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What if I don't have an idea? | Brennan: As I look at trying to start something myself, it's not the lack of "good" ideas that ever worries me (although if you tell someone you're interested in starting a company the first question they always ask is "what's your idea?"), it's finding the right partner or "someone else to work with" that seems to be the biggest obstacle. I'd rather have no ideas and a determined partner to work with, than 100 greate ideas and no way to execute.To that point, I have one burning idea right now but have not landed on the right partner. Any interest in talking about it? |
What if I don't have an idea? | hendler: There are many many great people in industries/services that just haven't led them to be technologists. They might have everything you don't - which is key to building a great team. |
What if I don't have an idea? | alex_c: Don't fret about finding The Big Idea (or even not having a List of Possible Big Ideas to choose from).I'm sure you get small ideas now and then. When you do, don't think about them too much, just jump on them, especially if they're small enough to finish in a couple of days. Something Bigger might grow out of one of them. If not, hey, it still beats spending that time watching TV or reading Reddit.You must have at least one friend who thinks sort of the same way you do. Bounce silly ideas off them. Create a mindset - for both yourself and for them - where you look at everyday activities and events through the perspective of "what can I do with this?", and chat with them about ideas regularly. |
What if I don't have an idea? | mde: Enjoy this phase! Idea generation can be a lot of fun. Get some books to stimulate. I've gotten a lot of mileage from "A Whack On The Side Of The Head" and "Creativity" (Csikszentmihalyi). Watch some TED talks. Go to your local unconferences and meet people and see what they're working on. Team up on those connections.Share your ideas as they come. Record everything that comes to mind. Get feedback. Iterate.Meanwhile, you can be educating yourself on the business side of things: starting a business, people/listening skills, presenting, marketing, etc. You're already here; that's a pretty good start. But books like "The Art Of The Start", "Founders At Work", and the Seth Godin variety are worth their weight in gold. |
What if I don't have an idea? | mrtron: a) Go work for another startup with a great team.b) Do some contracting. This will help you meet people and get your first taste of the business world. Learn to sell yourself, it should be much easier than selling any product. You also learn how to manage expectations, people and products.c) Start making products. They don't have to be big, be groundbreaking, but start making things and learn to make things well. Probably the first few things you will make won't turn out how you would like and you will learn some valuable lessons.d) Hopefully along the way, meet some other people who you can talk to and possibly work with. Sometimes you get lucky here, but you have to get that ball rolling.e) Along the way you will find something you are passionate about building. Build it. |
What if I don't have an idea? | markessien: How about doing something pointless but interesting. For example, a self aware web app.Anyways, I have a list of about 100 ideas, so here are two:* A generic API to access bank data from banks all over the world
* A site where one can list all the people that one hates, and what one will do to them when one finally gets rich enough/powerful enough etc.Just make something silly and small. |
What if I don't have an idea? | steveplace: Wrote a post about this a month back:http://www.graduatedtaste.com/2008/09/12/lists-of-successful... |
What if I don't have an idea? | ram1024: Off the top of my head, you could make a nationwide collaborative blog for teachers/professors to voice their opinions and/or publish short educational pages. get some sponsors for it and funnel the money back into some kinda foundation/fund for the education community.like a techcrunch for teachers, TeachCrunch? O_o |
how quickly do you answer support emails? | callmeed: We have a ticket system (which is just a basic Rails app I built). When a ticket is submitted, the customer gets an auto-reply that we're looking into it. The ticket is emailed to almost every staff member (6 of 8 people). An initial reply is usually submitted within 30 minutes (not necessarily a resolution). Tickets become a thread of messages until it is resolved.I'm a big fan of a distributed/threaded system like this. I don't like direct emails for support.BTW, if anyone is interested in using our ticket system, let me know–I could open source it on GitHub or something. |
What if I don't have an idea? | dineshshah: Lots of good comments suggesting you focus on what you love and are passionate about.But also ask what you hate; what makes you mad? It could be a little thing (e.g. why can't I browse the library of the DVD rental places in my neighborhood?) Is there a computing solution to that maddening thing? |
What if I don't have an idea? | asdflkj: The way to have ideas is to understand the field really well. That sounds kind of banal, but I haven't seen anyone approach startups this way explicitly.So, I would study history of technology and of money, and especially recent history of computing and the Internet. Then I'd try to simulate it all in my mind, and try to see patterns. and think of all the alternative ways in which it might have happened. What were the good ideas of any given time? Which of them were inevitable? Which of them relied on timing? By what chain of reasoning could they have been foreseen?I don't really know if this would help. It's a big undertaking, and I have other stuff to do now, so I haven't tried it. |
What if I don't have an idea? | mde: Another good idea resource from PG: http://ycombinator.com/ideas.htmlThat serves as a helpful litmus test. Not falling somewhere onto that map doesn't invalidate your idea, but the 30 items cover a lot of ground. |
