Forem: Laszlo L Mari

Bootstrapping a new venture

Laszlo L Mari — Mon, 17 Sep 2018 23:24:42 +0000

Dakai

They say running a business is hard. It wasn't particularly hard for me when starting my first company, Dakai. I had luck because I arrived in the middle of the wild west with all the gold diggers rushing to the rivers of capital to find gold and I was the guy in the back selling all the shovels. ICOs raised millions of dollars; enterprises were hiring us to consult on this new technology, we even had some government deals rolling. Then the market crashed two and a half months after starting my new venture.

Fortunately, we already positioned ourselves in the frontline of blockchain service companies in Europe. The issue is that slowly sales got so complicated that currently, it's almost impossible to find clients who outsource projects. We are doing fine though, the only issue is: there is no way to scale further.

Another problem I faced was that I couldn't ask anyone, I couldn't write about anything, and most importantly, we could barely mention our past clients' names, because the road to success in the blockchain world is paved with heavy NDAs wherever you look. This is the reason I stopped blogging and using pretty much any social media the past half year or so.

MVP Yard

Back to Dakai for a moment, I'm not planning to stop. It's vital for me to be in the coolest industry out there right now. To be at the forefront of innovation, but it's also essential to create a predictable sales model.
Since the new industry I'm entering is way less hostile I plan on blogging about how I am setting up this new venture and what steps I take to get clients, deliver projects, do strategic thinking or whatever that happens to us on this journey.

What is MVP Yard you might ask? MVP Yard will focus on creating minimum viable products for anyone and everyone in need of one. We will prioritize precision, clear communication and a German management style that we excel in. As a middle-sized corporation, it's a pretty bad idea to hire fifteen developers just to experiment with a new product you would like to offer. It's more common to outsource this kind of thing. As a startup founder, you might not have the connections to people who can build your project in record time, but you might have some capital from your last job. This is precisely why we want to help. We want to create and grow your startup further with a wide range of service offerings.

Of course, it's a limited industry, I'm not going to become the next Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, but I would like to use this company to have more space to innovate. Dakai grabbed all my attention and ran with it so I couldn't focus on anything else. With MVP Yard I would like to focus less on the company after a few months and start to develop 'side projects' - projects that have the potential to grow further than any of these two companies.

On another note, I'm also embarking on a social journey. A journey that I share with the world. I am confident that mistakes are already in the making, but I'm prepared to share them with you guys. I am also hoping that if some of you have experience with running a traditional service company, you will give me a few hints on what I should and more importantly, should not do.

PS: We already had a few clients (was running this as a secret), and I'm pretty excited about a first peak of the landing page I've put together during the weekend:

Where do Software Architects, CTOs, and other Senior+ developers hang out?

Laszlo L Mari — Fri, 24 Aug 2018 05:38:01 +0000

If you are a senior developer or above senior level what blogs do you read, what communities are you a part of, how do you get to know new people? Do you chat online anywhere?

Disclaimer: This would contribute and help me a lot with my market research

Let's talk about sleep.

Laszlo L Mari — Tue, 03 Jul 2018 17:50:49 +0000

⚠️ Warning ⚠️: This article will be controversial and may contain information biased towards my point-of-view.

Now that we got that out of the way I would like to talk about sleep. Not just sleep, but about the way people talk about it and about the studies that come up with magic numbers based on massive amounts of people with entirely different backgrounds (physically, mentally, daily routine-wise).

Recently I've seen many articles popping up about sleeping habits, the way humans should sleep, the magic number of how many hours you need and the way you should rest together with hundreds of gadgets or apps that will help you fall asleep and wake up refreshed.

How do you know how much sleep you need?

Well, not from studies focusing on other people. Sleep is one of the most mysterious things we do, and some people spend half of their precious 24 hours on it because they don't understand how it works.

Almost all studies take subjects from various backgrounds and compose an average, but when publishing results, most people skip over these details. A scientist can make an experiment turn in their favor in countless ways. Look at this, this or this to only mention a few. What's even worse is that most people (I would say 80%, but this is a vague estimate) only read news articles about the studies, that are further biased, sponsored, the author might not understand what they talk about, or it's generally not precise enough to draw any logical conclusion.

