Rob Roberts

Created an experimental AI app that creates custom illustrations, goodnight messages, and bedtime stories:

Just a note to let everyone know that #Geico is the worst effing company. No way to login, contact info is hidden, chat is useless, and waited 1hr 30 on hold and never got through... #geicosucks #bozos

@StateStreet @Fidelity we’re watching you and will remember who supports pride and diversity during g these times.

Some of my favorite illustrations:

Created an experimental AI app that creates custom illustrations, goodnight messages, and bedtime stories:

So embarrassed by @MBTA "customer service"...typo in paying for parking on their app and NO ONE will fix it despite 4 disputes, appeals... @groupekeolis is ALSO incompetent! #mbta #keolis

@MedusaBrewing Beer Garden open this Thurs 5/23? Didn't see an official announcement ANYWHERE!

@adityaag Yeah you just did them wrong

1/ Weekly 1:1s with direct reports are a staple of Silicon Valley management. The idea is to check in, see how they're doing, and provide feedback. I did this for 10+ years at Facebook & Dropbox. Frankly, I hated it and found it useless. But it's what "good" managers did.

@kirsnvartem @bubble Nah…8 years in and I still stay with the native platform + APis. The second you get down into code, productivity goes to sh*t.

The more you build with @bubble, the less you rely on Bubble and start working more with actual code. It's exciting to go beyond the default features, experimenting with JSON, OpenAI calls, CSS animations, and intricate logic. I love it.

@JJEnglert I like reggaeton for working out (“Dura Dura” is a fav)…the music is very upbeat and fast and it’s usually in Spanish, which is good for me so I don’t have to know the extremely dirty lyrics…

I need some new music suggestions. Especially music for working out and being active. Any suggestions? I like mashups, and anything else that is high beat.

@cerealbuilder @bubble Charge 10x and wait 6 months before you start building it…

What’s your biggest tip to make @bubble app feel like a traditional app?

@Marskhan99 @LarsMaehler How do you “sort out” time zones? Having people work at the same time can be important…

@LarsMaehler Thanks for sharing, but I believe payroll and time zones have already been sorted out. It's more complex on the internal government side.

A genuine question: Why do many companies offer remote roles, but limit them to within the US? How does remote work in the US differ from remote work in other countries? 🤔

@Marskhan99 Time zones is a big issue. This sometimes even limits us within the US.

@realEstateTrent If you have a business and you can’t pay employees a living wage…it’s not much of a business…

Friend of mine runs restaurants in California. Just checked in with him. “I’m in Chicago!” What are you doing there? “I’m buying an automatic sauce dispensing machine.” Apparently the machine’s over $100k, but he can now replace the employees that spend 4 hours per day, per store putting sauce into containers. “Yup, that new minimum wage law!”

@gaganbiyani OK. Who are you? Do you have any data about Duolingo effectiveness, or just trolling? Oh just trolling.

Duolingo is a fascinating study in consumer "education." The app is fairly useless for language learning* but is wildly popular. 88.4M Monthly Active Users 6.6M Paid Subscribers $530M in FY 2023 Revenue $93.7M in FY 2023 EBITDA The kicker? $8.4B market cap. 2x bigger than Udemy + Coursera combined. Shocking considering it is more edutainment than education.* Lessons: - Consumers often engage more with edutainment (competing with Candy Crush or TikTok) than education. There's a very weak correlation to effectiveness. (MasterClass is another example imho: low on learning, still very successful). - Duolingo still has a HUGE impact on language learning for millions of people because they are 1000x bigger. Even if they are 100x less effective than another language learning app, they can still provide 10x more value to the overall population. - Growth and EBITDA are significant better than Udemy/Coursera. The market loves profitable, fast-growing companies (why wouldn't they?) *Sorry, but its true. Duolingo is a fun game, but you can spend years on it and not be able to have a conversation in your language of choice.

@nocodelife Need to get excited about the tech that will make a difference for the customer

Classic founder mistake I've been guilty of many times: Getting more excited about the technology than the customer.

@Matt_Graham_ Also brings up what happens at death…where does that energy go?

I used to teach thermodynamics at the Navy’s Nuclear Power School. The first law of thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it is only transformed from one form to another. If you teach this over and over again, it can get monotonous, but it provided me with an important question to reflect on: What do you transform your energy into? - Health - Relationships - Chasing fame - Helping others - Making money - Your kids or loved ones - Your job, work, or career - Shaping the body you want to have. - Creating something new, like a product Of course, we all put energy into several things, but I find most people pour most of their energy into one of these categories. Life only provides us with a limited amount of energy. What do you do with yours?

@Nodirbay @deezign_io @bubble Yeah the answer to unlimited is…NO. Discounted groups of subs, fine. But not unlimited. Never have seen that work out. And TBH the fact they’re asking is at least a yellow flag…

What is a fair rate for unlimited team pricing for a SaaS with standard rate of $25/mo? Uptick in interest for @deezign_io by @bubble agencies. My current team pricing is $15 per seat (min 3 seats). But a client has asked for unlimited seats. How would you price that?

PSA for anyone with lots of domain names registered: There are a bunch of very realistic phishing emails going out about domains rn.

@vibhu @nikitabier I def believe events is yet to be solved. Lots of opportunity, wildly changing content from untrustworthy sources, inherently local and variable locally. But it’s a huge problem to be solved…it’s not just recent college grads who think so…

@nikitabier in my yc batch in 2011, paul graham said this (and local events) are the most common startup ideas that get pitched said something about how startup founders in this specific age (post college but pre-maturity) think everyone wants this

I've been pitched "yelp but with friends" every week for the last year. I will answer all your DMs at once: Yes, it's a reasonable idea. But no, you shouldn't build it. Let me tell you what will happen: Because it's the first app you've ever built, you'll be inclined to allow reviews for all things—home services, restaurants, shops. And you will justify it to yourself with, "Well, the opportunity is even bigger!" It will take you 2-3 years to realize that no one is using it because [1] users can't remember to use your app when it's not specifically marketed around a vertical (i.e., "restaurant recs from friends") and [2] reviews will be spread out across too many businesses for users to get signal from the app. By that point, it will be too late to verticalize.

@brentonstrine @bubble One could argue that the complexity would make the refactoring difficult in any environment. Also, usually the iteration happening during the design and development means that the full range of complexity isn’t visible until the end. So yeah, hindsight is 20/20 🤪

So I'm refactoring some extremely complex stuff I built in @bubble a couple years ago, which inspires me to remind you all: just because you CAN build something in Bubble, doesn't mean you SHOULD!