curiousgeorge

You should assume funding will not happen. Follow your intuition here. And then calm down and realize that 5-7 months of living expenses isn't exactly scraping by. Follow everyone else's advice on cutting costs, and look for part-time work.

Your deeper problem is the expectation that someone else will invest in a company with a large team, obligations to cover back pay, several months of development behind it, and no road map to profitability. If your company is pinning its hopes on a long shot instead of figuring out how to get a revenue stream, that is your problem right there. How it gets solved depends on the company. The standard way is called bankruptcy.

It is extremely unlikely they want to fund you. I'd ask at the outset what their motivation for the call is. Ask them to give you their own understanding of the market: how your product compares to others, what they think about the industry, etc..

What they tell you will make it clear if they have looked at your product in more than passing detail. It is more likely that someone has named your firm as a potential competitor in their business plan and they are just doing due diligence as parent-post suggests, in which case they may not even have visited your website.

If they cannot tell you anything interesting about your own product or market then what is the point in talking to them? Politely tell them you'd be pleased to talk when they have a better understanding of the industry and understand what sets you apart. Then get back to coding.

>> the economy will continue to tank despite (or because of) attempts to "stimulate" it

Perhaps you should make up your mind about basic economic causality before hectoring Krugman for having actually read the original texts. The General Theory is a difficult and dense book and Krugman offers a decent summary of Keynes' paradox of thrift.

If you are interested in economics, the problem with your suggestion is that by the time he gets around to discussing the paradox of thrift, Keynes has already broken claims that Say's Law forces supply and demand into equilibrium through changes to the wage level. If I remember correctly, he did this with the empirical observation that while additional wages may induce labor to enter the workforce, declines in real wages don't generally cause a decline in demand for employment.

Communism would have worked if people didn't try to game the system too. If your philosophy isn't robust enough to deal with the sharp intrusions of reality, complaining about reality isn't the solution.

hire hot people and you get to meet their hot friends.

Once you get bought, you aren't perceived as an independent company. Media focuses on the buyer not seller. Which is one reason to make them pay cash.

Not if you know the people and you know the project. Managing outside your area of expertise is a lot more difficult.

Not really. The last nail in the coffin of serious research on the gold standard was "Golden Fetters" by Eichengreen. It has a phenomenal and indisputable country-by-country timeline showing the cycle of deflationary behavior stopping during the Great Depression in country after country shortly following (4-6 months) the effective abandonment of the gold standard. One can argue that N=20 is not significant research, but there is a reason no-one will take you seriously if you do.

I personally haven't met anyone who has argued for the gold standard and has read it although that may be a comment more on the academic backgrounds of the people who used to write pro-gold stuff and stuff it into my inbox back in college than the theoretical basis of the argument. So while gold may have a place as an investment (especially as a hedge against inflation) in large part people who spend considerable breath on extolling its virtues using words like "intrinsic value" and "stability" and "natural" are kooks. Their choice of the word "natural" is also odd since gold coinage is hardly more natural than paper and in fact is less easy to control the asset base.

When economists talk about not repeating the mistakes of the 1930s, they are by and large talking about the importance of maintaining liquidity in the system to prevent deflationary spirals, and avoiding liquidity traps. They are also cognizant of Keynes' proof that Say's Law does not work once people want to start doing things like holding liquid assets, and the dismal performance of things like the zero-inflation policy in Canada and other countries through the 1990s.

I'm amazed by the number of Internet libertarians who have jumped on this bandwagon.

Perhaps you can be more specific about why you need a co-founder? Can you build the product yourself? If you cannot what value do you bring to any venture?

I'd suggest you put yourself in a position of strength by executing and other people will want to work with you. If you cannot clearly articulate why you are seeking/need a co-founder, you should not be looking for one.

This is just rent-seeking behavior by the state. China has all sorts of these tests. The private market doesn't pay any attention to them.

I'd like to find out a more effective way of online marketing so that I can reach more people like the ones already paying me, and use the revenue to hire people to reduce my own workload and push the business is new directions.

Also, fix your email. I just sent feedback to customer-support@wozad.com and...

"Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 550 550-5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist."

One Suggestion:

You want people to have positive feelings about your company (you are putting a lot of work into it in order to help people, right?) so drop the negative advertising. Figure out ways to differentiate and complement others so that people who use and like other services don't feel personally threatened by your advertising.

Even if it is really obvious you are competing with someone, don't say it that out loud, since you are likely to fork into a different business model from them as you grow and find your own niche. Playing nicely with others will get you more positive buzz from the community, and you'll be perceived as a better partner by others if you play nicely.:

"Adsense for X, Wozad for Y".

