Some years ago I started to have some issues with my wrist from writing too much (and playing) on the computer. It was an early symptom of RSI and I wanted to tackle the problem as early as possible. I solved some issues by moving my gaming sessions on consoles, but I still needed to sort out writing.

Best Keyboard to Avoid RSI:
Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard

While I was searching for a good external keyboard for my laptop (to use while at home, at least), I found this article from Marco Arment. He was really happy with his Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic keyboard, so I had to try it.

My experience with Microsoft Sculpt keyboard

4-5 years later, I just bought my second one. The first one still works quite well, but another member of my family decided she needs it. So here I am, with a new keyboard on my desk, albeit with a UK layout, unfortunately, since I’m really used to the US one. The reason? No Amazon in Europe would sell a US layout Sculpt keyboard. Well… I bought it from Amazon UK.

Later update: in the end, I cracked. I ordered one more expensive (for us, in Europe) from the United States. And my fiancée uses one now, as well. This makes 4 keyboards in total in the last 7 years. And we have one with UK layout in case anything happens.

The shape of the keyboard takes a little bit of time to get used to it. Your writing speed will likely suffer, initially, so you need to put in the effort. The keyboard is basically split in the middle, so if you’re a fast two hands typist, you will adjust pretty fast, but otherwise it might be a little weird.

One thing that makes the keyboard good for RSI prevention is the palm rest. It’s big enough and, more important, it’s higher than the keyboard, so your fingers are, actually, a bit lower than your wrist. This helps a lot, because you’re not forcing your wrist up, as it happens with normal, straight keyboards. The keyboard is also facing downwards on both sides, from the middle, so that you keep the natural position of your wrists during writing.

MacOS solutions: CMD/Option keys

Because I use it on the Mac, I needed to do one change, though. Since CMD and ALT/Option keys on Macs are in different positions than Windows key and Alt on Windows, I switched the keys in System Preferences/Keyboard, as you see below. Now the Alt key on the keyboard is CMD and the Windows key on the keyboard is ALT/Option.

Finally, the mouse. It also helps with RSI, but it’s actually a little bit weirder than the keyboard, if you can believe it: it’s round, like a half of a tennis ball and it actually works quite well. When you use it, your hand stays in its natural position, a little bit on the side, not with the wrist forced in the awkward position to the left (if you’re a righty). Btw, I’ve only seen right hand mice for this keyboard, so keep it in mind.

Weird things about the keyboard

• it’s not bluetooth, it has a small USB dongle for both keyboard and mouse (and numpad). It is better in some ways, worse in others. YMMV.
• it doesn’t have a CAPS LOCK led. You never know if it’s on or off. It can be annoying sometimes.
• the space bar is split. Might feel weird
• the top row of keys (functions/media keys) are smaller and have a different feel when typing. This includes Escape, which is quite important if you’re coding. It’s not a dealbreaker, you should just know about it
• the NumPad is separate from the keyboard. I don’t use it, so I’m happy with this solution, because it makes for a smaller footprint on my desk, but your needs might be different.
• it has a different type of batteries in the mouse than in the keyboard and numpad.

If you want the keyboard, you can find it on Amazon (US, UK, DE), with local layouts. I assume there are other providers, as well, but I didn’t look for them. You can, also, buy just the keyboard, or just the mouse, based on your needs.

Below you can watch a video (not mine) with a review after one year of using the keyboard. It’s not the best image quality, but it’s the best video I’ve seen in terms of an actual user telling you what’s good and not. My experience is a little bit different, since I didn’t have the problem with the rubber strip at the bottom (you’ll see).

Oddly enough, I found it really difficult to explain to other people just what Mavenhut did. :)

What was the most difficult question I got during a pitch?

The truth is, there are no easy questions during a pitch, especially when you don’t know the answer.

As a consequence, the most difficult questions I got during a pitch were the ones I didn’t know the answers to.

The thing is, as you go from pitch to pitch, you shouldn’t have issues with the previous difficult questions, because from one pitch to the other, you should know the answers.

A difficult question I received during raising money from Mavenhut was:

What does Mavenhut do?

And I wasn’t really able to explain in a concise way what Mavenhut does and it took me about one or two days to formulate the answer in a way that people would understand.

Since Mavenhut built Solitaire games, one of the questions was:

Do you really think that people would buy an application that’s already free on their computer?

And it took us a little bit of time to find a way to explain why people would spend money on an application that’s already free in their computer.

Another question I got was:

Are you really going to spend 80% of the seed money that we give you on advertising?

And, actually, the answer is simple: it’s “yes”. Explaining it is not as easy so it took us a little bit of time to find a way to explain why gaming companies use so much of their investment on advertising. All I had to do was explain the “Unit Economics: of our users aaaand… it was ok :)

There are no difficult questions; there are just questions that you don’t know the answer. Yet.

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From pitch to pitch, the “difficult questions” should change; you should have different difficult questions and, in time, there shouldn’t be any.

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This is a big move for Spotify. In some ways it’s like the huge content deals sites like Netflix, HBO, Disney+ and Apple TV+ did when they launched their projects. And I feel that financially is in the same ballpark.

