Perhaps a "one shot access pass" or something that lets you in for a few months while you do financial planning may be useful.
It might also be a good opportunity to check back in with people later (say in 12 months time) and get them to sign up again, if you can provide them with valuable insights and help them stick to their plan
Do you feel like it's more the price or the billing frequency options that affect the psychology here? To me, a month of planning for the price of a cocktail sounds about right (esp. when compared with traditional advisory services), but perhaps others think in different terms. Or just disagree? haha.
Interestingly, I still get messages fairly often from new users that (in their opinion) pricing is actually too low... so I wonder if more pricing / feature tiers could eventually be helpful to appeal to the different segments.
Pricing is a super tricky issue, especially when its for something related to financials. I think there are plenty of people who wouldn't bat an eye at $14p/m (and maybe they are the target audience), but there are also plenty of people who aren't buying $14 cocktails.
I fall into the camp where I like to play around with spreadsheets (free -£time) or other online calculators (free) just to make loose projections and see where I'm at. I make a good salary (for the UK) but don't pay for any financial advice (and probably wouldn't unless my situation got really complicated). I think if it was priced at £30-50 a year or £4-5p/m I (personally) might go for premium because the tool is honestly really great!
One completely different avenue you might consider is to selling direct to companies to provide to this a service to their employees. I'm not talking financial companies, but more as part of the benefit package. My company added something to their benefits, called bippit - which is awful (or at least not useful to me), but provides virtual one-one financial advisors and some very basic online tools.
Would you fall into the camp of "make it universally cheaper"? Or carve up the feature set into more tiers with different prices? Curious how you would divvy things up, if the latter.
I do also grant general discounts on request (info on pricing page).
You're probably right about the enterprise / benefits angle, but at the moment I wouldn't have a clue how to actually go about it. Enterprise sales is the kind of thing I always imagined you might need a team (and a lot of time and pitching) to pull off... True or false?
I’m speaking as someone who has never had to price anything. To me it feels like a service that doesn’t give me monthly benefit (i.e. frequent recurring usage like my iCloud storage or Netflix etc) as I wouldn’t use it often enough, so paying monthly just feels like a waste to me. The difference between monthly rate if bought as a year and per month is pretty big to incentivise people to pay up for a full year - I personally dislike this strategy, it implies to me that I have to pay a 50% markup just to have the option to change my mind after a month or two (to me this implies I might, so best to get all the money up front).
I think you want to incentivise long term ownership of the product (MRR->YRR) with a focusing of the price at yearly. It aligns more with financial years / tax filings and the general cadence of people looking at their finances.
Now as I say I have absolutely no experience and haven’t done any market analysis. So this is just my opinion.
I think for me it's about the ongoing nature of the subscription. Everything is a subscription model these days, and I'm quite wary of "zombie" subscriptions that take money every month, but I don't actually use them.
For me financial planning feels like a "once every 5 years" process with possible lightweight annual check ins to see how I'm tracking towards the plan and tweek some details. A monthly subscription doesn't map well to this model. This is why I suggested something like an "access pass" might be a better fit for somebody like me.
The problem for me is how rarely you'd use it. I could see myself buying this, and using it forever, but only a few times a year. Monthly pricing for quarterly or semi-annual check ins doesn't feel like the right trade off. (I say this as someone who uses Actual Budget monthly).
I looked at your lifetime subscription and was keen on that for the reasons above but $500USD is eye watering.
On the other hand, mind where and who those people are. $14 is probably peanuts for a wealthy software engineer living the SV life and a 6 digit salary, so if those are the ones writing, no surprise they might think like that. Nothing wrong with making them your target audience, of course.
But in other places, $6 can already buy you a cocktail :-D
I've mentored many developers at this stage in their career - it's a challenging leap to make, because your moving from a world where improving your technical skills moves you forward to a world where you need to improve your soft skills to progress.
Some general advice that may prove helpful:
- Read "The managers path" by Camille Fournier. It's an excellent and very readable guide, with great advice at any stage of your career.
- Be aware of the difference between "People Management" and "Technical leadership" and know which direction you want to head in. Some companies merge the two roles to a greater or lesser extent. Others clearly define and seperate them.
