ganashaw's comments

I really enjoy the Eggplant podcast. Early episodes are Spelunky/roguelike focused, but they've branched out a ton since then. https://eggplant.show/

This is super insightful--thanks. You've listed a lot of things about the managerial track that are still achievable on an IC track. You've also listed something things that some may consider "downsides" and acknowledged that they are things that must be accepted on the manager's track (though they're not all downsides, I personally really enjoy [productive] meetings).

I'm curious what you perceive as the reasons _to_ go into management? What do you enjoy about it?

For me, the value in attending a "top" university is much more about the networking and "name recognition" on resumes, and the enormous boost that those factors offer you over the course of one's career, than it is about the actual coursework. Unfortunately (imo) if a recruiter is given two identical resumes but ones says MIT and one says State School, the MIT resume will almost always get preference for interviews, salary negotion, etc.

I went into massive debt attending CMU, when I could have probably gone to a perfectly good university for free, but I've seen first hand (and been told by recruiters) how much just having THAT university on my resume has affected my prospects, and so I still think it was worth it. That's not to mention the other experiences afforded by attending a world class university like research opportunities, internships, etc. which all sort of serve as a positive feedback loop for improving the prestige of the university and it's alumni.

This is great feedback! I definitely think it's a harder sell for someone who already has a system that works for them.

Thanks again for taking the time to respond. Happy new year!

Thanks for the feedback! In my view, these are some of the biggest advantages of Itinee over my previous spreadsheet planning:

- Visualize everything on a map. This is big for me just to help organize what days it makes the most sense to do things - Estimate travel costs (e.g. Ride sharing) based on distances between stops - Easily adjust number of attendees. Some costs are split regardless of how many people attend, like hotel rooms, while others are a fixed per person price, like event tickets - Ease of use for someone NOT familiar with spreadsheets. My wife couldn't replicate any of this in a spreadsheet, but she can use Itinee.

Some of the above may in fact, and probably is, possible with some fancy spreadsheet shenanigans, but the main point was to make the whole process more accessible.

I'd be really curious if the advantages I mentioned weren't apparent on the website or if they simply weren't, in your view, "enough" of an improvement over a spreadsheet to justify paying for it.

My grand vision is actually a "trip itinerary search engine" so people can search for "Barcelona for 2 people for $1000 or less" and get all the matching itineraries.

But yes, as you so rightly pointed out, such analytics is only possible with a user base, which I've been struggling to acquire (admittedly, I haven't tried very hard). A free model may be a good way to go to build that user base initially, and may be something I explore, but I didn't want to give something away if people WOULD pay for it.

One thing I've considered, if I do go down this route, is that free users' trips are public (or mostly, I would try to censor dates/residential locations) while premium users can make private trips or something like that.

Overall, I've gotten a lot of feedback on this thread to reconsider the pricing/monetization strategy, so it's definitely something I need to look at.

Yes! Budgeter here as well :) My YNAB subscription is well worth it, BUT I use YNAB at least weekly. That was a big struggle I had with coming up with a pricing model that made sense here--realistically, it seems like most/many people will only be actively using Itinee for relatively brief periods of time throughout the year, which, at least if I were the customer, would make me wary of long subscriptions.

As a developer/founder I absolutely would prefer regular subscriptions to sporadic one-offs, I just doubt(ed) if people would actually signup for that.

I certainly agree that transitioning to a subscription model would require lower prices to be feasible and may be sufficient to get people on board with "wasting" their subscription for 75% of the year.

As a tangent, I find that it's really hard to get this kind of feedback from real/potential customers (like yourself!) but such feedback is incredibly valuable (thank you!). I wonder if there's a market for some service where I could pay $100 for 3 people to go to my landing page, try my product (free of cost to them, obviously) and then be open to some conversation about their experience. It seems like there could be a market for that given the "Indie Hacker" boom. Maybe such a thing already exists.

