MicahWedemeyer

1/3 of people who clicked on this link and decided to answer. Most non-runners probably just don't care to read about it.

$150/hr for a good developer means this thing can run for a year and still be cheaper. Any improvements or enhancements they add you basically get for "free" over that time.

Plus, I have yet to see the feature that requires coding once and never needs touching again. When I upgraded my app from Rails 2 to Rails 3, there were all sorts of 1-offs like this that I had to tweak and fiddle to get working right again. It takes well over an hour just to remember what you were thinking when you originally wrote it.

Thanks for sharing your story. It's important to realize that "doing a startup" is not necessarily the same as "doing what you love". Picking a project that has the right mix of personal passion and monetizability is a very tough problem.

Good luck in your ventures!

I appreciate that it's not exactly an earth-shattering problem, but "about 2 minutes" is a huge underestimation. I think "an hour or so" is still pretty optimistic but at least possible. At that point the $10/mo for the Pro plan starts to look pretty competitive to writing your own.

I'm thinking perhaps you could have multiple instances of the tag, each for a different purpose. Most tools would use the first one, but if it's something like a browser plugin it would just display them all to you and let you choose.

If you're wondering why this would be nice, it's very useful if you want to write a blog post or something and say, "Hey, we just added support for XYZ to our tool"

Think of the sites that allow you to share on different services and they have like 100s of logos. Imagine trying to build that list. I've done stuff like that and it's a pain to try and find all the images. If there were a Chrome plugin that would tell me that a site has a sanctioned logo, it would simplify this kind of task by a ton.

I love it, but for my app we charge subscriptions with a free trial up front. Do you have any suggestions on how to phrase the wording so it's clear that the charge isn't going to happen right away?

If you're trying to market your product, there is nothing as powerful and successful as email. Yeah, your crappy newsletter will probably just get deleted by 95% of people who get it, but the cost/benefit is still in your favor.

If you want to be a success in business, sometimes you have to take off your "indignant customer" hat and put on your "trying to make a sale" hat. Don't be a jerk to your customers, and make it easy for them to unsubscribe, but setting up a periodic newsletter is an amazingly awesome way to get repeat business. Don't not do it just because you think your product or service isn't a perfect fit. Let your customers be the judge of that.

It seems like one takeaway is that a significant portion of people will just pay the default as stated, even if given a choice. I think people just have a hard time deciding what something is actually worth, so they'll take whatever advice is given. So, when pricing your products, if you're wondering if you should charge more, the default answer should be "Yes"

I'd be a little concerned that you're abandoning the network you've built in SF. I guess it depends on the business you're starting, but when I co-founded my consulting company, all of our initial clients came from my existing network.

You might want to make the GiftMark more prominent, like a popup as part of the initial welcome. I just focused on the main area and thought it was only possible to add what was displayed on the page. The only reason I went clicking was to help evaluate the app, and I tink under normal circumstances I never would have clicked a menu item for "Add gifts from around the web"

Cool idea all around. Good luck!

Statements like this just sound a little slimy: Everything you do and say on Facebook can be used to serve you ads. Our policy says that we can advertise services to you off of Facebook based on data we have on Facebook.

This is an excellent example of why I love the paid SaaS model so much more than advertising. With a paid app, your customer is your user. With advertising, the customer is the advertiser and they have very, very different goals than the users.

Great idea and execution.

Still, I'd really recommend ditching the ad at the bottom and focusing on perhaps a single call-to-action, like following on Twitter or liking on Facebook. I know it's tempting to try and monetize something like this but overall the ads and share buttons just kind of junk it up.

Thanks! jsTimezoneDetect is something I've been looking for.

Hey, let me also jump on the bandwagon of armchair-quarterbacking your decision! -Insert quip about how easy it is to do this stuff here...- Boom! I showed you!

Seriously, I'm not sure why everyone in this thread is so convinced that their name or name-choosing process is somehow genius or better than that of the OP. Obviously the OP knows that choosing a name is tough and you're never going to get the perfect name. It's all about compromising in the right places to get a name, a domain, a social presence, and so forth.

Personally, I found the story educational and a close parallel to my own difficulties with choosing names. I'm especially grateful for the discussion of buying the domain name. I'd like to hear the actual dollar value, but I can understand why that wasn't mentioned. At least it's clear that the price moved by $1000's which gives some frame of reference instead of us just guessing whether it was $100 or $100,000.

Thanks for sharing your experiences. It always helps to hear all sides of the story.

