(OP) In my post, I actually ask the question of whether a student would _want_ to interact with the tutor, not if the tutor is capable of providing good instruction. These are drastically different critiques.
I’ve been in the habit of emailing myself a lot, I’m excited to give this a try! I had thought of building this myself, so I’m glad I don’t have to :-)
I'm also emailing myself a lot. It works well but every time I do it it feels wrong and shameful. Like, I know there are better solutions but I just won't make the effort.
Our customers are split between the US and Europe. There are a lot of decision makers in the process who need to approve a purchase at school, so things are pretty time consuming.
I know that for hospitals it is a minimum of 18 months assuming no large purchasing process like RFPs or RFQs.
Personally I am surprised when it takes less than 3 years
Basically just a lot simpler. Replit has a million features (and AI ghostwriter) that in my experience are distracting for kids (I used to be a teacher and still tutor kids 1:1)
It really bums me out how Repl.it has evolved from its beginnings as a simple, free, accessible-anywhere programming scratchpad into a heinously complex cloud-persisted SaaS product.
Have you considered offering a version of your product that doesn't persist anything- or perhaps persists snippets in URI parameters or localStorage- and which can be used without an account? It would meaningfully lower barriers to entry and adoption.
If you go to https://app.pickcode.io/lessons you can do some free Pickcode VL lessons without an account. Later this year we’ll probably add some Python or Javascript to that page too. URI storage would be neat!
This post (just thinking of use of Unix tools within game software) reminds me of that bug a few years back within steam itself that accidentally deleted user’s root directories
Palantir is a classic example of what is a hybrid services => product business. It was a _very_ long road for them to get to a point where their product could actually scale without massive implementation effort, but I think they’re finally getting there (they offer a cheap self service option now AFAIK)
One of the interesting bits of information that came out of Microsoft's acquisition of Github was that at the time, the majority of Github's revenue was enterprise deals. Enterprise is a code word that product businesses frequently use for services - yeah sure you have a product, but here are these guys who want to use it to the tune of $10M/year but you will need to do custom development just for them, so what is that? That looks a lot like a conventional service business running inside the same company as your product business.
Microsoft actually seems to specialize in that sort of thing (selling a software product, and then offering some quite expensive, bespoke enterprise consulting services for it). But they are not the only ones, looks around the industry and you'll see it everywhere.
The only real drawback to this model when you're small is that it dilutes your focus and multiplies complexity and cost because you have to manage multiple very different lines of business simultaneously. But if you can overcome those challenges it can make a lot of sense, be an expert at a particular problem, sell a product for the average Joes who have that problem, do bespoke consulting services for the money-laden enterprises who have their own complex versions of it.
Not quite, the onprem version was older and didn't have Actions for ages, for example.
But to be fair, basically all enterprise deals involve services as you generally need to train people in how your thing works if you want to get enough adoption for when Finance come looking for operational efficiencies.
It's been a while, but I think that enterprise customers all had access to both enterprise cloud and on-prem. What I was really getting at though is that there was no custom code or consulting with the vast majority of GitHub's enterprise deals.
I think its less about custom code for Large Company Inc., but rather, when Large Company Inc. had a bug or an feature request that was prioritized and perhaps released to them first
When it comes to analytics or machine learning type products, the scaling without massive implementation effort problem seems to be pretty universally hard to solve. Of course the usual big names seem to manage this on some level but startups seem to get stuck at building a handful of great solutions for a handful of clients/problems but unable to increase the number without also increasing the effort proportionally.
Do you know of any examples of small scrappy places that have figured this out? Is there any good writing on what kind of organisational and engineering approaches are necessary to make this step?
This is because data is basically a service business. Like the value is the specific data and it's hard to build a product that works for customers without a lot of custom work.
How does this compare to magnet? Magnet has worked well for me for years, although recently I was trying to clean up my menu bar and realized there was no way to remove the menu bar icon. I’ll ask for some advice on that here actually since there are some Mac experts, is there some terminal incantation to remove a menu bar item?
