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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 obligations you currently have and move onto bigger projects while spending a few hours a week making sure the other smaller projects continue to run smoothly.EDIT: Spelling mistake in first sentence... |
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 launched on July 1st. Ramen profitable where I live is about $1,000~$1,200 a month. Off the top of my head, I spiked up to that on October 2007th, and have sustained it since about October 2008th.You can check my numbers to see if my memory is faulty or not: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats . Sales and expense graphs are on the left hand side. I don't have a profit per month graph simply because it would show wild swings just because of the timing of expenses -- sometimes AdWords will have two bills in one month and then none in the next, for example, just due to minute differences in timing. |
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 quite spiky, so that you have to be earning considerably more than a minimal amount before you can have confidence that you'll be able to cover your bills in a given month. |
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 better positioned me to do exactly that. I currently live without a car. I currently have a lot less clothes than the typical american. We cook most of our meals from scratch yet own one frying pan, one pot, and one oven pan. I have very little furniture. Etc.It's been very freeing and the result is I have more time, energy and mental focus for working on personal goals. |
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, and would love to see more famous writings composed in such manner. |
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 low cost area helps increase flexibility (Carol and I sold our large house near the beach in San Diego, and bought a small economical house in the mountains in Central Arizona).The great mythologist Joseph Campbell advised his students to "follow their bliss," and I can agree with that as long as you are supporting yourself and family. In life, try to do what makes you happy as often as possible.Also, +1 for you for not wanting to go into debt. |
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 you think this service will make money? |
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. MVP ;-) |
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 in opening, which, again, had been carefully budgeted and kept as low as possible) and started making a profit our second.We just finished our 5th year in business and last year's earnings were down, thanks to the economic problems plauging, well, everyone. We ended up making less than we did in year 4, but only by a very small margin, and it was still more than we had made in year 3, and still profitable.We've been very careful about how we manage finances from day one and given a lot of other local businesses that didn't make it through the year, I'm calling 2009 a success. |
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 workflow and why it is setup that way helps even with limited collaboration. The drawback to this is environment configuration is very specific to the type of project, size of your team, and the development process you follow.In order for this to succeed as a site you'll need to pick a niche (like any startup should, boiling the ocean is hard) and build an audience around that -- i.e. developers using Netbeans on C++ projects using buildbot for CI in an agile environment. I use this example as you cite Netbeans in your idea and you thus probably know others using it giving you the start of a community. |
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 that action requires multiple exposures still hold? |
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 can approach their smaller clients, offer a cheaper package with the guarantee that you can migrate their existing data. |
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 touchdowns. |
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 design/market strategy. Steve Blank has a post on how he was able to get sooo much out of his competitor's catalog/specs.Simply put, if there is a company with a product and lots of customers and you want to compete with it, you don't have to reinvent the wheel if you can emulate individual components of the competitor.Now that you are close to even with them on product/marketing, you can find an area where you will be better than them. Pricing is weak. May be you can offer an added service. May be you can make some component more efficient and highlight the fact that you are more efficient than that competitor.Competition can be real good if you know how to use your (successful) competition as free R&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 is; I assume you already know this number from the top of your head (if not, you've got bigger problems to worry about).At this point, this becomes a problem of function maximization. Assuming your competitor is the market leader, and the rule of thumb for market leaders to take 50% of the total market, what percentage of the remaining clientbase can you realistically capture? Calculate your potential revenue with this scenario. Do the numbers add up for anything sustainable? If no, pivot.With nichification, your total market is obviously smaller, but you might capture it better. Calculate it with markets [A,B,C] ,and see what percentage of these market you have to capture, in order for total revenues to exceed that of non-nichificated product. Can you capture that amount realistically? If yes, nichify; otherwise, proceed with original plan. |
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 can learn the more advanced stuff that Clojure or Common Lisp has.For implementations, I'd probably start with PLT Scheme for learning. It's fairly complete and easy to get up and running with. Some other implementations are faster (Stalin), and some may have more practical libraries (Bigloo, though that's debatable), and some may have more interesting implementations (Chicken), but PLT's a fairly well-rounded early choice. (Disclaimer: I started with Bigloo and my experience with PLT is limited to getting Arc to compile on MzScheme.) |
