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hajrice

1,863 karma · joined March 24, 2009

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hajrice··on I'll Build Your MVP for $1k
I don't want to rad on your idea, as I see what you're saying but MVP's should be, by their nature, a minimalistic approach to your product which you plan on extending down the road as you gather feedback and validate your ideas through your customers. That being said, when you have a vision of your MVP in your head, as it's minimal you can clearly go in depth with who you want certain parts of the app to work; For instance, if you strip down a lot of features(like you would with an MVP) you're left with a few core features with which you can specifically jot down how you want them to work to the point where you can say(for instance, for upvoting articles) I want it to send an AJAX request, etc. I hope that clarify's the point I'm trying to make.
hajrice··on I'll Build Your MVP for $1k
Thanks for the comment. I agree, the design is horrible, heh, I even put that in the footer indicating that the site was a result of an idea and a couple of hours in photoshop + xhtml/css.

That being said, I'm going to shift the design, as I totally agree with your comments as soon as I'm done with monitoring over HackerNews for questions/concerns/etc... :)

hajrice··on I'll Build Your MVP for $1k
Thank you very much Simon; I'm pretty glad to see that you appreciate my response time! :)
hajrice··on I'll Build Your MVP for $1k
Great question. There aren't any defined conditions, as this what I've put up is a MVP itself heh. As long as it's reasonable and can be built in rails3 is the initial condition;

Of course, after I get a certain number of applications I'll have to review them and contact each individually and a lot of people are obviously going to look at what they need and whether I can deliver that in a reasonable time frame.

Short answer: (and I hate to say this) It's relative, tho I won't spend more than 33 hours on a project.

hajrice··on I'll Build Your MVP for $1k
Very sorry! I just fixed it!
hajrice··on I'll Build Your MVP for $1k
Thanks Alain, it was a pleasure working with you in the past.
hajrice··on Ask HN: Sleep hacking?
haha, yeah, good one ;)

From what I've seen, it doesn't really work, though Dustin Curtis' article on sleep hacking is most definitely a good read: http://dustincurtis.com/sleep.html

hajrice··on Ask HN: Best cities to live in?
For people, like me, who are into living cheap and who don't really care about how far away they are from VC's/Angels/etc I'd suggest you visit:

* Bangkok - you can find hotels starting at $10/night and probably cheaper in other places around Thailand...I'd suggest you check out the "remote" places near the ocean, I hear it's much cheaper.

* Budapest - great city; cheap to live in, people seem pretty nice .. especially women from South East Europe.

* Istanbul - Greaat culture; the people are soooo nice, crime rates are really low...I remember when I visited and went to eat at a local restaurant the owner was very nice, we had a nice chat, he asked where I was from..and soon after as I asked for the check, he said no no no, please, please, it's taken care of. I'm not saying everyone there is like that, but it semeed to me that almost everyone was so welcoming.

I'm going to be moving and living in a few cities, if you'd like to talk more, ping me(hajrice@gmail.com), I'd be glad to talk more.

Good luck!

hajrice··on Tell HN: Someone should make a screen capture tool for Chrome
hah, you have the same problem?
hajrice··on Will you pay 400€ to get feedback for your startup idea?
NO WAY. First of all, with the lean startup its easier than ever to validate our idea. There are tons of ways to get feedback on your idea. VC's and "market experts" cant predict whether or not my product is going to be successful based upon the idea.

Why pay some bozo to give me feedback when I can have my customers, people who actually use my app and are passionate about the problem.

hajrice··on Ask HN: What is your programming music?
+1 for The Social Network soundtrack. Definitely great coding music.
hajrice··on So you're the CEO, what do you actually do?
My favorite part was the last slide where you gave an overview presented in a table..I really loved the Feeling row, I can really reflect on it(we're near launching).

doing the time: happy

making it real: not so sure

making the jump: cry

launching: scared <-- a lot of us are here :(

some traction!: Yes!

gaining momentum: Ack!

growth: AAACK!!

team in place: Adjusting

sustain: Happy

hajrice··on Fusion Holiday Developer/Designer Bundle
It took me a while to understand what they're offering. The design is a little too much bloated. Hardly understand anything on what comes in the bundle after spending ~20 seconds on the site.
hajrice··on Who is living off their startup fulltime?
>> Our downtown office we rent we got for next to nothing (thank God for karma)

I'm curious to how you got a free office. Would you mind sharing?

hajrice··on Ask HN: What's the value of consulting experience?
I dont do consulting as often now, but when I do need some money, I do UI consulting. It's a little annoying IMO, especially with all the restrictions and working with someone who has no taste in design whatsoever yet they still keep on pushing their ideas forward....But, here are the somewhat positive sides I've managed to branch out from it:

* The ability to keep on working even though you want to kill someone how annoying their project seems to be.

* The ability to keep on iterating small changes which unfortunately are just warm ups to even more iterations.

* It's very annoying, even though you are probably making a good chunk of money. Great thing about it, once you move onto your project/startup(which I really suggest you do as soon as you have a proven idea and market) you'll pretty much love it and become very good at building something good.