So now we have a fantastic and extremely abstract topic called sleep. News sites connected sleeping less than 7.5 hours with Alzheimers, cancer and so many different things. The problem is that the patients might have had various factors in their life influencing the development of such disease. For example a recent study found that the environment you grow up in contributes to later developing Alzheimer's. Since the closest you can get to isolated subjects are rats and the brain of rats is still a lot different from humans we can't tell if sleep causes these issues or something else.

Yes, some facts are tough to argue with. The REM and deep sleep states for memory and regeneration have been monitored with MRIs and a bunch of other experiments/machines many times. On the other hand, you can't track how much sleep someone needs generally. The best effort scientists made was measuring brain output (completing creative or difficult tasks) when subjects slept well and when they slept in wrong ways, but this is an extremely short-term conclusion (usually subjects have been called in for only 2 days), and scientists didn't measure what they ate, worked out and so on for weeks before. Even the period between experiments might change results or just that the subject is not in their home, but in a hospital or an unfriendly environment. I am sure I would need a bit more time to fall asleep if I was in an uncomfortable hospital bed.

7.5 hours

This is the magic number. If people sleep above this, they will be healthy and will live a full life, if you sleep under you die of cancer, right?

I don't believe in magic numbers drawn from vague long-term conclusions. For example, I usually wake up after 4 hours of sleep and feel more refreshed, than when my alarm wakes me up after 9. (This is almost every day, by the way, my body kicks me out of bed, and except taking a nap midday I can't really do anything about it).

The way I tested how much sleep I need was by A/B testing the hell out of it for years. It's not a short journey.
Successful businesses A/B test lots of things. Your body unconsciously A/B tests food by creating cravings, you A/B test products or tools when switching between them back and forth for specific tasks, but only very few people A/B test sleep. Instead, they set the alarm for 7.5 hours from now and wake up hoping they will be happy and healthy afterward.

I am not saying you should sleep for 4 hours. I have seen people feeling the worst all day because they tried my methods. In fact, I'm the only one I know who can sustain 2-4 hours of sleep without almost any caffeine intake combined with an "unhealthy" diet (I eat lots of meat, barely any vegetables and some sides. Minimal sugar and close to no caffeine). It works for me, but it likely won't for you.

If you need to rely on caffeine in the morning your body is trying to tell you it's exhausted or that you've built an addiction. If you are yawning your body is saying it's tired and you should go to sleep. There is no shame in napping midday. I often get myself up to speed with a 30-minute quick nap, even if my day is packed with things to do.

What's the point of this article?

People, don't rely on vague scientific facts. Experiment with your own body. If you know your body and mind, you will be able to control your life more than anyone else around you and don't try to fit other people's routines on yours.
A/B test routines as aggressively as you would test your product's features.

Make sure you minimize the external differences between the preparation for tests. This can mean eating the same meal, exercising the same amount, working the same hours and countless other factors depending on your life.

This piece of article is my opinion, and I hope you will take it with a grain of salt. Please validate any point I made and don't fall into the trap of believing another stranger telling you what to do.
One of the main reasons I wrote this article is to send it to people telling me how I should sleep or not sleep and to help people who follow the latest trends of minimal sleep (Silicon Valley, I'm looking at you) rethink their choices. No one knows what effect throwing your body out of balance might have on you. No one, but you in 20 years and until time travel is discovered you might be doing permanent damage to your body by sleeping too much or too little compared to what's natural. If you move to another city or another place you need to redo all of your tests and maybe you should record data points densely to see what fits you best.

Take care of your body, your mind and remember that your body knows itself best, not someone on another continent.

What is Dakai?

Laszlo L Mari — Wed, 25 Apr 2018 06:14:24 +0000

I got many messages asking for advice in the blockchain space. Things like how to get started, how to reach customers, how to become top players, how to get ahead of the others.

After 2 weeks of editing and reviewing with my team, we came up with an article that doesn't just show how we work but also gives useful advice for those who want to start their own business in the blockchain space.

You can read all the advice on our blog:
http://dakai.io/2018/04/23/what-is-dakai/

Let me know your thoughts!

