I have a background in Machine Learning and it is my belief that the mind does use branch prediction. Take for example a scenario where you are climbing down a stair in your house. Your brain already predicts that you are about to land on the next step. Now if the step height was lowered than the usual, the prediction fails and you immediately focus back on the climbing-down process to see what has happened and prosecute whatever fall-back actions are needed to minimize disruption.
Nitpick: having a background in machine learning is only slightly relevant to belief on what the mind does. It's having a background in neuroscience that's important.
I think this is a little more tricker. When customers make buying decisions, there is "Nest, owned by Alphabet and not likely to be shut because they are broke" benefit that they get. When they fail to meet those expectations, it should and will certainly reflect on the trust for Alphabet. Mainly because of your argument: Alphabet has little control over the companies and one should stop expecting good treatment and product lifecycle just because it is under Alphabet umbrella.
We have been working on http://growthzilla.com - a data driven growth solution for salons for a little more than a year now. We have paying customers since launch and have zero cancellations. Our customers love the product for 3 reasons (1) ease of use (2) effectiveness in driving growth and (3) customer service
The problem: we are growing slower than we would want. Is there anything you'd like to suggest?
We started with selling to people in our network. Now we have some online ad campaigns, referral and just went to a trade show. We currently have 50 customers. Added 10 last month.
If you're growing 25% / month, you're not doing too badly.
How well are online ads and referral working? How does the referral program work?
It sounds like there are a bunch of channels you haven't tried yet. Here are a few ideas.
Standard channels:
1) Sales. Yes, you call up the all the salons and ask them if they need Growthzilla. This is still the way most things are sold to local businesses like salons. You can try email, phone, even in person.
2) Content marketing. My guess is that there are a lot of salons, and not a whole lot people writing about how to run them. Maybe you can become the go-to place not just for software, but for the knowledge salon owners need to run their business well.
3) Improve your website. It looks like there's no way to just try the software, and there isn't much info about it on the site. Having something other than "request demo" may improve conversions.
Wackier ideas:
1) There are lots of software options for salons that do something similar. It's not clear from your site what makes you unique. What is it? If there's nothing truly special, maybe you need to change the product.
2) Channel partnerships. Who are the big companies selling products to hair salons? Could you get them to resell Growthzilla and split the revenue?
3) Affiliate sales. Are there affiliate sales people who sell other products to salons (scissors, hair product, etc)? If so, can you have them sell Growthzilla too?
4) Organize free conferences / meetups for salon owners to learn about how they can tech-enable their business.
I'd second the website makeover. It doesn't have to be super sexy, but right now it looks like it's from the late 90's, early 2000's(at least on desktop).
On Desktop:
That black bar at top is bulkier than it needs to be. You can try moving 'the merrier way' from under 'Growthzilla' to the right of it instead. This would allow you to slip it down a bit. There's also no branding. You don't need to hire a marketing company or anything to do this, just try to get a common theme going because right now your colors are all over the place. The slider is moving a little too fast. If you extended the time by about 15-20% I think that's be great for slower readers like myself. The initial call to action under the slider is good. Like snowmaker said, definitely explain more about your product and what sets it apart. Again with the colors, your icons next to your features are purple/blue and some other text is too, but then you have orange buttons and your logo is orange and yellow. I would probably just stick to orange/yellow since they're in your logo and you can couple this with various shades of gray. The purple/blue completely clashes with the orange/yellow. For the testimonials, your slider isn't centered.
On Mobile:
Everything looks much better on mobile than on the desktop. I see nothing you really need to change here, other than the branding/theme/colors. If you're using Bootstrap, it's really easy to use your current logo for mobile and a more horizontal logo on desktop using by using the hide/visible classes(.visible-md-block, hidden-md).
I really hope that the next generation of companies founded and run by people who grew up being on the other side will refrain from making this kind of decisions.
If I'm building a service that needs an account system with 2FA, detection of automated attacks, and some decent amount of internal security, I am surely not going to build it myself. It is just like rolling my own crypto in all the wrong ways.
There are a couple of providers that will do this for me, for free: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and GitHub come to mind. Each has some tradeoffs of public perception, losing audience members who refuse to have an X account, etc., but it's mostly a tossup. For a technical service like this I might have gone with GitHub, but if they're owned by Google, having only Google logins seems like the right choice. (Among other things, you already have a Google account in a sense when using Firebase, it's just run by a separate team at Google.)
Sandstorm, a project that encourages you to self-host all your web services, came to the same conclusion:
There are numerous existing authentication and authorisation layers/tools available that already support things like rate limiting, locking on X failed attempts, etc.
There are also numerous existing open source TOTP/HOTP 2FA systems.
Yes, you will likely need to do a little work to make things work together - but you are a software developer.
Using these existing systems is not like rolling your own crypto, it's like building your app on top of an open source crypto library.
I don't have an existing Google account and I don't want to sign up for Gmail, Google+, or any other Google services. What should I do?
It is easy to create a Google account for any existing email address without tying it to any Google services. It will only be used for identification and login. You can sign up for this "slimmed down" Google account here. You can also create this type of Google account via the existing migration flow on firebase.com.
Why should a company use a disparate number of login systems for their various products? Having a login system for each and every product is a huge liability, as you then have to either roll out code amongst several different systems, or you have to continuously audit several different codebases, all of which function in the same exact way.
Shame less plug: Dear tea lovers on HN, I am from Nepal - home to some of the best organic tea [1] grown in the foothills of Himalayas. I have been thinking about starting Candy Japan [2] like subscription service but for Nepali tea. Would you be interested? Please e-mail me if you would like to help me start this. sbashyal@gmail.com
I have already received a few emails showing interest and I am committed to make this happen. Send me an e-mail today showing interest and I will ship an assorted pack of premium Nepali tea for free for the first month (early September).
Glad to hear! The question still remains why they didn't want your business in the first place and why are they changing their decision now. As a start up founder using Stripe, I would like to know.
