Matt Mazur

I love running into folks that remember AOL-Files:

To be honest, my Dad gets the nod for buying me a VB book that included VB5 back in 5th grade (1997). But, I’ll have to say that you (with that AOL-Files.com site) and this guy named “Oogle” inspired me with the “hacker” curiosity by about 6th grade. In this case it was all black-hat though =)

From a HacherNews post about how folks got started in programming.

Good times.

The following chart compares three recurring payment options I am considering for jMockups:

1) Paypal Website Payments Pro with Recurly or Spreedly

2) Authorize.net with a merchant account with Chargify

The calculations assume a recurring $8/mo payment from customers:

Click to view full size

You can download the Excel sheet here.

Recurly & Paypal Website Payments Pro Calculations:

• Paypal is $30/month plus $0.30 + 2.9%/transaction for sales of $0 to $3,000; $0.30 + 2.5% for sales of $3,000 to $10,000; and $0.30 + $2.2% for sales of $10,000+ (source). For example, if I have 100 customers who are paying $8/mo, my monthly Paypal expenses are $30 + ($0.30 + 0.029 * $8) * 100 = $83.20.
• Recurly is $29/month plus $0.20/transaction for up to 200 transactions/mo; $69 + $0.10/transaction for up to 500 transactions; and $199 + $0.09/transaction for up to 2,250 transactions/mo (source). (Note that if you’re not billing monthly, it becomes a bit more complicated because they also look at how many users you have in addition to the number of transactions — see their pricing page for more info.) So for 100 customers–assuming 1 transaction/mo/customer–Recurly expenses are $29 + $0.20 * 100 = $49.
• Total monthly expenses for Paypal Pro + Recurly = $132.20. Total monthly revenue for 100 customers at $8/customer = $800. Total profit = $800 – $132.20 = $667.80. In this example, 16.5% of the revenue would go towards payment processing.

Spreedly & Paypal Website Payments Pro:

• Speedly is a flat $19/mo + $0.20/transaction. For 100 customer, that works out to be $39/mo.
• For Paypal Website Payments Pro and Spreedly the total is $83.20 + $39, or $122.20, or 15.2% of the revenue.

Chargify with Authorize.net and a Merchant Account Calculations:

These numbers will vary a bit based on the rates you get on your merchant account. These calculations assume a $0.25/transaction fee, a $9.95/mo monthly statement fee, a 2.19% Vista/Mastercard discount rate, and a $25 monthly minimum.

• Authorize.net is $20 + $0.10/transaction (source). For 100 customers, the monthly cost would be $20 + $0.10 * 100 = $30.
• For the merchant account, the fees would total $9.95 + $0.25 * 100 + 2.19% * $8 * 100 = $52.47.
• Chargify is free for up to 50 customers; $49/mo for up to 500 customers, $249 for up to 5,000 customers and upward from there (source). For 100 customers, it would cost $49/mo.
• Total monthly expenses for Chargify, Authorize.net, and this merchant account is $49 + $30 + $52.47 = $131.47, or 16.43% of the revenue. About the same as Paypal + Recurly or Paypal + Spreedly.

Final Thoughts

For an $8/mo subscription, you’re going to be paying 20% or more of your revenue to the payment processors until you reach 50-70 customers. That’s amazing to me.

For this comparison, Chargify wins hands down when you don’t have many customers because their service is free up to 50 customers. The more customers you have, the closer the options become. Also, remember that you don’t have to use Recurly or Spreedly with just Paypal Website Payments Pro — that’s just what I’m looking it; do you own calculations before making a decision.

It’s also important to note that the difference isn’t that much when you work it out. For 2,000 customers, the difference is less than $150/mo, but when you consider that you’re making $16K/mo at that point, things like customer service, how easy their API is to use, and what features they offer become a lot more important than the price difference.

Finally, if you notice any errors in these calculations, please let me know.

Lean Designs, the HTML5 mockup tool I’ve been working on, is now jMockups due to trademark issues with “Lean Designs”. It’s coming along incredibly well and I expect to launch the alpha version in two to three weeks.

If you’re interested in helping test it when its ready, add your email to the mailing list on the jMockups.com homepage.

