LeBlanc

I was in the same situation as you about 2 months ago and I decided to take the plunge and work on my own start-up.

While I know that work experience and the network from working someplace awesome would help me, I had the idea, the passion, and a basic prototype so I decided to just do it. I could always go join a start-up later, and I don't have any debt or obligations so I can live super-cheap. Even if I fail I will have a cool piece of software to show for it that I can use to help me get a job later.

Good luck with whatever you decide! Shoot me an email if you want to talk.

W3Schools is one of the best free resources out there. http://www.w3schools.com/

Here are some books that I have used that have been helpful

PHP and MYSQL for Dynamic Websites http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0010SEMW8/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp...

Javascript: The Definitive Guide http://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-Definitive-Guide-David-Flan...

Hackers and Founders is a great group that meets up every other week. I've been to two of their events and everyone has been really awesome. There is a meetup this upcoming thursday in SF.

http://www.meetup.com/Hackers-and-Founders/

I'll point you to some articles written by people more experienced than I at this:

anti-family: - Jason Friedman http://www.humbledmba.com/the-drag-coefficient-scoring-syste...

Pro-family: - Vivek Wadhwa http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1431263 http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/07/when-it-comes-to-founding-s...

Hope you find these helpful. Good luck!

It sounds like the problem you are having is user retention. You get people to your site, but they don't end up sticking around to use your tool/service on a daily basis. This means that you do not have a strong enough value proposition (or you are marketing to the wrong people, but more likely the former).

Try to get feedback from the people who tried your website but then left. Repost to the blogs you posted to and try to see what the people who tried it think, and why they didn't up leaving.

Also, make sure your website is solving a real problem. Your site may be 'useful' but unless it solves a problem that currently really really frustrates people, nobody is going to want to spend the effort to go to your site and use your tool unless the problem is solves is really big, and your solution is awesome.

I could give more specific advice if I knew anything about your site. Good luck!

Being attached to a university can be a big advantage if the university has good start-up support, especially since you already have a network there. However, being in the bay area can also be a huge advantage, as is free rent and food. If your university has good start-up support, and there are people in your area you want to work with, stay in Provo. If not, move out here. Another thing is that you can always move out to the bay area later. Keep in mind that moving will eat a few weeks of your time, and can be expensive.

I just moved out to the bay area a few weeks ago and I am really glad I did. If you do move out here, shoot me an email, or go to a "Hackers and Founders" meetup.

If you are willing to be flexible in terms on location, you can get cheaper rents but still be close to the city proper via public transit. Places down in the peninsula will be even cheaper, but you will have to factor in the price of the commute (caltrain from mountain view to SF everyday can get expensive). There are also the google shuttles, but I have not used them.

Living with room-mates will also save you a bunch of money obviously. I am down in Palo Alto right now but thinking about moving up to SF, so long as I can convince the people I want to live with to find a place cheap enough for me. Good luck!

Depending on your location, there may be institutions similar to Dogpatch Labs or Hacker Dojo. These are places where hackers can get cheap temporary 1-2 person spaces to work. I don't know of any outside of the bay area though.

I think a 'find other hackers site' is a great idea. Given that you are a hacker yourself, why don't you make a site like this? If it was well made, I would use it.

How about instead of using the resume / cover letter combination you ask a series of interesting questions similar to the YCombinator application?

This will 1) weed out all of the people who spend minimal effort on a job app and just spam their resume / cover letter everywhere, and 2) will give you answers to questions you actually care about. The more unique/interesting the questions the more unique/interesting candidates it will attract. UChicago used this method in their "uncommon application" to attract a class of really smart, unusual people who were passionate about learning.

I haven't had a chance to use this method though ( I just thought of it recently), so I make no guarantees. Good luck!

Whatever you do, don't reference specific issues the customer had or statements they made. Most people will find this very creepy and stay away from your service. That said, you can tailor your pitch to whatever pain points that customer has.

So "I saw that you have a problem with X at wonka corp" is a no-no, but "My service is way better at X than wonka corp" should be fine. In general, keep it general.

You could also try to teach yourself. If you already understand object oriented programming, then learning ruby on your own should be doable. It really depends on how you learn best. I prefer to teach myself, and was able to learn ruby and rails in a few weeks.

One thing you should consider is that the successful people you want to imitate are probably partially successful because they did not imitate others, but did what worked for them.

Everybody is different and will work best under different conditions. Try to find out what schedule works best for you.

I get the most work done later in the day, but I still find myself most productive if I get up reasonably early. So I allocate easy / non-thinking work in the morning, and do stuff that really requires creativity and brainpower in the afternoon / evening.