What if I don't have an idea? | jdavid: ok, step one skip the great idea thing. the reality is that the internet is a large enough for competitors in any market.step 2 is build something you know well, it will make it easier to copy and you might find a few things to innovate on later. i have tried the big bold approach and i end up having to scale back my plans, its so depressing. Looking back i would rather be dealing with problems as i grow.step 3 repeateventually you will find a team of people that are doing things that are interesting.step 4 end loop, profit, retire |
What if I don't have an idea? | markm: If you want to talk about some ideas just send over an e-mail and we can discuss. |
What if I don't have an idea? | bretthoerner: I imagine this will be lost in the fray, but thanks everyone for the great replies.More ideas about how to uh, have ideas than I had ever imagined. Thanks a lot, seriously. |
What if I don't have an idea? | danielhodgins: I understand where you are coming from, and I would like to share what worked for me. I just finished university, and have been in 3 startup situations so far, none of which have gone anywhere. That's not to say I didn't learn some very valuable lessons. In fact, I learned things in these failed startups that I might not have learned any other way. In addition, I am still alive, and stronger for having walked through the fire a few times.I think the most important thing for someone like you is to start generating momentum. Let me explain how you might go about this.1. There is no mistake, only make.Build stuff. Fail. Just make sure you fail quickly and cheaply. If you actually bring an idea to life you have succeeded no matter what happens. You will have seperated yourself from everyone else who has ideas but never acts. Ideas are just ideas if no one does the tough, painful work required to actually execute them. Like a young piano prodigy the more you can practice actually building stuff the better you will get.2. Go to events.Talk to other entrepreneurs/programmers/designers about what they are doing. Ask lots of questions and learn. It's tough to learn anything if you never keep your mouth shut.3. Learn about business.I realize some people on this site are code-centric, but in reality it's only one piece of the pie. You will be better off if you read and understand what makes good businesses tick. Everything from branding, copy, and positioning to pricing, business models, and marketing. It helps to learn all of it. I would be happy to recommend some great books if you contact me.4. Start learning about what people want.Try and understand what makes people use particular web sites. Is it speed? ease of use? unique design? Copywriting? Branding? Or did the site take an old idea and put a unique spin on it? Perhaps you can take elements of certain ideas and combine, bundle, or package them in new ways.This is getting way too long, but I hope anyone who reads this gets some value from this post. Feel free to contact me anytime. I would be glad to share any of the information or resources I have gained from years spent learning from advisors, mentors, books, blogs, and anyone at anytime.Best wishes.Dan H. |
What if I don't have an idea? | louisadekoya: Check out http://www.ideatagging.com and see if one of the ideas there grabs you. |
how quickly do you answer support emails? | manmanic: My answer seems to differ from most people here.I do all sales and support once per day, first thing in the morning, getting the mailboxes to completely empty. I then glance at the mailboxes a few more times during the day, but don't send any more replies till the next morning. The only exception is if there's an urgent issue or serious bug.This works for me because:* I can concentrate on productive work (building new features) most of the day without serious distraction. If I were to reply to emails all day long, I'd get far less done.* In my experience, users put that little bit more effort into solving problems themselves, if they're given the motivation to do so. They read documentation and FAQs. If you reply to emails within half an hour, you'll often find yourself in a lengthy back-and-forth that takes up a lot of time.This second point might sound like heresy in a world where the customer is always right. But it's not so bad to lose customers whose opportunity cost in time is greater than their revenue is ever going to be worth.While a small minority of users are unhappy to wait more than an hour or two for a reply, a guaranteed 24 hour turnaround is still pretty good compared to large companies. |
how quickly do you answer support emails? | lux: I've been using email for my main company, which isn't great. Just finished putting together the new support system, which is still email-based, but also logs everything in a private ticket system and texts if there's an emergency.Response time: it varies, but it's definitely good to send a "hey we're looking into it" canned response so their issue is acknowledged. It would almost be worth it to have a few of those prepared and auto-reply within 10-20 minutes with one... |
How do we add a second reply to a question we were asked re. our application? | cofejay: Nice, looks like you have interest shown..did you receive a question via email or was there a separate page you're suppose to check on yc reponse? |
What if I don't have an idea? | portfolioexec: all of my ideas have been bourne out of experience. is there an industry that you like outside of web? my passion has been in real estate and it's led me to create a web app for real estate investors that solves many of their needs. |
What are your Favorite Feeds? | dpapathanasiou: That link is: http://www.seeksift.com/asp/suggest(not sure why urls don't appear in the discussion text) |
ASK HN: Who would you use to host a Dot Net Nuke site? | jason: http://discountasp.net/sp_dotnetnuke.aspx .Net hosting tends to more expensive but discount has been good to me in the past. |
What if I don't have an idea? | radu_floricica: Ok, a strange ideea: if you want to do a startup but don't have an ideea you like, you can try something ourside IT. I did it for about a year (a local courier company). It failed, of course, but I learned _a lot_, about startups, about people, some about myself. And more importantly, one year later I have my passion about programming back.
