Business newbie here. How relevant is that to B2C? If my saas-like product is simple and relatively cheap, is it worth spending so much effort into sales instead of, say, marketing? Got any interesting resources?
I can't get my head around how sales could work efficiently with B2Cs in general.
Marketing is the top of the funnel. He's not talking about a hard sales function but actually the process from attracting someone to closing the sale (e.g. clicking 'buy').
Marketing leads to sales. If your marketing doesn't convert viewers of your marketing effort to buyers then you have nothing.
For consumer products, look at how competitors do it. What looks like it is successful? Try it. Put proper metrics and A/B testing on everything you try.
adwords is interesting because you can create a landing page and test it. regardless of whether it's cost effective it allows you to test your top benefit, etc. even if your targeting SEO your going after the same keywords. facebook is a way to test things as well.
I certianly have been lucky. And our team knows a lot of people, it helps enormously. But I have also realised without hard work and a willingness to learn, the luck and know-who, would have been completely wasted.
Of course you need a decent product and some hard work to go with it.
I'm not sure if I remember correctly but it was either Peter Thiel or Malcolm Gladwell that mentioned (in one of their books)how much luck and knowing the right people can make all the difference in the world. It makes sense because I know firsthand that the smartest folks are not necessarily the most savvy business people and a great product with good customer service may not be enough. Getting your foot in the door or knowing someone who can open a door can be a huge deal.
When i was something between 11 and 14: I was going to an eletronic store with my father to buy a cd player for me (i was looking forward to it) and my sisters where watching tv while they were already over there time budget.
I didn't want that (not sure what english word would fit here) and pulled out the cable and the plug broke. My father was annoyed/angry and i was crying because we nearly didn't drive to that electronic store.
I realized two things:
1. enviousness/distrust/jealousy is stupid
2. me being angry/crying about a situation i can't change doesn't change that situation
I got less emotional/more rational after this event.
I also think that this was one key point to become a nihilist.
Few years ago, I started getting a package almost everyday from my recently deceased Uncle's 82 year old wife. It was anything from small things like old photos and key chains, to larger items like a traditional India "Thali" meal plate made of silver, an Ivory (from a real elephant :( and more.
Turns out she was clearing out the late Uncle's garage and stuff all around the house, and returning gifts from my family back to us, and doing the same with others (friends and relatives who had sent my uncle stuff). Mind you, he wasn't a hoarder. It was just things people gave him over the (many) years and he kept them because of the emotional element (friend, family) attached to such things.
Old and frail herself, I remember my Aunty spent a good few months -- almost a year -- shedding the baggage. The postage alone must've cost her a few 1000 $s. Not to mention packing, taking stuff to Good Will etc. It reminded me of the quote from Fight Club - "The things that you own end up owning you.".
On that day, a young 16 year old me decided to never store or keep anything with me and become a minimalist, even if it was an "emotional" thing. Because I don't want me or my surviving family to have to go through something like this ever! I also don't buy any gifts for anyone, and instead give cash whenever I am obligated to give a present or gift (think weddings, birthdays etc)
I understand, I really do, but consider that in the sadness and duty of clearing things out, she held memories in her hands. Some would have been treasured. She would have smiled more than once.
That she spent so long doing this also suggests it may have been cathartic for her.
That said, I keep very, very little myself, but for different reasons (I simply don't need anywhere near the stuff I have and tend to clean ruthlessly every now and again).
I will also suggest that gifts given years ago have far less value now.
I'd add to that that everything, all the things you can consider are passing. The amount and specific shapes of that passing are where your mind dwells and wonders away unless you pull it back.
This is one of my "aha" moments as well. I was working on a development project for free. I hated it even though I had interest in the project itself. I didn't realize until a long time after that I felt as though my work had no value. I communicated this and suddenly I was making $75/hr.
My takeaway was: Everyone's time is worth something.
Recently, I realized that instead of putting the pressure to launch a website specifically, I could launch products within the website instead. This got me to start writing, sharing, and getting feedback immediately, and has made me feel much more comfortable that I'm building something people will actually use.
Most things people tell you that are important are not (at all) important. Realizing that removed all stress and since then everything has become easier business wise as well.
When I was 13 years old I figured out that people of other faiths believe in their Gods just as fervently as my devout and conservative family believed in theirs.