I don't know if one exists, but a browser plugin that allows for cookie synching might be able to do this. If it doesn't exist, someone should make it.

Chrome has built in bookmark synching tied to your google account.

You don't need to send the data to cars for wi-fi equipped traffic lights to be useful.

I can imagine hooking up a traffic light with both a wi-fi device and cameras to measure traffic flow. Traffic light A could communicate with traffic light B to let each one know how much traffic was on the way to the other light, so that it could adjust its programming. If you did this on a large scale, I would expect it to reduce traffic by a lot.

Of course, I don't know if the reduction in traffic would be greater than the cost of equipping all traffic lights with wi-fi devices and cameras.

Are you using any parsing tools? Like the stanford NLP?

I am currently developing an API for the stanford NLP so that other web apps can easily use that parsing and word tagging tool.

Cool website. I like the idea of the "where is this slang used" feature.

It depends entirely on the person and their spending habits.

Try making a list of what things you will spend money on / buy and then estimate a monthly cost for those items.

Food can be one of the hardest things to quantify, especially if you cook all your own food (a great way to save money). You can try to figure out how much on average you think you will spend on each meal. This is higher for me than other people because I eat a lot of food and a lot of meat. I spend on average $20 per day on food.

I think it depends on the person. I don't have any problem at all with the emotional support, but I really miss being able to sit down with someone and have a strong brainstorming session. I do talk to other people to get their advice/ideas, but it is not the same as talking to someone who also has their head in the game and is doing it 100% like you.

Thanks for this perspective!

I recently had the opportunity to outsource some of my development to India. An Indian friend of mine had a team that was looking for a project. I ended up not working with them for two reasons.

1) the small size of my project meant that the time I would spend writing up extensive design docs and requirements, and meeting with them via skype, could be better spent just doing the coding myself. This is probably true for a lot of small companies.

2) I wanted to be able to learn for myself how to do some of the stuff I needed to do. Teaching myself has been very rewarding (it is difficult though, and not for everyone)

I think, as your said, outsourcing is best for really big companies who have the structure to manage it, and the size to benefit from it.

What matters more than whether you are happy or not is whether your users are happy or not. One thing you could try is to launch to a select number of users (generally friends and family) and get their feedback before launching to the general public.

I am also very interested in this. I need a JRuby hosting solution and there are not very many out there. Plus I would like to learn how to run my own server.

prgmr.com is out of space though. Does anyone know of anything else like this out there?

This is a great idea, good luck! These types of events are very fun and educational.

One possibility you could look into is either a business plan or elevator pitch competition. Start-ups will submit their bplan or give a 2 minute pitch to a panel of investors, who will judge them and give feedback with a Q/A session. I have participated in several of these and they are very useful for both investors and entrepreneurs.

You are probably right that it doesn't make sense right now, just because a lot of the good suggestions in this post are more pressing.

The reason I suggest it is that it would give you access to a number of users right off the bat which could be good for getting feedback from a large group of people who are actually going to use your app for their actual to-do list (rather than the informal sort of playing around with it I just did for a few minutes). In the end, it really depends on where you want to go with this.

The online to-do list application market is very crowded. There are a whole lot of different apps out there. I like your idea of a structured to-do list next to a priority one. Have you thought about using the APIs of the other to-do list apps to pull a user's data from those sites and display it using your novel method?

The simple and clean design is actually what I like best about the site. I'm sure you've seen www.startuply.com (which is amazingly down right now because of an asp.net web.config error, wow!) That might be a good source of job leads for your crawler.

I also really like how you link to the companies website and not to some 3rd party job posting. Have you thought about adding more info to the start-up profile page on your site?

Isn't this largely a hardware problem, not a software problem? No matter what you do on the software end, your screen is still going to be made up of millions of tiny dots.

My recommendation is to go the start-up route for the following reasons:

1) You will be able to solve interesting problems more so than a large company which at least early on will have you doing small iterations on what they already have

2) You will be exposed to the opportunity to get business experience of a type much more valuable than what you can get out of an MBA. Get an MBA for the network, not for the academics, and not if you want to solve interesting problems in the CS space

3) you will develop the type of valuable experience that all those job applications you are looking at want. Even if a start-up fails, you will be able to point to an interesting thing that you helped develop that will help with the job search in the future

Take this advice with a big grain of salt. Do what YOU want to do, like solve interesting problems that you have passion for without worrying about where it will lead you. If the problems are interesting, and the solutions are awesome, you will end up in a great place. If you go build something cool that you can show to start-ups, they will be much more interested in talking to you than if you are just a cover letter + resume combination.

Where are you located? If you are in the SF Bay Area I'd be willing to talk to you about opportunities around here.