Important stuff: don't sink too much money into it, and try to use it to make connections, not brake them. |
What are your Favorite Feeds? | mixmax: What are you going to do when the list becomes larger? The signal to noise ration will fall sharply. |
What are your Favorite Feeds? | fuzzy-waffle: You should probably index the tags on the feeds also. |
What are your Favorite Feeds? | mg1313: Is this another Alltop.com sort of...? |
What if I don't have an idea? | qqq: Good ideas aren't worth anything, remember? Just buy one on the cheap. |
What if I don't have an idea? | YuriNiyazov: I am in a surprisingly similar situation, except I, in addition, have the experience of a failed startup (was working on a friend's idea, not mine). I have a contract job that's ending in December, and then... |
What if I don't have an idea? | shimon: I've been in a pretty similar situation recently. I quit my day job in May, wanting to pursue my own projects. For two months, I worked on my own projects, releasing something new every week or two.That was fun and I learned a bunch of new things, but in retrospect it wasn't the best way to spend those two months. I had planned to start looking for consulting work in month three, so I started emailing and calling people, arranging meetings, and putting the word out at geek gatherings.A funny thing happened. I started hearing a lot of great project ideas, some of which were potentially paid jobs and others which were just cool hacks or proto-startups. And these came not just as spark of inspiration but with a person, or sometimes a small company, that actually cared about getting it built. It took longer than I expected to actually get paid -- almost a month; it turns out consulting contracts aren't that dramatically easier to sell and execute than getting hired to a regular job, so plan on lots of slow interpersonal cycles -- but in the meantime I was amply supplied with great projects and some good partnerships. Many of these are on my back burner now, behind the work that pays well but dominates, and I mean DOMINATES, my schedule. On the bright side, timing my every minute has dramatically increased my stamina -- I can do a lot more work in a day than I ever have before. This will come in handy with whatever I do.Anyway, here's my advice: start looking for consulting work immediately, and try to get quickly to a point where you can pay your living expenses on 15 billable hours a week. By the way, you might think this is "not even two full time work days", but let me assure you that when you can't count lunch, news.yc, stupefying meetings, etc. against the clock, this will feel like a huge work load. Do not promise anyone 20 or more hours a week until you have tested your capacity; there's a lot you can optimize, and you will.The regular consulting work will help you develop discipline, improve your stamina, and keep you in touch with people. In your spare time, which again you should try to preserve, do whatever projects draw your fancy. Get in the habit of soliciting ideas at parties, from family friends, etc. and see where you can take them in your spare time. Then when you find one that works for you, and some people who might make good partners, deploy the rest of your cushion (the one you didn't spend because you were paying your living expenses off of consulting) and take the plunge.Good luck! |
How should I approach selling ideas? | ram1024: i think a seeding arm like Y-Comb is something you definately should look into. grab a technical minded programmer co-founder and enroll to it or one of its copycat sister-programmes. a sort of startup-camp like Y-comb will be able to fill in your gaps and give you the support you need to bring a product of yours to reality.i am kind of in the same situation as you, and i have found other like minded individual here on HN. so we're not so rare a breed. once you get the gumption to set your ideas in motion, the pieces of the machine will start to come together. you need to take that first step in order for motion to happen.i have applied for this round of Y-Comb with big dreams, but it took actually deciding to do it to realize that it felt right. even if not accepted, it was time for me to do something about my ideas, and turn them into my ambitions instead. i hope this motivates you to start your battle for success as well |
What if I don't have an idea? | jfornear: Hey, I'm in Dallas... currently a senior at SMU. Dallas has plenty of resources depending on what you want to do. Of course it's nothing compared to the valley, but just off the top of my head, http://viewzi.com, http://www.texasstartupblog.com/, http://www.biggu.com/, http://woot.com, http://match.com, http://theplanet.com, http://Godtube.com, and other randoms are all based here. I would argue that there are definitely worse places to be.I'm pretty good at front-end design with CSS, XHTML, JavaScript (mootools/jQuery). Our skills might compliment each other?I'd be down to grab a beer with you sometime to plot the dethroning of Google for YC summer '09 or something. jfornear[at]smu[dot]edu or jessefornear[at]gmail[dot]com |
What if I don't have an idea? | LPTS: Ask Psychedelic Mushrooms for an idea. |
How should I approach selling ideas? | ScottWhigham: No matter what, to me, it seems that you need the capital up-front; without it, you are going to have a much tougher time finding developers. That capital could come from you - it doesn't have to come from investors - but you probably have to pay your developers.You don't mention your background with respect to doing a startup before or managing people/budgets so I'm assuming you haven't done those things (also the question itself seems to support my assumption). In that case, I would suggest that you want to make damn sure that you want the money (from anyone - friends, family, etc) before you sign any deal. As an entrepreneur, you have ideas and you have a reputation. Your reputation is way more important than your ideas. This idea may be brilliant but all kinds of pitfalls lay ahead for even the most seasoned of entrepreneurs who have brilliant ideas and capital. Here's the key: if you #### this particular idea up, you #### up your reputation - and then no one wants to invest in future ideas...Again, I'm making the assumptions that you are young and haven't done a startup on your own. Please feel free to correct my assumptions and I certainly don't mean to offend if I accidently have :)Another word of caution: lots of people think they have access to capital but, when it comes time to actually getting the check, they find it wasn't as easy as Uncle Jimmy made it seem. Maybe you can get the money without a fuss but I'd assume you need a pretty damn good business plan if you've never done a startup and are wanting capital for a pre-revenue, idea-only company. |
