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How to make the most out of my domain name? | rrival: Why is no one talking about Fujitsu? =)http://www.fujitsu.com/us/services/retailing/technology/hard... |
Please Review My Startup: BeBefore | ique: It seems like it could be useful and has a nice clean layout, big pictures, vids and useful links. I sort of agree with the "spam" feeling though, something doesn't feel right about it, maybe the lack of text, maybe with nothing but pics on the front-page it just looks like a big ad for random products.One functional problem though: I tried to search for an olympus camera and typing Olympus and it completes correctly, I see that there are Olympus Exx models in the list and i continue to write Olympus E to fetch just those and look them over, but then suddently at Olympus E it switches the autocomplete to say "BenQ ..." which is obviously just wrong. |
Please Review My Startup: BeBefore | daok: It tooks me few seconds to figure out what was the purpose of this website. No complete review, just a list of product with affiliate link. No About Page, no information about how to use the website. Not sure if it can be valuable since you can simply do a Google on the product and find more information. I think you need to get more review of product and to add on the interface more data. Like some one pointed out, at first the website look like "spam" and I got the same feeling. Keep the work on it, might be something useful later. |
Please Review My Startup: BeBefore | jriddycuz: I agree with most of the comments here that it's not obvious what the site is supposed to do when you first land on it. Really, a simple "Be Before! gives you information on such and such in a way that no other site does..yada yada. <a href="/about">Read more about Be Before!...</a>" would be extremely helpful. |
Please Review My Startup: BeBefore | 27182818284: This might come off as a little harsh, but you've seen http://www.google.com/products before, right?At first, I thought that the site was going to be a cool place for information on the latest gadgets in a nice, clean layout. I inferred from the name that "Be Before" meant something like "Be before your friends"
After playing for a few seconds, though, it just feels like one of those old pop-under ads. |
Review My App - CareLogger (A Diabetes Tracking Tool) | alexh: I like it!Unfortunately, the fundamental problem with diabetics, and the reason that the (now) 4 people who have commented here never created this app, is that diabetics are lazy. This needs to be soooooo easy to use. Which it is, to the extent that it is a webapp.This really somehow needs to get turned into a mobile app, which will remind you to do the checks, and prompt you for a reading. If you were to provide a simple web API, I would probably be plugging into it tonight on Palm.If this app texted me, and I could respond with readings, I would be in love.Particularly for basal tests and bolus tests on an insulin pump, prompted readings with a dead simple interface are key. When you are supposed to be doing this 5 times a day, you are going to be as expedient as possible. This is the primary problem with logging systems. Personally I either forget, or don't want to run upstairs every time.The only real missing feature of note is the lack of an interface for basal and bolus testing. Though that only applies to a subset of diabetics. |
Who's Hiring? | aquaphile: MileMeter, in Dallas, TX. See http://milemeter.com/jobs for details. |
Review My App - CareLogger (A Diabetes Tracking Tool) | iaman: Very nice. I agree with most commentators that a mobile app would be a big step forward. It will also greatly help patients to share their log data with their physicians instead of mere print outs as suggested on the web site. The solution for laziness would be complete automation as one poster suggested or the patient's physician should press to see this data during all their visits which will indirectly make it a habit for the patient to enter their data. Anyways, nice app again. Good luck. |
Review My App - CareLogger (A Diabetes Tracking Tool) | Vindexus: I have to agree about the signup page appearing out of place. I'd keep it in the same style as the rest of the site.The About page has "About HumaLogger" as the header. I'm assuming you guys changed names once or twice ;) |
Review my Startup - IntroSpectrum (Website Performance Monitoring) | shpxnvz: This is a project I've been working mostly alone on for quite a while. It's a hosted website performance monitoring service that uses live browser instances to test page performance and generate reports highlighting performance problems.Any feedback, tips, etc... would be greatly appreciated! |
VPS - Where should I go? | aidscholar: I'm happy with linode. Decent prices, good service. |
VPS - Where should I go? | z8000: Probably to searchyc.comhttp://searchyc.com/%2522ask+hn%2522+vpsI like Linode FWIW. Bandwidth pooling, good API, good resources, mostly-idle (hand-waving) quad-cores, 5 data centers, a very responsive IRC channel and forums, ability to grow/resize a linode at any time, etc. |
VPS - Where should I go? | spooneybarger: If you need backups by the company themselves that can be used to deploy more instances I would go with slicehost, otherwise linode. Slicehost has more features like a handy iphone app, but linode is cheaper and at least in my limited testing, performs better. |
Review my friend's app (launched today) | pedalpete: it is actually quite interesting, and has a strong underhanded 'lets get something done so we don't end up on meet or die'.But what is with 'Goolah'? That is a fairly ugly mascot, and I don't think he is adding anything to the site.
