I was born in Nigeria. I barely remember it, but what I can remember, is being constantly told how bad it was. It's entirely possible that my parents had an unreasoning fear of it. When we are kids, they are our source of Truth.
I also remember my sister getting caught in one of those 'squito swarms, near the Delta. That was freaking awful.
Uganda was a bit worse; but we also had other things to be scared of.
I should also mention that Ebola wasn't actually around (that we knew of), when I was a kid, but we hasd some fun diseases. The parasitic ones (like Elephantitis and Belhartzia) were pretty difficult to look at.
Well then, nice to meet a fellow Nigerian :) Ebola is a recent thing AFAIK, so it would make sense that no one was freaking out about it when you were a kid.
To be fair, it does sound like you were in rural Nigeria, so my Malaria experience is likely different from yours
Someone pointed out that us Europeans were probably a lot more sensitive to this than others, who had been around it, all their lives. Also, my mother was the prime vector for my information, and she might have been a bit freaked out by all the fun ways Africa has to kill people.
But I'm still here. I seem to have survived.
My African friends would run around barefoot over the most God-awful crap, and were some of the healthiest people I've ever known.
I have a Chevy Bolt and a Model 3 in my household. Of course I much prefer to drive the Model 3, but the Chevy bolt is also all electric , goes about 240 miles on a single charge and costs about $20k less than the Model 3.
Why more people don't get a Chevy Bolt, is a mystery to me.
I got a second Tesla instead of a Chevy Bolt because 1) Superchargers 2) Autopilot 3)Huge screen 4) continuous software updates 5) larger trunk and frunk space 6) more efficient battery 7) long range option 8) no dealership model
We ended up getting a second Model 3 as we felt all the other options weren't as appealing. The SR+ (which also has 240 miles of range) is not $20k more than a Bolt and is an amazing value of a car. It has the majority of the benefits of the more expensive Model 3 variants and I felt I got the same car for $20k less than my first one.
I promise you that less people by the Bolt because it looks like an electric car, a bean. The i3 looks like dogshit too. The model 3 just scratches that itch for a cool looking car. The i8 does too but I think it only gets like 13 miles on its battery?
The Bolt is not $20k less than a model 3 in the US. But more importantly to me, it is really really tiny compared to a model 3. I feel like many of the comparative reviews fail to mention this.
The Model 3 is 20 inches longer, 3 inches wider, but 6 inches shorter. It looks like it has more comfortable passenger space, but comparable cargo space.
Overall, the Bolt is not that much smaller on the inside so I don't believe it's accurate to say that it's really really tiny compared to the Model 3.
I think the storage space figure for the Bolt is a bit theoretical. Its storage area is tall, but otherwise a relatively small area behind the rear seats that would be difficult to fully utilize.
Standing next to them makes the difference in dimensions readily apparent. The Bolt just looks tiny. My current car is an RX-8 with rear suicide doors because of its limited space. Even it looks larger than a Bolt (probably because it is 1 foot longer than the Bolt).
>Why more people don't get a Chevy Bolt, is a mystery to me.
Lack of service for me. Unless you live in an urban center, most independent dealers can't afford the service center upgrades required to service EVs, especially if they only sell a handful a year.
While I love my 2013 Volt, GM has not release ONE software update (that changes anything I can detect) since I bought it. The car I bought in 2013 is the car I have now. All my TM3 friends have a car that constantly improves constantly in both dramatic and trivial ways.
I don't know if they had "something wrong" when initially purchased- they were great cars already, but in the last year or so Model 3s have had braking distance improved, a 4-camera dashcam added, a security sentry mode added, games added w controller support, a Netflix/YouTube/hulu theater, new music steaming (Spotify) on top of existing slacker, two types of self-summoning, new remote controls via the phone app, improved range, traffic visualizations, energy usage visualizations, new crash avoidance systems, faster supercharging, better cold weather improvements, a refreshed/refined ui, improved navigation, better driver personalization, fun Easter eggs, camping mode, better acceleration, new 3d climate control visualizations, much better lane keeping & "drive on nav" with auto lane changes, dog safety mode, track mode, and many more I'm forgetting.
