1,863 karma · joined March 24, 2009
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... :)
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.
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
* 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!
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.
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
I'm curious to how you got a free office. Would you mind sharing?
* 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.
Keep it lean.
* 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
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.
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.
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!
Burnouts? Definitely. I don't handle pressure that well, so I have so many of them! :(
In a presentation, the CEO of activeCOLLAB(Ilija Studen) mentioned that they were pulling in 50k Euros a month, this was back in 2007 *
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* Video Lectures.net(unfortunately it's on Croatian): http://videolectures.net/webstart08_studen_sks/