The worst tech article I've ever read

Laszlo L Mari — Mon, 16 Apr 2018 07:56:05 +0000

It's a dark Monday morning here and Mashable made sure it's even darker for the people who they reached through their ads.

A friend of mine sent me a screenshot from Facebook that said "4 reasons Java is still a programming language you need to learn"

There's nothing wrong with this so far. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Java hater who wants to point out fallacies concerning Java but the fact that when you navigate to the article, the title changes to "4 reasons Javascript is still a programming language you need to learn" already raised my level of nervousness about it.

So I kept reading on..

The first paragraph tells me what happened in 1995 when JavaScript first appeared. That's alright, nothing wrong with it, except I'm not sure how Hillary Clinton being first lady correlates to JavaScript coming out.

Let's skip to the first sub title though: "1. Java's where the money's at"
Wait, I still can't decide if they are writing about Java or JavaScript in this article and what the point is. Each programming language has money invested, orgs using it. For example the average salary for Erlang is way higher than the one for JavaScript OR Java.

So comes the next paragraph where they are still writing about Java. In fact they are quoting the salary estimate for Java and not JavaScript (the first one is avg $73k based on a quick Google search, the second one is $115k). They also quote Google using Java. It's true at a level, that some products at Google use Java but most of its infrastructure is built on Python, JS and some very low level technologies like C/C++. Java is only used in products where the team only consists of Java developers. Very rare.

They also call Java open source. To the extent of my knowledge OpenJDK (Java Development Kit) is open source but Java is not. Anything you call Java needs to be up to the TCK standards and approved by Oracle. Also the original JDK made by Oracle is not Open Source.

Here they add a link to their shop of a Java course in the article so I suppose this article is in fact about Java. But why get JavaScript mixed into it?

The last point is about the ease of learning it. Well, I could argue with that point but it's up to personal preference. I just have no idea if the writer of this article ever wrote a line in it.

Why don't tech publishers fact check their articles? It's actually a really short one and without misinformation it could even give some insight to the people with no experience. Actually, they are advertising it aggressively on social networks which means this probably reached a lot of people who will have no idea about what's what in the industry.

This article is probably the worst I have read in a while but would love to hear your top worst developer articles.

Any opinions to tell? Say it in the comments

In case you need blockchain developers, Dakai.io is here to help.

The connection between Lego and productivity

Laszlo L Mari — Sat, 14 Apr 2018 17:34:38 +0000

It's a sunny Saturday afternoon. I just built the Eiffel Tower out of Lego. Yes, I'm over 6 years old or 14 that the piece advised as the "target audience", but I think Legos are one of the most amazing toys that don't have an age limit.

Why do we love Legos so much?

While building I tried to analyze the answer to this simple question. You start building a Lego by the instructions and it just sucks you in. If you are one of those people who left Legos behind at age 9 you might as well pick one up. There aren't many things more relaxing than building one and focusing on the small pieces that will build up into something big in the end.

I realized the small pieces are what makes it so addictive. When you pick up the handbook given with the toy you immediately see small steps you need to take and you see what they will become.

^ This is what you see first.

What does this page tell you? Just find the 6x6 square and you are done with the first step towards your goal. It doesn't show 3-4 things grouped together (or rarely but in a way it's still easy to figure out what to do). It usually shows you one thing you need to do and it shows you visually.

It just drives you. You immerse yourself in the tutorial and follow it closely because that's the shortest way to get to the result.

How does this connect to productivity? WTF?

Well, what I was thinking of is that I'm most successful in programming, in being a CEO, in strategy when I break down my tasks into pieces so small it feels trivial to follow along. If I write something like

[] Connect homepage to database
or
[] Write email to Mr. X investor / client

When the page in this example has like 5 queries and the email should consist of 10-12 paragraphs I don't really feel like starting. Not sure if anyone else is like this with tasks but I just wanted to point out that if you struggle with the task at hand you usually say it's too complicated.

It's not.

You struggle because you are looking at a large chunk that is essentially a system in itself. Whenever you start working on the task you will have to first think through the whole system and store it in your memory which itself gives you mental trouble depending on the size of the piece.

