NoBSWebDesign

Funding and outside influences aside, writing a business plan is still one of the most important aspects of developing your product. When working on an idea, if my product isn't important enough to warrant a couple days pouring over the market research and putting something together, then the idea isn't worth developing.

This is especially true if you have more than one person working on the project. You need to make sure everyone stays focused on the big-picture goal, and that everyone is equally aware of the target market and projections for the company. You don't have to get incredibly specific in the plan though. Feature changes shouldn't need to be included in updates to the plan. But if your project is changing directions or target market, then the changes should be researched and plan updated accordingly.

That being said, I almost always leave out financial projections until later in the game after v1 has been launched, because even most investors will know that this section is complete BS before that point.

Oh, and all of this should of course be filed under "IMO".

As you peeps have pointed out, 400k is ridiculous. I go to an expensive private college, and it's on the order of 120 for 4 years (though it's actually a 5-year school).

And if his kids are really entrepreneurial, as he claims, then they'll have the motivation to apply for scholarships like I did. I have received absolutely no financial help from my parents, and yet have accumulated very little debt.

I have learned most of my knowledge by teaching myself, and generally goof off during class if I even go (and no, that doesn't put me into the B group). But I've also been exposed to an incredible variety of people and built a huge network of friends and acquaintances in almost every industry.

Another point he seems to be missing is that to make a Facebook or Myspace app go viral, you need an initial network of users, typically your own friends. I hope his kids have fun trying to promote their app to all their high school friends who have gone off to college and lost contact.

I think what makes me most upset about this article, though, is that he's not using his views to make his own decisions, he's using them to make his kids' decisions. I feel really bad for his kids.

Lead guitar in a band!

http://www.moirocks.net

If you know your target market (and you should), and you have direct access to them, propose possible names to them and get feedback, while at the same time soliciting them for more name ideas.

We struggled with ours for a while. We had several possibilities that we liked, and started telling people we'd meet at conferences and whatnot. When we talked to them again days later, they would always remember one more than the others. We had several clever names with nice flow and alliteration, but RateMyStudentRental.com is what everyone always remembered (though for us, this is most likely due to the already-existing and popular ratemyprofessors.com).

2-5 hours a night, but I've only been doing that for the past 4 years.

My family members have seen sleep specialists, and according to them, the "people need 8 hours a night" argument is not true for everyone. Different people need different amounts. And if you actually read the research papers (it's been a couple years, so I'm not sure of links), scientists don't even know with 100% certainty what the purpose of sleep is.

However, that being said, there was a study done recently showing a correlation between getting less than 5 hours a night and heart problems later on in life. This has prompted me to start averaging closer to 5 hours than 2 hours lately.

I'm the exact same way. I am most productive from about 11pm to 4am. Luckily my 9-5 only requires me to work "just hard enough to not get fired." I'm also still in college, so my college roomies don't mind the music at 3am, as long as it's not blasting.

I was just thinking the same thing while responding to the bootstrapping thread which seems to have made it to the front page since I left work yesterday, with a ton of comments.

I'm right here with you at GMT-5.

We're bootstrapping 100%. My full-time engineering co-op (required for graduation) pays the bills. I also do marketing and web consulting part-time. And sometimes, my band makes decent money as well.

Our startup itself, though, is funded by winning competitions. We've won business plan competitions and we just recently added 1st place at a statewide marketing competition (it's funny when engineering majors beat business and marketing majors at business and marketing). Now we'll be going to Atlanta in April for nationals.

Whenever people ask us if we're considering funding, we typically reply that we prefer the type of funding we don't have to pay back, though I couldn't see us turning down a serious offer.

Sometimes I think it'd be cool to be able to work on our startup full-time, but I already work on it for probably 6-10 hours a day, so I'm not sure how much we'd really gain.

I work best with distractions. My favorite three distractions are music, people (i.e. going to the coffee shop), and tv, in that order. If I'm coding at home, either the music is cranked or the tv is on. Though, I try to watch uninteresting shows, so that I don't get distracted. If either Discovery or the History channel are on, I'm not getting much done.

Study what you think you will enjoy the most. The vast majority of what you learn in college comes not from classes, but from your friends, networking, and extra-curricular activities. Education is nice, but developing as a person is the real value of going to college.

If you love to read and are naturally interested, any subject is easy to pickup and learn. I went to school for engineering, and I found business, programming, and web design all relatively easy to pick up (though easy doesn't necessarily imply that there was little time-investment involved, quite the contrary).

