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If there was a bury/upmod brigade on HN, how would we know? | rms: PG says that his best software for checking this is not in the public source code. |
How do you organize your code on your machine? | selven: "/.../Desktop/project_name" contains all the files for that project. Every project has its own directory. |
Does Web Traffic Always Equal Income? | dwight721: If the traffic has a direct relationship to something you are selling; then yes. Only you would know this. Conversely, there so many traffic generating sites that send visitors to your site in hope of gaining reciprocal viewing from other users that it's impossible to tell the "real" reason someone visits a particular site. Traffic means nothing unless it is controlled traffic that you generate for a particular reason; whether it be to read an article or to sell a product |
How to design a karma reward system | dustingetz: stackoverflow has a few interesting incentives:- activity is renamed to 'rep' which implies that your activity ranking reflects on you personally, even though everyone knows its really a measure of how long you've been active and whether you answer broad beginner questions that get a lot of google hits- it makes sure you know when you are downvoted- though the numeric penalty of a downvote is negligible, but since it is a personal criticism of your reputation, you have ego incentive to improve your contribution |
How to setup scaled-down Craigslist for my struggling rural area? | sacrilicious: White label? No. Singularly-focused on Classifieds? Nope. But Patch.com may be a great way to pull together towns that are ailing and need to rely on each other.
Am I biased? Yes - these are guys I know and respect, but it's at the very least a good model to shoot for and they may solve a lot of the harder problems as they grow. |
How to become a better programmer? | ngom: You need a sound understanding of CSS, HTML and javascript. Although you may have been messing about with them a lot, try and get an in depth understanding of CSS selectors, what semantic HTML mark up is, and how to write quality code in javascript -- unobtrusive javascript is something to look up.Javascript is really worth learning in depth. It has some quirks that will gently introduce to some useful topics such as JSON, closures, elements of functional programming, prototype based inheritance, and so on. Further, it will help you understand how to get more out of other dynamic languages too; python, ruby, etc. Douglas Crockford has some great videos on Javascript that are worth looking up.You're not restricted to client-side programming with Javascript either. For instance, look up nodejs - a nascent server-side javascript framework that looks quite promising. It will really make you think if you've just been a PHP guy up to now!Try and get a handle on PHP's more advanced aspects - many of which have only really arrived in recent versions. Classes, name spaces, closures and so on. Although I'd really suggest another dynamic language altogether; python is a good choice, but ruby is splendid too.Once you're confident with that stuff you may want to go in a slightly different direction. Try Java, C, Clojure or Erlang. Try reading some more general computer science books.I hope that helps. Good luck and all the best. |
How do you organize your code on your machine? | njharman: ~/work/fooN
Where fooN are svn (possibly other) working directories.My personal (at home) is slightly different cause I have a lot more stuff than just code revision controlled. ~/work/art/
~/work/src/
~/work/sys/
~/work/web/
~/work/words/
"sys" is /etc and other system files from various machines. "web" hearkens to the days when websites were static html and images. Probably should merge that with "src" somedayIn src I have some directories such as "hints", "icons", "perl", etc. into which to stuff bits of things that don't deserve their own VCS repository. |
How do you organize your code on your machine? | grayrest: ~/dev -- projects I'm (semi-)actively hacking on
~/Repositories -- checkouts of dependencies and projects
I'm tracking but not hacking
~/arc -- same as dev but for work |
New Year resolutions and programming/coding projects | cmars232: Learn Scheme. I've been coding along with "The Little Schemer" over the break.I feel like I need a fresh perspective before I can approach Clojure -- otw I'll just end up writing a bunch of Java with parens. |
How do you organize your code on your machine? | dannytatom: ~/ ls dev/
freelance opensource personal slum
Fairly self explanatory, slum is for random one-off things that probably won't go anywhere. |
Monthly Subscription Plan vs Annual Subscription Plan? | paraschopra: Do an A/B test! |
