I was able to pass four AWS certifications and learning a ton in the process by taking courses on https://acloudguru.com/ and lots of practice on AWS itself.
Highly recommend acloud. I would use them again to re-up my certs as well.
Wow! I'm a lemonade customer and the fact that leadership twice mentions that leaking customer data is by design, is mind-boggling to me. What product owner would suggest such a feature!?
Sites we interact with may become adversarial towards us at any time they see fit. I wish my browser and the extensions I use were sacrosanct and outside the purview of other companies/sites.
Without a doubt! I'm not too concerned because I'm using it within the USA to access my email, HN, and various other common websites while on public wifi.
I've set up my own VPN using Streisand [https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand] & Google Compute Engine (Micro Instance). When you create an account on Google's Cloud, you get $300 (or used to at least). This instance type is big enough to handle the few devices I connect to it, fairly speedily too.
I was just going to say that same thing. Unfortunately, the chains of habit are generally to small to feel until they are to hard to break. Even with this change in hardware, how many will change this ingrained habit of theirs?
Living in NYC also, I use Gett mostly and sometimes Juno (due to 30% off limited time promotion). I always ask drivers which service they like. Many do not like Uber or Lyft due to the % they take, compared to Gett/Juno.
Also, I found it interesting that nearly all drivers have multiple cell phones logged into separate services, sometimes Gett and Juno! I wonder what the percentage of drivers Gett will be picking up that were already Juno drivers.
It's my understanding that you're working on your "startup" until you've found a repeatable way to generate profits. Once that occurs you then begin working on your "company".
I see, I apologize for not providing you with what you were looking for initially. I struggle with over analyzing problems. This leads to paralysis in some cases, including when coming up with ideas for products/services like you're experiencing.
I have a friend who wants me to work with him on a project. The problem he is trying to solve doesn't scratch an itch for me though. I have noticed, for me personally, that I am more motivated to work on something if the solution solves a problem I am currently experiencing.
"The problem is that the ideas aren't particularly revolutionary." There aren't really many more "revolutionary" ideas anyways. Sometimes all it takes is to find something that's already been done and find a way to improve it. Look at Nest Thermostat, Slack, Evernote, etc. The great thing about going after a market that's already got customers is that you don't have to validate a need, because the market is already there.
Hi Aswerty, this is an interesting problem to solve and one I'm looking to solve myself. Maybe the first thing to do is understand the job the customer wants to get done. Here's a great video I just watched that delves into that topic (5 min long). http://youtu.be/f84LymEs67Y
I would then attempt to workout exactly what the business model and your value proposition to your consumer would be. I've read the Business Model Generation book and I found it to be helpful and thorough in coming up with ways to generate potentially profitable businesses. Their second book, on Value Proposition, looks fascinating as well. http://businessmodelgeneration.com/
I would also read 'Goodbye Minimum Viable Product, Hello Maximum Value Proposition' (http://torgronsund.com/2014/12/04/minimum-value-proposition/), which includes the video i posted earlier, as well as an intro to Simon Sinek's work on Why How What.
45% of profits, may or may not be good. Off the top of my head, they will have...
* hosting costs (and everything that goes with that)
* payroll & benefits (are they paying themselves?)
* taxes (the rate they are taxed is dependent on the state they incorporated in and the type of corporation they are incorporated as (Sole Proprietor, LLC, S or C Corp))
* misc.
It could turn out that they don't run a profit, yet still generate revenue. If you feel that it has legs, you may want to ask for a percentage of the company. This would make you an employ and would allow you in the future the potential to receive dividends on profit. This is taxed at 15% instead of normal personal income tax rates. (obviously i'm looking at this from the USA point of view.)
Highly recommend acloud. I would use them again to re-up my certs as well.