Nathan Baschez nbashaw

How narrowing your target market can unlock growth

Here’s all the metrics you can improve by narrowing your market:

Word of mouth / virality - When you have a clear, focused marketing message (e.g. “Volley is a community for entrepreneurs to help each other” vs. “Volley is a community for people to help each other”) it becomes easier to spread to the right people. I now might think to tell an entrepreneur friend about it if they need help, whereas before I didn’t link “Volley” with “Entrepreneurs” in my mind.
Conversion rate - I’m more likely to sign up for a community for entrepreneurs than a site that lets people help people, because it’s more clear what kind of help I can expect to get and give.
Activation - If you have a concentration of people who share similar needs and abilities, more requests will get fulfilled quicker than if there is a huge diversity of needs from different kinds of people. Basically, you can reach market liquidity faster. This will get more people to the “

This is my cool technical blog post. It's written in markdown.

Quantum Computing something something????
Blown to Bits
Why Nations Fail
Re-Creating The Corporation
???
Imagined Communities
Makers: The New Industrial Revolution
Evolution Isn't What It Used To Be
All Connected Now
Everyday Technology

Whiteboard

Whiteboard lets you create new rails apps insanely fast. Instead of going through all your configuration one step at a time in your terminal, with Whiteboard you just write everything once, then run it.

setup do
  rails_version '4.0.0'
  app_name 'dash'
  db 'postgres'
end

Chrome Actions

1. Utilities for URLs

It would be cool if I could explicitly define certain URLs as keywords, so I could just type fb and it would go to facebook.com. Right now typing f autocompletes to facebook, but that's not a behavior I explicitly control. You have to wait till chrome realizes you go to that site a lot for it to show up.

2. Actions based on site utilities

Since each site has a command line interface defined by it's URL, it would be cool if you could have utilities like "search" that could combine with site keywords to produce smart behavior, like fb search dan poggi or tw tweet just setting up my twttr.

3. Application launcher

Kind of an oddball one, but I think it would even be cool to launch native apps from the chrome urlbar. I'm in chrome almost all the time, and if I want to open or switch apps it would be sweet to open a new tab and type that application's keyword.

	import UIKit
	import PlaygroundSupport

	struct StringConstants {
	static let bullet1 = "This is a small string."
	static let bullet2 = "This is more of medium string with a few more words etc."
	static let bullet3 = "Well this is certainly a longer string, with many more words than either of the previuos two strings."
	}

	typealias ParagraphData = (bullet: String, paragraph: String)

	# Kickoff - the quickest way to start new rails apps

	# How it works:
	# 1. Install the gem: `$ gem install kickoff-rails`
	# 2. Generate your kickoff file `$ kickoff new`
	# 3. Edit the kickoff file to specify the foundation of your app
	# 4. Generate your app: `$ kickoff`

	# Set up default gems
	gems = ['omniauth', 'omniauth-twitter', 'pg', 'airbrake']

	// Create our IpsumGenerator function
	var IpsumGenerator = function(){};

	// Master method that gets called to generate the ipsum based on a set
	// of words and a desired word count.
	IpsumGenerator.prototype.generateIpsum = function(words, wordCount) {
	this.wordList = [];
	this.sentences = [];
	this.paragraphs = [];
	this.generateWordlist(words, wordCount);

	// Create our IpsumGenerator function
	var IpsumGenerator = function(){};

	// Master method that gets called to generate the ipsum based on a set
	// of words and a desired word count.
	IpsumGenerator.prototype.generateIpsum = function(words, wordCount) {
	this.wordList = [];
	this.sentences = [];
	this.paragraphs = [];
	this.generateWordlist(words, wordCount);