DirtyAndy

If they can produce this cheaply enough and if it doesn't need too much shaking to make it work it could revolutionize children's toys. A lot of kids carry around their toys a lot in comparison to the amount of time the electrical parts are actually in use, so there should be ample charging time. Lots of toys only need their batteries replacing every six months to a year, so I assume they are fairly low drain and would suit this well.

Edit: Battery compartments that children cannot get into a also no doubt a part of the manufacturing cost, so batteries that never need replacing that can truly be built into the toy wouldn't need battery compartments and could simplify design.

Any leap into the unknown is very hard, but whatever you do, don't procrastinate on it, the older you get the harder it gets - don't look back in 10 years and wish you'd made the move. Whilst I firmly believe if you really want to do something you can do it at any time, it definitely gets harder as you get older.

Try telling your wife and kids you are going to leave programming and the money you make and start again on something else, it's possible yes, but generally not so easy. Your "support group" of friends is much harder to leave the longer you have had them around. And "aspirations" are generally slightly harder to fulfil as you get older (trainee hairdresser at 25 OK, at 50 it seems a bit weird).

Also don't assume that if you leave you wont be able to step back into it. There is always a demand for good people and unless you are in an extremely limited market you quite possibly will be able to step straight back into where you are.

My wife and I (late 30's) are about to pack up our family and move countries and I'm contemplating what I want to do when I get there so I'm kind of going through the same thing.

Pool.com sends out an email of their "Hot List" every day with a list of expiring domains (http://www.pool.com/hotlist.aspx?ia=hotlist). They send about 30 domains a day, and I guess in an average week 5 are interesting and you can register for them at the various auction sites (Pool has no guarantee of getting them on the drop) and then bid on them. Very few domains that are usable go for less than $100 though.

Not as good as Ryan's AI but a nice easy way to occasionally catch a good domain.

I think the point of the guys blog post / rant is not so much the price in general, but that he felt the product targetted at the start-up community. Not that I have taken too much notice but I was under the impression that is where they were targetting it and I wouldn't be surprised if most of their beta testers were from that community and expecting the $10 per month pricing that they are more familiar with.

Personally I would never create a business that targetted other businesses that really have no money, it has never seemed a great business plan, but I would not do a beta marketing of "hey you, try this, you'll love it" to then offer a product they cannot afford.

I'm sure they will have no problems finding customers, but more of a problem finding beta testers for their next product.

The story is based on a 2003 Today's Christian Woman survey and a 2006 Internet Filter Review survey. Both of these have a somewhat vested interest in the result and I find it hard to believe the survey is not skewed!

I'm sure 9/10 women are exposed to some levels of pornography at times, newspapers in Britain have topless women on Page 3, adult(ish) humour websites sometimes have fairly risque ads, but personally I would find it very hard to believe that 1 out of every 6 women has a pornography addiction - I can't even believe men's addiction level is that high.

All companies, not just start-ups, need to look at this and not just sell their programmers, but all their staff, and more importantly explain to all their staff exactly what it is the company does.

I do contract development and it has never ceased to amaze me how many staff at companies really have no idea what the company does, I've worked at pharmaceutical companies where you'd swear people have never even seen a pill, and media and advertising companies where people must never seen an ad.

All companies should develop an introduction pack, whether that is a video, powerpoint or brochure, for new staff. It should explain what the company does, how it does it and why it is good at it. The payback would be immense.

Try signing up to a few services and get some ideas from what they send out - I've been doing this of late.

I think Huddle.net sends clean emails where it is clear to see their point etc, and they don't email that often which I think is important with b2b type apps. I'd recommend taking a look at how they structure their communications.

Good Data is another I signed up to, at times they send too frequently (if you launch 5 things over 2 weeks please don't send me 5 emails) and their emails are too wordy etc - but really good to have those emails as a case of what not to do.

If you go through an accountant in the UK to create a company they used to be able to help arrange bank accounts - that may no longer be valid. If no one is resident in the UK (you certainly don't have to have a passport, I have 2 personal bank accounts and 3 business accounts and no passport) then you may have a problem.