Known to be coming in the next major versions- everything from user-selectable horn and pedestrian safety sounds ti improved "come to me" summoning and suggestions keep coming.
All these incremental improvements are delivered OTA.
Was there something wrong before? The longer braking distance might have required a trip to the dealership to fix on a traditional car, but otherwise, not really.
Is there any doubt these cars are improving significantly after purchase in both large and small ways?
Anything that is connected to the internet needs regular updates to remain secure. As a Bolt owner, I too am disappointed about the frequency of security updates. We have had ours for 18 months and only received one update.
I like the fact that GM is taking a more conservative approach to what components of the car have internet connectivity compared to Tesla, and that was a big factor in me choosing the Bolt over waiting for the Model 3. I also don't have any expectation for feature updates over the life of the car. But that does not excuse them for not providing security updates for the portions that do have internet connectivity.
That iconic American brand that's been in business for over a century, producing money for shareholders, jobs for 10s of thousands and tax dollars to benefit every American.
Wouldn't buy a Chevy in a million years. Their reputation is for making cheap hunks of unreliable junk. Maybe that's changed and their new cars suck less, but the brand will forever have a stigma in my mind.
Plenty of other useless or actively harmful products also match that description. Philip Morris death sticks. Kellogg's sugar cereals. NFL concussion factory.
The point of the GP's comment is to answer the question of "why don't more people buy a Chevy Bolt". Because for a lot of people the Chevy brand is a negative, not a positive.
I think he was thinking more along the lines of "won't have the instant approval of the internet like brands that start with T, end with A and have 5 or 6 letters will"
how are you learning though? Who you play against is pretty important. You need to try and play against the strongest players you can find. Dont be afraid of losing to them
Playing against strongest players (or engines) demoralizes me. It makes me want to avoid the game. I find I need to play against a challenger that is better than me but one that I can beat about 30% of the time.
Back in the day I was pretty good at Warcraft 2 - solo and missions. I have a friend that never lost to me - not even once, although later I found I was close on two occasions to beat him. In the end I lost interest to play with him because in a way I would know the outcome.
1) Remade website to be more professional looking, faster, more focused towards SEO, mobile friendly. I could write many pages on this :) but following online guides will get you in the ballpark
2) Started writing interesting content. Truly good content is a PITA and you need to be a decent writer to make something compelling, but our first good article got us more traffic than the entire site with over 100 content pages.
3) New tools. everything linked together to see where our sales were coming from. Phone system, website, live chat, in person. All of our leads funneled into one system. We could see what was getting people and what wasn't
4) Online advertising. Locally first, expand AD reach as campaign becomes more nationally competitive. Make sure all the tools you setup continue to track where all these leads are coming from
5) Better "convincing" of clients that we're legit. Company T-Shirts and swag. Hotel-type exaggerated pictures of our team and office. Meet the team page. Professional website like I mentioned earlier. FB, google maps, yellowpages, wherever we could get a free listing. Automated scheduling systems for client meetings, phone tree for calls, tons of previous work repurposed as marketing material for clients to see. Listing our bigger clients on our website. 800 phone #. All the hallmarks of a big successful business even though we weren't exactly gave clients a much bigger confidence in our abilities and enabled us to charge more.
6) Marketing toward high value targets-- we needed to get the ear of C level and VP's. Concentrating on the fact that we were a US company without outsourcing. Marketing to wealthy areas "doctorville" we called it. Targeted marketing to business corridors. We went deep, going as far as checking the AS of your IP address and whether any services were running on it. A surprising amount of the time would could link an IP back to a company, so we could quietly market to your company just from you visiting our site.
7) competitive research. Found our biggest local competitors. Quietly outbid them on all their ad keywords. Even more quietly made sure we had all the backlinks they did on search. Got a list of their clients one way or another, marketed directly to their clients already knowing their weaknesses from our clients who previously worked with those competitors. One competitor hosted their own servers, so I figured out who owned the IP and tracked ownership of the company through their email server. Another put their email address at the bottom of all public sites they wrote, a simple targeted google search returned all/most of their clients' sites. Another had a "client login" page setup on all of their sites that had a redirect to their main page. Searching for backlinks using SEO tools revealed most of these client sites.
