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Why is it so hard for social media/networking sites to monetize their users? | njharman: It's not. It's hard to to monetize with advertising which is all most sites even try. Virtual goods, premium accounts, merchandising those are methods that work.Also thinking it in terms of monetizing users instead of monetizing your site/products is symptom of failed thinking. Users aren't cogs in your money making machine, they resent being used/abused for your profit. Do something your users want, offer something they will pay for. |
RSS feed for posts with more than 5 pts? | brfox: Have you seen this:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=214028 |
How to do targeted web crawling? | wehriam: You could try latent semantic analysis of new pages to determine similarity to other documents in your domain.I've been doing a lot of web crawling recently, feel free to get in touch if you'd like to discuss further. |
How do I startup if I'm not a developer? | ibsulon: Wait... you know PHP? Why not just use PHP? Really, it may not be popular with the HN crowd, but use what gets the job done.
Have confidence in yourself, and get a prototype done. That will give you the experience you need. |
How long until ramen profitability with iphone apps | hboon: 1 single practical piece of advice if you decide to drop out - make sure you set up the paid developer account along with both paid and free contracts before you drop out.If it's done quickly, you have nothing to lose for waiting, if it takes a long time, count yourself lucky you waited. |
RSS feed for posts with more than 5 pts? | sam_in_nyc: 1) Go to http://www.dapper.net and create a feed which includes the # of points a post has, and possibly takes the page # as input.2) Go to http://pipes.yahoo.com and use the dapper feed(s) as a source, and filter the feed by # of points.Or, I'll do it for you if you buy me a ticket to the 99% conference. |
Hunch gave me an idea, a troubleshooting website | kbhangui: I think this is a good idea. I've thought about creating a computer troubleshooting site where the solution is downloadable (as say a bat file on windows, shell script on linux) and will fix the problem for those not as experienced with computers.Of course, this doesn't translate well to real life, but could be a source of revenue.Just throwing the idea out there, haven't given it much thought. |
Does the UK need a YC clone? | davidw: > governmental initiativesAs people keep repeating, the thing that makes YC special is not the money - you could get a few K from a lot of people. It's the connections - as a simple example, where else could you meet all the people that Paul has as speakers at their dinners? |
Does the UK need a YC clone? | barry-cotter: Good god yes. Never mind the UK, Europe needs a proper YC clone, and if one gets significant traction anywhere in the EU/EFTA it'll have the same kind of advantage in that space as YC does in the US, i.e. first pick.A good YC clone would be fantastic but (as the sainted pg says, pbuh) angels are the limiting factor. YC Edinburgh would be fantastic and given time might be sufficient to build a proper startup hub, but if some entity ponies up the cash for the "buy a Silicon Valley" plan, you're crushed. Even aside from that a substantial portion of any Scottish clone's rounds would end up in London.Dragon's Den
Pro- They decide very quickly.
Con- The expertise is not there, so they will say yes seldom.
Seedcamp
They're later stage than YC. Good and all but you need a let a thousand flowers bloom thing.
Prince's Trust/Government grants
Pro- Lots of money
Con- The anti-angel. Not an entrepreneurial bone in their bodies, must fill out forms and justify why the money went to this company rather than that one.Can you imagine an agent with more perfectly misaligned incentives? They have no upside if their investment decision goes right, and probably no downside either. People in those kind of jobs very rarely get fired.Coda: Yeurope appears to be moribund, so the spot is open again. Their website hasn't been updated in ages and has advanced linkrot. |
Please review my app: rubyxp.com a ruby regular expression tester | guybrush0: Seems pretty cool, but who is really the target audience?Wouldn't it be more useful as a netbeans/rubymine/eclipse plugin? |
Does the UK need a YC clone? | pclark: YC is international. |
how do you find a good salesperson? | RobertSeviour: I hope you will excuse me pitching my own product, but it's exactly relevant to this thread.'How to Hire a Good Technical Salesman manual' by Robert Seviourhttp://seviourbooks.com/how-to-hire-a-good-technical-salesma... |
How Much Revenue Do Your Favorite Websites Get from You? | cschneid: Not much. Facebook makes almost nothing off me, Twitter doesn't make money off anybody, reddit & hacker news both have very little or no ads.CNN / NY Times / Local news. I RSS all of it, so no money there....I have found myself buying from Mac ISVs a lot more recently. Macheist, Coda, a few games. All within the last few weeks. Not quite my "favorite sites", but I am giving somebody some cash.And yeah, Amazon. Although it's not in my favorite sites list either, it's just a well run store.So I suppose I only pay for goods, either physical or digital, and not content. |
