Anyone else look into Hex? I'm new to alt coins but a passionate friend convinced me to look into the project. It's designed to be a decentralized certificate of deposit. The incentives reward the community for locking up their coins causing the price to go up. I've 4x my initial investment.
Interested what the hackernews community thinks of this project?
What type of person would you trust with acquisition advice? This is a topic I've struggled with how do you inform target users about your product without being dismisssed
Do you have any examples of outreach methods that you appreciate?
Obviously when something works it's not likely it will be noticed, but I'm curious if anything broke through without offending?
Also, do you pay for SaaS or are you not at all that demographic?
I personally detest every email marketing attempt that is not a curated newsletter I intentionally signed up for.
I also don't browse ad funded social media, so that's not reaching me.
And I use ad blockers.
So I guess my question is, how can someone with something that you or I would want to pay for let us know that it's available? In a way that leaves us saying "thanks for telling me"?
Hackathons and conferences are good venues for advertising this particular product, and an email/slack message is not a completely unreasonable mechanism for doing so.
However,
1. Do it through official channels. If you want to advertise your product by mass emailing hackathon participants, then sponsor the hackathon.
2. If are not sponsoring, then at least limit your outreach to people who you actually talked to during the event. Have genuine conversations, tell them about your product during the conversation, and ask if they'd like a "tree trial of the pro membership" or whatever. Only follow-up if they are actually interested.
3. Most importantly, communicate professionally. That means a well-structured, concise, convincing, and error-free piece of text. It helps to list next steps. The message in the OP is, to be frank, a rambling mess of a narrative with middle school-level grammar errors. I would expect better written communication skills from a high schooler. Even if I met this person at the hackathon, and even if I solicited a followup, this email would probably still make me lose all interest.
Thanks, I think I understand your perspective better. It sounds like you care more about the lack of genuineness or professionalism than the act of reaching out and selling, if I'm understanding correctly.
I think the takeaway for me is to work in a space/field of genuine interest so that building relationships can be a genuine activity.
No, it's exclusively the lack of profesionalism. Business is business. I don't want a "genuine" sales/marketing person. Your product is not my baby.
The right way to do this is to 1) sponsor the event and then 2) send out a professional email/flyer/whatever pitching the product through the official mechanism.
I also want to add that he emailed me under false pretences. He conjured up an imaginary world in which we were close friends and I cared about what he did at the hackathon and what he’s doing afterwards (I’ve never met the guy). He undoubtedly wanted me to believe that he handwrote this email for me alone when its a copy-paste marketing email that he’d reused many times.
Not only is it dishonest and wastes my time, the execution is so bad I feel embarrassed for the guy (really? You “arrived” at a virtual hackathon?)
Edit: Oh my god and I almost forgot. He sent this to me at 3:21 AM!
I'm really surprised that this is taking so much of your mental energy :/ I remember you wrote quite an aggressive message on the Hackathon Slack that had to be removed by admins..
It seems like you took my email so much more serious that you should have!
I definitely didn't want you to feel like I was faking a friendship, this was a cold outreach done because I believed that this could add value to you.
But it's just cold emailing. I didn't mass email people without a reason :) You met people, you might not want to lose touch, that's it.
But agreed - totally a grey area - I'm not complaining, I should of course expect such reactions!
Love that! I guess it's a billion dollar question.
I can share my approach:
My startup is targeting early founders. We're building an app to help you stay in touch with users through a Segment.com integration. So here's how I cold email:
I get emails from founders on Indiehacker that have some revenue, are web based and make revenue through subscription. https://www.indiehackers.com/products lets you target really well.
Then, I use Clearbit to figure out if they're using Segment.
And if they are, I shoot them an email to briefly explain what we do and that they can give us a try and get set up in a few seconds because they are already using Segment.
It's the same email for everyone but already pretty personal due to the initial research.
What exactly does that mean? What is it that put you off in his approach? Was it the cold outreach? If so, how would you have liked to be approached for his type of service/product?
Didn't you just say you were just giving spam emails a try in an earlier comment? And now you say you've tried many cold email approaches? I'm having trouble keeping track...
Awesome work! I understand its a proof of concept for a hackathon but what's the value of AR here? If AI can indicate a fault with a high success rate how does AR help this situation?
Thanks! Good question, the AI part is clear, it will indicate if there is a big chance of break. The AR will help the operator decide without going to the actual break whether the AI is correct.
The AI only suggests, does not decide on its own. As such, an operator will be able to see the break in full detail (the top and bottom and up close) to better be able to decide whether to continue production, or do a reweld.
Also, sometimes the AI will not be able to provide a good input, as new materials might be welded together and no data is available for them. In that case, again it's up to the operator to actually give the go or no-go.
The AI will inform the operator after about 2 seconds, the operator then still has about 8 seconds to finalize his decision.
The current prototype is not really usable, as it has some big usability issues. We might work further on improving this prototype with the organizer, depending on their interest.
The ARKit example app has a readme doc that lists best practices when developing ARKit experiences. I feel that list is super valuable when building ARKit apps in general.
1. The AI in games has access to internal representations of game state and does not have to recognize it from pixels on screen. This is a massive difference.
2. The logic is usually a bunch of (human-authored) scripts consisting of if-else spaghetti.
Also, the AI opponents don't have to play by the same rules. They go by fun > fairness to keep things interesting. That's why you normally can't keep a huge lead on AI opponents, because they "rubberband" back up to you faster than they should be able to.
Wouldn't surprise me if they don't even 'drive' in any sense while off-screen, just increment some abstract position relative to the track length. But I don't know this for a fact.
"Wouldn't surprise me if they don't even 'drive' in any sense while off-screen, just increment some abstract position relative to the track length. But I don't know this for a fact." This seems unlikely, especially given how item pickup zones operate. Since an item box disappears for a short period of time after someone drives over it, it's imperative that the position of the CPU player who drove over it, and the one that comes after that (and inherently gets no item) is represented accurately. Even off-screen, AI continues to collect and utilize items.
Then again, maybe this is just done by cheating simply with an RNG.
Mostly experience, but you should get plenty of results by just Googling "mario kart rubber banding". Looks like the top result mentions a patent on an algorithm for it, but I'm blocked at work.
It's a common enough term, though, there's even a page for the trope here:
Interested what the hackernews community thinks of this project?