Points: 29

# Comments: 38

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35993100

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

Definitely. Personally, I have __never__ purchased anything from Amazon, looked anything up with Google, shipped anything with FedEx, gotten somewhere with Uber, received a COVID vaccine from Moderna, used an iPhone or Android cell phone, played an Atari or EA video game, used a Mac or Windows computer, used any program that relies on NVIDIA GPUs, sent money via Paypal/Venmo/CashApp, contacted someone using a Cisco phone or router, found a job or closed a sale via Linkedin, watched a video with YouTube, shared a file with Dropbox/Google Drive/OneDrive, stayed in an Airbnb, booked travel with Kayak/Expedia, bought a home that I found on Zillow, bought anything online via Stripe/Shopify, bought anything in-person via Square terminal, looked a Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat/Twitter post, bought groceries with Instacart, ordered food with Doordash, hosted code on Github, made a video call with Zoom, looked at a Figma/Sketch design for work.

It was, in any case, of course certain that all of these things would exist.

> For all the talk of unbridled innovation, venture capital services only very specific types of innovation: those that stand to produce large exits for investors, and with relatively low risk, regardless of whether the business itself holds much promise or provides any societal benefit.

Yes. Anyone who has ever worked for or invested in a startup can attest to how low-risk and predictable they are. If only they were more volatile: then my life would be more interesting.

3% of seed-stage startups eventually exit? If only I could count on success like that each time I drive my car, take a flight, or cross the street.

I converted the conversion rates from unique-trial-paid for each scenario. It looks like 0.846% for credit card required upfront and 0.264% for no credit card required. So *net conversion is ~3.2x higher when a credit card __is__ required upfront.*

Showing my work:

I eyeballed each bar chart and turned it into a data table. I'm getting median unique-to-trial conversion rates of 3.1% (credit card required) and 6.1% (credit card not required). I'm then adjusting these to account for the % of "don't know" responses. So, adjusted medians of 1.8% (cc required) and 3.3% (cc not required).

Following the same process for trial-to-paid yields medians of 47% (cc required) and 8% (cc not required).

Multiplying each pair yields 0.846% (cc required) and 0.264% (cc not required) unique-to-trial-to-paid.

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

- Dropbox saves $50M/year in AWS costs

- Dropbox spends $200K/year (salary, benefits, equipment, SaaS, etc.) for their average infrastructure engineer

Following those assumptions, Dropbox must hire <250 additional engineers for this to break even.

Of course, these assumptions may be wrong (please correct them if so!) and this entirely ignores the unique computing needs of Dropbox's business, which may be unique vs. anything available off the shelf.

Having the capital and desire to make an investment is the easy part of investing. Actually earning that allocation is difficult.

Yet, most conceptions of investing seem to be shaped by public markets and their ubiquity. That is to say, public market float is taken for granted - when in reality it is missing from every asset class (practically or literally) save for G7 (+China) secondary-market public equities (and now cryptocurrencies).

Paid ads are pretty expensive in everything financial services because churns are low and thus LTVs are so high. So, if you want to grow this, paid ads will be tricky to make work. Never mind that you should stay organic as long as you can.

Serious investors seem to make a habit of knowing other serious investors. Often, in large quantities. There might be something interesting to explore there.

For pricing context, FinViz elite (https://finviz.com/elite) costs ~$25/mo. Other, newer tools (Atom, Koyfin) are free. However, these are research tools, not notification tools. Anecdotally, notification tools seem to command higher prices.

I would guess that false negatives are your biggest churn risk. Meaning, subscribers will be angry if your list fails to cover one opportunity that they miss out on.

I think subscribers will (and should) also expect 0 downtime at this price. So, it may be better to focus on reliability over new feature rollouts. In this market, a plaintext email with companies, tickers, and list dates would be a significant upgrade over existing consumer (read: not Bloomberg) alternatives.

After all, customers will pay you for convenience, not proprietary data. As other commenters noted, this data is all freely available on NYSE, et al.

Your value prop == 'aggregated list of all upcoming IPOs in your inbox'. Not 'some' IPOs. You can demonstrate that the product works well by providing one free sample.

I've never experienced this with any service that supports 2FA. All other 2FA services that I've ever used will not allow users to disable 2FA without first proving identity via 2FA.

(I recognize that 2FA is fallible. I am not arguing that it is perfect. But, if you're going enable 2FA auth, you should try to do it correctly.)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23884730

Points: 4

# Comments: 3

Refusing to accept SAT/ACT scores would cause a profound change. Whether or not that is advisable is a separate discussion. The question begs, if we eliminate the SAT/ACT, and we decry GPAs as non-standardized, then what?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory