At the moment, it's mainly just price. We try to offer the same services but with much more affordable plans.
One spot where we do differ greatly though is our bulk email verification. We check for more risk factors and information about an email address compared to other companies.
This companies directory part of our site though is more just a service for easily finding the main contact information and emails for a company, without having to be a member of MailDB. Being a member is free, though! :)
Thank you for your code, I will be definitely be referring to this as I build the base of my current project.
Diving back into Node though, just so I can get my current portfolio up to par and job-ready, it makes me realize how broken this whole process is.
It seems like bi-annually, either Node.js is changing, Webpack is changing, React is changing, or possibly all three have changed. What you learned just a year ago has been modified and 'updated', usually with configuration and API changes. This leads to a whole slew of new articles and tutorials and boilerplate GitHub projects being created, only to be somewhat legacy less than a year down the road.
Then the plugins you have to learn, all of which separately might have configuration and API changes from one version to the next... Then you have to learn server side rendering because all of this is built for the client, so it's time to incorporate some weird page loading query string hacks to get that working...
All of this feels like it's just one hack put on top of another, to try and achieve what browsers have been doing since the 90's, just without reloading the page.
I think the updates to JavaScript in ES6 like arrow functions, classes, the spread operator, etc are great, but even this I could see going down the C++ route of just trying to add every single feature a programmer can think of to the language.
This is why I prefer Go so heavily. The core language keywords and features have not really changed since its inception. I hope one day this can all be condensed and simplified, much like Go is doing for backend languages.
I'm using MailChimp for building the email list, and I'm using the same MailChimp account as I do for my main SaaS, MailDB (https://maildb.io).
This is completely separate and has nothing to do with that site - I thought the settings were different for this specific list.
I'll double check now, thank you! And no worries, you will never be emailed regarding that site - this list is only for SaaScriber and this idea alone.
The way I was looking at it, this is something we want to form a real team around and build in 4-6 months time.
While we could try to leverage our own idea, without having this site known and heavily trafficked, the subscriptions will be minuscule and probably not enough to achieve our goals - look at early Kickstarter. An influx of cash would help get the word out.
Plus, we're hoping to work with SaaS companies who sign up and see which products/ideas want to launch with us.
I do see your point though. Maybe this is something where it needs to start small, using the idea itself as proof.
Just want to say, I'm not affiliated with LE, but I think it makes a lot of sense to donate to them if you use their services regularly.
From my own use case, integrating TLS for my site via LE and the autocert package in Go has been seamless. It's completely free (if you want it to be), and it looks like I won't have to worry about renewing certs anymore. The service LE is providing is amazing. Just thinking of the millions of dollars they're collectively saving everyone, yearly, is pretty crazy.
If anyone at LE reads this, thank you for your work!
Yes! At my job I've setup a per-paycheck donation to LE because they have saved me so much time (apache, nginx and caddy automagic SSL) and in the long run it'll probably still be cheaper than buying one of the SSL certs from the other companies.
It is a small token of how much time they saved us from setting up ssl for our clients. These small monthly donations can add up help them thrive in the future.
That's wonderful! How does your company write that off? Is it a business expense? I know a lot of companies don't really care to "donate" for various reasons, am wondering why your company is so willing when it is not required.
This. Everything is easier with an invoice; Accountants and tax inspectors are always suspicious about donations with only an email as a confirmation. It's a point patio11 already made in the past about OSS.
It sounds like your company should be the ones donating! Kudos to you either way and I agree, with how easy this has become compared to other solutions I have no problem donating to them.
I fully agree, which is why I set up a recurring donation for what I would otherwise pay to some commercial certificate authority. LetsEncrypt is doing great work!
What's crazy to me is that their crowdfunding campaign [1] has only raised $100K so far, considering what they're doing.
My previous SaaS product, Navilytics, I built from scratch and ran completely on my own (minus a couple of blog posts from a friend). It very well could have been successful, but I made the mistake of thinking the product would sell itself and never did any real promotion leading up to launch. I paid for this as another competitor, who had the same idea I had at the same time and built their own version of the product, starting marketing it before it was even in beta. They're doing > $1 mil per year now in revenue.
Previous one before that was an affiliate network I ran with a buddy of mine, so just two people. We did very well with this one (but only mildly when compared to other large affiliate networks at the time).
