There is also an animated show called Pantheon that deals with “uploaded intelligence” and the process is likewise fatal. I can’t recommend it highly enough. It had two seasons and the story was completed.
The article has some helpful points. But as a programmer-SAAS-founder-who-took-over-ads operation, I have some tips on some insights we gleaned doing paid ads (and getting it to be profitable for us):
1. Most important tip: is your product ready for ads?
- Do not do paid ads too early.
- Do it once you know that your product is compelling to your target audience.
- Ads are likely an expensive way of putting your product in front of an audience.
- No matter how good the ad operation, unless your product can convince a user to stay and explore it further, you've just gifted money to Google/X/Meta whoever.
- If you haven't already, sometimes when you think you want ads, what you more likely and more urgently need is better SEO optimization
2. The quality of your ad is important, but your on-boarding flows are way more important still.
- Most of the time, when we debugged why an ad wasn't showing conversions, rather than anything inherent to the ad, we found that it was the flows the user encountered _AFTER_ landing on the platform that made the performance suffer.
- In some cases, it's quite trivial: eg. one of our ads were performing poorly because the conversion criterion was a user login. And the login button ended up _slightly_ below the first 'fold' or view that a user saw. That tiny scroll we took for granted killed performance.
3. As a founder, learn the basics
- This is not rocket science, no matter how complex an agency/ad expert may make it look.
- There are some basic jargon that will be thrown around ('Target CPA', 'CPC', 'CTR', 'Impression share'); don't be intimidated
- Take the time to dig into the details
- They are not complicated and are worth your time especially as an early stage startup
- Don't assume that your 'Ad expert' or 'Ad agency' has 'got this'.
- At least early on, monitor the vital stats closely on weekly reviews
- Ad agencies especially struggle with understanding nuances of your business. So make sure to help them in early days.
4. Targeting Awareness/Consideration/Conversion
- Here I have to politely disagree with the article
- Focus on conversion keywords exclusively to begin with!
- These will give you low volume traffic, but the quality will likely be much higher
- Conversion keywords are also a great way to lock down the basics of your ad operation before blowing money on broad match 'awareness' keywords
- Most importantly, unless your competition is play dirty and advertising on your branded keywords, don't do it.
- Do NOT advertise on your own branded keywords, at least to begin with.
- Most of the audience that used your brand keywords to get to your site are essentially just repeat users using your ad as the quickest navigation link. Yikes!
5. Plug the leaks, set tight spend limits
- You'll find that while your running ads, you are in a somewhat adversarial dance with the ads platform
- Some caveats (also mentioned in the article)
- Ad reps (mostly) give poor advice, sometimes on borderline bad faith. We quickly learnt to disregard most of what they say. (But be polite, they're trying to make a living and they don't work for you.)
- (Also mentioned in the article) Do not accept any 'auto optimization' options from the ads platform. They mostly don't work.
- Set tight limits on spends for EVERYTHING in the beginning. I cannot emphasize this enough. Start small and slowly and incrementally crank up numbers, whether it be spend limits per ad group, target CPA values, CPC values - whatever. Patience is a big virtue here
- If you're running display ads, there are many more leaks to be plugged: disallow apps if you can (article mentions why), and disallow scammy sites that place ads strategically to get stray clicks.
- For display ads, controlling 'placement' also helps a lot
6. Read up `r/PPC` on Reddit
- Especially the old, well rated posts here.
- They're a gold mine of war stories from other people who got burnt doing PPC, whose mistakes you can avoid.
There's a funny Japanese movie about small business tax shenanigans, A Taxing Woman (1987). Several of Nobuko Miyamoto's movies take a humorous look at Japanese business. Perhaps the best of those is Supermarket Woman (1996).
As a teenager, I loved solving Nonograms in puzzle magazines on train rides or when I was bored, they are the perfect time killer. Somehow I forgot about them but recently rediscovered them through a Twitter post, which was a real pleasure.
The linked website seems to be very nice, especially since there is a community aspect to it, where people can send in their own puzzles (it seems like).
