Group items tagged

The spacing effect is "one of the most remarkable phenomena to emerge from laboratory research on learning,"

The problem of forgetting might not torment us so much if we could only convince ourselves that remembering isn't important. Perhaps the things we learn — words, dates, formulas, historical and biographical details — don't really matter. Facts can be looked up. That's what the Internet is for. When it comes to learning, what really matters is how things fit together. We master the stories, the schemas, the frameworks, the paradigms; we rehearse the lingo; we swim in the episteme.

"The people who criticize memorization — how happy would they be to spell out every letter of every word they read?"

1. 80/20 rule from Noah Kagan Appsumo’s founder, Noah Kagan, notes that one rule of thumb that they follow is to use 80% of their marketing budget for things that are working and 20% on newer marketing initiatives. One more thing: they go all in when they find marketing channels that work. You can watch one of his presentations where he shares his experiences of growing Mint, Facebook, and AppSumo here.

2. Communicate, communicate, communicate At Treehouse, we work remotely and as you might imagine. There are some that think there is no replacement to working in person while others support it. For us, we’re half and half – we have an office in Orlando and we also have a team up in Portland. The rest of us are distributed. But hey, it works because we communicate a lot. If you don’t feel like you are running enough A/B tests, speak up about it. If you feel like the team needs more developers, speak up. If you feel like an executive decision is going to cost the company money in the long run, talk. People might not always agree with you but it’s your job to communicate. You’re doing the company a disservice if you aren’t being honest. To get you started, here are some tools we use to communicate: Campfire Skype Google Chat Google Hangout GoToMeeting – we use GoToMeeting for our leadership meetings. It’s very simple to use and the video quality is pretty good.

3. Be a voracious reader Although there’s a lot of crappy content circulating the internet, there’s always going to be someone you can learn from. The key is being able to discern signal from noise. For example, if I’m looking to learn more on conversion rate optimization, there are great blogs such as Unbounce, ConversionXL, KISSmetrics, SEOmoz, and more. Just look at the detailed blog posts that they write: 10 Useful Findings About How People Use Websites – ConversionXL 5 Landing Page Conversion Killers – Unbounce The Ultimate Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization – SEOmoz If your goal is to squeeze every penny out of your website, you should be reading conversion rate optimization articles like the ones above. They cost no money to read and stand to help create original ideas that will eventually create more profit for you. This applies to any topic you’re interested in. Using the right tools can go a long way in helping you save time. If you’re on the go and don’t have time to read, you can use Pocket. To help you find relevant topics/articles via Twitter, you can grab curated lists using Listorious. Finally, I like picking off interesting topics from Inbound.org or Hacker News. Key takeaway: don’t read every single blog out there. Find the ones that actually add value and follow them.

With the rise of the glorious interwebs, customer behavior has changed radically. Historically, gathering information about anything required an enormous amount of time and resources. Talking to sales reps was the ideal way to learn about product features and benefits, learn about the market, and see how everything worked.

As we all know, that’s no longer the case. With Google, Twitter, Facebook, and every other platform we use to connect, we have an unlimited access to just about any topic. This means we’re more informed as consumers than we’ve ever been.

Ramit:  I want to emphasize a couple of things you mentioned. One, if you’re charging 5, 10, 20 bucks an hour, it’s very, very difficult to go from that to charging 200, 300 an hour or 10,000 a week.  It’s very difficult to make that transition. If you do it when you come in, that can happen. But going from one level to another is extremely difficult.

Thumbnail sketch: You can get from $20 to $100 by getting serious as a professional, and you get from $100 to $200 by getting really good as a professional (or working in a high-demand speciality), and then somewhere between say $150 and a weekly rate in the tens of thousands you probably repositioned your offering such that it is no longer directly comparable to what you were doing before.

