nbarry | 11 years ago | on: San Francisco stops startups selling public parking spaces
nbarry's comments
nbarry | 11 years ago | on: Startup advice: cold recruiting
Hmm, good point. Maybe there's a sweet spot there where you give enough detail to explain what your company does and what you're looking for from the person you're reaching out to, but don't go too long. Like, maybe 1-2 sentences max. "Our company is seeking to disrupt X industry through disintermediation, and I thought you looked like the badass engineer who could help us take our user interface to the next level."
nbarry | 11 years ago | on: Why Founders Shouldn't Delegate Support Too Early
I'm a huge fan of delegation, though I think the author's points are all excellent. Here's how recommend doing both: Hire someone to process and review customer complaints. Give them very specific guidance about how they're to handle customer concerns. If they can solve the problem within some predetermined short amount of time (say, 20 minutes), they should solve it. If it will take significantly longer, then they should escalate it to someone who can probably solve it faster, and can provide a more remarkable support experience.
The support screener should also summarize all the different types of tickets we get into categories for executive review.
nbarry | 11 years ago | on: Startup advice: cold recruiting
> Don't explain what your company does. ... Google would never send someone an email saying "I work at Google, a search company in Mountain View which is organizing the world's information".
The Google comparison is a poor one, since Google is extraordinarily well known, and most start-ups aren't. And even they do describe the team each position is on, at least on its job postings.
If I were getting enough cold emails that I wanted to filter some of them out, I'd be likely to avoid emails that made me do work to research what a company does. A brief sentence about what they do, and why the recruiter/CEO/etc. thinks I'm a good match, would go a long way toward getting that coffee date.
nbarry | 11 years ago | on: Proterra, an Electric Bus Maker, Aims to Follow the Tesla Model
> Micheal Austin, a vice president at BYD America, praises Proterra’s designs but downplays any rivalry, calling the other company only “a competitor on some levels.”
He's right, and this is why Tesla recently opened up its patents for use by others. Sure, BYD and Proterra do compete for some cities that are ready to make the investment in electric buses. But both of them are mostly competing with cities that are likely to stick with the status quo, and their efforts to market their buses will help both of them by broadening the market.
nbarry | 11 years ago | on: Bannerman (YC S14) Delivers Bouncers On Demand
Yeah, even as I was writing the idea, I was thinking that it must be really hard to do well.
nbarry | 11 years ago | on: Bannerman (YC S14) Delivers Bouncers On Demand
> With its $35 per-hour, per-guard flat rate (paid after an event has gone on without a hitch), Bannerman is shooting right for the middle of those two markets.
Here's an interesting business idea for lovers of analysis and market research: Create a database of various industries, measuring especially these variables: 1. Cost of the service/good provided 2. Some very rough quantification of its value (NOT its cost) 3. The ease with which customers can obtain those services/goods; this includes how long it takes for the customer to obtain the services/goods.
Then, identify large gaps - places where there aren't many options at a certain price, or at a certain level of value, or where the ease of obtaining the services/goods is very high.
Sell subscriptions to this data to entrepreneurs looking to start or pivot companies.
nbarry | 11 years ago | on: The Pivot
It reminds me of Jim Collins' concept (not original to him, I know) of shooting lots of little bullets and seeing which one hits, rather than wasting gunpowder on one big cannonball before you're even sure you're aimed in the right direction.
Except he mostly used that concept to describe how companies decide which individual products or strategies to focus on, while the idea of a pivot is that you shift your entire company to do something else. (Reminds me of another Collins metaphor - it's important to get the right people on the bus first, and then you can decide together where to drive.)
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But opportunities like this exist all over the place. Crowdsourcing and coordination are great when they lead to new opportunities, but it kind of sucks that companies like this are out there coordinating for the sake of monopolizing some existing resource.