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buying your own time. | ddemchuk: Create a handful of super specific and efficient web apps that have a low monthly fee to use and have a good potential for a user base. Target internet marketing or SEO type apps that help automate things if you want a niche suggestion. Use the income and knowledge gained to step away from whatever obligation... |
How long did it take you to get ramen profitable? | elliottcable: What’s ‘ramen profitable’ mean? |
How long did it take you to get ramen profitable? | asyazwan: This question is kind of general. It depends on your niche market and luck. I do suggest you follow Seth Godin's blog as he gives a lot of insightful advice you can use as startup.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/It might help though if you give more details. |
How long did it take you to get ramen profitable? | netcan: If you actually want some advice, you might need to divulge some more information. Start with how much do you need in order to be ramen profitable & how you plan to make it.Example: Some people mean doing some consulting on the side. Timeline's don't really apply to them. |
How long did it take you to get ramen profitable? | patio11: I don't know how meaningful this is, because I was fully employed for all the time under discussion (and going full-time while only ramen profitable would cause me to have a very unpleasant discussion with the immigration office regarding my worth to Japan), but here you go:I coding in late June 2006 and launc... |
How long did it take you to get ramen profitable? | idlewords: If you mean 'earns enough to cover monthly living expenses', about thirty months for the ad-supported bedbugregistry.com, and one week for pinboard.in (thanks to an enthusiastic plug from Daring Fireball which resulted in a large number of paid signups).My limited experience with project revenue is that it's... |
What iPhone or App Store data/analysis would be interesting? | avis: Thanks for sharing the data!I'd love to see correlation between age groups->downloads, obviously what you mentioned; PR->downloads and any other vertical data for the specific campaign...
avi@ |
Who is the best Freelance Rails Developer you know? | conorh: Me. Well maybe not, but I am a freelance Rails dev in NYC :) Lots of experience, worked on many sites, and have great references. Some of my code on github - http://github.com/conorhDrop me a line. |
buying your own time. | Mz: FWIW:For personal reasons, I've made drastic lifestyle changes. Part of the result is that my expenses have dropped drastically and my concept of "essential possessions" has been radically altered. Although it wasn't done specifically to help me venture out on my own, it has become increasingly clear that it has ... |
What are you working on? | epi0Bauqu: http://duckduckgo.com/ |
Review my idea | officemedium: it can't be too productive spending your time watching other people be productive.. |
Review my idea | cglee: It'd be sweet if the recordings were of people actually creating something well known. For example, if you could say "here's a screencast of how the Twitter prototype was built".In a similar vein, I remember an Etherpad recording of PG writing an essay. At the time, it was one of the coolest things I've seen, an... |
buying your own time. | mark_l_watson: I turn down about 1/2 of consulting offers (two today, which is a record), spending the time on research, general learning, and the non-tech aspects of living.For me the trick is: I got an agreement from my wife that it is better to remain on top of new tech than to maximize earning. Also, living in a lo... |
IRC channel for HN ? | dfranke: #startups on Freenode. |
How long did it take you to get ramen profitable? | blizkreeg: How long ago did you start/launch? Are you relying mostly on ads so far or paid upgrades?Much depends on how well and wide you promote it. It's an idea with good potential, us south asians do face this problem quite a bit =) |
Review my idea | betterlabs: It is a good idea but there is a fundamental problem, I believe. The developers who have a great environment may not have any incentive to share it, and a lot of other who share may lead to spam/not-so-useful screencasts which may be laborious to clean (even if you use the community to rate it). Also how do... |
Review my idea | willwagner: I like the idea.I really like this site which I believe I found via a hackernews comment sometime back:http://usesthis.com/It performs a similar function, albeit exclusive to their hardware and software setup, and a screencast and more detail would be interesting. |
