Shrewple

Posted by stevegraham

Hiring Without Agencies. Fight Fire With Fire.

Today I read via Hacker News the experiences of Tobin Harris from Engine Room Apps during their effort to recruit an iOS developer without using recruitment consultants. 

Tobin found that after paying £200 to post a job advert on CWJobs, his advert was almost instantly cloned by recruitment consultants with Engine Room’s details stripped out. Soon after he became inundated with calls from agencies offering to send résumés of candidates that replied to the cloned advertisement for up to £7,000. Outrageously predatory tactics.

Anyone with “agent” in their job title is probably bottom feeding scum that would sell their own grandmother for a few coins, it’s a rule of thumb that has never let me down in life. As a Ruby contractor, I have had a lot experience with recruitment agents over the years and I can count on one hand those that have earned my trust. Don’t get me wrong a good agent is worth working with, someone like Rhys Evans for example, who knows, and is known by literally every quality Ruby developer in the UK, will help you find someone you probably couldn’t find on your own. 

Anyway, faced with attempted extortion, I would have accepted the unsolicited résumés, presumably supplied with contact details stripped out (natch), and then used Google or LinkedIn to find them myself, and cut out the agent altogether. When the inevitable threatening phone call from the agent came, it would probably go something like:

Me: Oh hey bro. How’s it going?
Beelzebub: PAAAAAAYY MEEEE OR I’LL SUE YOU INTO OBLIVION!
Me: Oh it’s too bad you feel that way. Anyway, I would really appreciate it if you would stop these idle threats and never call again.
Beelzebub: SEE YOU IN COURT!
Me:  Sure. Good luck proving any of this beyond the standard of reasonable doubt required in court. FYI, the job advert that you cloned is a copyrighted work. Unless you desist immediately I’m going to instruct my solicitor to litigate against you for damages, which will include, and definitely will not be limited to the fee you’re trying to extort from me and all costs I incur defending myself. Thanks.

It will end there and then, and they won’t waste time or money trying to rip you off in future either.

Shrewple is software for professionals who can deliver their services over the telephone.

Have your own toll free telephone number your clients call and their credit card will be automatically billed for your time at the end of the call.

Shrewple will launch as soon as we have secured a merchant account. To be notified when Shrewple launches, please leave us your email.

Posted by stevegraham

The (Real) Hot Girl Effect and Networking

Sir D.G blogged about how once women pass a certain threshold of sexual attractiveness, the amount of men hitting on them drop off exponentially. The rationale being the perceived attractiveness cause the majority of men to believe that they’re out of their league. As a corollary D.G extrapolates the same phenomenon afflicts corporate titans, i.e. those so far up the food chain that no one attempts to network with them.

As interesting as his theory is, I have to say in my experience it’s a non-sequitur. D.G. uses the example of Goldman Sachs CFO apparently being a warm and friendly chap, welcoming all comers with open arms, and many people missing out on making a new poweful friend because of this. Having recently attended the TechHub Christmas party, also attended by super angel Dave McClure, I have seen that at least in tech, people aren’t always so coy in approaching heavy hitters.

I was tipped off that Dave was going to attend the party earlier on in the day, and I figured that given I’m building a business around Twilio, and Dave’s intention to invest in Twilio based companies, it would make sense for us to have a brief chat. However, when I got there I could not see him for the baying mob of nerds that pitched and encircled him. I knew from Twitter that in the two days preceding this event Dave had been on a long-haul flight to Paris for Le Web, and then jumped on a train over to London for this party and presumably other things. After witnessing the furore, I decided to abstain from introducing myself and discussing Shrewple, I didn’t want to be that guy or ostensibly every guy in the damn room. I felt the non-stop pitches and sweaty palms thrust forth to be a little obnoxious, and it was no doubt exacerbated by the exhaustion that follows long haul travel. After checking Twitter, I felt vindicated, “Don’t pitch me bro” McClure tweeted from the event.

If you really want something, e.g. to discuss your idea with Dave McClure, be smart about it. A much better outcome is likely if you obtain an introduction through a mutual connection, in mellower surroundings. Brute forcing the dude at a party is not the only option!

The Hot Girl Effect For Reals

However, I do believe that there is a so-called “Hot Girl Effect” and that there is a tremendous amount of good will in being associated with very attractive women. The effect is off of the charts when they are smart and informed. I know that may sound incredibly sexist, but sorry my guy, I’m afraid that’s how the world is.

I was introduced to the ”Hot Girl Effect” by a girl I dated once. This girl is an absolute knockout, and very smart too. One time she took me to this random event, and people that I might have wanted to speak with were actively networking me. Once she started talking about Ruby on Rails, they were eating out of my hand. That one event yielded relationships that are still in my repertoire today, and the amount of effort I expended was effectively nil.

My mind was blown, but when you think about it it makes perfect sense. No matter how successful a man might be, no matter how much wealth he accumulates, power over women is the great equaliser and this eludes many men of great wealth, power, and influence. I saw this truth play out in their eyes “This woman is beautiful… HOLY SHIT SHE IS TALKING ABOUT RUBY ON RAILS. OH MY GOD, THIS IS SUCH A NOVELTY TO ME! WHO IS THIS GUY?! WHAT’S HIS SECRET?!”

People might say “Oh, you can never relate to the *insert impressive title* of *insert Fortune 500 company*. You simply cannot afford to do the things he enjoys, how could you possibly relate?” Well yes I can my guy, because everyone can relate to a beautiful woman.

If you are fortunate enough to have a smart, attractive partner, deploy the advantage. She will be down for it, because she wants you to win, she loves you.

