eksurfus

I've run a bootstrapped startup that's seen a lot of iterations in the last nine years. We started in the midwest, then transitioned two years ago to the valley when we were accepted to an accelerator. I deeply understand the opportunities and pitfalls of wearing a lot of hats. Because we have been continuously profitable, however, its been an excellent, stable learning opportunity. If you are potentially interested in joining a small team and either exploring (a) a leadership role based on your experience or (b) owning, driving and gaining expertise in a particular business area to gain specialty, I'm interested to connect (email in profile).

I co-founded a company with my boyfriend of 1.5 years, who later became my husband. Our company has been bootstrapped and profitable for the last 8 years. Initially, we were both slightly embarrassed to be both co-founders and in a relationship, but as time went on (and especially in moving to SV) we realized this is incredibly common. Its also very common to co-found with a sibling, cousin or other family member. The reality is that running a company is incredibly hard, and you need to be able to trust your co-founding team members. Family members (by blood or marriage), if you are lucky, are often the people you trust the most.

Love this! Works great and simple design.

It was mentioned at GopherCon that many developers use Windows in China. Golang's ability to compile on Windows makes it a natural choice.

Most Chinese websites are built on the Windows platform [1]. Windows XP and Windows 7 have a 60.7 percent and 33.4 percent market share respectively (94% of the Chinese market) as of May 2014 [2].

[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-so-many-Chinese-developers-pref...

[2] http://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-os-replaceable-by-chine...

Congrats on taking the leap! I would love to see what you're working on.

Thanks so much for the feedback. What market(s)/use cases did you consider when you designed your forms platform (eg medical forms for private practice, tax-related forms for government, HR forms for enterprise)? We are finding that our general model works ~80% well in a lot of these cases, but we're working to identify the market segment to really focus on drilling down into.

I think you said it well when you said you're entering the rabbit hole :). Building these types of applications is HARD, and there's a high barrier to MVP. We're currently working to get as much feedback as we can to scope our problem more narrowly. We've found interest from people in developing applications in government and K-12 especially - have you had similar experiences?

While its a tough nut to crack, we think if we can grab a toehold and iterate, this type of solution could save vast amounts of developer time.

We currently use this platform in-house for a K-12 application with 40K+ users.

We found that there was a tremendously high hurdle to building forms-based applications to meet user expectations (eg rich-text editing, PDF generation, auto-saving, real-time collaboration, per-field versioning, etc). FormBig factors out this plumbing, allowing developers to instead focus on the specific forms, business logic, and end-user use cases instead.

You might consider a way to add additional value to your news site. One idea I've always thought would be cool would be to algorithmically determine news that is disproportionally more popular in other parts of the globe than where you're located. For example, anti-US news trends at a far higher rate outside the US, and the same is naturally true for any country. Being able to easily see what you could be missing without needing to do a lot of work would be really interesting IMO. And make it harder for governments to suppress negative media.

We regularly perform PDF extractions at my startup. For each new client, we'll run batches of several thousand at a time.

A more attractive monetization model for a customer like us would be $0.01-0.03/conversion ($100-$300 per 10,000). A low per-conversion cost would easily allow us to test for a given group of PDFs if the conversion service was a good candidate for that batch, and if not, chose an alternative up-front (but allow us to test again the next batch easily at low cost). Also with a low start-up cost, its much easier to tell customers you won't make any specific fixes (take it or leave it, and test it first). Then you'd have the flexibility to work on broad classes of problems/improvements more at your leisure.

As a YC Hacks participant, the most striking part of being there was just how genuinely friendly and helpful everyone was. Really a great experience.

Checkout Steve Blank's guide:

   http://steveblank.com/visitors-guide/

Trevor, really appreciate the post. Any reason you chose elance over other sites (odesk, guru, etc)? Any additional tips (eg did you try encouraging certain freelancers with great credentials to bid on your work)?

Just to toss it out there, Go (Golang) is becoming increasingly popular, but still has a relatively small community (much of which is based outside the US). This seems like a potential good case for using freelance developers (when language experts are few and geographically distributed).

SameGoal | FRONT END ENGINEER - CLOSURE LIBRARY, full time in Milwaukee WI (remote via video conference ok)

Hey HN! We're a bootstrapped, profitable start-up looking for talented Front End Engineers to help pioneer a web-based, semi-structured document authoring platform.

SameGoal currently provides an online form completion and management system for K12 special education, already used to author over 1 million documents. Over the next twelve months, we will be expanding our market nationally. Additionally, we consider this product a proof of concept application for a more general enterprise solution.

Come join our team: http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/27751/front-end-engine...