Please review my app: rubyxp.com a ruby regular expression tester | nc: quite similar to rubular.com |
Should I outsource development outside the US? | coglethorpe: Your startup sounds rather technical "a nontrivial web site," yet you have two CEOs, a lawyer and an accountant. In my opinion, you need to let go of at least one of the CEOs and outsource the lawyer and accountant until you have a need for them full time.Why do you have two CEOs? Fortune 500 companies only have one. This sounds very much like an idea cooked up by some "business guys" who thought they'd farm the real work of a tech startup out to their buddy in IT. I've been there and I haven't seen it work.In my opinion, there's a place for outsourced work, but it isn't when a startup is developing it's core technology assets. That requres heads down devlopment by a team of dedicated engineers for a period of months. That's exactly why YCombinator was set up. To deal with the minimal business setup and let the team just dig in for a quarter and see what happens. |
Should I outsource development outside the US? | quilby: This has been discussed many times. See:http://searchyc.com/ask+outsource |
Should I outsource development outside the US? | noodle: executive summary: you get what you pay for. if you want a quality product, you'll pay for that quality product in some form or another. cutting corners now will compound costs later. |
Re-architecting on Slicehost to handle 50+ apache processes? | jrockway: I assume you need this many Apaches to fully use all of your CPU?If so, there are a number of approaches to take. If your app is blocking on sending/receiving data to/from the client, it would benefit you to segregate the actual app servers from the frontend servers. You can use mod_fastcgi and run your PHP stuff in FastCGI, or you can use a frontend threaded apache talking to a backend PHP apache via mod_proxy.If you are blocking on things like database access or other non-web IO, then you need an event loop so your app can do something else while waiting for IO. I don't know what your options are in the PHP world, but this is very easy to do in Perl.Finally, real threads will probably also solve your problem. I recommend CL or Haskell. (Although I think Slicehost still uses an ancient Xen that can't handle SBCL. Oops.) |
Re-architecting on Slicehost to handle 50+ apache processes? | bretthoerner: Can you not fix the media problem? Putting nginx up front to serve media would relieve a lot of huge Apache/PHP processes.Are you actually hitting the limit in practice? So you have 50+ concurrent requests at once? Is this a "real business"? If so you shouldn't be so afraid of putting in the time to setup nginx or something else... you'll literally _have_to_ to different media serving and load balancing if you plan to grow whatever_this_is.As far as actual RAM usage, you'd probably save some space and lose very little (depending on what your app does) on a 32-bit OS. Sadly, Slicehost only offers 64-bit... you might check out Linode or one of their other competitors. I'd only suggest this option if you're really broke, though. You'll still have to do the work mentioned above on Linode eventually... the 64->32 would only be a small stopgap.I don't do any PHP anymore, but I think thread-safeness largely depends on what external C libraries you use, and generally isn't guaranteed. |
Re-architecting on Slicehost to handle 50+ apache processes? | iamelgringo: * edit * dumb question. Sorry |
Re-architecting on Slicehost to handle 50+ apache processes? | Fenn: Apache/FastCGI/PHP _should_ be very stable (it's mature/old).I have used it on production sites for years, and in fact, have not used mod_php since before PHP5 for the exact reasons you describe.You may need to tweak your FCGI settings a bit - the amount of children/fcgi process lifetime, etc all make a difference.One thing I would highly recommend is ensuring you run under a PHP accelerator (APC is free/great), particularly with FCGI. This will reduce the time each PHP-FCGI child takes serving a PHP request (as it doesn't need to reparse the code every time), which means you can have less children. Less children means more memory available and we all love memory.If you're having specific stability problems with fcgi, do some googling on the errors you're getting. There definitely have been bugs in the PHP fcgi interface, so an upgrade to later/latest version may help you there.Alternatively, something like lighttpd/nginx could be a good option for you (though they both recommend fcgi if you want them talking direct to PHP as well).Good luck! |
Should I outsource development outside the US? | crpatino: So, you say you want to keep thing "as small as possible", bring 5 people on board, but still none of you is able to create something that the customers will pay for? I don't want to make any judgements, but seems like you do not appreciate the real value of the technical implementation. Your CEOs may have all the connections in the world, but if you cannot afford to have your product build, you still have nothing.There should be nothing wrong with outsourcing the implementation details to a bunch of code monkeys in a developing country, but the point is that monkeys execute blindly. They are cheap because they do what you tell them to do (communication problems aside), no more but sometimes less. You cannot expect them to understand your problem and interpret a somewhat subjective description into a comprehensive requirements document. If they could do that, they would not be monkeys and would not want to work for peanuts.If your resources are limited, you need to bring in at least one local reliable guy who wants to work for equity. His first job would be to build a rough prototype that will help your CEOs to harvest their network for additional cash (in the form of partnership, pre-sale money, whatever). The second job would be to lead a newly hired no-monkey team to build version 2.0, and provide the insight gained with version 1.0 to make this project successful.<shameless_plug>If you still want to cut some costs by hiring a foreign based team, I would recommend to pick a Latin American country... Mexico, Brazil, Argentina... We are not as cost effective as Asian developers, we have a huge advantage by being in about the same time zones. Mexico is Central and Mountain time, Central America is Atlantic I think. I am not sure about South America, but it is pretty close also.Having access to the customer in real time pays big time when you are doing agile development. If you only share a few hours per day, or not at all, the cycle times will be in terms of months instead of weeks. You will have to rely more in Big-Design-Upfront style of development.</shameless_plug> |
Should I outsource development outside the US? | david927: I'm a big proponent of this; I guess because it's worked well for me. You can get spectacular results for much less, but you have to know what to watch out for.For example, you should have (at least) one person in the off-site location who really 'gets' what you're doing. This person should be the CTO/Architect, if possible. Development should be agile. You need to know if it's ever going off-course as soon as possible. Communication can't be understated; have daily scrums, for example.There's a lot more. Feel free to write me. My email is in my profile. |
Re-architecting on Slicehost to handle 50+ apache processes? | gojomo: Find out if disk IO is the real bottleneck -- excellent chance that it is, especially if MySQL is also on the same host.Set 'noatime'. Ensure there's no swapping.Don't assume more processes improve throughput; they could be worsening things with contention at key places.In case there are small memory-leaks anywhere in your stack that pile up, set 'MaxRequestsPerThread' to anything other than the default '0' (unlimited).If you can't separate out static content at least make sure all outgoing headers get maximum browser-side caching on non-volatile resources. You could also add a front-end reverse-proxy-cache, on a tiny host, to get many of the same offload-cost-of-static-content benefits. |
Anyone doing a startup part-time while working? | newy: Really depends on the type of startup your running. Is it just developing technology? Then that can be easily done nights, weekends (and overnights). But if your startup involves significant operational work, dealing with customers or meeting with clients/partners, then it's almost impossible to do unless you have that work 'outsourced' someway, whether to partners or to other firms, etc. |
Anyone doing a startup part-time while working? | run4yourlives: Yup. It's possible, but extremely difficult. Moreso if you have a family.Take pg's advice here if you at all can and stay away from that day job. Couldn't you monetize your service immediately instead? |
Anyone doing a startup part-time while working? | jlees: If you've been working on it for 8 months you probably have a better idea than we do of whether you can handle both ;)If you need the cash, you need the cash. But there are other sources, and a job should be your last resort. Yes, people have done it, and it generally involved having a fairly flexible job that didn't mind you taking business calls etc; and not getting a lot of sleep! |
How do I startup if I'm not a developer? | quellhorst: Pay other people to code, or learn to code. Nobody is going to code for equity in your idea.Another option is to join a hacker who is starting a company and work on their idea. |
Re-architecting on Slicehost to handle 50+ apache processes? | jawngee: nginx + php-fpm NOT fastcgi.Serve your media/static from another smaller slice running nginx on a subdomain, or have it picked up through cloudfront or some other CDN. |
Re-architecting on Slicehost to handle 50+ apache processes? | nessence: Go for nginx, it's worth it, get another IP if you have to (and can do so). If you don't want to do that...Don't turn keepalive off, set it to 7 seconds - or - look at your analytics and see what your average user's session length on the site is and set it to somewhere between 7 and half of that number. The idea is, if someone doesn't click on something within 7 seconds they're either going to be on that page awhile or they've left.If you can, tweak the StartServers, MinSpareServers, and MaxSpareServers parameters (if applicable).The above parameter defaults can cripple your site if you're over 25 concurrent sessions and have a complex application (among other factors). The minspareservers defaults to 20, I think, and at that rate you'll be guaranteed a continued thrashing death/birth cycle for your apache processes which will constrain all your I/O.If none of this works then the complexity (read, bloat?) of your app (Drupal?) is too much and you need a beefier host.Media files have nothing to do with any of this. They'll hold connections open but they won't constrain I/O like application memory footprints and child process cycling. |