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Here’s my daily AccountableTo report:

What did you work on today?

* Improved the code that displays the toolbar when you select an element
– Only show common groups of attributes when multiple elements are selected. For example, a text box might have font and border attributes. A picture wouldn’t have font attributes, but it would have a border. When you select both, the toolbar now only shows the common attributes (border in this example).
– Also, if the element shares common values for a specific attribute (both border widths are 3px), the toolbar defaults to that value. If they are different, it doesn’t display a value for that attribute.
– Changed the default toolbar positioning for selected objects. This has been a bit tricky. For example, you can say by default to show the toolbar to the left of a selected element, but what if that causes it to extend beyond the right border of the screen? You say, OK, then show it to the left of the element. OK, but what if the element spans the width of the screen? You get the idea–the new algorithm works fairly well, but will likely change as I get feedback from actual users.
– You can now reposition the toolbar by dragging it around the screen. jMockups will also remember where you dropped it so when you select that element again, the toolbar will reappear in the same position. The position is also saved when you save the mockup so when you reload the page it remembers where it should appear.

We are human beings. We are thinkers, dreamers, explorers, artists, writers, engineers. We are anything we want to be – but only if we have an educational system that supports us rather than holds us down.

This speech, given by a high school valedictorian at her graduation, is worth reading.

Preceden is coming along well. After several different pricing and freemium model variations, I settled on a $19 premium account which lets you surpass the 5-event limit for a free account. That seems to have worked pretty well and the site is bringing it a few hundred dollars a month with little work on my part.

For the last six weeks I’ve been working on a new web app called Lean Designs. It started off as a tool for making decision trees, evolved into a web-based diagramming tool, and is now slated to become a pixel-perfect mockup tool.  It’s similar to Balsamiq, except it’s completely web-based and high fidelity, meaning it doesn’t looked sketched. The editor is built on top of HTML5′s canvas element, which makes it incredibly powerful in terms of what it can render. My short term goal is to build a tool that can quickly create website mockups that are indistinguishable from the actual sites. It’s not there yet, but it’s close.

(Lean Designs, unfortunately, is a temporary name and will not be what the final product is called. I found out this weekend that the name LEANdesign is trademarked by a company that produces related software with the same name. New name is TBD.)

Also of note is that for the past two months I’ve been using a site called AccountableTo, which is currently in private beta. The site, which is being built by a Philadelphia based web developer named Mike Nicholaides, helps you stay focused by encouraging you to write a daily log of what you’ve done that day, which other members of your group can comment on (Mike and Chris Conley in my case). AccountableTo asks two simple questions: What did you do today? and What’s the next step?. It’s that second question which is the most valuable because it forces you to think about what you’re going and what you need to do to get there. I’ve found it incredibly useful in helping me stay productive day after day.

Here’s one of my updates from three weeks ago:

What did you do today?

Background work:
* Arbitrary HTML color input
* Drop down color palette (thanks Yahoo)
* Select from previously used colors
* Set background color to none
* Ability to change the canvas background color

What’s the next step?

Need to spend a few hours cleaning up the code, which has gotten a bit unwieldy.

Also, I’m considering focusing on creating high-fidelity website mockups (ie, forget about diagramming). It’s tricky because on one hand, adding the diagramming tools would not be very hard, but, it’s easier to market as a “high fidelity mockup tool” than as a “web based diagramming tool that can also do mockups”–thoughts? A natural step once I had this in place would be for it to generate quality HTML/CSS from the mockups (but that would probably be a few months down the road).

That second part — algorithmically exporting to HTML — is going to be fun, though it’s something a lot of developers want and will pay for if done well. Think of it as a web-based Dreamweaver that doesn’t suck. Imagine rendering all the PSD 2 HTML sites obsolete. That’s the long term goal.

I’m also preparing to move to Boston in a few weeks, so my progress of late has been slower than normal. I’m going to wait until I get settled there to launch the mockup tool, so it’ll probably be sometime around October.

Slowly by surely…

Andrew: I actually went to the way back machine to see what you were up to before you did this, to see who you were. And you had your resume up and I looked at it and it’s pretty freaking impressive. In addition to three degrees from MIT which a lot of us have seen in news stories about you and the one from Harvard, you worked at Oracle. You worked at a venture capital firm. You were on a path to be one of these rich people of Silicon Valley. You’re not going to be that now, right? Not with this.

