I'm going through a great Irish incubator at the moment and I agree. The ones that focus on customer development and give you the added resources to do it more effectively are definitely worthwhile and make your limited time more productive.
There are a lot of incubators out there. For startup founders I suggest you do your homework.
I thought this was a parody. Obviously most well known and funded startups would have a large number of early users from SF / The Valley in technical professions.
I like the app and I think the easy to remember name suits it well, even if Hemingway might turn in his grave. It's a promising start, but I'm not sure if I'd continue to use it unless I could start tracking improvements in my writing.
I would love to see a bit more of the hard data behind the rankings. For example, I just tested a blog article I wrote 5 minutes ago against an article written by a proper journo on PandoDaily and I scored higher. Does that make me a better writer? I hope not.
In all seriousness, the idea has a lot of potential and you could certainly find a few nice ways to compare yourself different writing styles of famous authors Hemingway or someone else.
The app icon doesn't really look Facebook-like and the second screenshot look like a photoshop disaster. If I had never heard of the app, I wouldn't think it's an official Facebook product.
It's painful to do a tech startup anywhere but in my experience, what London suffers the most from is the cost of living.
I spent the last 3 years working in Shoreditch and most of the startup founders I came across were either bootstrapping to the extreme (spending nothing but sweat capital on their project) or freelancing at least 2-3 days a week to cover costs. I think in practice this makes a lot of the work look more amateurish in comparison to seed/angel funded teams in the US. In practice, you would see a technically very talented founder without the right UI/design, a visually polished MVP with no user traction, a businessy founder outsourcing technical work to East Asia etc.
A bit misleading this part:
Less than four months after launch, Quip now runs on 76% of the world's smartphones and tablets.
I didn't know I had Quip on any of my devices.
Also:
Available in 11 languages on 8,560 distinct mobile devices, Quip can now be used by 1.3 billion people on mobile devices, and over 2 billion people on PCs.
Last time I checked there were only about 1.5 billion PCs in the World.
I do like the website, but I'd be a bit spooked by the big numbers.
Power connector like the wireless chargers by Nokia etc? Not sure what a I2C interface is...
My point is that I would prefer objective reviews, not glowing praise from fans etc. The key question for is not what tech did they pack in a small screen device, but does it actually feel better to use than the incumbents.
Meh. I'd wait for the first few objective reviews.
I lost interest when they said things like "there is one hardware feature that is unique to Jolla: The Other Half [...] a concept of user-changeable smart back cover."
Surely replaceable plastic covers have been around for decades and they are mostly associated with low-end feature phones... or really old Nokias.
Very interesting. Would you mind sharing which vertical/industry you are in? Do you think your success is because competition is currently low or because you can do something clever in targeting the ads?
The way I see it Twitter is either a broadcast channel for people who want to share lots of self-important things or a stalking channel where people can follow celebrities etc. Eithe way I don't see people buying stuff unless it is celebrity endorsed.