Since truth isn't determined by where you happen to be born, it seemed unlikely that my family's God was the one true God while all the others were false.
That's the "aha" moment that changed the course of my life.
In an astronomy class, our professor gave us the formula for Escape Velocity. It's typically used to calculate how fast a rocket must go to get out of the gravitational pull of the planet. It's a simple formula that takes into account the mass of both objects, and their distance.
As you make the mass of the larger object greater and greater, it becomes clear that eventually the escape velocity can be greater than the speed of light.
That's all a black hole is: A gravity well strong enough that even light itself cannot escape.
I knew this already to some extent, but the simplicity of the math really stunned me.
a rocket takes off. let's say it's going upwards at 1 m/s at some short time after takeoff. why can't it then reduce (not to zero) acceleration such that it stays going upwards at 1 m/s all the way out of the gravity well? don't aim for escape velocity, keep the velocity at exactly 1 m/s until you're out.
but MUST the rocket achieve its 'escape velocity' in order to escape? why can't we have a casual stroll out of the gravity well?
escape velocity applies for an unpowered vehicle, right? throw a rock, it's gotta be going at least at the escape velocity or it won't escape. but throw a rock that's propelling upwards itself all the way out ...
if I want to climb stairs, I propel myself gradually on every step, I don't require that I launch myself off step 1 with the speed to get me to the top.
"a rocket takes off. let's say it's going upwards at 1 m/s at some short time after takeoff. why can't it then reduce (not to zero) acceleration such that it stays going upwards at 1 m/s all the way out of the gravity well? don't aim for escape velocity, keep the velocity at exactly 1 m/s until you're out." <-- that will totally work, but isn't escape velocity.
Escape velocity is essentially the velocity an object must start out with to move towards an asymptotically infinite distance from the gravity well without additional thrust. That last bit is what makes it escape velocity. The gravity well will slow the object to near zero velocity but the object's distance will eventually overcome the gravity before it reaches zero or negative velocity.
Your example of moving at a constant speed of 1 m/s is only achievable with constant thrust to cancel gravity, thereby stopping the object from slowing during its ascent. If the object has achieved its escape velocity, no additional thrust is needed. One is not better than the other, it's just a matter of what is more practical in terms of fuel or travel time.
yes - my question is whether escape velocity is necessary to leave a gravity well.
and if it's not, taking that to its logical conclusion - why do we NEED to go faster than the speed of light to escape from inside the schwarzschild radius of a black hole? can't we leave under constant thrust at 1 m/s?
There are a few things to tease apart in this. First, maintaining a constant speed of 1 m/s requires constant application of force to overcome the forces working against you. On a road surface, these are air resistance, rolling resistance, etc. It takes very little force to oppose these at this speed (wind resistance increases with the square of speed, so the faster you go, the more force you need to keep going that fast, which is why gas mileage drops as you move above your engine's optimum operating range).
Heading up from Earth, you are facing a deceleration of 9.8 m/s/s, so you need to apply enough force to counter that. The amount of force depends on payload, e.g., a little plastic drone don't need so much, a Saturn V carrying something to high orbit needs a whole lot.
Escape velocity is the velocity at which no further thrust is required. That's the key point: The object is travelling away from the well so fast that it is already going fast enough to overcome all of the rest of the gravitational drag it will experience until it hits micro/zero-G.
Rockets need constant thrust (constant force and acceleration) to overcome the constant force and acceleration of gravity).
If you accelerated a human being to escape velocity at the surface of the Earth, you would concuss them to death (and likely organ damage them to death).
A photon starts life at C, whatever C is in its current medium.
Yes, the fundamental reason is conservation of energy. If there is not enough energy stored in the rocket's fuel to escape the gravity well, it doesn't matter whether you expend it all at once (and fail to reach escape velocity) or expend it over time as in your example. "Escaping the gravity well" from any point takes a well-defined amount of energy (which we call "gravitational potential energy") so your fuel use strategy won't help you in the end.
Yep. Along similar lines of thought, there's the issue that the equations and laws governing classical mechanics fall apart in such settings.
Even so, assuming that we can apply classical thought to the problem: the simplest roadblock to rockets escaping from a black hole is that their change in mass per time unit multiplied by their velocity must at least partially exceed the gravitational pull.
