redfalcon6's comments

I have one of these houses. Just built it and moved in. Save time and increase quality. Dried in with insulated walls / windows in 4 days!

Price is still an issue.

Part of the reason is that we pay no penalty for crappy energy hog homes. You can build with prefab panels and get airtight really quickly. So all the extra $$$ goes into better build and overhead for the factory.

Hah yes. In the early days of Zipcar in NYC (not sure if this is still allowed as I moved to the country and now drive a gas guzzling truck), I reserved every weekend for 48 hours for a full year in advance. Then on the Friday before the reservation started I would decide what I really needed, as there was no cancellation penalty. I probably only used it every second or third weekend, but noticed it really improved my "get out there and do something" motivation, as I set the default for "I have a car."

Probably wasn't good for Zipcar though.

Let me reply the counter case. Someone very close to me suffered a severe episode of manic depression. So much so that they were getting evicted from their apartment and losing their job. We tried to escalate help from across the country and NONE came from the medical establishment. (Talked to both the psychologist and psychiatrist.) No offer of evem brief inpatient care, which would have helped ameliorate the damage which they are still facing caused by clearly a medical problem. Their answer was to let my friend ride it out, even though he was vandalizing buildings and threatening neighbors in his delusion. (Friend being heretofore a very high performing person in grad school.)

So yes, the profession is BS but I would say the pendulum has swung a bit too far based on the help we were asking for and didn't get.

A hard balance for sure.

Just one shift. Haven't done the benchmarking so far. Has to be improvement opportunity just given the walk through from my eyes.

Awesome. Any tips on order and production systems?

And totally with you on the employees - they know way more than I do and are the ones who built this business!

Or skip the sodastream and special kit and buy a "carbonator cap" for 15 bucks. That, a tank, a fitting, and a regulator and you're good to go.

Very interesting. I'm going to be in "next gig mode" next year and am a Vet. Was thinking about what kind of company to start. Would you be available for a short chat? My email in my profile.

Yes, but... There are now a huge number of new wells being drilled precisely because of the fracking boom. So if no fracking, then the water doesn't get contaminated. It's not the actual fracturing of rock thousands of feet below that does it, true, it's the pipe that goes there and back. But the responsibilty does roll up to "the driller" which are the guys getting gas out of the ground.

What I'd actually likes as a feature is an output telling me WHEN to start my trip based on the lowest travel time due to traffic. Would be wonderful to have a histogram by hour for journey times based on traffic prediction.

Very interesting. I have been on a kick recently on how to really attack the college market with a different offering, and had thought of some of these same points. (Which you are executing on! Well done!)

My concept was to try to create a study abroad program, which combined a concentrated "learning community," along with some MOOCs, and on-site tutors/navigators. I think you could run this at a RADICALLY different price point than most colleges, and therefore nip at the edges of the market. Basically take a semester or two share from traditional colleges.

Of course, the challenge is in accrediting and ensuring credits would transfer back to the college. But it just seems when colleges are charging $40k / year tuition that there is some room to attack this on the edges. And the college students then get the benefit of a fun study abroad which would be even cheaper than home....

Yes to this! Just by virtue of you asking this question means you are not the dumbest guy. You at least know you need to learn. Truly dumb guys...well...

Nice! Is this full time and you're making more than stated above - or are you part time and you are making ~1K / month as a side biz? Just curious about order of magnitude?

Awesome! Any recommendations on what pop-up / interstitial providers to use? I have a small site which has free, useful file downloads, and these could work well on that as an additional revenue stream. I have Adsense on there now but it is only pumping out $200-300/Month off of 10K+ visitors.

Is this your self-made content, or are you essentially an affiliate for someone else's course? Mind sharing a bit more how this works? Very interesting!

I recently sold my house on my own. We live in a hot metro area. I initially listed it just on Zillow and did an aggressive social media campaign. Within a week I had several offers.

My mistake initially was to try to attack both sides of the realtor(tm) mix: seller and buyer brokers. I was clearly taking the seller side out. But I was willing to work with buyers' brokers if they found me. But I wanted to twist the commission scheme, as a flat rate doesn't make much sense. (e.g., an incremental $100K is huge for me but very little for them.) So I tried to create a stairstep where if they came in below ask, the broker would get paid .5%, and if they were 100K above ask they would get 3.5%. Needless to say, this failed. I had many brokers tell me they would refuse to bring clients to see my place, DESPITE their fiduciary duty to do so.

In the end, I offered 2.5% commission to buyers brokers (the standard in my area). I also listed it on the MLS using a shady site where you can pay to $150 bucks to a broker to list it on the MLS. Finally, I scraped the websites of 3 major brokerages in my area and did a mailing list to 100 brokers with the subject line of ADDDRESS X, 2.5% Buyer Commission. (100 brokers in 4 square miles. Should tell you something.) Had a 60% open rate and a 50% clickthrough rate. Lots of appointments right away.

I endeded up getting 9 offers and having a 2 step auction. I of course netted out what I would have to pay to brokers, so folks without brokers had an automatic 2.5% advantage. I ended up selling without a broker on either side. 3 weeks from first listing on Zillow to contract signed.

So yes - it's definitely possible to work without brokers if you're willing to do a little work, you're confident in your pricing skills, and you're in a hot area. As I said to my wife, each individual showing we did saved us about $2K!

Wow - kind of suprised that there is no reaction here. I do "big time" consulting where this metric is used all the time. I do believe this could be a very powerful service.

Wonder if lack of response is because the startup community doesn't know about these kind of metrics or because it is not tied specifically to metrics which matter for your business (acquisition, revenue, cost, etc). Of course, that has always been the challenge with NPS.

I read the bio - and it appears that he was partly killed by the Brits' crappy food!

"But the alien climate and culture took a toll on his health. Ramanujan had always lived in a tropical climate and had his mother (later his wife) to cook for him: now he faced the English winter, and he had to do all his own cooking to adhere to his caste's strict dietary rules."

Check out places like http://www.shipwire.com/ and http://www.owd.com/

I've used both in some ecommerce experiments. Shipwire is more remote control, while OWD has real people you can talk to.

I prefer OWD for a couple hundred bucks a month and they do everything for you, and integrate with many shopping carts including Magento for completely hands off experience.

I think this shows a confusion about what part of the problem he is solving: He is solving a MARKETING problem not a DELIVERY problem.

Yes the cleaners are probably not doing anything differently than they normally did. BUT:

-the cleaners had problems finding clients -clients had trouble finding good cleaners

If you've ever tried to find one of these folks, it's a total PIA. Basically it involves asking your friends or posting to craigslist and then wading through a bunch of crap. This is easy - find and pay online!

If you're against "extracting value" here, you should also be against grocery stores. Surely they are robbing the poor farmer by linking buyers and sellers?