Review my idea | thiele: Why not give it a shot using a simple site/blog and YouTube? You could first make your own screencast and post it up in a blog article. Then recruit a handful of your friends to make their screencasts. If the project still seems fun and you are seeing some user interest, then think about building the site out. ... |
How long did it take you to get ramen profitable? | kellishaver: Well, my "startup" is not a web site, but a brick & mortar business, so the dynamics are a bit different. The business managed to pay for its own operating expenses from day one, thanks to some careful budgeting on our part. We broke even our first year (making back all of the initial money we had invested... |
Review my idea | bretpiatt: The sharing of environment configuration is very common among high end WoW raid guilds -- we did this on a regular basis and would see significant statistically measurable improvements when people setup their interface for specific encounters.The process of going through and explaining each step in your work... |
What iPhone or App Store data/analysis would be interesting? | JoeBorn: A graph charting downloads v time with PR events or advertising milestones noted, or some more sophisticated analytic for which milestone drove traffic. I'm terribly interested in understanding the relationship between PR and downloads, how much "inertia" is there? Does the old "8 views" advertising axiom th... |
Review my idea | skmurphy: The ability to diff two environments would also be useful, it would allow you to find folks that were close to yours but different (e.g. same tools different settings) vs. different tools. |
Found a smart competitor with a 3y headstart. What to do? | aaronblohowiak: How many customers do you need to hit your mark? it is less than 10% of your competitor? Think about churn and picking up their scraps, as it were. You may be able to survive as a small fish, if you are trying to build a so-called lifestyle biz. |
Review my idea | ThinkWriteMute: Make doing screencasts with voice easier and then I'll get back to you. |
Found a smart competitor with a 3y headstart. What to do? | tcarnell: This will make essential reading:http://businessofsoftware.org/ebook.aspxAlthough it's primarily concerned about pricing, the process of pricing requires consideration of your product placement with regard to the competition. Enjoy! |
Found a smart competitor with a 3y headstart. What to do? | tcarnell: 1. Do some market research, actually having some competition will make market research much easier - phone their clients and simply ask them which new features they would like and what things do they have trouble with, then target clients with similar profiles.2. You could build a migration tool so that you c... |
Found a smart competitor with a 3y headstart. What to do? | uuilly: It probably means its a good idea. Nobody ever gets total market and at the beginning you both have essentially zero market share. So compete hard for the clients they don't get. Or rope in people who've never heard of them. Just b/c they have nice uniforms and helmets doesn't mean they've scored lots of to... |
Found a smart competitor with a 3y headstart. What to do? | zaidf: First, you have to decide if you want to compete with them head on. This means beyond just having a similar product. It means going after the same customers and same everything.If you do go that route, you should make use of the upsides. One upside is, you can reduce your risk by emulating their proven product d... |
Found a smart competitor with a 3y headstart. What to do? | sdrinf: A quick&dirty math approach:At a very basic level, you're working with:potential_revenue = sum(total_market) * P(customer) * LTV_over_period(LTV usually stands for lifetime value of customer, but we're only considering annual numbers below)First you must must must figure out what the size of your total market i... |
What Lisp dialect should I learn? | nostrademons: Honestly, I'd start with Scheme, because it's a small language and will teach you the basics of Lisp-like languages. Once you understand closures, and macros, and continuations, and data abstraction in Lisp-like languages, and how you can build just about anything out of these building blocks, then you c... |
What Lisp dialect should I learn? | cabalamat: Depends what you are trying to achieve. If you primarily want to learn the language, Scheme is a good choice. Ifd you want to write code that would benefit from Java's extensive libraries, Clojure is the obvious choice. |
Found a smart competitor with a 3y headstart. What to do? | wisty: Every piece of software in existence has competitors. If you can't beat your competitors (even by iterating), then listen to your existing customers, and find out what they want.You might drift into a vertical niche, if your product is a good fit for that niche. |