You are showing yourself the piece I highlighted in the picture above. You don't see the 6x6 square. To get to the 6x6 square you need to think the whole thing through that takes time and mental power away from you every time you stand up from your desk and go to get a drink. Every time you have to get out of the loop, which is pretty often in current workspaces.

Conclusion

The next time you hit a task that feels too heavy ask yourself how to start on it and if you are a visual type sketch the steps in your notebook. This method is powerful. Don't put too many things on one page though. Just sketch 2-3 steps down and turn the page. Your time and productivity are more expensive than the notebook.

I hope I could help. As usual, I would love to hear your feedback in the comments.

Also if you haven't yet, check out Dakai.io, my company! Maybe we can help with your blockchain projects.

Product Preview: Seqton - Blockchain Outsourcing Easily

Laszlo L Mari — Fri, 13 Apr 2018 04:27:26 +0000

Great to be back here. Took a pause from writing (and almost everything else) last week, because we got very close to getting done with our first product developed for -us-. Not for customers (In a way that we didn't get hired to develop it, of course we want to have customers on the platform).

Let me give you a little background on why we did this.

What steps you need to launch an ICO

Launching an ICO is difficult. There are regulations, there's a whitepaper you need to fill up mostly with BS (even if your product is good and you could sum it up to one sentence to anyone you need to create a lengthy whitepaper), you need to find a developer who takes care of the smart contract, you need to find a security company checking it afterwards, then they iterate on the code, then marketing comes on board and in the meantime the legal team is telling you about how it's not gonna work.

Many founders give up because they hire unprofessional people to manage their launch and end up not having any idea what's going on, wasting a lot of money and time.

This is where Seqton comes in the picture.

After working with a number of ICOs, including some of the most successful ones at Dakai we've seen a pattern emerging: People who hired companies got their ICO out and raised a lot. People who hired freelancers and individuals, trying to manage everything themselves mostly failed and just came back to the companies in the industry after their struggle.
Even in this case though, it's really difficult to find companies you can trust. Most are just simple scams who won't get your product very far.

How Seqton helps

We realized there is absolutely no product out there that can connect you with companies in the space to outsource your whole ICO in a few clicks. I personally think that as a founder your focus shouldn't be on micromanaging the last copy writer in the team. You should talk to investors, network, and all those things.

With Seqton we give you a roadmap and guidance. We show you how to do an ICO, what makes it successful, the steps you need to take and we connect you with the best companies for each step you can take, with their budget transparent so you can pick the right one.

There are reviews that help you read other users' experiences with the organizations and there is lots of info available without spending hours googling after references etc.

You can also just submit your project publicly, waiting for companies to approach you instead of the other way around.

What difficulties we might face

Of course it's not super easy. I'm really worried that thousands of Indian and Pakistani companies will add their companies, driving down the quality of the platform. We are trying to tackle this by having an invite system the first few months, approaching both projects and companies privately.

Also a worry of mine is that many companies who focus on similar things in the dev world can just simply create a part in their software that does the same thing as us and crush us with their marketing. Not so sure how I can protect myself from this.

Feedback

I love feedback, especially this early. If you have any advice, any experience, anything to share I would appreciate if you dropped me a line either to laszlo@dakai.io or here in the comment section.

Also make sure to check out our website to understand more of our culture: Dakai.io

Shapr, the networking secret of successful founders

Laszlo L Mari — Sun, 08 Apr 2018 19:03:24 +0000

Are you planning to connect with relevant people in your field? Would you like to reach the top people in your industry? Get investment, get advice? There's a small French app that covers all of this with an extremely growing following.

The app is called Shapr and we, at Dakai.io use it a lot. We have had several clients in the past from the application and we get relevant leads all the time. It also has a really friendly vibe and people are generally trying to help each other with a giving mindset.

There's a saying "Your network is your net worth". I would add that your active/organic network is what really matters and apps like Shapr enhance that.
It creates super niche groups of people that have something (or a lot of things) in common and lets them vote for each other by a Tinder-style left or right swipe.

It's the same effect as when founders drop off into a foreign city and try to reach other people from their home country. This is a very noticeable action in China that I've noticed when I was there. People build a way stronger rapport/connection because they are a part of a small group and a basic level of survival instinct kicks in.