Maybe he should be eating money and time rather than just staring at me blankly and asking me to enter some info. |
Review my startup: Cashier Live | tbgvi: Hey everyone, we just ended our closed beta and launched so I wanted to get your thoughts. We’ve been working on Cashier Live for about 9 months– in beta for the last 4 or so. Even though it’s pretty polished now, it started off as an MVP and we’ve had our first two stores/users involved from the start. We’re pretty happy with it (so are our users) so we thought now is as good a time as any.Looking forward to hearing your feedback |
Review my startup: Cashier Live | misuba: Convincing people that broadband is stable enough to bet their income on is going to be a hard one. |
Review my startup: Cashier Live | tocomment: This looks great!My wife owns a dance studio so I'd love to get her switched over to this instead of QuickBooks POS. I hate it because there's this insanely complex process to get it connected to a regular QuickBooks install.To even bring up switching over these would be her requirements:1. Integrate with QuickBooks (not QB POS, but regular QuickBooks)2. Manage inventory very well.3. Accept QuickBooks merchant service (whatever the one you sign up with when you install QB POS).4. Have a way to operate when the internet is down.Note that there are credit card gateway services like intercept so your customers can use their own merchant services. That would probably drive up your adoption. |
Review my startup: Cashier Live | wensing: In that Flash piece at the top, I can't click ahead to "Manage your store" or "Secure data" or "Try it free". You have to wait for the movie to progress forward. You should change that. |
Review my startup: Cashier Live | whereareyou: Way to go. Web based POS's are definitely the future.An online demo might be a good idea. Best of luck. Maybe Intuit will but it :) |
Review my startup: Cashier Live | tocomment: Oh for the pricing. I'd make the free kinda sucky, and have the current basic plan be $5 or $10 per month.My reasoning is that the current free version would meet our needs, but I'm not comfortable putting a free web service into our sales process. When you pay for something you feel like it's going to be around for a while. |
Review my friend's app (launched today) | growt: I was a little bit disapointed. I thought your friend had a revolutionary take at online dating :) |
VPS - Where should I go? | carbon8: linode, slicehost, rackspace cloud |
Review my startup: Cashier Live | cantastoria: You guys should look into restaurant POS. The existing systems are horrible and usually require a team to come in and set them up and cost a fortune.Oh and just a quick comment.. I would spell out Point of Sale and not use the acronym. It has a different meaning to most people. |
Is using humor in your pitch deck a good idea? | skennedy: Did you catch the superbowl commercials last night?Done well, humor can be a key component of a marketing strategy. |
Is using humor in your pitch deck a good idea? | robfitz: Humor helps if you're already doing well, and hurts otherwise. |
Is using humor in your pitch deck a good idea? | jolie: I think there's a hierarchy in pitch priorities:1. Clarity.2. Brevity.3. Uniqueness of product.4. Uniqueness of pitch....and so on. If you can make your pitch more unique with humor in a way that doesn't cross any boundaries of taste (and if what you intend to be funny is ACTUALLY funny), then go for it!For example, I saw a pitch to a room of startups, VC, and press that involved singing, dancing, weird accents, and a ukelele. I loved it and remembered the company's name, the product, the founder, the works. Because of that pitch (and their general attitude toward the tech ecosystem), that company's getting a video interview and a shot at a guest post on RWW.com. |
VPS - Where should I go? | regularfry: Where are you? http://www.bytemark.co.uk are good in Europe. |
Review my startup: Cashier Live | mrtron: This system seems to be like early VoIP applications in terms of product evolution.Similar challenges: Stability/security/availability, perceived value to customersBut similar advantages: Zero chicken and egg problem (VoIP could do outgoing calls, you still perform the same CC txns), very low costs, ability to compete in a previously expensive market |
Is using humor in your pitch deck a good idea? | chime: I saw the whole presentation. I have absolutely no idea what lmframework is or does. All I see are words and no actual information: http://lmframework.com/page.php?id=lmfSure, humor could help with pitching an idea or hurt it if used unwisely. But lack of information about what you specifically do will certainly hurt a lot more. In the slide 50/52 you say you've built the part that monetizes the rest of the (Internet-iPhone) gap but then the slideshow ends abruptly without any explanation. Sounds extremely fishy to me. |
Review my startup: Cashier Live | yumraj: While I understand the Flash hate etc. that some people have below, before you start doing anything about it do prioritize your features.Who is your real customer, I'm assuming it's small business owners etc. Do they real care about Flash/AdBlock etc. Do they even know about those things?Focus on the real features they care about, do some market research, if you haven't already. Offline backup is a high priority feature. CC fallback on the traditional system is another (which I believe works via phone and not internet).What about touchscreen support and UI to go with it.I had worked on NCR POS UI way back in the '95-'96 and we used to create OCX (remember those?) controls which were huge so that the UI worked well with touch screens. |
Is using humor in your pitch deck a good idea? | coffeemug: I'd say in a pitch, unless you're really good (judging from your question you're not quite there yet, and few people ever are) situational humor is OK, while all other humor should probably be cut completely. If something funny happens during the pitch, it's ok to joke about it. Planned humor usually doesn't go over well.We had a phrase or two in our pitch (not the slides, but verbal communication) that were a bit humorous, and it happened to work really well. But it's very easy to overdo it, and ultimately, it's unlikely to make much difference. |
Review My App - CareLogger (A Diabetes Tracking Tool) | liminalist: Type 1 diabetic here. Maybe I can offer some unique insight. Or maybe, also being a hacker, that makes me overly critical, so sorry if this is too harsh.There are tons of tools like this out there (including software from Medtronic, the leading maker of insulin pumps, that they've clinically proven increases diabetes control, and integrate directly with glucose meters). I don't use them because:* My meter stores that stuff for me and does charts and stats. If I want those charts on my computer, I can just upload the data with the software that comes with the meter.* Having all the information graphed in one place on the web isn't more useful than looking at my meter.* If I did want more than the meter does in one place, I would just use a spreadsheet.* These tools don't add any major additional insight into what I can do to manage my diabetes better, at least compared to the work in using them.Your pitch -- and the center of your development thought process -- needs to be "use this and you will live longer and have less stress in your life, for X, Y and Z reasons". Don't write another line of code until you have that, is my advice.The most general problem is that there is no "stickiness" to the app -- no compelling reason to keep using it day after day. (Some ideas to get you going: make it get smarter the more I use it. Send me actionable info -- "you've only gone to the gym once this week -- on weeks when you go at least 2x, your avg. BG is 20 points lower". Make me want to show off when I'm doing well, and indirectly apply social pressure to do better when I'm not.)And you don't even have some basic details right. You have nothing for exercise! That's huge! And the glycemic load, fat content, and amount of fiber in a food is as important as how much carbohydrate is in it. Knowing how many carbs are in a piece of pizza isn't that useful (and there are a million other tools to do that already --including ones built directly into insulin pumps and blood glucose meters, and mobile apps). If you don't know that you should take very different insulin amounts and patterns when eating a serving of Skittles, pizza or brown rice even though they have the same amount of CHO, you don't know enough to help.There really isn't anything in the app that shows you've even read the wikipedia page about diabetes. Sorry if that sounds harsh but every part of the app reflects it, and so as a diabetic it's hard not to find the whole thing condescending. In addition to nothing on exercise, your app doesn't do anything with A1C/fructosamine, C-peptide tests, cholesterol, T4, etc., all of which are more useful to compare to blood glucose readings than BP, and as important to track over time. Have you even heard of A1C? They run commercials on TV reminding diabetics to get it checked regularly all the time.Maybe my expectations are too high, or maybe yours are. If you're going for super-simple, it needs to be a lot more simple, a bit more useful, and a lot more memorable. If you're going for sophisticated, you've got a whole lot of work to do and probably need to get diabetes and/or a medical degree first. But you need to make a choice: are you going for power users, or casual users? Even if you got the medical details right, there's a basic market fit problem here, and a lack of stickyness, as mentioned above. There are way too many competitors not to have the market fit be solid and have some very unique twist.In general, if you're selling a specialty product, you need to know more about the specialty than the average user. I've created some very successful software for the specialty $foo market. But I was a $foo-ographer for 10 years, everybody in the $foo world knows my name, I've been blogging about $foo for 5 years, etc.As a white guy, would you start a line of hair-care products for black people? Open up a Thai restaurant even though you've never been to Thailand, don't even eat Thai food, and there are already 3 good Thai restaurants in the neighborhood -- but you heard that lemongrass is somehow involved? Probably not, so why do this? DON'T FAKE THE FUNK.Oh, final pet peeve. For the love of Pete don't say stuff like "CareLogger makes it possible to share your logged information with your physician simply by printing off the desired records." No. Being able to print a web page is not a feature. I can just take my glucose meter to the doctor and they can pull my data directly from it into their computer! Don't mention stuff that makes you look bad, even to downplay it. If you can't compete on a feature, don't mention it. Sell the features you do have, preferably the ones competitors don't. |
Review my startup: Cashier Live | jeromec: I haven't read all comments, so apologies if something has been covered. I think you could make some serious cash if you execute this correctly as well as heed customer feedback. For the website, several things... The site looks great, but needs tweaking. I'd get rid of the Flash. The loading is irritating and so is the auto changing between tab views. I want to click to move when I'm ready. The animation is overkill. It really serves no useful purpose except to say you can design a fancy site. I'd stick the animation in the video, but make it actually show something useful - like larger screen walk-throughs. This brings us to the video. I don't like being tricked; when I click a video reading "view video" I expect something to play immediately, not link to another page. Next, the video is too long and boring. I'd use the homepage video to answer these 3 crucial things (applicable to all sites) as quickly and concisely as possible: 1. What is it? 2. How can I benefit from it? 3. What does it take from me? Lastly, I'd put "A Complete Hardware and Software Solution" up higher in the larger green font, as that is an important point to know. That should get you started, but you've got a great thing going I think. Good luck! |
I love Nethack. Are there other great terminal games? | Falcor: The SLASHEM variant of Nethack has a lot of added awesomeness - rolling a Doppelganger monk is particularly rockin'. |
Review my friend's app (launched today) | ntulip: Changing the url allows you to see what other results people got. now that was a waste |
I love Nethack. Are there other great terminal games? | jacquesm: hunt the wumpus ;)the infocom stuff.hhgttg and others. |
Review my startup: Cashier Live | dasht: I'm very skeptical of this idea. I don't mean to spread "negative energy" or flame but, may I be frank?Walking it through:Let's start with the straw-man that I'm a small single shop and don't want CC processing. Cashierlive will take me as a customer for $50/month - but I can buy a robust cash register that will last years for less than that and I'll probably save more than $50/month using my own in-house inventory management system even if I wind up having to enter journal tape and receipt data into my PC manually. On top of that, the used cash register I buy will likely be a more robust solution.Suppose I'm that same dinky shop but now I want to add CC processing. There already exists a competitive market for low-acquisition-cost, fee-based CC processing - just go into any corner liquor store in a big city. I can either add a service fee to CC and debit card purchases, or set a minimum purchase price for card usage and adjust my retail prices slightly. (Which is right depends on the nature of my products and my customers.)Suppose I'm still a single shop but larger and more sophisticated. I want integration of POS with inventory management. I want CC processing. If I'm setting up for the first time to achieve that state I have to drop a decent chunk of change on HW and I damn sure want to have competing offers from CC processing companies. Yet with cashierlive I'm locked into cashierlive's CC processing partners and any subsidy I'm getting on software or hardware looks like chump change in my larger budget.The higher up the chain my business goes, the less attractive it is to (a) trust cashier live to protect my data; (b) trust cashier live to to remain in business; (c) trust cashier live to keep up with me in feature demands; (d) trust cashier live to avoid massive attacks on their servers; (e) trust that cashier live isn't down when I need to collect reports to file taxes; etc.As a larger, more sophisticated customer - all those unknowns and risks greatly outweigh the relatively modest cost savings.What about if I have multiple stores and am really attracted to the cross-site inventory management features? Or like the "access anywhere" features for reporting. At that point I'm sophisticated and flush enough that I can probably do better on my own - with bespoke software if I have to.The low end of the market has plenty of reasons to find a simpler, more robust, cost competitive solution in existing markets. The high end has every reason to run, not walk, from the kind of centralization of control and purchasing decisions that cashier live implies.Cashier Live as a business seems to be essentially a value-added broker of CC processing services. In that sense, it competes directly against the IT/POS consultant that my local accounting firm uses - the guy who actually comes into my shop and connects devices and strings wire. Cashier Live is competing against that with on-line training videos and a help line - which is weak. It's especially weak since, regardless, I still have to hire my local accounting firm.Swapping out my "small business perspective" hat for my "engineer with VC sensitivities" hat: the centralization of data and services