Found a smart competitor with a 3y headstart. What to do? | jacquesm: It's good to know they exist, they'll probably be aware that you exist sooner or later as well.It's a big world!There is more than room enough for two, three or 50 companies doing what you're doing, the market is more than large enough for that, especially if you look overseas as well.A three year headstart i... |
Found a smart competitor with a 3y headstart. What to do? | maxklein: If it took you a while to find the competition, it will also take your customers time. And by that time, they will be used to your software. |
Found a smart competitor with a 3y headstart. What to do? | dnsworks: What do you do? You man up and kick their asses. |
Found a smart competitor with a 3y headstart. What to do? | forkqueue: You already have a couple of clients prepared to pay for your software. If the 'three years ahead' competitor is so great, why aren't they using the competitor's product rather than yours?It sounds to me like your competitor is targeting a different market to you, and picking up some of your target market a... |
What Lisp dialect should I learn? | davidw: If it's just a functional language you want, you ought to consider other things too:* Haskell: very 'pure' functional language from academia, much more so than Scheme.* Erlang: slightly more practical functional language that's used in industry and has some nice properties, but is probably not a 'thing of beaut... |
What Lisp dialect should I learn? | plinkplonk: The "learning well" of a dialect is more important than agonizing over choosing any particular dialect. Pick one at random and write some large (5k to 10k line) programs in it. Read some programs written by great programmers who use that dialect.The knowledge you gain will transfer very easily into the di... |
Found a smart competitor with a 3y headstart. What to do? | skmurphy: Unless you are actually losing business to them I wouldn't worry. You are taking a niche market approach and should be able to find ways to differentiate your offering. From your description you are targeting a different market, |
Would people pay for this service? | patio11: I think the people who would most benefit from your help (startups who are likely to fund and want to improve their relative position) are going to see "small equity position" and think "Awww dang, that is going to cause us a million and one legal headaches and is an asterix we will have to revisit in every fu... |
Would people pay for this service? | davidw: Aren't there things like this already? I think more along the lines of consulting fees rather than equity, though, which makes them seem dubious to me. Equity for results seems fair to me.Somehow though it doesn't seem very innovative... maybe there's something else that can be done in that space that's more ... |
Would people pay for this service? | mixmax: Based on your posts here and your blog, if I look at what I would want to use that expertise for in my company it would be something different. You have an experience in tech and entrepreneurship that is one in a thousand, and that shouldn't be wasted on helping companies doing powerpoints. I would much rather ... |
Who has a Merchant account & can I ask you about it? | teejae: I'm also interested in learning about Merchant Accounts. If anyone has time to talk about it, would be very appreciative. My contact is in my profile. Thanks! |
Would people pay for this service? | marketer: I wouldn't do it, because living in the bay area, it's not too difficult to find people that have gone through the fundraising process and ask them for advice.That being said there are a lot of desperate people out there that are willing to pay for this kind of information. You'll probably get the same kind o... |
Would people pay for this service? | jparicka: I know I would. Can we talk? http://beepl.com |
Found a smart competitor with a 3y headstart. What to do? | Tawheed: Find out what you hate about their service, and make sure it is improved in yours. 37Signals' book had something about this, its the chapter on "Have an Enemey, pick a fight" - http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch02_Have_an_Enemy.php |
Spam fighting with bogus lead gen nowdays? | niyazpk: When you start playing on the same standards, what is the difference between you and them? |
Would people pay for this service? | rms: Do you do biotech? |
Any recommendations on places to vet ideas? | niyazpk: This is the place. Post your ideas to HN and hopefully you will get thoughts from many smart people. |
What Lisp dialect should I learn? | mahmud: Scheme. The amount of high quality, and mostly free Scheme literature out there is overwhelming. |