Monthly Subscription Plan vs Annual Subscription Plan? | pvg: I think it depends more on the complexity (conceptually) of the product and the cost. A user might be more inclined to commit for a shorter trial period and test the usefulness of the premium features - for consumers, 'cost of a latte' seems to be a much easier decision to make than $50. There are also other parameters you can tweak, the first one that comes to mind is the utility of the free offering, especially for a community site - more users means more network effects, more community participation and more opportunities for conversion. Right now your free offering seems to be drastically more limited than the pro account and that might be something you could play with. |
A free "cell phone" for use within a few miles of home? | bemmu: More than why not, I'd like to know why? |
How do you organize your code on your machine? | cmelbye: ~/Projects/ for important projects (i.e. not git clones of random GitHub projects, but major personal/work projects)I don't have many other random code snippet things, but they generally go into Dropbox for easy storage. |
A free "cell phone" for use within a few miles of home? | jarsj: I have seen geek radio pairs. The quality wasn't great and they came with many ifs and else. Then there are legal restrictions, atleast here in India. Checkout ThinkGeek.As for the successful commercialization, I think it involves too many components for ordinary people to be able to use it and customer support would be a nightmare. |
Monthly Subscription Plan vs Annual Subscription Plan? | iworkforthem: It is best to have the 2 options available. Monthly a bit more ex. so that users can use and terminate anytime they want. The yearly option for your hardcore fans, of course, it should be a bit cheaper. So far this work really well for me. |
How to become a better programmer? | mattm: Buy a subscription to Safari Online and spend 15 minutes each day reading about programming.It doesn't really matter what you read. Just pick a book that currently sounds interesting and read it. Since you are interested in OO PHP, there is a book called something like "Developing Object-Oriented Applications in PHP 5" |
A free "cell phone" for use within a few miles of home? | jgrahamc: Does anyone else remember Rabbit?http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_(telecommunications)?w... |
How would you invest/manage $20K in startup seed money? | joshu: You need to build a bunch of inexpensive, low-effort prototypes. Do that while you're employed.The most important thing here is what will the startup _do_, not how to run it. Spend some time figuring that out.Anything you spend time on that ISN'T the product (renting out houses, consulting jobs) are a waste of time. |
A free "cell phone" for use within a few miles of home? | wglb: A ham radio license won't help, as ham radio transmissions are forbidden to be encrypted, and there are limitations on speech, e.g., profanity, commercial transactions.There are unlicensed bands that are available, but again there may be restrictions similar to ham radio, and cost might also be a factor. |
How would you invest/manage $20K in startup seed money? | js3309: From your statement, it doesn't seem like you want to "start" a company. My best advice is to angel invest in a company that can use your expertise. A good place to start is YC Demo days. DONT QUIT YOUR JOB!My question for you: is 12k pretax, if it is how much do you save per month? |
A free "cell phone" for use within a few miles of home? | mvalente: Hack a walkie talkie ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkie-talkie ) ?Use one as the base and get the audio in/out connected to your home PC audio in/out.Hacking in a tone dialer ( http://is.gd/5EjWA ) might also be necessary.-- MV |
Recommendations for an accountant in Toronto? | richardw: I don't live there so I can't help you, but I'm interested in your question. Why wouldn't you look on one of the online recommendation websites? (e.g. Yelp, or whatever works in Toronto.) Do you figure HN-types would give a better answer? |
Monthly Subscription Plan vs Annual Subscription Plan? | Travis: I'd recommend testing your hypothesis. A pure split test (A/B) doesn't quite seem right, because it'll be more difficult to compare w/o doing some sort of multivariate regression.I'd suggest this: peel off a small segment (10%, 20%) randomly out of your user base. Give them the option for monthly / annually. Compare the revenue from that group to the revenue from your control group. Even if you do anger a few of your customers, or the monthly plan costs you a lot of sales / revenue, you've only done it with a small section of your audience.The only downside to this is that you might find some customers prefer the monthly plan, even if you only want to offer the annual (after testing, you find that annual is more profitable to you).Each site is different. Each customer base is different. This seems to me like a situation where you should collect data, rather than look for high level advice. |
How would you invest/manage $20K in startup seed money? | clueless123: Been there, done that.. with hindsight my personal recomendations are:1. Don't leave your existing job until you have to , keep the income comming.
