It's pretty fun, made it to the $1B valuation on my last attempt :)
I read bits of the instruction guide a couple times, but some things that weren't super clear at first:
1. I didn't realize how important it is to raise another round. Is there ever a reason not to? The money bag was a small little thing, and I didn't know to click on it before reading the guide.
2. 90% monthly churn seems pretty bad... but maybe it isn't? Not sure what to do about it, improve the product maybe?
Should you be doing marketing before product market fit?
3. At first (when I didn't read the guide) I thought marketers help us get customers. But I think they just reduce CAC?
5. Do the tasks matter? I never figured out the what the numbers mean. I never deleted any of them - should I?
6. Do ops people do anything?
7. Task velocity is a bit unclear, and the onboarding is only tied to the blue bar if you read the guide. Would be nice to show on hover maybe, and could show some sort of aggregate across your team?
8. Do I get anything for investing in my product? Does the product get better over time in some way? Would be nice to track that.
I love LinkedIn as a founder/developer. It's become my main social network after the Twitter acquisition.
Your experience depends on what show up in your feed. For me, it's mostly developers talking about web performance optimization, small business owners talking about conferences they've been to, people sharing posts or videos they've released... and the occasional post from the local council or someone criticizing Facebook's AI features.
Posting on LinkedIn doesn't necessarily mean bullshitting or low-value content. My two most popular posts are about single-page app performance [1] and TCP slow start [2]. And when I talk to people using our product they mention they have team members regularly sharing my posts in their company (but they might not "like" it on LinkedIn).
I might not be getting thousands of engagements, but there's little point reaching random people who aren't interested in working on the same problems as me either.
Local overrides are super useful for testing site speed:
• Your local setup is likely different from production (not serving from production domains, not using image resize services, using different HTTP compression...)
• You might not be able to run tests on localhost, e.g. if you're an external consultant or working in technical SEO (who often want to give specific recommendations to devs as dev attention is scarce and expensive)
There are still some limitations of testing changes in DevTools:
• Testing a fresh load is a pain (need to clear OS-level DNS cache, need to clear the connection cache in Chrome, need to clear cookies/service worker)
• DevTools throttling doesn't represent server connections accurately (you need to throttle at the OS level for accurate data, which slows down your whole computer and requires admin rights)
WebPageTest [1] and my own tool DebugBear [2] now support experiments to make it easy to try out content changes in a controlled lab environment.
Is this an actual sales objection that comes up? Are potential customers saying that making the code open source would address their concerns, or would the cost to host and maintain the software internally be too high? Would code escrow be an option, so the source only becomes available if you go out of business?
Someone was CFO at two companies and the auditors only checked the year end balance against his falsified statements. So he transferred money from the other company temporarily to make them match.
"""To avoid detection, Morgenthau doctored African Gold’s monthly bank statements
by, for example, deleting his unauthorized transactions and overstating the available account balance in any given month by as much as $1.19 million. [...]
Morgenthau knew that African Gold’s auditor would confirm directly with the bank the actual account balance as of December 31, 2021, as a part of its year-end audit. [...]
Morgenthau deposited more than half a million dollars of Strategic Metals’ funds into African Gold’s bank account on December 31, 2021, because he knew that African Gold’s auditor would confirm the account balance as of that date, in connection with African Gold’s year-end audit.
"""
I wondered about that when reading the Money Stuff article about it a while ago. What should they actually have done differently?
One of the issues was that "she could not share her customer list
due to privacy concerns". So maybe JPM could have pushed back against that more?
"""Javice also cited privacy concerns in sharing Frank’s customer data directly with
JPMC. After numerous internal conversations, and in order to allay Javice’s concerns, JPMC
agreed to use a third-party data management vendor, Acxiom, to validate Frank’s customer
information rather than providing the personal identifying information directly to JPMC."""
"""
After the August 3, 2021 Zoom meeting, the Data Science Professor returned a
signed version of Frank’s NDA. The Data Science Professor’s usual hourly rate was $300.
Javice unilaterally doubled the Data Science Professor’s rate to $600.
[...]
Specifically, on August 5, 2021 at 11:05 a.m., the Data Science Professor
provided Javice an invoice for $13,300, documenting 22.17 hours of work over just three days.
The invoice entries show that the bulk of his time was spent on the main task that Javice retained
the Data Science Professor to perform – making up customer data. The Data Science Professor’s
invoice indicated that he performed “college major generation” and “generation of all features
except for the financials” while creating “first names, last names, emails, phone numbers” and
“looking into whitepages.”
In response to the initial invoice, Javice demanded that he remove all the details
admitting to how they had created fake customers – and added a $4,700 bonus. In an email to
the Data Science Professor at 12:39 p.m. on August 5, 2021, Javice wrote: “send the invoice
back at $18k and just one line item for data analysis.” In total, Javice paid the Data Science
Professor over $800 per hour for his work creating the Fake Customer List, which is 270% of his
usual hourly rate.
The Data Science Professor provided Javice the revised invoice via email seven
minutes later at 12:46 p.m., commenting “Wow. Thank you. Here is the new invoice.”