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 is your advantage. After all, you get the benefit of their three years of product development without having to go the long way round. Check out what they've got and learn from it.Stick to your plan, observe them like a hawk and make sure that you give your customers excellent service. They won't go looking for a competitor until you mess up.Don't worry so much about keyword rankings, a solid business does not solely depend on search engines for its traffic. And there is always advertising if you want to go and acquire new customers in a higher volume.As for going 'niche' that might be a great strategy to stay under their radar until you've been able to level the playing field and you have a bigger war chest.But in the long run their existence shouldn't matter much, it's not like you're going to go head to head with microsoft or google on operating systems or search.It's just another company, they come and go. Likely there are other competitors out there that you haven't picked up on yet.In a market with no competition, anybody can be 'top dog'. Such markets are illusions, any way that you find to make a living someone else will come and see you and think 'hey, nice idea'. Some of them will be better, some of them will be worse. There is no hard and fast rule that says that the first mover will be the one to win the game.The there is the subject of locality. If you are going to address the 'self employed' market then there are so many options so 'slice' that market that if you make it easy to adapt your product to a niche that you could also address many of these niches in parallel, effectively you are still 'broad' but you now have a unique advantage for each of those little sub markets.Which should remedy some of your keyword worries, since it is much easier to rank high for combinations of keywords than that it is to rank high for individual keywords.good luck! |
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 as a happy accident. If you focus on the needs of your market, it becomes less and less likely that those sort of people will use your competitor's product.I suspect the competitor is unlikely to care too much about your product - they'll see it as a 'low end' solution that only has the potential to take away customers they don't make much from anyway. |
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 beauty'.* F# and Ocaml seem to have their supporters too...Clojure seems to be popular these days if it's a Lisp you want. |
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 dialect you choose next (and you will get more informed by then and won't have to ask in forums). |
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 funding round from here to doomsday -- pass" and the people who are likely to be the clients from heck ("Our deck isn't quite ready yet, but we have a napkin!!") are going to see "FREE!" and jump at it. And then whine at you when they are, predictably, not successful at getting funded, despite "YOU HAVING AN EQUITY STAKE!!1"Basically, it is the classic adverse selection problem that is eliminated by charging people money. |
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 creative (ala YC and its new model). |
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 want you as a boardmember/advisor. This would give a company two distinct advantages:1) An extremely knowledgeable person who has been there before with which to talk on complicated issues. Experience in startups is rare as you point out. When it is coupled with deep tech knowledge it's even rarer.2) Your name on the businessplan/presentation. Namedropping seems to be a major thing with investors. Unfortunately.Also, companies that are out raising money often aren't good customers as patio11 points out. Besides there's no repeat business, meaning that you'll have to constantly be on the lookout for new customers. Equity payment is great, but it's a lottery ticket. I don't know your personal situation of course, but if you need bread on the table it's probably going to be hard.But I'm sure lots of companies would pay in either equity/cash to have you onboard as an advisor. I know I would. |
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 of people who are willing to pay lots of money to pitch to investors. |
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.tecmentor.co.uk/ . |
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 research/defense tools are working? |
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 valuable when all of your friends are using it too. These tend to be winner-takes-all.I suggest that you stick to your strategy until you hear a customer mention a competitor by name, or otherwise have proof that you are losing customers to your competitor. |
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 guess is that it would be an 80/20 split. 80% of the members of Hackers and Founders would shy away from what you're offering. If you've been in the Valley for any length of time, and do basic networking, you're going to get to know people with ties to investors. Off the top of my head, I could think of 20 people that I'd go to for advice and introductions if I were looking for investor money right now, and they'd point me in the right direction. Most of my members might talk to you, but they'd be pretty leery of selling a stake in their corporation before they know you. I've found that the early stage founders I hang out with at Hackers and Founders tend to mistrust 2 types of people: 1) Pure business guys looking for technical co founders and 2) Money guys offering to help them out in exchange for a piece of the pie.I could be wrong, but I'd think that the 20% of founders that would be most eager to take you up on your offer would be the most desperate of the bunch. I think that by pitching yourself primarily as a guy who helps people get through the funding pipeline, you're going to be selecting for the wrong type of founders. I can imagine that founders who aren't in the Valley might be more eager to take you up on your services, as well. There's a much bigger separation between founder and investor in other parts of the country and world, and those people need quite a bit more help in the funding department.What has really helped the guys at Hackers and Founders are people who are available to be a friend throughout the process. Generally when the founders pursue the funding process, they turn to their friends who helped them early on, and if those friends have enough experience, those friends become board members (and at times get equity).One of my members in particular has been phenomenal at that. He has a resume similar to yours, and he just hangs out with early stage founders for love of the game. He talks freely, shares his experiences and advice freely, takes people out to coffee all the time, and when founders are looking for fund raising advice, he's the first person they turn to.What's in it for him, is that he gets to interact with hundreds of entrepreneurs and he can pick and choose the best of them to hook up with and work along side of. But, the teams that he signs up with trust him implicitly, because they've been getting advice from them for a while.If you have other questions, feel free to ping me. I'd be happy to talk about it. |
