Poll: Did you start company in 2011?
I'm curious. Did you start a company in the passed year? Why?
The things that enabled me to leave and start something new were that I became more known for my work so I was offered opportunities, advances in broadband, video conferencing, web based project management, collaboration tools, powerful hosted DVCS, and other free tools allowed me to easily work from home so I didn't have to relocate or commute for hours.
It has been a good few months, it is going well, and I'm excited for the next year.
Side note: Congrats to all HN members who started a company and kept it going this year. It's a lot of work, but fun as hell.
It's kind of neat to be able to say "yes, I build these things from scratch, based on my own knowledge and research, due to risk from my own pocketbook, while working full time."
Also, I've met some very cool people (whose work I had only previously admired from afar!) because I had questions about a library they wrote or was improving a design of theirs, not to mention starting to form a set of people who I can email for advice (from how to make PCBs to the best tape to order from ULine.)
Highly recommended!
My co-founders and I have just quit our jobs to focus full-time on it. It's a mobile-focused B2B media company (pull up constructiondive.com on your phone for a very rough feel for where we're going). I'm working on a blog post to explain why, but the short version is we see a great market opportunity and our team is uniquely qualified to fill it. I really like working in the B2B space because there's a ton of money floating around, but it seems so unsexy that there is little competition from innovative startups.
YC strongly advise you to use their default company structure as it's much easier to raise investment if investors know you've been correctly set up.
-sorry for my terribad english
We spent 2010 freelancing figuring out the business side of things a bit, earning some money to give us a bit of a runway, kicking lots of ideas around, and working on our tech chops.
12 months in we're starting to focus more on marketing and sales than development, and we're aiming to be profitable sometime before the end of 2012.
Everything takes a lot longer than you think!
We connect travelers with locals in their destination who can give them experiences that traditional tour companies cannot.
Me and my co-founders have been bootstrapping it since earlier this year, when we failed to find any real competition online for this concept. In a fit of global consciousness synchronicity, there are a few dozen now popping up all over the world.
Right now we're a service company around Qt only, but hopefully getting out a product next year either alone or together with another company.
Being a service company also means that 2011 is already profitable for us. Hooray for having established connections/networks.
If anyone in the Berlin area is up for a beer and exchanging some knowledge, we're interested in that.
I've got an update coming down the tunnel to fix this, but it might be difficult with this page because there isn't much substance. I'll think more about how to solve this in a way that makes sense relevant to the rest of the pages out there. My main focus is to not write any code for edge cases, but to figure out a way to solve the whole of the web at once. :)
(Also are you familiar with http://www.opencalais.com/ ?)
The first thing I see this service being used is for news readers. Not having to develop this technology themselves will lower the cost/barrier of entry into their markets, so hopefully they can focus on interfaces. Beyond that, I'm sure people could use it to scrape and aggregate information about what people are concerned with around the web.
On charging for it, I'm not sure yet. I was thinking of using a credit model similar to Twilio for payment. Service might be 1c/unique (previously un-fetched article) and .1/0.1c for each fetched (cached) article.
I've run across OpenCalais before and I think it's a great big idea -- I love the idea of a semantic web.
Being as though I was in the same boat as you (and my programming skills are still laughable!), what I found to be really helpful is while you're learning how to program, using other skills (maybe you know how to make a webpage, or animate)to create a mock-up to more quickly and easily translate your idea into something concrete and more understandable that could attract people (read: potential co-founders) into at least looking at your idea--at the very worst they can see that you've put some time and effort into your raw idea and as I'm sure any technical co-founder here would say, that's a good start. Good luck Meng. :)
I'm a single founder, and it's a boostrapped project, but I'm counting it here anyway. Things are going well.. I think, at least.
One of these companies already existed as a non-profit, so that was re-filing to go the S-Corp route and start making real money. The other is new.
I was lucky enough to find two amazing cofounders to start Ridejoy and doubly lucky to participate in YC. Being a founder isn't for everyone but for me, it's the most thrilling occupation I could imagine. I wouldn't trade it for anything.
Not many customers yet, but I think there's a market for this. Everyone needs to keep their website bug-free.
Which answer should I choose? ;)
B2B only right now: http://healthexpense.com/
"While Notifo will continue to run in the interim, I encourage you to find alternative methods to accomplish your notification needs." http://blog.notifo.com/notifo
I had an idea, called a few companies that I thought would pay for it. Then, I skipped school (I was in high school at the time) for a couple of days and built it. After I had built the BARE minimum version (now that I look back, our "search" was using simple MYSQL LIKE "search" and I was selling it) I was able to get a few companies to pay for it. And am now working on it full-time.
Maybe I'll write a blog post one day about the process.
I left on good terms with a decent severance package and kept a good chunk of equity.
Not a company but I launched a re-done version of my file sharing service: http://dropsauce.com
Plan to work on it some more in the coming few months.
Also released a jQuery calendar plugin on github: https://github.com/glad/glDatePicker/
consulting, web sites, support, training, and other things in Atlanta.