Is OpenID dead? | wmf: I expect OpenID usage to increase as sites adopt usable UIs for it, but I am an optimist. |
Does the UK need a YC clone? | Major_Grooves: Undoubtedly the UK needs some YC-like schemes.The YC FAQ does say “There already is a Y Combinator in your town: Y Combinator. The seed funding business is national, not regional.” and we know that in fact it is international as UK teams have taken part. In fact as far as I know, all the YC-like schemes will consider international applicants.However, as jlees says, that does not benefit the UK. I believe that a lot of it is to do with national culture differences - the US just has a much stronger ethos of innovation and investment. People are just more likely to be entrepreneurial in the US. Entrepreneurs built America and it’s been part of their culture since colonists first settled there.Meanwhile, in the UK, most individuals with large amounts of money (enough for angel investing) are either “old money” or have gained their money through conventional high-paying jobs (lawyers, investment bankers) where entrepreneurship is not part of the job per se. Those that do try angel investing, just don’t quite “get it”. Technology is completely alien to some farmer with 100,000 acres who happens to have a spare £100,000, meanwhile biotech investments (my current sector) will scare the bejesus out of most sane angels.I would love to start a UK YC equivalent, but I would not want to do it without having experienced considerable success through starting and exiting some companies, or through gaining significant experience through VC work (which is closer to my current job). If anything, these experiences are needed just to build the network which we know is more important than the money in these programmes.As has been mentioned, there are some schemes around in the UK, but there is nothing that /really/ fills YC’s concept-PoC niche. There will be eventually though - once I have got a spare £100 M from successfully selling a few companies I will gladly start one! |
Should I outsource development outside the US? | ibsulon: If you are going to go with outsourcing...I would suggest bringing on an enterprise architect with experience in outsourcing to design the system and have a full understanding of what is going on. Preferably, this individual would have a group he has worked with already.But given the constraints you mention, I'd suggest getting three developers in your area who prefer to telecommute and meet for coffee twice a week. |
Is OpenID dead? | briansmith: For your website, security is unimportant, so the user can just use the password "password" that they use for all other sites where the password isn't important. Logging into every site as brian@briansmith.org/<generic password> is noticably more convenient than logging in with OpenID.Logging in with a username and password is faster than logging in with an OpenID, because the OpenID protocol requires several HTTP requests per authentication, whereas a usernmae/password only requires one. |
Anyone doing a startup part-time while working? | patio11: I've been doing it for 2.5 years now. Its gone from "Ooh, I can afford to buy myself a Wii" to "Oh, erm, it appears that I made more sleeping than I did while awake three weeks out of four last month".I've blogged pretty regularly about it. See profile.My advice: find a job which is OK with you having a side business. I have an arrangement with my company that is mutually beneficial: I firewall my extracurriculars from the day job, I bring them the stuff I learn about engineering and business, they wish me the best of success and officially ignore the existence of my "personal hobby".Make a business which is designed to have returns which are super-scalar to your time investment. I am religious about automating, outsourcing, or eliminating just about anything that I have to do more than once in a blue moon, even if it only takes me 5 or 10 minutes to do manually. My entire life is a series of 5 minute increments and I don't want to waste any licking stamps. (Somebody does that for me these days.)Remember that there are more important things in life than working. If you neglect them, the lack will bite you in the hindquarters, both in more important respects and in impacting your work/business. |
Please help review VISA's "Platform for loyalty services" patent for the USPTO; help stop patent trolling | RobGR: I have emailed that link to someone who implemented a system that would probably fall under that patent in the 1990s. |
Anyone doing a startup part-time while working? | RobGR: Does anyone have any experience based advice, on whether a side job that paid less but did not involve computers or any relation to the startup (for example, being a night stocker in a grocery store) would be better than a day job programming ? |
