My first release since quitting my job: ShoveBox Mobile | Hacker News Reader

My first release since quitting my job: ShoveBox Mobile

wonderwarp.com

41 pointsdangrover20 comments

Just curious, the about section says that you're a sophomore at Northeastern University. Is that out of date, or did you have a job while in college? (the title says you quit your job)

> In addition to my own products, I've also handled numerous consulting projects.

He was probably talking about that. Or,

> I have experience in web development in environments including PHP, Ruby, Java, and, under duress, C#/ASP.NET.

Also,

> I am a third-year undergraduate majoring in Computer Science at Northeastern University.

The Internet is a wonderful thing :)

I'm actually not sure what to put there now. I guess I'm kind of a drop out for the time being.

Here's a graph summary of what I've been spending my time on: http://files.dangrover.com/howispentmyyear_draft_annotated.p...

(Later, I'm going to normalize the data and run correlations with sales/traffic, and go totally Tufte on the graph)

I was in school, then I took a sanctioned perfectly-normal break to work at a company making iPhone games in Palo Alto (most students at my school leave every 6 months for an internship). But I was pretty miserable at this company, and realized that I was making roughly the same off of my business (which was <= part-time).

I was trying to follow the traditional path, mostly out of fear. But the arguments for why you should rack up lots of debt in school and let yourself be taken advantage of by employers who pay you much less than you're worth in exchange for this "experience" or some such started making a lot less sense.

It seems like 80% of my time at NU was just spent on meaningless crap that I put up with because I was afraid of what would happen if I didn't get amazing grades and impress some employer. I could have been taking more challenging and diverse courses if it weren't for that. The urgency behind this kind of went away when I realized that I have some sort of fundamental mental block when it comes to the idea of being a "good employee." And that maybe I shouldn't care so much about having a traditional career when I had another path that was getting more and more feasible by the minute.

So, I dunno, I'd like to go back to school, even do some research (I've gotten really into programming language design/implementation lately with a side project). But the most important thing is being happy. And for the first time in many years, I am.

Hmm, I think I've gone and made it more douchey than what I had there. Back to the drawing board.

"I could have been taking more challenging and diverse courses if it weren't for that."

I find this to be the single biggest flaw with our current education system.

For too many employers, your entire educational experience is reduced to a scalar between 0 and 4. Even diving has a "degree of difficulty" in addition to how well you executed the dive. Shouldn't education have something similar?

I think to fix the education system, you have to fix the employment and hiring systems first. Unfortunately, a lot of people view college as a 4-year job-preparation institution instead of an institute of higher learning.

Then again, you could view the fact that more and more people are starting their own businesses as a potential solution. We're realizing that you don't need to wait to get "experience" or education, so if you can move faster than a traditional job or college, why not do so?

Looks like a very interesting piece of software. Definitely something I would use if I used a Mac as my primary machine, or an iPhone as my primary phone.

That said, did you do both ShoveBox and ShoveBox for iPhone since you quit your job, or just ShoveBox for the iPhone?

On another note, the ShoveBox section of your website looks great. It's informative, easily accessible and clear. I must say it was a delight to view.

Just the iPhone app and a corresponding new version of the (existing) desktop app to enable 2-way syncing over WiFI.

For those of you who remember me from demo day but are scratching their heads: the Divvyshot iPhone app will be the second!

Should remove the oversize dollar sign on the font page or move the pricing details into another page.

Feels like the customer are getting pushed to buy too quickly.

Something like this is less pushy http://macromates.com/.

Good point. I used to send users to that page to purchase, but now I send them directly to the store. On the other hand, I want users to know what they're getting into if they download a trial version ("wait, you mean it's not free?")

That would probably be a good thing to do an A/B test on. Everyone has an opinion (like me: "hey, I like the dollar sign! It's simple, clear, I recognize it instantly, and I hate web sites where when I want to give them money I have to go looking for how to do it!"), but measuring your conversion rate between the two options will tell you which one is actually better.

My thought is the exact opposite: the front page is exactly the place to find the "Buy now" button and I think you should change the color of the download and purchase icons. I know it will screw up your nice color scheme, but it should be more obvious.

There is nothing pushy about this. The one thing you should absolutely never forget is to make it as easy as possible for people to send you money!

That monkey noise when you first load the page is an immediate turn off. Don't do it.

That was meant as a secret easter egg for when you actually click on him, NOT to happen on page load.

I explicitly turned autoplay off when I made the page, but I guess your browser ignores that.

Removed now.

Interesting app. But so, isn't this very similar to what something like Evernote does?

If so, how do you plan on competing with an application that has been there for much longer and has built quite a plan? Do you think that there's still a market for such applications?(All actual questions)

There's definitely a market. The biggest competitor is not Evernote but 3M.

Actually, my app has been around a bit longer than Evernote.

A lot of my customers have told me that they switched to ShoveBox from apps like Yojimbo or Evernote because they really like its interface and the inbox/message/rules metaphor it uses.

I don't really have to beat Evernote -- though I certainly want to put a dent in. I wrote a syncing engine for the new app that's actually pretty abstracted out and device-agnostic. So I should be able to get a cloud-based solution rolling pretty quickly if I decide that's the right way to go.

But right now, I'm not so distracted with the idea of murdering Evernote. I'm living off the income from my company now -- I don't understand quite how -- and I'm delighted every time another sale comes in. And any incremental improvement in those numbers is awesome. I have ambitious sales targets for the rest of the year, and so far I'm meeting them. But what I'm doing is decidedly not a startup. The goal isn't to take over the world, but to be profitable, do good work, and be happy.

Good work, the product itself looks useful and the product website is easy to navigate and read.

Looks like an interesting set of applications. Love the site and icon design. Did you design both yourself, hire someone to do it, or do you have a cofounder? If you hired someone, mind sharing their contact details? ajju at hcoop dot net . Thanks.

I designed everything there except for the app icons.

The incomparable Jordan Langille of onetoad.com did the app icons.

You should follow the Tapulous model and release multiple editions.

Such as:

ShoveBox Mobile: Battery Drainer Edition

ShoveBox Mobile: Weezer Cover Band Edition

ShoveBox Mobile: Mobile Edition

ShoveBox Cellular: Fart Edition

ShoveBox Revenge: Derek Smart's DESKTOP COMMANDER! Edition

Great Job!

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