Either you utilize ungodly amounts of fuel per second or you already have a crazy-high velocity or some combination of both. The math just makes it infeasible. There's limits on mass you can have and eject, and limits on attainable speed.
It was when I learned that the genetic code actually resides in the set of tRNA-synthatase enzymes that couple the appropriate amino acid to appropriate tRNA.
When I was in high school and realized for the first time that the 6502 assembler mnemonic LDA was the same as the number 169, thus bridging assembler source code with its machine code representation.
One day at age 4 I, for some reason, was cranky. I went with my dad to a kiosk close to our home where this big smily overweight owner always gave a little something as a snack when I came.
This time I got nothing and I asked my dad why after we came out. He said "I dont know, but you seamed really cranky." and I realised that my attitude affects the attitude of others.
One of my childhood memories was finding a piece of yellow plastic broken off of some toy that had lots of colorful little symbols and ornaments printed on it. It lay buried in grass for a few years at that point and it went almost white, bleached by the sun. I stood a while, pondered and remembered the toy as I had remembered it further in the past. Fast forward to my late 20s. I started, not too systematically, learning quantum mechanics because I always felt that, although regarded as an intimidating topic, it is probably a thing that is, given a bit of time, not too complicated to understand and involves just as much forgetting established ideas as it involves understanding new ones. And THAT I have on lock down, you hand me ideas no matter how complicated and I will forget the shit out of them so hard it's gonna make your head spin, tremendous. So when learning about entropy and information conservation it struck me:
Every time a photon tickled my child self and told me about the way atoms of my toy were arranged, black ones here, yellow ones there, my god even some god damned green ones, that information was not handed to me for free. It was taken from my toy and not only when I saw it but for as long as it lay there enjoying the sun, it sent its information out to everyone passing by, even back into the sky, while putting on its new dress which was designed with a die and tailored by nuclear fusion. Some of it will have waved pluto good bye before the real journey began. Year in, year out. And, finally, it showed. Patterns grew less strong. Distinctions between different regions of the plastic died off. And the information from all the times I saw my toy was, as exclusively as anything, mine. Noone else ever laid hands on these particular bits. They are with me, still, because they tipped a few neurons of mine into a state stable enough to last a few decades. They are slowly leaking, for instance into your brain right now, but I am sure I will not run out until I turn senile.
TL;DR quantum mechanics made me realise that all my toys were doomed but that I managed to secure some of their essence
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadI can't get my head around how sales could work efficiently with B2Cs in general.
For consumer products, look at how competitors do it. What looks like it is successful? Try it. Put proper metrics and A/B testing on everything you try.
Luck + [hard work|skills|knowledge]
You could be lucky and then not know what you are doing and fail.
You can know a ton and just not be in the right place.
It is that magic elusive combo.
I tell my kids you can only control one side of that equation. Learn as much as you can.
I'm not sure if I remember correctly but it was either Peter Thiel or Malcolm Gladwell that mentioned (in one of their books)how much luck and knowing the right people can make all the difference in the world. It makes sense because I know firsthand that the smartest folks are not necessarily the most savvy business people and a great product with good customer service may not be enough. Getting your foot in the door or knowing someone who can open a door can be a huge deal.
I didn't want that (not sure what english word would fit here) and pulled out the cable and the plug broke. My father was annoyed/angry and i was crying because we nearly didn't drive to that electronic store.
I realized two things: 1. enviousness/distrust/jealousy is stupid 2. me being angry/crying about a situation i can't change doesn't change that situation
I got less emotional/more rational after this event.
I also think that this was one key point to become a nihilist.
It helped me understand functional programming too.
Turns out she was clearing out the late Uncle's garage and stuff all around the house, and returning gifts from my family back to us, and doing the same with others (friends and relatives who had sent my uncle stuff). Mind you, he wasn't a hoarder. It was just things people gave him over the (many) years and he kept them because of the emotional element (friend, family) attached to such things.
Old and frail herself, I remember my Aunty spent a good few months -- almost a year -- shedding the baggage. The postage alone must've cost her a few 1000 $s. Not to mention packing, taking stuff to Good Will etc. It reminded me of the quote from Fight Club - "The things that you own end up owning you.".
