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Review our startup - EventGel | samuraicatpizza: First criticism, concerns, then praise in no particular order. Apologies for duplicates feedback. And I may have gotten carried away...Criticism:* We'll start with the offcolor comment: the name EventGel sounds like something KY or Trojan Condoms would sell. This may or may not be a plus depending on y... |
Rate my startup, Go Test It (cross-browser testing) | dawie: I would use it. I feel that your pricing is too expensive. I would pay $10 maybe $15 as a small company. |
Do you have a yearly plan for your SaaS app? | catch404: How long did you run the test for? The reason I ask is I pay monthly for backpack (37signals) and after 4 months I'm considering a yearly plan. 37signals offer a lump sum option which to me is an even better option.tl;dr: New signups may like the yearly plan after a few months, and lump sum payments (maby wit... |
Any way of avoiding the $800/yr FTB tax on CA LLC's? | mscmas: Why doe the limited partnership pay the annual fee of $800
but not a general parnership? |
Do you have a yearly plan for your SaaS app? | byoung2: The irony of course is that the handful of customers who did choose the yearly plan actually contributed to one of my best months in terms of revenueI'm not an accountant, but you should recognize that revenue over the life of the subscription, not all in one month. The revenue you collect from a client signi... |
Top submissions by day/ week | mcav: are you thinking of this? http://news.ycombinator.com/listsor maybe this: http://top.searchyc.com/ |
How do I keep my p/t web development team motivated? | CyberFonic: Is your design documented? Is the implementation documented? If so, promote your current two guys to team leaders, hire some kick-ass programmers to finish the job. Pay a substantial incentive for hitting a mutually agreed deadline.Oh, by the way, do you have a business plan? One with dates, budgets, re... |
Review our startup - EventGel | spokey: Congrats on the launch. I second much of the feedback that's already been given on this page, but I wanted to mention two other specific things I've noticed:1) Your "What is EventGel?" box at the bottom of the page (which is evidently anchored to #help) has too much text. It looks like you've listed every featu... |
Self awareness | rms: Meta discussion certainly isn't banned here. I thought it was weird that post was killed -- I'm submitting it again. |
Who started the "removal of the last vowel" trend? | cperciva: I'm not sure about companies; but the first instance of "removal of the last vowel" I know is the creat(2) system call in UNIX. |
Do you put a smiley photo of yourself on your app's About page? | herrherr: Looking at the analytics of all the websites I have build (50+) the most visited page is always the "team" or "about" page. So there seems to be a desire for getting to know the people behind the company name.
Yet this doesn't prove that it is a good idea ... just saying :-) |
What do you wish you had known before starting up ? | apsurd: 100% tangible or 100% worthless. |
What do you wish you had known before starting up ? | garply: Start selling things as quickly as possible. |
What do you wish you had known before starting up ? | lee: If you have a partner, make sure you setup a vesting schedule. I didn't, and now wish I did. |
What do you wish you had known before starting up ? | csomar: learn more about debit/cerdit cards and micro-payments |
What do you wish you had known before starting up ? | bensummers: How long everything takes.Also, how to listen to advice (my co-founder and I wrote this up for the SSE blog): http://blogs.sun.com/startups/entry/how_to_listen_to_advice |
What do you wish you had known before starting up ? | edw519: Great question. Off the top of my head... 1. if (ethics != 100%) return(DontBother);
2. Regardless of paperwork, you're *married* to your co-founder.
3. if (CofounderMarriage == wrong) return(StopNow);
4. Customer first, technology second
5. Make your customers love you, everything else gets easier.
... |
What do you wish you had known before starting up ? | ScottWhigham: Cash is so important - don't take it lightly. When I first started, this was a side project for me and the tendency was not to be thrifty. Because of some bad decisions spending-wise, it ended up delaying when I was able to go full-time with the business. |
What do you wish you had known before starting up ? | KevBurnsJr: A guy I once met told me to: "Make something people want." The harder they want it, the less hard it will be to survive. |
What do you wish you had known before starting up ? | percept: I was reading this, posted by Snaptalent (YC Winter '08), last night:http://snaptalent.com/They talk about choices they made and the end result.It would be great to hear more from YC people about their experiences (a number from the list on Wikipedia have sold or moved on). |
What do you wish you had known before starting up ? | alexcq: Existing competitors more often mean that the market exists, not that the market is saturated. |
What do you wish you had known before starting up ? | known: A Known Buyer and http://www.swaroopch.com/blog/serious-before-startup/ |
What do you wish you had known before starting up ? | maurycy: Sales matter. |
What do you wish you had known before starting up ? | rama_vadakattu: The below may be seem simple but i don't know when i was starting up :( ................1.Don't go alone atleast partner with one or two similar minded person .2.Keep run way for atleast 1 to 1/1/2 Year.(nothing auto magically happens)3.More features will not make your product popular.
