bmr | 11 years ago | on: The Lawyer’s Apprentice: How to Learn the Law Without Law School
bmr's comments
bmr | 11 years ago | on: An Update on Aereo
I don't think the holding turned on the number of antennae at all. Nor is oral argument very important in appellate practice.
bmr | 13 years ago | on: The last day
This thread has turned me off HN for st least six months.
bmr | 13 years ago | on: The Next Big Consumer Application Will Possibly Not Come From An Accelerator
1957: Future NBA superstars are unlikely to be black.
bmr | 13 years ago | on: One of Apple’s Best Ideas Ever — Made Worse
Sometimes I wonder if we should all just take a walk outside.
bmr | 15 years ago | on: Anatomy of long sales letter
We laugh at people "on the lower half of the bell curve" who use the "length equals strength" heuristic to evaluate long-form letters, but the same thing happens in these comments all the time.
bmr | 15 years ago | on: How to find a technical co-founder
Three months into my own (exhilarating) journey, I think the best answer may be to become one yourself.
bmr | 15 years ago | on: Towards Better Online Dating
I wrote about a grubwith.us-esque dating site in an Ask HN submission a little over a year ago.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=878657
The challenge with this model is that extracting money from users requires repeated action on their part. That subscription money is so much easier. With an average account life of six months, match.com gets about $180 per paid user.
If you went with a Groupon-like model for a site that revolved around sending people on dates, and assuming you could make about $10 on $20ish dates, each user would have to get out there 18 times in order for you to beat the subscription model.
I still think there could be a big opportunity in a site like this, but it's not hard to see why the incumbents hang onto their subscription models for dear life.
bmr | 15 years ago | on: 4-Hour Profitable Project: Viral Marketing Explained
Sure, I was just curious if paid traffic could have been profitable for you. With $8 in profit per shirt and a conversion rate of 0.5%, it looks like anything over $0.04 per click would have resulted in a loss.
Your site was gorgeous, and the idea was strong. Amazing how hard it is to push people to action.
bmr | 15 years ago | on: 4-Hour Profitable Project: Viral Marketing Explained
I seem to remember you saying you had a new visitor every 4.5 seconds for 48 hours (can't find it again though). That works out to about 38,000 visitors.
So the conversion rate was 200/38000 = 0.5%? Or am I missing something?
bmr | 15 years ago | on: Ask HN: What kind of personal financial investment do you do?
I've seen it mentioned here a few times, but if you haven't heard of the permanent portfolio, check it out here:
http://crawlingroad.com/blog/2008/12/22/permanent-portfolio-...
bmr | 15 years ago | on: Tell HN: The 4-Hour (Profitable) Startup - How I Did It
Thanks for being open. I think the most interesting part will be about how many hits you got and what kind of conversion rate you were seeing.
Some of my personal curiosities: How many people abandoned the purchase when confronted with the PayPal form? Do you think you could have been profitable with paid customer acquisition methods (like geo-targeted display ads), or would that have eaten into your profit too much?
bmr | 15 years ago | on: The Groupon dirty secret
Groupon's real "dirty secret" is that they've brilliantly navigated the seedy world of affiliate marketing. As far as I know, Groupon uses the same affiliate networks as Acai scam artists (as opposed to say, building their own a la Amazon) and is (was?) willing to pay several dollars for a single email address.
How they managed that is the real secret and I would be extremely interested in that story.
bmr | 15 years ago | on: Things Real People Don't Say About Advertising
Maybe not, but those things may still wield pretty heavy influence. Advertising is a strange world of subconscious desires and difficult-to-rationalize preferences (colors and shapes of buttons, for example).
bmr | 15 years ago | on: US Patent system so dysfunctional you can patent a stick from a tree
Obligatory exercise your cat with a laser pointer patent:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5443036.html
This was always included on the first day of any patent class in law school.
bmr | 15 years ago | on: Register a Business Today
My unused CA S-Corp has been the bane of my existence lately. From the $800 fee to the documentation required to stay in good standing (small, but easy to forget when the company does nothing), it's more pain than it's worth.
If you're someone with lots of ideas and lots of peaks of excitement, it actually might better to postpone incorporation until you can't responsibly continue without some sort of limited liability.
bmr | 15 years ago | on: Copyright troll lawsuit blows up in face of Righthaven
Grellas, any idea how a "SLAPP-back" suit would fare for any of these defendants?
bmr | 15 years ago | on: The curse of being a gifted child
One curse of gifted children is that their work life is significantly more "regular" than their academic achievements. Even if they become doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. there will be plenty of people with the exact same title - many of whom were not similarly gifted.
I imagine there's quite a bit of worry that they should be doing something greater.
bmr | 15 years ago | on: Dear Foursquare, Gowalla: Please Let’s Stop Pretending This Is Fun
In their early days, they were paying affiliates $2 per email submit.
bmr | 15 years ago | on: Get Out of The Building – And Win $50,000
Those first three paragraphs make up one of the best explanations of entrepreneurship I've ever read.
page 1
If you aspire to BigLaw this will never get you there, but if you want to be a consumer-facing plaintiffs' lawyer (where the reality is that well-executed advertising probably beats a stellar education anyway) this might be a wise move.