A lot of our products are created around collecting data. A useful technique for that is web scraping. Web scraping is essentially a form of data mining. Pretty much any information that you can see on a web page can be retrieved (scraped). We scrape a lot of data and I am personally very knowledgable about scraping because I have been doing it for years now. Proxies When … [Read more...]
The human component
There are more and more companies that try to hide behind people and complexity. Instead, there's something to be said about working in public and putting a face to your product. Yes, it's risky but it can also help build a powerful personal brand. You probably already know that one of my company's core principles is transparency. For me, that means that we share our journey … [Read more...]
The way of the monk
TLDR: making and executing should have priority on learning, and you should do it in solitude. #1. A world of inputs Today, we have a lot of inputs in our lives: podcasts, books, videos, courses, television, etc. In fact, in my opinion there are too many inputs. If you want to learn, you can do so using your preferred medium, whenever you want. You can listen to a podcast … [Read more...]
Why velocity
One of the core principles of my company is: velocity. Velocity is declined in many ways in our day to day work: we go to market as fast as we can, we try to ship features fairly fast, we try to have a minimal turnaround time on support tickets. I learned this from my co-founder on the Dealflow project, Ryan Kulp. I consider Ryan my mentor, not in a guru way but more in the … [Read more...]
Strive for boolean values
Life as a founder is complex. We have to look at different dashboards every day to get a sense of how the business is going. Then, when we are performing some tasks, we are probably working with at least a couple of online tools at the same time. We need to use less dashboards and less tools in order not to add complexity to our daily work. But, this is not a blog post about … [Read more...]