Yep, every language is fundamentally broken. Fortunately, some are useful. Go has proven to be useful in building stuff that matters, at the end of the day. This unfortunately can't be said of all the fancy languages with perfect type systems.
I've been hacking on Instadrop for a few weeks now. It's a platform to discover and share things you love - tech, media, apparel, etc.
It's an exploration into what product discovery might look like given that Amazon is plagued by fake reviews and we're constantly being bombarded by targeted advertising from FB, Google, etc.
I've always relied on trusted sources (e.g. Wirecutter) and word of mouth recommendations when it comes to discovering great things. This is an attempt to replicate that process on a larger scale.
Anyway, I would love to get your early feedback on the idea! It's very early days - the product database is definitely incomplete, and tons of features are missing. :)
can you describe what the product is like from a users perspective? why would I use this and when ? I'm not so sure after looking at it for a couple mins.
> In other words, YC got lucky on Airbnb. Because YC's first impression of hundreds (or thousands) of other founders has been wrong.
IIRC, YC has rarely rejected a company that would be valued at $1B+. Perhaps SendGrid is the only one.
> It's just kind of pitiable that YC can't do better than this.
I don't believe any seed investor has a better rate of return than YC. I don't think it's even close. Whatever you imagine as "better" doesn't exist.
> A huge improvement for a YC-like investment firm would be to do something more objective. Competent people do not hire employees on the basis of a first impression, they spend many hours assessing their skills, abilities, personality, etc.
Perhaps it's not wise to fund founders based on how companies hire employees. Companies hire for risk minimization, not return maximization - just look at your average tech interview.
I think you underestimate the value of culture fit when it comes to building successful businesses. I'm sorry it doesn't fit into your framework of objective assessment.
It just launched a few weeks ago, but is on track for ~300K page views / month. The top 5% of users spend over 8 hours / week watching content. Looking to grow the site first, then monetize through affiliates and advertising.
I've been working on an ad-free social network and group chat app that puts the focus back on the people who matter most to us -- family and close friends. It combines a lot of features I personally want to see in a social app - messaging, photo sharing, event planning, and more.
It's an ad-free social network that is supposed to be a richer and more private alternative to Facebook.
It's been adopted by my closest friends and family, but hasn't grown much beyond these initial users. The product itself tries to do a ton of stuff: messaging, photo sharing, event planning, location sharing, video sharing, etc. Perhaps that's part of the problem -- it doesn't do one thing particularly above and beyond existing solutions.
I've been running a very shitty threaded message board for years ("running" being a very loose term - I mean it's still there). There is a parallel facebook group that exists solely to tell me when I've f'd up.
The people still on it, are the people who use it as a "separate space" to all the rest of the bazillion dollar alternatives - hellbent on shoving adverts, tracking and all the rest.
I'm only going off on this tangent, as maybe what appears to be lack of traction, could also be (if you squint hard) a benefit. Could you cookie-cutter out instances of your product?
If you can, then maybe you could position it as a micro-ecosystem for events people don't immediately want to integrate into their existing mega-social world.
e.g. Weddings.
Could on-board all people invited to the app (click this link to say if you're going or not), let them get to know each other a bit first, share photos they took of the event, plan stag events, enter dietary requirements, link to the wedding list, buy a nice photo from the official photographer, send a message to that bridesmaid you thought you were getting on well with, click on faces in photos to see who they are etc etc.
Have you thought about using an email group instead of running your own thing? I'm asking this because this is kind of what I'm doing — threaded email groups that act as a message board within the emails. There's a few people using us to do similar things as you, and since we only charge for admins (i.e. you) and not the number of mail receivers, it'd be dirt cheap since you'd only need one seat. In any case, definitely cheaper (and zero maintenance) than running a message board.
It's here at https://aether.app/email/#/force. If that turns out to be your thing hit me up and I can extend the trial for you as far as you need to give it a shot.
Seems really cool -- what's the unifying idea? It's gotta become my "go to" for some one thing. What is that one thing? My recommendations are: personal or public Journal; ability to make combination timelines with friends (photos/experiences) to "weave"; build it around location with a more tethered approach to specific zipcodes -- now you can host actual meetups via app; dive into the idea of clubs or groups. If it can become the "go to app" for some one thing, it could take off pretty quickly
This resonated with my own personal experience building a messaging app for my closest friends and family. It's been a steady 8-12 daily active users for the past few months.
I'll probably write a blog post in the future about what it does and why we use it. I'm also considering open sourcing the entire project!
I've been wanting an app like that for awhile now. I started messing around prototyping something like that around planning events with others. I'm excited to see what more of this!!