Sal: Unless they make a movie about the Khan Academy. Yeah, you know, it’s funny. When I was working at a hedge fund, the six years after business school, I was the senior analyst at a hedge fund, and it was doing well. And then, my manager retired. He encouraged me to start my own fund. So, I was on that track to kind of be a hedge fund manager and all of that. But, the whole time I kind of rationalized that the only reason that I’m doing this is because I want to, one day, start a school.  In my mind, I didn’t want to start a school, write grants and go to the Department of Education and get a charter and all of that. I felt the constraints. I just want to become really rich and just do it on my own terms. So, that was my rationalization for just trying to generate alpha day and night.

From Andrew Warner’s Mixergy interview with Salman “Sal” Khan, who has created more than 1,500 free educational videos on YouTube, which you can check out here.

Adrian Lamo, the hacker who turned in Bradley Manning, a 22 year old Army Specialist who submitted classified documents to Wikileaks, used to be heavily involved in the AOL hacking scene many years ago.

Here’s his AOL-Files.com profile when he went by the name Magus:

Inverview taken on: 1/12/01

What is your primary handle? I’ve gone by Magus since I first started using online services – at the time, bulletin board systems – in the early 90′s.
What are your current AIM screen names? Line Trace
What is your e-mail address? adrian@adrian.org
Do you have a web site? inside-aol.com, terrorists.net, securid.org
What is your real name? Adrian Lamo. . if you want to be technical, its the Doctor Reverend Adrian A. Lamo, Ph.D . . Doctor of Divinity and minister through the Universal Life Church, the grandma of all diploma mills everywhere. . .i don’t take those seriously, and don’t expect anyone else to, but i put them on my resume and my business cards to make a point of my disdain for the certification and educational process.
Where do you live? i move around alot .. i like to travel, and have lived on both coasts, and spent a couple years in south america. . i’m in transit right now. . but am based out of San Francisco.
How old are you? 19
What are your hobbies? i like to break and explore. breaking things is integral to the progression of technology. . people accuse me of being directionless, but i think its important to drop dynamite into the pond sometimes, to see what floats up. in my copious free time, i like to explore abandoned buildings and sewer systems, as well as exploring occupied buildings – its amazing how many security guards will escort you up to the roof of a skyscraper if you only ask, or won’t even stop you if you look like you know where you’re going. . urban exploration is definitely a big passtime. one of the reasons i like to travel, too., i used to be involved in local activism and whatnot. . worked with the city government, stuff like that. . i’m massively disinterested in politics now though.
How would you describe your physical appearance? scrawny geek ; )
What do you hope to do as a profession? same as i do now. . short term, interesting contracts for worthwhile places. i’ve been working since i was 16, and have run through a pretty big variety of jobs and contracts. . most of them designed to be short term .. i did a 3 month security audit for a fortune 500 company once, that was probably the most interesting. . but i’ve worked for everything from nonprofits to law firms to private investigation firms. . i set up a Netzero account for one of kevin mitnick’s former attorneys at one of them, of all the ironic things. . thats the sort of thing i want to keep doing. i don’t want to be stuck behind the same desk all my life, working at the same place until i have too much invested in what i’m doing to be able to do anything to risk it.
How long have you been on AOL? used the service briefly when i was younger, when it was known as Quantum Link, and i was playing around with my commodore 64. . but i didn’t start to really use it til the mid-90′s. . i used AOL 1.6 for DOS/GeoWorks for the longest time, and actively resisted going over to the Windows version until they started disabling features one by one. .they eventually sunsetted it altogether in June of 1999. So. .something like 7 or 8 years now.
How much time do you think you spend online each day? it varies. . .depending on where i am and what i’m doing. sometimes, if i’m interested in something, i’ll spend days online nonstop. . sometimes i’ll spend days without touching a computer. on a really average day, anywhere between 4 and 12 hours ;x
What programming languages are you familiar with? i don’t really program. the only languages i’ve worked with are x86 assembler and OPL for the EPOC16 palmtop OS.
What do you spend most of your time online doing? breaking and exploring -=)
Who are your good friends online? They know who they are.