Analyze Trends in your data | nreece: Wordle - http://wordle.net |
Real costs associated with a startup? | nostrademons: "Real" as in dollar, or "real" as in economic?By far the biggest cost is opportunity cost, but that's also the least "real" in dollar terms. Two years that you spend working on your startup is two years of lost income (~$200K+ for decent software devs), or two years that could've been spent getting an MBA or grad degree, or two years when you're not partying and getting laid.As for actual monetary costs - paying people to do things is the main one. Legal fees can rack up quickly if you want an actual corporation - easily a couple K for a barebones S-corp if you do it with decent lawyers. If you have employees - well, you know how much you could get paid, then increase that by 50-100% for overhead.Software and hosting costs were essentially zero - for basically any web stuff, you want to be using free software anyway, and you can get cheap hosting for like $10/month ($80/month if you're doing something weird and need a dedicated server) that's perfectly adequate for trying ideas out. S3/EC2 also can result in really cheap hosting if you're not using much capacity. If you need to scale it'll cost you, but if you get that far you're doing so much better than 99% of startups that you'll welcome it.Biggest unexpected costs for us, by far, were founder buyouts. My remaining cofounder and I each dropped a grand to buy out cofounders that weren't pulling their weight - and while it was totally the right choice from the POV of preserving the relationships (one of those bought out later led to 2 job leads for me when the startup folded), it would've been even better to not bring them on board to begin with. Be very careful who you start a company with, and make sure you each have the same level of commitment and goals for the company. Buyouts can be as expensive as divorce, and usually lead to the death of the company. |
Is OpenID dead? | watmough: I've used OpenID to access StackOverflow, and it's a somewhat disconcerting process, involving visiting another web-site, which I do NOT want to think about, since I want to access the visited site.On this evidence, as Joe User, OpenID simply has too many moving parts and will fail.I'd be interested in what the SO experience is. Is it even possible to get on that website without OpenID? |
Real costs associated with a startup? | patio11: My biggest cost, by far, is AdWords, but I always planned on that. Its a "pay $1, get $2" situation, so I'll do that all night long.The big unanticipated cost for me is freelancers. When I started, I did everything myself, by hand. Turns out that most things are not worth my time. Freelancers are also a "spend money to make money" option for me these days, but I got a shock when I did my taxes last year and realized I had paid out the equivalent of about a month's salary on them.[edit for context: one-man software business, 2.5 years old, produces roughly dayjob salary.] |
Re-architecting on Slicehost to handle 50+ apache processes? | oomkiller: It seems that you already know the solution to your problems, but don't want to do it. NGINX! Nginx may be confusing to people that are long-time apache users, but I actually find it to be easier, once you get the hang of it.On another note, if you're filling up 50 processes and can't afford better than Slicehost, you should seriously reconsider your business model as it's obviously not working. Another option would be to speed up the execution of whatever code is being executed in those processes.Final Word:
nginx+FastCGI |
Is OpenID dead? | qeorge: OpenID is a great idea, but the execution is off. For one, there's too many providers, so I have to remember a weird URL just to login (myvidoop.com? really?). The whole process is inherently awkward.On the other hand, using your Facebook, Google, Twitter, or Yahoo login is easy and familiar. These services don't have the openness we want, but if the goal is to increase engagement I think its a net win. |
Real costs associated with a startup? | puzzle-out: I ran an E-commerce company, and we had to fly in some of our products (jewellery). UPS were extortionate - they misquoted me on the phone, and my mistake was not getting it confirmed over email. DHL are fine, in my experience.
In the long term, I should have been more organised so that I had time to ship the products in. |
Real costs associated with a startup? | Element: one of the unanticipated costs for me was marketing, I sell my webbased software to businesses and its not the kind of thing you can sell via search results & adwords campaign, so alot of brochures, trade shows and cold calling are required to sell subscriptions. |
Real costs associated with a startup? | hbien: An unexpected cost for me would definitely be CA franchise tax ($800/year) and registered agent fee (~$100/year). |
Analyze Trends in your data | ScottWhigham: Learn sql |
Should monetization be an afterthought ? | Hexstream: It shouldn't be an afterthought if you have any expectation of making money. |
