Apple will approve apps that prevent sign-up in the app. The problem is that they will deny you the ability to even tell the customers where to go to sign up. Notice that the message displayed in the Spotify app doesn't have a link, doesn't even mention that you can sign up on their website. The customer has to infer that that is what's going on -- good on Spotify for using "premium" as a trigger word because Apple rejects apps that contain the words "purchase" and "subscription" _anywhere_ in your app if you're not using IAP. We were rejected once because those words appeared in an error message sent from the server.
I don’t think it’s special for Spotify. It comes under the “Reader” apps clause (originally carved out for Kindle?) where apps which sell: music, movies, books, email can require that a user create an account on the web first (but cannot link to it, which is stupid)
I feel this, but likely because I am a software engineer and PC tinkerer from the '90's.
Everything that get's created, gets commercialized and swallowed up by whatever product roadmap that commercial entity has. The soul of the internet, from my point of view, can be simply stated as "connection."
Where do we go when we want to connect further and wider than our feet can take us? The internet. What is the point of connection? To share who we are through a wide variety of means: games, text, images, music, voice, etc.
The internet as a protocol supports that endeavor, but the layers that were built on top of the internet started swallowing up human attention. Now there are a few large leaders who have built application layers on top of the web, and that's where people go for their connection. This very website is one of them.
Recent developments with ActivityPub and mastodon are promising. Personally, I'd just like to find my way back to a universal protocol for connection. At the root of it, there's a need for infrastructure which will always cost money. I think that's the main hurdle that needs overcoming.
Very impressive from a technical perspective. I should know, since I worked on a startup for 3 years who attempted to productize a similar system. If this can scale, I think you have a very valuable foundation.
Did you build Nino Meets using AWS Chime? I'm curious.
Now for the feedback:
Because the use cases are so broad and all-encompassing, marketing and onboarding into your system will be a huge challenge. Do not underestimate it. At my startup, we hired onboarding specialists since most small business owners we were attracting were not exactly engineers. They needed a lot of hand holding to understand how all the parts went together.
Take notion as an example, they have a huge community dedicated to showcasing things you can build. Even then, I don't really like notion because it is such a blank canvas. It's a hard hurdle to overcome!
I think a valuable next step would be to partner with people from different industries to create custom templates that are built on top of your more general purpose foundation. Those templates should reliably solve specific work flows that those users would be familiar with, and they should have no trouble getting up and running right away.
If you can solve that, you will really have something!
Your current website looks like docs for other engineers, so I'd strongly suggest creating a few more websites, each one branded and showcasing specific workflows for the target audience you are looking to convert.
Thanks for the actionable feedback regarding marketing and onboarding. You're spot on that the home page is being like docs for other engineers, I didn't even realize I was doing that.
Honestly, it's so offbeat compared to the sensationalist headlines that have been optimized over the last 20 years that it feels refreshing. I would probably read it just for that fact alone!
Somehow the lack of sales are the product teams fault? Let's start messing with the product to figure out why sales aren't happening. Haha, it's so sad it's almost funny!
A lot of founders hire a product team way too prematurely. A lot of founders who have experience making product think that the product sells itself....
Just curious if you'd include alcohol in that list? What about prescription pain-killers? Just curious where you draw the line on what's criminal, and what's not.
Personally, I'd rather criminalize the negative behavior, rather than the drugs themselves. Like DUI laws, for example.
This is slightly smarter. I have zero issues with people being addicted to whatever they want, so long as it doesn't negatively affect others. You do fentanyl in the privacy of your own home, then go to work in the morning? Cool.
Well that's the rub ain't it? Punishment, at its root, is just a method for control. The more brutal the punishment, the more fear is created, and fearful people will then obey commands (laws).
It's such an infantile mindset, I'm frankly surprised it has stuck around this long.
We all just want to live, and enjoy the fruits of our lives, our friends, our families, our work. When a social break happens due to anti-evolutionary behavior, that situation needs to be corrected. Threat of punishment never needs to come into it.
I've been waiting for this. Seems like it is a self-contained cellular device requiring a subscription, which makes sense. I guess I am curious how I can be in communication with it. Will my contacts be texted from a new phone number? That seems like the biggest hurdle for me, as I'd just like to use my pre-existing cellular service that I already pay for.
I also find it curious that a former Apple exec formed this company. I'd assume Apple itself would want to pursue this internally, as such a device would be yet another killer addition to the iron grip of the Apple ecosystem.
