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skaber's comments

skaber | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: Can anyone share cases study of successful SaaS getting into the market?

Have you met potential clients yet? Get on the phone, have a face to face meeting with them, and make sure you understand what's the problem they're facing before presenting your solution. Repeat 20 times, then summarize your findings by drawing a value proposition canvas. After you've manually onboarded a few customers, heard their feedback and have a clear sense of which persona uses and buys your product, then you might be ready to start investing in advertising and scaling your go-to market strategy.

skaber | 3 years ago | on: The Best iPhone

Fully agree with you. I need the practicality of a smartphone but want to reduce screen time. The 13 mini forces me to use my laptop if I want to read or perform a task.

skaber | 5 years ago | on: I Replaced Baremetrics and ChartMogul with Rake

Your Ruby ActiveRecord query is so under optimized, you are loading a ton of records that instantiate objects and then apply a filter on this huge array. I'm pretty sure you could make it 100x faster.

skaber | 5 years ago | on: SaaS We Happily Pay For

Good job @plehoux and team! I'm really please to see your Québec city based SaaS on this list.

skaber | 5 years ago | on: Build Software from Front-to-Back

I think the issue here is that there's a sole developer working on the whole app with the difficult choice of choosing where to start. I think that creating a design that covers most test cases of the app would then let you start from either section of the app. I am surprised OP doesn't mention anything around GraphQL (why or why not it could help).

skaber | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: How to properly manage a product roadmap?

What's been key to my startups on executing and following a roadmap was to use OKRs at the company level. The roadmap has become a consequence of the company's annual and quarter OKRs. As a product manager, you are responsible to come up with a roadmap and priorities based on your team's (engineers, designers) interpretation of the OKRs. The same way you won't be telling the business team which client and opportunity they're chasing, they shouldn't try to draft your roadmap as they have no understanding of the technical challenges linked to your roadmap. Using OKRs has been a common ground for multiple departments to agree on priorities and communicate progress. The challenge can be that there must be mutual trusts across teams. I recommend reading Measure What Matters. Ping me if you need more resources for OKRs and I'm ready to share more personal stories and experiences.

skaber | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: What was the best decision you made in your career?

I also adopted a similar work approach earlier this year. Worked crazy hard 16-33 y/o with extra non-paid hours. I now manage all work shoved on my plate as a priorized backlog and no longer allow people to drive the priorities given to me. I am somehow in a high level position with many teams to manage and avoid at all costs offloading tasks to others without these items being filtered through my lisl first. I always make sure that I won't interrupt someone else's current tasks. I also have discovered the power of requesting to people that they send me an email with all the detailed informations for a particular task. With IM such as slack these days, people tend to throw away their responsabilites on others cause it's just so easy to do. Overall, I think that being more calm and facing the truth than I no longer want to accomplish more than 40h a week as resulted in me working better without any comprises.

skaber | 9 years ago | on: Gail, not Gmail

So there's really no way for a company to take over a domain if they have a legitimate reason? My company's dot com shows what looks to be a low value video. I've reached out to the guy a few years ago and he simply replied that there were some things that money couldn't buy... Petal.com if you're interested. I'd love to have that domain, and yeah it's affecting our brand.

skaber | 9 years ago | on: Staffjoy is shutting down

I sincerely feel your pain, we also had to fight old paper and excel habits with a digital tool. I am also in a startup working on a Scheduling product with math optimizations (absence management, work constraints, IBM Cplex solver)...! I will be happy to review your open source code and see if anything can be reused on our side. PetalMD has a freemium approach in a niche market (Canadian healthcare providers), and we burned lots of money before we finally focused on the core value for our user base. The freemium gave us the critical mass and leverage to have discussions with partners and we learned through the years what had to be enhanced in our product to offer several pricing plans.

Our niche is really helping focusing the product enhancements and the marketing efforts. Scheduling needs are broad and we constantly have to refuse opportunities.

Good luck with your next venture!

skaber | 9 years ago | on: Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

Good memories. I remember leeching longhorn builds from some guy on an irc channel on efnet through xdcc transfers. Every two-three weeks there was a new longhorn build that I would burn on a cd and use to format the family pc. I would've been a great beta tester!

skaber | 10 years ago | on: Congratulations You’ve Been Fired

Agreed, a startup has many tradeoffs. For instance, we want to attract key players/talent that we can barely afford. I've been a large contributor to my startup culture over the past 3 years, and while we created an envious work environment, we can only keep the right people that fit the need of the moment. Work hard + play hard really applies to our company and yes it creates some hard times. We live with a constant executive + management pressure to run a lean company and generate profits in our niche market. To me, this is only a mark of respect to the investors that were crazy enough in the first place to believe in our project. I think that it's hard to understand that chaos unless you've been part of an early startup yourself. I can also understand that 25 years in journalism is a hard fit, it totally goes against the entrepreneurship skills you might need to survive and appreciate the ride in a startup.
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