I have only just started looking into this, but you may find you can open a company in Jersey or Isle of Man. I think you can do this remotely and get a bank account etc. Also if you are an EU citizen then you might want to try Ireland.

I'm sure you can appreciate why countries don't make it easy for non residents to do these things, and you may find it a lot easier to set up in your own home country until you can actually afford a presence in another country.

Sorry if this is bad form on HN (both replying to my own message and/or posting the following), but I thought this might be of interest to a lot of readers. Before you go and pay a bomb to a "squatter" or complain about how expensive domains are here is a list of some domains that I would consider reasonable names, that I have bid on (please note I didn't win most of them) at dropping domain auctions, that could have been purchased for a fairly modest amount (yes I know some people think $8.17 or whatever it is is the only amount anyone should pay):

clovo.com 65.00 axod.com 70.00 exod.us 100.00 forq.com 190.00 disc.us 200.00 wrax.com 201.00 flysafely.com 275.00 changethings.com 286.00 stockwidgets.com 294.00 given.org 300.00 conky.com 302.00 maxan.com 303.00 coret.com 325.00 pinex.com 331.00 surun.com 359.00 broadly.com 401.00 airlabs.com 403.00 onecolor.com 428.00 typically.com 450.00 exchangemedia.com 450.00

If this is not HN style then please let me know and I will delete the post (if that is possible). If you want more examples I could post a page somewhere. But my point is a bit of research and patience and you can nab some pretty good domains for a good price (I so wish I had bought changethings.com)

I guess I fit into the "squatter" category here so I can possibly offer some advice from that side. I receive about an email a week asking if I want to sell xyz domain. They nearly never offer a price and I end up going back to them and saying that it is for sale, I haven't really thought about the price blah blah blah, but I paid a bit for the domain - make me an offer. And they tend not to come back.

My advice would firstly be to not use a hacked name for a business orientated product. Some comments here imply that your clients will be tech savvy - well in my experience the guy that is going to sign off the bill probably is not, and being too clever with a name wont help you there - stick to a simple .com name.

Secondly use a thesaurus and try and find different words for "project" and "name" that you might be able to string together and pay $9 for rather than buying off someone else. Whilst lots of domains are taken there are still billions of combinations available.

Thirdly, without going too obscure, see if you can find a 5-7 letter pronounceable generic domain. Know any kids, ask them to spell the word you come up with, that is always a good test. http://domaintyper.com/ has a list of "web 2.0" names it generates, sometimes some good ones (generally not, but worth a click). Last time I did this exercise for my business I came up with about 30 usable names.

If you do want the squatted name, try sending an email directly to the person along the lines of "Hi, I have an idea for a small business and the domain name registered to you xyz.com would be quite a nice match. It is only in the early stages, I'm a student blah blah so have little budget and was wondering if you'd be interested in selling the domain for $200". If it was me I might come back to you wanting $400, but unlikely I'd ask for $1,000 or 10K unless it was really valuable, and if it is 11 characters it probably isn't. You've set the expectations of what you can afford and that is a good place to start. Bare in mind you can get a readable 4 letter domain for under $1,000 so don't go too high.

Nice start to your app. I had a similar idea a few years ago which I never acted on. One thing you might want to do is categorize things by price. When I thought about this idea it was because whilst if I am going to buy an espresso machine I go out and research all the details and then make a decision based on many factors, most of my friends ask me "what is the best espresso machine under $500" etc. Whilst that doesn't apply to some things you have like banks, it does for most things people will buy.

Good luck, hope it works.

Assuming that your ideas do not require incredibly technical solutions this shouldn't be that much of a problem. I'm sure any team is better with a business person and a coding person, but for most sites I see launched I'd prefer business skills over coding skills, and I certainly wouldn't learn how to code to achieve it - there are no lack of cheap coders around.

There is often a lot of talk about Minimum Viable Product. Outsource the project for $xx and you will certainly achieve MVP. Developers working on their own projects tend to get the wrong idea of what is important and lover to tinker, so it is much harder to achieve MVP. Someone that has 10K to deliver a project tends to deliver exactly what is asked for and no more. You can certainly have a contract where bugs are fixed for free for a month etc, and an agreed rate for future additions.

