dstik's comments

dstik | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: Best way to get into blockchain development?

Typing from phone but here are some resources that really helped me:

Blockchain Fundamentals: https://github.com/ethereumbook/ethereumbook

Practical Solidity: https://solidity-by-example.org/

Crypto Zombies is an amazing beginner step by step course to build a blockchain game: https://cryptozombies.io/

Finally, ethernaut is a series of increasingly difficult security challenges to learn about risks, exploits, info sec for blockchain dev: https://ethernaut.openzeppelin.com/

Oh, and any Patrick Collins tutorial video on YouTube (solidity, chainlink, hardhat, truffle, brownie, so much more)

dstik | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: What (side-)project are you working on?

We're building Circles for Zoom (https://www.circlesforzoom.com) - to give you more control over your Zoom calls.

It's a fully native MacOS app (swift, not electron/etc) built on top of the Zoom SDK that transforms meeting participants into moveable/resizable circles on your screen and offers additional power tools to get your desktop back and have more control over your meeting experience.

It's just two of us now, working as fast as we can and listening to user feedback to drive priorities on our roadmap.

It's free to use - we would love to hear feedback from anyone willing to give it a shot!

dstik | 5 years ago | on: How can I send text messages (SMS) to a list without coding?

If you're truly looking for no-code, check out:

  - ClickSendSMS (https://www.clicksend.com)
  - EZTexting (https://www.eztexting.com)
They also have Zapier integrations so you can do more no-code stuff.

Also, Zapier itself has a outgoing SMS offering (cannot receive sms messages) in case that's helpful as well.

dstik | 6 years ago | on: Show HN: Mobile-optimized video platform to enhance SMS

We’re available everywhere! To be clear, we don’t send sms messages. We provide the video platform (creation tools, video player, data + apis) that you use to enhance the sms messages you’re already sending from your phone or another service

dstik | 6 years ago | on: Show HN: Mobile-optimized video platform to enhance SMS

Hey HN, we’ve built a mobile-first video platform designed to be used in conjunction with your mobile messaging outreach (like SMS, FB messenger, etc). It’s web-based (no downloads), designed to load fast, offer interactivity, along with APIs + webhooks.

We’ve finally released a free tier to give more people the chance to leverage our platform. We’d love to hear and incorporate your feedback as we continue to build features and evolve the product!

dstik | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: How do you approach enterprise sales in an unfamiliar industry?

The best way to start is by tapping your networks (personal, professional, online communities) for conversations. Your first step should be trying to understand how the industry works, what types of partnerships exist (and what the value exchange is for both parties), and understanding the responsibilities of folks with different job titles in that industry.

Start with a single conversation with anyone you know who's remotely related to that industry (preferably someone in the industry, if you can). Look for second degree connections on LinkedIn to folks at companies in that industry and ask your mutual connection for an introduction. Treat these meetings as informational interviews where your goal is to soak up as much knowledge and info as possible - be curious, ask a lot of questions, and listen more than you speak. Always end the conversations by asking for other introductions to people they think might be relevant or helpful.

By the time you've finally understood the landscape, you've already started building your network in the space. You've likely been building your product during this time - probably by integrating with non-paywall publishers and smaller news outlets. Work your way into the smallest paywalled news source first and start having conversations about the value prop with them and why a partnership with you will be beneficial to them. From there work your way up to the bigger guys. Remember that it will take many conversations and you're building relationships - deals like this are not closed overnight.

Hope this helps - good luck!

dstik | 6 years ago | on: Show HN: I'm building a system that automates onboarding

Great work - this looks very cool. We'd be very interested in exploring it. We started looking into https://www.appcues.com/ but their pricing seems prohibitively expensive. They have a nice Chrome extension that allows nontechnical folks to easily create/customize the onboarding/tooltips for your app -- curious how your snippet will guide users through creation.

Really excited for you!

dstik | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: Was integrating with Zapier worth the time/effort?

If your question is whether being part of the Zapier integration catalog will drive new customers / business, then I wouldn't count on it being a major growth channel. Though, being listed will serve as additional credibility and will likely have branding and SEO benefits for you.