2. Spend as little as possible, as late as possible.
3. Leverage your knowledge and experience.. stick with what you know.
4. Have fun, enjoy what you are doing.. life is way to short. |
Where do I go from here? | jacquesm: Why is being an architecture astronaut supposedly a bad thing ?There are plenty of places that are in dire need of people with that skill, it's taking system administration to a whole new level and not that many people are capable of doing that.If you're up for a challenge find some fledgling open source project that tries to solve a real world problem that you have some affinity with and start contributing.Sooner or later inspiration will strike. It usually does when you stop looking for it!best of luck, Jacques |
Where do I go from here? | patio11: What do you do for inspiration? How do you come up with your personal projects? When do you find time to do them outside of work?I talk to people who have problems. (I recommend meatspace for this since if you just go to HN or Twitter you'll tend to select the problems that people on HN or Twitter have, and they'll say something like "I am really involved in too many social networks and need like a meta-social network, with RSS feeds and Twitter integration", and you'll go off and build something that will never be used by someone without a Twitter account which, by last count, excludes 99.9% of the population of earth.) For my personal project, I solved that problem. Finding time was a matter of looking at what I did between leaving from work and going to sleep and deciding what mattered to me less than being a successful businessman. Bye, WoW, it was nice while it lasted. |
Where do I go from here? | turkishrevenge: "My problem is - or, rather, one of my many problems (because I surely have more than one problem) - is that my hobby, my passion is programming."I know its been said over and over again, but I think the advice still holds: join an open source project. Contribute to a piece of software you and others enjoy using. Software only gets better when people are willing to work on it. |
Where do I go from here? | angelbob: "Hey, we need someone to develop an infrastructure for scheduling and running thousands of jobs on hunreds of different boxes and to keep the status of said jobs, etc." But that kind of makes me an architecture astronaut which, supposedly, is A Bad Thing (tm)Just doing it to do it makes you an architecture astronaut. Finding somebody with that problem and solving it, especially in a different way, is a desirable thing. You could either out-compete an existing solution by doing it better, or find a chunk of problem space they don't really address (or don't address well).Then you're an entrepreneur, which around here is certainly a desirable thing :-)That is to say, figure out what it's useful for and keep that in mind. |
Where do I go from here? | vaksel: start a blog, build a following, then once you decide to do your own startup, you'll have that first 1000-2000 early users |
Where do I go from here? | edw519: While the work is somewhat interesting and challenging, I'd hardly say it's something I'm passionate about.The reason you are not passionate about your work is because something is missing. Identifying what is missing is your first step in determining where to go from here.I have been in a similar situation to you. Always working. Important stuff. Sometimes cool, often not. But something was always missing.Architecture not rigorous enough. Inadequate data base design. Insufficient requirements definition. Lousy code base. Unable to scale. Unable to expand or handle completely new features.But I always managed to make it work anyway.Then it occurred to me, if such mediocre systems were able to produce adequate results in commercial environments, what would be possible with great systems?So now I'm building a framework/architecture/environment that beautifully handles everything I thought was missing before. The passion is built-in. Instead of, "Look at me, ma!" now it's "Look at this, everybody!"Where do you go from here? Fill in the gaps that should have been providing passion all along. That oughta keep you busy for a while. |
Where do I go from here? | mtrimpe: Start a company. Just pick some interesting idea you're actually capable of executing and just start building it.Don't worry so much about whether you will actually make money, to keep it a hobby, but make it in such a way that you might, to keep alive hopes of actually making a living out of it.Doing it that way will allow you to make it however you please and to make it as beautiful as you want. The fun part is that along the way you will encounter critical areas you never thought about, but which are quite interesting to do once (setting up a build infrastructure, migration etc.)Just make sure your code stays a thing of beauty, something so solidly engineered that you're truly proud of it. Don't rush things but take the time to make them 'just right'.That way you'll have had a great time writing it, and if your company ever gets off the ground you'll have an amazing code base to start off with. |
How long after launch did you get your first customer? | dpcan: Before I launched each app, I had my first customers lined up. I think it's a mistake to spend time developing something first and then hope there are customers somewhere.To be more specific, while developing a big product I spent time each week contacting people in my network until I found customers that were ready to pay as soon as I went live. It worked well.In one case, I found a company that allowed me to offer 4, 2-hour classes with 15 people per class for 1 day after launch just to introduce them to the app, answer questions, and get everyone signed up.I got about 40 paying customers that day, and it was the best launch ever for my small business as all those people told more people and we were growing from day 1. |
How long after launch did you get your first customer? | jacquesm: 1) same day2) mailing list that I'd built up over years |
Where do I go from here? | alain94040: Easy: keep your day job. Work night and weekends on something you are passionate about.Where to find cool stuff? As a programmer, the world is your oyster: there is a 100:1 ratio of people with ideas vs. people who can implement them. You probably don't know that I run a website to help people find such ideas: http://fairsoftware.net/publicProjectsIf nothing else works, there got to be some open source project which you think could use some serious rewriting. In my case, I wish I had the time to design a better shell (bash just isn't smart enough for the way I work - if you ever used the Mac MPW in the late 90s, you know what I mean).For others, it's a better, smarter GUI framework. I also think you could build something really cool to display Google search results: coverflow is just one starting point, but you can easily beat Google at the display part because of their fanaticism with providing simple page results. There is a better way for sure. |