This is how it looks in numbers. Joe Rogan’s Podcast has:

• 190 million listeners per month (in April 2019, at least). If the link doesn’t open at the right time stamp, go to minute 4:48 in the clip.
• 8.4 million subscribers for Powerful JRE YouTube channel
• 4.46 million subscribers for JRE Clips Youtube channel
• revenues of $30 million in 2019

I mean, he’s doing pretty well on his own, personal, distribution channels. It probably took a lot of money and opportunities to move his podcast to what is, essentially, a closed system. Yes, the podcast will be free, but you still have to be a Spotify user, which didn’t happen before.

Rogan’s YouTube channel will remain live, but it won’t contain full episodes. There might be clips or other supplementary content which could benefit from YouTube’s search algorithm and push people to listen to full episodes on Spotify.

From TheVerge

As a side note, I don’t like Spotify as a podcast player. I use Overcast and I find it better for that. I do use Spotify for music and I find it has the best suggestion engine, but I’ve been testing YouTube Music lately, as well.

Going back to this deal. I feel that it can be a turning point in the world of podcasting. The straw that brakes the camel’s back and moves a lot of podcasts (and podcasters) to closed platforms. I don’t love it, frankly, but who knows.

On the other hand, I rarely listen to Joe Rogan’s podcast and, when I do, I usually go to YouTube. So it might not be a sign for the industry at large. Anyway, interesting to follow where it goes, since it can be a first sign for things to come for “freelance creators”.

Image made in 2 minutes with Canva

With all the pressure put on the business environment by the quarantine we’ve been into, due to COVID-19, there are some businesses, though, that saw amazing growth.

Still, a statistics site wouldn’t have been one I would’ve thought about before the pandemic. But Worldometers.info saw a growth to 1 billion visits in April. And not even that, but 70% of those visits are now direct. This, compared to 80% of the visits being from Google prior to February 2020.

If you make a “back of napkin” calculation, you see that they generated a revenue of at least $1M just in April 2020.

That’s not bad for a statistics website, right?

By the numbers: Worldometers.info was the #28 most-trafficked website worldwide this month, according to data and analysis from SimilarWeb.

That’s up 20.6% in traffic from March and up 36,928% from April 2019.

More details here.

Of course, this is not the only site with COVID related numbers that made the news recently.

A 17 year old student made a coronavirus tracking website, as well, and he refused $8,000,000 to allow ads on it. As opposed to worldometers, which already existed and had ads on it, nCoV2019.live doesn’t make money and, apparently, doesn’t intend to.

The dashboard is really popular, with about 30 million visitors a day, and 700 million total so far, so it’s unsurprising that Schiffmann has gotten offers to put ads on the website. One offer in particular would have contracted Schiffmann to keep up the site for $8 million, which he turned down, and he says he likely could have made over $30 million if he’d put up his own ads, but he says that’s not the goal of the site.

More details here.

In the phrase “minimum viable product” (or MVP), the keyword is MINIMUM. And there’s your biggest mistake.

First of all, if you don’t that what’s an MVP, see here.

If you want to watch, rather than read, there’s a video at the end of this post. For more similar videos, subscribe to the YouTube channel.

What’s the biggest mistake you can make related to building your MVP (Minimum Viable Product)?

The biggest mistake that people make when it comes to their MVP is doing more than you need to do.

Building an MVP means building the least amount of features that get you the information you need from the market (that your product is necessary).

But our mistake, as startup founders and product creators, is thinking that the least amount of features necessary for something to be the MVP is actually a lot more than what you really need.

Think about this: Dropbox had an email form explaining what their product will do. That’s it. And they had 75,000 people waiting to test their first version.

So, let’s say we’re building a website for pet owners. The MVP should be a form where some owners can put their details and they get the information they need. Even if that means you do the manual job of finding the information for them.

The mistake would be to build an entire website, with a great design or with any kind of design, and put it online and take the time to create a logo and take the time to think really well about the name.

You don’t need that in order for you to test the idea. You just need the form and the information you provide and you need to get some users to use that MVP to see if the idea that you have is actually good for the targeted audience.

Do not over-complicate things: this is the biggest mistake you can make when it comes to the minimum viable product for a startup.

Or, as Paul Graham put it: during the MVP phase, you must do things that don’t scale.

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Sounds funny, right?

“Is Saturday a business day?”

Short answer: No, for some. Yes, for some others.

Even shorter answer: if you’re an entrepreneur, YES, Saturday is a business day!

Now the longer version and explanations.

I was born in communist Romania. For the first almost 5 years of school, until the fall of the communism, I went to school on Saturdays. Granted, they were “short” days (we had just half of the normal week day hours), but we still went to school on Saturdays.

Back to present day, most of my entrepreneur friends also work on Saturdays. They might not go to the office, but they work on Saturdays. Well, if you are an entrepreneur, do you ever really “leave” your job?

There is a real reason, though, why people would ask themselves if Saturday is a business day. And it usually has to do with working with government or financial institutions (banks, mainly).

In my experience, most of them don’t work on Saturdays. They might have an office or two that are open on Saturdays, but you need to call ahead or look online for their schedules.

Here are some areas where people generally DON’T work on Saturdays:

– government offices
– financial institutions
– lawyer offices
– notary offices

I’m sure there are more, but these are the ones most people want to know about.

If you really want to know what a business day is, here’s a Wikipedia link.

Image source: Canva.