My recent goto app for Nonograms is https://nonograms-katana.com , which works great on browsers and mobile alike with lots of well thought-out features (e.g. it asks you if you want cells automatically crossed out if a line is complete) and beautiful artwork, good interaction, etc.
For people looking for something similar and actually minimalist, I highly recommend http://68k.news
I don't know what algo it uses, but it basically grabs top headlines, aggregates similar stories with their headlines (so you can see how other news sites headlined the same news), and then most importantly presents a plaintext version of the article that is accessible without visiting the news site directly.
It's honestly the best news site I've ever used, and would recommend it a thousand times over. I also believe I found out about it on HN a few years back
I too was using text-only versions of sites like CNN, Reuters, or Christian Science Monitor[1], and they were fine. But what I really wanted was to turn any news website into a text-only website.
* Automatically builds a list of news stores, separate from the navigational hyperlinks.
* Detects RSS/Atom feeds to provide a more accurate list of news stories.
* Uses Readability to show only article content on article pages.
* Uses meta data like OpenGraph or Twitter cards to provide richer formatting, and to determine page type.
It regularly converts 900 KB home pages or 1.2 MB news articles into into 3KB for links to news stories and 5K of text
It does this by:
* Using semantic tags like <header>, <footer>, and <nav> to determines which hyperlinks are navigational and which ones are likely links to news articles.
* OpenGraph meta data to determine page type news stories and extra metadata.
* A Aggressive HTML parser that strips out a ton of tags, CSS, JS, etc
* Readability library to extract out the text of news articles
I built this as a service in Gemini, so if you have a gemini browser you can try it. Otherwise, here is a HTTP-to-gemini proxy showing you what a NYT article looks like:
Besides great podcasts like Embedded and Planet Money, NPR is also home to NPR Training which has lots of helpful information.[1] Their ear traing guide is great. [2].
> the 10-day counterclaim response window is required by law.
Punitive towards individuals and small businesses.
From what I can see, it seems to be a curated list of IPTV sources [1]
Which puts it in search engine activity territory.
I'm reminded that Github stood up to the UK's City of London Police who issued a DMCA for the PirateBay Proxy on GitHub. [2]
However Law can be used to resource burn entities where no compensation for failed legal attempts exist as the City of London Police demonstrated with their actions.
X-Keys (mentioned by the author as his source of the relegendable keycaps) and Genovation are two manufacturers of programmable macropads popular for commercial and industrial use. Especially Genovation can be found pretty cheap on eBay (I see as low as $25 right now). If you're looking used, also consider PrehKeyTec for larger programmable keypads ranging up to full-size keyboards with triple function rows and the gap between arrow keys and navigation block filled in (magstripe reader and keyswitch too, these are mostly popular for POS applications).
It is a bit absurd what a decay there is here, from obviously good to increasingly conservative & closed models. But this discussion on power struggles was excellent yet lacked some of the larger context of what mode the business at large operates in, & Klein here had some semi-interesting if pointed ideas to get us thinking about modes of thr firm.
Unfortunately Scott- who is covering this has been pretty highly insensitive & crude repeatedly.
I have lots of military publications saved as PDFs. The US Army and Marine Corps provides for free tons of manuals of a massive number of niche topics. The majority of them are not applicable for most people, but there's a number of these manuals that I think are worth having on hand in case of long term outages or catastrophic events.
Take this manual on radio operations from the Marine Corps:
It basically goes over everything you need to know about radio theory and constructing antennas, and teaches these things more effectively than any other resource when I was recently learning about amateur radio. Other resources are long-winded and contain distractions, but military publications like these are distraction-free.
Here's the modern version of the Army manual on survival (formerly FM 21-76):
Two books which I read this year that have helped me become a better writer are,
Charles Bukowski On Writing
Kurt Vonnegut Letters
These books aren’t so much about how to write better but more so a look into the minds of two good authors. Helped me get over some of the hurdles of writing. Probably not very useful if you’re looking to be an improved work document writer but for creative writing they were great.
I think you're looking for a business/economics hybrid field called "unit economics". Its all about churn, customer acquisition cost, etc. There's a guy who works for Microsoft named Tren Griffin who tweets case studies of this stuff - might find it interesting.
