Polar

I'm looking for a co-founder for Polar.

https://getpolarized.io/

I'm trying to re-invent the way knowledge is acquired and maintained by students and life-long-learners. Medical students, undegrads, scientists, engineers, etc.

We've shipped an MVP and are doing amazingly well. Our customers LOVE us and are really addicted to the product.

We're growing 60% every month so far and our users have uploaded about 110GB to our cloud infrastructure.

Revenues are early but we've proven customers will pay.

REALLY excited about how passionate our user base is as well.

I'm looking for a co-founder to really take things to the next level.

I'm looking for 1-2 people with the following skills.

1. React UI/UX. You need to have at least 10 years of experience. Not only in React of course but I need a frontend ninja. This is going to be a consumer product so I need someone to really help us nail the user experience and frontend.

2. Someone with a strong background in growth. Not just marketing. Not just sales. But more growth and growth hacking. Creating a unified view across sales + marketing + product + engineering and analyzing conversion rates and activation funnels to REALLY enable long term viral growth.

I have some background in both of the above so I can do either but part of the job of a CEO is replacing himself with people far better than what they're currently capable of.

It also goes without saying that this is a four year commitment and more of a marriage than a partnership. I need someone that has a "take no prisoners" attitude towards building a company. If a brick wall gets in your way you won't hesitate to beat it down with your bare fists.

Nothing will stop you ... this is my attitude and I need someone to have my back like I will have yours.

I'm burton at my getpolarized dawt eye oh ...

I figure if you're not smart enough to decode the above email address it's probably not a good fit anyway :)

#looking-for-cofounder

I've been building Polar for the last 4-6 months. Launched about 3 months ago.

https://getpolarized.io/

We're doing VERY well. 65% growth last month and 7000 users - all organic growth via word of mouth. Our users have uploaded over 100GB of documents and annotations in the last three months.

We're on target to hit these numbers again this month.

Revenue is doing well too and is typically what one would see from a freemium app (5%).

None of this was via SEO or any marketing - it's all just because users love the product.

I'm looking for 1-2 co-founders with some combination of the following skillsets:

React + Frontend. You're a React ninja. You think Typescript is awesome. Understand JSON + REST APIs and love webapps.

Design + UI/UX. This is going to be a consumer product so I'm also open to someone REALLY strong in UI/UX and hopefully understands enough coding that they could work on the frontend. This is going to be a consumer facing product so having solid design is important. I want to gamify the system to really encourage the users to stay involved.

Growth. Someone VERY strong in growth. The plan is to grow this to 100M users and I want to start measuring retention, conversion, and build a scientific platform for optimizing which features to ship.

Right now I'm working on raising grants + planing a seed round. If the grants come in we might just work on the grant funds while improving the core product for the next year to avoid raising VC and selling part of the company.

I've been a successful entrepreneur in the past. I've ran my last company for the last ten years. 7 figures of revenue. Sold my previous company to Six Apart. Sold my company before that as well.

Invented RSS and tons of web tech and Open Source.

I'm VERY passionate about this project. Working 10-12 hours per day 6 days a week.

It's also a product that I need. I won't rest until I have it...

I was working on a doing a previous startup when I came up with the idea for Polar. What you see on the site is only the tip of the iceberg. I think it's going to be ground breaking. Something you can tell your kids about.

Send me a PM and lets discuss.

Do any of you create demo videos for your apps?

I want to create basic tutorial / intro videos for my apps with some basic effects:

• a fake mouse so that the movement is smooth
• zoom in so that when something is clicked I can zoom into that part of the screen

... I'm sure there are other features I'm missing bit iMovie is a bit low level for this as I have to do all this manually and there's no fake mouse pointer.

I'm looking for a co-founder for a project I've been working on for the last six months.

https://getpolarized.io/

I'm far past the MVP stage and more in an early go-to-market phase where I have to prove out that it can bring in revenue and also need to focus on growth and marketing.

I need someone REALLY good at these two areas (growth and marketing) as getting it into the hands of the user is a massive project in and of itself.

My strength is in engineering and seeing that there's a market but understanding marketing an growth is it's own challenge in and of itself.

#looking-for-cofounder

I wrote up a long post about the value we received from being featured on Hacker News and how to best harness it:

https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/02/getting-hacker-news-lessons-for-entrepreneurs.html

I'm hoping this proves valuable for other entrepreneurs as there's not many posts about early stage growth or how to launch an app so that you can get some initial feedback.

Hacker News can be a huge resource if you have a technical product.

The feedback they provide can be insanely valuable and they can also deliver a huge number of initial users.

The challenge of course is how to properly handle it and I tried to address this in the post.

Anyway. You guys have been super helpful so I wanted to give back.

#hackernews #analytics

I need to hire someone to do basic artwork for my app from time to time.

Mostly app store images really.

Are there any sites you guys use?

Can we talk tour vs introduction video for apps?

I added a tour to my app which increased our day 2 retention to about 15-20% (from 5%) but only about 50% of the people complete the tour.

The rest cancel the tour at the first step.

I'm curious if video would increase this and be a better option than a tour.

Feedback here?

I implemented a feature as part of Polar to ask users to perform actions based on their usage of the product.

These are things that will benefit Polar like asking the customer to leave us ratings on sites.

Almost NO customers actually do it though...

We ask about 1000 customers a week and the conversion rate is < 1%....

This leaves me with some open questions:

1. Maybe it's too easy to just dismiss. Maybe I need to make these more or a requirement than a suggestion.

2. Maybe instead of a survey I can just ask one question at a time. Maybe like 1x per day and they ONLY have the option of answering it.

Or maybe it's just pointless to ask them?

Have any of you guys done chrome extension store optimization or app store optimization?

I'd like to see some numbers, over time , of a chrome extension or an app being optimized.

The previous version of our extension was useful just for the desktop version of our app so we didn't get a ton of downloads.

The new version if for a webapp so I think we're going to get a lot more people to install it and KEEP it installed.

I think the way the chrome extension position optimization is done is that they look at the number of downloads and the number of installs. If you get a lot of uninstalls you get a lower rank.

I'm hoping that this actually resolves the problem and that we get a better ranking on SERPs.

Some apps get 300-3000 downloads per day which is pretty awesome so I'm going to be really excited if we get a good position but going to have to keep working at it.

I have Polar 1.5 almost done. Tons of lessons learned to get to this point.

The main hypothesis I'm testing now is that the web is the most important platform and I should be focused here first.

I'm going to focus on the app stores and SEO as distribution as well as getting press coverage ...

The main struggle I think is that most people want to use mobile or webapps and that I've cut my legs off by not focusing on the web first.

I'm still going to prioritize our desktop app.. That's not going anywhere. But the hard work has already been done there I think.

I think it's a pretty solid hypothesis so we'll see...

Big release goes out in a couple of days.

So far we have built up about 5000 MAUs and I think this is going to go a long way to get us to 50k...