proposed by cashier live are just nuts. It creates a massive and precarious single point of failure in direct proportion to the number of customers it acquires and the number of transactions it processes. Asked to comment on the technology I would be conscious bound to speak out against it. Asked to invest, I would have to decline.BUT: HOW TO FIX IT!!!!Web-based POS, inventory mgt. etc. is a fine idea provided (as noted in other comments) it's hardened against interruptions of net connectivity and avoids centralization. All of the problems I listed above have to do with the unreasonable centralization of cashier live's model: centralization of choice about CC processing agents; centralization of choice about software features; centralization of choice about database structure, backup-policy, etc.; .....I think cashier live would have a chance if it polished up its code, released it under GPL, partnered with accounting firms instead of directly CC processing firms, and went into the premium fee support / consulting business while learning to franchise sales to put qualified reps on the floor of customer's shops to hook things up.I have a hunch that cashier live grew out of doing some bespoke work and then trying to turn that into a commodity service "web 2.0 style". Perhaps the better course would be to learn how to do bespoke work at scale, for a premium.It would even be OK for cashier live to resell hosting for the web service provided that hosting weren't centralized and the customer had the option of finding their own hosting. |
VPS - Where should I go? | godDLL: This is not HN material. Direct this question to http://serverfault.com/Other than that, here's a list that should do you good: http://djangofriendly.com/hosts/ |
Looking for interns / entry level? | amitk: Manymoon is hiring full-time engineers (http://bit.ly/9sdEmA) and an intern (http://bit.ly/b8yE8N).We're a small, funded startup in San Francisco that's already generating revenue. Manymoon is also a top-rated application for Google Apps.Please contact jobs@manymoon.com |
I love Nethack. Are there other great terminal games? | zephyrfalcon: We should write some... |
I love Nethack. Are there other great terminal games? | lepht: http://www.catb.org/~esr/ski/Ski is a super addictive SkiFree-like game for Terminal. |
Is using humor in your pitch deck a good idea? | dustingetz: i don't get it(read the whole deck, clicked around, watched 30sec of a video) |
Review my startup: Cashier Live | losvedir: Any reason the video with the smiling guy on the front page can't start playing if you click him? It looked like it should and I was initially confused when I pressed "play" and the video didn't play, taking me to a new page instead. |
Review our site Aylay.it | Vindexus: "Aylay is built on the collective intelligence of the Web. With Aylay Agile Search, start searching and get results simultaneously from the sites you know and trust, instantly. Refine your search and get results in real time without leaving the page."That's quite a bit of marketese. None of that really tells me what it does. Is it a search engine? Does it search for trending topics? Is it a news aggregator?I did a search for BioShock 2 and that showed me what it did. I think some better home copy would be "See search results from Google, Wikipedia, Twitter, Digg and more, all on one page." or maybe "Search multiple sites and see their results all on one page."It's actually a pretty cool service though. I don't like the custom scrollbars on the results though. They just aren't standard enough. Maybe add a slider type function, or just a normal scrollbar. |
Review our site Aylay.it | bpick: Pretty cool site, unfortunately there were some strange side effects from searching.a. 20% was injected between my wordsb. I searched for "Income of women in India" and got the wikipedia entry for the United States.I like being able to decide which search I want to look at however - very cool. |
Review our site Aylay.it | lurkinggrue: Not bad, add reddit as well? |
Review my startup: Cashier Live | Raphael: Increase the font size. |
Review my startup: Cashier Live | stevenwei: Interesting idea. I've been around the restaurant POS space for a couple of years and have been wondering about the feasibility of doing a web based solution.To my knowledge there are a few other players in this space, although I don't know how big they are or how much traction they have:http://www.firesalepos.com/
http://www.imonggo.com/MICROS has a hosted POS solution called Simphony but I haven't seen any restaurants using it yet.From a customer standpoint, my biggest concern is reliability and redundancy if the network connection goes down. You obviously can't stop processing transactions if the internet is down, which means you have to store that data temporarily locally. I would be concerned about the security of that data (especially if you are recording customer information and/or credit card information, which brings PCI compliance into play).As an administrator, I would be concerned about:1) Making sure that you support the hardware devices that I might want to use (card readers, printers, barcode scanners). Are you doing this via some sort of keyboard wedge into the browser window, or some kind of ActiveX control?
2) Making sure the rest of the system is locked down. E.g. I don't want some cashier being able to pull up Facebook in a second tab while running your POS. Generally POS kiosks are fairly locked down to only run the POS application and nothing else. |
Review our site Aylay.it | tdmackey: I find it disappointing in its current form. I assume you aren't doing much more than a few ajaxified api calls to the 5 or so engines you're aggregating which is neither technically challenging nor technically interesting.However, if you applied relative rankings for the individual items from each engine and aggregated them into a single results page instead of multiple "framed" result sections, you might have something I would actually want to use. This would also overcome many of the usability and UI problems I find issue with.It certainly has potential to become something. |
Review our site Aylay.it | mstefff: why would anyone want to use this? |
Review our site Aylay.it | andrewljohnson: You know you are heading down the wrong track with this when you say "searches Wikipedia, Twitter, and more..."Please tell me one search engine that doesn't search these. It's almost like you are calling out a weakness in your product.Google doesn't search Wikipedia and Twitter and more. They search everything, and if you are going to be in the search game, you better follow suit. |
Review our site Aylay.it | taitems: Ideally you should develop a "velocity" kind of ranking similar to http://www.oursignal.com and merge in results, instead of simply displaying them in individual boxes. That way a user can work out which is the most popular/relevant entry overall, not the most relevant per site. |
Check out my YC app demo - rip away | freebsd_dude: Ive taken the site down. Thanks everyone for their suggestions. |
Review our site Aylay.it | dangrossman: Thanks. I searched for one of my sites, and found a "how to hack [site name]" video on YouTube I didn't know was there. It wasn't actually a hack, just a silly JavaScript trick to disable a upgrade nag graphic, but I never would've noticed that video otherwise. |
How do you use SSH? | sumeeta: Cool. Now what? |
Is using humor in your pitch deck a good idea? | jdietrich: It is a good idea - if you're actually funny.I don't know what your product is. I've scoured your website and I still don't know what your product is. No sale. |
I love Nethack. Are there other great terminal games? | throw_away: people seem to like dwarf fortress (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/). I do not get it, though. |
Is it crazy to offer a freemium package in a "lo-fi" startup? | learnalist: What i Think your doing is dangling a "carrot on a stick".
