How I built a business in a weekend (Or, the benefits of shared workspaces) | Hacker News Reader

How I built a business in a weekend (Or, the benefits of shared workspaces)

arshadchowdhury.com

65 pointsarshadgc28 comments

> Once at the meeting, you tell everyone attending to text the word “PTA” to 917-746-0007. You’ll immediately get their numbers and emails added to your list at RollCallMe.com

How do you do that? How do you get someone's email from a text she sent?

After texting the codeword to the number, RollCallMe sends a polite text asking for an email as well.

When I tested it the text was "Thanks! You can reach me at ##########. Could you please reply with your email so we can add it to our list?"

http://arshadchowdhury.com/740-how-i-built-a-business-in-a-w...

You don't build a business in a weekend.

Exactly. Kudos on building a fairly complex application over the weekend, but the journey has just begun. 'Build it and they will come' does not apply (usually) for revenue generating businesses with real customers.

You're right in that it's not a profitable business yet. It's only a business in that we offer a service and we charge for it. We definitely don't do that profitably yet! We've built a minimum viable product that we'll use as a basis to explore and define demand.

That's cool, what you've built in such a short time is great and I wouldn't take away from the achievement... I'd just change the post title :-).

I think you are all missing the point of the post. Merits of the business aside - the point was about the benefits of working in a shared workspace; how it fosters collaboration and knowledge exchange.

Is texting really easier for people than hand writing on a sheet of dead tree? Kids these days..

Personally I would much prefer writing over texting a random number (with a follow-up text for my email), but I guess an advantage is that it avoids queues at the sign-in sheet.

Maybe the problem was with the example? One application I could see for this is maybe being at a conference and entering into a drawing. Instead of filling out a paper form or standing at a kiosk or having to go to a web page and type in some auth code, you just have to send a single text message and you're done.

I can see some applications, and knowing the cost of the administrative portion of promotions, making it easier to be an expert at it definitely has monetary value.

I've been to many (tech-focused, admittedly) conferences that handle this through RFID tags or simple barcodes embedded in the conference badges, the advantage to that system being that attendees don't have to do anything more complicated than hold up their badge to a badge-scanning attendant.

I feel like there's a fantastic use case for the parent's project; I'm not quite sure what it is yet.

You're right... I'm trying to figure out how this can be useful. I used it at a recent Meetup to divide people into committees, and that worked well. But yeah, the hunt for more use cases is on.

Perhaps I'm missing something really basic here, but if all the 'troops' have to do is text a given codeword to a number, how do you get both their phone number and their email address?

Where are you getting the email addresses from?

I tested it out and this is what it says:

"Thanks! You can reach me at [my number]. Could you please reply with your email so we can add it to our list?"

The marketing page really needs to be changed to make it clear that it doesn't automatically gather email addresses.

I can see the benefits of the pitch that people only need to text the codeword but you could presumably extend the service to offer greater parsing of message content e.g. people can text the codeword, name and email and you parse them out rather than ask people to reply again with their email address.

We started off asking people to send their email along with the code word but that was really confusing. However, we only ask people for their emails once; from then on RollCallMe remembers the email. - Arshad

Very interesting project. It shows well the value of collaborators and having people in one place. It's also a very well written piece. aes256 (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3733968) and robinjfisher (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3733913) asked a key technical question, so I'll give a little feedback on the linked page itself:

typo: Dogpatch Labs by no means normal. It’s a small, tight community of tech entrepreneurs who love to help eachother

"eachother" should be two words

I doubt it: Everything was done within 30 square feet

A bit picky here, but you may as well get it right: 30 square feet is a tiny area for a workspace: for example, a room (closet, really) measuring 5ft by 6ft would have an area of 30 square feet. I doubt that's what you meant. You probably meant that everybody was within 30 ft of everybody else, or something of this nature.

Thanks, Dhimes. I'll update the language to be more accurate. How embarrassing! - Arshad

Looks interesting.

I can certainly see the benefits for conference organisers. I also think it might be popular for restaurants/bars who normally obtain business cards (to add to mailing list) for entry into monthly prize draws.

How are you obtaining a person's email address from a text message?

So you built your business entirely relying on third-party services. Not only is this dangerous (if they change their rates one day, you will need to scramble), but, your business has virtually no barrier to entry.

Now that you wrote an article on it, there will be other people that will build a similar business in a weekend and compete with you.

I don't think they did it wrong. Imagine if he decided to roll it's own functionality when there is a 3rd party service offering the exact same functionality. Then he would be in real trouble because somebody could catch up by using the readily available 3rd party service.

He should build his advantage on being the first and having a better product. Techical services he's using are not part of his core product.

..as tons of other startups do, and actually the only external services they use are Twilio and Stripe, others cited are just opensource frameworks/technologies (RoR, Bootstrap).

".as tons of other startups do, and actually the only external services they use are Twilio and Stripe, others cited are just opensource frameworks/technologies (RoR, Bootstrap)."

..and they are disposable. Most startups I see I know won't be around in 2 years.

.and they are disposable. Most startups I see I know won't be around in 2 years.

they won't be around not because of the external services they've used but because they wont find the right business model. It's like saying that every ecommerce around will fail because they're using and external payment processor like Paypal. Maybe some of them can fail because of a Paypal "horror story" (account blocked etc..) but most of them will fail because they are not profitable.

I partially agree with you that relying on external services could be a risk, but in this case they've chosen services for some part that are not so easy to implement internally, and for that they've picked two new but highly growing services.

Now that you wrote an article on it, there will be other people that will build a similar business in a weekend and compete with you.

There already were competitors: http://presentnow.me

> So you built your business entirely relying on third-party services.

I'm going to have to disagree with you there. Neither Twilio nor Stripe are in the same business line as RollCallMe and thus are offering services, and thus not competing, therefore they have an incentive to keep prices down in order to attract more customers. I cannot speak for Stripe, but Twilio has lowered their rates in the past and does a wonderful job in regards to both technology and customer service.

Yes, there are no technical barriers to entry into this one-service industry, aside from knowing a Rails person who can wire up the app, but time-to-market, initial pricing and the potential for add-ons that can engage more users and augment the revenue streams give them the advantage. Choosing Twilio gives them that advantage.

Not a rock-solid app by any means, but one that's needed and doesn't compete directly against more mature and properly funded platforms.

Great idea. I wish them good luck.

Nice hack, Arshad! I remember you when you were still a student selling naps :)

Thanks, Andrew!

This is not a business yet.

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