bradleyjoyce

yes, but my opinion is that ad placement is doing more harm than good. for the site's audience, I think it's a safe assumption that they are fairly web-savvy and able to detect ads without too much effort. As a google adsense block, it's a cost-per-click ad. You see where i'm going with this... savvy users, poor ad placement = very few clicks = no revenue.

of course, that is all anecdotal... I'd be really interested to see real performance numbers on it.

I couldn't resist.. the irony was too great after seeing http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2138141

I would love to know the actual breakdown of the demographics of the sample.. and how that changed across industries.

I particularly wonder if you limit it to internet founders if the data would skew younger, and thereby affect other answers as well.

Groupon is one of those stories, when in a year or two or five, one side or the other is going to be going "I told you so!"

I agree with a lot of the author's points... especially about customer fatigue.

thanks for taking a look!

we generally charge and hourly rate that is a bit below market price (in comparison to other shops I know, and individual ruby devs)

:-)

I suppose you could argue that... in my experience, no matter how successful your portfolio, potential clients that don't really understand the work/skill involved still easily get stuck at price

this is probably true to some extent

have you checked out http://tweetsaver.com?

so just really curious.. what's the reasoning behind requiring it?

hmm, I'm pretty sure that's what Octav had told me in chat.. either way you require an email address...

    RuntimeError: The request is invalid: {"message": "invalid JSON message", "errors": [["", "A valid email address is mandatory"]]}

that feels pretty hacky to be honest.

the real issue is that one person may have multiple accounts in the app, and they may want to use the same email address for all accounts... I have no reason to enforce a unique email address.

It's odd that Sunnytrail would when there is usually a common unique identifier across all apps for users.. user id

I absolutely love the idea and the look/feel of this app. When I first heard about it I thought... this is what I've been looking for.. an easy way to auto capture and generate all these important metrics!

So I got started immediately with integrating it into TweetSaver. Unfortunately, I ran into a show stopper pretty quick.

When passing a signup event, they require you to send a unique username. This was a major bummer since for the free level of my app, users are not required to give an email address and in general emails may not be unique to a user in the system. This essentially renders sunnytrail unusable for me.

The best part though is that co-founder Octav is always in the live chat on the site, so I explained my situation and he said they would take a look to see if there is a better solution. I'm anxious to see if they can make some changes that will allow me to use their service!

Ryan Roberts (http://startuplawyer.com) is based in Dallas but would still be a great option for you.

do you now of any good resources for getting started with sphinx + mongodb (preferably on rails).. thanks!

do you feel it's "production ready"?

Interesting, thanks for the response!

when I saw someone retweet about this service in my stream it was a bit confusing... can't really see the purpose myself, when you, as you mention, you can handle this within the confines of your own registrar.

I'm curious as to why the developer felt the need to make this.

The twitter API limits you to pulling the most recent 3200 tweets... so if you roll your own keep this in mind.

Also there a number of Twitter archive services out there that let you download a copy of your timeline. Remember that they too are limited to the 3200 by the API.

I happen to own/run one such service (http://tweetsaver.com). We'll get your most recent 3200 tweets from your timeline, plus all your mentions, DMs and favorites. We allow you to export these as a CSV file.

However, if all you want to do is download the tweets, my service is probably not the best option.

Well I have to say the target customer is really a business or organization that has multiple twitter accounts and is using Twitter pretty heavily already.

That being said I do appreciate the feedback! I'm hoping to have some videos/screencasts up soon as well for the tour.

100% correct!

I can understand how TDD can feel like an extra burden if you're a single developer working on a project. However, having tests is so critically important if the project is passed on to another dev. I recently inherited a project that I had worked on at a previous gig. There were no tests but at the time I was familiar with the code and it didn't matter too much to me at the time. Now, the code has changed significantly, there are still no tests, and I'm always a bit nervous if I have to make a push to production, wondering if somehow I missed something that's going to break the app.

Even if you hate testing... do it for the sanity of the next dev on the project.

Tech Wildcatters in Dallas http://techwildcatters.com

you might watch the interview for quite a bit more insight into their approach. It seems they have spent quite a bit of time/money making sure everything is kosher.

It looks interesting for sure. I signed up while I was watching the interview yesterday, but didn't see anywhere on the site where I could actually submit information about my startup for funding... it just gave me an investor profile.

I think the general site layout is good overall format, but the design could use a lot more polish.

I would suggest maybe a subtle texture for the background, a tighter color scheme (see http://colorschemedesigner.com/) and sexier typography.

From an e-commerce perspective, I might suggest you put your main product more prominently on the front page with and add to cart button or view more button, instead of the slider.

also, the area below the slider is a bit cramped in my opinion.

There is never a straight answer to these types of questions.

If you're just getting started then Heroku is probably the easiest and cheapest way to get started.

I seem to have the perception that many apps do something like Heroku --> EY --> Self-hosted/managed as the app grows

I suppose it might be important to mention that the free beta was a closed beta... people had to be explicitly invited to use the site for free.

The target customer is businesses/enterprises or other organizations that was to brand their social media presence in one location (starting w/ twitter and eventually including other sources).

the app is http://get.floxee.com/

so I have 2 that I work on daily (http://tweetsaver.com and http://floxee.com) that are not my primary business but I have probably about 10 that I rarely work on. Of those 10 there are probably 2 that I think could be big deals at some point in the future and the other 8 I probably should abandon :-)

Kind of funny considering 37signals just invested a boatload in their new offices