On the other hand, we found that building a Zapier integration made customer on-boarding faster and smoother, which helped to speed up our overall sales processes. While slightly different from your use-case, our product requires an API integration, so allowing customers to integrate via Zapier instead of requiring development effort to support our APIs has reduced the cost, time/conversations, and resources necessary for our customers to work with us. It also reduces technical support requests.

Finally, seconding what lpellegr said, Zapier has now introduced Partner Tiers, meaning that you need to get your own users before you can graduate to a listing level of beta and then even more users before you get other benefits like a blog post and potentially featured status.

Overall, I'd look at whether these benefits are worth the engineering effort. If your main goal/priority is marketing then there may be other exciting growth/marketing opportunities that would be a better use of time with better ROI. Hope this is helpful.

dstik | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: Burnout App Feedback

I know you're only asking about the name but wanted to share some other helpful feedback as well.

I usually worry about all-in-one tools being a combination of the most popular features of each specific tool but not being powerful enough to perform the job of said tool. To mitigate this, I think having full pages breaking down each of those sections (instead of just paragraph sections) would be helpful. I like these short summaries, but additionally linking out to full sub-product detail pages would be very helpful. I wonder how each of these sub-products compare to their full product alternatives and don't quite understand from the landing page how interconnected they all are in order to make me willing to forego certain features/functionality for the sake of data organization.

As an example: We use Pipedrive as our CRM - it has concepts like: User ACL, Deals, Contacts, Organizations, Activities, etc. It offers visual workflow automation, a robust API, and advanced filtering searching capabilities. I'd like to see all of the features I'd get with Burnout's CRM to help me evaluate the product before I'd consider switching.

Regarding the name: personally, as a founder/engineer, when I hear the term burnout I think of the negative mental/physical/emotional state that I (and friends/teammates) have experienced in the past - so the name puts me off. A suggestion could be something like (warning: bad ideas alert): Startup (another play on words - since this guides you through starting up) or Blueprint.

It looks like you've built a ton of product here and I'm excited to see a live demo and check it out myself.

dstik | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: Do you still subscribe to any (printed) computing magazines?

So happy to see other 2600 subscribers in here. This is the only print magazine I subscribe to. I also don't read the entire thing but it's always a combination of interesting perspectives, articles by true enthusiasts hacking around for fun/exploration, and nostalgia.

Fun fact: they published an article I wrote on hacking AIM profiles + away messages back when I was in high school.

dstik | 7 years ago | on: Show HN: Standup tool that works like Snapchat stories for remote teams

Hey bdagnino, we definitely need to work on that :)

Tape is a video-based communication tool for remote teams using the story-format for consumption. Starting a tape is as easy as sending a snap (with a subject line), replies are threaded inline (think email meets stories) which results in clearer communication and better team chemistry as you get more "face-time" with your remote colleagues.

Currently, organizations with remote teams use Tape for elements of agile (stand up, retrospective, sprint planning) as well as meeting replacement (time shifting meetings to asynchronous video instead of struggling to coordinate live calls across time-zones) and for overall communication. It is deeply integrated into Slack which fits into most workflows.

I'd love to chat more about how we can help your team! (dave [at] trytape.com)

dstik | 7 years ago | on: Show HN: Watercooler Questions – super effective team building (just 30 sec/wk)

Author here. Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions…

Our team built a visual communication tool (think video stories for workplace communication) and one of the surprisingly effective ways one of our pilot customers began using the tool was as a quick team builder. Someone would send out a really simple question over video and teammates would respond on Tape. Simple questions like “What was the last country you visited” turned into easy ways for people to discover they had overlapping interests/experiences.

The experience was way more effective than expensive happy hours or offsites which are nice but generally just let friends at work hangout with each other rather than building new connections. The only problem was it required everyone to download our mobile app (https://www.trytape.com/app) and someone had to come up with a question every week. Because of that, we decided to devote a quick sprint to productizing the interaction and make it dead simple for any team to take part in the program.

Watercooler Questions:

  - No app installation required (done 100% through email/web)
  - Fully automated (we send your team a new question every week)
  - Super effective and time efficient (Spend just 30 sec a week answering a question and learn more about your teammates)
Check out a fun example here: https://www.trytape.com/t/E1efYE42xr10

Looking forward to on-boarding more teams and continuing to iterate on it. Excited to hear feedback!

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