I strongly suggest “How to Read a Book” by Adler. It’s an excellent discussion of types and levels of reading.
When faced with a large, imposing text, my method is:
1. Read the title page, table of contents, index, and introduction several times. This should make it clear what the book is about and how it’s structure.
2. Read it straight through from start to end. No notes. Don’t worry about not understanding. Intellectually, I’m very passive. Just familiarizing myself with the terrain. Keep in mind the knowledge gained from the previous step.
3. Read through again, paying attention to key concepts and terms. Make a list of key concepts and terms. Try to understand and resolve the concepts and terms in relation to each other and the structure of the text. This is still very passive reading. You shouldn’t be forming any opinions at this point.
4. Create your own outline of the text. If the table of contents is well thought out, this might be redundant. Still very passive. No opinions yet.
5. Go through again, summarizing all the key ideas. Still very passive, you’re just trying to map out the text. Not forming opinions.
6. Rewrite the outline, now including your summaries.
7 and above. Now, if necessary, start actively critiquing. That’s a whole different matter. And usually involves playing the author off other authors. You usually don’t get to this part. I’ll refer you back to “How to Read a Book.”
The key thing is to focus on passively understanding, rather than opinion formation.
The doc recommended surgery for my RSI, but I managed to get myself out of it with a few months of very careful changes to my work environment.
1) Pay attention. Frequent stretches. Frequent breaks. I highly recommend this "Hand stretches for guitarists" vid http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSrfB7JIzxY Once you learn the routine, it's fast, easy and feels noticably better.
3) I was 1-finger hunt-n-peck typing the whole time. Hands pretty much hovering and lax for minimal tension. Careful about not touching the desk with my arms.
2) 2 keyboards and 2 mice. One keyboard on my desk and one on my lap. One mouse on my desk on the right. Other mouse under my desk on a platform on my left. Changing postures very frequently.
It was a pain in the ass. But the random, shooting pain in my hands eventually went away. Totally worth the hassle to avoid cutting my wrists.
I've been listening to techno (not EDM in general, Techno) since the 90s. It's definitely my favorite music for deep work; something about the tight repetitive loops is just perfect for concentration. Since the pandemic started I've been listening to techno mixes almost constantly in order to mask the noise from everyone else in my house. Initially, I found it difficult to find decent mixes since Techno has become a generic term for EDM. I just returned to following the genre so I really didn't know where to look. However once I found a single Soundcloud account curating mixes of the style I like, it opened up an unlimited supply of music through following recommendations. Maybe someone will find this useful:
I've got about 40 or so playlists on SoundCloud for individual techno DJs I like, as well as a couple for general techno mixes - they're all the ones with "techno" in the title :) You'll find a some overlap with the artists in your playlist in fact, I've got playlists for Ben Sims, The Advent and Drumcell that I found in the first minute of scrolling through it.
What sort of techno do you prefer? The artists I've got are mostly the tougher end of European techno, there's also some Detroit techno, acid techno and hard techno/schranz. You can look at my likes for my favourites...
I've also been into techno since the 90s and it's still my favourite thing in the world :) The combination of relentless kick drum and the constantly changing synths and percussion never fails to draw me in. It manages to sooth my ADHD with the constant heartbeat of the kick drum while the constant progression of everything else serves to keep my attention from wondering off after a few bars.
I recently wrote a high level book on data science with a bunch of pictures and illustrations (not nearly this nice).
I am a big proponent of the idea of fusing art and technical content in a pedagogical way.
This is really nice, even if I'm not the target audience, I can appreciate just how much care and effort went into this work. Best of luck moving forward!
Hey, papercups looks like something I was searching for the other night but never managed to stumble upon. I just checked my search history and maybe that will be useful for you to see.
'intercom',
'intercom alternative',
'intercom alternative producthunt',
'slack live chat integration'
I remember that the majority of the producthunt recommendations were dead projects and the 'Top 5 intercom alternatives'(etc.) articles didn't seem to mention you.