Lots more. It took a lot of creative thinking and some failures :)
> 2) Started writing interesting content. Truly good content is a PITA and you need to be a decent writer to make something compelling, but our first good article got us more traffic than the entire site with over 100 content pages.
What was different with that piece of content? Was it only the content or did you also promote/tailor that content to new channels?
I can't really say without giving my details, and as you can see I like throwaways :) especially when I'm at work.
The difference was that the rest of our content was bland marketspeak whitewash garbage stuff. "Expand your client list 5x TODAY" type bs. Also useless PDF whitepapers on project we completed. Pro tip, nobody reads PDF unless it's the only content available, and on Google that's rarely true :).
The new articles were all focused on specific issues that our clients would have. Some favorites:
"TWC business modem speed up"
"AdWords tracking conversions"
"Choosing the right software development company"
"Pros and cons of outsourcing development"
"Online marketing for small businesses
"AdWords overview for CEOs and VP s"
"How to hire AdWords expert"
"Company outing locations in (cityx)"
"Most popular CMS for company websites"
"Small business tax audit guide"
Articles with a clear purpose and tailored to what our kind of client, and person, would be searching for. Admittedly this takes some really creative thinking but the results can be amazing.
Not all of our articles were related to what we did at all. They were built so that our target customers would search for them. Business owners, especially local. People looking for custom software even if it's not what they initially have in mind.
Our only channel for these articles was google search. In all, about 95% of our traffic went to new articles straight from Google. We trailered content mainly to our location, and this is probably a wise choice for any small business.
The content raised Google's opinion of how good our site was, even when the article wasn't bringing in sales. Most of the time they would be first page for targeted keywords, about 40% of the time the first result. Some of them are years old now and still first on Google, if that gives you an idea of how powerful well written pieces can be.
Writing the actual content: make sure the article is long and well written. The times/WSJ/new yorker should be a guide for what kind of writing google likes. Long form and extremely focused on a subject. Pictures help too.
Google looks at how many people view your article, for how long, and whether they go back to search afterwords if it wasn't what they wanted. They track future searches related to the article they just brought you to, to see if it has stimulated the person to read more into whatever your article was talking about. So for example the best CMS article. Did the user that read your article end up checking out the CMS you mentioned? They track how often users return to the same article, and probably whether they bookmark it. They even know how deep your knowledge is by comparing the distribution of uncommon words in your article to more trusted sources like journals and high quality books on the same subject. This is all admittedly speculation but google is extremely good at rating the quality of your content. The new AI processing google uses probably doesn't even know why an article is good, it just knows that it is.
The thing that helped me most writing the good articles was a deep background in the subject. For things I didn't know as much about, like managing the business, I would pick the brain of somebody that did know a lot for an hour or two then put it to writing.
If you don't have much knowledge about the things you should be writing about you need to find a decent writer that does.
If you don't want to deal with all that just pay google money for ads, and get really good at "the game". AdWords is extremely competitive and you need somebody with the drive to win at any cost, because the road from the start of your first campaign to something profitable will be expensive and hard.
Channels are overrated IMO :) you can reach around 90% of all web users on Google alone, and close to 100% on Google+fb. To start out at least, just pick a few very pervasive platforms and get really good at using them
Thanks so much for writing this out. I actually do a lot of the stuff you mentioned here already with comparable success.
Google is my main traffic driver and I never had much luck with content shared through social media or any other channels. For me, it's 90% Google as well and some articles are there for 8 years already. 3-5 articles out of a hundred or so drive 80% of new signups.
I treat my articles like shopping windows: I revisit and refine them whenever I see fit. I write new content mostly to show Google that something is happening on my website. I lost rankings on some articles, because I didn't publish a lot through 2016.
Anyways, your comment is a good description on how one can succeed by making their customers' problems their main SEO/traffic strategy.
I feel like a lot of these strategies could be used with small bootstrapped businesses with some tweaking. Especially #5, appearing legit is too often ignored in smaller businesses.
We were bootstrapped :) . Old school company that had been around for 20+ years, just needed a kick in the pants since advertising/marketing has changed immensely since the dawn of the internet.
