johnmax's comments

Hey, we are a startup in Germany. When are you going to come to Germany/Europe?

Great, thanks for the numbers and the advice.

Will definitely need to check this out.

I come from the mobile world, and my experience is, from myself and others, that cross-platform solutions always brought more pain than joy.

The latter solutions were great in theory, but created huge problems, when a little bit of a custom behaviour had to be implemented, maybe dependent on the target platform.

Also, when developing natively, there seems to be much more usable open-source code.

Wow, AutoHotkey looks cool - maybe it is nice for doing a first prototype.

Yes, I would check the focused windows, but also would take screenshots to evaluate (with OCR/NLP) whether the email you are writing really relates to your todos.

I would not store those data, neither locally, nor transmit them to my servers, as I am very concerned about security (if my servers get hacked, then I don't want to have anything sensitive on them).

Yes, it's a good point to do such market research. Will need to carefully structure the ads, to not skew the results (e.g. because users from one platform are cheaper per click, and thus will be preferred by Facebook)

Thanks a lot for the numbers.

Do you have any view on whether those percentages still hold, if you only look at (e.g.) startup employees or freelancers or other customer groups, which may probably like such productivity apps?

Interesting - I didn't know about that possibility. Thank you!

Yes, I totally agree, I would first build it for me and work with it.

Right now I use a Mac, but I have used also Windows in the past, and - if I decided to code in Windows - then would switch all my work to a Windows machine, too.

Everything I do is pretty portable between those two platforms, so I don't have any problems with switching between the two.

Thanks a lot for your feedback - eventually, if it is successful, I would launch it for all possible platforms.

So, getting to paying users is not a priority for me at the beginning.

Getting to heavy users definitely is, and discoverability may be better on the Apple App Store I guess, though eventually I would like the product to be so good, that it also gets word-of-mouth attention.

very true, need a study which shows which activities/rules are really effective, including people-were-able-to-stick-to-them

If there was a method to fight such abusive patent trolls, I would immediately donate!

It is the exploitation of a bug in the government source code, and it should be fixed..

I would add that the founder stories we read about are, even if true, only the 5% which turned interesting.

95% may have been boring failures

when i hired product managers, the most critical point I looked at was “building something that users love”. If you can prove this, you are ahead of average (of course you also need some standard stuff, including communication skills, but those are more common).

the above is related to intelligence (understanding activity numbers) and emotional intelligence (understanding the user).

thus, it would be good if you can polish up your skills/presentation of yourself in that area

if we followed your reasoning, you are able to provide anything illegal at a website, simply by hosting it in a country which you dont really target (eg isle of man).

thus, courts must be able to ask for what they did in the case of gutenberg.

by the way i dont see the big problem, except if the fines were big (maybe they were like only 200 usd)

hn

personal taste: i am missing reading about the root cause of the problem in the first paragraph. have spent 5 minutes reading and nothing yet.. stopped altogether

I was in a similar situation:

(1) I did one thing at a time, based by a tutorial which involves exercises (eg coursera princeton blockchain or coursera andrew ng machine learning). you must do complete exercises, otherwise you forget so quickly

(2) I overestimated the value of such learning: Usually you can only scratch the surface, and forget it after a time. This made me reevaluate the value of such endaveaors. I would rather go now with learning something that I will use daily or at least weekly on the job

couldnt agree more. i have had several big deals in the pipeline, one of which i closed.

in retrospect the effort wasnt worth it. the deal consumed many months of our focus and work (plus as a bonus a neverending worry on our minds, because of continuous small requests), during which we werent able to advance our product.

at the end of the day, it is all about creating a great product, which will then sell itself.

in contrast to that, closing a big deal has often more to do with 1-2 senior people at a big company thinking that they need this product for their customers. those senior people may be wrong, because they dont have a good feel about what new technology is attractive to people. and the kicker: no matter how big the deal, once no benefits materialize for the big company, they will kill the cooperation quickly (and usually have ensured enough fineprint to be able to do so).

my summary: there is no free lunch :)