Great points. My comment below was along a similar vein.
209 karma · joined August 17, 2010
I am not trying to say that Chinese startups don't have good ideas. But why do they have to blatantly copy US startups that are successful? Obviously, startups inspire each other, but I will posit that what is lacking in China to a certain extent is:
1. Creativity, which leads to a strong tendency to generate knock-offs of Western companies or products. This includes both software and hardware. 2. Openess or ability for people with good ideas to step forward and actuate them. The Chinese educational system is segmented and once you are on a certain path there is not really the ability to change or reinvent oneself as easily as in the West.
Look at Twitter, Apple, and many of the other companies at the forefront of tech and business. The leaders and visionaries behind these companies were not necessarily formally trained in what they are doing cause who can be trained to be a trendsetter! No way. There can only be the right environment for innovation which needs creativity, access to resources, and lots of hard work.
I speak as someone trained in the US in philosophy and politics but learned software development as an afterthought and am building companies and products. Someone like me could not exist in China and to a lesser extent in India due to their narrow-minded educational systems.
I wish founders and developers across the world the best of luck in their endeavors, but know that me and my non-traditional founder compatriots here in the US will compete with you and compete hard!
Using Node.js. The node js example even provides the code to replicate it. Is this person using node or some other websocket approach?
I am a developer with startup experience and skill in Ruby, JS, and frontend technologies. I have 6+ years experience and a BA from UC Berkeley. I created a post related to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1786901
hulu.com yellowpages.com
also major sites: like justin.tv. slideshare etc
The argument that "Ruby cant scale" just doesn't hold. Check out Ruby EE by passenger.
1. Patience. Building a company is a time-intensive process that can be frustrating when family is demanding a lot of your time. Just focus on the goal and slowly pick away at your giant todo list for launch.
2. Its Good enough. Sometimes it seems like things are not moving forward or moving forward at a glacial pace. At these times I try to switch gears and say to myself "whats here is good enough for V1".
3. Time Management. I work 8-5 at my job. Come home and hang out with the family from 5-10. Then work on my startup from 10-1 pretty much every night. This takes both discipline and the ability to handle being a bit sleepy.
* Adoption - Rails is being heavily adopted, especially with the startup community, but also state agencies, hospitals etc.
* Community - Rails has a strong community of core devs, plugins devs, conferences, books etc.
* Jobs - Tons of Jobs in my experience. We have a hard time finding good Rails/Ruby devs. I have checked the market, seems like there are plenty of Rails jobs across the country. Check out: http://jobs.37signals.com/
* Scalability - Yes, Rails can scale. Check out: http://rails100.pbworks.com/Alexa+Rankings Ever heard of Hulu, JustinTV or Big Cartell?
* Fun - Ruby was designed for programmer happiness
These are not that complex and should be well-understood by any would-be entrepreneur. We are writing our own recurring billing system right now for our startup www.wellhubstudios.com, using Auth.net CIM. Auth.net even offers recurring billing themselves. Another obvious issue with the services you mention such as Chargify et al is that they charge a higher rate for each transaction than most other Merchant Account providers, sometimes 1-2% more per transaction which, if your trying to run a viable business based on margins it is something to greatly consider. The Transaction fee we got was ridiculously low compared to what these "recurring billing" apps (which surely will reduce your headache) are offering. Off to make some money.....
See the pattern? Get a development job doing whatever you can. Hack on stuff, build it, then try to move up.
Key is, Web Based software, IMO, is a show and tell type profession. Like carpentry the emphasis is on what you can do, what projects you have built, rather then degrees, age etc ...hope that helps...