Using a hosted mail server with a CNAME that isn't your domain name | SwellJoe: Nonsense.You have a weird idea of what information SMTP servers care about when determining spamminess. DNS is vitally important to getting your mail delivered...but what CNAME is in your MX record is completely and utterly unimportant (it's like worrying about what the name of your mailman is...George or Franny...when the important thing is your address and zip code).Get your DNS RFC compliant, get your SPF records correctly configured for the servers that will send mail for your domain, make sure your sending SMTP server(s) are not in any RBLs, and you'll be fine. MX records are irrelevant. |
Using a hosted mail server with a CNAME that isn't your domain name | tihomir: add TXT SPF Record on your domain that includes your MX recordIN TXT "v=spf1 a:mx1.theemailserversdomain.com a:mx2.theemailserversdomain.com a:mx3.theemailserversdomain.com ~all"and then check out http://old.openspf.org/dns.html
If you want on that site you can look on other domains examples. |
Using a hosted mail server with a CNAME that isn't your domain name | mixmax: How did this story get 0 points? Is there a downvoting button somewhere? |
What if I don't have an idea? | TweedHeads: Develop for the iPhone, you'll make some money for sure while you learn some interesting technology.You'll never regret it, if Japan and Korea are indicators of mobile consumption.The future is mobile! |
What is the best way to promote your new fancy web application? | okeumeni: First post it on HN, if you can take the though review it shows how thick you skin is. If you pass the review, you’re ready to go show off to the rest of the world. |
What if I don't have an idea? | jsmcgd: Make tech friends. There's bound to a bunch of people in Dallas that would like to team up with you. Go find them. They'll give you the ideas you need. |
What if I don't have an idea? | symptic: Move to Austin. |
What is the best way to promote your new fancy web application? | iamelgringo: Amazon's Mechanical Turk can get you beta testers and first users for $.01-.05 a piece. It's generally cheaper than using ad sense. |
What is the best way to promote your new fancy web application? | petercooper: You could write a book on this. Heck, I probably should - I've done it a few times :)A short list (but by no means anywhere near complete!):- Find as many blogs in your niche as possible. Pitch them properly (a lot could be written on that point alone) DON'T JUST GO FOR THE BIG ONES! The smaller blogs are more likely to link to you if you're friendly to them and develop rapport.. I run blogs with over 10,000 subscribers and I love helping people who are FRIENDLY and GENUINE.- Use your social network.. you've been building one up, right? Make sure all your Twitter and Facebook followers know about what you're doing. Lean on your Linked In contacts.- Stumbleupon advertising (if appropriate, 5 cents a visitor). Adwords advertising (if appropriate).- Find places where users of competing applications gather (forums, Google Groups, etc) and work your way into their attention zone.- See if there's a sub-Reddit that's specifically for your niche. Find people to charm there, post ancillary links regarding your app, etc. Don't over-do it.- Post it on HR (as someone said above)- Find your way in to interviews, podcasts, etc. A lot of content providers are dying for more content - you might make a great interviewee. The media is less opaque than it seems.- Go to events! Make sure you have an elevator pitch. Get excited. Wear schwag featuring your logo, etc, if you want to. Don't just focus on the big-wigs - get anyone who might find your service useful excited.- Does your design rock? Get on to the "CSS design", and "Web design" show case type sites. There are hundreds of them around. Not amazing exposure, but the more links the better and any one of your visitors might turn in to a serious contact.- Start your own blog for your company / startup. Make it really interesting. Be candid. Show off new features. Show off stuff you're working on. Show off your team or your technology. Build up your own tribe of followers. They will make all the difference when it comes to saving you on del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, and so forth.- Make sure you stay on top of your e-mail. Customers might test you with e-mails - responding quickly and completely can make the difference between sales and no sales - or life and death with a startup.- Find ancillary reasons to get your service mentioned in blog posts and tutorials. For example, if your startup is an RSS mashup generator of some sort, you need to have tutorials out there that recommend your service. Get those tutorials and posts on to Reddit, Hacker News, Digg, etc.- If people write about your site, write tutorials that mention you, etc, PROMOTE THAT CONTENT EVEN IF IT'S NOT YOURS! Get people reading stuff that's about you - not by you!- Remember that bigger sites like TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb (if applicable to your sector) love exclusives. Don't bother mass pitching those - focus on one, whichever you can get best rapport with, and offer an exclusive. Your product needs to be AWESOME for this to work though.- Follow a search.twitter.com search on terms related to your service (and even the name of your service) .. get in touch with people who might be interested, respond to all comments about your service.