paulmatthijs

It has huge implications. What is “exactly significant about this” bust is the prevention of multiple assassinations, kidnappings with planned torture, and multiple large coke smuggling operations being intercepted. Plus it’s all evidence. Previous encryption breaking busts like this by the Dutch national police have led to lifelong convictions of multiple murder squads.

Sorry to be a party pooper, but this is a non-existing thing (and a repost, btw).

It’s true that we are taught to look over your shoulder when opening a car door, but to label it “the Dutch Reach” is really too much honor. It’s just common sense.

Give and Take by Adam Grant - even after a few years, it still causes me to constantly reflect on my own actions’ motive and if they’re “otherish” or not.

Getting Things Done - not the method but the insight that you can’t manage time, only your actions. And that it’s OK not do to anything without having to make excuses to yourself.

The 2nd and 3rd Ender novels - Ramen and Varelse are concepts that apply to vega/veganism from a completely different angle. It’s not an intended metaphor I think, but it applies to my life on a personal leve; (I’m not vegan, my wife is).

As a bit of counterweight to all these "$5" replies: we paid about €7K for our logo - which is not a lot.

I've been a logo designer myself, waaaay back, and have always known that just having someone designing a pictogram and styling a word is kinda winging it. There's more to it than being good at drawing/sketching/Adobe-doey.

Our logo was a three month process with a branding agency, of which the actual logo design took less than a month to iterate.

The main part is getting straight what the brand represents, who's it for and what the persona of the brand is. You want the designer to really understand what the product/company is about. We couldn't have done this went starting out, since we didn't know all that.

So, if there's a take-away from all this, besides that good logos cost good money, is that you should get your product really straight, before spending money on a logo. Bad or fuzzy product view gets you a bad logo.

There’s a thing between being entrepeneurship and working for a company: freelancing. It’s for those that feel no attachment to a company, but do have a very developed skill set or trade.

In our free market economy, there will always be a system where someone hires you to create value, which costs less than it makes them, in the end. If you want a bigger slice of that pie, you need to make it a viable business case. Hiring a top freelancer to create value, without the hassle for the employer, is worth a markup. Being scarce helps too.

To me, it sounds like your main issue is that you feel you don’t get enough of that added value you bring. If normal compensation schemes don’t cut it for you, you surely must be able to ask a major hourly rate as a freelancer, or a royalty.

It totally depends on your business model. Is your expected ARPU 10, 100 or maybe 1M?

I'd personally focus on a KPI that tells you something about how much your customers like your product, and can't live without it. Aim for turning even a few of them into evangelists. Retention is the main force driving that.

But once you get that deep, it's just as easy to implement a full AARRR funnel that will give you much more insight.

Always to fully silent, vibration off too. Watch is set to silent and vibrate, and I take it off between 6-8PM for family time. Do Not Disturb on the Watch is switched on when I go to sleep, so I can still track my sleep.

Letting go of the distinction between productivity and hours put in. I never ever believed there was correlation, and still it's hard. Coding just takes time, better get used to it.

I'd say discovery is an issue. I'd like to be able to instantly find a product/service that hooks into whatever my kids just discovered. It won't be used for long probably, so it's more a matter of supporting micro-skill advancement than a complete course in whatever that's looking for long term users.

For example, one of my kids got into Thomas the Tank Engine. I got her an iPhone game that taught here eye-hand coordination and puzzle solving. Lasted for a week, after which she got into toilet training. There's an app for that (Pepa Bath, pretty cool). You catch my drift...

Annual, although I'd like to see some real life high volume SaaS numbers on churn comparing the two.

We do non-recurring monthly and recurring annual as a in-between solution.

Some say all sound engineers are all failed musicians. And then some became coders. And then some became founders...

Me and my co-founder regard our "ventures" into music as part of what needed to be learned to be able to become good coders. Without it, we would be not this skilled. So we're happy we didn't end up doing what we wanted to. Sounds like you have the same experience :)

Never, not for a second. It's the investors that made it possible to go full time with our venture. We couldn't have done it without. Be happy.

I sometimes hear founders regretting it, thinking the returns are too high compared to the initial investment (angel, seed). That's unfair, I think. It reeks of jealousy. You can't put a value on the peace of mind you get, for a while, of being able to do it your way.

FWIW, we only did a large seed round, no need for VC since, so things might be pretty different for Startups in the Series ;)

We reached out to everyone that ever did a review of a direct competitor within the last 4 years - we were very much last-to-market.

About 10% actually did a review of us on launch which gaves us a major boost. However, the ones that reviewed us a few months later are those with a long tail.

Reach out to those that love good products. Even if they have a small audience, it all adds up in the end.

The QC35. We have had several models in our office and the 35 has by far the best cancelling while retaining speech intelligibility. It's audible artifacs are more in the 300 Hz range as opposed to the two octaves above it as is the case with the 25.

I was a mastering engineer before becoming a founder, and my cofounder was DSP engineer. We're both allergic to bad processing so we were pretty sceptic about everything Bose. Their other stuff is terrible, but this is awesome. Just did 20 hours of travelling, couldn't be happier. I also have 1400 USD custom mould Ultimate Ears but I'll never use those again on planes.

Only downside I've come across is some pitch bending when listening to high pitched strings in soundtracks (Rogue One, Arrival)

We did what was in hindsight a small launch. We put our app on Betalist first, got good response, redid a bunch of things, got it out on Product Hunt, got some more attention.

Then we targeted reviewers of competing/related products. That's what the kicker was in the end. A small launch easily eats up all your time, so keep it simple. A continuous drip beats a big bang.

Is your product niche enough so that there's a handful of sites covering it? Reach out to them. That's all you'll need in the start, and honestly all that is possible for you to reach. Don't go the way of paid ads and such, put in sweat first.

PS: IMHO you don't get to decide if you reach MVP, it's the users that do so by telling you it's a useful product and they're happy to be using it. Then they'll start asking to add more features ;)