danielstudds

ugh, yeah, newb mistake: forgot any sort of tracking. Probably will do some spend.

There's definitely demand, and you should be able to get decent wedge if you're any good at it. The reason why there's a race to the bottom on freelance sites is precisely because there's demand: a large number of people who are just in it for the money, rather than a love of programming, choose java because it's popular.

To get your day rate up, though, you're going to have to build up your own network, so that you're not competing against everyone else on the freelance sites. Check out Brennan Dunn's books/blog/email list. [1][2]

If you're good and get the right connections, you should be able to get up towards that $100/hr mark. To get beyond that, you really need to be able to point to a bank account and say, "because of me, there's more money there." See patio11 [3]. At that point, language is far less relevant - and in fact, I'd hazard a guess that Java is a particularly difficult language to do that with (because it tends to be more backend rather than front-end, but that's an unsubstantiated gut feel.)

[1] http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com/ [2] http://brennandunn.com/ [3] https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin...

Nice examples of traction! How'd you land the Nike deal? Any money change hands? To make decent suggestions about where you should focus, we'd need to understand your motivations. What are your aims? Which is more likely to get you there? (Also, if your aims are making heaps cash -either directly or by selling- keep in mind that both apps and social networks are tough to build businesses around.)

Is this similar to https://github.com/NYTimes/Emphasis? What's new?

Really, who cares? It's on pirate bay, it's been downloaded 100,000 times: if you want it, it's out there. "Liberty" has already been achieved! Hooray!

I have a bookmark folder "to read" which would be better named "I don't really care about this". The best system I found was similar, but just suited my habits better: if I find an article I wanted to read but not right then, I send it to my kindle using the browser plugin, and spend an hour each evening reading through things.

"But information overload isn’t the problem. If it was, you’d walk into a library and die." http://www.gtdtimes.com/2010/02/11/the-problem-is-not-inform...

Wow, that's impressive - often I struggle to recall the details of what I've read - setting a written product of an objective would be useful. This must take a lot of discipline... how long did it take you to establish this habit?

I've not quite had this experience, but similar, and agree - if you've got what they want, then they'll be happy to receive your call. (As long as you're polite about it!)

Agree that tech is myopic... or perhaps it's just a segment of tech - there are a lot of tech people working happily for those large PS firms you mention.

Ah, I wish this were so easy! Perhaps it's a certain lack of kahunas, but I never felt like it would be appropriate to ask the recruitment agent if I can swing by... plus, now in my consulting gig (sub-contractor) I get a call, hop on a plane, and go work someplace. (That said, no interview...)

PDF generation is a complex business... you're not going to be all things to all people, you need to choose a particular niche (at least to start with) and make that work. I can see the value prop in report generation on SF. "PDF Generation for developers" is too broad: I don't think you can do it (because there are so many different types of of PDFs to generate) and I can't see the value prop (because it's going to cost you more to provide a generic PDF generation service than it will cost me to use an existing library.)

That said, there might be a market there for developers, but you'll need to identify a very particular challenge that devs have and provide a much better solution than what they can achieve with a library in a day.

I work in the DOCCM (Document Output for Customer Communications Management) space, which in a certain light is just generating PDFs (well, perhaps a bit more complex than that...). Enterprise deals in this space will have 6 or 7 zeros, so yes, there is a market for generating PDFs. There are already some cloud providers out there (like exari - it's been a while but I remember their stuff being pretty cool.)

That's a bit different from vanilla PDF generation, but perhaps a good portion of that is down to marketing. How you position this could be important. You've got your salesforce version - nice :-) That should mean you're selling direct to a business user, so have you worked out what their pain point is? Do they think of it as "generating PDFs" (you've branded it as "Great Reports", so obviously you think they don't!) I don't know anything about report generation on SF, but I'd be shocked if there wasn't already some competition - have you looked in to that? What's your point of difference?

Down to your assumptions: 1) I've only ever used FOP & yes it is tedious, but it gives you a lot of power, and that power is going to be hard to replicate.

2) Generating large no of PDFs is hard to scale. For a cloud service, though, you need to work out how you're going to deliver a large number of PDFs over the wire. (You'll easily be able to generate more bytes of PDF per $ of CPU than you'll be able to transfer per $ of bandwidth.)

3) That sounds like a safe assumption (almost a tautology).

4) I'm not so sold on this. If I can get equivalent functionality from a library, I'll use the library. I don't want to add a dependency on an external service (making my own service more fragile) unless it offers a significant benefit. Stripe saves me SO MUCH TROUBLE it's a no brainer. There's is no way I would even think of trying to replicate what they've got. The barriers are significant. What are the barriers to me using a library instead of Pagify? Not nearly as great.

Gut feeling, the SF report generation product is much more compelling, but check out the competition in that space.

Congrats on quitting the job! Now... down to the real work!

Find your customers first. If you know who they are, then you've got a chance to validate the idea. If you don't, then you can't.

Finding the same thing with node.js, I got started OK with passport thanks to the examples for passport-local: https://github.com/jaredhanson/passport-local/tree/master/ex..., especially express3-mongoose-multiple-files.

Beyond that though, I've had to hack a fair bit to get "remember me" working (following the practices suggested http://stackoverflow.com/questions/549/the-definitive-guide-... and http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2004/01/19/persistent_login_coo...) so not exactly straight-forward. (Aside: the remember me example for passport local might not be production ready, see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16136712/is-an-authtoken-...).

Also would love to hear what others are using!

I'm 9 months in to my startup (consultancy/product combo for enterprise), probably 2 weeks from having the first signed deal. I quit my day job June 2012. Then I wasted 6 months spinning my wheels.

What got me back on track? patio11 (http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/) and Amy Hoy (http://unicornfree.com/). The way they think about these things is a much better match for how I think about the world than say Eric Ries (that said, great book, and anyone involved in building a gragh db has my whole-hearted admiration.)

Key things for me are:

-holy shit, you can charge $x0,000/week (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4805091)? What am I doing wrong? What can I do to charge that much? No seriously, what can I do to charge that much? Thinking about that pretty solid for about a month changed the way I view things (both consultancy and product).

- if you're doing it right, you're customers will tell you "shut up and take my money" (http://unicornfree.com/2012/shut-up-and-take-my-money-or-how...). I started off with an idea and was looking for a customer. That wasn't fun. Starting with a customer and solving their problems is much nicer.

Also: I'm reliably told that you don't need to quit your day job if your smart about it. That said, doing this full time is pretty sweet.

A standard defined by an RFC will be a win for consumers, not sure if it'll be a win for companies though. If whatsapp can create a monopoly and make money from it, that's a win for them.

This has been my experience - every organisation I've left has got by irritatingly well without me. The ones without solid metrics to measure success just fudge the metrics anyway; the ones with solid metrics notice quickly what they need to replace.