Should monetization be an afterthought ? | brm: Don't rely only on your perceptions of whats valuable, ask others... you'd be amazed what people will pay for, things like data, pro accounts, products tangentially tied to the purpose of the site etc...if you'd be willing to share some of the basic details of the idea I'm sure we'd be happy to act as armchair quaterbacks and toss out ideas for how it makes money |
Should monetization be an afterthought ? | Harkins: If you can build the site without a significant investment of money or time then it's OK that it'll take time or tinkering to earn back your money. If it's expensive to build and doesn't have a clear path to earning back that investment, it's at best a gamble. |
Should monetization be an afterthought ? | sarvesh: The question you should be asking yourself is will the users buy your product/service? Ads or subscriptions you are still trading your product/service with your customers. Is it something that will be useful enough for them to trade some money or click on your ads? Whether they will depends on how much value they are getting in return. |
Should monetization be an afterthought ? | AlanEdge: It depends on your objectives.If you take angel/institutional money, you should at least have a good idea of what billion-dollar-plus market you're going after.How specifically you monetize within that market can't always be pre-determined because its a function of a really good product (which takes a lot of morphing/iteration).It's not a good idea to bank on advertising (unless you're building an ad network) or unless you're product has a great context for capturing purchase intent (from which you can do some pretty killer lead-gen/affiliate). |
Should monetization be an afterthought ? | auston: Paul Graham once told me something about this...http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=153547 |
Should monetization be an afterthought ? | michael_dorfman: Having a business plan is not "over-analyzing stuff."If your goal with this project is to make money (i.e., it's not just a hobby), then figuring out how to monetize it is an important step.The question you need to be asking yourself is: what value are you creating, and for whom? If your idea doesn't provide value to a group of people, it's not going anywhere as a business.(Note that the users of the product aren't necessarily the same people it provides value for.) |
Is it alright to cycle through inspiration/discouragement? | SwellJoe: Is it alright to cycle through day/night? It is inevitable. It is neither good, nor bad.The human brain is like a committee, with millions of warring factions. Sometimes the positive bunch are running the show, and sometimes the negative bunch are shouting louder.And, of course, taking an honest assessment of your idea is important. You've gotta listen to both sides and try to ascertain which one is correct. But, the "there's tons of X" is a nonsensical argument. There are niches within any large software market that are being served poorly. There are opportunities to change the game in any large market, and those opportunities come around every few years...you just position yourself to take advantage of them and be the company that changes the landscape.Google changed the landscape rather than accept that search was an also-ran idea. It took the Japanese until the late 70's to figure out how to change the auto industry landscape, but they did, and now the big three Japanese auto makers rule the market, with Toyota (the most forward thinking and efficient mover among them) the leader. |
Should monetization be an afterthought ? | pj: How are you planning to pay for your hosting costs, advertising, marketing, branding, design, coding, food, rent, a car, and all the other luxuries in life?That money has to come from somewhere.How much money do you want and or need to survive? How many jobs do you want to create for others? How long do you want to retire? What are your plans over the next 1 year, 5 years, 10 years...?What do people want to pay for? Well, people don't like waiting. Once they decide they want something, they want it now now now.People pay for food. You have to eat. People pay for management of life's necessities. People pay for more life. They pay for less fear. They pay for convenience. They pay for more time.They pay for more money.They pay for less cost.
They pay for more entertainment.
They pay for more control over their environment.
They pay for vision.
They Pay for stability, accessibility, consistency...What do you want them to pay you for? |
Is it alright to cycle through inspiration/discouragement? | gills: It comes with the territory of daring to act on your ideas.If you can learn to be happy that you have an interesting enough life to experience such incredible highs and lows, and to know that they are transient, nothing will stop you from chasing your ideas. |
Should monetization be an afterthought ? | HeyLaughingBoy: Ask yourself this question: what fraction of businesses that want to be ad-supported actually turn enough of a profit to be worthwhile? If the percentage is high enough for you to consider it a reasonable risk then go for it.[edit]
I can't imagine starting a business unless I knew exactly who would buy the product, why they would do so, and I had a fairly good idea of how much they would pay for it.
