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• #1052
Sigh - had the email from Seedrs this morning - stanby investment was rejected. Will go patronage once I figure out how to get my money back from seedrs.
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• #1053
A linear thread is a good accurate model of a single conversation. Tree-structured threading is a half-solution because it doesn't support re-merging discussions and only tends to fracture them. Even when people aren't explicitly replying to multiple posts, each new post is implicitly a reply to everything that has come before, i.e. the current state of the conversation.
In the glory days of newsgroups, every reader ran their own news reader client software to keep track of what they'd already read and what was new to them. Without that it is very hard to follow ongoing tree-threaded discussions. If web forums attempted the same, that burden would be pushed onto the server.
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• #1054
Is anyone else entirely underwhelmed by most of the companies on Seedr? The email today contained an eBay competitor (we'll do it better, more efficiently), a 'win a car in an airport comp' company, a google latitude competitor, and a geocaching company. All seem decidedly unlikely to succeed, and frankly, meh?!
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• #1055
^ yes.
Looking through the others I did come over a bit...
For that reason, I'm out.
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• #1056
^ Christ, she really doesn't have a "good side" does she.
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• #1057
Actually, I think she does. Having watched a couple of episodes of Dragons Den where she's offered her time and contacts even when she's not invested, and having watched her program on women in the workplace, I think that she has a very good side.
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• #1058
Actually, I think she does. Having watched a couple of episodes of Dragons Den where she's offered her time and contacts even when she's not invested, and having watched her program on women in the workplace, I think that she has a very good side.
I meant more in a photographic sense.
I don't know her so can't comment on her personality.
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• #1059
MrDrem repped.
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• #1060
This is what I'll most likely do. We do it already but it's perhaps too subtle, I'll try and make it more obvious what is in response to what.
On an entirely different topic, the investor I was hoping would be the anchor in our Series A is in the news:
http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/30/high-profile-uk-vc-stefan-glaenzer-faces-jail-after-sexual-assault-conviction/Jesus christ,
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• #1061
I find it a real shame ..... It's because of his track record that I preferred him (and Passion) over the guys at Balderton (all ex-wankers for the burst banks).
If he stays in the game, then I will still prefer Passion (and I hope he is able to stay with the company he helped found).
The least he could do is change the company name.I would think that the game has now changed. You and we have demonstrated real market power. We hit the target six times faster than any other Seedrs launch. There is a 12% bonus promised by patrons.
That is likely to be noticed, the next Seedrs round could raise much more. You could find a queue of big investers, all willing to "help".
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• #1062
Would probably have broken the record by more if most of those 15 hours hadn't been during the night.
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• #1063
Velocio
Will traders get a personal page or something? What features are you thinking of for classifieds?
I'm asking because most classifieds end up on page 2 within the hour (and subsequently further down the archives by the day) and people often/generally don't utfs
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• #1064
One of the investors I met at the Seedrs thing suggested we'd cheated by bringing in our own investors rather than relying on the ones that Seedrs provided. I wouldn't regard it as cheating, I'd rather have investors that know me already and are aware of the product idea and track record.
It was an interesting evening though. I spoke to another investor who was a farmer and was not equipped at all for determining which were the good companies and which were the bad.
I tried to explain it for him... these are your 5% high risk investments, everything else should be in stable and safe investments. But with the 5% you should either go with your heart and something you believe in, or attempt to seek out the black swan company ( [ame]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory[/ame] - the super massive company that is obvious in hindsight, such as Dropbox, Facebook, etc).
There are at least a few things that can help identify potential black swans by ruling out the ones that could never achieve it by asking a few simple questions:
- Are there constraints that limit the company growth? Such as headcount and space for a hair salon, physical land for a farmer, etc.
- Does the revenue grow in-line with growth of usage?
- Is the potential market measured in hundreds of millions?
If the answers are No, Yes, and Yes... then you might have a company that could potentially be a black swan event and go super-massive. But if a company is going for "We want to be the fine dining of meals on wheels in Cheshire", then avoid investing on an economic basis as you'll never get a great return on it.
I thought that asking people to invest from here meant that I'd exposed myself to many naive investors. But that isn't really the case, you're all very skilled at pooling your learning and discussing things. So you've by and large managed to educate yourselves rapidly. What I saw at the Seedrs event was a mix of extremely experienced investors (most of whom were kicking themselves for not getting a slice of Microcosm) and then a load of extremely inexperienced and naive investors (who I felt were going to lose their money if they weren't able to learn quickly).
I also felt at the Seedrs event that the entrepreneur mix was similar. A few good ones (in the minority) and a load of bad ones (who seemed to just like the idea of being an entrepreneur and perhaps picked their company idea out of a hat or by playing a game of exquisite corpse ( [ame]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_corpse[/ame] ).
I did really like the Oyster card for desk space thing. His valuation was a bit nuts, but the idea is quite sound. I also did not like that they left the event early to have a celebration party for raising funds... I felt receiving investment was a responsibility and my best response was to knuckle down, not to drink it down. But it's a damn good idea, even if he just managed to get spare office space around the transport hubs solved for the "I've got a couple of hours to kill" crowd it would work quite well. But it all comes down to how well he can convince the landlords of empty offices to grant him the space on short leases, and who knows how his company survives an up-turn in which office space is less available and more expensive.
Anyhow... rambling now.
- Are there constraints that limit the company growth? Such as headcount and space for a hair salon, physical land for a farmer, etc.
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• #1065
Velocio
Will traders get a personal page or something? What features are you thinking of for classifieds?
