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Candy Japan 2017 Year in Review
This was another tough year for Candy Japan, with many factors combining to a sharp decline in subscriber numbers. Contains revenue numbers, site statistics and learnings from 2017.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49 posts.
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The Merge
A popular topic in Silicon Valley is talking about what year humans and machines will merge (or, if not, what year humans will get surpassed by rapidly improving AI or a genetically enhanced...
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Why Education Startups Do Not Succeed (2011)
I co-founded PrepMe in 2001. We were one of the first education companies online and the first purely online, personalized platform. We were acquired in 2011 by Providence Equity-backed Ascend Lea…
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Yes, but what does your startup do?
I recently signed up for a hackathon. Part of the deal these days is that sponsors get to send promotional messages to the attendees. Fair enough. The only problem is, most of these messages are rubbish! Here's the verbatim message I received - there were no links other than to Twitter. See if you can work out what…
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Avoiding Startup Tarpits
Startup growth can be painfully slow. So slow that many entrepreneurs just give up and quit when their launch doesn’t go as expected. When…
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Things learned while running your own self-funded startup
Here's a brain dump of the things we've learned while running our business and shipping our first product ( Basis ). My experience at Valv...
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How I stopped procrastinating, learned to code, and launched my first product
I discuss the six major barriers that I had to break through in order to go from lurker to launcher.
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The life and death of a startup
At DjangoCon Europe 2017 , and again at DjangoCon US 2017 , I gave a talk entitled “Autopsy of a slow train wreck: The life and death of a Django startup”. After I gave those presentations, a number of people requested that I publish the content in blog form so they could share it with colleagues.
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Startups should not use React
That is, if you ever hope to be acquired by a larger company
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How to Pick Your Next Gig: Evaluating Startups
Samvit Jain writes on startups, the tech industry, machine learning, and what he has learned along the way.
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To start a billion dollar startup, start looking for problems
Yes! You read that right. If you want to start a billion dollar startup and you are looking for ideas to work on then most probably you are...
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Building a startup in public: from first line of code to frontpage of Reddit
I show how I built a mini startup called Hoodmaps in public from the first line of code to a functioning web app that I got to the frontpage of Reddit with ove…
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Successful Solo Founders
Note* Since publishing this, a research study came out by MIT with more information and data on this. See 2 founders are not always better…
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Twilio – Why there's no API for crossing the chasm
How the market focus and culture that helped Twilio reach significant heights can transform from assets into liabilities…and what to do about it.
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The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups
Data analysis reveals 50% drop in San Francisco startup funding, with Series C & D rounds falling 66-75%. Key insights on shifting venture capital trends in 2016-17.
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Why getting traction is so hard these days
The end of the cycle One of the best essays written last year was Elad Gil’s End of Cycle? – referencing our most recent 2007-2017 run on mobile and web software, and the implications for investing, startups, and entrepreneurs. Although he doesn’t directly talk about it, the end of a tech cycle has major implications…
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Everything I Wish I’d Known Before I Started Demoing SaaS
Everything you want to know about Medellin and Colombia
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Twice as happy customers means half the marketing spend
Halving your cancel rate doubles the number of customers your business has. Even if you run a subscription business forever, you will not have infinite customers. Instead you reach a steady-state number.
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Ten Weeks with Y Combinator’s Startup School
In early March 2017, I found out that Y Combinator had announced its first online startup school. That really made me happy, since we’ve…
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SaaS Pricing (2013)
SaaS pricing is a mystery to many developers. Here is how to do it better.