That means I start by figuring out what people need and then examining if I can provide it. But I'm not a millionaire yet.If you just throw something against the wall to see what sticks, something will. The question is will it be enough to be a worthwhile use of your time? |
Is OpenID dead? | kevinherron: Logging in with OpenID on StackOverflow is fairly easy for me since I've always got my gmail account opened up in another tab. I just click the little Google provider button and I'm logged in, no typing involved. |
Should monetization be an afterthought ? | pg: Depends on the kind of startup you're starting. If it's Facebook or Twitter, yes. If it's PollEverywhere, no. |
What would normal people do with Twitter search? | dangoldin: Just a few ideas of the top of my head:- If some service stops working (some website or phone system), people can get on to twitter and find out if others are having the same issues.- You can use it to keep track of various sports teams. See what the players are up to and how the various games are going without having a TV.- You can even have TV channels tuned to a specific "Search" depending on your interests to get a pulse of what's going on (sports news, news from different countries)- Combining these can give you a "build your own channel" tool that can give you real time info.- Another idea may be to convert it to something similar to a radio channel. If there is ever a nice way of aggregating various tweets together by theme - that might be a good way to be entertained.There are probably a whole lot of other ideas that people can't even think of yet but it'll definitely be interesting to see. |
What Paid Services Do You Use For Your Startup? | cperciva: AWS for application hosting and storage. Paypal for payment processing (if that counts). |
What Paid Services Do You Use For Your Startup? | jbrun: Basecamp, Highrise, Harvest, Slicehost, GitHub, Paypal Merchant Account - that's about all for now. |
What Paid Services Do You Use For Your Startup? | jaxn: Github, LightHouse, The PlanetAll of those services provide things that I need, but don't want to spend time administering. In the case of The Planet they are providing the network, but I still maintain the servers. I am thinking about moving to Amazon once the contract is up.From a non-webapp perspective, I pay for legal and accounting too. I have thought about paying for a personal assistant, but haven't pulled the trigger yet. |
What Paid Services Do You Use For Your Startup? | andr: Dropbox, Mantis, and git, the latter being hosted on Slicehost. |
How to Inspire young people in computer science? | amichail: Tell them about the opportunities that arise for starting your own company with minimal resources. |
What Paid Services Do You Use For Your Startup? | catone: GitHub, Linode, AWS.A merchant account is in the cards, though we don't know where yet (and haven't finished the process of incorporation, so can't get one yet).At some point we might use Exceptional (I like the look of it, but I'm not a coder so I'm not making the decision of whether we need it or not) and if Get Satisfaction proves useful perhaps pay for a plan there. We'll see. |
Should monetization be an afterthought ? | webwright: Totally depends on the market you are serving, the size of the opportunity, and the amount of cash you think you can drum up.But it's certainly viable to first create something that people would rather chew off their own arm than give up (Google, Facebook, Twitter).It's also great to have a revenue model out of the gates (salesforce.com).What's the startup idea? |
Should monetization be an afterthought ? | Skeletor: If you have access to a research library, you could do some research and write a feasibility study in a day of work. A feasibility study would be the first draft of your business plan after working on it for a day.Do some basic market research at the library, know how big your market (users) would be and some basic information about them (are they 13-25 WoW players or 30-45 baby booomers.)Find similar services to your idea and do some research on them. Even if your idea is really novel, you can find replacement products and research them.
e.g.: My company is a lot like Hacker News, but for serious hard core chefs. Hacker News make X amount of dollars with a userbase of Y users, we could probably do something similar.So spend one day of research and produce a 1-2 page document with your research. That will really help you start to think of how to convert an idea or service into a business. Even if you have a strong idea of how to make money on a service, knowing this basic info will help you polish your ideas and help you sound really smart when talking to investors, potential partners, and even customers. |
What Paid Services Do You Use For Your Startup? | sgoraya: The Planet, Ringcentral, Google Apps |
What Paid Services Do You Use For Your Startup? | stuff4ben: Unfuddle.com for subversion hosting, wiki, and bug tracking. Will be using AWS in the near future once some code gets written. |
What Paid Services Do You Use For Your Startup? | dangrover: Slicehost, CampaignMonitor, Wufoo, AWS (just for S3 hosting of downloads) |
What Paid Services Do You Use For Your Startup? | Mistone: we are an eCommerce biz so a bit diff:
bigresponse (email marketing)
MediaTemple
Adwords (off and on)
Facebook ads (now off no real interest in restarting)
Amazon Merchant Account |
What Paid Services Do You Use For Your Startup? | bbuffone: Google (Docs, Site, Mail), Skype (Communication), Unfuddle (Repository), AWS (Runtime), drop.io (File exchange), Vimeo (Video), Scribd (Docs) |
Should monetization be an afterthought ? | medianama: I believe you should do it if you can build, promote and manage it without any cost structures...I think Facebook/Digg would be vastly profitable if they didn't employ all those people. Do they need to? |