There are some unsaid etiquettes

You need to be careful with some things that aren't written anywhere but can undermine your success on the platform:

Don't advertise

The Shapr community really hates if you advertise when sending your first message. The app is all about organically making connections and not just about snake oil salesmen trying to sell their product to the masses. Try to ask for advice, ask how you can help and in case your service can help the person, tell them you are XYZ owning / working for this company that solves their issue. You will have a bigger conversion rate, I guarantee you.

Help first, ask second

Have a giving mindset, try to help others out, ask them directly how you can be helpful in their life or career. They will appreciate it a lot and probably give you the same advice later on.

Purchase Shapr premium if you want to sell better

With premium, you can "fly" to the regions you want to sell to and make relevant connections. It also has a feature that shows you to way more people than usual which will maximize your reach and sales. If you have a website, put it on your profile page and lots of people will actually click it. Take it as an ad that needs your interaction too but way more relevant than any other type.

Use it

Yeah, you read it right. Just start using it and see how you like it after a few weeks. I doubt you will want to uninstall it if you are a business owner.

Download the apps for iOS / Android

Dakai

If you are new to my article, Dakai is my own business that helps companies with cutting-edge blockchain solutions. We helped run some of the most successful ICOs ever, governments and enterprises with consulting and education.

If you would like to know more about how blockchain can help your industry, Reach out to us, contact me personally: laszlo@dakai.io or check out our website: Dakai.io

Possible dev.to bug: Can't comment on mobile

Laszlo L Mari — Sat, 07 Apr 2018 21:11:51 +0000

Hey dev.to team, I can't really comment on my phone. What are the best steps to take?

Just left out formalities so you see my point straight, I hope you are having a great weekend.

I'm on iOS latest (beta) - ~11.3 and the Safari coming with that version.
Commenting works fine on my computer, I tried logging in and out on my phone but no luck. What do I do wrong? Is it only broken for me?

Thanks for the help in advance, I hope this is the best way to report bugs, if not let me know how.

What tools we use as a modern startup in 2018

Laszlo L Mari — Sat, 07 Apr 2018 06:07:59 +0000

It's another day and another post. At Dakai we use a bunch of things to increase our productivity. If you read our website I think you will know a bit more about our culture but the main points are, that we try to stay transparent to the clients, we are remote-first and we build blockchain products.

The company is up for 6 months so we had a lot of trial / fail / retry situations with a lot of our tools. Let me sum it up quickly what we used, what failed and what worked out.

Project Management

There are so many tools for this out there. You have no idea. I could start listing them and I wouldn't finish until the end of the day. It's kinda overhyped too, so you never know what's good for your people and what isn't.

First, we used Trello: It was okay but I hated the way it looks and it wasn't very scalable + It lacked features like deadlines

Then we started using Asana: The UI was nice, it scaled but it wasn't a lot more than a todo list that you could occasionally switch into trello mode (But we never really did that) and they wanted us to pay a bazillion for that if we scaled to like 50-100 people. At 50 it would be $6k every year. Who needs that money thrown out on the window?

So there came 20 other tools we signed up for, tried and didn't even start using as a team and one more that grabbed our attention: Notion.
It's worth to note that I was an early adopter so I got Notion Premium for free forever in my workspace, but I didn't end up using it heavily since then. It was just sitting in my browser and then this update came out on the 20th of March: Notion v2.0

So this was kinda like Trello for the teammates that loved it but you can add any tag, filter by anything, add pages inside a trello item where you can add pages inside where you can add trello items inside.
(And I won't continue but we can get into an infinite loop here and eventually kill Notion's servers)
You can create docs inside, manage permissions of the specific pages (Like not everyone should access our financial data that we -now- store there), have a page just for fun things to do etc. It gives so much freedom I can't even explain, but try it and see it for yourself.

This is not a click bait, I actually love this tool since we started using it

Email and connected services

So we needed a company email, right? Mine is laszlo@dakai.io by the way if you wanna drop me a message sealed in a poop emoji title (someone actually did that once).

We needed to pick between Google that everyone uses, our own local mailserver that not many use and Zoho mail that even less companies use. We tried all 3 of these and surprisingly we ended up using Zoho.