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. In doing that, I saw a lot of what you saw with regards to terrible and weird presentations, but I also saw some groups that looked like they had a ton of promise but were terrible and communicating the point.That being said, you may want to consider also providing services to some of the smaller funds out there as a bullshit detector. I think by and large investors are MUCH more technologically savvy these days, but I still get the feeling that there is a fair amount of money outside of SF/NYC/Boston/London that lacks confidence for some of the more interesting technology companies. |
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.Given that you already have a paying customer helping you develop it, and that your product is supposedly easier to use, this doesn't even seem like a difficult decision. |
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 legitimate jewel — so diamond sellers are his real competitors, and other non-stone gems should help legitimize his business. Therefore, when he can't accomodate a prospect (say, he doesn't have the right color) he should advertize for other pearl providers.Another similar tech example: e-mail; the more companies used e-mails, the more IMAP became a useful protocol. The complete opposite would be ERPs: it's much easier to share the same ERP as your customer & provider. Therefore, if you are a competitor of SAP (the ERP for BigCorp) trying to specialize towards SMB, you spend a lot of commercial effort to explain the benefits of ERP in general to small businesses, only to pave the way for them switch to SAP——because that's what their customer use, and those are too big to change.That why you have many e-mail providers, several cell phone makers, but only one dominant search-engine, one dominant ERP provider, one dominant social network, etc. To tell the difference is hard —— for instance, encouraging open standards might help your customer to switch to the leader more than it would help you offer a compatible service.I'd love to help you (all that is what my PhD is about ;) but I'd need more detail about your specific industry. |
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 the disposable emails that get deleted by users, and we ask each user to generate a new email for every new website. That way we can track the websites that spam.Anytime the word "malicious" and fighting come up in the same sentence, i get a little worried. Our goal is to give the user complete control over their inbox, the problem with having a few gmail, hotmail, whatever accounts is that if you sign up for a few semi-important things (like HN!!) if you delete the email you delete your "forgot password" functionality. Also if you give your web address to someone and they choose to sell it, you have no way of tracking it, or stopping the additional spam sources. I'm trying to fix that with my service.While it might not be for everyone, its extremely useful to me...so i'll keep improving it and making it a service I want to use. These spammers essentially make money off of your data (email), so why don't we put some data back in your hands, like a listing of the source of spam!Let me know if you have any comments about the site, its a fully functional beta...but not quite ready for a "Ask HN: Review my site". I'm also open to new anti-spam technologies techniques or methods (preferably non-malicious), so feel free to leave a reply. |
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 valley.The Angels here give you money and will gladly help you with your pitch and intros when the time comes to do series A.I'd suggest focusing on long term value. If you're valuable to a startup over the long haul (2+ years) then you can justify being an advisor and getting a .1-.25 percent grant. Throw in the pitch consulting for free. It's the least interesting part of building a company. |
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. You could also consider running a poll with Mechanical Turk workers. The turkers would answer a poll like which design is better for about a $0.05 a person.I've done the conceptfeedback.com for testing some new elements in http://tgethr.com before we had the traffic to start experimenting and the feedback was great. |
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 client. For that its perfect, except I have no one to test it on.You can also branch out as a notification service that tracks acknowledgment, (Doctors appointment reminder service, etc...) |
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, and it would take you a lot of time, money and certification fees to get connected to them. Having an IPSP in between will save you a ton of heachaches, as well as lower your profile as a target. The price of hosting for servers that are certified is also much higher than for run-of-the-mill webservers because you have to ensure that physical security of your server is warranted at all times, and most hosting facilities can not do that (they have customers visiting the server rooms and unless you have your own locked rack people will have access).The downside is that you will not have the customer card info/cvv information so if you ever have to switch IPSPs you are basically starting from scratch.In practice this is only a problem when an IPSP falls over, but as the IBill and DMR history shows this occasionally does happen and it takes thousands of merchants down with them.One more reason to get that merchant account of your own, at least like that you'll get your money if the something bad happens.I use vxsbill myself, it is run by friends of mine, but the downsides for people from the US (which I assume applies to you) is that you need a dutch presence to make use of them and the application fees are steep.The upside is that they are rock solid (or at least have been to date), each and every one of their customers has a separate merchant account, so a misstep by one customer does not affect the others.Without segregated merchant accounts that is a very real risk. |