Get your idea working, prove it is viable and you might have to throw away all of the code that was written and start again with a really good team, but at least you know it will pay off.

Good luck

You're a broke college student with 2K to spend on adding features to your website, surely you should be able to find another broke student that would like your 2K and could do a perfectly adequate job of delivering it - especially with the potential to be involved in future pieces of work.

Not only is a really good designer / developer going to be too expensive, they probably aren't going to want to get out of bed for a small project like that, so rather than outsourcing overseas why not find someone that is in a similar situation to yourself and you can have face to face meetings with to set expectations etc.

Whilst I agree with your logic, I think there is still a difference between being an entrepreneur and running a fairly standard business. Your definition would say that someone who buys a franchise or setups up a basic shop is an entrepreneur - I think few people would see it that way. An entrepreneur need not be trying to be revolutionary but they should be shooting for the stars and trying to at least improve on the way the competition does business

One of these people designs logos etc for medical practices, employs 5 people and has revenues of $225,000. By my calculations that is an average of $25/hour per person in revenue. That is not pushing the boundaries in revenue or ideas - that is just another person who has a small business. I'm not criticising that person in the slightest, that is great for them, but if they are making a list of top entrepreneurs under 25 then that is pretty sad.

As I think someone else pointed out this is probably more just a case of very poor journalism.

Firstly great site and great idea. But you are not (hopefully) posting here to get your butt kissed but for some constructive criticism and ideas, so here goes:

1. The site is a little busy and lacks a real call to action. "Start Designing" kind of disappears

2. I think you need two sites. One for the business market and one for the consumer market. These could both have the same backend etc, but probably need seperate names / front ends. Businesses (generally) don't buy from consumer related sites and vice versa. Your product definitely seems capable of satisfying both markets (and I would use the current domain for the business market)

3. Your focus both on the site and in your comments here seem to be slightly on the ability to design your own product. Personally I am useless at design so this would not appeal, but I also know a number of people who are amazing at design, but not that good with a blank canvas. I've only taken a quick look at your site but I would perhaps focus on the excellent designs you already have and offering customisations to them over actually having a blank canvas (which is where I ended up when I clicked Start Designing).

But overall looks really good, good luck with it.

My thoughts: 1. Like most people here I didn't really like to have to login to see anything, especially with the bait-and-switch approach. I think you either need to show a random result for people to see, or let them do a single search and log an IP address to something (difficult as I guess multiple people from one company can have same IP). Another option would be to show a reduced set of information maybe show 1 or 2 of the test results in full and all the rest just have the % without clarifying what is good and bad?

2. Site looks really nice. I like the blurb and the site makes me want to put a URL in and find out more

3. Personally I think it is pricey. I would have thought perhaps a per domain model or the like might work better - $10 to track a domain for a year - with alerts when it goes down or up in score etc? $20 a month might work for some design/development agencies because they can test loads of sites, but I think you are limiting to your target market majorly if you do that.

I've never heard of Amazon payments before so I'm pleased I took a look at your site - I learnt something! I think a lot of business people will prefer that over google and paypal etc.

Good luck!

I like the free trial option, without ever entering any credit card info. A free trial gets the user used to what they are getting, and you don't have to upsell them later. If you just let them use the free version from the start it is easy for the user to end up thinking "oh these ads on the side aren't too bad" or "oh I don't need to have my company logo at the top" etc etc - so it is more difficult to get them to convert. Once they have used the version with there logo and no ads (or whatever it is you are offering) it is less likely they will accept downgrading.

The other issue with a free trial is it gives you thirty days of your product being out there before you need to get the billing working. Maybe you can launch next week instead of next month.

The other thing I like, that is rare to see (and would probably suit your time tracking app), is a working demo. Allow people to use the app without having to create an account or enter an email etc, just have some dummy data and preferably ensure the data is cleaned after each use (to prevent someone entering objectionable material). Most people that are likely to use your app are smart enough to go and click around and see if it is what they want. Then they can sign up to a free trial and you have a customer who is more likely to turn into a real customer.

Good luck.

