since then to try and get NPR to correct or update the article?
Well it was interesting. He asked us if we had a link to the drug dealer article. We looked and couldn't find one. I was in contact with him the whole time, sent him links to other criminal results and even offered to do the interview over and be less specific and say "criminal" instead of "drug dealer". I told him the merits of the story were still true, we could still show that Pete shared google results with a criminal, and we even put him in touch with the person who worked at the company who found the results. Instead he posted the article implying it might not be true, and said when he asked us about it "we went silent". I followed up with him after and he said that he didn't seem my emails (even though he answered some of them)...
We were worried that people would feel the same way, but in general we only got good responses from the interview. We signed a lot of people up, too.
That said we've been careful to be much more specific in the future. We don't want to mislead people especially since it could hurt our brand. The truth is, Pete's results were a mess and it was hurting him. He shared a name with several criminals. There really was a drug-related article about a Pete Kistler but we can't find it (we never thought to keep it)--so now we only say "criminals" and link to the articles we HAVE found
