hwijaya

Just a side note. Few companies that are mentioned in Jim Collin's "Built To Last" are examples of companies that are going great even after the founders left. 3M, P&G, Disney, Walmart...

Ah, the classic debate of part time vs full time again. Sigh..

I think it's depend on people to people. I personally know that i'm not the "part-time-and-do-it-safely" kind of person. I get too comfortable.

I function much better as soon as i burn off my ship and jump off the cliff. Somehow, that's how my survival instinct works. That's how i signed up for 1/2 marathon and full marathon while i haven't been able to run one (and, of course, after that i became much more discipline in training and eventually finished).

Again, it depends on your personality.

Okay. We'll make sure to iron out that bug. We'll try to reproduce it based on your information. Thanks!

Thanks. Yes, we're looking into making no 1 and 2 happen asap.

We've look at few JS libraries, but, they're not as good looking as Flash one. What is the major drawback of Flash you think? Isn't most people's machine got Flash installed these days considering YouTube etc? Thanks

Not sure i understand your question correctly. For our case, i just started it with a long-time friend of mine. I did talk some part of it in our blog. Maybe you can find it relevant in addressing your question. http://blog.blindoptimists.com/2009/01/23/hello-world/

I think design/usability are acceptable. At least i can understand it after playing with it for less than 1 minute.

The only thing that you need to be careful of is probably a market-risk. This type of site is platform model and usually run into chicken-and-egg problems, therefore, takes longer than you imagined to take-off.

Overall, the idea is great. It certainly has potentials. Keep it going! ;)

Thanks for a lot of your suggestions. That jott service is definitely very interesting. I'll let you know again when we have new releases.

So, you're saying, you prefer to be able to input using the currency that you set? Or, just for display?

Example, you can input "Books from Amazon UK for £10.95"? Or, simply just for display?

Thanks

I second this opinion. Start attending meetups. That will widen your network and you surely have more awareness on what other events to follow. Eventually, you'll end up in a group of hackers and startup founders.

Wow. Thanks a lot for your quick reply.

Yes, we would like to decentralize the whole process of inputting transactions from web.

Well, we build this to solve our own problems, and from years of experience, we know we hate having to sit in front of computer everytime we come back home just to input transactions.

We have started working on Twitter and email. Sms is still on plan since we're not sure if people would like to spend 25c to input their transactions.

Regarding your banks. I have to agree 100% with you. Both my cofounders live in Indonesia. We hardly have proper internet banking there, let along importing transactions.

iPhone, Blackberry, Android and Pre is definitely on our plan. There are a lot we would love to do. Have been trying hard to get focus on finishing one by one.

Again, really thanks for your reply. Appreciate it.

It's very interesting read. Quite refreshing actually.

It's amazing what credibility/track record can do. Even in the recession time they still can raise $50 million more than planned. I think, this is a great proof of "investors invest in people"

The problem with screen-shot is how do you test part of your page that is password protected? I tried the BrowserLab this morning and i can only test the public page.

This is certainly true. I always said to myself that running a startup is like running a marathon. If you can just move one step at a time BUT KEEP MOVING, soon, you'll arrive.

That's what i did when i finished my marathon last year. Just one step at a time, no matter, how much i hate it (especially started from 30km+). The metaphor of cry from sadness to joy and everything else is so spot on pj!

Sometimes i cooked Chilli Con Carne. It's easy and last long. Healthy too. http://proven-great-and-simple-recipes.blogspot.com/

I put any "great and simple" recipes that i found in that blog. So, yes, i like your site idea. It definitely would be helpful for someone like me.

Curious if this is healthy for startups in long term, to work like that crazy.

I always worry that i might over-burn the team by doing things like that. After all, startup is more of a marathon than sprint.

I think things like options and any other legal is a very delicate stuffs and better be done with experts (lawyer, accountant etc).

For resources, here are few that i have in the arsenal:

Marketing: http://startup-marketing.com/ http://andrewchenblog.com/

Legal: http://www.thestartuplawyer.com/

General: http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/ http://onstartups.com/

You can ask any topic: http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?biz http://news.ycombinator.com/

Hope it helps.

Totally agree about the community.

There are a lot of times i see fellow HNers down-voting comments that are irrelevant and can hold themselves for not falling into the "stupid-war" like what usually happen in other discussion board.

That's the reason i'm here and not in Digg/Slashdot. The community are smart and critical.

Just fyi, there are other startups in Australia that also work on this spelling problem http://spellr.us/

And, you can find his talk here: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1685

This is no doubt one of the best speech i ever heard. It gives me a lot of new perspectives when i heard it for the first time back in 2006. Here's the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA

Not sure if he's right with regards of building great company. We're also on our ways of solving our own problem at the moment.

So far, i can say that, the only concern that i personally have with solving our own problem is, "is it just us that have the problem or other people got the same issue?" (a.k.a is this a big enough problem where we should spend our valuable time on? or should we move to another project).

From my own experience, 2 benefits that i personally have with solving our own problems are: you understand exactly on what is the 80% of the pains and when things get tough, you can encourage yourself that worst case scenario is you use it yourself.

Still interesting although they're no longer startup. Only 1 out of so many years?

Come to Australia. =) From my experience (before recession & before my startups), it's not hard to find an IT job as long as you know your stuff. Most employers are willing to support you for permanent residency.

I have the same problems. There are two tricks that i find quite helpful:

1. Find a team partner - and you will be cornered to start "get things done". Otherwise, you can't keep show up everyday without any progress

2. Have a weekly team target - we have it as weekly iterations. Always release something out every week.

Well, the good news are, you realize your problems and looking for solutions.

Bill Gates seems to have the same problem with procrastination, early on in his career: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ic1Ro4LkKw

I like it. It's clean and minimum-usable.

Hmm..as of using it, maybe if you can make it like a widget where i can link it to my site, that will be more usable (at least for me) in terms of setting up polling system.

Techmeme. Strange, can't see anyone read it here?

Few things on my mind as i look at it. You need:

1. Tagline - Make people understand what you're doing within 1 - 2 seconds. Most people don't read at all.

2. Better call to action - I generally prefer to have one priority over another. Making it blue and red communicate the same priority, and remember Barry's paradox of choices? It made me not clicking both. I learned call to action a lot from here: http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/good-call-to-action-buttons/

Good luck!

Actually, i like it as Hacker News. I'm just so used to say it as "Hacker News" to explain things to my team. Can't imagine having to pronounce "Innocuous News".

I never get any strange look. Or...maybe because i just don't care about it. For me, it's their loss. I always feel there are so many things can be learnt from HN, especially if you want to stand in front of the tech-curve. Tried to promote to a couple of friends, but, never see them jump into it.