How I Made $350 In Two Days With Three Pages and Some Payment Code

Hi my name is Dan Shipper and I’m a rising sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania. This is the story of how I created DomainPolish a site to get on-demand, inexpensive focus groups to review your website and ended up making $350 with it in two days.

 It all started when we found out we had made it to the TechStars NY Wildcard Round. The way the TechStars Wildcard works is they take 10 teams who they really liked, but whose idea they weren’t fond of, and give them a week to come up with a new idea with the understanding that at least one of the teams will make it into the program. While we were deciding which idea we wanted to pitch to TechStars, my teammate Jesse Beyroutey (fantastic blog here) started using Amazon Mechanical Turk to get feedback about them. He would post a short description of the idea, and then ask the turks (as they’re called) to give us their thoughts. I was surprised at some the high quality comments we got, and I was fascinated by the power of the concept. There are a lot of awesome things you can do with a distributed, on-demand workforce of people gathered over the internet.

Fast forward two months and we didn’t get in to TechStars, but I had started using Mechanical Turk to evaluate my side projects before I released them. At first I was skeptical that a mass of untargeted workers from around the world would give me good feedback about my web designs. But after posting a few surveys, and tweaking them to maximize quality, I was surprised again to find that many of these lowly paid workers gave extremely insightful and actionable feedback about my projects. That’s when I decided , “Hey, if it works for me why wouldn’t it work for everyone else?”

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How Is Chess Like The Socratic Method?

Let me start this post by saying that I’m fascinated by how things fit together. How is Mother Teresa similar to Richard Nixon? How is Facebook similar to UBS? It’s very easy to assume that many of these questions are unanswerable. On the surface Mother Teresa isn’t at all like Richard Nixon. But once you really force yourself to look at them objectively and dive into the subtle details that separate one thing from another, similarities almost always exist. Once you can figure out how one thing relates to another, you can begin to peel back the shroud of our every day assumptions, and reveal the golden strings that connect all of the things in our lives. Knowing how things connect means knowing how the world works. And that’s what I’m interested in learning about.

So now let’s address our original question. How is chess like the Socratic method? Let’s first start by defining exactly what we’re talking about. Chess is a “board game of strategic skill” where the object of the game is “to put the opponent’s king under a direct attack from which escape is impossible.” The Socratic method on the other hand, is not a game, but system of argumentation and discussion wherein the protagonist attempts to convince others of his viewpoint simply by asking questions. These questions follow a specific logical flow that eventually ends in proving an apodictic conclusion.

The Socratic method is a great tool to use in argumentation simply because your opponent doesn’t know that he is proving your case. It’s very easy to state what you think and attempt to coerce the other person into agreeing with you. Very seldom does that work. Have you ever watched a presidential debate? I don’t think I’ve ever been convinced of an opinion I don’t originally agree with by watching even the best politicians in the world try to force it down my throat. Certainly my perception of who I like might change, but my politics don’t. In my experience, trying to force my opinion on someone else makes them dig in their heels against me, and generally creates unnecessary tension and animosity. Generally I end up doing that anyway just because it’s easier, takes less thought, and is sometimes more satisfying. Somehow the words, “No you’re wrong” can be said with special glee that clouds the true objective of a conversation. But by using the Socratic method you don’t force your conclusion onto the other person, you take what the other person gives you and ask the questions that lead to that conclusion.

Well how is chess similar? Let’s start by asking another question, what’s the object of chess? To checkmate the other person’s king of course. Ok, so we have one similarity. Both chess and the Socratic method have a starting point and a known objective. In neither case do we know what the path to that objective will look like from the beginning, but we know what we’re gunning for. Now the next question: how do we win in chess? Now from my very limited knowledge of strategy in general and chess strategy in specific I know that you can’t beat your opponent. You can only make your opponent beat himself. You have to make him react to your moves in such a way that he exposes his king. If he doesn’t do that you will never be able to checkmate him.