#5 is a killer for so many places, maybe the most common big mistake. This is one place where "fake it till you make it" is absolutely mandatory for success. Selling yourself as a "freelancer" devalues everything you do. Selling yourself as a startup is similarly dangerous. Having the cutesy small business/startup vibe might sound appealing to customers and the valley but it makes you look disorganized and unstable to big successful businesses. These are the very customers willing and able to throw lots of money around.
I cringed at GitLab's unnecessary transparency recently because it makes their vulnerability and management missteps all more apparent. Their mistake is the kind of shit where the better choice from a business perspective is to be reasonably honest then give all your customers a free month or two so they stop talking about it. Their absolutely transparency exposes a lot of internal politics and missteps, especially mentioning people by name, A HUGE no-no in any kind of big business. If I was fortune 500, hell even INC 500, I would run away as fast as possible.
At this point I think I'm just going to start the blog I always planned but never did :). I've got about 10 pretty long articles buried in my docs folder about marketing and a bunch of other nonsense. I was never CEO/VP of a company but I've always done my best to "see the forest through the trees" with this kind of stuff.
maybe common sense was the wrong phrase. It seems like many of these solutions are just basic answers to really simplistic problems: Why is no one visiting our site? Because it is outdated, not optimized, and has no content = Make some improvements
This is part of what hindered me in getting started. "But these advices are as obvious as Sun Tzu's Art of War, everyone does it".
What I got reading the groovehq blog post that was posted here was that you should be spending little bit of time on multiple strategies until you find one that sticks.
More importantly keeping experiments cheap, fast and not so time consuming to put out in the wild. I liked that <10hr approach from the other HN comment.
I highly suggest this thread to be "stickied" or made aware of in someway. It's literally gold and this is exactly why toiling the jungles of HN comments is worth it-you discover gems that you can put into action.
:)
I checked out your site, looks great...Very similar to our setup.
Two things I noticed. Your site can be made more optimized for highly impatient types. I recommend always showing a phone number that leads directly to a sales line with no wait, and a live chat bubble for those too skittish to give you any information.
I always found best results putting the phone number big at the top of the page and again near the contact form. Make it show a special tracked number when users come through ads and the business is open for calls, your regular office number for visitors that didn't come through ads, and a disposable phone number to your cellphone for people that originally came through an ad but tried to call when the business is closed. Make all calls coming through ads go directly to a real person. The justification for all this work is that you already paid good money for anyone that comes through ads so its financially worth a little spam to give them a direct line to a real person. You want your conversion rate as high as possible once you've already paid. If you are a local business use a local area code, 800 # for anything advertised nationally.
For the live chat bubble, make it automatically come up and say something friendly to anyone that has browsed site for more than X minutes or seen more than X pages. Make sure it only shows up when real people are available. Add something near to contact form like "or chat with us now" that automatically opens the bubble and notifies a real person of an incoming request.
In my experience you'll get around 20% of initial contact from calls and maybe 30% from live chat. A decent percentage of these will be people too lazy, paranoid, or old school to fill out your contact form. Email forms are increasingly used for annoying stuff like permission to view the rest of an article, so many users are weary of giving you a direct contact without knowing if their please will go into a black hole. The ability to contact immediately, through phone and especially live chat alleviates these concerns. It makes you real, legit in their minds, immediately.
These are somewhat irrelevant questions... one thing that is almost guaranteed is that your original idea will change, and all your loft projections will not come to pass.
Nope. There are are domains. What's also interesting is that GPS coords are used extensively for joining domains and accessing services nearby.
We have our own UNIX distribution now for cloud services. It's Called 'cloudy'
When you have W2 employees, there are additional taxes you have to pay, which you don't have to worry about if they are 1099. At a certain size, you are also mandated to provide Health Care benefits etc
The price does not have to be so high..IF stuff is not working out, you can just quit and try something else. There is nothing heroic or romantic about living in poverty.
Joining the workforce or running a so called lifestyle business that makes actual money is not a bad thing.
All this talk of sacrifice and being gods tells me you need to step outside your bubble. You are trying to start a company, not solve World hunger.
It is treated pretty much the same way Americans treat getting the Flu