DotCloud (YCS10) announces sweet new dashboard in beta

This looks very nice, but stepping back for a minute of unsolicited-but-hoping-to-be-helpful advice: "Get a real starter app launched on dotCloud in under five minutes." - 5 minutes is a long time.

More or less, it means I'm going to have to do a lot of up front thinking. And all of the repos on the dotCloud github account are for app-templates, not real 'example' apps (kudos to you guys for providing that, and for providing so much other open source goodness).

As a comparison, the instructions for getting Kandan up and running on Heroku are literally "copy and paste this" and it just works, and opens up in your browser when done. You can invite others in and start tweaking from there (https://github.com/cloudfuji/kandan#heroku). Far less than 5 minutes - really less than ~8s of your time, unless you watch it.

I'm not sure what your developer-acquisition strategy is, but have you thought about reaching out to some of the big open source projects in the developer communities you want to attract, and working with them to make dotCloud deployments a kind of default? The quality of most open source apps is usually pretty abysmal, but maybe that can be improved over the long term, and most of these projects would love to have a 'standard deploy platform' to target.