- Write a bog standard press release and submit through the standard channels. This will not help much but at least your company name/service name will end up with a ton of results in Google - this can help you look bigger than you are. You /may/ even get some offline coverage if the press release is actually kinda good (but not too crazy). It's cheap to do this.- Build ancillary "fun" services that tie into your main web app. Something fun, free, perhaps something that you can relate to sites people find interesting, such as Twitter. Let's say your main service is an online graphics editor. Perhaps you could create a separate site where people can create avatars for Twitter / Facebook from a small set of templates.. separate project but promoting the first.- Hustle, hustle, hustle! Make sure you know as soon as someone blogs about your service. Follow Google Blog Searches, etc. Keep Googling. Get commenting on blogs (not in a spammy way - just get your name and service out there). If someone needs to do something your service offers, you need to be there!I believe Jason Calacanis wrote an interesting piece on doing PR for a startup recently. Find that article and read it - I recall it was very good...BTW, if anyone thinks I might be able to turn this into a good book, resource site, or similar, vote this up and I might give it a try! :) |
What is the best way to promote your new fancy web application? | webwright: http://andrewchenblog.com/2007/11/22/why-bloggers-and-press-...Interesting contrarian viewpoint. I don't agree with it entirely (the truth always lies somewhere in the middle) but the important takeaway is that active promotion is expensive as hell (either time or money).I'd say the most important thing is to BE WORTH TALKING ABOUT. If you're yet another project management app or bugtracker, this is challenging. Have a twist, have a story.Next, try to find a viral loop (read more Andrew Chen if you think your app has potential here... Most don't).Be an SEO genius. It's the gift that keeps on giving.Learn about direct response marketing (best way is going to marketingexperiments.com and playing the adwords / landing page game). This only works if you have a product to sell, of course... Unless you want to play arbitrage games, which have gotten harder.The trick is (after a very brief push for your spike of attention and accompanying SEO-juicing backlinks) to find a systemic way for business to come to YOU. |
What is the best way to promote your new fancy web application? | MicahWedemeyer: I just gave a presentation on this at Barcamp Atlanta. The slides are up on my blog if you're interested:http://blog.aisleten.com/2008/10/18/generating-buzz-without-... |
What is the best way to promote your new fancy web application? | jfarmer: Promoting a website is the same as promoting any other product:1) Identify your target market
2) Find a distribution channel
3) Pursue your target marketMany startups go the TechCrunch route, but unless your target market is Silicon Valley technologists it's probably not a smart move. Put another way, not all customers are created equal.When I was first launching Appaholic (now Adonomics) I posted aggressively in the Facebook developer forums. Beyond that I pursued SEO.Most startup people I know think a bit about (1), very little about (2), and jump right into (3). Be methodical and data-oriented, instead. |
Buying a new desktop | sfamiliar: sounds like you want a mini-dvi adapter, a big standalone screen, a usb keyboard and mouse, and a steelcase chair, not a desktop computer.if you want processing power for web servers and databases, get a slice somewhere -- they're pretty affordable. don't buy an entirely new machine when you can get everything you asked for in the first paragraph for the macbook (and the sync hassles that come with two machines). you'd have to buy that stuff anyhow if you got a desktop, why not get it without the desktop?my setup: three slices, a macbook, 25" 16:9 flatscreen LG in portrait mode. i use the mac keyboard, but have a really comfy chair. there's a file server in the kitchen, but it's left over from an old desktop and is not a speed demon -- it doesn't have any inputs or outputs connected save for ethernet. |
Need a host with some balls, offshore maybe? | palish: http://www.reflected.netThey're very good. I have a dedicated server with them. They also host www.ytmnd.com, which has had a long history of copyright trouble. |
What is the best way to promote your new fancy web application? | r00k: Make it so good that everyone talks about it. |
Need a host with some balls, offshore maybe? | callmeed: I asked about Euro-based hosts here recently:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=295949That might help |
Buying a new desktop | ScottWhigham: I bought my last rig from newegg - parts and then put it together. For my newest one, I went to Frys to buy an off-the-shelf box and was pleasantly surprised that I could get a very powerful machine for $800 or so.Frys and Microcenter offer great choices in Dallas (where I am) and I'd assume elsewhere if you have 'em. |
Buying a new desktop | watmough: Buy a refurb 20" iMac.I'm working on mine right now, and it really is one of the nicest machines I've ever used. |
Need a host with some balls, offshore maybe? | natch: Host offshore, but put heavy assets on AWS S3? I don't have an answer on the host, but thought this idea might help, since offshore hosts can be slower for US access. Amazon might be pussies too, I don't know; but this might buy you time. |
Buying a new desktop | ram1024: if you can wait it out a bit, USB 3yum![edit] aww crap, now it's saying i have to wait till 2010 till USB 3 hits. that... that's longer than Longhorn 7! |
Need a host with some balls, offshore maybe? | mixmax: Try and look into where the pirate bay is hosted. They seem to have balls of steel. |
Buying a new desktop | strlen: D.J. Bernstein (yes, "that" djb) has a fairly good recommendation page, albeit out dated:http://cr.yp.to/hardware/build-20071203.html