Where do I go from here? | chipsy: If the suggestion of solving other people's problems or entrepreneuring doesn't (directly) interest you:Find a second skill to cultivate that complements programming. (Prime examples would come from the arts and science.) Seek a novel interdisciplinary approach to using both the new skill and your current ones. You don't become passionate about hard work overnight, yet you've somehow reached that point with your programming abilities. So lifestyle changes notwithstanding, if you can do it once, you can do it again with a new skill.Doing this will bring you out of the "meta" realm where it looks like everything in software is one of (hugely complex, painful to maintain, already built, a pointless hack). Instead, you will have the benefit of perspective and can start to apply your technical armaments to some other field where computer-oriented problems are obvious, commonplace, never-ending, and usually - at first - easy to solve. |
How long after launch did you get your first customer? | Asa-Nisse: First day (hour?).Adwords.Consumer product if anyone wants to know. |
Where do I go from here? | coryrc: Read HackADay www.hackaday.com and improve on one that sounds fun. |
Where do I go from here? | stephen: If your dream job is "thousand of jobs on hundreds of boxes", why not start hacking on something like Hadoop/Hive (or any one of the other new/popular distributed data stores) and, after proving yourself to the community, try to get a job for one of the companies that sponsors/offers support for the project?E.g. cloudera, engineyard, something like that.That way you're programming on a project that is technically challenging, more mainstream, and also a core part of the company employing you (instead of just being an enterprise IT cost center), all while leaving the business stuff to the company's sales/execs/etc.My hunch is that those types of companies are more open to telecommuting as well, which might be nice given you mentioned having a family. |
Completely crazy idea for an image classification system? | pgbovine: you might want to take a look at the Shazam song classification system, which essentially does a 'brute force' search like the one you sketched out, except with a lot of cleverness to make it run super-fastresearch paper:
http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdfblog entry summarizing paper:
http://laplacian.wordpress.com/2009/01/10/how-shazam-works/ |
Where do I go from here? | bgurupra: I have experienced exactly what are you are talking about here and at least this was my problem - I was not happy simply because my mind kept jumping from one thing to another, I would spend all the time on news aggregators,checking emails, reading some random stuff,jumping from one task to another without concentrating on anything and not fully completing anything on interenet.I always wanted to join some open source project but everytime I would just manage to download the sources,maybe do some sample work and then get distracted onto something else.Then I thought maybe I was just lazy and tried all sorts of productivity tips and tricks to get out it.Then one day I was reading a Buddist book on Medidation and it had some really useful advice( and no I am not at all religious but at least what that book seemed to me was very clever mind hack).It asks you to just "Let go" , don't think about your past, don't think too much about the future.Just focus only and only on what you are doing right now.If things are meant to be they will be, if you like programming just go and program , don't bother too much on what is the problem,eventually it is only but logical that you will get good at it, you will obviously start working on areas that interest you,you will become skilled enough that you can probably get a job in the field you like or maybe open up your own company.I think the key is you have a computer and you have the interest, just go an program and don't bother too much about doing something "important" or writing "Poetry".The book btw is Mindfulness-Bliss-Beyond-Meditators-Handbook |
How long after launch did you get your first customer? | patio11: I had my first customer two weeks after launching. (He actually got a refund -- but I learned two things to incorporate into version 1.02.)My main plan when starting the business was acquiring customers through SEO, with the possibility of eventually "cracking the AdWords code" and figuring out how to acquire them profitably through there. That is pretty much still the plan. |
How long after launch did you get your first customer? | compumike: For our first product, we used eBay, starting an auction at $0.01/free shipping and letting it go for a week to see where it ended up. We got lots of bidders and a better price than we expected, and most importantly lots of interest.After that, we did several more eBay runs to test different copy / pricing, and then with that information, launched our own web store (normal fixed-price checkout, non-eBay) about 8 weeks after that first auction.Now with 2nd product, we've already got an established reputation and traffic in our niche, and developed the 2nd product specifically around the feedback we were getting from customers.This is for a consumer product, hybrid of physical parts + content. Not sure that you can apply the eBay concept to a SaaS, but depending on what you're doing, it may actually be possible (i.e. if people would be naturally searching on eBay for software to fill that need, then put up a 12-month subscription as an auction!). |
Where do I go from here? | bhousel: Find a local meetup, and try to connect with people in your area who have cool ideas. Then put together a team and start building.BTW, if you happen to be in the NYC or Philly area, email me. |
How long after launch did you get your first customer? | elblanco: Same day. Had customers lines up before launching. |
Please critique (harshly if necessary) Movie Tracker | hoffmabc: http://movies.blinkindustries.comClickable |
Where do I go from here? | jrockway: Go to conferences. Make friends with like-minded people. Get another job.Then you will be closer to your dream than you are now. |
How long after launch did you get your first customer? | dagw: The last startup I was involved in had two customers lined up before launch. We (well the two founders, I was technically the first employee) started by pitching their product to their contacts in the relevant industry and didn't actually launch until they had a couple of at least potential customers lined up.The product was quite niche and quite expensive so we didn't really need many customers. So the plan was to grow largely by word of mouth and by using our network of contacts to get future leads. |
Rate my startup idea "Be Caller Nine" | replicatorblog: Is there a way to make it useful in an asynchronous context? I think the kernel is smart, but the 9th caller issue seems less pertinent in a web-based world. However, the notion of creating a reward system for attention and action could be the start of something big.Right now I imagine the evaluation of such a purchase would be: "cool, but I can just say "the first person to send me an email with an answer to X" wins something."Cool idea though, stick with it. |
Please critique (harshly if necessary) Movie Tracker | tdoggette: It looks sharp, but my main concern would be that anyone who's the type to watch and track movie watching already has Netflix and won't want to invest time in something else.How are you swinging ticket discounts, by the way? |
Rate my startup idea "Be Caller Nine" | danicgross: cool. i think the ideas that take services that were previously available only to bigger corporations and make them accessible to everyone (ala polleverywhere.com) are almost always useful.
