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track_progress's Introduction
Udacity - Statistics (ST101)
- started_on: 25 jun 2012
- on: 01 Aug 2012 - 08 BRule
- now_at: 4.1
- goal: 2013
Udacity - How to build a startup (EP245)
- started_on: 01 oct 2012
- Phase 1 - Get ready to sell
- MVP - minimum viable product
- meets minimal customer needs
- Identify customers and markets avail.
- JerseySquare example
- on: 02 oct 2012 - Lecture 1.5b
- on: 04 oct 2012 - Lecture 2
- on: 13 Oct 2012 - Lecture 2.21
- Value Proposition - satisfying a customer need
- solve a pain & create a gain => MVP
- product market fit at the intersection of prod/market
- keep in mind to "get out of the building"
- Customer Segment or market
- model the product'st "Persona"
- create Pain Killers - problem vs need
- depending on market web/physical/etc you need a model to get feedback on your solution
- Value proposition - why hasn't it been solved yet?
- ayasdi - tech insight / twitter - market insight
- on: 14 Oct 2012 - Lecture 3.1
- on: 23 Oct 2012 - Lecture 4.1
- Customer segments
- understand whom are the people who might buy your product
- there might different segments available
- create a "day in the life" of a customer for a persona
- customer gains - list of what can they win by using your product
- you have to validate some of your hypothesis
- customer pains - opposite version of gains, need to understand it
- know everything about your customers - create a customer persona
- who's the customer - in context - payer might be a different person
- B2B present less chances to get useful survey results compared to B2C
- 2 sided market, e.g. google - searching users / paying advertisers
- 4 types of startups: existing market, resegment market, new , clone
- changes everything: initial costs, market size, sales model
- chasm between early adopters and mainstream market depending on startup type
- wider depending on market type
- revenue stream for each value proposition
- first customers for startups are just crazy people like you
- 85-90% features are unwanted & un-needed by customers
- most fail due to a lack of customers not because of the product (also: vision, founders fight 1/4, too expensive to fund)
- founders spend 20% of their time w/ customers
- [4] distribution channels:
- virtual / physical 2x2 matrix: 2,2 twitter, 1,2 amazon 2,1 ERP 1,1 cars
- most successful startups pick only one distribution channel, at least initially
- on: 1 nov 2012 - Lecture 4.5
- physical distribution channel (4.5)
- solution complexity: system integrators - handle the most complex solutions > Direct Sales > VAR > Retail > Web
- as we go up solution complexity, the value added increases; higher volume are at the low end
- channel economics
- direct sales: e.g. $100 = cost of raw materials ($33) + r&d, sales & gen. admin ($20) + discount ($10) + PROFIT ($37)
- indirect sales (reseller): cost of r.m. ($33) + r&d, sales & gen. admin ($15) = 48$ + discount ($10) + reseller ($20) + PROFIT ($22)
- selling costs are lower, but losing more on total profit
- Customer Relationships
- how do you get, keep and grow customers? - double barrelled funnel the same, slighty different for web and physical products
- get - viral loop, in-funnel / keep / grow, out-funnel
- update the consumer archetype, how do they know you and research about your products, how do they buy?
- have an opinion based on a fact, try to continually refine the archetype
- pay - PR to promote your product or company / goog or fb pads based on archetype / trade shows / e-mail / mail /
- unpaid - blogs, guest articles, social media, speeches
- physical channel: awareness, interest, consideration, purchase
- modify the funnnel to fit your needs, use it as a template
- 5.11 - 2 nov 2012
- getting customers is more expensive than keeping customers
- keeping customers using loyalty programs, newsletters
- grow customers - end funnel
- up sell - different product lines w/ different prices / cross sell - selling similar products / referrals (physical)
- get mobile funnel: acquire - how to get them to visit your site / activate - pay / sign up - engage w/ the product
- 2-step process; customer aquisition cost (CAC) - 10k users, .5 ad word -ppclick, 500 sign up, 50 paying => $100 C.A.C.
- churn: how many customers leave
- grow for web: lifetime value (LTV), how much will they spend from get/keep/grow, we must have LTV > CAC
- ideally LTV should be (much) higher than CAC
- on: 6 Nov 2012 - Lecture 6.1
- Common mistakes
- revenue stream IS NOT the price, and a lower price than competition is not necessary needed
- it must be driven by the customers
-
pricing must be based on value and not cost, customer should feel that
- Revenue stream: the strategy of the company to generate cash from each customer segment
- each revenue stream may get different pricing tactics
- Pricing: the tactics used to set the prices
- fixed: value based on customer segment, based on volume, cost + mark-update
- dynamic: negotiable, based on yield, auctions
- depending on your customers, get out of the building :)
- Fee: proportional to the usage of the service / flat fee to access to service / licensing - fee for use IP
- on: 7 Nov 2012 - Lecture 6.10
- Market types affects pricing
- how will the competition react, can we undercut them?
