Cool idea! I think there are a few things on the usability side that you could do to make it even better:
* Lock the body when you open the modal by setting overflow: hidden. That will prevent people from scrolling around accidentally while filling out the form.
* This is related to the first point, but you should probably position: fixed the modal
* Make the label for the monthly donation clickable - people shouldn't have to find the little check box!
* Lighten the .iframe-subheader-text as it can be pretty low contrast when the background is white
* Add some subtle animations to the open and closing of the modal. It feels very jarring right now.
If you make the black overlay container position fixed and the window itself normal, you can have the modal scroll within the context of the black overlay. Facebook uses this same method and it's significantly nicer!
Jumio is actually a complementary service to ours. Jumio pulls information off of identification, but the information is not verified. You can use us to verify and authenticate that information.
Account recovery is a great use case. Any mission critical applications for businesses should require more than security questions or a phone call in order to gain access to accounts.
We agree that front-loading is not always the best solution and are working on systems to help firms with progressive authentication, too.
tldr; There's room in the market for more than one non-solid dietary product, the goal of Soylent is to be a complete alternative that supports an active life rather than something that just lets you survive, ensure is expensive and low calorie.
Yes, I've read that in the past and without being rude I do not consider that to be 'thoughtful'. It's a repetition of what he's said a number of times about his goals for Soylent, but it does not answer my question.
He mentions Ensure as follows: "I considered Ensure but found it much too expensive, low calorie, unpalatable, and an ingredient make up that was far from complete or optimal." That does not tell me anything about Soylent.
Sure, he wants to make it cheaper. Can he? About a month ago I posted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5875246 The pricing is very close between Soylent and Ensure Complete. Abbott claims you can live long term on it etc.
My suspicion is that he's comparing Soylent with the common consumer "Ensure" product which is relatively low-calorie etc.
4 bottles of Ensure Complete would only be 1400 Calories/day, vs. 2200 Calories for Soylent. You'd have to drink 6/day, making it $66.43/wk for Ensure Complete (cheapest Amazon price) vs. $52.88/wk for Soylent.
Of course, you said that you considered $73.48/wk to be "very close to Soylent pricing". Sure it's in the same order of magnitude, but a 40% increase is nothing to sneeze at.
The response is definitely worthwhile, and a bit of it seems to be that the use case is different. It would be a bit expensive to replace a majority of one's diet with Ensure Complete. A 16-pack of 8oz Ensure Complete is 5600 Calories for $42, so eating for a day costs $15. The preorder price of 1 week of soylent is $9.29/day, but worryingly we don't know how many Calories that is...
A quote from Vice on the crowdfunding page indicates that it should be about 700 Calories/day[1] (making it several times as expensive as Ensure), while Rob Rhinehart's blog indicated that he was consuming a reasonable number of calories earlier this year (2629 C/day)[2].
"More expensive per Calorie" is not necessarily "more expensive" for the target audience. The classic "2000 Calories per day" assumes some level of physical activity. If you don't have any physical activity, you're better off consuming fewer Calories per day, as long as you get all the other nutrients you need.
This is an important consideration. The target audience of Soylent likely has some wild variation in desired caloric intake, perhaps 4-6x between people who want to drop some pounds and people who lift as a hobby.
Yeah. The creator of Soylent makes a point of saying that it should be tuned for the person using it. Hopefully in the long-term they'll offer versions with varying calorie content. Alternatively, they could offer a two-component system with nutrients and minimal calories in one and pure calories in the other, to make it easy to tune that one variable for your target calorie consumption.
The main lecturer co-founded one of the biggest personal genomics companies in the US, so I'm quite certain that he realizes the difference between the two.
The course emphasizes using CS-related skills in any startup for product development and getting insight into your market. Example exercises are things like scraping competitor data, wading through genomic data from the cmd line and building internal APIs for managing company data.
I took it in the winter at Stanford. It was an amazing class - the material was very strong and there's an emphasis on working on ideas that matter. Read: not social startup #5024. Every Thursday we had hackathons that went til 6am where the main lecturer would advise us on our ideas, give feedback on the product and generally teach us about the important things™. That was considered to be v1 of the course, and I know he (the lecturer) plans to iterate on it and make it better every time it's offered.
We build APIs and products that help companies fight fraud and automate cumbersome compliance requirements.
https://jobs.lever.co/blockscore/a12f7545-e0dd-49ee-805d-3cc...