Would people pay for this service? | jms: I've worked with someone offering a similar service in the UK. We didn't continue the engagement as the business was at the wrong stage of development for his involvement, but if we were in the right stage then I think his help would have been very valuable.Maybe it'll be worth talking to him - http://www.tecment... |
Spam fighting with bogus lead gen nowdays? | j_lagof: I really think email spam is a problem already solved (at least for most end users). I use gmail, yahoo and hotmail (for different accounts) and I rarely get any spam.Now, I know the anti-spam tools are working very hard to stay updated, but using the spammers tactic is too much. Why change if the current rese... |
Found a smart competitor with a 3y headstart. What to do? | po: A lot of people are making good comments about there being room for more than one competitor in a marketplace. I totally agree with that but I would add that this is true if the service stands alone.If your product depends on network effects, it is no longer true. Services like Facebook and twitter are more valuabl... |
Would people pay for this service? | iamelgringo: I've been running an HN meetup called Hackers and Founders meetup ( http://hackersandfounders.com ) in Silicon Valley for over a year and a half. I've seen hundreds of hackers/founders come and go in the last 20 months. I've also seen a number of people trying to sell consulting services to them.My best ... |
Would people pay for this service? | icey: I'm not sure about your monetization strategy, but I'm positive there would be customers for this.In 1999 I spent a lot of time helping out some investors I knew by providing technical expertise after they'd gotten burnt by people proposing things that had a lot of ocean boiling numbers and hand wavy technologies... |
Review my idea | JangoSteve: I think that's a cool idea. I've always enjoyed Lifehacker's pieces on the Featured Workspace as well as their Featured Desktop articles, because I like seeing fresh ideas for arranging my home/office and desktop. I would definitely enjoy seeing the same for workflow environments. |
Found a smart competitor with a 3y headstart. What to do? | JangoSteve: There have been a few similar posts on here in the past. The consensus is usually something along the lines of... keep building your product. Don't let your competitors scare you. Think of it like driving; if you drive down the highway staring at the car next to you, you're going to crash. Look forward.Give... |
Would people pay for this service? | JangoSteve: It sounds to me like a basic consulting service, albeit one in which you'd accept a small equity in place of part of the consulting fee.So, I guess I'd say, yes, people do pay for consulting. The question is, what type of people/startups will you attract with the equity offer. |
Found a smart competitor with a 3y headstart. What to do? | Bertil: It actually depends a lot on the type of service that you are considering: will that competitor make your life easier or worst?A simple example: my brother sells pearls. He considers other pearl sellers as competitors, but actually the more people see pearls being worn, then more they'll assume it is a legitima... |
Review Our App (http://www.InstantLoop.com) | raju: Clickable link - http://www.InstantLoop.com |
Review Our App (http://www.InstantLoop.com) | sync: Calling my customers? I usually hang up right away for these spam calls... it doesn't seem like the best idea to annoy my customers with any calls like this. |
Would people pay for this service? | shalmanese: This is making me wonder, could this work from the other end? Would a VC be willing to have you as a head hunter and pay you in equity for successful referrals?It would still be your job to coach startups towards successful presentations but the money is coming from the VC end and not the entrepreneur. |
Review Our App (http://www.InstantLoop.com) | davidjairala: The idea seems original and the site's looking well, however you might wanna make the "Free Trial" button a little more visible by placing it near the top of the page. |
Spam fighting with bogus lead gen nowdays? | thinkbohemian: I have a little website that i've been working on http://www.whyspam.me its a more advanced form of mailinator. It gives you a disposable email that forwards to your inbox. It's free, it never expires, so it is possible to never ever give out your real email to another website again.In addition we track... |
Would people pay for this service? | wavesplash: In Silicon Valley we'd politely refer to you as a Lamprey and at least at my events you'd be banned from attending.I have two bits of advise that I tell all the startups I work with:- Never give equity for one-off work- Never work with fundraising assistantsYour background just isn't that unique here in the... |
A/B testing with only 1-2 sign-ups per month | Alex3917: Based on your current traffic? About 55 years. |