On that day, a young 16 year old me decided to never store or keep anything with me and become a minimalist, even if it was an "emotional" thing. Because I don't want me or my surviving family to have to go through something like this ever! I also don't buy any gifts for anyone, and instead give cash whenever I am obligated to give a present or gift (think weddings, birthdays etc)
That she spent so long doing this also suggests it may have been cathartic for her.
That said, I keep very, very little myself, but for different reasons (I simply don't need anywhere near the stuff I have and tend to clean ruthlessly every now and again).
I will also suggest that gifts given years ago have far less value now.
You can trade this for everything else - the exchange rate is up to you.
My takeaway was: Everyone's time is worth something.
I should get off HN.
Since truth isn't determined by where you happen to be born, it seemed unlikely that my family's God was the one true God while all the others were false.
That's the "aha" moment that changed the course of my life.
Well, that and learning Bayes' theorem.
"I believe in one fewer than you"
As you make the mass of the larger object greater and greater, it becomes clear that eventually the escape velocity can be greater than the speed of light.
That's all a black hole is: A gravity well strong enough that even light itself cannot escape.
I knew this already to some extent, but the simplicity of the math really stunned me.
a rocket takes off. let's say it's going upwards at 1 m/s at some short time after takeoff. why can't it then reduce (not to zero) acceleration such that it stays going upwards at 1 m/s all the way out of the gravity well? don't aim for escape velocity, keep the velocity at exactly 1 m/s until you're out.
yes, I know - Tsiolkovsky, reaction mass, delta-v etc etc clearly that's wildly impractical
but MUST the rocket achieve its 'escape velocity' in order to escape? why can't we have a casual stroll out of the gravity well?
escape velocity applies for an unpowered vehicle, right? throw a rock, it's gotta be going at least at the escape velocity or it won't escape. but throw a rock that's propelling upwards itself all the way out ...
if I want to climb stairs, I propel myself gradually on every step, I don't require that I launch myself off step 1 with the speed to get me to the top.
what am I missing here?
Escape velocity is essentially the velocity an object must start out with to move towards an asymptotically infinite distance from the gravity well without additional thrust. That last bit is what makes it escape velocity. The gravity well will slow the object to near zero velocity but the object's distance will eventually overcome the gravity before it reaches zero or negative velocity.
Your example of moving at a constant speed of 1 m/s is only achievable with constant thrust to cancel gravity, thereby stopping the object from slowing during its ascent. If the object has achieved its escape velocity, no additional thrust is needed. One is not better than the other, it's just a matter of what is more practical in terms of fuel or travel time.
and if it's not, taking that to its logical conclusion - why do we NEED to go faster than the speed of light to escape from inside the schwarzschild radius of a black hole? can't we leave under constant thrust at 1 m/s?
Heading up from Earth, you are facing a deceleration of 9.8 m/s/s, so you need to apply enough force to counter that. The amount of force depends on payload, e.g., a little plastic drone don't need so much, a Saturn V carrying something to high orbit needs a whole lot.
Escape velocity is the velocity at which no further thrust is required. That's the key point: The object is travelling away from the well so fast that it is already going fast enough to overcome all of the rest of the gravitational drag it will experience until it hits micro/zero-G.
Rockets need constant thrust (constant force and acceleration) to overcome the constant force and acceleration of gravity).
If you accelerated a human being to escape velocity at the surface of the Earth, you would concuss them to death (and likely organ damage them to death).
A photon starts life at C, whatever C is in its current medium.
But does that same restriction prevent a rocket which wants to coast at 1m/s - under constant acceleration - from the surface to infinity?
I.e.: is the schwartzchild radius only a point of no return to light, not rockets?
And if not a hard limit to rockets - oh, I guess that's fun to know :-)
(Yes clearly utterly impractical - trying to understand if there's any fundamental reasons at play here)
Even so, assuming that we can apply classical thought to the problem: the simplest roadblock to rockets escaping from a black hole is that their change in mass per time unit multiplied by their velocity must at least partially exceed the gravitational pull.
Either you utilize ungodly amounts of fuel per second or you already have a crazy-high velocity or some combination of both. The math just makes it infeasible. There's limits on mass you can have and eject, and limits on attainable speed.
This time I got nothing and I asked my dad why after we came out. He said "I dont know, but you seamed really cranky." and I realised that my attitude affects the attitude of others.
TL;DR quantum mechanics made me realise that all my toys were doomed but that I managed to secure some of their essence