clintavo

Wouldn’t this still mean they cracked your gmail password? Or am I not understanding how this was executed?

I think this is already happening. HN might be a sort of example, but other communities I’m in are much smaller

I started my Saas business in my 30s and ultimately it has been enough for me to be financially free. I’ve run it full time since 2005. Yes, I’m in my 50s now and still running a saas and developing new software. 30s, yes you can start over, and it’s even still young to do so.

Edit: I was not a software developer professionally before I started over.

In my early saas products, I just used two radio options either labeled on/off or yes/no. I know that’s “wrong”, but it’s super clear

We are. We suddenly can't pull up any of our properties that use cloudflare DNS.

I'm not able to merge pull requests.

The PR is stuck in the "Checking for ability to merge automatically…" stage.

So I guess I can "confirm"

Not tech savvy enough. And the email we provide is included with their monthly fee - migrating would cause them to incur additional fees they wouldn't want to pay.

Thanks! Yes, better now.

Just signed up and looked at the api docs. Even the "signed" option for privacy says coming soon. I guess, at the moment, there is no way to secure a video on mux?

It's likely a no go for us without domain based restriction. I'd rather do that then deal with signed urls, we wouldn't want them to expire. We deal with artists who have painting instruction videos, they're going to want to have those behind a paywall on their own domains (and then we'll offer them in our marketplace on our domain too).

OK, that makes sense. Is it possible on your platform to make videos private? IE, I add a video, make it private and then add something that says "this video can only be played from subdomain.mydomain.com" (which I could then have behind a paywall of course).

I ask because we're working on a solution for our users and we have 10,000 of them.

OK, but I looked at Vimeo's api docs and they looked pretty feature complete for someone who wanted to build their own site and never use the vimeo CMS. It's possible (it looks like) to add video all through the api, and simply host the videos on Vimeo infrastructure. They even have the ability to lock videos so that they can ONLY be streamed on certain domains (so you can paywall videos etc). Am I mistaken about that? If not, is there an advantage to Mux?

My company is very interested in moving into this space (building a video community and charging for paid videos not hosting & processing like Mux).

We might be very interested in Mux, however, here is my question and please forgive my ignorance: isn't this pretty much what you can do with Vimeo via their api?

for me, yes

To clarify. We don't buy SSL certs from Rackspace. I was referring to Rackspace allowing their OWN certs to expire, breaking api calls made to those endpoints. The URL I linked to was a webmail.us URL which is a Rackspaced-owned domain.

Edit: fixed grammar.

We've had issues previously with Rackspace and SSL certs expiring (webmail api certs, not mailgun previously). My app has been "broken" twice in the past due to expired certs, to the point that we now monitor all SSL certs used on third party api's that we rely on. (As well as monitoring our own certs of course).

We've got our eye on Rackspace's webmail reseller api's SSL cert, which now has less than 14 days till it expires: https://admin.webmail.us/excedentsoap/excedentsoap.wsdl

This may not be entirely true. I started on angel.co as a beginning investor with no deal flow. I have invested once via angel.co so far and have come close several times. I have also made several connections which have now allowed my deal flow to expand well beyond angel.co. A 30K deal would be ideal for a beginning angel or syndicate.

Look for a better deal, definitely. Have you tried posting your company, product and fundraising on http://angel.co? There are lots of investors there and 30K would be a tiny deal for many of them.

Edit: clarified sentence.

We keep having the same debates over and over. We've seen this before on the desktop. It started with apps that had to be written for both Windows and Mac. Then the web came along and, as bandwidth increased, many apps were able to be run as web apps, simplifying code maintenance and giving developers the ability to easily target multiple platforms. Apps that benefit from linking work better as web apps. Some types of apps, however, run better as native apps: things like games and Photoshop. So we ended up with both.

Mobile will follow the same track: we'll end up with both.

Yeah, I think I got the better end of the deal :-)

However, I think a lifestyle business can evolve into a startup. These discussions sometimes seem to forget that life isn't always neatly planned out in advance. For those of us living outside of the Valley, the tech community needs to remember that not everyone and their brother is plotting their next "startup."

What can happen is (and this is an amazing thing about the times we live in) that a side project takes off, slowly becomes profitable, allows the founder to quit his job, focus on it full-time and then one day, he looks up and thinks "wow, I could swing for the fences." I guess that could be classified as a "lack of ambition" for not having a vision in the first place. OTOH it could be considered a smart move because the founder has already made something people want.

Mailchimp, Balsamiq, DuckDuckGo to an extent, and in a smaller way, my own "startup" are examples.