Being down to 0 money left is quite different to bankruptcy, do you have large debts that are going to cause someone to file bankruptcy proceedings against you? Otherwise I would have thought worst case scenario was really just looking for a new job and you might know that you need to do that slightly before you fully run out of money.Lets imagine the lead time for getting any old job, starting and getting your first pay cheque is 6 weeks. So 6 weeks from running out of money I would start job hunting.

From your comments in reply to others I assume you are young(ish) with no dependents. That has to be the best situation to start a business in. You talk about perhaps doing this again in the future with another idea, but imagine in that future you are married, you have kids, you have a mortgage. I'm in that position and I can tell you it is a lot lot harder than it is when you have no body depending on you - I can go without for a while, but kids grow, they need new clothes etc. You also get more accustomed to a lifestyle as you get older - which is hard to give up (Thank God I built up a cellar over the last few years because I cannot afford to buy wine now!).

If you've lost faith in your idea or don't see it being a success then cut your losses now, but if you still think you can make it work my advice would be to go for it.

Good luck.

PS. Also you mention that you are doing everything from dev to sales and marketing. If you actually have contacts in the industry I would focus 100% on dev, then get them to look at the product properly. People you know don't need to see your sales and marketing to tell you if the product will be a success.

There are three things I would look at first and foremost 1. Name - pinkdy really isn't that memorable and has little to do with getting pregnant. With competitors like fertilityfriend and knowmycycle and mymonthlycycles you probably need something that is a little more descriptive 2. Landing Page 3. SEO

When I first read this I thought you were going into a market that was way too crowded for you ever to succeed (in English at least). But actually the top search results for "track menstrual cycle" and "track period" and several other searches are not that strong and with the right SEO you should be able to break into the top results. The landing pages of your competitors are awful. Too much text and too much of it in light pink which is hard to read. A simple high impact landing page could help you beat a lot of your competitors - but that isn't going to help if you cannot drive people to your site with the right SEO.

Two other ideas for you to think about. 1. what is the market like for other languages? Maybe there is a lack of Spanish language competitors etc - it might be easier to get going with them first. 2. I don't know if you can create a widget that can be included on forums, but there are a lot of womens forums around where they discuss all sorts of things. A lot of these women are trying to get pregnant and if you can tap into them on those forums it could be a good marketing opportunity.

Obviously as everyone else has said here, do get the English right, and it could be worth checking if someone in a foreign country uses the site and for some reason feels they want to sue you that you are safe.

Good luck.

Personally I'm in the process of starting something and trying to focus on that as much as possible, but I still have lots of ideas. So I have a whiteboard in my office and when I get an idea it goes on the whiteboard. The whiteboard is divided into two sides - ideas that are fun but will never make a penny, and ideas that need further investigation to see if they are commercially viable.

Up until recently I have done contract development work. Nearly all of the ideas that I have that are on the potential money making list come from my work interactions. Either systems I have developed where 90% of the system would work for loads of other companies, or systems that the company wont develop but that the users want, that I think other companies would want.

I am assuming you are a programmer of some description (I assume most people on here are) in which case I think you are in the best position. Look at the systems you work on, Can they be improved, can they be generalised so that other companies may pay for them. It is amazing how many companies will take the $200 a month option where you cannot change the background colour to cyan over the fully customised internally built $20,000 option.Obviously be slightly careful that your company does not have rules where if you invent stuff whilst in their employment then they own it etc - but most companies don't seem to bother too much.

Your startup can accomplish boring business jobs and make money, it doesn't have to be a rip off of Facebook or aggregate Twitter data for you to have a happy life.

Good luck

I finished high school, spent 1 year full time at university, then 5 years very part time whilst I started a business. It's 18 years since I started that business and I still don't have a Bachelors degree, but it would be wrong to conclude that just because I never completed it I didn't get anything from it. Similarly I recently met someone who nearly finished their PHD, but has abandoned that to start a business. I am sure she got a lot out of the work she did towards that PHD even if she didn't finish it.

I'm going to be at both events (photo on http://www.twitter.com/DirtyAndy ). Don't really know anyone going although interestingly met jlees at a pitching course two weeks ago and exchanged e-mails with axod a month or so ago. Small world message! I do have a bright orange t-shirt but shall not be wearing it - I have a bright orange business card which will have to do!