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 away" until the system runs out of memory causing android to take over and kill some programs. My favourite so far is "Taskpanel". Additionally, for recording a GPS track, use "My Tracks" which is simple and enjoyable enough to use, lets you email the file to yourself when done."gpsstatus" is fantastic - the must have for a tinkerer! Also usable as a level, so no need to get one of the trillion level applications.Believe it or not, the flashlight apps are very handy to have on the desktop, as they keep the phone from sleeping/dimming too soon.HANDS DOWN the best application if you do any amount of texting or MMS, is 'handcent sms'. It is a fantastic program, and one of the nicest Android programs I have used. Can't praise this enough!For twitter, 'twidroid' is my favourite. I don't do too much twittering, so am not sure the competition, but this one is speedy, feature filled and never bogs down my phone. You'll find that isn't always the case with android apps, so twidroid gets a nod for this (as well as handcent, it is rock solid).If you use ampache at all, my buddy Kevin created an android app to stream from your ampache server. It's called 'amdroid' and is pretty decent. It's definitely a work in progress but it's fully functional.'phonalyzer' is cool for seeing stats on your phone usage. Much better than any carrier specific graph on a webpage, and it's small enough to not worry about having it installed and taking up space. It's definitely what I call a "toilet" app, because that is about when I use it, however, it's nice to know my usage here and there! I guess that is praise, because it means I don't have to spend hardly any time using the app to get benefits from it.depending on the android version/carrier/handset manufacturer, you may want to install 'spare parts'. It's a few more settings not found in the settings menu, but I think this only supplements handsets running android 1.5, but I am not sure off top of my head.Finally, root your phone and install 'wireless tether for root users'. I kid you not, it's the most useful app i've used. You can't find it in the market, but a simple google search will get it for you, and you can just click the link from the android browser to install it. It has access control lists, WEP (better than nothing) and multiple concurrent client support. I love this application, but of course, use at your own risk as you have to root your phone to use it (not a problem for most handsets), and you may run up data charges fast if you don't have unlimited.That's my main list, anything else has been tinkering. These have been installed/reinstalled on my phone since I have had an Android device. |
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 your charges processed.Imho you are on the wrong path and would do better to simply apply to an existing IPSP as a customer and get a merchant account. That way you sidestep all the things that have to do with certification, you only need to pass the merchant accreditation, which is a whole lot easier and less costly.Examples of IPSPs that you could apply to are epoch, ccbill and vxsbill.Good Luck. |
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<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 40211
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;nasa.gov. IN A
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
nasa.gov. 300 IN SOA ns1.nasa.gov. dns.nasa.gov. 2008043229 10800 1200 3600000 14400
No A records. $ dig www.nasa.gov
; <<>> DiG 9.6.1-P2-RedHat-9.6.1-7.P2.fc11 <<>> www.nasa.gov
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 22541
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 9, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.nasa.gov. IN A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.nasa.gov. 300 IN CNAME www.nasa.gov.speedera.net.
www.nasa.gov.speedera.net. 120 IN CNAME www.nasa.gov.edgesuite.net.
www.nasa.gov.edgesuite.net. 21600 IN CNAME a1718.x.akamai.net.
a1718.x.akamai.net. 20 IN A 64.81.79.72
a1718.x.akamai.net. 20 IN A 64.81.79.70
Looks like the whole site is served through Akamai too.What's a "direct @ url" ? Now we're overloading the @ for something else too? |
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 easy to do. |
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 (if you think they are extremely good) by manipulating the url. Add another query parameter to the url and resubmit it. |
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 example, that translates into an enormous amount of money available within the Chinese economy.Compare the potential for growth with western countries. China has a long way to go before achieving parity with most western countries. Poorer countries have the potential for rates of economic growth that vastly outstrip countries that are already wealthy. Whether it will happen is another matter but the potential is there. |
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 of search, the starting point of big volume business.edit: by 15% I meant 15% of India & China combined. |
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 traffic), GMail, Search, Voice Search (works surprisingly well), Goggles (less useful than I'd hoped), built-in music player for MP3's, camera, contacts, alarm clock, YouTube.AndroZip for file {de,}compression and filesys browsing.Dolphin browser, better than stock browser.Watched a few TV show episodes on TV.com. Quite nice, I hope they expand their offerings.ConnectBot for ssh access. Remote Desktop for remote Windows login over VPN during emergencies. Had a VNC viewer, forget which one, before last factory wipe.Icviewer for PDF files.AcroBible for full NIV and Portuguese-AA bible editions w/ commentary.Google Voice for very cheap international calls.Had a Facebook app installed at one time, I'll get back to it when I have the patience.What I'd REALLY like: a way to reformat and fetch AT&T U-Verse DVR shows onto the phone from anywhere to watch them while away from home. |
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 that. |
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 looked very compact.The only person that ran a real production clone of HN with substantial traffic that I'm aware of was nickb, together with prakash and miles under 'newmogul.com', since then this has been taken over by markenomics.com, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of activity there.As for stability under load, from what I can tell by observing HN the server goes down several times an hour and has a script wrapped around it to keep it up or something like that. Every time it goes down it re-reads the state from a bunch of files and then seems to work quite well until the next crash. The crashes - as far as I can see - rarely lead to data loss though there have been some rare instances of comments getting mixed up in the wrong threads.I hope this helps. |
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). The USA might still have some of those small local banks in existence that could be purchased at a reasonable multiple of earnings - or perhaps you might find one interested in an Internet based joint venture. |
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 issue. |
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