After getting tons of inspiration from the Hacker News community, I'm delighted to finally share what eldavido and I have been working on for the past few months. Let us know what you think!
120 karma · joined March 15, 2009
@coopermarcus on twitter
http://www.linkedin.com/in/coopermarcus
I can understand parallel-tracking some of these things, but if you do too much at once, don't you end up doing nothing well because you waste so much time task and focus-switching?
The only way that parking would, in general, cost a whole lot more in the future was if there was a whole lot more demand - and I'm not sure anyone is predicting that we are facing an imminent increase in the number of cars seeking to park in San Francisco.
We need some straightforward AJAX stuff for a relatively simple CRUD application - no super-fancy design, no strict requirements besides that it works great and looks at least OK. Platform is open source, MySQL, some Python, etc, but you can use what you like (as long as it isn't Microsoft : )
Interested in chatting more? Email me at cooper dot marcus at gmail dot com and let's meet up at the Meetup!
One key difference I've noticed between industries is the speed with which they adopt technology. I believe many tech entrepreneurs mistakenly assume that non-tech industries are as welcoming of new technology as tech-heavy industries. Understanding the pace of technological uptake in your target industry is highly important - and don't think you can change it!
One of the best ways I've found to understand a new industry is to attend a trade show and talk with lots of people. Tell them you are new, and ask them to explain the basics. Buy people drinks at the bar and quiz them. Get the same few questions answered by a number of different people. Ask who the industry experts are, then find them and get them talking - experts tend to love to share their expertise!
I've found particular success by applying technological advances that give me a competitive advantage in an industry that is otherwise slow to adopt technology. Don't try to sell the technology, or otherwise compete on the basis of the tech itself - instead, use the technology in a way that your competitors would be slow or unwilling to do, and thus gain an advantage.
For instance, in my gourmet packaged food company I used a (then) new digital label printing technology to allow me to experiment with new labels rapidly and at very low cost. The labels weren't "perfect" looking, and my competitors would not tolerate anything other than "perfect" labels, but customers didn't care. I was able to quickly and inexpensively refine my labels, which resulted in higher sales, without spending lots of money on new printing plates (which my competitors assumed you needed to change labels). In this case, I used a technological advantage (new digital label printing) to compete on an industry-standard characteristic (label content) - I'm emphatically did NOT try to sell digital label printers to the gourmet packaged food industry.
Most businesses won't ever get venture funding, so setting up a C Corp now "just in case" is typically a big waste of money and effort. Instead, used some other entity type, then if you really need to, convert to a C Corp. Your early $ are far better spent marketing your product than on lawyers for corporate formation activities.
I organized my last startup as an S Corp so that initial losses would flow through to me, the founder and primary initial funder. Then, once I'd "lost" all my investment, and we were approaching outside investment, I converted to C Corp. This worked great, except for the loosing all my investment part.
VCs doing this could also get a bad rep - "Yeah, I pitched those guys - they offered me $50 if I'd give them the company and quit so their guys could run it" - not good for the deal flow the VCs need.
Currently I work around this by forcing myself to wait a while before visiting the comments page, then visiting it just once, because if I come back it is typically too time consuming to scan through and figure out which comments I've read and which are new.