you might want to look in to developing in other mediums other then calling - texting or emailing in are also good. |
Rate my startup idea "Be Caller Nine" | stevedewald: One company I recently purchased from (www.bonobos.com) has had some success marketing via rewarding consumers for attention. Their various strategies got people a little more involved than just listening and calling a phone line, but I think it's an interesting concept. |
Rate my startup idea "Be Caller Nine" | lanstein: Do radio stations really have that many phone lines though? I'm not sure what the benefit of that would be; just let the carrier create the circuit or not, no? It certainly sounds like a good idea if the alternative is maintaining that level of infrastructure. |
Is it wise to build products on twitters API? | nfnaaron: totlol's experience may influence your answer: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1019360I guess it depends on a) whether products you build can stand on their own and are just augmented with twitter integration, combined with b) who you think will eventually buy twitter. |
Rate my startup idea "Be Caller Nine" | NickWritersBloc: I think executionally it's a great idea. The thing is - telephones were always used as an input channel because people were listening to the radio and NOT doing something else. Maybe there's a live tv application here - maybe event programming makes sense (you could sell this off to a progressive experiential marketing agency - Jack Morton/etc.) for promotional elements.The long and short of it is - think of the required use/application and where this actually fits. Or if not, create a use for it and monetize. |
Rate my startup idea "Be Caller Nine" | JangoSteve: I was a DJ and program manager for my university's radio station, and based on my experience I think there's a much larger opportunity here. Firstly, to answer your question, yes I think non-profit radio stations in particular would be quite interested in something like this, as they can't usually afford more than a 1 or 2-line phone system.Now, the larger opportunity. If you could make it a less-specialized system and aim it at radio stations, I think you'd really have something. The biggest problem we had with taking calls on the air wasn't so much that we couldn't afford the phone lines, but that we couldn't afford the call-screener. If you had a system that could simulate let's say 10 lines, whereby people call in, it plays an automated screening message asking them their name and purpose of their call, and then it transcribed that onto the DJ's computer screen and allowed them to pick which calls to answer while the rest remain on hold, that would be awesome!I don't doubt this could probably be done with some combination of Google Voice and Grasshopper. Then again, they don't market their products to this niche the way you could. The biggest hurdle with B2B is acquiring the customers, which often takes a focused message. But I digress. |
Rate my startup idea "Be Caller Nine" | staunch: Sounds like the classic case of developing a thing because you think it's cool, not because you've seen any demonstrated need for it. Even if there is some demand you probably have little chance at getting in front of the decision makers, if you don't even know who they are already. I'd say 99/100 times this enough to know you should immediately abort any plans of turning it into a business. Maybe put it up somewhere, promote it a bit, and let people enjoy it, but don't try to make it into something it isn't.On the other hand maybe this could eventually lead you to something that could be very successful. While trying to sell this you may find that there are many other unmet needs in the market. Maybe you can develop a whole suite of similar tools. This might be as good a place to start as anything else. |
Rate my startup idea "Be Caller Nine" | dksf: It seems like this is 1 feature which might be interesting to bloggers/podcasters. Is there a more generalized "podcaster sweepstakes platform" you could build? Help bloggers/podcasters engage their audiences more around giveaways/sweepstakes to generate buzz and attention, track brand impressions/dollars, present network of advertisers, etc... I'm not a big blogger or podcaster so I wouldn't likely be the best person to design this product to solve my problems. But reach out to real users/partners/potential customers. They'll likely tell you what to build. |
How long after launch did you get your first customer? | sgoraya: I had a demo built which I then presented to a small group of potential clients (which included my partners contacts in Commercial Real Estate and Oil field services - there were probably 15 people at the demo). After the demo I had two clients and things got going from there.From idea to demo: ~4 monthsWe build custom geospatial apps. for our clients. |
Tricks for choosing which features to charge for? | makecheck: As a consumer, I like being able to at least try any feature, no matter what tier it's on. Just make it clear when something is a trial, as opposed to permanently free.There's nothing worse than having to pay $10 more per month, or whatever, only to find out that something isn't worth it. |
How long after launch did you get your first customer? | JangoSteve: For most of my products, I've had customers before launch. Then again, I guess that depends on what you mean by "launch". I've never been big on showy launches. I usually put something up right away, and then get to work refining and finding more customers. Based on my last couple endeavers, I no longer even begin work on any new products until I already have a customer for it. (and by "work" I mean actual coding/design/development, because of course the process of finding a customer for a new idea is still technically work of the non-technical variety) |
Rate my startup idea "Be Caller Nine" | tron_carter: Good idea, I think there are many low-power radio stations with limited resources that could utilize something like this. Also, the concept could be extended for local businesses to run phone-in contests when running a TV or radio ad. |
