Comment by tansey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tansey | Hacker News Reader

My startup[1] is built on .NET (MVC 3). As I noted in a blog article [2], it's certainly reasonable to use .NET if you meet the same guidelines, and it sounds like your co-founder does.

I would, however, encourage you to use .NET MVC instead of WebForms. The former is very similar to Rails, Django, and other popular MVC frameworks, so if you find that you'd like to make a transition to another language/framework, it will be much easier this way. The latter is really just an antiquated technology with lots of problems and not very much of an OSS community.

At the end of the day, it's about getting to market fast and testing your hypothesis. Building your MVP is just the very beginning of your startup journey. You will probably have to change your product a lot, so go with what you can hack in quickly. If it turns out that you have the next StackExchange (which is built on .NET MVC) and you need to massively scale, then drop Spolsky or Atwood a line and I'm sure they'll be happy to give you some pointers. That's a good problem to have.

[1] http://effectcheck.com

[2] http://www.nashcoding.com/2011/04/10/building-a-startup-part...

Incidentally, effect check is quite cool. It's a weak suggestion, but I'd look at bringing the "live demo" call to action to a more prominent homepage location. I had to search around a bit to find out what exactly was going on and how it worked, and once I did it was easy to use and kind of cool.

Thanks! :D

That's a really good suggestion. The live demo was a bit of an after thought on my part. I bought the design from Theme Forest, customized it, and launched it in a few days, then realized it would be good to see the tool in action somewhere.

We're kind of pivoting towards a more dashboard-style product for professional, highly-paid writers (lawyers and speech writers mostly), and once I'm done with that we'll certainly have a cool live demo ready. We'll also probably release a scoring API with free and for-pay rate limits, since developers have already shown some really creative applications [1, 2] in our hackathons.

[1] http://blog.effectcheck.com/2011/07/14/interview-with-joey-c...

[2] http://stalkerbot.com

Thanks for talking about AppHarbor in your blog post. I'm developing an MVC 3 site and planned on deploying it on AppHarbor and was always curious how well it worked.

AppHarbor is awesome. The development process could not be any easier. You literally just create an MVC project and push it to your AppHarbor git repo and you're done. They also have support for SSL, multiple collaborators, and error logging. There are also a few features that I know are coming that will make it all the more awesome.

The add-on program seems pretty cool too. We're planning on adding EffectCheck to the list of supported APIs soon.

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