Implement fe... |
What do you wish you had known before starting up ? | pclark: product market fit.forget users, focus revenue.AARRR. |
What do you wish you had known before starting up ? | matt1: Related question: what's the general feeling about starting a project that you believe will be popular, but that doesn't have a clear revenue path? |
What do you wish you had known before starting up ? | jacquesm: That being a start-up is like being a goldfish in a sharktank. |
Idea for a blog: whydontwehaveityet | percept: Sounds like a job for "crowdsourcing." If you can't reach original sources, perhaps you can get responses from people who know people, work in the same field, etc.Like a Science HN. I guess there's a Science Reddit now ("I'm a stem cell researcher--ask me anything").Edit: Maybe that's what we really need--Redd... |
Anyone used XtraDB from Percona (instead of InnoDB)? | labria: I use it on one of my servers. But unfortunately, I have no data to compare to =( |
Idea for a blog: whydontwehaveityet | IgorCarron: It's a very nice idea actually. I'd contribute to it. What happens in most cases is that that one of the party (researchers, PR, ....) has oversold the potential product in the first place. Another part of the story is that in the process of maturing, or increasing their technology readiness levels (TRL) so... |
What do you wish you had known before starting up ? | tiffani: Pick partners that are just as enthusiastic about the actual idea and its business potential rather than those who are only really looking to line their pockets. You may miss it at first (especially if it's your first venture), but nobody can keep a facade up forever... |
What do you wish you had known before starting up ? | swombat: Before my first start-up? I wrote it up here:http://danieltenner.com/posts/0005-starting-up-with-a-friend...Many other things, too, most of which are mentioned in other responses here, but this would have saved me enormous amounts of grief and money if I'd read it and understood it ahead of time. |
Idea for a blog: whydontwehaveityet | wallflower: Check out Technology Review (TR) published by MIT. I was a long-time subscriber.http://www.technologyreview.com/ |
Idea for a blog: whydontwehaveityet | rman666: Flying cars; medical tricorders; food replicators; space vacations; gravity boots; anti-gravity boots; Rosie the robot; basically, anything from Star Trek or the Jetsons. |
Idea for a blog: whydontwehaveityet | smokinn: Here's another suggestion: wireless electricity. There's the new Sony wireless tv but it's an idea that should've picked up way more than it has, especially for stuff like cell phones. |
Idea for a blog: whydontwehaveityet | flooha: Funny, I was thinking about almost exactly the same topic just yesterday. Much of the problem absolutely has to be patents. I have several awesome ideas which I will never put one second of effort into because I know I would get patent trolled to death and none of them are software related.If we TRULY wanted ... |
How about a limit on the number of links you can post per day ? | tokenadult: Already in the guidelineshttp://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.htmlis "Please don't submit so many links at once that the new page is dominated by your submissions."I think reader ennui resulting in a more rapid response of ignoring submissions (or downvoting comments) is the best control on this, rather th... |
What do you wish you had known before starting up ? | barnaby: That ideas are expensive, it's implementations that are valuable.The smaller and narrower the idea, the easier it is to implement. Just keep whittling away more and more out of the idea and just boil it down to its core essence, so that you shed as much of the expense of your idea as possible. This makes it fa... |
What do you wish you had known before starting up ? | jasonlbaptiste: Make sure someone has a final call in the company. You can even divide it out: person a has final call on product design, person b has final call on scaling issues,etc. Even if you have 50% equity each, designate it through voting shares or just a bylaw.A two person bureaucracy is a sure fire way to e... |
What do you wish you had known before starting up ? | rokhayakebe: The market. The market. The competition. |
How about a limit on the number of links you can post per day ? | makecheck: It seems a lot of over-posting comes from the famous "karma: 1, created: 30 seconds ago" accounts, so it may make sense to impose limits based on time as a user. (Karma may not work as well, as I could imagine a spammer creating 100 accounts and using them all to upvote one another's submissions.) |
What do you wish you had known before starting up ? | cmos: Stand up for yourself.Don't make any mistakes big enough to kill the company.The moment you realize you can't pay a bill talk to the company you owe money to and explain to them exactly why. Then offer to work out a payment plan. You'd be surprised how many companies are just happy your communicating with them ... |
