LeBlanc

http://railstutorial.org is the best Rails 3 intro book I've found. The HTML version is free or you can buy the print edition + screencasts.

Agile Web Development With Rails by Sam Ruby et al. is also good.

There was an issue with the pledge buttons - it's fixed now.

Thanks for the advice though, I think it's spot on. I'm going to put in "X people have committed $Y" ASAP.

That is very valid concern. I built in 'stealth mode' so your startup is only available to people you send a special link (with a generated key) to. Check 'stealth mode' when you create a startup.

Good point. Email addresses are now only shown to the actual user. Also, I made it so if you choose to make your startup stealth on signup, your user will be stealth too.

What are you accepting payments for?

WePay is great for anything based around a group. They have a really nice API - I built http://www.everribbon.com with it

Amazon FPS is also really great if you want to do anything complicated. Unfortunately this means that the API is also very complicated and a bit hard to dive into.

Shoot me an email if you want to ask me questions about either one.

One thing he needs to have figured out is: how are you going to get people to come to your site. Since he has a background in sales, he should already have a solid plan for how to get visitors and turn them into users. If he doesn't that is a huge red flag. You can have the most awesome value proposition ever, but if you don't know how to get users (not just traffic), then it doesn't matter at all. Most people underestimate how hard it is to get people to use stuff on the internet.

Also, if you gave us a general idea of the market or general area the idea falls under, we could provide more specific advice.

Good luck!

WePay can handle the bills/rent side of things. http://www.wepay.com

If you DO decide to switch from PHP to Ruby on Rails make sure to get very familiar with Ruby before you dive into Rails, otherwise learning rails will be very frustrating. You can also try out Sinatra before Rails. Sinatra is a great lightweight framework that I've been using extensively. It is awesome. http://www.sinatrarb.com/

Regarding whether or not to switch I will say this: you can build whatever you want with either language. The big reason you should switch is the fun and challenge of learning something new. Both languages/frameworks have their advantages and disadvantages. You will be LESS productive if you switch languages at first because you will be new and will have to learn the 'ruby way of doing things'. Eventually you may end up more productive in the long run, but productivity is influenced by so many factors and language/framework is just one of them.

Regarding deployment, Heroku (free for small apps) is a good option for if you don't want to deal with deployment much. Linode ($20/mo minimum) is great if you need to do anything fancy and/or want to have root access to your deployment environment.

http://railstutorial.org is the best rails tutorial I've seen

Good Luck!

Sinatra is a great very simple Ruby framework based off of Rack.

It's great for making simple apps that don't need the complexity of Rails.

http://www.sinatrarb.com/

Kohana is my favorite PHP framework. It is very similar to Rails and makes working with PHP very pleasant.

http://kohanaframework.org/

Check out the open source Stanford Parser (Java) http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/lex-parser.shtml

I also wrote a free open source javascript API for the Stanford Parser if you want to play around with NLP in JS. http://nlp.naturalparsing.com/browserparser/parse (it is a bit slow at the moment, someone is using it to parse all of wikipedia).

Specifically regarding learning Ruby/Rails, I would recommend taking a look at http://railstutorial.org/ - this is the best rails tutorial I have come across.

Also, you might try learning Sinatra before Rails. Sinatra is very simple and streamlined (but still incredibly flexible and powerful since it is on Rack). Rails does a lot of things that may seem like magic, but with Sinatra it is always very easy to understand what is going on with your app. http://www.sinatrarb.com/

Completely agree, often I find the best articles on /new and not on the front page.

I think a great experiment for pg would be to set /new as the front page for HN and see what happens.

Very cool! Congrats on launching something.

One thing I would absolutely love is a way to convert HTML into FBML, which is currently just an awful awful process.

You could look into the Open Calais API. http://viewer.opencalais.com/

Newsley uses it to categorize financial news items - http://newsley.com

You should do some reading into the economic theory of bundling.

While custom pricing gives the user the most freedom, it may be confusing, and you may make more money by bundling your services. The classic example of this is movie studios which, when selling movies to theaters, will bundle a hot blockbuster movie with a less popular movie. By bundling these two movies together, the studio ends up with a higher profit than if they sold both movies individually at a higher total price.

That is the important part: by selling goods as a bundle at a lower price than the sum of the prices of the goods sold separately, you can actually increase your total revenue.

Here is a good article to help you: http://livingeconomics.org/article.asp?docId=288

You should be able to use analytics to get a sense of the utilities that users place on each item within your larger product. From there you can construct the pricing of your bundles to maximize your profit.

Good luck!

WePay has a great API - https://www.wepay.com/developer/api

I built EverRibbon with it http://www.everribbon.com

Given that this angel wants an equal stake and directorship, and has said that he wants to live the start-up life vicariously through you I would expect him to be quite hands on in his role with your company. Expect him to try to make a lot of decisions about how the company should be run. So, don't bring him on unless you would also be comfortable having him as a co-founder.

I would recommend trying to stick it out. If you want inspiration, watch Brian Chesky's talk at Start-up School. AirBnB went through exactly what you are going through, and in the end it worked out for them.

http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272180383

Good luck!

If you want to change this then you and anyone who agrees should do the following:

    1. find and submit interesting stories to HN

    2. visit /newest often and upvote stories that aren't fluff

If you and all the other people who love HN do this, it will substantially improve the community.

I'll have to put this on my 'to read' list, it looks really interesting. I think natural language processing/understanding may become one of those next 'big things' like mobile and social media simply because understanding what a user is trying to do will become very important.

If anyone is interested in playing around with a robust natural language processing tool, I built an API for the Stanford Parser. http://nlp.naturalparsing.com/browserparser/parse

Why raise money at all? To deploy a web app all you really need is a virtual server like SliceHost, Linode, etc. This costs $20-40 per month and should have enough resources for a regular web app until you get really big (in which case you should have some revenue to help cover costs).

Watch Tom Preston-Werner's (the founder of GitHub) speech at Start-up School for inspiration: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272178966

PHP is not equivalent to Rails. It would be more accurate to compare PHP to Ruby and compare Rails to a PHP framework like Kohana.

I've worked with both Kohana and Rails. Rails is more popular so it is easier to find solutions and add-ons. However, it does a lot of things by 'magic' and a beginner will have a hard time modifying rails source or creating a gem (if they want to do something non-default). Kohana on the other hand is easier to understand, extend, and modify, because the entire source is in your project folder as PHP code.

Good luck!

WePay lets you collect money (people can pay you with credit card or bank account) and then you can send money that you've collected to whoever you want. So you could, if you wanted, put money in your group and then send it easily to whoever.

One cool thing you could do is to allow the user to put a widget on their site showing their uptime percentage. Uptime Robot is, in essence, an impartial 3rd party that can guarantee website's uptime claims. This might be something you could charge for.

Good luck!

Ruby is a good choice and is similar to Python. However, if you do choose Ruby, I would recommend starting out with Sinatra instead of Rails. Sinatra is simple and easily understood so it makes a good starting point. Rails does a lot of things by 'magic' so it is a lot more difficult to start out with.

http://www.sinatrarb.com/

On the other hand, if you do go straight into rails, this is the best rails tutorial I have found:

http://railstutorial.org/book

You should check out this talk that Jason Putori, the designer for Mint gave titled "10 Things: Design for Non-Designers".

http://vimeo.com/15066599

If you go searching around for comparisons between the two, keep in mind that Rails just released v3 which is significantly different and improved over versions 2.