Just the same as many mobile companies offering you free calls or sms. They/you want them comfortable with your product, used to using it. Then the barrier to going past the free quota is a little lower.I equally like to a point how your tracking it via excel, instead of building a system for hours. Once proven it might aid growth of revenue, then i see the system being built.Even if the above is not correct for you, it has given me food for thought and helped solidify a few liquid thoughts. |
Is it crazy to offer a freemium package in a "lo-fi" startup? | moconnor: I think it's more like a traditional trial model than freemium - the real benefit of your service is its convenience, not the ability to send letters at all. To benefit from the convenience you need to be sending more than two letters a month, so the free stamps just give people a way to try the service out before they sign up. Anyone wanting access to the real benefit then starts paying (either by default or by switching to a subscription). Nice. Do you have stats on how many people use their first stamp to send a letter to themselves?On an unrelated note: why isn't there a nice big picture of your gorgeous-looking paper and envelopes on the site? |
Is it crazy to offer a freemium package in a "lo-fi" startup? | patio11: Psst: internal dashboard to track the number of stamps which non-paying users used this month won't take you five minutes to implement. It is a single SQL query, right? I know you'll have to discard a working Excel system to do it but from the moment you're done to the moment you die you will never have to update that Excel file again. Process efficiency! You can crank out as many of these little micro-things as you want and put them in a single dashboard, which will give you a quick health check at a glance, minimize time spent bookkeeping, and make you not waste too much time digging into reports when you could be working. OK, tangent over.There is nothing wrong with giving people free things that actually cost money, as long as your COCA (cost of customer acquisition) is substantially lower than your LTV (lifetime customer value). It is no different, conceptually speaking, from doing something like paying from AdWords for a user who might convert into the trial but never into a paying user. I'll probably pay Google close to $1,000 this month for that: this is safe because I have historical data and a failsafe (discussed later).It has also been my experience that most users go up-or-out very quickly on my service. If that continues to be true for you, you have very little to worry about.If you speak to an accountant, who are generally conservative types, they will recommend you to do something to cap your maximum liability via this. For example, you can clarify that unused free stamps expire at the end of the month. (That might already be the policy. If so, smart.) You could also reserve the right to yank that offer at any time. I'm not a lawyer, but I think that is likely to be as simple as merely yanking the offer at any time.I'd put a failsafe in the system to prevent you from spending over $X on free stamps in a day, for reasons similar to why Google only has authorization to charge me $X in a day: if the process goes suddenly out of control, have a human think things through before saying "Oh, sure, 1500% growth is totally normal under these circumstances. Spending approved!" It might happen because you ended up featured on the front page of the NYT. Congratulations. It also might happen because you ended up on 4Chan when some enterprising individual suggests using your service to send a million pictures of genitalia to some public figure who has made statements they do not approve of. |
Is it crazy to offer a freemium package in a "lo-fi" startup? | csomar: You are using the best strategy, but you should care about people leaving. Why do they leave? May be they were not satisfied with your product, or they just don't want to pay.There is a trick to make people pay, the same that Microsoft and other software companies are using. Give your service for free and start charging when your customers can't afford to stop using it, then they afford to pay!Evil, but works. |
Is it crazy to offer a freemium package in a "lo-fi" startup? | jdietrich: Why two free stamps per month? If someone uses your free service for three months, or six, or twelve, what are the chances that they will upgrade to a paid service? Why would this be more profitable than a plain pay-as-you-go plan with no free stamps, or one or two initial trial stamps? If I choose to sign up with one of your monthly plans, will you offer me a refund of my unused credit if I decide not to use it? |
Please review my startup for bicyclists | spokey: I've been working on Brightspoke (part-time and bootstrapped) for a couple of months and while there's a lot more left to do, I feel there's enough of the MDP/MVP in place that hopefully you should be able to see where I'm headed.For fear of tainting your first impressions of the site, I won't say a lot more right here, but I'd be happy to go into more detail later in thread if anyone has questions about the site, technology, vision, business model or process that led to here.I would greatly appreciate any and all feedback, from design to copy to coding to features. I've been looking at some parts of this for so long I can no longer tell whether some changes are better or worse.Note that some bike pages are a bit more robust than others (a function of the data currently in the system), for example:http://www.brightspoke.com/b/2010/surly/steamroller.html
http://www.brightspoke.com/b/2010/surly/karate-monkey.html
http://www.brightspoke.com/b/2009/khs/flite-team.htmlAlso, this page:http://www.brightspoke.com/t/bike-stem-calculator.htmlhas proven popular on some cycling forums. |
Please review my startup for bicyclists | danteembermage: I'm sort of a target user for your site (family of five, don't own a [working] car, bike everywhere, don't know much about bikes)I like what you've got; your site would be much more valuable with a lot more information. Things that come to mind1. Maintenance of all kinds, how to change a spoke, what is a chain whip for?, truing rims, adjusting rear derailleurs, etc.2. Classified information for bikes; you might think craigslist might have this locked up but I bought my bike from there and the guy who sold it to me was really frustrated with people calling him with random questions he didn't understand. A convenient form with blanks for relevant stats would help us newbies.3. Events page; cycling events happen all the time, an RSS of rides in my area would be nice4. Forum: war stories, racing strategy, a clubhouse for cyclists.5. news/blog cycling related legislation, celebrities on bikes6. Bike mods page: DIY propelled, row cycles etc. showcase interesting inventionsBasically a community site with really great technical info and lots of pictures could be really compelling I think. To fly I think this thing needs more meat on its bones. |
Please review my startup for bicyclists | apsurd: My first impression was that I accidentally typed in the wrong url and went to one of those fake-website landing page sites that just run ads all over them. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with your color scheme and blatantly stock picture. One thing that might help is to soften up the background with either a gradient, texture, or just a more pastel color.Would be helpful (for me at least) to have some sample search queries so I can get a taste for what I will get even without having to fill out the form. Show don't tell. Maybe a "popular" gallery or a "best deals" gallery etc. Filling out that form takes way too much effort for the "unsold".Lastly I was pretty sad to find no pictures of any bikes whatsoever! Pictures are pretty important.Your design really is not "bad" it just gives off the an iffy/questionable vibe as to the legitimacy of the site.