- what are their costs
- Single/multi-sided market: e.g. Google - cares about users first, revenues second
- for a physical channel, go for both at the same time
- for multi-sided market, talk to the payers not only the users
- "revenue first" companies - focusing on revenue more than others
- "Hockey stick" - startups in a new market, flat revenue initially, then after an inflexion point, exponential growth
- 1st year bump - due to early adopters
- "draw the diagram" on how you'll be making money
- key revenue model questions
- what are the customers paying for and how is easy is for them to keep paying
-
don't put all features in the initial product (packaging)
- estimate the market size: CAC, LTV, how many units will you selling
- get feedback from customers 100 web / 10 non-web
- on:11 Nov 2012 - Lecture 7.1 - Partners
- Partners: what type of relationships you need to have with them
- shared economics, what's in it for your partner / mutual success & failure
- working together with others to help build your company
- strategic alliance: use partner to build a "whole product", using 3rd parties to provide solution to customers
- greatest strategic alliance: iPod (apple + record labels)
- joint business development: intel + OEMs => intel inside, promotion and ads programs
- in new market no need for "earlyvangelists", as most tend to fail
- coopetition: to do something jointly for their industry (tradeshows, associations)
- key suppliers: outsource part of company to 3rd party - backoffice, manufacture
- virtual channels/traffic partners: deliver predictable levels of customers (web)
- risks: e.g. Boeing building 787 - outsource all manufacturing, supply chain too scattered - decisions made by accountants and not engineers
- risks: longest of their decision schedule is yours now as well; no clear ownership of the customers; products lacks vision; difficult to unwind or end
- investments from large companies: "what's in it for us?" - buy us without (investing) money
- who's the sponsor? and what's the motivation?
- understand that you're not a PEER to large companies
- partners can be a potential acquirer
- try to understand if customers want you to have partnerships
- on 12 Nov 2012 - Lecture 8 - Resources, Activities and Costs
- most important assets: finance / money, IP, physical resources, human resources
- 4 critical: physical, human, financial, intellectual
- physical goods are capital intensive, how to scale
- easy to start-up, especially in softare, some rough calculations on capital invested vs. possible gains
- VC in both operating and financing phases, angels, friends and kickstarter in financing phase only
- lease-lines/factoring only in operating mode
- on 26 Nov 2012- Lecture 8
- HR: teacher: learn about a subject, improve a skill - coach, mentor - giving and taking advice
- always hire people better than you!
- IP: trademark - you can protect branding (marks, logos), copyright the 'creative work', contract/NDA, patent the 'inventions'
- Costs (alywas < Revenue) in-sync w/ investors from day 1
- fixed costs: building, employees - every month, don't move
- what are the most important cost to operate the business
- startups search for the execution metrics, but you need to first understand the metrics that matter
- burn rate - how much money are spent per month
- Reading recommendations:
- Startup Owner's Manual
- Business Model Generation
- The Innovator Dillema / The Innovator Solution
- goal: 2013
Udacity - Software Testing (CS258)
- started_on: 27 jun 2012
- on: 27 Jun 2012 - 1.11
- python -O : optimize, disable assertions
- valgrind: always assertions are enabled, about 5% of time looks ok
- nasa: most phases w/ assertions, landing assertions disabled
- try to test w/ values sampled from entire domain
- domain restrictions are acceptable as long as they are documented
- for OSes we should test all values even if it's outside the specs (e.g. negative vals for >0 reqs.)
- same for GUIs, the same trust boundary is present, which needs testing
- on: 11 Nov 2012 - 1.23
- use defensive coding, trying to prevent corner cases/errors
- not on goal2013
- SM is dividing a thread block in 32 thread warps
- 16x16 threads/block => 6 thread blocks => 1536 theads for Fermi
- CUDA 3.0 supports up to 1024threads/SM
- SIMD - same instruction on multiple data sets
- control divergence when condition contains threadIdx
- memory coalescing when a burst read is equal to a `tile' width => optimal memory bw utilization
- corner turning - when copying from global to scratch memory, no penalty after end of copy using bursts
- shared memory - SRAM - no need for bursting
- arbitrary sizes for tiling of processing of the elements
- operations need to be independent of each other (associative and commutative)
- privatization - multiple threads write in output, use a reduction tree to merge the results in a single version
- reduction computation - has identity value (e.g. 0 for sum, 1 for product) and is assoc. and commutative
- avg. parallelism (N-1)/ log(N) for reduction tree - comparable to an efficient algo.
Coursera - Neural Networks for ML
Codecademy - Python track
- started_on: 10 Oct 2012
- on: 13 Oct 2012 - 3.1 / 8
- on: 15 Oct 2012 - 4 / 8
- universal imports - from module import
- function import - from module import function
- import - import module
- on: 1 Nov 2012 - 4.4 / 8
- on: 6 Nov 2012 - 5.1 / 8
- on: 12 Nov 2012 - 6.1 / 8
- on: 23 Dec 2012 - 8.1 / 12
- while/else, for/else construct - only when terminated w/o break
- enumerate(array)
- a, b, ... = zip(list1, list2, ...) - iterate over multiple lists at once
- char in 'string' - correct syntax
- list comprehension [ j**2 for j in range(10) if (j+1) % 2 == 0 ] # squares of odd numbers < 10
- list slicing array[start:end:stride]
- lambda functions
- list_for_input=['1','2','3','4']
- filter(lambda var: var == "3", list_for_input)
- bin() to get binary representation of values
- XOR (^) to flip bits using all 1's
- class SUPER(): [...]
- class SubClass(SUPER): [...]
- override: super(SubClass, self).SUPER_method(params)
- Python Testing - Daniel Arbuckle
- Introduction to Neural Networks for Java - Jeff Heaton (http://www.jeffheaton.com/ai/)
- started_on: 01 jan 2012
- paused
- Don't Make Me Think - Steve Kruger
- started_on: 01 oct 2012
- finished_on: 20 Nov 2012
- The Lean Startup
Coursera - Human Computer Interaction (HCI)
- started_on: 01 jun 2012
- now_at: 5.1 (week 3)
- overall: 7/10
- finished_on: 13 Oct 2012
Currently paused / postponed / cancelled
CS373 - Artificial Intelligence
- started_on: 01 nov 2011
- paused
- goal: 2013
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