ExpectZero

@expectzero-blog

65 posts

Cofounder

Why do you need a cofounder1. Sometimes when you are in no mood to work, a cofounder can help you get things done.2. One more perspective on things.

Who is a good cofounder1. Believe in you and the idea.2. Genuinely care about start up growth.

How to find such a cofounder1. Cofounder should not already be a friend, he should be the one you met in some party.2. Keep talking about your idea to your freinds and everyone you meet, sometimes you will be introduced to someone via your friend.

Relations among cofounders1. If you are the one who started the company, you have additional responsibility of making sure that the cofounders are happy both personally and professionally.

How to develop personal relationship1. Go out for dinners often.2. Celebrate occasions like birthdays and common festivities.

One of the best things I like about my start up Truffle.io is the team. My cofounders are now my best friends.

Spreading love all around Truffle.io

Tell Her Happy Valentine's Day

Evey girl you meet today, tell her Happy Valentine's day.

Every girl you dateed, text her Happy Valentine's day, no matter how bad the breakup was.

Every girl you ever had crush and you have a way to contact her, tell her Happy Valentine's day.

Today there is free pass on any awkward moments, spread love :)

Why Truffle chose Face-to-Face Meeting

Just came across one of the articles on facebook where the author sums up quite beautifully about our interactions in the online world.

With this in mind, the only benefit of facebook I can think of was that it helped gather “background information.” You could see if you had mutual friends and find out where people lived. But this information isn’t enough to sustain a friendship let alone spark one. So if getting background information, which is nothing more than interesting facts, was the only benefit of the group, I started to further question if we are actually gaining anything important by using Facebook.

This is the exact reason Truffle wants to explore in person meetings rather then ping pong interactions online.

Truffle wants to re-energize those butterflies in your stomach that comes to live only when you meet someone in person.

A Girlfriend, A Boyfriend

A guy try so hard to get this girl but he messes up a small detail and then the girl picks on him saying "Oh that is a very bad thing to say, why would you say that?". Guy sulks in his own little world thinking of how it will be awesome if the time goes back to the moment when they started having this conversation so that he can change his words and make the girl happy again. But that doesn't happen and the guy just feel frustated that the girl doesn't like her.

Now think about this, would you rather spend your whole life with a person with whom you always have to think twice before speaking anything or you want to spend a life where everything is just a flow. If you want to start a relationship with someone, look at it as a combined effort from both the girl and the guy, if you think the effort is only coming from you even after you have expressed your desire then he or she is not for you, they are looking for something else which according to them you can't provide. Let them go, your flow will get you someone eventually.

Flow with the emotions, your surroundings, your internal peace, let go of all your expecations and just be in peace with mind and body.

Offcourse hurting someone's feeling won't give you internal peace but then how do you decide someone got hurt with your words, you dont know, people are different, they react to different things, don't worry about anyone outside your own body and mind.

Publishing Django Logs To Heroku

Cluster fuck number 1, my online dating start up website Truffle (www.truffle.io) crashed during logging via linkedIn while I was showing it to one of my friend.

Cluster fuck number 2, django errors were not logged in heroku. heroku logs didnt show anything and anyways heroku logs only show last 1500 lines of logs lines.

Searched all over, couldn't find anything that could capture the django errors in heroku logs. Finally figured out how to tame this mule.

1. Open settings.py of your django app.

2. Look for "LOGGING"

3. Under "handlers", add

'console':{ 'level': 'DEBUG', 'class': 'logging.StreamHandler', },

4. Add the newly created "console" to the "loggers"

'loggers': { 'django.request': { 'handlers': ['mail_admins','file','console'], 'level': 'ERROR', 'propagate': True, },

5. Add Logentries as one of your add-on so that your heroku logs can be archived.

6. Intentionally insert a syntax error in your views.py and push to heroku

7. Fire your recently pushed app on the browser

8. Go to Logentries Web UI console and you'll get all the errors.

9. Drink beer.

#JustMigrated #django #heroku #heroku logs #logentries #logs #Python

Self Improving Feedback

How do you improve what you produce?

Keep writing your thoughts on a paper, no multitasking. You'll see your design gets better after 10 mins. More so, if you can draw the things out on a visio or omnigraffle, it will make thought process clearer.

My initial designs are just god awful but after about 2 hrs of drawaing various shapes, they make me happy :)

Passion As An Habit!

@Zee said on twitter "Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going."

Habit is a beautiful concept our mind has evolved for making us do things that we might like or we don't but since we have a habit we keep on doing it.

You want to open a start up, you start by coding everyday and try to make it a habit. It's good but if it's not coming from your heart or its not your passion, it wil be very hard to sustain that habit.

I recommend to first make "following your passion" as one of your "habits" and everything will fall its place.

How do you find passion? It's a bigger thought provoking post and I ll write it sometimes this week.

NTY Paywall Is Working

I was reading this article about NYT paywall working and then suddenly these point came to my mind.

Because news paper provides a holistic overview of all the people's area of interests as compared to blogs that are most of the times related to a certain area.

A medical doctor dont want to read the doctor's journal everyday, he also want to read other news like "How many peolpe were killed in Syria"

So blogs should not compare themselves to the newspaper and similarly there pay structure are way different from each other.