So maybe just kill two birds with one stone and focus on getting juicy pictures of badass bikes in a nicely laid out gallery. I actually don't know much about bikes, but would like to, so I'll be rooting your site on.HTH |
Please review my startup for bicyclists | mwexler: Unclear if this is aimed at bike experts or bike newbies. Is this to help me find a bike? Then help me understand WHY the data points are important. Even your front search frame dropdown: alum vs. steel? I don't know, why should I pick one? This assumes I already know the reasons why these filters are important.The data dump for each bike is nice, but again, no context, no comparison feature, nothing to let me know why each data point matters.If you are going for an expert audience, then consider expert tools: experts all already have a bike, so they want to consider upgrades and alternative bikes for alternative uses. So why not allow users to search that way: Given that I have a, say, Trek 7.2 FX, what's the next logical upgrade level/search features from that? It would be differerent and new, afaik.So, it's a fine data aggregator, but I would love to see some smarts via a more bike-thinking way to search, and a more useful display of the data which allows me to know that some frame angles are "race ready" and cause you to lean down while riding, or that some frame types are better for vibration but may not be necessary if you ride short distances on pavement, etc. That context can also be provided via on screen comparisons: 1 variable across 10 bikes, or comparing 2 bikes across all variables.I agree with danteembermage around community features; these days, it's hard to get far without them, either built in or by allying yourself with an existing community. |
What's the deal with Common Lisp? | sedachv: Bad corner of the Lisp world? Socket libraries are the Skid Row of Common Lisp.The reason it's hard to create a good library comes from an interplay of 3 things: streams, lack of standard character representation, and lack of standard foreign function interfaces. The latter two are sort of advantages in that if they were standardized in 1989 or whatever, we would probably have wound up with something stupid involving DOS code pages and Fortran on VMS.Streams are convenient and most CL functions expect them. They're also a really inefficient way of using BSD sockets. Especially when your Lisp implementation's character encoding isn't UTF-8. So if you want to write fast network code in Lisp you basically need to use the raw POSIX FFI functions and byte arrays.Then you get into fun stuff like vectored I/O (which you may or may not be able to do depending on whether your GC moves arrays around), and event-based I/O (which people disagree as to how to do properly). But it's ok, because none of the existing socket libraries try to support this anyway, so you're back to calling POSIX functions via FFI.(I gave a presentation about this stuff last year: http://carcaddar.blogspot.com/2009/11/november-montreal-sche...)If your socket library is dependent on any third-party libraries, pray that the latest versions will not completely change their interface and make your library fail to compile. Then multiply all this by the half-dozen or so Common Lisp implementations people expect to be supported.Just like Skid Row, this has been a recognized problem for many years (well over a decade for certain), and it's kind of hard to make it better. Flexi-streams over usocket is the best off-the-shelf solution, so you're probably doing the right thing. |
Please review my startup for bicyclists | jdietrich: I just don't know what your product does for me as a user, at least not yet. As a serious bike geek, there's nothing I couldn't find at one of the better-stocked dealers, some of whom will provide very rich and specific data. I've spend stupid amounts of money on bikes, but they've all been carbon-framed, drop-handlebarred, with 20 gears, rendering your advanced search not nearly advanced enough.Your tool could be incredibly powerful and useful for me if your database held information on weight, allowing me to shop on a dollars-per-gram basis. Comparison shopping features would be very useful and provide you with a substantial revenue stream in the form of affiliate fees. A database of parts and a wish list would allow me to configure a home-built bike or an upgrade.If I were a casual cyclist, I can't see your site making me any less confused than the front page of the first cycle dealer I pick out of Google. If I found my perfect bike I'd still need to Google for a dealer that stocked it and potentially get tripped up by different model years, different specs etc. I don't really know what any of these terms mean, how many gears I would want or which material I want my bike made out of - I just know that I want a nice light bike for buzzing around town, or something plush and comfortable for pedalling round the park, or something that will carry my shopping. I see the mouseover popups that explain some of the terms, but they don't clarify things all that much and it seems like I'm stumbling around at random.As it stands, I just don't know why I'd use your tool instead of going straight to a bike retailer. Your stem calculator is useful because it provides information I can't really find anywhere else. The rest of the site feels like you've built it because you can. I can't see the problem that you're trying to solve. |
Please review my startup for bicyclists | tonymorgan: You've got the quotation on the front page wrong, it's, "Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the human race.". |
Please review my startup for bicyclists | by: Some small observations :In Firefox 3.0 (Javascript off) the drop-down menus do not sit next to their labels properly. Perhaps if you get it to pass W3C validation http://validator.w3.org/
it will look better.It would be nice to browse the bicycles as well as search them.I didn't really know what information I was searching until I had looked at the results. Is this a bicycle shop, or a portal to other shops, or a second-hand market place? |
Please review my startup for bicyclists | pierrefar: I'm a big cyclist so definitely in your target market.The big problem I see right now: What is your site about? I opened the link with a bit of excitedness and literally I spent a few seconds confused as to what this site is and what it does for me. Some specific points:Your tag line "We love bikes", yes great, so? Tell me in a nutshell what this site is about.Have a big heading that explains the site, a starting point for the eye if you will. Right now the only real text you have is a quote about poets and cycling, which is not relevant to me. It doesn't explain anything about the site, and it suggests that the site may be for poets who don't cycle and want to convince them otherwise.Are you helping me understand how to buy a bike or are you selling me a bike?The search bar at the top is almost invisible, and the hint that it should be by name is even harder to read (yellow on blue in an odd typeface).So the key message is: I don't know what the site is about, and even a few seconds later I still didn't know. Now that I've played with it a bit, read the about page, I kinda get it, but I'm not sure. This confusion means I won't remember it.Great name by the way. I love it. |