Idea for a blog: whydontwehaveityet | qeorge: Not as high-tech, but that Power Mat [1] device seems like a good example. I remember reading about it a few years ago, and just saw the first commercials for it this week.Its a good premise for a blog, and would have plenty of topics. Like all blogs, it would depend on whether you stuck with it long enough to ... |
$4.99 vs. $5.00? And what do you call your premium memberships? | ErrantX: Speaking personally $5. $.99 stuff has always annoyed me :) (mostly from having pocketfuls of change) |
$4.99 vs. $5.00? And what do you call your premium memberships? | pbhjpbhj: Ultimate! Got to be ultimate .. though I named a web hosting package "Emperor" once it was only a tailored package for a previous business partner.I always round things and never go for the only $999.95 type pricing - simply because it annoys me; I probably lose out as I think the psychology of that sort of p... |
What do you wish you had known before starting up ? | MicahWedemeyer: I really don't see the point of these very vague Ask HN posts. Surely all of this has been said before in longer, better composed blog posts. Just read the stories that show up on HN and you'll find answers to your 10,000ft startup questions.Ask HN is very useful for specific stuff, like "please give f... |
$4.99 vs. $5.00? And what do you call your premium memberships? | percept: Is it really for single-digit dollar values, or is that just an example?I ask because you could do like $19 or $24 or whatever, which is sort of a compromise between straight-up and psychological pricing. I suppose the single-digit equivalents would be $4 and $9. |
$4.99 vs. $5.00? And what do you call your premium memberships? | quellhorst: This is something you should test, not ask for other people's opinions. |
Review our startup - EventGel | mailarchis: You might wanna consider adding an address book import feature or some kind of invite sending feature via which you can invite folks you know.Great concept. All the best |
$4.99 vs. $5.00? And what do you call your premium memberships? | IsaacL: I believe Joel Spolsky mentioned in an article that instead of marketing one of your options as the 'premium' one, market the other as the 'discount' one. That depends on what other offerings you have and your market segementation, of course. |
$4.99 vs. $5.00? And what do you call your premium memberships? | steveplace: It depends. Why not split test? |
What do you wish you had known before starting up ? | rythie: If it's your first start-up, have a business model so you can bootstrap - raising any significant money will be difficult without a reputation. [Though being in YC/TechStars will get reputation/connections quickly I guess.]If you are doing it in your spare time, plan on it taking all of your spare time.Marketin... |
$4.99 vs. $5.00? And what do you call your premium memberships? | unalone: Depends on what your service is. Certain names work for certain products. "Club" suggests a certain environment that's quite separate from "Premier", and "Platinum" is another service entirely. |
$4.99 vs. $5.00? And what do you call your premium memberships? | pospischil: I've always liked just having a single number e.g. $5 instead of $5.00 or $29 instead of $29.99.There has been loads of research done on this topic though. Here is a quick link to what wikipedia has:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_pricing |
$4.99 vs. $5.00? And what do you call your premium memberships? | DanielStraight: Use names that make sense. If you're only going to have one level, this isn't a big concern, but if you're going to have more, use names that are obviously related. Bronze, silver and gold is good. Business, premium and pro is bad. Who knows how they are related? |
$4.99 vs. $5.00? And what do you call your premium memberships? | noodle: the only practical reason to price something at $_.99 that i can think of is to keep yourself in a lower payment processing bracket.for example, amazon flex pay charges one rate for below $10, and another for $10 and up. the difference isn't large, but keeping a charge at $9.99 instead of $10 ends up netting y... |
Idea for a blog: whydontwehaveityet | stcredzero: That super capacitor mentioned a few years ago (estor?)Someone periodically comes up with a new longer lived/more potent battery or a very compact capacitor. The problem is not making such devices. The problem is making them safe and cheap to manufacture. |
What do you wish you had known before starting up ? | webwright: - Charging money is a whole new learning curve. Our free product was humming along. We launched a premium product and... "What?! It's not taking off?!" There's a lot to learn about where to put the "pay wall" with a freemium offering, how to get users to upgrade, how to optimize a public/brochureware si... |
$4.99 vs. $5.00? And what do you call your premium memberships? | dflock: I'd be interested to hear what patio has to say about this. He sells his Bingo Card creator software for 29.99 and split tests everything. Have you ever tried split testing prices? |
Do you have an Amazon account with a credit card? | MikeW: Yes.