“Networking” Is Odious

I absolutely detest networking events, the activity of networking, and the actual term networking itself. At the risk of sounding like a misanthrope, a lot of people at these events are self obsessed to the extreme. Interactions with them usually go as follows:

Dude: “Hey! What’s your name?”
Me: “Hey, Nice to meet you! I’m Stevie…”
Dude: “Hi Stevie, I’m Bob, what do you do?”
Me: “Wel…” *cut off mid sentence*
Dude: “Gee that’s swell. I’m the founder of Foogle, we’re like the X of Y!

The only thing this guy is is the ass of doucheland. I think it’s pretty clear why “networking” is anathema to me, it has a connotation of people purely using others. That’s not the way I roll. Even if you are incredibly useful to me, if we don’t have a good relationship, we’re probably not going to be very useful to each other in reality. So if you must approach McClure et al at one of these events, and you don’t have a knockout lady friend at your disposal, how about you actually try to connect as a human being with common interests first? Like the guy who asked Paul Graham questions about his Lisp dialect Arc after he spoke at an Imperial College Entrepreneur Society event. PG went to the pub, had a beer with him after the gig, and even suggested that he stay in touch and apply for Y Combinator.

It amazing how far not being an obnoxious asshole will get you.

S

Shrewple is software for professionals who can deliver their services over the telephone.

Have your own toll free telephone number your clients call and their credit card will be automatically billed for your time at the end of the call.

To be notified when Shrewple launches, please leave us your email.

Posted by stevegraham

Twilio.rb: The Ruby way to interact with the Twilio API

If you haven’t heard of Twilio, they’re a cool startup in San Francisco that are revolutionising the VOIP game. In simple terms, they offer scalable VOIP platform, with pay as you go pricing, all exposed via a HTTP REST API and competitively priced. 

Shrewple itself uses Twilio for all of its telephony needs. I had the idea for Shrewple about four or five years ago when I first started playing with Asterisk the open source PBX. When Twilio appeared and abstracted away all the underlying complexity of VOIP behind an API implemented using the lingua franca of the internet, I decided the time was right to jump in.

There are already a handful of Twilio Ruby libraries so why another? Well, none of them support the entire API, have clean Rails integration, excellent test coverage (an absolute must for any code I use), and provide satisfactory abstraction. Personally I need all these things, so I wrote one myself.

Consider the following, this is how one makes a call using the Twilio library that has been adopted as de facto:

This isn’t cool. It isn’t DRY, and it completely ignores every principle of OOP.

This is how you do the same with Twilio.rb. First configure the library once with your account credentials, e.g. in an application initializer:

Then to make a call it’s just this:

Another advantage of this is that it returns a Ruby object that is effectively just a different representation of that resource, so it has its own methods. So to hangup the above call:

Or to redirect it to another TwiML document immediately:

Twilio.rb also has great Rails 3 integration. If Rails 3 is being used where Twilio.rb is required, it extends it by adding :voice as another mime type your application can respond to. You can have a controller that looks like this:

Your app will also now respond to the URL http://example.com/foo.voice

It also registers an ActionView template handler for TwiML views. In this case the view file `foo.voice`. The views are as simple as this:

So simple! The whole API is supported, the README is quite comprehensive. See the Github repo for more details.

Twilio.rb is a beta release, to install use the `—pre` flag with Rubygems and report any bugs to me!

$ gem install twilio-rb --pre

Shrewple is software for professionals who can deliver their services over the telephone. Have your own toll free telephone number that your clients call and their credit card will be automatically billed for the time they speak with you.

To be notified when Shrewple launches, please visit http://www.shrewple.com/ and leave us your email.

Hope you find Twilio.rb useful, Thanks!

Posted by stevegraham

Beta!

The time is almost here.

Send an email to me if you’re down!

stevie <—at—> shrewple <—dot—> com

Posted by stevegraham

Rack It Up

After I applied to Y Combinator I thought to myself, when doing a startup it’s probably best to get something up online ASAP, hence this blog. After I registered the domain name I realised that shrewple.com was a GoDaddy holding page, horrible!

I quickly went to Tumblr, started a new blog, set up the subdomain CNAME entries, and threw together a custom theme in couple hours. Still, the A record pointed at a GoDaddy holding page. I thought about quickly provisioning a box and redirecting traffic to the blog with rewrite rules, but I decided that was wasteful. Instead I pushed a one line Rack application to Heroku, and pointed my DNS at that, which doesn’t cost a dime.

With so many efficiently priced web services available, the climate is so good right now for web entrepreneurs. The only limit is one’s own creativity.

More on that later. :)

S

Posted by stevegraham

What is Shrewple?

Hi, my name is Stevie Graham. I’m an entrepreneur based in London, England and I would like to tell you about Shrewple.

Many internet bootstrapped entrepreneurs have trouble monetizing the freemium business model satisfactorily. Also the very nature of a bootstrapped entrepreneur means that his resources are constrained, and can easily become dominated by support requests from customers. Given how constrained a resource time is, especially in a bootstrapped environment, I think it’s fair that one should expect a return at least commensurate with any time expended, whether that time is spent implementing new features in a web application, acquiring new customers, or dealing support requests, there should be a return.

In the case of customers that occupy the ‘free’ segment of freemium, i.e. most of them, how does one provide good customer service through support but also make business sense to do so?

One answer is to offer premium support.

Shrewple offers a toll free number that is routed to a number of your choosing. When your customers calls, they are greeted in your company name and prompted to enter their credit card details, the call is then connected to you and your customer is billed for the duration of the call.

You set the cost of the call, and you set what times you wish to make yourself available for calls. It’s all up to you!

Bookmark this blog for updates, Shrewple will be available real soon.

Best

Stevie Graham

Founder

Shrewple