Thanks for the catch! I updated the language to "...purchase a trip slot and editing access for as low as $10"

Your comment makes me wonder if it would be clearer to present things as "Trip slot + first month of editing access = $10" and "Each additional month of editing access = $5" or similar.

That could work! I'm curious what makes subscription models more attractive from your point of view. Is it just simpler to understand? It seems strictly less flexible than a pay-for-what you need model. I suppose in your example the advantage is that you can get a discount by paying for more up front which is a clear advantage for people who will take multiple trips in a year or are planning a trip far in advance.

Yeah, the issue I see with something like that is that realistically, someone could easily take several years to take 3 trips.. seems a bit tricky to convert free customers to paying customers.

Thanks for the feedback and well wishes!

Pretty much by waving my finger in the air :) I originally started with something subscription based, but it felt a bit inflexible. For example, if I offered 6mo subscriptions, people probably wouldn't purchase a subscription if they were planning a trip to take in the next month, because you're "wasting" 5mo.

Now, it could be that my prices are too high, but that was sort of my rationale--I thought it would be better to let people pay for what they need.

I think a freemium model could work, but at this point I don't think I have any real features that would meaningfully distinguish the free version from the paid version. I did consider limiting like the number of days your trip can be for "free" users--I might revisit this in the future.

Really appreciate the feedback!

Thanks for the feedback! Pricing is not my forte. My thought process was basically this:

- In general, people are probably only planning a single trip at a time (an exception might be if travel agents were to be interested)

- Based on that assumption, it came down to what resolution of access people would want. With the current model, 6 months of editing access comes down to $35. I could, equivalently, just charge $35 for 6mo of access, but in my head, I thought people would be more likely to actually give it a shot if the barrier to entry were cheaper (in this case $10).

So it could be that my actual price is just too high (i.e. $35/6mo of editing access is too much). I haven't gotten much feedback one way or another on this (though one could argue that the lack of purchases could be seen as pretty clear feedback). I've just read that founders tend to underprice their SaaS services, so I was wary of starting too low.

I spent about 6 months building Itinee (https://itinee.com) which is a trip planning app focused on being budget conscious. I built it because my wife and I love to travel but my assortment of spreadsheets was a little intimidating to her. I wanted a platform that let us both participate in the planning process. Unfortunately, due to COVID, people aren't traveling so I haven't really put any money into marketing it or done any more development on it. I might revisit it once things get back to normal. I don't plan to do much more development until I get user feedback, though

You mention remote, but the job description says the position is based in SF. Is this position only remote temporarily due to COVID, or is this a full-time remote position?

Would you mind sharing that problem? Always looking to improve my own interview questions.

I can't figure out why this isn't accepted as an answer for latch? Admittedly there's probably something simpler, but this seems to adhere to spec.. https://i.imgur.com/mnePQc7.png

As it happens my full-time job is working on our COLREGS path planning and collision avoidance :) Our primary focus at the moment are the rules concerning standing on/giving way with respect to other vessels. Some of the other rules, such as the one you mention, aren't being handled at the moment. However, we do have active projects working on the vision side of things to help get us closer to full compliance.

Most of our software roles (one of the biggest teams we're growing at the moment) are located in the U.S.! We'd be very interested to hear from you.

I work for a company that builds boats for many of the same goals in a more traditional form factor. The potential of autonomous marine vehicles is very high, and a very exciting field to be working in. https://www.asvglobal.com/

(If you're interested, we're hiring!)

Perhaps I was too general. A more accurate statement would be if more than 3-4 languages are listed without any distinction between languages you're good at and languages you've just used, then I become skeptical. And I said skeptical, not that I reject the resume outright. I just find that more often than not those candidates don't actually know more than one or two of those languages very well. Or worse, they don't know any of those language very well. (Not that this is a bad thing! We all have to start somewhere; but listing a lot of languages in such a situation seems dishonest from my point of view).