Last year I bought a copy of Steep for my son (he was 7). First day in our Christmas vacation, he thought he could to a 360, just like in the video game, he landed on his nose. We stayed for a week in the resort watching snowboard on youtube. :)
Do you think you are acomplishing more because of this service?
I think they should start with a lower fee and charge x more every time the user fails to complete a task, on time. People need incentive to finish something. Not sure if someone emailing you is enough
If it helps you maintain intrinsic motivation then it may be of benefit. Maybe depending on the person a gentle reminder or a wakeup call works best, but the motivation shouldn't be focussed on getting a pat on the back or to avoid someone yelling at you.
> Sounds like good motivation to do shit work just to get it done on time.
You say this like it's obviously a bad idea. Why?
The more work you do, the better it will be, even if you're not trying for any particular quality level. Most people have much more of a problem with the amount of the work they do than with the quality.
I read of an experiment conducted on a college pottery class. Half of the class was told they would be graded on the quality of the pots they produced. The other half was told their grade would be determined by gathering all the pots they turned in, smashing them, and weighing the pile of shards. The heavier the pile, the better the grade.
The grade-by-weight group turned in higher-quality pots.
I remember hearing of this before - I think it tells us a huge amount about how best to achieve our goals, or to coach others in that regard.
For example: ask a team to build a software project with excellent design and best practices and they may hit "analysis paralysis".
Ask them to build perhaps 5 distinct - but cheap and disposable - implementations and you might find they get a much better idea of how to do things "right" very quickly.
This appears to be an example of Facebook's "move fast, break things" axiom, or an example of "make it work, then make it good.
I'm not sure where the latter comes from, but I've read several startup case studies that began with founders who did everything by hand at the beginning (just to see if their process worked).
Sounds like a sure fire way to spend all the time on premature optimisation.
Scott Guthrie at Microsoft used to talk about rapid prototyping, and to always throw away the prototype code and redo from scratch. Never keep the prototype, and especially don't just push it straight into production.
Exactly my point! That's an excellent technique in fact, tell a team upfront this will not be allowed to evolve into production and, freed from unease about future plans, they'll explore and experiment much more openly.
As far as I can tell the article basically says: If you reward people for doing something, they will stop liking to do it and quality will suffer.
BAAS helps people to do something they set out to do, but can't get themselves to actually do it.
It seems to me it doesn't really matter if you start to like it less, since you already don't like it enough to get started. And the quality point is moot, since it's better to have something shitty (that you can then improve), than have nothing at all.
Don't forget that actually getting started is the most important part of doing something. An effective way to finally clean up the kitchen is not to plan 2 hours for it, but to just take 2 minutes to wipe the countertop. Before you know it, while wiping the countertop you move stuff back to their proper place and two hours later the kitchen is done. And if not, then at least the countertop is clean again, which was better than leaving it dirty.
This does disalign goals of the user (get stuff done) and service provider (more money if someone fails as long as he is successful enough not to churn) though
I actually didn't like that episode because she very clearly said she spent no time looking at the product and just clicked buy. But there are legit reasons to want a UK plug in the US (maybe you're traveling and want to have it with you when you leave). The fact that the seller is trying to game the rankings is more an issue with the rankings system than with the seller.
Gaming the rankings/listings isn't an issue exclusive to amazon, every single website has this issue, in fact even phone books (remember those) had to contend with people listing their name with leading A's to try to get to the front. Gaming listings is as old as lists and until we can come up with a solution to that problem we're always gonna have problems like this.
You might be logged in on your iPhone with a different user than your browser. That's what happened to me. When I changed to the same login as my phone. They even know where I parked my car and for how long.
I might be wrong. But I think the reason they created Atlas was to give Stripe access to non supported countries. They will do all the work with incorporation, opening bank account, etc. And you will operate your business from the US bank account. After your business has a credit history you can even have credit cards.
You will probably need an accountant in Brazil to see how you declare your business entity in the US and also an accountant in the US to declare you US taxes.
Hey Jason congrats on your product. Really liked your writing style. Very funny and informative. Nice job.
Do you worry about amazon releasing something to analyse the logs and killing your business? They just released Amazon QuickSight in beta and I think you will probably be able to import logs from their services. Of course the user will have to create the reports themselves but I guess your audience is tech savvy.
Absolutely. But it's been 10 years now, and the best they've come up with is a sort of stripped down Cloudwatch-style request count graph for Cloudfront usage. That did actually cause a bit of a dip in signups when it came out, but I think there's still a need for more detailed reports.
But yeah, the expectation is that they'll squash it dead any minute now. I'm hoping that the next thing I'm building will have replaced S3stat as an income stream by the time that happens.
