this is great feedback. right now, as churches join, we're collecting a version of every data point you mention. soon, search will begin evolving into more of a personality based matching service.
Sean from @FaithStreet here. We're focused on Christianity because its a big market (1m+ Christian communities, 60 million people actively involved in Christian communities) that we're passionately involved in, and we think it would be much harder (for branding, for user acquisition, for product design) to approach multiple faiths simultaneously.
For now, churches create free profiles. We're rolling out paid features for churches soon.
Groceries make up a smaller percentage partially because they are so much cheaper than eating out.
As for it being healthier, it all depends on your choices. If I am eating in, but having noodles and microwave pizza it will be much less healthy than getting a salad out. I have been on business trips where I ate every meal at a restauraunt for more than two weeks, but it was a relatively healthy diet.
The implication of your comment is you eat out 3 (or more/less) times a day, 7 days a week? Out of curiosity, what kinds of foods are you buying? How much would you say you spend a week on food?
In my early 20s I was somewhat like the OP - I would eat out for pretty much every meal. The trick to it was only eating twice a day, or once if you could manage it. The end result was actually fairly inexpensive depending upon where you were eating.
Of course, that was back when my body could handle this kind of abuse.
been in the situation of working for terrible managers in a big company, was 24, working at a top 3 nyc law firm - quit after less than a yr - started working on the startup i'm applying to yc with for summer 2012, trying to innovate in a wide-open, extremely under-served space: Christianity
I'm impressed by 42Floors and Your Mechanic. I like that each company identified an area full of inefficient orthodoxy and innovated - like AirBnb. 42 Floors also seems to have an especially strong team (Flightcaster) and has a slick design.
Yeah, the unequal bargaining power between the company and the candidate is a real problem. Even if the company makes providing the access information optional, there's still a kind of invasive coercion happening.
That said, companies have been requiring that applicants submit credit reports for a long time, so the idea that there's a bright line between what's "private" and what's "public" when it comes to employment isn't quite right.
I once worked for a company that did a lot of military contracts. They would ask some of us to get security clearance to be able to work certain projects (and enter the 'secret room'). It was still optional and I never felt it pushed on me even though it would have had career benefits. I opted out because the requirements and paperwork were nuts and part of the deal was that the government would potentially track whenever you left/entered the country and a whole bunch of other things.
I thought this was a really nice way of letting your employees have a choice even though in this particular case they probably could have forced everybody to do it. Now you have companies which do not really need to have this personal information asking employees for it. Here's the thing though. If my employees had lots of nasty things to say about my company then my reaction wouldn't be to stop them by monitoring everything they do. Wouldn't you want to try and fix the problem?
Second that. I lived for a year in Manhattan (East Village) while working on my start-up - I had roommates, but I made well under 75k and was just fine. Was still able to do all the things a 25 yr old guy wanted to do. The idea that it takes $75k+ to make it work in Manhattan is a farce perpetuated by big banks selling shitty jobs to naive grads and people who don't know how to budget/ be thrifty on message boards.
But think about the long run: Roommates are great until you hit age 30 or so and settle down and get married and maybe have kids (no pressure here Sean!). At that point Manhattan becomes painful unless you are married into money. Now you could move out to Brooklyn or your startup can avoid older employees (which is illegal), but if you grow your company to over ten people you can hit those issues pretty quickly. Also it's a spectrum -- Manhattan on $60 can work while being in NYC on $25k is a nightmare.
Yup. But they were talking about starting salaries on the Fog Creek thing. $75K right out of college for a young adult opens a lot of doors. But I definitely agree that being 30 with a kid, rather than 22-24, would be a lot harder on $75K.
I hear that. However, the thrust of the article and the focus of my comment is about new grads, people in going through the recruitment -> internship -> job offer cycle
Most important part of the system the article describes: "We use the summer to decide if we want them full-time. So we give them real work. Hard work."
Too many summer internships (see big law, big finance, etc) fail to give employers the information they need to know if there's a fit, and, just as importantly, fail to give top students the information that THEY need to know if this is where they want to spend 70 hours a week for the next 1-3 years.
I agree, this smells a lot like late '00s legal recruiting - throw money, parties, and interesting work at summer associates, giving them and the firm almost no information about the actual long-term fit.
One important difference that the author doesn't mention is that after a start-up launch you're still going to be testing hypothesis, making improvements/ changes/ pivots such that your product 6 months after launch might not look anything like your product at launch. With a book, you might add more to a new edition, but the product is more or less set after post-release.
Still, I think it's an interesting post - especially about how writers can learn from iterative/ lean methods. Thanks for sharing!
