Devan Sabaratnam
@dsabar
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Creator & co-founder of @HRPartner. Serial developer of a plethora of web & mobile apps. Vintage guitar player. Former commercial pilot. EiR at @Catalysr.
Darwin, Australia
Joined April 2008
My talented wife painted this portrait of our son @jordanravimusic to celebrate him releasing his new single “February 14th”. Enjoy the time lapse and the song…
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I've been off all social media for a few months while dealing with a very heavy event in my personal life. I myself am fine, but today marks a major milestone for a loved one, and I feel the need for some positive thoughts to get me through the waiting and not knowing. .
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In 35+ years of coding - Every single time I built an add on with another vendor as the underlying platform, it was killed by the vendor either changing their offering or going out of business. Every. Single. Time. Integrations are fine, but build something standalone.
AI startups building on GPT realizing that new GPT basically replaces their product offering.
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The above was VERY close to a conversation I had with an existing customer a few years ago. Remember founders - The only way a customer acknowledges the value in what you build is if they are willing to dip into their wallets and pay you for it.
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Customer: We absolutely need you to build feature 'x'.Me: Is it important to you then?.Cust.: Yes, absolutely critical for us.Me: Ok, It will cost you an extra $50/mo to cover our costs for 3rd party services. Cust.: What? NO, not paying that!!!.Me: So, NOT that important then. .
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One important thing I have learned while building a startup:. People can impress you by being 'book smart' when it comes to marketing, design and programming. But the people who get results are the ones who are 'street smart' and have proven real world experience in the above.
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I noted NO URL parameters were passed to the web link, so they must be using session cookies or some other way of ascertaining how people came to their page and identifying the visitor?!? Is this genius or evil? I cannot decide. .
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What kind of marketing sorcery is this? I saw this post from Twitter friend @michaelaubry this morning and clicked on the ClipSpark web link, and noticed their landing page had Michael's handle populated AND showed MY other Twitter friends who had already signed up!
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Having another one of those days where I am looking at code in my app that I wrote 2 years ago (according to Git logs), but I have absolutely NO recollection of ever having written it, nor do I have any idea what it does or how it does it. #coderlife.
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My first meeting for today is scheduled for 8pm tonight, so I decided to have an impromptu meeting with life at this particular boardroom during the day… Looks like everyone else was too busy to attend!
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As a startup, MRR/ARR etc. are great, but one of the greatest feelings of accomplishment for me this month was seeing our first Customer Success hire 4 years ago grow into a fantastic Product Manager with us now. It's quite wonderful to see someone's career progress like this!.
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It's 2023, and it still takes a minimum of 4 mouse clicks across two browser tabs to print a PDF attachment within GMail. 🙄 . (6 clicks if you count closing down the extra tab and the PDF preview pane). .
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It's rare that AI tools make me go "Wow!", but we've been using @tldview for our Zoom product meetings, and the email summary it generates within *seconds* of the meeting finishing has always blown our socks off, and been incredibly useful for the rest of the team.
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. We ensured that we provided proper validation of data going in, then we built an export from our app so they could take that data back into Excel/Sheets etc. and slice & dice to their hearts content. That was part of our journey towards product/market fit!.
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. The problem was that while spreadsheets are great at filtering and pivoting data to provide reports, they are awful at validating clean & consistent data entry. So we changed our messaging, and our app. (cont'd).
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A negative customer interaction on Friday left me feeling down, but then I woke up to this flood of Stripe notifications in my Inbox this morning and felt grateful for how far we've come. I remember only getting one or two of these per month in the early days!
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Same reason I like meeting vendors / colleagues / customers in cafes or restaurants. I get to see if they thank the wait staff as an indicator of whether I will spend the energy to have long term dealings with them. .
The one interview question we should be asking:. Do you say "thank you" when someone holds a door for you?. Why?. I don't want to work with anyone who doesn't.
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