My new project, I'm working with a buddy of mine who's good at the things I'm not so good at. While I think it's 100% possible to be a sole founder and do very well, having a solid team makes the entire process a lot easier. Plus, having people to bounce ideas off of usually leads to making better decisions.
Is anyone else seeing the possible security risk shown in the 'Vision and Face Recognition' section?
The main concern I would have is someone spoofing the visual recognition system with something as crude as photographs, or something more advanced like a mask.
He states in that section, "Once it identifies the person, it checks a list to confirm I'm expecting that person, and if I am then it will let them in and tell me they're here." My first thought is someone could see if there's a friend/acquaintance who routinely visits, and then spoof their face with a mask. Let alone if the system automatically lets Zuckerberg in, then that's all that would be needed.
this is a guy who has multiple armed security guards outside hit home 24/7. Plus the fact he almost certainly has staff and assistants who are coming and going from the house. There is no way you make it to the front door if you are not expected, this is just to save his staff from having to use the key or for someone to open the door for them. This would never be secure enough for a normal persons house
This is a reference to a scene from the Michael Moore movie Bowling for Columbine, where he is walking in a Canadian neighborhood and just opens the front door of someone's house. I couldn't find a better clip than this one: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pjJbtb4Bs0Q
Huh, never lock the door when I'm in the house, except at night ... is that unusual? Live in a smaller UK city. Perhaps if we had anything worth stealing it'd be different.
Is it perhaps the US Americans are the peculiar ones and other countries are more like Canada?
For anyone wondering, the name is not a result of a mistake, apparently 'beta' was commonly transliterated as 'b' in the past (as opposed to 'v', the sound that it stands for).[1]
Rather what the hell happened to the guy that had tape on his laptop camera and microphone. Suddenly he's got an always on listening device. How does one go from one to the other?
Securing a local network is orders of magnitude easier than a laptop which accesses the internet constantly.
Stick the cameras on a vlan only accessable to the (local) servers doing the face recognition, stick the servers on a vlan that has no direct connection to the internet.
Compare this to a laptop which is connected to the internet with multiple attack vectors (browser, email client, etc...)
Does he have some custom build network router that he trust? Putting tape over your camera means you know enough to not trust the laptop hardware neither the OS or browsers like you said.
But he says: "We use .. Sonos system with Spotify for music, a Samsung TV, a Nest cam for Max". So all of his appliances do get outside.
I did a double-take on Nest cam. So he's streaming videos from his house on the internet with a closed source hw and software.
I didn't read the part about Nest to be fair but with some basic network design you can easily segregate networks and reduce your attack surface massively, even if you're using internet connected devices (seperate vlans, use http proxies with ACLs, no inter device communication where not needed).
The difference between a switch and a laptop is that your switch isn't running browsers with 0days found regularly, no malicious JS payloads, no phishing emails.
To exploit a switch you generally need access to the management interface, something anyone who has any experience with networking does not put on the same network (virtual or physical) as laptops, iPads, televisions, or internet connected cameras.
I agree with what you are saying, however tape over the camera means you don't trust the OS or the hardware manufacturer with a console command like modprobe to actually do it's thing and disable the web camera.
Sounds like he knows where the data being recorded is always going and what's being done with it. Pretty different from the chance that a camera/mic on a laptop might be randomly sending data to some third party.
To be honest, we probably won't try and filter out spam traps. Our service is really meant to aid you in finding specific emails.
Given that, we will be implementing multiple verification and confidence checks for each email address. This is to help ensure a given email address is for a real person, with multiple legitimate web sources listing it, before you ever send a message.
This is true, but you may have to go through hundreds of search results in order to find the right email. Also, we use extensive pattern matching which would be very hard to mimic through a search query.
In a sense, our service just saves you a lot of time from finding and then verifying an email.
yes, I do spend a lot of time finding emails. as a startup founder I did much of my sales development over email / linkedin. I learned the quirks of several search engines - and made it work. Bing was the best. Google, ironically, the worst. This service is something I'd be interested in for sure.
Awesome. Our goal is to create a quality, enterprise level piece of software, which is affordable for everyone and actually makes sense to use given the price point and benefits.
If you ever want to talk about business/startups or anything, send me an email.
One spot where we do differ greatly though is our bulk email verification. We check for more risk factors and information about an email address compared to other companies.
This companies directory part of our site though is more just a service for easily finding the main contact information and emails for a company, without having to be a member of MailDB. Being a member is free, though! :)