Categories Tech
Since then we've…
🚀 Featured 15,000+ startups
💖 Reviewed 70,000+ submissions
😘 Welcomed 100,000+ registered users
💰 Generated almost $1M in revenue
⬇️ THREAD
📅 It all started as a way to get publicity for an iPad app me and my friends were working on.
In 2010 it was hard to get press coverage as a bootstrapped startup.
This lead me to create "https://t.co/jL3uUNmhzx" (the .com was taken)
📢 TechCrunch (@alexia) wrote an article on it.
Back then, getting featured on TechCrunch was the equivalent of hitting #1 on Product
✍️ Couple years after, I wrote the origin story with the clickbait-title:
How I Tricked TechCrunch Into Writing About My Startup
Ironically it gained 60K views and drove even more visits than the TechCrunch article. Check it out for the full
💰 I didn't intend to monetize BetaList when I started.
But when established companies started asking how to get featured, I offered them paid advertising slots instead. Starting at $50/week and continuously doubling the price until they said no.
Today it's $1,500/week.
this has made me so angry pic.twitter.com/fD4arUoYnw
— Hannah Jane Parkinson (@ladyhaja) October 12, 2020
Plus let’s be honest here. Im a technical person and have flirted w getting into cyber for ages, but the things I love about mech engineer are not actually in cyber. I don’t want to do PEN tests for banks all my Life. Its not quite being in a workshop, or living on a rig -
There’s a bigger question here about what the point of all this is. Encouraging people to explore different jobs is great. But are we talking about quality of work / Life? Have we thought about whether these environments are welcoming or hostile? What energy are we putting into
Changing the structures of these industries? Do you know depressing it is going into work with people who think who you are isn’t of value? No amount of money is worth it for everyone
I’ve gone off on a tangent. But it’s taken me a long time (and I’m still working on it) to unlearn the ‘undervaluing’ of the arts that I grew up with, and stuff like this doesn’t help, and makes me sad. Because we should be better.
❓👉🏻 Do I recommend unlimited vacation days?
Here's my take. Thread 🧵 ⬇️
Hey @joelgascoigne do you recommend unlimited vacation days \U0001f44d or \U0001f44e for startups?
— Will Trapp (@trappology) December 19, 2020
I do not recommend unlimited vacation. There are problems with it. The most clear, for us, was that with unlimited vacation, the team did not take enough vacation.
When you have an Unlimited Vacation policy, you introduce a significant amount of decision fatigue with taking vacation. When you don't clearly state the amount of vacation, you put that burden on individuals.
With Unlimited Vacation, a strange side effect is that people start to really think about how taking vacation could reflect on them negatively. When you have to choose every time, and how much, vacation to take, you might just end up taking nothing.
So, I do not recommend Unlimited Vacation.
With that said, I believe Unlimited Vacation gets more criticism than it deserves. Some even go as far as to say that Unlimited Vacation is unethical and a way to stop employees taking vacation.
i started off the year by releasing a new Micro Channel sound card, the Plaid Bib CPLD edition. little did i know that this would not be the only sound card i would release this
i'm happy to announce a new sound card clone, the Plaid Bib CPLD Edition! this is a version of the Ad Lib clone I designed for MCA bus machines, now with a CPLD instead of the hard-to-find bus interface chip: https://t.co/UCi1vT4QyD
— Tube Time (@TubeTimeUS) January 9, 2020
happy new year! \U0001f600 pic.twitter.com/aUPrtFhwh5
later, i took apart my apple II and found a capacitor inside. and inside that through-hole capacitor, i found a tiny surface mount
so i took apart this axial-lead ceramic capacitor and found a tiny 0805 surface mount capacitor inside!
— Tube Time (@TubeTimeUS) January 25, 2020
(i put a regular 0805 next to it for scale.) pic.twitter.com/JfY73fYO84
at my favorite electronics surplus store (the only one left in silicon valley!) i found an incredibly cute computer, and fixed it up and got it
whoa, what have we here? pic.twitter.com/aZSiEJnZe7
— Tube Time (@TubeTimeUS) January 31, 2020
in february, i played with some tone reeds, an unusual electronic component.
here's some unusual electrical components. these are tone reeds. they're used in older radio equipment, such as public safety radios and ham radios. they are used to send or receive CTCSS tones. let's take one apart! pic.twitter.com/rgWOvnv2VZ
— Tube Time (@TubeTimeUS) February 2, 2020