It's also a huge win if you need multiple people to sign a document.

Without a tool like HelloSign you need to email the document to each person one by one to get everyone to sign on the same "paper". It's a mess and takes up a lot of time and coordination.

With HelloSign (and other similar tools), you can just send out an email with a link to everyone at once. They can sign the document asynchronously in whichever order they want, and when everyone has done that, you get a notification.

PrompterAI | Helsinki, Finland (Onsite) | Backend engineer, Product designer | https://prompter.ai

We're a team of 3 (technical) founders and now hiring the first people to join us. The company is in a very early stage so you get to have a real impact and build things from the ground-up. That being said, we do have the product up and running with a bunch of active users providing us constant feedback, as well as funding to pay reasonable salaries.

At PrompterAI we build a virtual assistant for people working in sales and account management. The information they need to keep up with is scattered around tons of different tools: LinkedIn, news, email, Slack, CRM, support ticketing system, intranet etc. Based on users' calendar, who they are meeting with and what the meetings are about, we filter and aggregate relevant information from all those tools and compile it into a daily briefing package. It's kind of like a virtual executive assistant that helps people to keep up with everything and making sure no balls get dropped.

If you're interested, drop me a line at lauri (at) prompter.ai, happy to chat more :)

Then again, if a "video view" is defined as "watched over 3 seconds (50% of the video visible in the screen, IIRC)", then it sort of makes sense that "Average Duration of Video Viewed" doesn't include non-views.

For sure Facebook should attempt to name their metrics as descriptively as possible, but also advertisers should make sure they understand how different conversions are measured, what's included and what's not. Another example would be "Clicks" metric, which included all engagement (i.e. likes, shares etc), instead of just "Link clicks".

I thought about this as well, and concluded that FB must be reporting 'video views' as any time a video starts autoplaying (or something similar). In this way I could see the total estimated viewing time getting significantly overestimated.

It doesn't seem all that unreasonable, yeah. If a user scrolls right past a video, should that really count towards the average?

A user below summarized the issue the way I understand it:

> what happens is that views under 3 seconds aren't counted towards the average. So if you have 999 999 views of <1 second each and 1 view of 3 seconds, the reported average is 3 seconds / 1 view = average view time of 3 seconds, while the true average is something like 500 000 seconds / 1 000 000 views.

This is massive fraud, especially if you're shouting from the rooftops "Look at how much more attention people are paying to your videos in our platform!".

Surprised that the article doesn't mention Website Custom Audiences (WCA in short), which for many startups might be much easier to collect compared to email addresses.

With WCAs you can build audiences based on people who visited your site (or say, a specific URL like a blog post or a thank-you page). You can then use these both for retargeting (e.g. someone visited your site but didn't sign up yet), or build lookalike audiences out of website visitors and/or signups. Imagine that someone read an amazing blog post describing some key features or use cases of your product? Why not create a WCA and then craft a creative addressing that specific audience segment.

Another benefit of WCAs and lookalikes based on those is, that they're updated automatically, whereas for email-based custom audiences you'll either have to manually upload new signups to FB, or set up some custom automation to do that for you.

Smartly.io - Helsinki, Finland

At Smartly.io we build tools for largest European eCommerce-sites and Ad Agencies to automate and optimize their Facebook advertising. We're about 18 months old, currently 24 (8 devs) people strong and growing fast. We have actual paying customers (see our frontpage), have raised funding from top investors in Finland like Lifeline Ventures (e.g. Supercell) and our team is a bunch of experienced startup veterans (founders of Startup Sauna, worked previously in SF etc.).

We're looking for full stack developers. There's plenty of interesting challenges to tackle, ranging from designing and building UI to handling large amounts of data and designing models for automatically optimizing bid levels.

Interested?

http://smartly-fasttrack-2.herokuapp.com/

Thanks! :)

As many have asked, at least for now there's no real spam protection. Asking you to confirm email for every email/referer pair prevents me from adding your email to zillion sites (although confirmations could also get annoying at that point :) and spamming, but of course that doesn't still prevent bots from filling out your form.

I think in a way it's a tradeoff between ease of use, both for you and the visitor. Alternatively we could do heavier registration process and/or let you configure some running on our server, but then setting things up wouldn't be as easy and you might as well just run your own backend. For the visitors forms provide an easy (than, say just email) way to reach out. I guess the question is, do you prefer false positives (spam) or false negatives (folks not reaching out) :)

Regarding having clear text emails in the source, I'd argue (based on nothing but anecdotes) it doesn't matter, much. As throwawaymsft said elsewhere, bots are pretty good at figuring out what "you (at) email (dot) com" means, so in most cases you'd anyway be getting much spam. We considered a token-based approach instead, but decided to go all-in for simplicity. Also, since we're using forms anyway, they're more likely source of spam than some bot crawling just for addresses.

great idea.

I think you can give the user the option to specify the email hash (MD5 maybe) instead of clear text email.

so either:

<form action="//api.formspree.com/user@example.com">

OR

<form action="//api.formspree.com/b58996c504c5638798eb6b511e6f49af">

You can provide the user a small tool to generate the email hash.

Good luck

Gravatar uses MD5(email) as an identifier, so using that would potentially identify the recipient quite easily.

The recipient can be identified by email or md5(email).

But it's good enough that an auto scraper or spam bot will find it easily.

But then how can they know where to send the email to?

They have the email (confirmed email) in their DB. they can easily calculate the hash on the fly.

I'd use base64 instead of a MD5 hash, but I'm not a huge fan of security by obscurity.

This might also work:

    <form action="//api.formspree.com/user.smith/gmail.com">

Truthfully, base64 is probably better at deterring email harvesters.

Oops, good catch, thanks! Hadn't thought of this.

Apparently the problem is just sending a request https->http. https->https should work fine. Adding SSL asap.

EDIT: now you can also use https://api.formspree.com/your@email.com

The rules are more complex. I'd say just do away with the refer(r)er. http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/47405/how-can-...

Maybe later when you have a real problem, fix it then. Let's cross bridges when we come to the river, that way we'll all have much simpler code!

(Brace dev here)

Definitely not intended :) The modal should disappear once you make your first change to the files in Dropbox. If this doesn't work, please shoot me an email lauri@brace.io.

Sorry for the confusion.

(Brace dev here)

Sorry for the inconvenience. I'll look into this. Can you shoot me an email with your site's name? lauri@brace.io

Thanks!

Haha, this is awesome :)

We built something similar last weekend in Node Knockout: http://startuplife.io. Not nearly as polished or complete as Hipster CEO, but maybe nice for Android users :)

Looks nice, buddy. Well done!