Oh, and the reason I mentioned Plymouth Township is because it's less than half an hour from Ann Arbor, so you could easily live in Plymouth Township and work in Ann Arbor.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention... when you start building and need a microcontroller, go to whatever company you need one from and ask for a sample piece. Typically all microcontrollers companies will send you 1-5 controllers as "testing and development samples." There is usually a form that allows you to order these for free on their website.

It's difficult for me to recommend a "Hello World" type introduction to electronics and microcontrollers, since I had 4 years of learning it in a university (obviously the budget is quite a bit different). I would say find some hobby you are interested in that uses LED's and switches, and find a tutorial on how to build that component. What you will find is that depending on the application, a simple button can be a lot more involved than you may expect.

For instance, if you played guitar, you could learn to make a footswitch that has LED's to tell you what channel you're on. But in this case, you'd have to look up the specs for your amp to see what type of resistance and impedance (if any) the amp expects from that channel. Furthermore, does it expect an active high or an active low signal, do you need to involve any BJT's (bi-polar junction transistors are common in simple electronics) or FET's?

Anyway, I'll not get into too much depth, because depending on what you're trying to accomplish, this may be overkill. That said, once you start building, Digikey is your friend!

http://www.digikey.com/

Also, I hate to promote this book, because I really disliked the professor that wrote this (seriously, one of my least favorite classes ever), but his book really does answer any possible electronics question you'll probably ever have (though, again, it's probably a bit overkill).

http://www.amazon.com/Electromagnetic-Compatibility-Handbook...

If you have any specific questions during your project, feel free to give me a shout. Admittedly, microcontrollers aren't my specialty, but I am an ME/EE.

I live in Ann Arbor, MI, and I love it there. It's got the University of Michigan. It's economy is dominated by education, high tech, and biotechnology, according to Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Arbor,_Michigan

According to Forbes, Ann Arbor is the third smartest city in the US, behind Boulder, CO, and Bethesda, MD, but just ahead of Cambridge, MA. http://www.annarborspark.org/about-us/newsroom/ann-arbor-nam...

If you really want a great city to live in, though, especially for kids, Plymouth Township, MI (this is actually where I'm living right now) was rated the 37th Best Place to Live by Money Magazine, in part due to its great school system. http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/moneymag/0707/gallery.BP...

Employment Review Magazine rated Ann Arbor the 10th best city in the nation to live and work in June 2002. It also earned the number 10 spot in The Princeton Review ranking of the best college towns in the nation in September 2001. Additionally in 2001, American Style Magazine named Ann Arbor the 22nd best Arts Destination in the nation.

Of course, then again, you've also got sites like these for a good counterpoint. http://www.annarborisoverrated.com/

Ann Arbor, MI

Futurama! That's counts as a sci-fi show, right? It also has sweet tech, like the smell-o-scope.

Ooh, and Chappelle's Show. That's a great tech show. The Haters is Time have a time machine, and then there was that episode where Chappelle visited the interwebs and punched out the spammer. That was awesome!

I graduate this summer. I've got only 12 credits left out of 204 for my dual BS in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering. I go to Kettering University (formerly General Motors Institute).

I wouldn't let something like not wanting to disappoint keep you from pursuing an opportunity that could change your life (I think someone already mentioned opportunity cost).

That being said, if you know anyone else you know and trust, and whom you would vouch for, given the skills required for the internship and who would take the internship, then I'd recommend him to the employer if they still need someone to fill the position.

This is a practice I learned from being in a band. Booking agents hate when you cancel, but love you for it if you provide another band to play in your stead. Granted, I know this is much easier to do with a band than with an internship.

I really enjoy using Slicehost. You get a whole lot of server for very little money. The trade-off is that unlike many other VPS's you must set up the entire server yourself from scratch through the command line. This can be a little frustrating the first week, but VERY rewarding in that you learn the intricacies of server setup in the process (assuming you don't already have that capability).

Even more importantly though, they have excellent support. Forums, wikis, and live chat through their site. I remember getting help one time when I was first starting out, chatting with one of the owners at 3am on a Tuesday night as he helped me work out a bug with my server.

Of course the obvious solution here is to sort them differently. You don't have to reject anything. Just sort the front page by popularity instead of "hotness" and give a link to recently popular. (on a side note, picking someone else's nose is listed 3 different times in the first two pages with the same photo). Or, you could make the top of the page a "Most Popular of All Time" box and the start listing the "hot" ones under that.