- Look for opportunities to mentor others, particularly grads or juniors. Mentoring is often the first step on a path to leadership or management.
- Leadership means being responsible for the success of a team, not just your own work. Look for opportunities to step up, take ownership and be responsible for your whole teams success.
- Find a mentor and meet with them at least once a fortnight for at least half an hour. Come to each meeting prepared with a list of things you would like to get their perspective on.
Lastly DO NOT lie on your resume. Lying would be a really great way to land up in a position where you don't have the support you need to succeed. It's fine to be up front and say "I've been static for a long time in my current job without opportunities for promotion. I'm keen to find a role where I can be mentored and grow into a manager and leader"
Their docs suggest you could allow the model to extract structured data by giving it the ability to call a function like `sql_query(query: string)`, which is presumably connected to your DB.
This seems wildly dangerous. I wonder how hard it would be for a user to convince the GPT to run a query like `DROP TABLE ...`
I think a good mental security model might be - if you wouldn't expose your function as an unsecured endpoint on the web, then you probably shouldn't expose it to a LLM
When he describes the appearance of the plane in the flyby, don't forget in your mind to picture 2 long trails of fire with Mach diamonds. It was a hazy day at full throttle after all!
I tried with some facebook comments and articles posted to facebook in chinese and the results were pretty much incomprehensible as well. It was so bad, it makes me wonder - has google actually enabled this for all users?
Their training dataset is almost certainly biased towards 'formal' Chinese sources, e.g. newspapers, news broadcasts, and so on. This is probably true for every language translation dataset, but at least anecdotally I can confirm the massive disconnect between spoken and written Chinese.
It's really interesting culturally, since modern written Chinese is split between Simplified (PRC) and Traditional (HK/TW/etc), because Mao thought Traditional was too difficult for the proletariat. Yet official national news sources in China are almost always given in formal Chinese, which nobody outside of the elite really speaks!
This effect is also extremely noticeable in the Finnish language. The rules of Finnish grammar are followed much more strictly when writing any kind of text, than they are when speaking. There are rules of grammar that are always followed when writing, but are not really that important when speaking.
As an example, take the sentence "kirja on työpöydälläni", which means "the book is on my desk". The word "työpöytä" (desk) gets two suffixes, "-llä" which corresponds to the preposition "on", and "-ni" which is the first-person genitive. But when speaking, this would easily come out as "kirja on minun työpöydällä" instead, where the noun doesn't isn't in the genitive form at all anymore, the genitive has become a separate word which is a pronoun with a genitive ("minun").
If you study just the grammatical rules and nothing else, you might think that the second sentence is obviously grammatically wrong. (Because according to the rule, the noun must change its case to correspond to the genitive.) Yet it's completely acceptable to say it aloud that way, even in a formal context, and nobody would bat an eye. While at the same time if you put it this way in any kind of writing, you would almost surely be notified by the grammar police that you have made a grave mistake.
I find this duality of language fascinating. And this will certainly continue producing problems for the field of machine translation. Google Translate is infamous in Finland for being near-useless for translating anything to or from Finnish.
The GP was about Weibo messages/posts, and how those written messages reflect colloquial or spoken language much more closely than something from Sina.
Written text in SMS and twitter tends to a lot closer to the way people speak, whereas newspapers are a lot more "polished". So there is definitely a bias depending on what you train your algorithm on. Also, topics and vocabulary may differ widely so if you train on newspaper, your algorithm will struggle with phone conversations.
If you are talking about Modern Spoken Mandarin (or written Spoken Mandarin: SMS, social media) vs Modern Written Mandarin I don't think the gap is that large compared to other languages. Certainly a lot less than the gap between written Colloquial English and Formal English (more words of Latin origins).
Looking at the People's Daily website (which is presumably an official news source in China), it looks like standard newspaper Chinese. Should be readable for most Chinese people with at least primary education.
"I don't think the gap is that large compared to other languages"
As someone learning Chinese, I can sympathize with Google Translate. Spoken Mandarin doesn't give you nearly as much context as more modern written Mandarin. I have no problem reading a newspaper but real conversation between Chinese people is just lost on me. It's not just a pace of listening thing, there is just too much of the sentence that isn't said out loud.
i tried the same with portuguese comments/text where i always felt Facebooks translation was pretty bad and in google translate it is a lot better, to the point you hardly notice it's translated by an algorithm at all.
