At the time I was a partner in an ecom firm (few guys and a small warehouse), and I needed a new logo every week or two, so I had the initial demand covered. Acquiring customers is at least 3 orders of magnitude more difficult than acquiring designers.

I launched a private vbulletin forum and invited about two dozen designers from a handful of forums. I posted my first logo contest with a prize of $200 IIRC. I offered $25 each to the first 4-5 people that submitted, to get the ball rolling and building some initial trust. And just like that I had my first successful logo contest. Over a few months I would host a contest 1-2 times a month, and would manually message each designer when there was a new one.

In parallel I started development of the actual site. When it was time to launch, I manually imported the vbulletin logo contests, and kicked things off with a single contest that I was hosting. That site still wasn't a living breathing thing yet, until I had an actual customer that wasn't me. So I burned about $1800 on adwords over a month, and received 3 customers where I made maybe $100 in fees. A rough start, but running nevertheless. After that I was able to get Facebook ads working after lots of trial and error which led to the first 100 customers.

[1] It's not that the actions were hard, it's that a successful result had a low probability.

I’m working on a name generation tool that uses 83 structured naming methods. Examples: React (Verb-based), Vue (Obsolete English), Facebook (Compound), Netflix (Portmanteau), Lyft (Creative Misspelling), Alexa (Personal First Name), etc.

I wasn’t happy with the slop generated by the overly general name generators or my own prompting/brainstorming. I went on a tangent and read the top (5) books on naming from Amazon. From there I was able to create very specific and detailed prompts which started producing consistently good names, the odd great one, and a small amount of crud.

Eventually this escalated from a large spreadsheet of detailed prompts to a side project.

Please give it a try, I’d be happy for any feedback on this early version. (I recommend the options tabs for some granular tweaking)

(The name was inspired digital music samplers where there is a lot of rapid experimentation and tweaking similar to this app)

I use a split ergo keyboard, blank key caps, and correct fingers for every key. I highly recommend all three.

For fans of the film Heat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHP4qbgAN6s One of my absolute favorites to work to.

Talk One: Harvard School Commencement Speech (aka Prescription for Guaranteed Misery in life)

Talk Eleven: The Psychology of Human Misjudgement which is the most important talk in the book. Interestingly enough it doesn't have any illustrations or sidebar notes like the other talks.

Then go from there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversation_threading#/media/...

VS

https://preview.redd.it/r7k2gf1kav6z.png?auto=webp&s=9fd7a0b...

I think the flat sequential thread works fine with a limited number of messages. Eventually with enough replies it degrades to being very unwieldy like traditional forums.

It's interesting that you were collecting for the sake of collection and not gaming. It reminds me of people that go full tilt building PC gaming rigs, but never actually play anything.

IMO the maps don't always match the terrain, but the maps are worth studying.

I'm going to buy the book as I found Traction super useful, and I'd like to see their take on popular mental models. But I'm keeping in mind the limits of models. (I like a good dose of Nassim Nicholas Taleb for this)

By design the US system should work better for those with more money.

An anecdote with the Canadian system:

A family member was diagnosed with Stage 3 form of cancer, and was receiving Chemo within a week. They have received excellent treatment the past 4 years and have "beat the odds" so far. I'm pretty sure the bill for this would be somewhere in the range of 500K to 1M in the US. The main costs for this so far has been parking, and some travel expenses for an out of City surgery.

I also know of someone of similar age who was going to be waiting well over a year for a hip replacement. (They went out of country I believe)

I've gone from Photoshop (1st version was 4.0 that I remember) -> Fireworks -> Sketch

just blocking them doesn't seem like that bad of an idea, especially with the fines involved.

I think the things that bother me is:

1) A College student working on a side project with no revenue are treated the same as some massive multi-national.

2) It's a foreign requirement that feels like a violation of sovereignty. Most business/startup owners complain about there being too much domestic regulations, now we have to worry about things outside of our own countries -- that also can come into conflict with our domestic tax authorities on things like data retention. An international agreement would be entirely different.

3) The GDPR requires clear and concise language, but have done nothing of the sort when writing the regulations. For most websites outside of the EU, could they not have produced a concise 1-2 page infographic produced by the regulators themselves?