Your first thought may be that many of the social news sites sort by recent activity by default. And this is true, but they also have users that check back several times a day. Your site, while interesting and promising, probably will not have that kind of user. Maybe once a week or even once a day.

Or another possibility is what I did on my site (ratemystudentrental.com). Sort by what is most useful to first time visitors, but then once the user logs in, make the home page sort by recent activity.

Also, while I do think this is a pretty cool idea, I have two other criticisms.

1) The design leaves much to be desired. I thought I had been redirected to some static placeholder page, or maybe some subdomain of your blog when I first clicked the link. This is also partially due to the fact that your homepage redirects to mobtropolis.com/scenes/hot, instead of just giving me mobtropolis.com.

2) This would be way more freakin' sweet if it integrated with Facebook. You could have an app that pull my "adventure/dare" pictures into my Facebook profile. You could also allow users to determine the difficulty of each challenge and give awards to users who compile the most difficulty/popularity points by proving they've accomplished those challenges with photos.

It sounds to me as though you might want to check out Amazon's Flexible Payment System (FPS).

http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=sc_fe_c_1_3435361_1/102-8843924-...

It allows, as the name implies, for very flexible payment transactions between you and the users, or even between two third-parties where you take a chunk out of the middle.

I'm a full-time student, a free-lance web developer and designer and marketing consultant, working on my own startup (ratemystudentrental.com), lead guitar for Flint-based rock band, Moment of Inertia, and work at a tier one automotive supplier as an engineering co-op.

I'm on my 3rd company (first web startup), and I've never spent more than $1500 to start. If you're willing to get down and dirty with legal docs, you can easily draft everything yourself (this of course takes great attention to detail and enough confidence in your ability to rid yourself of the notion that they're too difficult for common folk to write) and just get a lawyer to review it.

Then, if you're equally willing to throw yourself into the code and server setup, customer interaction, and the networking that goes along with starting a business, again, it doesn't cost much.

I like LLC's personally because they're simple, protective, and structurally transparent. Then again, I don't usually go out and seek investment funding. I like to startup out of pocket, launch early the agile way, and then fund development with revenue.

Of course you could go a step further like my site and many others and pick a domain that leaves nothing to the imagination. e.g. ratemyprofessors.com or ratemystudentrental.com or bookdealfinder.com

Well put. To summarize:

1.Make sure they are Contracted (and look up the IRS's definition of a Contractor).

2. Get the PSD, CSS, images, and javascript if applicable. Also, get at least a couple HTML's all styled up so you can put it into your dynamic template more easily.

3. They'll need a lot of access to the app to figure out how it's assembled and constructed and they'll need to study every element that's present in the whole app so they know how to style it. I'm a designer/developer, so I'm not extremely familiar with the whole process of getting someone who is ONLY a designer. Also, the estimate is just that, an estimate. Don't trust anyone who says otherwise.

I have no idea why my font is a lighter color on your computer. It looks fine on mine.

I'm not sure if there are any up on Docstoc, that site wasn't around when I wrote mine. I did a lot of research in making mine, typically the designer is the one who writes it, and then you look over it and tell them what parts you'd like to add, remove, or change. I can put mine up online for you to see/use once I get back to my main computer. I'll let you guys know.

If you need a web designer, I would start with any designer you might have a personal connection with (even if it's a friend of a friend). Those are usually the situations that work out best in my experience. Otherwise, try putting up a Craigslist post for a designer in your area or Google for a designer in your area.

As for cost, it really depends on what the state of your current app is (i.e. what does it look like now, how complex is it, how unique do you want the design, and how compliant do you want the site (flash/no flash,png's with transparency or just jpegs...)). Personally, I'd try to steer clear of anyone who quotes you a price without really examining the site first.

However, so as not to just brush off the price question, I'd charge anywhere from a couple hundred for a crazy easy redesign to a thousand for a more conceptual and custom design.

Deliverables: You'd want to get the CSS file obviously, any additional IE style hacks that may be contained outside the main CSS file, and all associated images. And the flash stuff if there are any embedded flash files (I'm assuming that for a webapp, you're not referring to a full flash site, because that would be ludicrous and highly unusable).

Legal: Make sure that you have a fully "Contractor" arrangement in place and that there are no ambiguities that could cause the person to be confused for an employee, because the IRS doesn't like that much. Also, try to get full ownership of the artwork if possible, so that you can reuse images on print stuff later if you want to. I always give my designs to the client to do with as they please, but it's not unheard of for them to retain ownership. Either way, it should be outlined in the design contract.

Wow, that was long, but hopefully it answered your questions.