Rate my startup idea "Be Caller Nine" | raheemm: Seems like this would be in demand, especially as more people start producing their own videocast and audiocasts.If you target the blogger market, and many of them use Skype, then you can implement your idea as a skype/justin add-on. It'll be easier to market by piggybacking on a larger solution/platform. |
How long after launch did you get your first customer? | ashishk: -2 months. (yes thats a negative)I built a dummy signup site before I started developing the real app. Launched with a few hundred users.That said, my app is consumer-facing, and I sign up customers with ads (it's a dating site). |
How long after launch did you get your first customer? | timdorr: 30 minutes. Customer #2 was at 60 minutes. But I had been hyping up the specific launch date and time for a while. But it snowballed pretty quickly. Haven't had a day without a sale since launch. |
Tricks for choosing which features to charge for? | angelbob: An old trick from shareware folks: pick features they won't want to use immediately, like going beyond a certain size/number of projects. That way you're only targeting people who already know your service is valuable to them (or isn't). |
Rate my startup idea "Be Caller Nine" | andresburgos: I can definitely see this on streaming radio apps like ShoutCast. Great idea Chad! |
Rate my startup idea "Be Caller Nine" | runT1ME: Think its a neat idea, and could have a lot of uses from radio to podcasts, etc. What APIs/telecom libs are you currently using? Have you looked into Voice XML/ccXML?I'm interested in writing some open source telcom APIs/server so I'm always curious to hear someone's thoughts that might be a potential user. |
How long after launch did you get your first customer? | koenbok: I think it was two or three months (http://www.checkoutapp.com). |
Tricks for choosing which features to charge for? | csomar: People will pay for feature $x a month, if that features helps them boost their earnings $2x; think of that: which features can make your client richer? How much? and charge! |
Where do I go from here? | csomar: You are stuck with ideas but you have a potential. Try something simple, if you are not working for money so you'll really not care if 10 or 20K users use it every day.Look around, what can help people? Something simple, small and easily maintainable. Finding it is a little hard. Don't forget that no one will give you the idea; but you can find it yourself.Do a little search on forums, what are people looking for? what causes them headaches? May be the solution is a little Firefox plugin, but it can help kill your free time... if you finished it, go to the next one. One of those projects may turn big and take to what you have never thought of... |
How long after launch did you get your first customer? | harisenbon: I had one customer within the first week or so of going live, but unfortunately that's still my only paying customer to date.I'm still struggling with the freemium business model and how to weight things to get people to upgrade to the pricier versions. |
Rate my startup idea "Be Caller Nine" | qthrul: Good reverse pattern research:http://www.google.com/search?q=%22winning+radio+contests%22By offering up a specific number of channels (i.e. incoming ports for calls) you could also specify what percentage of busy rings you could anticipate (example: Erlang/Engset calculations) to give the adrenaline effect that is more desirable -- hearing a "sorry you are caller # 4" vs a fast busy.You could also play back an advertisement for 20 seconds saying that to be registered as a caller you need to listen to this or their calling party NPA-NXX-XXXX will be removed from the call count listing.Sell the 20 seconds of ad time to local businesses saying things like "mention Blogcaster offer 14 to get 20% off your next meal" or unique one time numbers used for Amazon or other discounts where those numbers can be manufactured. |
Please critique (harshly if necessary) Movie Tracker | covercash: When I buy tickets, do you ship them to me or can I print them out immediately? Are they for a specific movie/time/date or are they generic vouchers? |
Best invoicing app? | caffo: I think the question would be if there's any invoicing app that supports moneybrookers, not which one is the best.Personally I use blinksale for my invoicing needs. Its well done and simple. A more complete (feature-wise) version is in the works, but who knows when they will launch it. |
Rate my startup idea "Be Caller Nine" | jasonwilk: Hey Chad, too bad about your original idea. I liked that one. Anyways, I think you need to think where contests are headed, especially when considering conferences, live podcasts, etc. Many people are going the SMS route, so if the app could integrate both phone calls and SMS, I think that would be fancy. Just my 2 cents. See you next week. |
Rate my startup idea "Be Caller Nine" | nannylaff: most of your responses are from "super techies". They may not be your target.One of your targets should be the folks that stay at home or listen on the radio...there are lots of us now...consider the demograhics. The "over the hill gang". |
Rate my startup idea "Be Caller Nine" | grandalf: This is a great idea, and I think the power of it is that it's essentially a raffle but stepping around the regulations that make doing so illegal without government permission. |
Please critique (harshly if necessary) Movie Tracker | joe_bleau: http://movies.blinkindustries.com/movies looks corrupted in Opera.How 'bout some screenshots? I can't seem to explore the site at all without signing up. |
Rate my startup idea "Be Caller Nine" | cujo: Do DJs and what not actually wait for the nth caller? I always just assumed they just grabbed a line and, woo hoo, that's the winner. |
Should I go with Chromium or Google Chrome? | melling: Chromium will give you the latest builds. You will also need to use it if you want to use plugins on Linux or Mac. |
