Ask HN: What startups have you bought things from?
We see a lot of startups promoted here on Hacker News ... but which ones -- if any -- have you actually purchased things from?
a) I had to send if off to the refurb. center after about two months of use (and pay my own shipping).
b) I haven't seen much progress in the app except stability increases. With all that raw data, I can imagine tons of fun features, particularly social applications.
c) Their website's claim, "You pick the factors and Wakelytics shows how they affect your sleep," translates to "You tag your nights and we let you sort by those tags." This is typical of the lackluster analysis-web app that your sleep data gets uploaded to.
d) The app self-admittedly cannot analyze sleep periods of less than 3-4 hours, and in reality considers anything less than 5-6 hours too short to recognize or record. (There is no mention of this shortcoming/limitation anywhere on their website.) This makes it pretty much useless for polyphasic sleep. Or naps of any kind.
No big deal, though. $60 is not that much money. It's a nice effort, and a good idea, but just not a very satisfying execution.
As for hardware, super super happy with the Withings scale and the Fitbit; fairly happy with the Zeo, not very happy with the WakeMate. Kind of looking forward to getting a lockitron.
Omnifocus (desktop, iphone, ipad) and other Omni packages are probably my most favorite commercial software, though.
Probably will sign up with tarsnap, but I want to set up my own dduped rsync backup too.
The mail scanning is a huge bonus when I'm away for a long period of time, and packages can be stored for weeks (or even indefinitely, if you want to pay for storage fees) to be picked up at my leisure. Doing things on my own schedule wherever I want and not worrying about the UPS guy leaving a package on the front lawn while it's raining is a great thing.
MongoHQ I came across here when they announced their integration with Heroku, we never used Heroku but we did go on to become a fan and paying customer of MongoHQ's for the last year or so.
AppHarbor I have a free account on, I really like what they're doing but I'm not sure if I'm ready to give up control of my servers yet!
ChatterAnalytics from the other day I'm just waiting for them to do something so I can pay to use it, cause that scratches an itch that I have that I hacked around half-arsedly the day before their post here.
those are the ones that i can come up with off the top of my headm additionally out of all those I cannot think of one of them i have a complaint about
did not even know you guys offered it (hotels) honestly, I was in Dallas about a month ago and found myself googling hotels in the area and checking on where? on my iphone before calling (the old school way haha) ... i'll make it a point to check it out next time
I've done business with startups like Etsy from when they were in the startup stage, to the established business stage (Etsy still considers themselves a startup though, however I think a company has passed that stage 6 years and 150 employees in).
I've hosted sites on Heroku, bought 'pro' on Forrst, and booked a flight through hipmunk. It seems there are probably some other companies in there, less well known, but it's not coming to mind.
Anyone who doesn't use Olark on their site is at a huge disadvantage.
Happy to pay em.
Also Appsumo.
I would recommend it.
I'm pretty sure there are others, but these are the ones I can remember from the top of my head. And all of them RULE!