How to Inspire young people in computer science? | adammarkey: I would tell them a couple things:1) Get involved in communities (like HN, and local CS interest groups) - getting involved while young can lead to many opportunities that "just having a CS degree" wont lead you to.2) Most university CS programs stick to 1 or 2 languages at the core (java or c/c++) - tell them to try and implement some of their homework in ruby / python / or even things like Scala to learn the similarities and differences between programming languages. This will only be more helpful as you progress into higher level courses. |
How to Inspire young people in computer science? | endtime: The same things that have been important for several years:- A CS degree doesn't mean you will become Dilbert- A CS degree doesn't mean your job will be outsourced to a BRIC country.- CS is not just programming.- A BS in CS can lead to fields like AI/robotics, bioinformatics, finance (well, that might be untimely), etc.- It's a myth that CS isn't for girls (mention Lady Lovelace ;) ).I think (the negations of) those are still the most popular harmful stereotypes about studying CS. |
What Paid Services Do You Use For Your Startup? | lecha: You asked for PAID services, not just any SaaS.webfaction, AWS (ec2, sqs, s3), paypal |
What would you do if you knew you couldn't fail? | jaxn: rethink my assumptions |
What Paid Services Do You Use For Your Startup? | pierrefar: Slicehost, AWS, Pingdom (downtime alerts).Lots of freebies too, though. |
What Paid Services Do You Use For Your Startup? | tdavis: Github, Lighthouse, Google Apps, Pingdom. That's all I can really think of at the moment. Hosting is situated firmly on the ground, so no AWS for now. |
What Paid Services Do You Use For Your Startup? | jlees: Slicehost, trying out Basecamp at the moment. |
What would normal people do with Twitter search? | jlees: It's pretty cool to have running while you're watching TV or something. Watching the Apprentice backchannel while watching the Apprentice, etc. (Obama inaug and Facebook did this well, too.)About to buy something? Twitter search for a quick and dirty finger-in-air to see whether you should rethink. |
What Paid Services Do You Use For Your Startup? | hedgehog: Question for AWS users: What are you running on AWS? (web, DB, static content, ...) |
What Paid Services Do You Use For Your Startup? | pmikal: Wordpress, Rackspace, Serverbeach, Onebox, Speakeasy Hosted VOIP |
What Paid Services Do You Use For Your Startup? | hikari17: I'd add gliffy (for diagrams), balsamiq (for mockups) and onebox (for phone service) to the list... |
What Paid Services Do You Use For Your Startup? | kbrower: linode, AWS(s3,cloudfront), getclicky |
What Paid Services Do You Use For Your Startup? | endtime: Google Apps, Slicehost |
What Paid Services Do You Use For Your Startup? | johns: Serverbeach, JungleDisk/S3, MerchantPlus, CampaignMonitor |
What Paid Services Do You Use For Your Startup? | skmurphy: Skype, Central Desktop, Silicon Ridge (web hosting), Webex Office (Calendar & Contacts), 123SignUp, Spellr, Dabbleboard, LinkedIn, iContact, Google Adwords, |
What would you do if you knew you couldn't fail? | hotshothenry: everything |
Should monetization be an afterthought ? | skmurphy: There is no harm in having a hobby, just don't let it get too expensive. |
What would you do if you knew you couldn't fail? | mahmud: I couldn't fail. My current project could, but I have gained enough intelligence in a niche market segment while researching my startup that I could start working as a highly paid consultant NOW. |
What would you do if you knew you couldn't fail? | ErrantX: ambiguous question: clearly "everything possible" is the only logical answer :) |
What Paid Services Do You Use For Your Startup? | RobGR: Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, a VoIP provider for a 1-888 number to an asterisk machine (vitelity.net).After that, it's just business class internet service and the electric company . . . I say screw all this hosting, cloud hosting, and bunches of paid web apps; in this day and age you should be able to install apache and set up whatever you need, and move to Rackspace or hire accounts if you are ever actually making money (which I'm not). |
What Paid Services Do You Use For Your Startup? | spif: I'll add GetSatisfaction to the list after all the bashing they've received this week.We (and our users) get satisfaction from them... |
Please help review my site CollectiveSys.com | mahmud: Dude, it's a bit too premature for adsense, dontcha think? Also, your summary of the project is too much jargon:"It's technically a Wiki + social networking site, and semantically a crowd-sourced review + social news site."Put that in active tense:"Read, edit and publish news and important stuff. Contact others and talk about stuff"Also, entries have the URL linked to the source. You might not wanna do that. I recommend a URL from the front page should go to a summary page, where people can read and post reviews, and there should be a big button/link where they can go to the original.Having a separate page will help you with .. err, figure that out, I'm not sure I want to go there now that I remember the adsense ;-) |
What would you do if you knew you couldn't fail? | LostInTheWoods: 1. Rob banks
2. Date Supermodels
3. Become a movie starNot necessarily in that order. On second thought, perhaps you should rephrase the question. |
What would you do if you knew you couldn't fail? | tokenadult: Negotiate a comprehensive world peace settlement. |
What Paid Services Do You Use For Your Startup? | agotterer: Free version of most of the paid apps work just find for us. Dropbox, getsatisfaction, basecamp.We pay for slicehost. |
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