Also, if you want to fight Google head on you're likely to lose. Better to find a niche, start making money and use that to improve your service.

What on earth would venture capital be needed for anyway? If you have clients you shouldn't need them.

One piece of advice: make sure you keep your social elements concentrated if you want people to contribute/comment. Nothing kills a site like a big empty forum.

I learned something interesting in grad school. It is that the Nash Equilibrium for mutual assured destruction involves the occasional nuclear explosion simply because players must be credibly irrational for the threat of deterrence to be effective. I can't figure out if this is interesting or crazy. But the fact we're not all dead suggests to me that rationality is overrated in politics as in economics.

The platform operates on Amazon EC. They did not take or try to take investment. And at least one person worked hard on it. This does not sound like failure. It sounds as if the product is either something that people do not want, or something that does not have commercial application in it's current state.

File this one under "find a job elsewhere and keep working on the project if it is worth working on".

Why do you think that re-writeability matters? People who write code that is difficult to maintain should make more money by virtue of being harder to eliminate. I don't think effective programmers document everything either, but maybe this is an unpopular opinion.

What sets really productive people apart in my experience is architecture and domain vision. This is certainly the lesson in the Viaweb example. Without good architecture innovation consists of "feature creep". You've got a good thing when you find yourself with changes that simplify a code base or system while increasing its power.

I suspect this is why people who develop their own tools are often seen by others are great programmers, and why Eric Raymond's definition of a hacker is someone who builds their own tools. I'm a worse programmer than a lot of people, but am orders upon orders of magnitude faster than anyone else in my niche domain by virtue of knowing how to do things and leverage existing assets. I assume really good programmers are leveraging their expertise in other areas too.

If this is true, I'd argue that what keeps the good people from earning higher multiples is that architecture and vision don't matter in a lot of cases. Companies that innovate less have less need for development characterized by rapid innovation. Systems get developed by spec and implemented by indifferent teams. You budget for the features you want, not the flexibility you need. Innovation matters more to smaller companies, but even there non-technical individuals rarely see the architecture through the interface. Flexibility becomes conspicuous mostly by its absence, as development gets "over budget and behind schedule everywhere".

I've had that a few times. It is very cool. But eating is cool too. Balancing the two is important. ;)

Regression analysis. Then factor out the expected effects of wealth.

quite impressive. thanks for posting, will play around with it.

Out of curiosity, does anyone use Ruby who doesn't use Rails?

Perhaps we can stop the language flaming. I build my stuff in a combination of PHP, C++ and javascript on a LAMP stack. Feel no need to justify it to people who aren't making architectural decisions.

That being said, being able to do something differently matters. Especially if you are in a niche market, it is much more difficult to get and keep traction without first-mover advantage.

Innovation in the way you will get traffic is one of the ways to distinguish yourself. If you are a paid service, consider integrating better commission/affiliate systems. They work.

What exactly is meant by incurred technical debt? How do you have "margin calls" on technical debt? Totally confused.

Unless you're certain about the UI elements, doing a hard design may be a bad move. I personally get better mileage from building the core architecture/functionality first, and working on the rest, ideally with public feedback on both after a certain stage. I've made significant changes in usability in the past as a result of this. If you end up hard-coding stuff before it gets scrutinized in the forge of actual use, you'll have a harder time making changes down the road.

YMMV. It helps if you use a framework or something else that can get you started. Just remember that customizing a framework isn't your core competency.

payment systems.

I don't know about English acquisition, but your timeline is way off for Chinese language acquisition, even for younger children brought to China. An aggressive timeline for adults in-country would be about 2 years to conversational fluency, and less for younger kids. This is more or less the pace you see for the faster Korean learners who come to China.

I'm happy you've had a good experience in Australia. You should remember that the barriers to learning English and Chinese are fundamentally different. English requires mastery of about 100 phenomes before reading and writing skills reinforce each other and learning accelerates: the language gets more difficult as you get better. In contrast, the difficulty curve for Chinese is steep when you start but gets much easier as you improve.

Working hard is important, but equally important is giving yourself the tools to maximize learning. Someone struggling to get through Dream of the Red Chamber with a traditional dictionary is at a huge disadvantage to someone using the proper tools and resources. Learning a language is like engineering in the sense that one should use the best tools for the job, and then put in the time needed to execute.

Classic Moser essay. I thought this would be a post about spoken languages as well, and would put mandarin at the top of the list as well. Since people are still hiring here (especially in tech related fields), I will happily take this opportunity to plug our Chinese learning product:

http://popupchinese.com

The ability to roll your mouse over the characters and see exactly what they mean, or just change all of the characters to pinyin on-the-fly makes it an incredibly effective way to learn Chinese.