I'd be curious about what this also means for Instacart given their strategic partnership with Whole Foods and their direct competition with Amazon Fresh.
Groupon is hiring product managers of all levels in the SF Bay Area. No introduction needed on what Groupon does. Join us in disrupting the local space. We have a great team that's passionate about the local space and works incredibly hard to improve how people find things to eat, see and do in their neighborhood. We're working on many challenges - from improving our local data (quality, accuracy, canonicalization for terabytes of data) to improving customer and merchant engagement within our mobile apps.
When my co-founders and I were applying to accelerators in 2008, we had been accepted into a Philadelphia based accelerator called DreamIt shortly before our YC interviews. Not knowing if we would get into YC, we accepted with DreamIt as it was an exploding offer. A few weeks later we found that we got accepted by YC. After deliberating it for sometime, we went back to the DreamIt team and told them that we wished to rescind our acceptance. This started a shitstorm with the DreamIt team as they seemed to take this very personally. It was the first year of doing the accelerator and they went as far as threatening to take legal action. Not knowing what to do, we turned to PG and Jessica for help, a bit hesitantly, as we were afraid of what they would say. PG expressed his extreme disappointment with how DreamIt had reacted to this and was supportive of our situation. He send them an email telling them to back off and that this was not an acceptable way to be treating founders.
Just one anecdote out of many of how YC has gone to many lengths to protect founders.
Since that experience, I've realized that it really doesn't do accelerators any good to introduce these conditions in their funding offers. It creates a bad reputation amongst founders in the increasingly competitive field of accelerators. And founders ultimately need to pick based on what they think will have the most impact to their business. Compete on benefits you can offer to founders, not legalese.
Yup, one password that they need to use to login, along with the email address that you've whitelisted for them. So its possible that someone could guess the password and their email address to get unauthorized access. I've debated a lot on this one and from the many parents I spoke to, this seemed to be a good middle ground between having some security and keeping it simple for family members to use.
The links in the emails have a special link that unique to each subscribers. These links at the moment do not expire but thats something I'm changing soon. All the images in the emails expire after a week.
1. Yes, its usable without Facebook. Sign up on the site and you can upload media directly (or email them in).
2. No limit on how much you can upload at the moment. This might bite me in the ass later but if anything changes, there'll be a grandfathering in of older accounts.
3. You set up a password for your timeline. This is then shared automatically with "subscribers" that you add to your account. They will get notified (via email) when you post anything and can click through this email and never
4. Great question. Currently the plan is making money on prints (a PicPlum like service - printing of photos and mailing to family members). I may also introduce a premium version with more storage.
Would love to get your thoughts on the revenue ideas. And great questions - I should spell some of this out on the landing page more.
* It solves a key problem for parents: How do I easily share my baby's pictures & videos privately without requiring my friends and family to sign up or install something?
* It automatically finds pictures of your baby on your Facebook feed and pulls them into your baby's timeline, so that your grandmother can see them.
* Built in SF with my buddy and I using Django/Python, MongoDB, AngularJS
Its a monthly recurring model. I actually partnered with a small company in NY that sells a tangential product to the same market. They do the marketing within the NYC market for me.
I can try to sell this more actively to other markets, SF being next since I live here, but with a full-time job and a baby, its hard! In terms of marketing, I think I could manage a small AdWords budget to run but it would initially be more just me cold calling and setting up demos - starting with smaller shops with a shorter sales cycle first.
I make about $300/mo with https://broker.mapthatpad.com. Not even close to what I originally was intending (and the amount of time I've spent building it) but to be honest, I have not been doing a whole lot in terms of marketing and selling it at the moment.
I hope to do more selling/marketing in the future and get this monthly number higher.
Disclaimer: I am working on a project in this space with the goal to give parents more control on how to share pictures of their baby (www.getbabydigest.com)
While the author of this article seems to take things to a certain extreme, I think this is a legitimate concern for parents today. Being a new parent, I consider my wife and I to be the average facebook "parent" users. We have a need to share pictures of our kid with close friends and family and since facebook most easily meets that need, my wife and I do post pictures of our kid there. We try to limit it to things we think would not be too embarrassing for him when he looks back them years from now.
It's hard however to know how he is going to react to them 10-20 years from now, let alone any impact it may have on his identity as he gets older. For now, sharing on Facebook, seems like the best alternative to email since its so easy to post and get feedback. I've looked at other alternatives (23snaps, kidfolio) but they all require re-creating my network from scratch which has been a non-starter for me. I think we're lacking a more private, secure alternative to Facebook that still makes sharing & commenting as easy as Facebook. And more importantly does not sell your data.
Congrats! Having worked with the founders, I can attest to them being "data geeks". I am a big fan of RentHop NYC and also cant wait till they expand to other markets like SF =)
Agreed on the cons. I've tried this as well for a while and it does require a huge change in lifestyle. My gym time was cut down to nothing as I would usually get up and hit the gym prior to work (going to the gym in the evenings is very tough for me).
So although my sleep time was the same (I was still going to bed and waking up at the same time as before), by taking out my gym routine, I was actually feeling more tired, down and otherwise less alert. So I've been playing with alternating work/gym during the weekday mornings.