http://cr.yp.to/hardware/advice.htmlMy advise is build your own: the price may actually be higher, but the upside is being able to select your own components (for better performance, Linux compatibility and an upgrade-ability route for the future - so you won't need to replace the entire computer in two years). |
Need a host with some balls, offshore maybe? | cstejerean: Can you at least name the company that's bullying you so we can go out of our way not to do business with them? |
How to find the best buyers for your website/app | noodle: why not post it on here or on your blog? i mean, i'm not looking to buy something, but if it looks like a good thing to invest in, i'd give it some thought.techcrunch just posted up a for-sale type section, that might be a decent place, too. |
Need a host with some balls, offshore maybe? | Harkins: I've heard NearlyFreeSpeech.net is good. No colo or dedicated, tho. |
How to find the best buyers for your website/app | jacobscott: Do you have competitors? Large customers? Know any experts in this area? Those are the people I would look into first. |
What are your favorite idea pitches? | utnick: For a role model/inspiration I would go rent a couple seasons of Entourage and try to mimic Ari. |
What are your favorite idea pitches? | lanceweatherby: I suggest tuning into Presentation Zen on a regular basis. http://www.presentationzen.com/ |
Need a host with some balls, offshore maybe? | needahost: You guys rock. I'm checking out nearlyfree right now but I think PRQ might be the way to go. Moving our site over is going to be painful and expensive so we want to get it right the first time and not have to deal with it again. With PRQ, it looks like we can do just that.The best part about all this - the company who is bullying us has never, not ONCE, sent a notice directly to us. Nope, they just pelt our host as a scare tactic. Low and behold, it finally worked and our host gave us a week to vacate. Super, thanks...So as usual, you guys rock. Thanks so much for the help. Sweden here we come - where the air is cold, the women are blond and the hosts have brass balls. |
What is the best way to promote your new fancy web application? | revicon: Apparently dropping your company name in this thread is a good way :)- http://mattcrampton.com/flickr/ |
Best intro to Emacs, Latex, Python? | makecheck: For LaTeX, Google the "Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2E", a fairly short PDF which I found covered almost everything I normally used.There are a million EMACS cheat sheets out there, but honestly I would find someone you know who uses it. Their enthusiasm will probably help you to learn it better. [Personally, I use "vim". :)]Python's own documentation links at "python.org" are pretty good. The language itself is quite simple and where you'll spend most of your time is browsing their library documentation anyway. |
Need a host with some balls, offshore maybe? | zitterbewegung: I would host in sealand by havenco see http://www.havenco.com/ |
Need a host with some balls, offshore maybe? | pasbesoin: Thanks for this thread. I've been becoming increasingly concerned about both stability and liability in the face of today's legal climate. Even the little discussion community that I've managed on my own nickel I see increasingly as a potential liability. One nut whose posts get some official or professional attention, and my life might be made cr*p. Although I wasn't actively researching, this gives me some options to consider. |
Need a host with some balls, offshore maybe? | lsc: redundancy is keykeep complete copies in different hosting companies on different continents.For details beyond that, we'd need to know what kind of trouble. The US is pretty good for most kinds of political speech, but horrible for many kinds of commercial speech. Many other countries are the opposite.But yeah. if you make sure you have a hot spare of your complete system in more than one country (this should be pretty cheap with the proliferation of VPS providers) you will be in much better shape. Once you have that covered, you really only need to worry about your DNS provider. |
Need a host with some balls, offshore maybe? | webwright: As long as you're posting anonymously, you should tell us all who your current (vaginal) host is. |
iPhone friendly Hacker News? | twism: I think buxfer makes one. I forget the URL though. |
iPhone friendly Hacker News? | pstinnett: looking for this as well. |
iPhone friendly Hacker News? | PieSquared: Hey, I think just being away from HN for a while is good for me. I haven't been here in a week or so and I'm pretty sure my productivity rose. Though it's fun to come back and read some of the stuff here when I feel burnt out :) |
iPhone friendly Hacker News? | jwilliams: To be honest, I don't mind the site as it is on the iPhone. The pages themselves are simple, so it renders quickly and it's quick to navigate.Not sure why - But a lot of iPhone versions seem to cut the number of articles/elements back quite considerably. Of the iPhone-friendly news sites that I use, most of them only display a dozen or so articles (rather than the 40-50 that are usually on the normal site).I prefer to zoom around a page then be stuck with navigating through smaller pages. |
iPhone friendly Hacker News? | enomar: Works pretty well through Google Reader. |
iPhone friendly Hacker News? | markbao: http://buxfer.com/yc/ - this one is the fully featured one, but it has been down for a while.http://code.seedlessmedia.com/iCombinator/#_home - this one works. |
Why haven't signup confirmation emails died yet? | vivekamn: Unless its an e-commerce site, just don't do it! |
If you have ever played WoW please critique my new site | henning: Looks cool. Too bad most WoW players are 13 year old jerks. |
iPhone friendly Hacker News? | kriyative: VenueM.com makes a great RSS to iPhone-friendly web site interface. Check out their Hacker News site (ideally on an iPhone/iPod Touch) at:http://i.venuem.net/ychn |
If you have ever played WoW please critique my new site | sbarski: It does indeed look very good. Nice design and a good concept to boot.I hope it does well. |