I remember reading a book about writing by Stephen King. He talked about innovating by combining strange ideas. An example he gave was that a book about plumbers would be boring and that science fiction was a crowded competitive market. But, he said a book about "Plumbers in Space" had the makings of a great story.

So, try to combine something you LOVE with something you admire.

Maybe you love cooking, maybe you admire Facebook. How about "Facebook for Cooks?"

or, "Wordpress for Restaurants", "Twitter for Travelers", "Google for Mechanics"

Once you have the area you love, you can pick and choose ideas from the leaders in the tech space and bring those that make sense into your niche. Make them easier to use for your audience, refine them, make them your own.

That's kind of what I do at FASO with art as the thing I love. BTW, someone else on this thread described us as niche photo sharing for artists - that's actually not what we do. We're more like "Wordpress for Artists", except that we predate Wordpress so technically Wordpress is like "FASO for Everyone Else". :-)

Been burned legally a time or two - it's CYA language in case of blatant abuse. Our plans are for individual artists, it would be against terms, for 100 artists to get together, pay for one plan and load 10,000 works and use our newsletter module to send millions of emails.

Maybe there's a way we can collaborate.

Good point. If I had abandoned the art industry like PG maybe I would have sold my startup to Yahoo by now....

I think that you may have highlighted something I was trying to say. Sure, maybe I got lucky and "nailed" it, however, spending 12 years working in a given industry makes it more likely that you'll nail it. Not that you need 12 years experience, but, I guess that was one of my points. That if you actually experience "problems" of a given industry, you have a better shot of hitting upon a solution that people want.

Thanks, I do need to learn more about button design.

We A/B test that hero section and selling features didn't perform well so we downplayed them. We've had a lot more signups with other ideas more prominent (Like "Sharing Art Enriches Life"). Believe it or not, the current page is the improved one. I never posted on HN before because I knew I get grilled over how bad our old design was. Maybe I'll get it to "good" status soon......

Edit - I see now the button you refer to. My designer had a nice one that was done properly but it had different text. I made this one to A/B test the current wording, and amazingly it outperformed the original by a wide margin. However, you are correct, we need to see if making the text on that button "correct" (with the current wording) improves things even further.

Is that a buyout offer? ;-)

How I market is another blog post I have planned. I think I've maxed our PPC and it doesn't bring in that many customers but is self-sustaining (in that the revenue off PPC customers is higher than what we're paying in PPC expenses).

Some things I've done very effectively in the past are full-page magazine ads (in artist magazines) and old-school direct mail. I wrote a direct-mail letter and purchased a mailing list of artists and over time sent the promo pieces out with a special discount code to sign up online. Some artists are very non-techy (especially going back to early 2000s), I even toyed with the idea of having a mail-in form to setup the website.

Probably our best marketing has been our free daily art marketing newsletter and blog (http://faso.com/fineartviews/). Our daily email list is over 15,000 and growing and we regularly promote to those artists. I think this is a strategy FAR too many startups ignore. We don't spend most of our time writing articles for other startups, we write articles that are of interest to our CUSTOMERS. That keeps them coming back to our site day after day.

Also - PARTNER with other companies. The gist of my marketing advice is this: Ask yourself, "Who else reaches the same customers I do?" Now partner with those people. For example, we host an online art contest for an art supply company. They promote our service to their customers and visa-versa.

Sorry if this is rough, will clean up and expand these ideas in future blog posts.

Not technically, although I do have a lot of help.

I've managed to build a good "team" by outsourcing as much as possible. I use Rackspace so I don't have to manage servers or do much sysadmin. I work with a freelance programming firm for things I need done that I can't/don't have time to do in house. I've hired freelance writers to produce content for our art blogs (usually artists. Also-I write for those art marketing blogs, drawing on my 16 years of gallery experience). I usually hire customers who know what they're doing as part time support agents - they work freelance from home via our forums and ticket system.

It's actually getting easier over time to outsource services as more and more Saas and Paas offerings come online (Do you know how much easier storing Terabytes of images is now that S3 exists?). A few Examples: I used to maintain a mail server, now that's outsourced to MailTrust, we outsource customer analytics to getclicky.com, we outsource email newsletter deliver to Cakemail.

Having said all of that, I am starting to look for an in-house developer. There are some aspects of a code-base and server configuration that are hard to outsource to another firm.

Thanks ngsayjoe. One small point - I'm actually now in my 40's, but your point remains. The site was profitable enough to risk it and go full time when I was 35.

Gracias.