Actually I still think Google is pretty bad at going between all Portuguese variants.
It puts them all in the same bag, resulting in very strange translations when using it as target language.
Going the other way around, I am yet to properly translate any of the variants into a way that all verbs and articles keep their sense across languages.
For example, translating você to either Du or Sie in German, depending on the Portuguese variant being used.
From what I know, Google's NLP service does not include intent extraction. Intent extraction is essential for voice command interfaces, such as those in Siri and Google Now. But I don't see why they would need to buy a startup for that, when they can do it themselves even better.
What about the possibility of Google being scared of being outrun or innovated out of its position in the AI race? Google does not have a monopoly on smart people.
Well, I was going to downvote, but figured it's better to comment.
> Ugh. This reeks of "safe space" nonsense.
What? I have very little idea what you are talking about, so I looked it up on wikipedia: "In educational institutions, safe-space (or safe space), safer-space, and positive space originally were terms used to indicate that a teacher, educational institution or student body does not tolerate anti-LGBT violence, harassment or hate speech, thereby creating a safe place for all lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students."
Which frankly sounds like a good idea, but doesn't seem like it has much to do with this blog post about managing members of your team.
> Part of working in a team is receiving comments and criticism from others. If you take these negatively and as attacks to you, rather than collective construction towards the final goal, then you have a problem and need to consider changing job.
Yes, except the point of the blog post is that managers should be aware that comments and criticism they would have been happy to offer as co-workers suddenly start to look a lot more like commands when they are coming from a boss. It's a good idea for new managers to be aware of this changed dynamic.
> What? I have very little idea what you are talking about, so I looked it up on wikipedia: "In educational institutions, safe-space (or safe space), safer-space, and positive space originally were terms used to indicate that a teacher, educational institution or student body does not tolerate anti-LGBT violence, harassment or hate speech, thereby creating a safe place for all lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students."
It was originally something like that but "safe spaces" just turned into echo chambers where everyone is only allowed to agree and encourage people and dissenting opinions are considered "unsafe".
> Which frankly sounds like a good idea, but doesn't seem like it has much to do with this blog post about managing members of your team.
The "safe space nonsense" grandparent was referring to is that when you attempt to stop people from being offended or thinking they don't own their work (or otherwise treating adults like children) by saying "just don't say this" results in a chilling effect that just makes everyone's lives worse. Nobody will come up with legitimate criticisms in fear of "being too mean" or "stealing your thunder", and people who need feedback will never get it as a result. I believe that's the effect that the grandparent was referring to. You get the exact same problem with univeristy campuses, where people wanted to be shielded from alternate views by claiming that you're offending them and that you're violating their safe space.
That's how it started, but now anything negative is met with "This is supposed to be a safe space!" whining. Unsurprisingly, some people either can't or won't make the distinction between things that matter (harassment) and things that don't (words like 'moist' or references to a phobia they have such as 'spiders').
You can imagine that it gets rather annoying to be told that you can't say "moist" in some place because it's supposed to be a 'safe place'.
It shows all 5 burns, in one shot. From a /r/spacex comment [1], we have:
1 - The ascent burn of the 9 Merlin-1D engines: the long bright arc upwards,
2 - the single Merlin-1D-Vac second stage burn: the thin, short line starting after the short pause of MECO,
3 - the 3-engine 'boostback burn' of the first stage, the upwards arcing thin 'fish hook' part that is overlaid with the thin second stage arc - which sent the first stage on a return trajectory towards Landing Zone 1,
4 - the 3-engine 're-entry burn' of the first stage at an altitude of about 50 miles: the bright vertical line above the ascent arc,
5 - and the final 1-engine 'landing burn' of the first stage: the lowest bright vertical line ending at the landing pad!
Perhaps a "one shot access pass" or something that lets you in for a few months while you do financial planning may be useful.
It might also be a good opportunity to check back in with people later (say in 12 months time) and get them to sign up again, if you can provide them with valuable insights and help them stick to their plan