I was pleasantly surprised to wake up to a HN post on Miami!
I find the tech scene pretty miserable here but then again I've worked from home for almost 10 years and I'm terrible at networking events. So it could just be my self-imposed social prison! I live further south (Pinecrest), a little further away from our "tech hubs" in downtown and midtown.
Good point. I've been dying to have a reason to use http://www.powtoon.com for videos, maybe it's a good time to try it.
I received a request for a multi-user license, so this is definitely tripping up others. I'll create some volume discounts and make that clearer before the checkout process.
If anyone would like to give it a try use the coupon code HACKERNEWS at checkout for a free download.
Sorry - not trying to question your business sense but powtoon.com just doesn't seem like a fit for what you have IMO. Just download Camtasia, get a decent headset mic, and do some screenshot videos that show people how quick/easy/etc. If nothing else, it will be a good exercise for you. "I have four minutes. How can I create interest during that four minutes?" Notice that I sad "create interest", not "cram every feature possible into four minutes" (which is what a lot of first timers try to do).
Once you create interest, then what? During the video creation/planning stages, write down any questions you think people will have and write (and edit/rewrite/check for typos) succinct answers. Make an FAQ and put it up there. Don't subdomain that - put that on your domain.
Next, take your best and most logical questions people will have and craft a landing page around that + your selling text. This is what landing page design and conversions are all about. You start out with an idea ("I need a video"), and one month of hard work later, you have an amazing site that starts really bringing in the traffic (and the traffic turns into money). Once you do that, start running some Google AdWords with targeting the SSRS keywords.
It's your product - no one knows it better - and you should be able to do a good video on it. Upload the vid to YouTube and embed it on your site. If you don't like YouTube, buy a sub to Vimeo for $60 and embed it using Vimeo (no ads). You can do a lot on Vimeo that isn't available on Youtube (search the web for that).
I like it - looks cool. I'd love to see it succeed. If you do ultimately decide to open source it, I'm sure the CodePlex community would dig it. Maybe you could put a trial/limited version up there that includes a nag/ad/etc for the full version. I don't know their TOS though so maybe that's not a good suggestion.
Thanks. I was putting the editor front and center, but you are right, perhaps the templates themselves can provide more value. I think I'm going to go further than bigger screenshots and let them download sample reports in .pdf generated straight from SSRS using my templates.
I've been out of the security space for a while but what I would love to see (and perhaps it already exists) is a threat "counter" for every authenticated user on my network. Data could be fed from various sources IDS and audit logs and actions like simultaneous logins, port scans or attempts to access files and apps that the user doesn't have access to would increase their threat counter. You could add weight to events e.g someone from marketing tryign to access a SQL server, router, or RDP to an accounting server, etc. Unauthenticated hits could be associated with an anonymous user. Once the entity has reached a certain threshold an analyst is alerted to investigate. You could even tie this to the support center - "Hello Mr. Rogers, I see you're having trouble logging on to the reporting site, would you like us to reset your password?"
I forget the term, but there is a similar value assigned to users for marketing purposes which is sourced from a variety of systems. The higher the value, the more likely the person would be interested in converting/making a purchase. Something similar surely exists for security purposes. With that said, the last thing you mentioned must be used with great caution, as it could easily be exploited.
I've been a long time eBay user and have also had issues over the past year with a couple of unpaid items and having to relist. The annoying part was not being able to give the buyer negative feedback, allowing him/her to waste someone else's time.
What about them linking your ID to Facebook for new users without let's say 10 feedback?
The requested solution is to manage the warranty repair order process and related parts inventories at multiple 3rd party authorized service centers for a manufacturer.
My (possibly naive) idea is to build a re-usable solution that is something like a desk.com CRM app with an inventory module and the ability manage pre-defined services.
Target market? Could be another manufacturer like my client, or service/repair centers by themselves.
There are lots of GREAT CRM/support services: desk.com and zendesk.com just to name a couple. It doesn't seem like I can tie parts to their support cases for the inventory management aspect of the solution.
If I can make the workflow flexible enough to cover different cases this could be even be extended to work as a field service tool by later adding a scheduling module and a maps/routing module for field technicians.
Letting them pay for development and keeping the IP would be the best of both worlds and I should try for that. If it's not an option my thinking was I get free domain knowledge via access to their employees and business processes and a baked in customer for the saas. I have plenty of Saas ideas with neither of the two where I could possibly be completely wasting my time.
Your client just wants their business problem solved. If they are a reasonable client, unless they made it very clear to you up front, they do not want to be in the business of designing, implementing, testing, distributing, supporting, and maintaining supply chain management applications.