If you have ever played WoW please critique my new site | Caligula: The design is nice. One suggestion would be to better mimic the ui/colors/look and feel of WoW's ingame ui. Also add some sort of clan feature where someone can register a clan that they could also use as their clan/guild website so like a facebook group.But disturbing too... A social network where instead of being about the users personal life, it is about a video game character they play. Luckily there are a boatload of people whose lives evolve around WoW so it could do very well. |
If you have ever played WoW please critique my new site | mattmaroon: FWIW, I'm not a player, but your design looks great. I'm a little iffy about the menu links near the top. I feel like they shouldn't be separated, and could maybe use a background that's a little less translucent. Also the word "legend" is a bit tough to read and should have a period after it.But the color-scheme and fonts are great. Overall it's pretty solid. |
Need a host with some balls, offshore maybe? | jbert: Would it be possible to create a web hosting system which doesn't have a single point of "legal failure"?I guess by definition, it couldn't be run as one company. But you could have independent but co-operating companies in multiple countries, each holding a copy of the hosted data.Would the directors/shareholders/managers have to be different personnel? (e.g. if Alice receives a cease-and-desist for material hosted by company A1 in country C1, is Alice under any obligation if she also works for company A2 in country C2 which also holds the material (and is available under the same URL, so would probably come under the same letter)?Some sort of a redundant array of inexpensive countries would be needed to have an 'internet state' that wasn't beholden to the laws of any individual country. |
If you have ever played WoW please critique my new site | arien: Very nice, it could be a great resource for roleplayers (but then I'd remove the 'uber l33t' line, heheh).I'd like to mention that the navigation through the journal entries didn't feel too easy. I'd suggest adding a link at the bottom of each entry to show the previous one, for example :)Good luck with your site! |
Need a host with some balls, offshore maybe? | morphle: We can accomodate you in the Netherlands. As the first ISP here I know my way around. We applied to Ycombinator this cycle with a site that we host ourselves, but I am happy to help find you any type of hoster you'll like. Merik at Knoware.nl |
How much revenue should we give to content creators? | ld50: i think you should do a cost analysis from a user standpoint of competing services. once a "fair" or "market" rate has been established, i'd then adjust your price significantly below that (of course you can't forget to maintain sufficient cash flow to stay afloat). then market the hell out of your service (make sure your service is on par with that of your competition). once you've established yourself as a leading marketplace for online music, develop a significant competitive edge and you'll be free to adjust your pricing structures upwards, as long as you monitor your attrition rates to make sure the market believes your tax increases to be "reasonable". keep in mind your competitive edge could be something as simple as "well, we've made ourselves the largest marketplace for online music". etc, etc, hire me as a consultant and give me an equity stake. etc, etc. |
How much revenue should we give to content creators? | ld50: "So far we've agreed that we should distribute 70% of the revenue generated from song sales to artists.I don't think this is enough though -- I think we should distribute some specific percentage of our total revenue (including song sale revenues and advertising revenues)">not important"Anyways, it's difficult to find a balance between how much revenue we're pulling in and how much we're willing to pay out.">this is the real issue. forget your first question. |
If you have ever played WoW please critique my new site | Raphael: "Critique" ain't a verb. |
Most cost-effective method of achieving physical redundancy | jwilliams: Interesting question :)1. The most cost effective in terms of immediate capital outlay is active-passive - which is pretty much #1 that you described. This is generally also less effort... and is generally easy to test.2. The most cost effective long term strategy is active-active as you get ongoing use of both sites. Particularly if the client is happy for reduced performance in a DR scenario... Even if this isn't the case, at least you get a performance boost from the DR site.This is usually more effort as you need things like replication to work/perform... And you also need to test a whole new range of failure scenarios.This approach does have some other advantages though. For example, you can do rolling deploys very easily (upgrade DR first, bring down Prod, upgrade Prod).3. A common hybrid is to have two active sites on the Tomcat/Apache end and active-passive for the MySQL. Depending on the DB load this can be a best of both worlds scenario.4. Some other solutions use a coherent cache solution - e.g. Tangosol, which works with Hibernate/MySQL. As long as the latency between the two sites is low, then this should work. Tangosol is a non-free product, now owned by Oracle afaik, but I don't think it's prohibitively expensive... I've seen this used a lot, and it's probably a very simple and elegant solution, but I personally don't like adding another moving part in. A lot of people I've met swear by it though, particularly Hibernate users. |
Most cost-effective method of achieving physical redundancy | brk: Get your own ASN ;)You are on the right path with your approach #1. Setup a failover server someplace and keep it sync'd at an interval that is the right balance between too-often and too-stale.You could opt to get a small dedicated machine from a larger-scale true multi-homed hosting company. Run haproxy on this "small" machine, which serves primarily to redirect traffic to whichever server is currently deemed to be the "active". Basically this is a low-end DIY Akamai kind of solution. Your cost would be somewhere between #1 and #2. You would eliminate the DNS-lag and the issues you can't control (other servers and clients caching stale DNS data that you can't refresh), and you would get most of the benefits of an availability service like Akamai, without the $15KUSD monthly price tag.There are other benefits to the haproxy solution as well, you can take either machine offline for maintenance with zero (theoretical ;) ) downtime, and if you ever get a traffic surge you can load balance between the two sites (which isn't a bad idea to do all the time if your syncing is up-to-date enough. Send every 10th connection to the fail over site, just to make sure it's always working as expected). |