Can you sell Rails at $50k a week?  I'm going to go with "almost certainly yes."  I think there are probably people who do that, and if you listened to them pitch clients, they would speak a language that holds very little in common with what you hear from a $100 an hour Rails developer.  Want to speak that language?  Keep reading for some thoughts.  (It will also help to get pretty darn good at Rails... though I think most people in my audience probably overestimate how skilled you have to be to move up that ladder.)]

Create case studies If you really want to show the value in what you offer, you have to create case studies. The simple ones won’t cut it, you have to give detailed ones… ideally with the exact things you provided and the results. To legitimize the case studies, make sure you put in testimonials from customers. This can be done in the form of video or text and if you happen to go the text route, make sure you include: Their full name Company name Their picture Title at the company If you want to see an example of a good case study, check this one out from Conversion Rate Experts.

Offer a free trial One of the easiest ways to handle price objections is to offer a free trial. Remember, just because you are offering a free trial doesn’t mean you can’t take a credit card up front. With Crazy Egg, one of our biggest objections from people is that our prices are too high. We created a “free trial” offering in which people had to put in their credit card up front. That offer converted at 59% higher than our 30 day money back guarantee offer. Keep in mind that you will get a lot of people who will cancel your service before their free trial is up, so when you a/b test this you have to also include cancelations into your calculations.

Explain the value The easiest way to demand a high price point is to explain how much money you are going to either make a company, or how much money you will save them. If you can explain this in an easy to understand fashion and provide case studies to back it up, it shouldn’t be hard to demand a premium price. A great way to do this is through sales copy. And don’t worry, your copy doesn’t have to be sleazy. I do this with Crazy Egg, NeilPatel.com and I also used to do it for my Quick Sprout Traffic System. You could even spice up your sales copy by including a video incase people don’t want to read your copy.

"investors are in a sense "buying" your time, not much different than consulting"Brilliant. I've never heard the concept of investing in a startup phrased so well.

My company has a really good chance of succeeding, but I still face these doubts every day. Here are some of the things that make the game worth the candle for me, even if we end up failing: * I'm proud of the product we've built. Even if it doesn't take off, nobody can take that away from me. * I'm incredibly proud of my engineering team. We're "a bunch of kids" who've built something incredible. Even if the company ultimately doesn't survive, we will have done really well. * I love my work and I love the people I work with. There are conflicts, sometimes I have to deliver bad news, deal with stress and monotonous work, firefight problems, etc. but in aggregate the work I do and the people I do it with bring me joy. I will always remember this time fondly. * When I started, I was a good engineer and a terrible product manager. Now I'm a good engineer and a good product manager, which makes me 100x more valuable. There is a bazillion other things I've learned, but this alone makes everything worthwhile.

* Facing doubt every day made me face the darkest corners of my soul. I stopped being an obnoxious cynical windbag and started appreciating the nuances of life, people, art, poetry, strength of human spirit and true magnitude of human dignity. * We're taking a real shot at building hard, sustainable technology that has a good chance to change the world. Even if we fail, I'll never regret taking the chance. * I met hundreds of people on my path. I dismissed some of them, but in retrospect I've learned from them all. I appreciate humanity a lot more now, and I understand where the dark parts of it come from much better. * Perspective is worth 80 IQ points. If you start a company you gain a lot of perspective. I could keep going, but I hope I've made my point. I'm not trying to sugar-coat anything -- failing may very well be the worst thing you've ever experienced emotionally to date. But keep everything in perspective and don't get cynical. You might still change the world in a big way. You might still change it in a small way. It doesn't matter. Enjoy the people around you. Get into adventures. Try to do something meaningful. Do the best you can -- things may not turn out how you wanted them to, but they'll probably turn out ok.

That you’re not supposed to know how to do anything right, and that’s o.k.

you didn’t need to know how to do anything in the beginning - you just needed to get good at finding the right answers quickly.

If you focused on learning, getting the right advice, in near real time - then you could take on any challenge.  It’s quite liberating once you realize that.