Here the key similarity becomes clear. Think of every move you make in chess like it’s a question in the Socratic method. You make a move, or ask a question and see how your opponent reacts. Based on his reaction you make another move, or ask another question, that hopefully will further expose his position to logical fallacy or his king to checkmate. The best players are the ones that beat you before you even know what’s happening. Just like a questioner using the Socratic method they know exactly what they’re doing from the beginning. You’re the only one who doesn’t know what’s going on.

What are the takeaways from this post? Well it’s clear that you can’t make people give you what you want. You can’t force a person to reverse his opinions, or to lose to you in chess. In order for them to lose they have to want to make the moves that ultimately undermine their position. So next time you’re arguing with someone think about it like a game of chess. And next time you’re playing chess think about it like the Socratic method. Even if you don’t win the first time, your understanding of the game will increase. And your success will increase as a result.

You should follow me on Twitter.

If you like this post you might like If you’re not failing you’re not trying or The Theory of Constraints (Or Why Bottlenecks Matter).

The Theory of Constraints (Or Why Bottlenecks Matter)

When I read about how to make programs that I write run faster, the most common advice is “find bottlenecks and eliminate them.” That sounds good on its face, but why is it true? That’s a question that I’ve thought about for a long time. Why not ignore the bottlenecks and make the normal parts of my code super fast. Shouldn’t that have the same overall effect?

For the past week or so I’ve been reading a business book that I found through a Hacker News thread called The Goal. Written by physicist turned business  “guru” Eliyahu Goldratt, the book, (as far as I have read) tells the story of a manager named Alex Rogo who turns to an old college professor for help saving his factory from being shut down. Continue Reading

My New Side-Project: DomainPolish

In the midst of all of the other stuff going on TechStars, my internship at Artsicle and a few other things many of which I will be blogging about in the near future, I just managed to finish a little side-project of mine called DomainPolish. The basic question that DomainPolish attempts to answer is: why doesn’t everyone have their own domain name, personal website, and custom email address? Domain names and hosting are so cheap now, and they add so much to your personal brand and online identity that I see no reason why everyone shouldn’t have them.

That’s why I created DomainPolish. You sign up, pick a domain name and then I go out and register it, set up email on it, and then you get a simple form to fill out (that you can change at any time) where you put in your name, a bio, a profile picture and optionally a resume, Twitter account, and LinkedIn account and that becomes your personal profile on whatever domain name you choose. It’s a simple easy way to set up a professional web presence and own our own internet home.

I hope you like it.

Battle In The Boardroom: Why Groupon Probably Paid Off Its Early Employees

After Groupon made its books public yesterday for its IPO, it has faced a firestorm of criticism from the blogosphere. Many of those concerns are well founded. Over the past year Groupon has effectively pursued a hyper-revenue growth, profits be damned, spend $10 to make $5 business strategy. They have an army of employees cold calling every business in the country trying to drum up business. From what I’ve heard their merchant experience isn’t exactly spectacular given that they take 50% of the profits, and almost all of the customers produced by a deal don’t come back. And that’s just a tip of the iceberg.

Those issues aside, one of the big questions that many people have asked is why on earth Groupon took 810 million of the last 1 billion dollars it raised and gave it to early employees through stock purchases. That sounds reckless and stupid on its face. It could even seem familiarly suspicious to a Madoff-jaded public. But let’s put ourselves in Groupon’s shoes and figure out why executing those kind of stock sales might make sense.

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#1 On HN: Our Traffic Stats

After spending the last three days coding our YC-interview demo, Wesley, Ajay and I decided to submit our project Readstream to Hacker News at 6 AM after an all-night coding session. Readstream is a fully-featured, socially curated stream of all the links brought to you by your Twitter timeline. Basically what we do is go into your Twitter timeline, find all of the articles linked to by the people you follow, and then present them to you in a format that allows you to quickly scan through and read the things that interest you. 

For the first 30 or so minutes after we submitted it we barely got any upvotes. Then upvotes slowly started trickling in. Eventually we made it to the front page. And then we were in the #1 position. Wesley and I were high-fiving and smiling, responding to comments, and watching our Chartbeat go crazy. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of finishing a long night of coding, being absolutely exhausted, and then watching your project climb to the top of Hacker News. That’s a feeling you have to hold on to. 