A/B testing with only 1-2 sign-ups per month | nate: Here's a great post on doing the math for this stuffhttp://blog.asmartbear.com/easy-statistics-for-adwords-ab-te...But yes, the bad news is it's going to take too long at your rate right now. I recommend looking at things like http://conceptfeedback.com to get feedback in lieu of being able to test right now. Y... |
Review Our App (http://www.InstantLoop.com) | Lior: Larger companies need such a system due to sheer volume and faceless interactions with the customers. Smaller firms better have a good idea what your client is up to without a survey/poll. The only target audience that makes sense to me is smaller businesses that do not have a long term relationship with the clie... |
Web Startup Friendly Banks / Accounts / Payments / Etc | jacquesm: Have a look at ccbill and epoch.Try to get your own merchant account by all means if you can.As for banks, any mid sized or large bank that will take your business will do, the bank itself is not that critical (other than that it would be nice if they stayed in business).FirstData is a gateway, not an IPSP, a... |
Review Our App (http://www.InstantLoop.com) | goberoi: You may also want to check out http://PrecisionPolling.com. See our post on Twilio's blog today:
http://blog.twilio.com/2010/01/precision-polling-a-business-... |
Best way to remotely demo your software? | sganesh: Use Microsoft Shared View if you're using Windows. http://connect.microsoft.com/site94 |
Web Startup Friendly Banks / Accounts / Payments / Etc | kareemm: In addition to SPreedly, check out cheddargetter.com and recurly.com. |
Why doesn't nasa.gov get its url to work? | babyboy808: They must have heard you. Works fine using nasa.govEDIT: using firefox. What browser are you using? |
Why doesn't nasa.gov get its url to work? | tdm911: Although a smaller scale, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has the same problem. bom.gov.au doesn't resolve to anything.For what it's worth, Firefox will change nasa.gov to www.nasa.gov.au but won't do the same for bom.gov.au. Internet Explorer won't do this at all. |
Good code to read for Python and C beginner? | nas: The Python interpreter is some pretty clean and educational C code, IMHO. Why don't you join python-dev, find some bugs in the issue tracker and start hacking? http://www.python.org/dev/contributing/ |
Why doesn't nasa.gov get its url to work? | TrevorBurnham: I recall a time (late '90s) when microsoft.com was similarly afflicted. Seriously. That was back when everyone instinctively typed "www," though.In this case, I'm sure it's a temporary glitch. |
Would people pay for this service? | adrianwaj: Do you have an extraordinary ability to take a company on 1 trajectory and steepen and accelerate it upward?Can you spot a winner, or spot something you can make a winner?Go and approach some companies and people that appeal to You. |
What android apps do you use? | roedog88: Aside from the built in stuff like email, calendar, contacts and maps with the traffic view I use the following every day:
shuffle as my to do list, and
StreamFurious (free version) for streaming audio.The TripIt and Yelp apps were useful on my recent vacation. |
What android apps do you use? | cullenking: google's listen is fantastic for driving down the freeway! searchable and queueable podcasts that you can save locally for when you have no cell service. Not sure how many can be queued up and cached, but I've done two no problem.Also, you'll want a task killer app, since you'll find that apps never "go a... |
Payment systems? | dimarco: Amazon Flexible Payment |
Payment systems? | jacquesm: I would suggest less capitalization in the title, it makes the place feel like AOL :)If you wish to facilitate the payment then you need to become an IPSP. The specific thing to look for is what it takes to become PCI certified. You will need to hook up with a gateway (such as FirstData or PaySquare) to get y... |
Why doesn't nasa.gov get its url to work? | thwarted: They don't have an A record for nasa.gov. For those who don't have dig (or don't care enough to do an actual DNS request and would rather trust some other, lesser tool): $ dig nasa.gov
; <<>> DiG 9.6.1-P2-RedHat-9.6.1-7.P2.fc11 <<>> nasa.gov
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- op... |
What do you use for bookkeeping? | jacquesm: A bookkeeper.I basically collect all the receipts through the year, do my own quarterly VAT and then have the bookkeeper do the annual reports, integration of all the companies and the actual filing.I don't send out a lot of invoices and I don't have a lot of stuff I buy on the company so that is relatively e... |
What do you use for bookkeeping? | aditya: Billings.app - switched from quickbooks since it didn't have time tracking and Billings does that and invoicing pretty well.Also, prefer it over freckle since freckle is WAY more expensive ($40 for Billings vs $12/mo for Freckle) |
