bradleyjoyce

hi - we just moved the site to a new server today and the DNS is still propagating in some regions, so if you get a 404 that is why!

"because no clear leader could be easily determined"

this should answer your question right there (imho). there always needs to be a clear leader.

There tons of advantages to living in DFW:

- low cost of living - low taxes (both business and personal) - access to tons of large corporations as potential customers (lots of corporate HQs in town) - a new incubator, Tech Wildcatters, that is hungry for great startups - great BBQ, beers - if you're into sports we have all the pro teams - Two great cities to choose from. Dallas if you want the faster pace, more hipster crowd... Fort Worth if you want something a bit cleaner and laid back.

The list could go on... I'll give you naysayers the fact that the climate here is not as favorable as many other places in the country.

there are a number of things going on. The best place to get connected is the monthly Dallas Startup Happy Hour. Currently being hosted at CoHabitat, a co-working space home to a bunch of startups. Next one is this coming monday.

http://launchdfw.com/news/dallas-startup-happy-hour-monday-j...

DFW has lots of startups, but they don't get a ton of exposure for a variety of reasons. Hopefully launchDFW can continue to grow to be a great outlet to show how active the startup community in the metroplex is.

if this is an old glitch... they should have told users about it!

I've just been running into this same issue actually and it's sooo frustrating. Especially with software patents that are so ridiculous. In my case, some idiot has a patent on basically using a database to look stuff up (just applied to one specific industry). It's actually an issued patent! Crazy!

Anyway, we had a brief consultation with a patent attorney and we think we can work around the patent in our case. But he said a thorough review of the patent and all the documentation could like run upwards of $10k, and any litigation would easily be $25k to start and most likely a whole lot more expensive.

Options are really-

(1) Find a way to work around the exact patent methodology and still accomplish your goal (2) License the patent (3) Do nothing and risk getting sued (4) Give up

Best of luck to you!

here's a good answer for you http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061007233502AA...

also, already it's pretty clear you're going to have lots of people clamoring for new/more features... +1 for saying No.. a lot... somehow I don't think you'll have a problem with this :-)

those aren't required fields, if you don't like them you don't have to fill them out

Andrew, look forward to seeing this project grow! I think it will be super useful!

I had this idea a while back and wanted to create just that... so I bought http://ifundedthat.com

I'll sell it to whomever feels like taking a stab at it :-)

this was really great to see/hear these guys duking it out. props to @pengwynn for holding it down for mongodb against the big boys.

you should look at everything... my personal order of importance:

(1) Unique visitors (2) Aggregate Visitors & Pageviews (3) Stickyness (this is avg TOS, bounces, %new vs %returning etc)

numbers are all relative as well.. ie, who cares about a 99% returning user rate if there are only 10 visitors per day.

Dallas!!! Our startup community has grown like crazy over the past year and just keeps getting better! We have cool stuff going on like ShopSavvy, Traxo, Swingly, Woopra and more! Check out http://launchdfw.com as well. feel free to ping me directly if you want to chat about it.

I generally agree with you, but then where would the world be if people didn't go out of their way in both asking for, and providing help.

This is a new experience for me, being the first time I've felt compelled to take my assistance to the level of asking others to help if they can and it's certainly changed my perspective a bit on the whole topic.

If you felt your friends were in a situation where they really needed the help, I hope you would reach out to as many people as you could to get them the help they need.

Why involve HN? Why involve anyone in anything? It's a community of generally good people that I'm involved in that may have the means of offering a little assistance to someone in need.

Maybe someday you'll find yourself in a position of wanting to help someone, but not being able to do it all yourself.

the $1000 is really an arbitrary goal to shoot for, I'll send whatever we collect within the next week whether it's more or less. But if you're wondering what the money will be used for, here is a list:

- rebuilding what's left (if anything) of her home when the waters recede - new clothes for her, her husband, and there 2 small children - ensuring they have funds for food, water, and shelter over the next view weeks - helping restart her business when the time comes

Thanks for the question and I hope you can help, even if it's just by voting this up.

- Bradley

lol, yeah I've been experimenting with @font-face... going to change it soon :-)

self-posting this because I think it's a story that should be heard.

what's your argument here... don't charge because of the potential for fraud?? That's crazy. If we all took that stance there would be no such thing as business.

with spreedly plus processing through paypal, there is a high level of fraud detection. We've actually rejected a number of payments because of high fraud potential.

The rest is just business and the risks associated with it.

it's an obvious generalization... every app is going to be different depending on it's purpose and target customers/users. Your example of plentyoffish is perfect. A site/app like that DEPENDS on having tons of active users, in which case the fastest route to that is free.

very good point about the spam/ghost accounts. we've seen that ring true for our free beta of Floxeee. Usually the people who are using your product for free are your worst customers.

Jim... I just wrote a post about this very issue: http://squeejee.com/blog/2009/10/29/charging-from-day-1-geni...

Are you writing all your own payment code? If so, why? I would recommend using something like Spreedly or Chargify (we use spreedly with TweetSaver). Getting payment integrated using Spreedly went very quickly for us. You should be able to get it up and running within a day or two.

I always vote in favor of launch early and iterate... but with tools like spreedly it's only an extra couple days at most to get payment plans in there.

the right people is definitely the key! not all people are made to work remotely... just a fact of life.

being more of a front-end guy in web development I would LOVE to be able to brainstorm on the whiteboard (or paper!) with other team members. For me, this is the biggest drawback since I feel like the digital tools (balsamiq mockups and others) just don't quite accomplish the same thing.

searching more than 6 days back in time and tagging are two things you cannot do on twitter that you can do on tweetsaver.

Personally it's worth the money to me to be able to search for old tweets.

it's $10/yr if you signup with the tweetblast option

Site was down for a bit, should be back up now!

thanks for the comments!

The reason for account, user and subdomain is that a single user can be a member of multiple accounts and a lot of people name their account one thing, but want a different url.

Invoice creation via freshbooks is not quite wired up 100% but is very close.

Thanks again for the feedback!

- Bradley, Squeejee/TickStart

Wow, thanks for the kind words! All the design credit goes to Squeejee co-founder Wynn Netherland. He's a genius! (@pengwynn on twitter)

Interesting... we haven't tested from a linux OS yet. I'll look into it. Thanks!