And now, without further ado: 

After being on the front page for approximately 6 hours, and being at the number one spot for about an hour (albeit early in the morning) we got 5,733 pageviews, 3,698 absolute unique visitors and a 66% bounce rate. 

One thing I noticed was that the bounce rate was a little higher than I would like. We thought that by throwing up an intriguing headline, and giving a little descriptive paragraph people would be ready and willing to sign up. And they were. But we also got a lot of people on Hacker News asking us to give them a way to see the app without using their accounts first. So lesson learned: don’t make people login with their Twitter accounts to find out exactly how the app works. Provide a video demo, or some other means of previewing to allow people to see the app before entering their person information.

Besides this I think the most interesting statstics come from our database. We signed up 720 users in our first day, and those users viewed over 12 thousand articles! That’s an average of over 16 articles per user. Good stuff! 

So if you haven’t checked out our app yet you should try it out at ReadstreamApp.com. We think you’ll love it.

Readstream: Our newest app

I’ll have a more detailed post up later, but for now check out our newest app: Readstream. Basically the app takes your Twitter stream, gets all of the links from it, and presents you with a beautiful and constantly updated flow of articles from the people you follow on Twitter. Check it out, I think you’ll really like it. 

Grim Tweeper – The easy way to clean out your follow list

So a few nights ago we released the Grim Tweeper as the easy way to clean out your twitter follow list. The basic concept is that we follow too many people on Twitter that really don’t have that much relevance to us. The Grim Tweeper let’s you quickly and easily get rid of them. It also has a pretty fun interface if I do say so myself.

We got some pretty good traction the first day, but since then our traffic has died out to a good degree. I think this goes to show that for a product like this to succeed (a small one-time app) it has to be seen by the right person. Sure every once in a while a very simple one-time use app will have such a great viral loop that it can organically grow itself out of obscurity. But in order for something like this to get popular it has to get mentioned by a big site. We submitted to a few big places, but we’re still waiting.

The best thing about it is it only took us two days to do. So if it doesn’t get popular soon we can just get on to the next one. 

One Month Two New Projects

Lest you think our team has been sitting on its laurels after the success of WhereMyFriends.Be, I’d like to show you what we have been up to for the past few weeks.

First we coded and released TastePlug which allows you to easily create a todo list for your music. It works by allowing you to text songs that you want to remember to our site. These songs are then saved on a profile page for you to view and download later. This is a pretty cool project that people seem to like, so stay tuned for the next iteration coming soon.

After Tasteplug we took a break for a few days, but over the last few nights we threw together The Grim Tweeper. The basic premise behind The Grim Tweeper is to allow you to easily clean up the list of people you follow on Twitter. I don’t know about you, but I definitely have at least a few people that I follow who I don’t really care about. Either they post spammy links way too frequently, or they like to talk about topics that I have no interest in. Either way it’s always good to clean out your follow list, and this is what The Grim Tweeper is all about.

All you have to do is log in and you are presented with the profile of someone you are following on Twitter. If you want to keep this person as a follower you press Keep. If you want to unfollow him you press Kill. And it’s as simple as that!

Anyway you should definitely check out The Grim Tweeper and Tasteplug they’re cool and simple projects that will hopefully make your life a little bit easier.

The Daily Pennsylvanian

Check out Wesley and me in the Daily Pennsylvanian (our university’s newspaper):

The next Mark Zuckerberg may be walking Penn’s campus. Wharton freshman Wesley Zhao and College freshman Dan Shipper, along with New York University freshman Ajay Mehta, partnered to create WhereMyFriends.be — a website that maps the locations of a user’s Facebook friends.

Since the website’s launch on Feb. 21, it has attracted 30,000 users and has mapped over 3 million friends. In February, the site was featured on CNN and Mashable, a news website that covers social media and technology.

You can read the rest of the article here.