andrewcross's comments

My startup Goosechase switched to a 4 day week last summer and it's awesome.

The two easiest ways to find companies already doing a 4 day week would likely be: 1. Dedicated 4 day week job boards, such as 4 Day Week (https://4dayweek.io/). 2. Looking for articles highlighting companies with 4 day weeks, such as this piece from Angel (https://angel.co/job-collections/20-startups-with-4-day-work...).

GooseChase | Senior Full Stack Engineer | REMOTE: North American timezones | https://www.goosechase.com

GooseChase is a successfully bootstrapped web and mobile platform for creating and facilitating scavenger hunts. Through our website, organizers create custom "hunts" for anything from on-boarding new employees, touring museums, educating students and more! Participants can compete as teams or individuals to submit photo/video, text or GPS based missions through our native Android and iOS apps.

We've grown quite a lot this year and are looking to hire a Senior Full Stack Engineer that will take major ownership of our back-end going forward. We've historically been a Django monolith (React front-end), but are increasingly moving towards breaking that up into microservices (mostly with node) to better handle our growing engineering team and load.

Our posting can be found at https://www.goosechase.com/careers/full-stack-engineer/

If you love working on something fun, but challenging, we'd love for you to apply at [email protected], or email me directly at andrew[at]goosechase[dot]com.

Network effects are great...when you have them. But in the beginning you won't. That's why if you can provide value to an individual user without requiring network effects, it will make your life a lot easier.

In this case, if you get bloggers using your product, logging their trips, etc, you'll slowly build up your content. Once it's comprehensive enough for travellers to get value from it, you'll be able to build network effects from a much stronger position.

If I'm understanding correctly, you are hoping this will become a site where people come for travel inspiration (e.g. I'm thinking of a trip to Thailand, so I come to your site, see the trips the travel bloggers have put up and go through them). If that's correct, you're going to have a tremendously hard time getting this off the ground.

Why don't you just focus on the travel bloggers side to begin with? Specifically, I think there's a need for a Soundcloud-esque embeddable widget that people can put directly in their blogs (naturally linking back to you). THAT provides real value IMO. Most blogs are highly entertaining, but they rarely have mapped content - you can provide that.

From someone that's founded a travel marketplace & failed, avoid network effects in the beginning if at all possible. It's a whole other level of pain, that in your case at least, I don't think is needed.

I'm actually going backpacking for 3 months starting next week, so if you come out with a widget, I'm more than happy to use the beta versions and give you feedback.

+1 for being will to pay for a SaaS version of this.

Congrats on getting out there & making something!

The biggest request I have is for alternative rule-sets. The pools I typically participate in are a lot less involved - e.g. pick the winner & runner up for a each group and go from there. Going game-by-game with scores is too much for a lot of people.

Seconded. I think I'm going to make screenshot backups just to make sure.

This actually seems like something Airbnb would want to acquire. From what I've heard, setting the price is still one of the most painful parts of hosting. Having this available for all users by default would be a huge plus.

While it's always tough when one of your main competitive advantages is price, this is a smart move for them. Really good talking point to get people in the door and away from Eventbrite. Best of luck!

This:

“It seems like we're a great fit. I'm excited. Before we go any further exploring a potential deal I want to bring up that we're fully focused on building world class technology and on servicing and supporting our customers to massive success. What that means is that we're not investing in marketing and sales as heavily because our happy customers are referring us to others who could benefit from our product. Does that sound like a fair arrangement to you?”

What a great way to phrase the ask. Switches from you pressuring them for the referral to making them want to help.

I don't know about a lot of these, but I run a travel startup so I can comment about the travel agencies restriction.

Travel in general is seen as a high risk industry. Try going to a bank for a merchant account, tell them you run a travel company and watch their reaction. They don't really want you as a customer anymore. The risk profile is too high.

There's a couple main reasons for this.

One, there's a higher than normal chargeback rate in travel. Think about this, you get to your destination and find out that the online pictures of your hotel are nothing like reality. You feel like you've been scammed, but the owner refuses to give you a refund. You aren't left with a lot of options. But if you booked with your credit card, you can request a chargeback and go stay some place nicer.

This same idea can be applied to inclement weather, an inferior tour, etc. Your expectations are different than reality, you can't get a refund, so you request a chargeback.

Two, the average transaction size is travel is quite large. If I'm upset with my dinner at a restaurant, I might be out $20. If I'm upset with my hotel on a vacation, I might be out $500-$1,000. That's a big difference. I might be able to live with losing $20, but definitely not $500+. So I go through the hassle of a chargeback since the dollar amount makes it worth it.

Between the two of these reasons, you end up with a high risk industry.

I'd imagine all the other industries that are prohibited have similar risk profiles.

You don't even have to wait for the signup either - you can often get them on the phone after a well-written cold email. I run a marketplace for trips planned by locals (Tripzaar.com), and when we are recruiting locals, we try and get them on a call before they even sign up. Then once we get on a call, we'll actually listen to their problems, offer to help, then manually create their account for them. Not only does this get more people onto the site, but we get a considerably more loyal community as well. I've heard this "sign them up yourself" strategy work very well for quite a few other companies too.

It definitely won't scale, but we'd rather have a few people who really buy in than thousands who wouldn't feel comfortable dropping us a line with suggestions.

Couchsurfing is fantastic. It's also very variable. Many people are willing to pay for a consistent, high-quality experience.

I fully agree with you. If you aren't being productive, you aren't working. The number of hours isn't a badge of honor, but the number of productive hours is.

Fair question.

For me, I'm going for a home run because I think it will allow me to have the biggest impact on the world. I was living in Chile for 6 months last year and have seen what my company (a p2p marketplace for trips planned by locals) could do globally. That worldwide impact is the driving force.

What it isn't is a money or peer pressure play. My first startup is actually set to double in revenue this year (to low-mid 6 figures) and I barely touch it. The money thing will come, whether I go for a home run or not.

I've tried it. It's really friggin cool. (My team's desks are right next to their's)

Some quick feedback. I'll be blunt, but don't take it the wrong way:

1) Show a nice big picture of grapes or wine or both on your home screen. This alone will boost the appearance tenfold.

2) Way too much explaining how it works. I don't really care if it's social or there's thumbs. Just get me wishing I had a glass of wine now.

3) Don't make me sign up to experience the value. The best call to action I can think of is to have me put in a wine I like and you show me a whole bunch of wines you think I would also like. No need to signup for that.

As another anecdote, despite having two technical co-founders for my first startup, I taught myself how to code. I consider it the best move I've made in the last 5 years.

Now on my 2nd startup, my highly technical co-founder recently left. If I hadn't learned how to code, I'd be in full panic mode right now. Going from "the business guy" a couple years ago to being able to build an MVP is huge.

One thing I'd love to see is an improvement in personal analytics. Fitbit is a good start, but the data is only useful up to a certain point.

+1 to Pete's answer.

Since you are technical & have social skills, you might want to focus on trying out "hybrid" roles (e.g. growth hacker).