Hrishipedia

Nothing to hide

If you’re doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide from the giant surveillance apparatus the government’s been hiding.
— Stephen Colbert (@StephenAtHome) June 11, 2013

How to handle Hacker News feedback on your beloved app

I’ve posted some of my apps to Hacker News for feedback in the past. I’ve also seen countless number of discussions on other people’s Show HN submissions.

While it can be very negative sometimes, HN is still a useful place to get users.

These are some tips you might find useful when you show your app next time :

1. Hide your Facebook connect button.

If you don’t have a signup method other than Facebook, for the love of God, don’t put your app on HN until you add it. HN hates Facebook with a passion, and using only FB connect will make sure you don’t get any useful feedback on the actual app.

2. Ignore most feedback on visual design.

It’s the most common trap we fall into when getting feedback. Everyone has an opinion on how things should look like, but it’s almost always useless data. People on HN are even more likely to give such superficial feedback because they are constantly surrounded by stuff like this and are generally more qualified to critique.

But unless you have a portfolio or theme site, you can ignore all of it and focus on discussing the core functionality of the app.

3. Focus on the positive feedback.

Figure out what people do like about your app and drill down. Remember, your aim is not to please everyone. Your aim is to just find some people who love your product, however crappy it may be.

4. Ignore any advice on pricing (unless it’s patio11 telling you to raise prices).

Unless you’re selling something for which HN is going to be the main target market (*shudder*), you are in serious danger of damaging your revenue by listening to complaints from people who probably won’t buy at any price.

Regardless of the pricing of any app, you can be assured that someone on HN will say “if only it were $some_arbitrary_value_less_than_current_price, then I’d totally buy it. I only need 3 foozles, so why should I pay for 5?”

5. Avoid asking for a credit card upfront

If you require a credit card upfront for signing up, you’ll get a lot of complaints. Add a coupon code specially for HN to let people sign up without a CC or give them a big discount. Either way, expect some complaints and ignore them.

PS I’d been meaning to write this post for a while, and today this post finally prompted me to just do it - “Posting to HN is like exposing yourself to the eye of Mordor”. Amen.

If you liked this post, you might also like “The funny irony of scratching your own itch”.

“Stuck in speedbump city

where the only thing that’s pretty

is the thought of getting out…”

(Source: youtube.com)

4 useful tips for startup founders

These are some things I’ve learned the hard way while building my startups:

1. Know the motives of people who give advice

Whenever you read advice online, ask yourself “What is this person selling? What’s their motive?”. There is almost certainly one. Not necessarily a bad one, but be sure to know what it is.

(Btw, I sell software, here and here.)

2. Social media is the new TV

Memorise this truth. Let it burn deep into the crevices of your brain. Any time you are on social media, you’re almost certainly not working, and most probably, wasting time. The problem is that you might think you’re doing work, when you’re not.

The most productive thing you can do on social media is advertising. Pimp your shit.

Look at the people who are both very successful, and spend a lot of time on social media. They probably benefit from social media in a very direct way. If a founder spends a lot of time on social media but their startup sucks, they’re probably a sucker too. Don’t be like them. Avoid them.

3. Giving advice to other founders is the best way to find out what you’re doing wrong

Founders love giving advice to each other. It’s extremely obvious to everyone what everyone else should do with their product or business. The funny thing is that we are blind to the same things in our own business!

The best epiphanies I’ve had were when I was dishing out advice to another founder. I realised I was talking the talk, but not walking the walk.

Advice is easy to give, hard to follow. I find it most useful as a mirror.

March 18, 2013

So from time to time, go give advice. It will help you learn what you’re doing wrong in your own business.

See what I did there?

4. Your goal is to make a successful business, not to produce the Grand Unified Theory of Startup Success

There is no end to how much time you can spend reading and debating about lean startups, customer development, product/market fit, market segmentation, yada yada ya.

Leave the business theorising and pontification to the gurus, consultants and investors. Don’t get sucked into that bullshit. It’s the biggest waste of time and energy.

No one got rich by tweeting pithy startup smartisms. Not even @levie ;-)

Google Reader Alternatives

So, Google decided to axe Reader. I made a chart of all the alternatives out there:

http://ginicharts.com/google-reader-alternatives

PS This also marks the soft launch of my new app Gini. Yayy!

Prosecutor as bully

lessig:

(Some will say this is not the time. I disagree. This is the time when every mixed emotion needs to find voice.)

Since his arresting the early morning of January 11, 2011 — two years to the day before Aaron Swartz ended his life — I have known more about the events that began this spiral than I have wanted to know. Aaron consulted me as a friend and lawyer that morning. He shared with me what went down and why, and I worked with him to get help. When my obligations to Harvard created a conflict that made it impossible for me to continue as a lawyer, I continued as a friend. Not a good enough friend, no doubt, but nothing was going to draw that friendship into doubt.

The billions of snippets of sadness and bewilderment spinning across the Net confirm who this amazing boy was to all of us. But as I’ve read these aches, there’s one strain I wish we could resist:

Please don’t pathologize this story.

No doubt it is a certain crazy that brings a person as loved as Aaron was loved (and he was surrounded in NY by people who loved him) to do what Aaron did. It angers me that he did what he did. But if we’re going to learn from this, we can’t let slide what brought him here.

First, of course, Aaron brought Aaron here. As I said when I wrote about the case(when obligations required I say something publicly), if what the government alleged was true — and I say “if” because I am not revealing what Aaron said to me then — then what he did was wrong. And if not legally wrong, then at least morally wrong. The causes that Aaron fought for are my causes too. But as much as I respect those who disagree with me about this, these means are not mine.

But all this shows is that if the government proved its case, some punishment was appropriate. So what was that appropriate punishment? Was Aaron a terrorist? Or a cracker trying to profit from stolen goods? Or was this something completely different?

Early on, and to its great credit, JSTOR figured “appropriate” out: They declined to pursue their own action against Aaron, and they asked the government to drop its. MIT, to its great shame, was not as clear, and so the prosecutor had the excuse he needed to continue his war against the “criminal” who we who loved him knew as Aaron.

Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor’s behavior. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The “property” Aaron had “stolen,” we were told, was worth “millions of dollars” — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash ofACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.

Aaron had literally done nothing in his life “to make money.” He was fortunate Reddit turned out as it did, but from his work building the RSS standard, to his work architecting Creative Commons, to his work liberating public records, to his work building a free public library, to his work supporting Change Congress/FixCongressFirst/Rootstrikers, and then Demand Progress, Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good. He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you.

For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House — and where even those brought to “justice” never even have to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be labeled “felons.”

In that world, the question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.” For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million dollar trial in April — his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge. And so as wrong and misguided and fucking sad as this is, I get how the prospect of this fight, defenseless, made it make sense to this brilliant but troubled boy to end it.

Fifty years in jail, charges our government. Somehow, we need to get beyond the “I’m right so I’m right to nuke you” ethics that dominates our time. That begins with one word: Shame.

One word, and endless tears.