Possible fix for the 'lost' submissions? | niyazpk: Two things:- Most of the submissions in the home page are pretty good. We cannot discuss every single interesting thing in the world. We are discussing just a small subset of them and as long as we are getting a very high quality home page, the lost submissions are not a problem.- You can always resubmit links... |
Why China is the Future (of Business)? | andyjdavis: number of people * average annual income = $'s available for buying thingsPretty much any number multiplied by 1 billion people = a lot.As the average Chinese citizen becomes better off the result of that calculation will go up really fast. If the average annual income of Chinese citizens goes up by 1%, for... |
What android apps do you use? | s3graham: http://mytracks.appspot.com/ if you're into that sorta thing. |
Why China is the Future (of Business)? | jyothi: Volumes drive many businesses. The buying capacity of China & India are raising.If 15% of the population use your service that exceeds the total US population. Any business driven by volumes eg. telecom providers, all FMCG products would never want to miss out on India & China. For Google too it is the userbase... |
What do you use for bookkeeping? | cpr: I was about to ask the same question.I've been using Quicken Mac for over a decade, but I need something more, given a business change, so I'm going to try out Quicken Online. (One of the main features I need is check printing, and most of the online accounting packages don't support that.) |
What android apps do you use? | nwatson: I have a G1.Android apps I use:DoggCatcher -- podcast fetcher and player, mostly for NPR and various tech shows. News on my schedule. I've used this since before Google Listen was available and haven't compared them, though many say DoggCatcher's better.Pandora for music pseudo-radio.Google Maps (great for t... |
What do you use for bookkeeping? | dustyreagan: Quick interjection on my own question:I just started looking at http://outright.com. I've been playing with it for the last 30 minutes or so. Seems like a pretty nice system. It sucked in all of my PayPal history from last year, and even properly expensed PayPal's fees. First service I've used that did tha... |
Copy protection for desktop software? | john1965: We use the crypto obfuscation+licensing package from http://www.ssware.com and it works well for us |
how hard is it to maintain your own clone of HN ? | thibaut_barrere: I also welcome comments on how hard it was to customize the look or behaviour, if you did so. |
What do you use for bookkeeping? | tow21: We use xero.com.Your best solution might depend what tax jurisdiction you're in, though. |
how hard is it to maintain your own clone of HN ? | jacquesm: I've toyed around with it for a couple of days about two minor releases ago, it was quite stable but under load that might be a different situation.My lisp knowledge is around -270 degrees so I had a real hard time understanding the code but bit by bit it started to clear up and once you get past that it look... |
What do you use for bookkeeping? | ars: GnuCash.It has modules for vendors (so you can track how much you owe them) and clients (how much they owe you), and employees (including expenses). |
How can I start my own bank? (Let's redesign banks) | jacquesm: Starting a real bank is hard, lots of solvency requirements and lots of very large lawyer fees in your future.It might be more feasible to start a credit union:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_union |
How can I start my own bank? (Let's redesign banks) | bdfh42: The simplest way is probably to do what Richard Branson (Virgin) just did and buy a small existing deposit taking bank.That way you get the legal entity and all of the controls and procedures already in place and can start to expand the operation "on line" (as I am sure Virgin are now about to do in the UK). Th... |
How can I start my own bank? (Let's redesign banks) | mootothemax: One of the main difficulties is obtaining a banking licence so that you can accept consumer deposits.Personally, I like Virgin's take on this; buy a small bank that already has a licence and go from there:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfina... |
How can I start my own bank? (Let's redesign banks) | volida: If it wasn't obvious that the banking system has its flaws, the recent crisis made it crystal clear.But, I'm not quite sure what's the exact problem you want to address. You are confusing local banks problems or their services with international issues.For example Zopa (http://www.zopa.com) targets the loan iss... |
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