I'm asking because most classifieds end up on page 2 within the hour (and subsequently further down the archives by the day) and people often/generally don't utfs
I really want to solve classifieds.
Second to events after getting the basics vaguely right comes classifieds. And whereas events is somewhat simpler to get right, classifieds is quite a complex beast.
The biggest thing I can do to solve classifieds is search. Helping people find what they want.
It's less a problem that you disappear off of page 2 in an hour, it's that once you've disappeared off page 2 no-one can find the advert.
For bikes people search by attributes more than the top-line title. That is, find me 59cm bikes and frames, but also show me 58cm and 60cm bikes and frames.
For camera gear similarly people search by attributes: Interested in lenses between f1.4 and f2, or between 35mm and 50mm.
If I can fix the search functionality I hope to then make that drive other pages. Trader profile pages, equivalent to the eBay "Seller's Shop", is one obvious thing, but I'd also like to work out how to convert popular searches into pre-made pages "Bikes 55cm > 57cm, Bikes 57cm > 59cm, etc".
The two angles on that being "This seller has good stuff, what else is he selling?" and "I'm looking for one of these, what is there?".
But both of those pages require searching classifieds gets solved. Search is hard... so you'll have to forgive me for wanting to get the basics done first and to solve events before I move onto an area which will no doubt bog me down.
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• #1066
I really want to solve classifieds.
(...) Search is hard... so you'll have to forgive me for wanting to get the basics done first and to solve events before I move onto an area which will no doubt bog me down.thanks, I appreciate your line of thinking. basics should be done first indeed, here's hoping doing that right will lead you around some of the undoubtedly massive number of bog areas you will have to drag yourself(yourselves) through before v1 of the new forum gets launched. best of luck, keep us posted
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• #1067
I did really like the Oyster card for desk space thing. His valuation was a bit nuts, but the idea is quite sound.
I remain unconvinced that this is a viable business. It isn't new and it's something that the big players already offer. I didn't see this issue addressed at all in their proposal but instead they are relying on the 'Oyster card' gimmick without really explaining why this is will make them the Facebook of the pay by the hour mobile working industry.
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• #1068
There were two bits of his pitch which impressed me, and both related to understanding his market and the challenge.
The company with the largest share of this market (offering desks ad-hoc) is Regus with their business lounge model. They have only 6% of the market. That's the biggest... the market is massively fragmented with no clear leader.
Their biggest competitor: Starbucks.
And that's when I was sold. He's right, when you have a few hours to kill between meetings, it's wifi you seek out, a place to rest your bag and grab a seat whilst you try to fit in a couple of hours work.
The problems with Starbucks though is the need to consume to justify the space, security of your possessions (especially inner-city), keeping the seat (if you need to go to the loo), the noise and distractions (if you're trying to work and need to make phone calls).
And that's basically where I went from being "Nah, that won't work", to "You know, he may have a chance... so long as he gets the location and the convenience is there, he might just crack it".
Understanding the problem you're trying to solve and the market is the first thing. And I actually think he gets that bit. The bigger high risk question is more whether he is the one that can actually make it work by getting landlords on board to put their empty space to good use.
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• #1069
Now that I can understand, and to me really shows the issue with Seedrs - there just isn't the depth of presentation and interaction necessary on their site as it stands. We all 'got it' with you, and you 'got it' at the meeting. I certainly didn't from the Seedrs site.
In my experience it isn't the landlords though which are the problem, but the managing agents. It did occur to me that if his model works then he could even tap into the Regus of the world, and there are plenty of businesses who have offices and conference rooms sitting idle if someone has the expertise to overcome the security and data access issues.
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• #1070
I really want to solve classifieds.
Might a search cloud or a list of the most popular items linking to a search work? Sales tagged with "forks" "frame" etc. would come up. It could lead to the same thing that you get at the moment where you end up going through 20 threads looking for one that hasn't already sold. Unless the OP could edit the tags when an item is sold.
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• #1071
possibility of editing ones own thread titles would be good
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• #1072
And other peoples.
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• #1073
To do what?
One of the things I have to balance is giving people the right level of control. I want to give as much as I can, but no more.
When I think of editing thread titles, where the thread has no replies I have no issue at all. But as soon as there are replies, then the replies are in the context of the thread title and prior replies to the thread.
If I allowed thread changing after the thread has replies, then there could be a real issue in that people could be duped into replying in a context that they never would. For example one could start a thread called "Add your username for a free beer" and wait until there were 50 replies and then change the title to "Add your username if you suck cock".
It's very easy to abuse and game.
Though if your intent is to communicate that a classified item has sold, then I'd rather have a status indicator on the thread... title stays the same, but the indicator changes from "For Sale" to "Sold" and prevents it coming up in future searches.
So the question I would ask is why the title should be changed (outside of asking a microcosm moderator/owner to do it).
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• #1074
Thought this was interesting re: the YCombinator process and how insanely competitive it is:
http://swaggadocio.com/post/37188318276/how-i-got-a-yc-interview-as-a-single-founder-and-blew
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• #1075
I responded to O'Shane's idea. an indicator is fine too.
requests for fixing typo's, adding info, calling people cocksuckers should indeed be aimed at a moderator
or you could just trust people to do the right thing and hit them with a bloody big ban hammer if they don't
perhaps he was just beta testing one of his new startups for a smartphone app that uses rfid readings of oyster cards in close proximity for identifying other members of a dating site only it wasnt going very well so he was trying to improve the test results by minimising the distance between cards and the reader (which due to its top-secret prototype nature he had to keep obscured in his trouser pocket)