Should I go with Chromium or Google Chrome? | tdedecko: I'm currently using Chromium on Ubuntu. I find the dev builds to be buggy. It is not very stable and it has some really annoying display bugs.I haven't tried Chrome yet, but if you are looking for stability I would trust it over Chromium. |
Best invoicing app? | laktek: Give a try on CurdBee - http://curdbee.com.We currently do support Paypal, Google Checkout, 2Checkout and Authorize.net. We do have plans to add support to other gateways including Moneybookers. |
YC vs TechStars | vaksel: To me YC is more of a first stringer compared to Techstars. They've proven their stuff. They've had plenty of exits. You know they can get stuff done.Take techcrunch for example, a ton of YC startups get their own stories. Meanwhile Techstars just gets a single big "here are some techstar companies" with a list of their top 5 companies.Given the choice, go for YC.Think of Techstars as your safety school. It's a great school, but deep down you know that the only reason you are going there is because you got rejected by the school of your dreams. |
YC vs TechStars | leelin: The alum network of other founders is helpful for technical expertise, startup advice, introductions, morale boosts, and idea exchanges; so consider in your decision the number of alums and where they ultimately reside.In YC's case, there are 9 sessions of alums and a big handful who stay in the Bay Area (even when the sessions were in Cambridge).Maybe some of the other programs form strong alum powerhouses in Boulder, DC, Philadelphia, Boston, or Seattle. |
YC vs TechStars | maxklein: I think both are equally difficult to get into. I think that TS does not impose as many ideas from above as YC. The YC companies all seem to have very similar names and designs when they first publicly announce, while the TS companies seem more diverse.A good technical team with poor marketing and biz skills should go to YC, and good biz people should go to TS. |
The future of HN | alxross: Agreed about there being more aggressive comments, etc. One possibility would be to move to another site and not lock it down. Moving to another site may be enough of a switching cost and I think there are many like myself who are not YC-funded but enjoy the original spirit of this site..."It's also counter to the spirit of the net to police too aggressively."
I also agree that it's against the original spirit of the net, but at some point in scale it becomes a requirement. I worked on a community site for a major TV presence which had gone awry. There were millions of community members and, unfortunately, some would be posting death threats about others or about celebs.I had hoped that there were "self-regulating" solutions but we had to ban the hell out of people. Not that HN is anywhere near that level of ugliness... :) |
Tricks for choosing which features to charge for? | barmstrong: I struggled with this question as well in the past on UniversityTutor.com. Here are a few common ones from other sites that I looked at. Maybe the right one will jump out.number of photos, highlighted listing (AutoTrader)storage space (Evernote)top listing in search results (Google)top listing in search results, larger listing/photo, more photos (Haystack.com)number of projects, ssl, storage (Basecamp)number of faxes sent (FaxZero.com)number of subscribers (Aweber.com)Pro Badge, storage, num photos (Flickr)receive messages but can't reply (Match.com)send messages to full inboxes, racy photos, other stuff (OkCupid)If you don't mind sharing the app we could probably come up with some other ideas too. If you literally just have a laundry list of features, then yeah maybe the best and most useful ones you give away free, and the ones power users will want you can make paid. That is the heart of the freemium model I think: a causal user who might find it useful once a month should be able to use it free, and spread the word for you. A power user who is logging in almost daily, or making money from it (for business), etc should be a paid user. |
YC vs TechStars | yosho: I think this community might be a little biased, just a little. |
YC vs TechStars | andrewhyde: I work at TS and have a lot of friends that have been through YC. You can debate about this a lot but at the end of the day both can be fantastic for your team. There is a style to the Valley, Boulder, Boston and Seattle that will be better depending on your company and team. All have their strengths.I'm jumping on a flight, wish I could expand. We have a ton of respect for YC. |
Why do you have to be an accredited investor? | ibsulon: It's government looking out for "your interests." That said...It is not as risky to go into business as it is to loan someone else money to go into business. You lose so much control, and people often gamble with retirement money because of a personal connection. When it goes well, all celebrate. However, it can tear family and friendships apart if it doesn't.The government assumes that if you have the money to lose, you are also wise enough to avoid such issues, as well as those of fraud, etc, and that you won't lose your shirt because of it.(People did lose a lot of money with higher risk investments in the market crash, leading to the 1933 reforms.) |
