Aha, so he is performing arbitrage. Charge customers a $1 for something he can buy for much less than a $1. I wonder if the recursion works, use the virtual assistants to bring in leads to also get his own customers.
Location: Chicago, IL
Remote: Yes, preferred
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: iOS, Swift, Xcode, Sketch, Git
Résumé/CV: Will provide upon email request
Email: tcjohns87 (at) gmail (dot) com
I'm an iOS developer with over 2.5 years of experience in Swift. I began my career as a CPA and spent 5 years working in fast-paced, deadline-driven environments at 2 of the large public accounting firms (last promotion was to manager).
As a large part of my transition to iOS development, I built the iOS app Routinist, which helps you achieve goals and build habits by scheduling them into your daily routines. Since April 2016, Routinist has 70k downloads, 720k sessions, and 7.5k monthly active users. Through the process of building this app and 33 App Store releases, I’ve learned much about coding, user experience, design, marketing, and business.
I built the iOS app, Routinist, which helps you achieve goals and build habits by scheduling them into your daily routines. Routinist has over 60k downloads and 600k sessions.
I am an iOS developer with 2.5 years experience in Swift and have executed all facets of the iOS development lifecycle from conception to launch, debugging, customer service, etc. I approach my work with consideration to the impact it will have on customers, coworkers, and the success of the business overall.
Prior to iOS development, I worked as a CPA in fast-paced environments and developed skills that are useful in app development including communication, team, interpersonal, management, organization, time management, and math/logic skills.
I love Tristan's philosophy that the purpose of technology should be to help us live deliberate lives and not distract us endlessly and consume our attention by taking advantage of our evolutionary shortcomings (e.g., resistance to change, fear of missing out, defaulting to whatever is easiest like scrolling a feed, providing variable rewards, etc.).
Getting a dog is a great idea (especially from a shelter), but I just want to set realistic cost expectations here.
My fiance volunteers for PAWS and it is typically a minimum of $350 in fees to leave with a dog. Also, dog food can add up (the dog we recently adopted needs grain-free food due to an allergy) so it's about $750 a year for a 28 lb dog (I would say minimum of $300 for cheaper food). Then you should take your pet in once a year to the vet and get heartworm, flea & tick medicine, etc (another min. $350 a year). And you'll probably want to get your dog a doggy bed, collar, leash, treats, etc. Obviously anyone can cut out or short cut some of these expenses, but this should be the minimum spend expectation in my fiance's opinion.
Well, obviously there are some reasons to live in Russia :) Every animal shelter is more than willing to give you a dog for free, dog food (a really good one) is around 50USD per month for a 55 lbs dog, annual vaccine is 12USD and rabies vaccine is free (government-sponsored). Heartworm, flea & tick medicine - 10USD every 3 months.
>"The symptoms I've experienced are... and poor time management."
I built a morning and evening routine app (Routinist) to help professionals schedule habits/goals into their days. I did not have ADHD in mind when I built it, but around 1/3 of the positive feedback I get through emails / reviews has some form "I have ADHD and this helps me".
The article says "Foursquare is on the path to $100 million in revenue", so they might be nowhere nearly that level. But I would think their largest costs are salary and servers.
Like most startups building a mass of users (e.g. Twitter), they have likely been optimizing for growth as quickly as possible. Which means spending all revenue/investment on getting customers, etc. and delaying focus on turning a profit until some future time (e.g., as the acceleration of growth slows).
It's probably an algorithm to get you some decent % of views early on to see what % of upvotes you get so it can move your post up or down accordingly.
"We want to help people stop forgetting 90% of their lives."
I also saw this tagline or similar on PH, and I got to say I'm not a fan. If you look at everyday on it's own, for most of us, it's pretty boring stuff. Why would I want a record of that? If something hugely important happens, sure maybe I'll want to be able to access that memory / my thoughts at that time in the future.
But 10 years (let alone 50) from now, I might not even know what year big events happened. And so I'll be digging through maybe 100s of hours of recordings/text if I'm looking for a specific event.
There's definitely some product in this space that could be great, but I don't think 60 second recordings is it, especially without some way to filter through the boring crap. I imagine looking through my old calendar would be more helpful than my 60 seconds of nightly drivel.
Of course most of it will be "drivel", but it's _your_ drivel, the drivel that your life is made up of. For most people that _will_ be interesting, or at least emotional, as they look back on life later on. For starters this group includes everyone with children. Just think of all the "pointless" photos we take of our children, they mean so much to us.
But apart from this, very soon (if not already) it will be possible to transcribe these messages and extract some useful metadata from it, even put together a kind of biography. That will be interesting even to sceptics like you!
Also consider journaling, many people, that live relatively uneventful lives, do that. This sounds like an alternative for them.
I don't journal, but from what I understand, products like the 5-minute journal ask you to journal some things you are thankful for, something positive/good that happened today, what you could have done better, etc.
This exercise seems more about focusing your day/priorities, clearing your thoughts and taking some time to feel some good vibes. It's not about remembering 100% of your life.
Yeah - If I'm going to look back on life later on at things, it will be 100x in favor of things like my kid's photos/videos vs words I spoke that were transcribed to text.
