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Comment by onwardly | Hacker News Reader

I have over $100k in student loan debt from undergrad, and have nearly run through savings for the startup I'm working on. My loan payments kick back in in two months.

We're launching in 2-4 weeks, and the nature of the project is such that if it doesn't take off immediately then it may never take off. Talk about a fire under your ass!

That said, I'm loving it. I'm actually living in India at the moment, working from my laptop. Its dirt cheap over here, and during the breaks I take I get to experience India. And did I mention its cheap? $5/day food, $6/day housing, $5/day miscellaneous.

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I am in the same boat (except for living in SF not India). Been doing startups since I graduated 2 years ago. Near $100k loans from undergrad, needing to pay off the convertible note from my first startup that didn't convert to equity, car payment and a few months into working on current startup where I haven't taken salary yet. Though the best thing I did was cancel my credit card a year ago.

On the "up" side, I have never had a real, structured, paying job so I have never made real money. Just some scraps that my blog makes each month. So being broke and (trying to) live within my means has become natural.

2008 grad too.

I like your second point here. I still live basically like a college student which makes it easy to live off very little. Heck, you should see some of the shitholes I've slept in in India to save $5 for the night.

I made great money one summer working as a management consultant, but hated the work. The perks were great though: first-class international plane flights, no per diem and lots of extravagant meals, blahblahblah.

None of that stuff means anything though. I'm not an ounce happier for sleeping in a nice room, or having an extravagant meal. Those things fade away as soon as they're done.

But I've never been happier working for something that I care about and that's mine.

Just out of curiosity, what kind of project "never takes of if it doesn't take off immediately"? What makes you think that?

You don't need to be very specific though if you don't want to reveal secrets, don't get me wrong.

We're about to launch, so just about time to throw off the cloak anyways.

Its a videochat website, which if I described you'd immediately compare to Chatroulette. If we don't achieve critical mass early, everyone will leave.

To a degree it is like Chatroulette, though there are different types of rooms and a security mechanism that actually keeps perverts off (you sign in using FB connect, though we never reveal to anyone who you are. This is just to track you so we can block you permanently if reported. And no, you can't create a new FB account and get back on; you have to have 20+ friends to sign in).

If you show up and noone is on the site, you're going to leave and never come back. Thus, need a critical mass to keep it going.

Based on some calculations I've done, to keep a minimum of 50 people on the site at all times we'll need 15k visitors per day.

There are a few other features that I'd be thrilled to go on and on about, but I hope I answered your question. If you're curious and have more questions, you can find my email address in my profile.

Interesting stuff. Here's what I would do if I were you: I would try to get it popular in a smaller niche community. Try to find an existing community on the Internet that's currently looking for an alternative medium to communicate to what they currently have. There's always plenty of drama on the Internet so that shouldn't be to hard. Try to get them to use your site. This way, you could constantly have a number of users without achieving a critical mass. Later on, you can build on that by improvements and "marketing" and get more users.

TLDR: I think if you're clever, there's no reason your could not get traction later on even if it fails to be a ground-breaking success right after launch.

I too am wokring on my startup from india, more or less reasons similar to yours. absolutely off the topic., if you are in india would you like to catchup sometime?

yea, definitely. just saw this. shoot me an email at jessecmaddox [at] gmail . Didn't see any info in your profile, but if you happen to see this let me know!

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