Dating applied to Regret Minimization Framework

Ever liked a girl? Go ahead and ask her out straight away. Take the rocking chair test, "When I'm 80, and on the porch in my rocking chair, how will I feel about the decision of not asking her out". You don't want to regret your decision, don't even think about the short term "rejections", think of the long term where in you are actually becoming quite good at the skill of asking someone out.

Thats about it, go approach. Spread some love.

Apologize and give some love

Recently gmail messed up my forwarding that I had set up from truffle.io domain to my personal gmail account and I ended up got getting any emails for a month. It turned out to be huge mess as I gave that account info in my design intern hiring post. I ended up missing a meeting with a designer and missed emails communications from all the others.

I emailed everyone back apologizing for the mistake and for gave away a 20$ gift card to the designer whom I left stranding at the coffee shop at 7 in the morning.

Anyways, its ok to make a mistake but make sure to make up to it.

Lunch with me!

In a new place and hungry, like a restaurant but dont want to eat alone. Shout out to everyone in the neighbourhood if anyone interested in grabbing lunch with me.

What is the most effective way of doing this?

1. Twitter? Doesn't really have a hastag for a neighborhood where I can shout out this message.

2. I dont know, have to figure out but seems like if this can be done, probably be good for meeting some cool new people as well networking.

3. Lets Lunch? Not on the spot but you can ask in advance if anyone is interested.

Make a "social shopping" first, then jump on solving real problems

Everyone is talking about entrepreneurs solving big problems like providing heath care to masses that in all seriousness is right initiative but actually not everyone.

Tesla and SpaceX were not the first companies from Elon Musk, his first paid "software" was at the age 12. He is used to open companies and I bet he won't be interested in any social shopping start up after all he has done. But here comes the difference, all you freshly minted entrepreneurs are not Elon Musk, you have just entered the waters. It's ok to start solving smaller problems and launch it fast.

The more you launch, the more experience you will be and then finally you can actually go ahead and built a Teleporter.

What you don't like eating?

I am very particular about my cereals, I will eat the same ones for over a month continuously but said that I also like to try different ones now and then.

Not always I am happy about my particular pick and I end up throwing it away. Now take this scenario, you pick a cereal that you want to try on Jan 21st and you didn't like it, it was so bad that you swear you ll die of hunger before eating it again and keep this thing is mind "that freaking cereal cover was made by one freaking of a designer hand picking each pixel making sure that as soon as you see it, you ll want to take it"

Flash forward to Aug 21st, you are strolling in Whole Foods again looking to try something new which won't shit in your mouth. You see this cereal sitting in the middle of the aisle looking at you, inviting you to take a bite. You are like "did I try this one"? Hmm no, don't think so. Let me try this, again which one I picked? Yes you guessed right, I got that mother fucker horse shit again.

Why this happen? Because your memory doesn't give a flying fuck to these small details but I am going to teach my memory a lesson.

I am going to buld an app that will take a picture of all the donkey ass cereals I don't like and whenever I go to the cereal aisle in Whole Foods will remind me not to get that sucker.

Are you interested?

If I get 500 no-horse-shit-takers interested in this, I ll start developing the app today and will release free on appstore.

Let's stand up and vow never to have horse shit again!

Learnings

1. When starting to develop a product, before even writing a line of code make sure you have enought evidence that there is demand of the product

How to do that?

-> On a webpage, give an easy to understand overview of your proejct and provide a text box where interested people will give thier emails showing interest.

2. Before implementing an idea, make sure that idea is atleast a $1billion market. The bigger the market size the better, even if you can grab 10% you will be able to sustain your company. Consider this with something that is only a million market, even 40% of the market will not give you much head way.

How do that?

-> Search for the financials of the company that is operating in your idea domian. Possibly they will be public so you can access their financial data.

If your idea is in a totally untested waters. Kudos, you are on to something big if you are able to implement it right

3. This point is for technology products

When making a prototye for your idea, don't ever choose mobile platforms as a way to prototype. Make a web app. Why? Because it will take the least amount of your time.

4. Fail fast. Rejecting your own idea that is like your baby is one of the hardest thing I have to go through but remember the earlier you reject your idea, more time you have in your hand to develop the next Amazon. For me, 8 months is the right amount of time for rejecting an idea.

Remember your time is the most important thing.

Making your co-founder happy

Productivity directly corelates to the level of happiness in life, if you are not happy its very hard to be focus. Part of my job as a founder/motivator for my company is to make sure that all my co-founders/employees are content in their personal life and if they are not, I try to do something that will help them achieve whatever they want to accomplish in thier personal life.

Healthy Start Up culture is directly propotional to a healthy personal life of its employees

Truffle reinvented online dating

Yes. Truffle made online dating cute, trust worthy and most importantly a self sustainable business for its founders

Java

Why the fucking fuck is so hard to make a simple service call from java. All is needed in javascript is fucking 2 lines of code but java oh java is so like fucking special. It takes freaking layers of abstractions and 100 lines of code to acheive a service call.

Fuck java

ExpectZero @expectzero-blog - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag