chlee

Hey, I was in a similar boat. I also resigned to start my own thing about a year ago.

I had a well paying job in one of the top tech companies. However, I felt unsatisfied with my job responsibilities and disconnected between what I enjoy doing and I was actually doing.

Therefore I took a year off (this month marks about 1 year and 2 months off) to work on my own thing/project. With that said, I hope to share some of my experiences with you.

1) Take regular breaks and avoid burnout

I was working on my project 24/7, from the moment I woke up to the moment I fall asleep ... 7 days a week. In hindsight, that was a recipe for burning out. I was mentally fatigued after 6-8 months into this routine.

Looking back, I should have taken regular breaks from work and not think about the project at all. Maintain an active social life, go on trips, spend time with friends, or as simple as forcing myself to take a day off every week would have done wonders for my own mental health.

2) Maintain your physical health

Physically and health wise, I was in a fantastic shape before I left my job and started on my own venture.

However, my health quickly deteriorated because I neglected my physical well being. For example, I exercised less and eventually none at all. I ate less than I should (I would go as far as eating 1 meal per day). My sleeping schedule quickly fell out of whack.

Take good precautions and maintain a good physical and mental health. This will go a long way in preventing you from falling into a negative feedback loop and damaging your well being.

3) If you build it, they will not come (think about marketing)

I gave vague thoughts to marketing while working on my project. I demoed my product to my close friends and family. They loved it, so i thought, if I build a great product, users will automagically show up. Boy, I was wrong.

It is good to develop a plan on how to reach your protential users and/or customers. Think about SEO. Think about finding a niche or community of [potentially enthusiastic] users to whom you can demo your product. Think about finding bloggers who can help you spread the word.

4) Everything will take twice as long to implement

Think a feature will take a week to implement? It will probably take two weeks if not more. I saw the iceberg effect firsthand while developing my own product. So be careful, be cautious, and plan accordingly.

5) Just ship it. D@mn it.

You will always notice issues, flaws, bugs, and imperfections within your product. As creators/founders/makers, we all do. However, we can spend eternity tinkering and fixing those issues, but our product will never ship.

Therefore, you should give yourself a rough deadline or an idea as to when you'll ship, no matter how imperfect your product is.

6) You'll need to hustle after you ship

Shipping is only half the battle. It is unlikely that tens of thousands will show up on your front step after you ship.

Therefore you'll need to go out and hustle. You'll need to think about things like marketing, customer acquisition, customer, retention, customer service, and so forth.

Quick question. Lets assume the best and this idea takes off. How do you plan to scale?

Seems like you have to put a lot of effort into printing and mailing the postcards for $1.99.

Also, design of emotion things by has don norman has affirmed what you said. People will prefer find visual/aesthetically beautiful things to be more "usable" than its non visual/aesthetically pleasing counterpart.

Universal Principle Design calls this "aesthetic-usability" effect.

From what I've heard from my recruiter friends, you want to prioritize flow, readability, and scan-ability over flashy.

Recruiters are often at-times swamped with thousands of resumes (and even more at big companies). They'll spend at most 5 minutes scanning your resume to see if you are a good fit.

I am actually working on this exact idea, except I plan on making the entire thing free.

Hey! I am the owner/creator/customer support/janitor/one-man-wrecking-crew of Savng.com.

I am pleasantly surprised to see it mentioned as a good example of Bootstrap based sites. On a unrelated note, I am not sure how you found it since I have really advertised it yet :o

To echo the same sentiment as avolcano, Bootstrap can be easily modified both via Less or CSS. And this is coming from someone who has rudimentary knowledge in both. A little change here and there can go a long way in differentiating your site from all the other bootstrap clone.

Here are a few low hanging fruits:

1) Colors -- Change the color of the top nav bar, links, text, and etc, as color has a tremendous affect on the look and feel of your site.

2) Font - Changing fonts is easy with Google Web Fonts and font hosting services like Typekit. Like color, it also affects the look and your feel of your site.

3) Laytout - Experiment and try different layouts, 1 column, 2 column, 3 columns and etc. Look at various sites within the same niche (and outside of your niche) for inspirations.

Here are some great resources that I've used in making my site:

1. Google Web Fonts

2. Typekit

3. Site Inspire

4. Siiimple

5. Grid Based

6. Minimal Exhibit

7. Design seeds enclosed (this is a godsend if you don't have a back ground in color theory like me)

8. Little Big Details

Unrelated. But I want to say serpIQ is great for SEO purposes. Its one of the legit SEO tools that I would consider paying for.

Don't take me wrong. I am not arguing that the Tinytrunk should allow arbitrary pseudonyms.

I fully understand the point that Fookyoung made. That he want to make sure real, accountable users are selling things on Tinytrunk.

Obviously, Fookyoung is trying to balance between preventing seller fraud and Tinytrunk's user experience. However, I think the balance is tipped towards preventing seller fraud at the expense of user experience.

However, there potentially harmful and/or unintended consequences that can result from publicly disclosing the user's full name on the internet, e.g. privacy related issues. For example, a malicious user can easily obtain sensitive and private information about a certain seller ala 4chan style either directly or indirectly. Also, we've seen how users reactive negatively to potential privacy issues nowadays [cite various user discontent towards facebook, google plus, and various social networks here].

Also, this is not a binary issue, e.g. either disclose the user's full-name or use nothing but pseudonyms. There are other alternatives and compromises, like the yelp method that I described above (which task rabbit also uses).

We can argue further on the issue of real names vs pseudonyms on preventing seller fraud. Like someone above me pointed out, ebay is a great example of a buying/selling market that thrived despite its users hiding behind pseudonyms. Etsy is also another example. Let's not forget various online forums that have thriving for-sale and for-trade sub-forums w/ its sellers and buyers using pseudonyms, e.g. AnandTech and Hard[OC].

I glad this feedback is useful.

To show how potentially creepy this is, I googled your users. I was able to find the user's linkedin and twitter in the 1st page of the search results.

Anyways, good luck. I love the idea, and your design is fantastic. Best of luck going forward.

A small feedback.

If I was a seller, I would be extremely uncomfortable with Tinytrunk showing my full-name in all of the items that I am trying to sell. I can foresee some privacy issues with this problem. For example, People can easily find information about me via google or some deep search engine.

Instead, you can perhaps go with the Yelp route -- show the the user's first name and initial of his or her last name, e.g. Bill G. instead of Bill Gates.

On the contrary, McKinsey is very well respected within the management consulting industry. It is part of the big 3 consulting firms: namely McKinsey, Bain, and Boston Consulting Group. The Mckinsey brand is probably the best known out of the 3.

Thanks for the feedback :D

I need a good alternative to Arial. Do you have any other recommendations from google web fonts?

Nice list! But I feel you may have overlooked some other great google web fonts.

For example, Open Sans and Arimo are two good Sans fonts created by the awesome Steve Matteson. I am currently using Arimo for my new project, and it s a nice replacement for the vanilla Arial/Helvetica [Neue].

Its a psychological effect called Aesthetic-Usability effect (as noted in the book Universal Principles of Design). Given two equal equipment/software/things/etc, the user will perceive the more-aesthetic designs to be easier to use than its less-aesthetic counterparts.

This is because "beautiful" designs help fosters a positive attitude between the users and the product. This then translate to feeling of affection, loyalty, and patience in the product -- all of which are critical factors in long-term usability and overall success of a design.

Its a well documented cognitive/psychological phenomenon. "Design of Emotional Things" dedicated an entire chapter to this concept.

There are a few issues at play here.

1) Many of the companies are with working with low profit margins, i.e. the profit margin is <5%. With rising costs in both raw supplies and worker wages + low demand from abroad, many of these companies are being driven out of business due to their decreasing profit margin.

2) Since rising costs are eating into companies' profit margins, many companies are looking at relocating their manufacturing base from China to countries with [even] cheaper manual labor. For example, Foxconn has recently inked a multi-billion w/ Brazilian gov't to produce ipads and apple related products there. Other companies are looking to relocate their manufacturing base to SE asian countries like Vietnam where cheap labor and gov't wiling to bend the rules for FDI are still aplenty.

Like you said. We'll see what happens.

>In China, it can be argued that this represents progress over the alternative, which would likely be rural poverty. The alternative might be 16-hour days, without anything resembling a dorm.

Well said. I would highly suggest that people watch the documentary "the last train home" (available on Netflix streaming), where it shows you the mentality of migrant workers who leave rural China for factory jobs in urban China.

>It sucks that things seem to work that way, but it looks like China is moving in the right direction here, not the wrong direction. At some point (as was the case in all the countries I mentioned) they will demand and receive there rights. There is evidence of this happening in China already.

Correct. There are many incidents in southern China (e.g. Guandong, wenzhou, and other cities with a large factory presence) where workers have gone on strikes to protest for fairer wages and better benefits.

Also, I read a NY times articles (can't recall the link off the top of my head) where Chinese factories were competing against each other for qualified workers. As a result, workers were given higher salaries and better benefits.

Are there blog hosting services that one can use in a subfolder? AFAIK, both tumblr and posterous only supports subdomains but not folders.

I refused to deal credit card based payments b'c of chargebacks risks. With chargebacks, the credit card company will always side with their customers, often leaving the seller with no recourse to retrieve the money or the item sold.

In addition, there are enough scammers lurking around on craigslist that I didn't want to expose myself to those kinds of risks.

I was also buying/reselling items with fairly low-margins. Credit card processing companies e.g. square, paypal, etc. will only eat away at whatever little profit I was making at the end of the day.

I used to do lots of reselling and arbitrage on Craigslist during my poor student days. Here's my experience.

As a general rule of thumb, always ask for cash. Or ask for a cashier's check if the buyer is not comfortable with carrying large of cash around. Don't accept anything else (e.g. personal check or even paypal).

I worked on NERO 5 years ago with many of the same people as well.In fact, we were the first batch of [then] undergrads join the project.

I am very glad to see that the project has continued and is still going strong.

I thought about incorporating Varnish into my side-project as well. However, Varnish seems to be a [potential] hassle when you account for VCL, ESI, and etc. It also adds an extra layer or indirection and complexity as you've mentioned.

With regards to caching user specific parts of your page, have you considered template caching [1, 2]? This way you can apply different caching policies to different parts of your pages w/o using varnish and ESI.

With that said, why would one choose Varnish + ESI (or reverse proxy in other words) over template caching + memcached/redis/riak? Can someone explain the pro's and con's of both approaches?

[1] http://www.makotemplates.org/docs/caching.html [2] http://jinja.pocoo.org/docs/extensions/

It's mainly due to the lack of human resources (e.g. engineers, testers, PMs, and etc.) You have to understand that the Hyper-V was a extremely team (less than 100 people) during the Win7 time frame.

At the time, the team's #1 priority was to make a product that is competitive to VMWare on the enterprise level. Therea re additional issues and overhead associated with porting Hyper-V to the client SKU's. And they simply did not have the time or the resource to do so.

Now, they are able to bring Hyper-V to Win8 (the client SKUs) since they have a bigger team and more resources at their disposal.

Yup, Microsoft acquired Connectix, and Hyper-V evolved out of VirtualPC. In fact, a few of the connectix guys still work on Hyper-V.

If the owners didn't take ~700 million of the table from the last rounds of founding, groupon would be in a better financial situation than they are today.