One account for AWS stuff
Another account for books/dvds/etc. |
Anyone used XtraDB from Percona (instead of InnoDB)? | morgo: To answer your question: Yes - I've used it. I wrote the first article you linked to though, so I guess I had to :p |
Do you have an Amazon account with a credit card? | jws: Since many people might not like to broadcast where they have accounts, I've presumptuously resubmitted this as a poll.http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=885790 |
Why does Lisp need to be slower than c? | wglb: Lisp executables are fast based on good compilers. You can usually tailor your Lisp program with declarations and speed/safety trade-offs to get very good code. There is a benchmark site called Shootout that shows how well pretty much any language compares for execution time.And if you discover that you have the... |
Why does Lisp need to be slower than c? | sjs: It doesn't. CL allows you to specify types and have your code optimized. This is an oft-cited feature of it. |
Why does Lisp need to be slower than c? | kroger: How to make Lisp go faster than Cwww.lrde.epita.fr/~didier/research/verna.06.imecs.pdfhttp://www.foldr.org/~michaelw/log/programming/lisp/reverse-...And there are more papers on the subject (google for it) |
What do you wish you had known before starting up ? | morpheism: Target businesses, not consumers. It is enticing to build a consumer-oriented service when you have a great idea and a strong team to implement it. The problem is that revenue per customer is low and you will need to attract a lot of users to offset costs and reach profitability. Your runway to success is ba... |
Why does Lisp need to be slower than c? | jws: The premise is only mostly true.See: How to make LISP go faster than C, http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cache:pJg0zHyA8s8J:ww...As an example, consider C pointers. The compiler never knows if two objects passed by reference are going to overlap in memory, so it can't do certain optimizations that seem obvious t... |
Why does Lisp need to be slower than c? | notaddicted: Assuming: you can generate any sequence of instructions you want with C.1. The fastest possible implementation is possible in C.2. Lisp will never "be faster" (the limited meaning of "be faster" we are considering in this context) than C because that is impossible.3. Any difference however minor, will caus... |
Why does Lisp need to be slower than c? | jws: We have now barraged the original poster with papers and assertions that his premise is wrong.How about a new premise: Why do LISP programmers write slow programs?, and if that premise gets shot to pieces, how about Why do people think LISP programmers write slow programs?. |
Anyone used XtraDB from Percona (instead of InnoDB)? | toolbag: We started using XtraDB a few months ago, I wasn't involved in the actual implementation of it so I asked our DBA, here is what he said:"it is supposed to work better with 8 core boxes like we have - both in terms of IO, and cpu usage.it also gives us more flexibility on tweaking parameters." |
Idea for a blog: whydontwehaveityet | wicknicks: That's an interesting idea. Maybe we could use some interesting automatic means to "cluster" information from these new technology areas. Suppose a system allowed someone to create a new technology area by defining all the entities involved in it (Names of people, research center, location of research center... |
$4.99 vs. $5.00? And what do you call your premium memberships? | pplante: I like round numbers. It keeps everything nice and easy to multiply :)As for the name of the subscription, I find this can be tough. We are launching with "Premium" for now, but we already have plans for a second level membership when some extra features are developed. When we get there the name thats being... |
Anyone here do Web mining/harvesting/scraping? | cjoh: We do a lot of scraping and the best we've found, really, is beautifulsoup and being good at python. There's no UI or easy tool that's going to replace that. |
Why does Lisp need to be slower than c? | Yaa101: Because C is not really a higher level language, C is very close to it's assembly core and often C and Assembly are combined in functions. Also don't forget that modern C compilers are very good in optimizing for speed AND size, if you see the generated assembly from the compile job there is hardly to none opti... |
How much would you give to a non-profit to rewrite emacs in scheme? | hapless: Climacs and Hemlock have existed for many years, but there's been no flood of users. Both are high-quality emacs-like editors written in common lisp; both have many extensions for development, mail, news etc.I can't imagine a donation-supported project going from scratch would be substantially more successful... |
What bothers you most about being a NYC startup? | lacker: The absence of response is perhaps its own response ;-) |
Anyone here do Web mining/harvesting/scraping? | keefe: I've done it with Java, HttpClient and regular expressions. |
Learning Javascript & AJAX | felixc: I'm going to recommend Douglas Crockford's "JavaScript: The Good Parts". It will really show you how to get the most out of the language and avoid the nasty pitfalls.As a side note, I attended a talk by him last night on this topic, and wrote up a summary. For a preview of the book, you may be interested in che... |
Learning Javascript & AJAX | hackworth: Jeremy Keith's "Dom Scripting" is a pretty good guide for getting up to speed with the basics of good JavaScript coding. If you want to transition to something more advanced later, I'd suggest "Pro JavaScript Design Patterns" by Dustin Diaz. |
