bigdang

Itching to build something but have no idea what people want anymore. I feel like everything has been built.

What pain points do you wish someone could solve? What do you think there is an opportunity for?

My company has been a remote company from day 1. Each member is located in a different part of the world, and we’ve never met in real life, beyond just video calls, Slack, and email.

I told a colleague about my intention to fire an employee by sending them an email, and he was taken aback. He said you should always fire face to face, in a video call.

Do you think it is “inhumane” to fire a remote employee via email, or is that, as I am thinking, perfectly fine?

I lead a remote team and give each individual the flexibility to choose their own working hours and capacity—"your work speaks for itself", etc. We're working on a long-running software project with a deadline that's fast approaching.

I want to ask my team to work a little harder to meet our goal. However, I find it unethical to require people to work overtime, in return for pseudo-glory or empty promises of growth. I want to instead reward them with something tangible.

I'm considering a project bonus: if we ship by this date, everyone on the team gets $X USD.

However, I'm reading that money isn't always a good motivator. I'm wondering if anyone has experience with this, or any other strategies for getting teams to work harder than usual without encroaching on their right to live and work on their own terms.

I have a personal twitter account with around 2k followers. But I haven't tweeted in over a year. I really kind of want to. It looks like fun. And it's good for building an audience. But there's something about posting a pithy opinion in < 200 characters that feels smug to me. More than that, I guess, is the feeling of permanence with every opinion. There's not been a time that I haven't looked back on something I said or wrote x number years ago without thinking, wow, I was an absolute moron.

How can I overcome self-consciousness and just tweet without GAF? Or am I doing the right thing and the people who tweet 100x/day are actually the weird ones?

And what percent of your assets are in the stock market?

I'm located in the US and would like to file a trademark for my product name in China. However, this field is ripe for suckers to get taken advantage of, and doing a quick Google search reveals a number of very competitive marketing results, none of which seem authoritative.

Curious to hear if you have any direct experiences with this, and what pitfalls and common mistakes to avoid.