Please review my startup for bicyclists | rythie: I think the drop downs should give totals of the number under that selectionThe colours clash and there a too many different fonts used.The Left hand side rounded corners on the white box don't look right. |
Please review my startup for bicyclists | Huppie: Since I am not very familiar with the english defintions for the handlebars I decided to click the 'Understanding Handlebars' link. Sadly there is an awful lot of text there but no images of the different types of handlebars. |
Please review my startup for bicyclists | Daniel_Newby: The "Understanding Handlebars" page should have pictures, not just a wall of text. |
Please review my startup for bicyclists | Huppie: "Our mission is to put more people on bikes by creating informed consumers."As someone who uses a bike as his main transportation (or maybe because dutch bike-culture is completetly different from american bike culture) I cannot understand how this website will put more people on a bike.If you want to put more people on a bike, here's a few questions your website should answer:- Why would I want a bike? (Cheap transportation? Faster than walking for short distances? 'Green' way of transportation?)- For what distances would I prefer a bike vs. a car? (I use a bike for all distances < 10 km (that would be 6 miles), mostly urban traffic.) |
Please review my startup for bicyclists | brown9-2: From the front page, it's not really clear to me what the purpose of filling out the "Discover Bikes" form is. Am I going to be shown search results of bikes to buy? Or just general information about different models? |
Please review my startup for bicyclists | silentbicycle: At risk of duplicating things others have said here -* If I didn't already know why I prefer steel to carbon, or aluminum, I wouldn't learn it from the site. It really doesn't give any rationale for different materials. It looks like you tried to explain the pros and cons of different handlebars, but it's a lot of text, and could be improved with pictures, showing different hand positions perhaps.* It may be a good idea to keep commuters in mind, perhaps factoring this in to "Bike Type". The equipment trade-offs are different. In particular, there are incidental accessories - reviews of (say) bike headlights would be nice, and I feel more comfortable getting that sort of thing online than a whole bike. You also don't have anything about singlespeed / fixed-gear stuff, another niche that might be easy to add.* You don't seem to have anything about bike size in there. "Clydesdale" riders (i.e., tall and/or heavy people) tend to need more durable parts, some people need extra-small frames, etc. This will complicate things tremendously, though, and being able to actually test-ride bikes in person is a huge advantage for LBSs. |
Deliberate practice to make for a better developer | techsansar: Intresting |
Deliberate practice to make for a better developer | andrewcooke: maybe you can, to some extent, exploit the nature of software? i'm thinking about how i have learnt, and how that ties in to the points you list above, and one obvious connection is that you are automatically guided to "highly granular areas for improvement" if you continuously refactor and revise (polish) you code.typically, to learn a new language, i solve a problem. the result of solving that problem is a chunk of code and it's usually a bit of a mess. you can use the mess to help identify what needs to be refactored. this then guides you towards learning more about the language, because often the mess is a direct result of not using the tool well.note that what you're exploiting here is the fact that it's a lot easier to identify "a mess" than it is is to identify a gap in your understanding of the language; identifying the mess helps guide you to the gap.at a higher level, the conclusion here is that you have not finished learning once you've written some code in a new language. in fact, you are just starting. it's only through repeated (obsessive?) polishing of the code that you achieve a deep understanding of the language.(and i think this also applies to languages you know pretty well - i use python at work, and have used it for years, but i am currently working on the fourth major revision of my lepl parser library and am still learning as i rewrite particular aspects). |
Deliberate practice to make for a better developer | Arun2009: This may not be 100% relevant to your question, but am posting this FWIW.My last paid job (C++ and Java developer at an investment bank) required a 2:1 split between debugging and development work. I identified the following areas that could use improvement.1. Knowledge of our code-base. I spent downtime at work reading code and documenting the system architecture. This also called for an improvement in my code-reading and debugging skills.2. Development work flow and knowledge of tools/technolgoies (GDB, Linux kernel architecture, Perl and Bash scripting for handy scripts).3. Domain knowledge (finance).4. Knowledge of other technologies involved (Sybase, etc.)I found that most situations didn't really call for expert knowledge of C++ and Java or of algorithms (as I was led to believe in the interview), but actual understanding of the code-base, the existing system architecture, and how our portions interacted with the back-end systems.IMO, with any technology, you will hit a point beyond which there's diminishing margin of returns on gaining deeper expertise. But you should read the technology reference manual (e.g., the Sybase Reference Manual or the Bash Manual) thoroughly at least once so that you build a mental map of options available that can be used when you need them. |
Deliberate practice to make for a better developer | francoisdevlin: I think one of the best things you can do is start trying to solve something in a very public way. The faceless mob on internet will correct you, and you can quickly learn from your own mistakes.However, this method has its drawbacks. You need to be able to simultaneously take the criticism with a (large) grain of salt, and be able to keep on trying after the eventual hash comments.You will grow fast this way. |
Review my Firefox add-on idea | DanielStraight: If I had a nickel for every time someone had an idea for community-edited overlaid content on other web pages, I'd be a very rich man. It has never worked. What will make your idea work? That is your fundamental problem, not whether or not it's a good idea. How you will make it work is the problem. |