Why do you have to be an accredited investor? | grellas: When a startup issues stock to investors, it is critical to keep the offering within the limits of recognized securities law exemptions. Otherwise, it is an illegal offering and any investor who purchased stock can rescind and demand his money back from the issuer or its promoters. Thus, securities laws are not to be taken lightly.That said, it is an extremely simple proposition to structure early-stage offerings in a way that meets exemption requirements and this can and does very often involve stock sold to relatives and friends. In California, for example, there is something known as the "limited offering exemption" (Cal. Corp. Code section 25102(f)) that permits issuances of stock to up to 35 non-accredited investors who have a pre-existing relationship with the company or its founders and who represent that they are purchasing for bona-fide investment purposes and not for immediate resale. The disclosure requirements for this, and the accompanying paperwork, are very easy to comply with.Most states have something comparable, as do the federal rules as interpreted under Section 4(2) of the 1933 securities act and under Regulation D (which sets out "safe harbor" provisions for private placements).The main advantage of using accredited investors lies in the tremendous reduction in compliance risk when issuers are doing more complex offerings. In the early-stage context, I recommend to my startups that they attempt if possible to limit their offerings to accredited investors simply because this keeps things things safest for compliance purposes but I also tell them that limited sales to non-accredited investors are usually fine. I have done a brief write-up on this at http://grellas.com/faq_business_startup_012.html. |
Why do you have to be an accredited investor? | dasht: I am a satisfied customer of and recommend Nolo Press. They publish books about "How to start a corporation" that answer questions like yours here, and also guide you through incorporating properly without paying excessive lawyer fees.One way to understand restrictions requiring qualified or registered investors for public offerings is to look at examples of who has been busted for breaking such laws. An example I recall from a Nolo publication is the "movie deal". You pick up a copy of Variety (back in the day) and there's an ad: "Invest in a new motion picture. Major director. Outstanding cast. Guaranteed returns. Call 555-1212". Then, a few weeks later, the check has cleared, grandpa is out $50K but owns a useless stock "certificate", and the grifters have disappeared into the woodwork and broken the lease on the fancy office they rented for the "Unbelievable Films" 'company'. |
Why do you have to be an accredited investor? | gojomo: It's leftover government paternalism from the scams and bubbles of previous eras.Viewed charitably, it protects less-sophisticated citizens from losing money they can't afford to lose in areas where the risks and legal structures are too complicated for them to properly evaluate.Viewed less charitably, it's just one of many traditional arrangements that discriminate against the non-wealthy, somewhat sustained (even if below the level of conscious intent) because they happen to protect the interests of those already wealthy.Sound paranoid? Observe that there's no law or paperwork which blocks a poor person from gambling away all their money -- plus all the money credit cards will loan them! -- on rigged games of chance, including some run by the government itself (state lotteries).But can that same person invest a few thousand to ten thousand in a private company? No, or not without costly paperwork which makes many ventures uninterested in taking such money. And that answer applies even if it's a small proportion of the investor's total savings, or in an area where they have first-hand expertise. |
Completely crazy idea for an image classification system? | frankus: Check out the [SIFT Algorithm](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transfo...). It's not exactly what you describe but might give you some ideas. |
Rate my idea - a site for OCD sufferers | subud: How would your site be different from "Patients Like Me" where people discuss their medical conditions?http://www.patientslikeme.com/symptoms/show/1920-obsessive-c... |
LLC to c-corp? | hga: How much depends on where you are and if the incorporation is out of state, i.e. in Delaware.However, why would you need a c-corp to accept investment? An LLC provides a lot more flexibility and you'd just have to redo you Operating Agreement.That flexibility comes at a price, an investor can and likely will insist on modifications that provide him greater protections/rights/whatever that he would have been able to get with an investment in a c-corp. I've worked for one promising company who's life was cut short when its devil investors abused various provisions they had put in the Operating Agreement to gain complete control (all of nothing, we all resigned, but they didn't seem to mind). |
Rate my startup idea "Be Caller Nine" | mlarkin42: As a marketing event producer at a multimedia company I say absolutely yes there is a market for this concept. I wish It was available now. It adds tremendous value to sponsorship packages and a measurable outcome for driving people to a website, event, etc ... everything other than television, print, and radio |
Legal barriers to starting an anonymous ISP? | bugs: I'm sure that as soon as something bad or illegal starts occurring on that isp like say child pornography or even something like anonymous bomb threats someone is going to have to be held accountable and if you can't point people in the right direction it might end up on you. |
Legal barriers to starting an anonymous ISP? | rcoder: If you're thinking of operating in the USA, you should read up on Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement (CALEA). CALEA pretty much requires that you be able to associate a name with any IP on your network, so you're going to have a hard time operating as an ISP without any personally-identifying information about your customers.Regardless, if you can figure out a way to anonymously collect payment for services online without either getting ripped off by your own customers or leaving a paper trail for law enforcement to subpoena, then you have a far more valuable commodity than simple bandwidth to offer. In fact, you would have invented "digital cash", and any number of folks (afore-mentioned law enforcement and tax agencies amongst them) will race each other to control or use it. |
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