Check out this article, which is a pretty in-depth analysis of my poker botting activities based on what I’ve written here, my 2+2 posts, HackerNews comments, and more.

Quote:

• Matt played HU SNGs on pokerstars part-time in 2006 and 2007. He seemed to have a fair success. He kept a blog in 2006 which is now archived on his mattmazur.com website. He was playing the 50s and 100s and taking looks at the 200 level, playing under the pokerstars name ‘kaon’. The blog stops in December, 2006. He states in the introduction that this is because he had started working on his poker bot project.
• Matt posted on 2+2 under the name nichomacheo. You can see his profile and posts on the archive server and on the current server. He is still posting strategy up until late 2008.
• He started posting his blog again in July 2007, a new domain. It was to log his return to HU SNGs playing on FTP. This was half way through his time running a pokerbot on stars (from screenshots, the the bot appears to have Full Tilt support). The blog only lasted 4 posts.

This was written by a professional poker player who goes by the name Hood who has “never written a bot … and advocate the strongest punishments for those who do“

I received the following AIM message a little while ago:

Curious, I responded back to Qtpiegirl8394. Here’s the transcript:

Qtpiegirl8394: let me know when you have your username

I thought this was pretty well done for several reasons:

• Most of the AIM spam I get is a simple “Hey click here to chat with hot girlz”, which is easy to identify as spam. With this, I got an IM from an official-sounding screenname (TMorganDirector), which asked me to contact another screenname due to technical difficulties.  Had it not been for the disparity in screennames (TMorganDirector vs Qtpiegirl8394), it would have been hard to tell this even was spam.
• The bot, which asks me whether I am a bot, seemed to keep track of where we were in the conversation. It starts out with a hello, who is this, and little by little leads me towards the webcam site. Most of the responses are generic enough that they work regardless of what I am actually saying. For example, it said “who is this again?” I said “you sent me an IM” and it said “oh yeah!”, but it probably would have said “oh yeah!” regardless of what I actually said because it knew it had just asked me that question.
• It also analyzed what I was saying because when I asked “are you real?” it responded “i’m as real as they come 100% live in the flesh”. Pretty good.
• The URL that it gave me contains her screen name (good), but then directs me to a generic looking webcam site (you can replace her name in the URL and it still redirects to the same page). They’d probably do a lot better linking me to something that looks like a profile page that contains a picture of a beautiful woman, her screen name (taken from the URL), and a big green “Chat now!” button at the top of the page. They could even embed a video with a girl saying “Hello? Can you hear me?” which would fool a lot of people.
• Another complaint is that it kept responding back to me even when I wasn’t saying anything (such as the “what? I’m definitely real I hate fakes” at the beginning). The whole “i’m sorry i get forgetful who is this again?” is a big red flag too since she allegedly just IM’d me–I wonder why the programmer included that.

Not bad though.

I bet the conversation rates on this method blow the direct-spam rates out of the water. They could do a lot better still with some calculating A/B tests.

I received the following email last week:

I am a fellow hacker-news reader, and just wanted to share with you this weekend project i did a few weeks back: hntrends.timepurge.com

This is basically a javascript (Raphaeljs) port of the flash frontend you have at hntrends.com.This was done as a personal learning exercise for Raphaeljs JavaScript library. There is a little python code at hntrends.timepurge.com/fetchdata that fetches your json data (Not set as a cron job. Just to create local snapshot manually).

Hope you like it.

My best wishes to you for the success of Preceden.
-Fenin.

With his permission, I’m posting it here for you all to check out. View it at hntrends.timepurge.com. To view the original version, visit hntrends.com.

It’s amazing how closely it resembles the original version. When I first loaded it I immediately right clicked the graph to ensure that I was actually looking at JavaScript and not Flash. I was showing off his version last night to a few folks at a Philadelphia Hackathon meetup and actually mixed up my site with his a few times because they look so similar.

A side by side comparison (click to view full image):

(With libraries like RaphaelJS and the advent of HTML5, you’ve got to wonder what the state of Flash is going to be in a few years. Outlook doesn’t look so good.)

Fenin, well done sir.

Comments on HackerNews here.