* Oh, not to mention that you'll have a better outlook on things after you've worked on a few projects for clients.

hajrice··on Poll: How well off are you with women/men?
Seems like HN is full of "players"
hajrice··on Please rate my Startup: Kroud - Q&A Community Building Tool
No problem. I suggest you check out the lean startup principles if you already haven't. Perhaps you might need to pivot. Eric is really balling hard there.

Keep it lean.

hajrice··on Please rate my Startup: Kroud - Q&A Community Building Tool
I just checked out startup.kroud.com and it seems super fast.

* This might just be me, but I'd suggest you improve your home page, perhaps add "Why use Kroud" or "Features" and such. To be honest, no one really cares unless you're some hotshot(don't mean to rad). Instead of that put what people say about Q&A. Here's an example: "63% of communities lose their members because of engagement. — WSJ" and then some button below that says something like: "Rewin those members with kroud"

* You're "selling" your product not yourself - remove the "Hey I'm Stu." Replace it with something regarding WHY JOIN

* Your headline is a bit vague("Questions and answers for your community"). When I first saw the headline I thought, oh this is probably some week open source project. I checked out your product and I think something like "Get your free hosted Q&A community up in minuets" or something.

* Good work on building some sort of comfortability with social proof.

I'm curious, how is this different than already-existing services like Sponge(getsponge.com) or

Oh, and, start charging for it.

Best of luck to you

hajrice··on To code quickly, you must quit coding
Interesting take on the problem of productivity. I've also noticed that when I do design work, design work after design work my design just gets ugly. To solve the problem I do the following:

1. Don't design/code for 2 days.

2. After 3 days, find some article that will get you pumped. Read it.

3. Design/code for 1 hour less than you usually would(for instance I usually code/design for 5-6hours a day, I'd do it for 4-5hours MAX here), take a 10 minute break and then continue. You'll get amazing results. I think this is partly because (like the author of this article said) your brain continues working on the problem.

4. Go to step 1.

hajrice··on Need a name for your startup? I wrote a domain name generator in Node.JS
First of all, fantastic job. Really love how fast this is.

As a user, I think "Don't like any of these? Search again, you'll get something different!" could be replaced with a great button: "Show More" or "Show Next Cycle" or something like that. It'd be much easier to find instead of looking for that text link at the bottom.

hajrice··on Ask HN: Friends and Family offering large amounts of money, what do i do?
Here's my take on this situation and what I'd do.

1) Validate the idea. This is very easy to do thanks to the new lean startup concept. You want to make sure that YOUR idea, the solution you're providing to a problem is turning heads. Dropbox did a great job at this(here's a clip of Drew's presentation at the lean startup conference: http://en.justin.tv/startuplessonslearned/b/262672510).

2) Make the MVP, launch it, show it to customers/users. If you feel that you're onto something proceed to step 3.

3) Take the money, dont use it unless you really have to. You want to be really ravenous and not do crazy things with it which is really hard when you get 150k+. Perhaps the best thing to do is hire someone once you really need them, I'd probably only spend that money on employees.

Good luck with your venture!

hajrice··on Why startup dad is kicking your ass.
Yes. I'm not a startup dad and I get where you're going at. Internal driven is a large portion of what motivates people. I'll take myself for example, before I even knew what a startup was I was building parsers and what not. I needed money really bad so I started looking into consulting which then lead to startups, etc.. Entrepreneurs are internally driven because a lot of them have been through a lot of bad environments and want to create a better life and fuel the economy(which is related to the first point)
hajrice··on Why startup dad is kicking your ass.
Hmm. I don't think that pressure is that bad, it really depends on how you handle it. For instance, look at UStream guys. Brad is a startup dad, from the navy/army. During service he was probably put under much more pressure and back then he was still a dad...so it really boils down to how well you handle the pressure coming at you.

Burnouts? Definitely. I don't handle pressure that well, so I have so many of them! :(

hajrice··on OFFER HN: Rooms in ...
To start off: I'm offering a room in Sarajevo. Feel free to mail me at hajrice@gmail.com
hajrice··on Any Open Source startups?
activeCOLLAB. Open source alternative to Basecamp. I'm certain that they're doing well over a million dollars a year now.

In a presentation, the CEO of activeCOLLAB(Ilija Studen) mentioned that they were pulling in 50k Euros a month, this was back in 2007 *

----

* Video Lectures.net(unfortunately it's on Croatian): http://videolectures.net/webstart08_studen_sks/

hajrice··on Ask HN: How do you design websites for bootstrapping?
Send me an email at hajrice@gmail.com. I might have something for ya.
hajrice··on Ask HN: Web app where hourly employees can "clock in"?
clockingit.com
hajrice··on Become a better designer.
Clickable:

http://www.questionify.com/

http://i.imgur.com/wmu7Q.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/KRbNx.jpg

hajrice··on Please review my startup - Questionify
Thanks Fabian! :)
hajrice··on Please review my startup - Questionify
Hey, thanks for the useful input. I sent you an email.
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