Back-testing system? | ScottWhigham: Wow - I don't think I'd ever heard of "back-testing" before. Google'd it - interesting...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backtesting |
Most cost-effective method of achieving physical redundancy | smoody: A quick question: When replicating mySQL across data centers, is there an easy or perhaps built-in way to encrypt the replication data streams to prevent prying eyes from potentially intercepting the data? If not, might that be a problem if one is passing replicating credit card numbers, etc.? |
iPhone? Blackberry? Android? Prayer? - How do you remotely monitor your startup? | shergill: iPHone. :) |
Most cost-effective method of achieving physical redundancy | vaksel: why not just auto-copy everything to AWS and do checks for uptime of your host. Then if the check fails, auto-forward the url to the AWS location.This way if it hits the fan, the only problem the users will notice is the 5 mins of downtime between the checks, before the site becomes slower due to the switch to AWSBut then again I don't really know hardware so could be wrong. But from what I understand should be possible |
iPhone? Blackberry? Android? Prayer? - How do you remotely monitor your startup? | tuukkah: I prefer an n810 (great screen, hardware keyboard, Linux) with internet access over bluetooth and a small cell phone. |
Need a host with some balls, offshore maybe? | lacky: SoftLayer is an amazing US host. They have a quality service, the support is great, and the price isn't bad, although they do have their 'premium'. I can't vouch for how they'd act with legal matters, but I'm sure the sales reps can give you a good idea.Don't go with PRQ. I've had a server with them before, and their support is nonexistant, and the speeds are nothing amazing. We've once waiting 3 months for a RAM upgrade.Leaseweb is good if you need a cheap, decent server. They stand up for their clients in legal matters, and the speeds are pretty good.I've had dedicated servers with all of these hosts, and all my reviews are based on first hand experience. |
Is there a name for the 'web shortcut' services? (tinyurl, tinypaste, cli.gs, etc) | ram1024: call em plinks <-- cause it's cuteshort for hop-links maybe? |
Is there a name for the 'web shortcut' services? (tinyurl, tinypaste, cli.gs, etc) | pwoods: I think they are referred to by there services. Like tinyurl is a tinyurl. But if you wanted to coin plink I'll support it! Only 1,499,999,999 internet users to go |
What is the best way to promote your new fancy web application? | wastedbrains: Petercooper shared a great list here are some of my thoughts...We failed to promote our last start up very well (Seekler.com), and our new start doesn't rely on eyeballs so we aren't really promoting it. That being said we did learn a few things. Some of these are probably specific to our type of site which was silly / interesting lists, other tips might be more generalizable.* Focus more niche, whenever we specifically targeted and marketed based around a niche we were far more successful (batman comics vs. comics http://seekler.com/lists/Best+Batman+Graphic+Novels+(Comics) )* Engage highly motivated users, we wanted to make a great horror movie list and we found a couple horror movie blogs, forums, and fans and got them involved in the process from the beginning and after they all thought it was good we promoted it.* Time you promotion, some days are better than others to announce a link / site / news. Figure out what days are best for your kind of content. Then try to focus all of the announcements across various sites into one day. Single day focus always did much better for us than slowly stringing along a few links here and there. (likely because of the larger social news and voting effects)* Get a good relationship with a couple bloggers that write about your topics. We had a few that we could email at any time and they were happy to add a link pointing out our new announcement or release.* Blog and Twitter we have had a few blog articles drive as much traffic to the site as any marketing attempt. I have also been amazed at how many people will sign up to follow site announcements via twitter if you don't abuse it by posting all the time.* One in awhile go for something edgy, some of our mainstream lists did well, but some of our weirder ones were easier to get links for.* Share the wealth if you get some good traffic from other sites link back to people, you will find them more likely to mention something you do if you have been showing them some love.* Spend a little time making sure you site is OK at SEO, just good enough that you aren't hurting yourself when you do get linked up for various topics.Anyways just a couple tips off the top of my head, our attempts where never hugely successful but we had a handful of good traffic hear and there. Hope some of my thoughts help. |
Back-testing system? | fbbwsa: yes, i'd be interested in seeing it put on the web for use. for casual observers, this is interesting.no, i don't think it could be built into a viable online business. most people who have backtesting needs have access to the necessary data via existing subscription services.unless a new service provides "cleaner" data and more breadth than existing services, it'd be hard to be competitive.the consumers in this market are relatively insensitive to price, so that wouldn't be seen as a significant advantage either. |
What's the YC company that lists electronic parts for sale? | mccon104: is it bountii.com? |
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