Deliberate practice to make for a better developer | beagle3: Do not ever cut and paste while writing code; type it again. When I learned programming in the ZX Spectrum / C64 era, magazines and books were also used as a software distribution media - and you'd have to type in the program to get the latest and greatest.I typed my share of programs (a few tens or hundreds of pages, I would guess), and doing that helped me figure out stuff like- which constructs are easier to memorise when you move your eyes back and forth from page to screen;
- that shorter code is usually better
- to keep only comments that would help me understand the code, NOT retype all the idiotic/historical comments originally in the program
- you actually get intimately familiar with lots of code styles, good and bad |
Education level of successful tech founders? | icey: Education can help you, yes.... but I've never heard anyone who succeeded say that their degree was pivotal in their success. They've all pretty well said it takes some smarts, some guts, and more hard work than ordinary humans should be able to accomplish.(Of course, in some fields you must have a degree just to play, so YMMV) |
collecting usage statistics | CoryMathews: Normally they are looking for what features you use most and how you use them.For example a program has a button on the main menu, after collecting usage stats they find out no one clicks this button. Thus they remove it from the menu. ect. Its normally all for usability. |
Education level of successful tech founders? | mos1: Grad school isn't just about in-class education, it's about making connections, opening doors, and demonstrating a certain level of seriousness about the endeavor.If you have an MBA from HBS and an MS from MIT, there will be a lot of doors open to you that simply won't be available without those sorts of connections. This is not to say that they are requirements for achievement. They simply improve your odds of getting "lucky" at some future point in time.That said, I shouldn't downplay the importance of the education aspect. The number of case studies I read and thought about during grad school did wonders for sharpening the way I think about my own business. |
What do you do for Asset Tracking? | portman: We use a SharePoint template named "Physical Asset Tracking and Management" that has been very effective for a 30-person company.http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/sharepoint/... |
How to code with a broken wrist? | olefoo: Hello. Go get the wrist taken care of. You are risking permanent damage to your hands. Coding can wait. |
How to code with a broken wrist? | rick_2047: Use dvorak. I know it sounds ridiculously simple but it works. And also it will help you learn new something for the rest of life. I say take this opportunity and at least try.My second advice would be to really type with one hand (if your regular hand, right or left, is not broken). I did my high school CS project this way. Was fun.Coding is more about thinking than typing anyway. (In that spirit you can try pair programming.) |
Review my startup: buriedTV | spulec: This is something I've been working on for a week or so. There is very little content. Any feedback would be appreciated.It was somewhat inspired by YCRFS 4. |
How to code with a broken wrist? | ZeroGravitas: Didn't xkcd have a perl based hack that mirrored a keyboard so you only needed to type on one side and it guessed when you meant the actual key or the mirror one.http://blog.xkcd.com/2007/08/14/mirrorboard-a-one-handed-key...Reading it now, the mirror shift is manually activated, probably a good job for a foot pedal, he only suggests automating the switching. |
Review my startup: buriedTV | JshWright: I don't trust the rest of humanity enough to make this worthwhile for me. |
Review my startup: buriedTV | steamer25: Interesting... There is a bit of value in not having to find and program your own content (e.g., Radio DJ vs. MP3). On the other hand, there are already a bunch of services that handle this in a more general sense (HN, Reddit, Digg, etc.) and specifically for video (YouTube, etc.).Your differentiation seems to be that you're planning a constant stream that doesn't require the interaction of an on-demand approach. Without interaction, I imagine it'd be difficult to solicit votes.If it were me, I'd try to get the streaming idea going by aggregating content and popularity data from the various existing services. |
Press Releases - Are they worth the trouble/cost? | ericd: Anyone have experience with PRNewswire? |
Please review my project, Done.io | gridspy: Hotlink: http://done.ioYou don't even sell me on your product before you attempt to get me to sign up.How about- a features page (ala http://gridspy.co.nz)- a public demo todo list (perhaps anyone can make public todo lists)- the ability to create a list using only cookies and no sign upSuffice to say I didn't sign up. Do you really need my email? |
Press Releases - Are they worth the trouble/cost? | jmonegro: I think it comes down to what it is that you're announcing and how big you are. I wouldn't bother if it is isn't a big deal outside your company. |
Am I crazy to port my Rails app to PHP? | tapostrophemo: More a note to myself than anything: check out http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1112543 |
Please review my project, Done.io | hamgav: Your site is missing a "Take a tour" page. You need to at least include some screenshots of the product or a video. Also, how is your product different from other task managers like Remember The Milk? |
What's the best way to get search engine traffic? | spooneybarger: easiest but most expensive: buy tons of banner ads that get people to search to find out more about your product.hardest but least expensive: get people talking about your product so that others start searching to get more info about it. |
What web hosting do you use? | alttab: I've had great success and ease-of-use with Bluehost (bluehost.com) and its subsidiary Hostmonster (hostmonster.com). They are an affordable shared host that do all the domain stuff as well. Their support is great and they have the latest version of CPanel. If you wanted to make LAMP or Rails applications they have support for that as well. Overall with domain, connersc.com was $120 for two years.Sometimes when the shared server is getting pounded, remote-ssh development can be a little laggy but if you are running Wordpress (which is in CPanel as a turnkey installation), you should be fine.There are probably other hosts out there, but as far as service and price its been working for me so far. I even put clients on it (before moving the others to rackspace). |
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