Google sucked because I was worried it steals data, you need to pay after many people and it just didn't feel right overall. I was a Protonmail user before but it sucked because you can't forward your emails, you can't export them, it's like a closed box. You switch to them once and you are stuck there forever which I hated so I pulled out fairly quickly.

Our own mail server sucked the most. The UI was horrible for the webmail. Like we were stuck in the 80s. Look:

Who needs something like this? I don't for sure, not in 2018, so we just quietly passed on this option and we had one more tool left to try: Zoho.

It turned out to be very extensible (even though their landing page and icons are stuck in the 2000s and suck bad the tool looks fresh and modern) and it had a calendar part + we could comment on emails internally that the email sender didn't see. These things were essential and I wrote a bot immediately that kinda automated my email habits, but more on that later. We started using this the first week and didn't regret since then.

Time tracking

As someone working with clients remotely (except when I'm consulting but that's different), we needed a solid, transparent time tracking app. So (drumroll) we tried Toggl. We paid a lot for the pro package so we could export nice PDFs etc but it just wasn't right. The desktop app froze for half of our team constantly, it looked bad, the online UI barely had any options for analyzing the data and we saw ourselves downloading it into Excel and just doing the calculations there.

It wasn't fir for our use-case. I don't know what could be simpler than tracking the time for a team and making it available for analyzing but I guess I'm very wrong somewhere with high expectations.

So we tried ~20 tools with no luck, all of them had issues so we just picked the one with the least issues: TrackingTime.co. Why can't anyone build a simple but non-buggy time tracker? Anyone out there?

TrackingTime is okay for now, we probably won't switch again because I don't want our data to disappear but if you have any recommendations let me know in the comments. I would appreciate it because time tracking without a proper tool isn't our strongest bit, especially that we analyze data every week to iterate and improve.

CRM

So everyone told me I need a CRM from the beginning. I spent 5 months without one, happy with my email and my memory but it got limited. I started to forget who I talked to, about what deal or project and stuff got really cluttered in my head.

So the logical way to solve this is to start looking for a CRM that can automate things and keep track of what's going on with your sales right?

NO. You will just waste your time like crazy. Don't ever do that! I tried all of them, I had a Saturday when I was only looking at CRMs to find one that actually does the job that I need it to do and NONE of them are okay.

Long story short we ended up integrating our CRM into Notion too and we had to give up automation (that none of these tools seem to support properly anyway) but I hacked together a script that can send out Linkedin messages to my connections at scale, based on conditions like how long ago we talked, what the person asked etc. It's a small project but I might sell it because I think there's a need for something like this coupled with email maybe?

Version Control

GitHub, obvious choice, duh.

Chat

We use Discord. I know, Slack is king in this but it's distracting, it is limited, it is expensive, it sucks at scale, it gets really cluttered and there are no proper permissions unless you pay thousands of dollars for the enterprise version.

Slack is bad. It decreases your productivity at the same scale it decreases your RAM in your computer. Summed up: avoid using Slack if you can.

But there's an alternative: Discord. It is originally for gamers, it has an amazing permission system, it is not cluttered and there are voice channels so most things can be discussed quickly through there. Heavy discussions go into channels divided by channel groups and we can even invite clients separately into one single channel where they can talk to us for rapid feedback.

FOR FREE.

What else would you need? We only found one thing missing: Threads. Threads were cool in Slack and we miss them but I bet Discord will come up with a solution very soon. They have an update every week so we see lots of improvements constantly.

Summary

With these tools our stack could go from so many different solutions to 3: Zoho, Discord, and Notion. I recommend trying this because it's powerful. Really powerful and will scale with you.

Any suggestions for me? Let me know

Also check out our website: Dakai.io

Testing this stuff

Laszlo L Mari — Fri, 06 Apr 2018 19:58:43 +0000

I wanted to try blogging in general and blogging on this platform a lot for a while. My guess is this is the moment of truth when I get to do this because I have a little free time.

I just realized how beautiful the font in the text editor of dev.to looks. Lucida Console is something I'll have to use later on in some of my projects too for sure.

See you guys with a bit more in-depth update the next time. This looks fun, I should really build this into my morning routine.