"A study conducted by Fisher found humour-orientated individuals likely to identify their mothers as demanding, unsympathetic and distant. They were seen as avoiding the nurturant role, commonly falling on the father to fulfil this role for the family.[21] "
Wow I didn't expect to read a wikipedia page written explicitly about my life today. Except in my case, my father didn't nurture either.
I never thought of my tendency towards humor as a tool for disarming family conflict, but it feels very accurate
I still find it hard to believe that fully-async working style is more productive in the long run. My experience with it was that the pace of synchronous collaboration and decision making is about 5X faster than async. A group of engineers or a product team standing around a whiteboard in physical space is going to win the day every time IMO.
Perhaps if a company has reached series A and developed a lot of in-person trust and communion, they could successfully start expanding to a remote situation.
I really think it just depends on the work that's getting done, and the nature of the collaboration and decision making that's required.
I think the major assumption is that collaboration is synonymous with productivity.
Candidly, in my experience, the results of collaboration, a lightweight version of "design by committee," have always come back to bite in the long-run. Primarily the issues are: diffusion of responsibility and accountability (i.e., since we all came up with it, then if it goes wrong it was bound to happen and someone else is responsible for fixing it vs. if I came up with it and it goes wrong, it's all on me) and lack of cohesive vision (i.e., the designs and decisions made are incongruous and lack cohesive vision; they're the result of slapping together everyone's, one could argue what would be in isolation, good ideas, but without the necessary steps taken to connect them altogether in a proper fashion).
If we assume the latter, rather than the former, then all that's increased is the speed of sub-optimal processes. One could even go so far as to say it's mostly theater similar to having everyone in the office: the appearance of work is more important than the actual outcomes of the work.
When everyone's together it's very difficult to get a quiet moment to yourself to really think things through and plan things out thoroughly. Instead you default to a more social, collaborative process.
From my own career, I've found I don't need collaboration often. I trust my ability to gather all the information I need, deferring to and asking for the help of experts that know more than I do, while still having the good judgement to synthesize it together into a cohesive and practical plan. In other words the buck stops with me.
Collaboration is absolutely required when the product is undefined. You as an engineer would not be able to do your job correctly unless you could communicate with a designer, a UX-researcher, a product manager, etc (unless of course you are talented enough to fulfill all of those roles by yourself).
Quite typically, communication between all of the above parties is required quite often, as snags are discovered along the way and they constantly require re-working and tweaking the original concept.
The teams I've loved working on make the best use of what people are good at doing.
The people that need to "get together" to share untested ideas so they can make a decision, or share analysis to provide evidence of the validity of a plan will do so without the engineers that do the work. There has to be someone there that has an idea of engineering or architecture, but not the whole team.
In other words, even just a product manager and a CTO or architect can figure out what needs done while not knowing the details of how it will be done, but then they'll pass that information on to the implementation team. Individuals are paid to figure out how and to execute on that.
That's an old outdated way of viewing the world. Everyone sitting around a whiteboard trying to brainstorm an idea is wasteful. Someone comes up with an idea and then everyone takes some credit and you've spent $10,000 and wasted the day but feel productive but deep down you know you didn't need most people in the room.
I disagree. My best ideas come in the presence of others. Something about the collective energy evokes new perspectives I did not have alone.
I think its a waste to get 10 engineers in the room to decide how to build a single module. That would be stupid.
But it likely makes sense to get a designer, an architect, and a product manager in a room. It might also make sense to get an embedded systems engineer, a cloud engineer, and a web engineer in a room to architect something.
I prefer fully async for the simple reason that programming is all text.
A programmer is first and foremost a textsmith. They create increasingly complex textual creations, and develop a deeply refined, idiosyncratic toolkit over the years for doing so. No reason to strip them of their best toolset if you don't have to.
If a job as a developer was 100% coding you might be right, but collaboration, problem solving and brainstorming work far better in person, at least in my experience.
You've outlined it so well! "you're stuck between... and you're just doing your best to make it all work."
Couple that with the fact that the whole front-end world has gone completely bonkers, reinventing the wheel so many times in the last 10 years I'm surprised my head hasn't separated from my body.
It's funny that things have come full-circle these days, going back to server-rendered views. My career literally witnessed the entire move from HTML -> SPA -> HTML again. It only took roughly 16 years.