This was my first thought, too. I'd think you'd need to be charging around 10x that amount.

Plus, that's ~14k in revenue, not profit. SaaS apps have great margins, but there's still some cost to servers and marketing.

Still, going from 0 to 100 paying customers in a year is pretty great. The next year will surely be even better.

Best of luck!

Also, vendor lock-in with a payment processor is pretty strong. Kudos to Braintree for supporting portability, but you're still locked to an API unless you want to re-code everything.

In other words, the first $50k is free, and then you're tied intimately to BT's API. The path of least resistance is to just keep going with them. You're making money. They're making money. Everybody wins. I don't think this is a bad thing, it's just not all charity.

All that being said, if they announced this 4 months ago when I was migrating my payment system over to Stripe, I'd have been all over it. BT seems awesome and this is a great deal. Stripe won based on price[1], but $50k free really tips the scales on that.

1. http://agileleague.com/2012/08/migrating-away-from-authorize...

The entire article reads like a howto manual for parenting.

It's articles like these that remind me why I hate working with BigCo. This kind of crap never happens at a small company. Sure, you have problems and clashes, but they're resolved ad hoc by humans, rather than by policies designed to align drones with the corporate culture.

Survivor bias mixed with anecdotal folksy wisdom.

"She scrounged what hardware she could get and succeeded" does not mean that everyone who does that will succeed. I'm sure most successful businesses buy or lease or subscribe to the hardware they need.

Being a hustler and working hard is required for success. Money, or lack of it, doesn't change that. But, having access to money, even just enough to get by day-to-day, will make a hustler that much more powerful.

Sidenote: Compare the comments here on HN to the blog comments. Almost exactly the opposite, which I find strange given the supposed overlap in audience.

We're paying 2x for the RDS multi-AZ setup that is supposed to failover in these cases. So far no luck. Think I'll ask for a refund.

Seeing the same. Amazon RDS in us-east-1, no connectivity although AWS console shows all green.

This is a good strategy. My only complaint with it (and I do it too for some things) is that it can mess up people's address books a little. For example, when I start typing someone's name in gmail, sometimes I get "Joe Smith <a3gfdf33sds32fs@someapp.com>" instead of "joesmith@hisdomain.com"

Since you're calling it a startup as opposed to just a project, I have to ask about business model. How will you make money off this?

I think you'll have a very, very difficult time monetizing this, as there are already dozens and dozens of free TODO apps. Unless you can carve out a die-hard niche that is 100% against signup and login forms, it will be difficult to compete with the others that are both free and easy to use.

Exactly my point. I'm as nerdy as they come, but this conversation never leads anywhere interesting.

I really hope she's right. There is almost no conversation as boring as a group of nerds going around in a circle trying to out-do each other on who was the first to do such-and-such:

Well, my first computer was a 486 with only 1MB of RAM

Oh yeah? Mine was a 286 and it didn't even have a 3.5" drive!

Oh yeah? Mine was a TRS-80...

...and so on it goes...

I installed a punch code deadbolt on our front door. It has been a life-changing experience. I need neither phone nor keys and never worry about being locked out. I just have to replace the batteries every couple years.

One of the biggest improvements, not offered by the Lockitron, is the lack of needing to fumble in your pockets for anything. If you've got a handful of groceries, it's much easier to shift a bag or two to get a hand free and punch the code than it is to go digging in your pockets.

Thanks for sharing your results. Advertising effectively is enormously difficult.

I've had results similar to yours in all areas of advertising. Someone asked me once, "So how has the ad we run on our blog for you been doing?" My reply, "Well, I think it's the least poorly performing ad we run, so maybe that's a win?"

I built a recurring billing system on top of Amazon FPS and it was anything but easy, especially once the credit cards started expiring.

I wrote a little about it here: http://peachshake.com/2010/06/15/saas-subscription-billing-o...

And then the move to Stripe here: http://agileleague.com/2012/07/migrating-away-from-authorize...

"I managed $ABC million budgets..." always makes me think, "Was it your money? Or were you just dipping into the seemingly endless corporate coffers?"

I think working with big corporate budgets negatively trains you for running your own company. You can just throw money at things and if it doesn't work out, no big deal. Drop $80k on a booth at a trade show that didn't result in a single sale? Well, at least you got some good face-time, right? That kind of thing just doesn't fly when you're just starting out on your own.

It's much harder to manage a $20k budget and go from $0 to >$0 revenue than it is to manage a $1 million budget that just magically refills year after year.