Launched in 2007, Airbnb has grown to become a $1 billion company. When Airbnb launched, they faced a tall task: How do we get people to learn about and trust our little-known website? In other words… How do we acquire users? So what approach did they take? Post on Craigslist! In a story posted by Dave Gooden, he finds out that Airbnb would contact people who were offering their homes to rent on Craigslist. The email would come from a random person (who was really from Airbnb) telling them of a “lovely site” known as Airbnb. Here’s a sample email:

1) You are talking too much.. 99% of the process of getting feedback is listening. If you want some great feedback on your website, shut up and listen.

2) You are getting mad at your customers for feeling one way or another. Customers are allowed to feel the way they feel. My above anecdote is a classic – she got angry for me not liking the font option, instead of making a note to herself “client can’t find the font change option – are other having a hard time finding it?” I also see companies get hung up on this mistake a lot with pricing. Business: “How much would you pay for this?” Client: “I wouldn’t pay for it but would use it if it was free.” It isn’t their fault that they did not understand the value of paying for it.

3) You are not understanding or caring about the customer’s WHY. You must understand a customer’s WHY. Why do they feel the way they do? A good example with a recent client: the feedback from not one but three testers: “I hate that color purple.” Ok, so you could take that and change it to orange, but you don’t even know why you are making that change. Instead, I asked why, and got back “because the font is hard to read at the top.” Ok. now we have a readability problem, not a color problem. Much clearer issue to fix.

“Hi Elle, what’s the angle?”

“Arbitrage on parsing shipping data,” I reply. “Well, everyone has an angle.”

My Dad explained that hedge funds are truly a dime-a-dozen in the finance world, not dissimilar from angel investors.

1. Good copywriting is underrated: Compelling copy is key to conversions and also making your brand human, friendly and fuzzy. Developers can’t write copy that well, that’s what marketers are for. Lesson: Great copy is a huge differentiator. It connects your audience to your brand and it has a direct impact on retention and engagement. “Copy is so important because it communicates your vision and helps you solve your products,” said Isenberg. “If you can’t do that right you’ll have little conversion rates and your not going to have a consistent brand image.”

2. Influencers are a big deal: Scale users quickly by onboarding communities. Isenberg worked with schools, trading rooms and blogs. Influencers hold the key to these communities. Lesson: The best way to onboard influencers is the old school way by building a real relationship. Pick up a phone, email them or best yet, take them out for drinks. “I love sitting behind a computer because it’s my safe haven, but the truth is that relationships is key to getting these people involved,” he said.

5. Distribution, distribution, distribution: Strategic alliances with partners helps create value-add for their user base and helps you get traffic (and SEO juice). Lesson: Embeddable widgets that allow users to distribute content across the web are particularly powerful when it’s the strategic partner’s content. “Find your most compelling feature that can be embeddable and do deals.”

Designing Basically, designing means how your software looks and how it works. The purpose of designer is to make software that's better than what already exists. A designer makes sure that a software is as simple to use as possible, execution is smooth and bug-free, and user never has any confusion in achieving his goals when he uses that software.

So, here are some skills and qualities that may help you in having a better life as a programmer. Social This is probably the most obvious one and that's why it's highly ignored. I can tell this from my personal experience. Whether you are in college or a company, being social always works in your favor. Often times, we ignore small things like saying a simple 'Hi' to a coworker or greeting them with a simple smile. I had this problem during my school days, and also for some part of college life. 

A programmers aim shouldn't be to simply write good programs, rather it should be developing really great products. Even the basic knowledge of designing can help a long way in accomplishing that. Recommended book : The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman.

I think Howard Aiken got it right: Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.

One thing I’ve learned from developing software is that it’s very difficult to transfer ideas. A lot of software projects never completely transition from the original author because no one else really understands what’s going on.

And when other people do have your idea, they still have to implement it. That’s the hard part. We all have more ideas than we can carry out. The chance that someone else will have your idea and have the determination to execute it is tiny.