Anyone here do Web mining/harvesting/scraping? | hellotoby: I use a mixture of cURL and PHP's DOM and simpleXML functions to scrape what I need. |
Learning Javascript & AJAX | eam: I was in the same shoes as you were. I really enjoyed Javascript & AJAX 7th ed. by Negrino & Smith. It's an easy read and has great examples. It nicely builds up from simple javascript to DOM manipulation, JSON, AJAX, and ends with a brief touch up on javascript frameworks.As I was reading this book at the same ti... |
How do Dave&Buster's and Chuck-E-Cheese avoid anti-gambling laws? | jacquesm: The key is that for gambling to be gambling the element of skill has to be less important than the element of chance.Otherwise it is a game of skill, not of chance.So, lottery -> 0 skill -> game of chanceAs soon as you get above a certain threshold of being able to influence the outcome of the game it is cons... |
Learning Javascript & AJAX | tptacek: There's nothing wrong with continuing to use jQuery. In fact, there is actually something wrong with "hand-coding" things for the sake of avoiding jQuery. Spend your time where it will make a difference. |
Learning Javascript & AJAX | invisible: I would honestly recommend reading through some of the code and trying to figure out what it's doing. Find a function in jQuery you use all of the time and figure out how it accomplishes it's goal. Also, John Resig has a decent (albeit may miss some of the points you'll need) tutorial application: http://e... |
Guiding Novice Programmers | jacquesm: Get them to start on something small rather than to dive head first into a huge application. If you don't have overview, and that's a really big issue in the beginning you will never build up confidence. Baby steps are small steps. Then once they master that build out the scope.Maybe isolate some small part o... |
Guiding Novice Programmers | makecheck: Make sure they're familiar with the documentation tools and web sites (e.g. for Python, they should know how to "pydoc" library calls, and how to find stuff on python.org, so when they see a library call or a new construct, they may be able to figure out what it's doing). |
Learning Javascript & AJAX | known: I like http://www.xul.fr/en/ tutorials. |
How do Dave&Buster's and Chuck-E-Cheese avoid anti-gambling laws? | anateus: In addition to the skill/change thing, there's something I've been told by a Linden Labs employee (when they closed the casinos in Second Life) is that there's a specific provision for "game tokens" versus real money. That is, as long as all you can earn from gambling is tokens the government doesn't really ca... |
Learning Javascript & AJAX | keefe: I want to echo the sentiments of others regarding the value of continuing to use those libraries. A lot of real world programming is about knowing when to use libraries and which libraries to use. |
Guiding Novice Programmers | keefe: I think one key is to have a solid understand of the fundamentals - I think programming is like martial arts that way. As usual, it doesn't have to be exact, just a useful abstraction. What is a computer program, anyway? A set of instructions for manipulating data and devices attached to the computer. The CPU ca... |
Learning Javascript & AJAX | workhorse: I am a huge fan of JQuery.I think the JQuery website provides a great resource for learning and using it.http://docs.jquery.com/Main_Page |
Learning Javascript & AJAX | furtivefelon: I will recommend the book i'm currently reading: Secrets of the Javascript Ninja: http://jsninja.com/. It is written by Jquery author, and it shows you basically how a framework like JQuery would be written. It is not a book for the faint of hearts, very in depth treatment of various aspects of javascript... |
Learning Javascript & AJAX | samuraicatpizza: I rarely use anything other than O'Reilly's"JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Fifth Edition" (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596101992/). It may be a bit advanced if you haven't done much programming before and is probably more of a reference book, but it covers a ton of topics and has a lot of working... |
what's a good pet for the working programmer? | PieSquared: Well, iguanas used to be very popular pets. Just let one roam around your apartment! |
what's a good pet for the working programmer? | eam: I currently have a small dog, very independent, but does require the occasional walk.I think a hermit crab might be ideal for you. |
what's a good pet for the working programmer? | yannis: Just to state the obvious a Penthouse Pet will probably be the best option, since you living alone (might be high maintenance though). Second best I would recommend a cyborg beetle http://discovermagazine.com/2009/may/30-the-pentagons-beetle...Third best will be a cat as long as you understand that you can neve... |
what's a good pet for the working programmer? | bobbyi: I have a cat and it works very well except that he does chew cables. |
what's a good pet for the working programmer? | pyre: Suggestions:
* A pair of rats
* FishEither way there will be cage/tank maintenance, but it might be more frequent with the rats.{edit} A tarantula could be good too {/edit} |
what's a good pet for the working programmer? | Todd: A pet rock may be the best choice. |
what's a good pet for the working programmer? | cperciva: I am owned by a cat. He generally sits quietly and doesn't interrupt while I'm working, and has learned to leave cables alone; however, he often wakes me up in the middle of the day to demand that food be presented or doors be opened.Overall, however, I'd rather be owned by a cat than have some other animal ... |
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