They want order management capabilities they don't have. They want to get those capabilities without hiring 1-3 more full-time people, each at a fully loaded cost of between $120-250k, all of them with ramp-up time and each with a 33+% chance of not working out.
Solve their business problem, collect your rate, and feel comfortable that you've generated a win-win. Get your contracts reviewed by a lawyer (you should keep a lawyer on hot standby for contract review all the time) and make sure that you retain IP. There are lots of different structures that accomplish that.
It is a good thing that after completing this engagement, you will be well positioned to offer this service to a next client, and a next, and even "all" the clients at scale using a SaaS offering. It's what makes you a valuable consultant. You should not be entertaining the idea of giving your services away simply to capture the side effect of getting better at delivering supply chain products afterwards.
Incidentally: something that I am continuously learning the hard way, even as I tell myself every damn time that I know this, but then proceed to make exactly the same mistake again and again: free has a negative signaling value in consulting. Don't do free. Free is terrible. It scares buyers, generates more uncertainty than it dispels, and it sets you up to fail.
By all means, help people out gratis, do favors, be accessible. But when your client needs something done, put a price tag on it or pass the work up.
You're both right. I will make it clear I want to retain the IP while offering them a permanent license with a maintenance contract. That, and have a lawyer write it up.
The thing is I always want to retain IP when contracting out work, but that's because I'm always thinking about re-using or re-selling the work. I've been working on my own projects so long that I wasn't thinking about this from the customer's POV. They are not in the software business and just need their problem solved.
I love the Stripe service and use it anytime I have the need for accepting CC payments. However, as a consumer, I see myself choosing the Paypal option for the sole reason that I only have to type in a password vs. taking out my credit card. Its the same reason I love buying items from Amazon. Any alternative to Paypal has to make the buying process just as easy.
Thanks for making me realize I've been using life expectancy tables incorrectly for most of my life.
One comment regarding the yearly progress of the cohort rate. I would think this would fluctuate with significant medical advances (e.g. the first few years that bypass surgery/artificial hearts started to be used). I can't see how medical progression is perfectly linear at 1.0%/year.
I think you're overestimating the number of people who benefit from even a major advance.
In the UK (population 70 million), 28,000 heart bypass operations happen per year. The number of people who will have one is in the low single digits as a percentage of the population.
Even for those people who do have one there is no guarantee that it will have a significant impact on their lives. Yes for some it will but for others it's only reduced one possible cause of death and a lot of the behaviours that lead to heart problems also lead to, say cancer, or diabetes, or liver failure, or something else that will cut your life short.
Then compare that to the thousands of small improvements.
I can see it might not be constant over an extended period, but I don't think there are many, if any, things that would cause a significant spike.
> I can see it might not be constant over an extended period, but I don't think there are many, if any, things that would cause a significant spike.
While it's hard to predict, I personally wouldn't bet against a game changing spike in the coming decades. It's only very recently that medicine has started riding Moore's law. Robotics and miniaturization are speeding up basic research by orders of magnitude.
I don't think it's unreasonable to say that biology has achieved more in the past two decades than in all preceding history. And there's no sign that the exponential is running out.
Granted, there may be fundamental limits that we don't appreciate yet. That's the whole draw of science, we simply don't know.
Interestingly I think the one thing that would cause a spike happened outside the last two decades - the discovery / development of antibiotics.
You may be right but there will still be bottlenecks in the process around patient trials and the more "manual" stages of any treatment.
I think the next big improvement will likely not register on life expectancy because it will be in response to a specific problem. The next generation of anti-biotics for instance will have a massive impact but will likely only cancel out the negative impact of drug-resistant strains of bacteria.
It's not perfectly linear in the short term, though what tends to happen is a longer-term cyclical effect rather than spikes.
This makes sense - medical advances won't be widely adopted immediately, then there will be a gradual acceleration of adoption (and improvement rate) once its benefits are proven and costs come down, and then no further contribution to improvements once wide adoption is the norm.
What you also tend to see is that advances affect improvements by year of birth more prominently than by year of discovery. In the UK we have a 'golden cohort' for example, which you could Google for more info.
Spikes do tend to occur during and after big causes of death (spanish flu, world wars) as the improvement rate drops sharply and then recovers again.
I find the tech scene pretty miserable here but then again I've worked from home for almost 10 years and I'm terrible at networking events. So it could just be my self-imposed social prison! I live further south (Pinecrest), a little further away from our "tech hubs" in downtown and midtown.
If you're in Miami and are looking for any events, Startup Digest does a good job of showing you what's happening each week: https://www.startupdigest.com/digests/miami
I'd love to meet some HN minded brethren though.. Maybe we should try and do an HN Meetup, anyone else interested?
Shoot me an email.