"""
Regarding "4 seconds wasted" per visit: HTTP Archive also publishes real-user performance data from Google, and only 10% of desktop websites take 4 seconds or more to load. (And I think that's not the average experience but the 75th percentile.) https://httparchive.org/reports/chrome-ux-report#cruxSlowLcp
The Google data uses Largest Contentful Paint instead of Speed Index, but the two metrics ultimately try to measure the same thing. Both have pros and cons. Speed Index goes up if there are ongoing animations (e.g sliders). LCP only looks at the single largest content element.
Desktop bandwidth is improving over time, but as I understand HTTP Archive is still using a 5 Mbps cable connection.
From their FAQ/changelog [1]:
> 19 Mar 2013: The default connection speed was increased from DSL (1.5 mbps) to Cable (5.0 mbps). This only affects IE (not iPhone).
There was another popular article on HN a while ago [2], claiming mobile websites had gotten slower since 2011. But actually HTTP Archive just started using a slower mobile connection in 2013. I wrote more about that issue with the HTTP Archive data at the time [3].
I'd consider expanding more on the freelance work you did through Upwork. What problems did you solve for your clients and what technologies did you work with?
I wonder how real the "not relieved by morphine is", or what that means exactly. Looked into this a while back and only found this source [1]:
> Intravenous access was obtained and 15 mg of morphine was given slowly. Over the next five minutes very little pain relief occurred.
> [...]
> A further 7.5 mg of morphine was given intravenously 15 minutes after the
first dose, but again this produced little relief. Over the ensuing 15 minutes a further 7.5 mg of morphine was injected intravenously, which eventually reduced the pain to a tolerable level.
DebugBear | Web Performance Advocate / Technical Writer | REMOTE (UK-ish working hours) | Budget: $60k - $100k a year
DebugBear helps companies monitor and optimize the speed of their websites. Typical users of our product are front-end developers, technical SEOs, and business owners.
We’re looking for someone who wants to develop a deep understanding of web performance and create technical content on this topic. For example, you could write an in-depth guide on how to optimize the Largest Contentful Paint metric [1] or investigate the impact Chrome extensions have on website performance [2].
DebugBear is a small business with two people currently working full time. You will be working directly with me (the founder) and have a big impact on how we grow and reach more customers.
Fundamentally this is a growth marketing role, but we really value high-quality technical content. Writing is the core part of this role, but if you're interested it can also include supporting our customer with site speed issues or building free tools as part of our marketing efforts.
Ideally you will have professional experience with both front-end development and technical writing.
I'm still finalizing the job spec and interview process – will get that done later this week. If this role interests you, you can email matt at debugbear.com and I'll send you more info when it's ready.
In June 2021 the managing director owed the company almost £1.1 million, up from £924k in 2020. Not sure how meaningful the assets are. (Update: I think these are unpaid distributions to the LLP members.)
£2.8 million in turnover in 2018 though, £2.1 million of that from outside the UK.
There's also a parent company (Hadleigh PVT Limited) that indirectly owns the business. And the parent company paid £192k in rental income to Gray & Farrar in 2018.
It is all quite weird, e.g. in 2013: "strategic marketing and business promotion costs have been charged at arms length by a business wholly owned by one of the partners"
2016 accounts say the principal activity was matchingmaking services.
> The advent of automobile use in the early 20th century brought about a measurable rise in total numbers of highway deaths and injuries. However, the automobile's toll on human life and limb was probably not extravagantly greater than the toll exacted by the combination of steam- and horse-driven travel methods it displaced
From skimming the article, it seems like motor vehicle fatalities in NYC in the 1990s were similar to total traffic fatalities in the early 1900s, even though the population almost doubled.
I'm assuming motor vehicle fatalities includes pedestrians hit by motor vehicles. There could still be additional deaths today from things like streetcars, horses, or ox carts, but I feel like those would be low.
It's much more limited in what's covered, but when I had some questions around VAT I found the website of the British and Irish Legal Information Institute really helpful: https://www.bailii.org/
It's noindex, so it would normally be super hard to find the cases if you don't search on the BAILII site directly.
I read bits of the instruction guide a couple times, but some things that weren't super clear at first:
1. I didn't realize how important it is to raise another round. Is there ever a reason not to? The money bag was a small little thing, and I didn't know to click on it before reading the guide.
2. 90% monthly churn seems pretty bad... but maybe it isn't? Not sure what to do about it, improve the product maybe? Should you be doing marketing before product market fit?
3. At first (when I didn't read the guide) I thought marketers help us get customers. But I think they just reduce CAC?
4. Once you have a larger team it gets very heavy on the "Build" clicking. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GRpxPfcpAjWem-3gs2Tnd_5xDwF...
5. Do the tasks matter? I never figured out the what the numbers mean. I never deleted any of them - should I?
6. Do ops people do anything?
7. Task velocity is a bit unclear, and the onboarding is only tied to the blue bar if you read the guide. Would be nice to show on hover maybe, and could show some sort of aggregate across your team?
8. Do I get anything for investing in my product? Does the product get better over time in some way? Would be nice to track that.