jv2222

I would wager that just about EVERYTHING in literature, tech & art has been created by "Standing on the shoulders of giants"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_gi...

LOL. That may be a step too far ;)

Affiliates are generating revenue by helping promote tweetminer. The software used is http://www.idevdirect.com

Yeah. The lump sum transactions are not pro-rata they are logged as in the month they happened.

TweetMiner has been a side project for the past 3 months - I've been averaging about 2-4 hours work on it per day

1st Line of code August 10th 1st Signup September 13th (34 days to go beta) 1st Sale October 17th (68 days to first sale - 1 month beta) 1st $1000 November 17th (98 days to $1000)

About 500 beta testers signed up. Very few converted because I gave them all a free pass for one year.

Here's the paypal links I used to get things up and running...

https://www.paypal.com/en_US/ebook/subscriptions/html.html https://www.paypal.com/en_US/ebook/subscriptions/Appx-ipn_su... https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&c...

FYI - First sale was on Oct 17th which probably accounts for the variance :)

Oops! There's a slight bug in the customers by plan stats code. The real number of customers is 51 (2.8%) -- listed on the customers line -- (bug fixed now)

Getting from the first line of code to $1000 revenue is the hardest part of ANY business. Think about it. Google. Facebook. Twitter.

TweetMiner did that in 98 days. That's VERY rare for a web startup, especially for a part time project in a space that everyone says is not monetizeable.

Sometimes it's not about the amount of revenue - it's more about what the business proves. After that it's just a question of scaling and not f*ing up...

I want to add something to this discussion. Something I certainly did not expect would happen. Since I released the revenue figures publicly I have had three angels contact me saying "what are your plans, are you looking for any investment". Imagine that! Angels perusing me!!

As I say it wasn't intended - but it's a nice side note.

Yes, I've been very motivated by balsamiq - but another big reason is because we talk about it weekly on our tech podcast http://techzinglive.com - the main reason is because this is exactly the kind of data I wish I had been able to see when starting my earlier one man businesses

http://tweetminer.net/stats -- I spent $zero! :)

(check out http://techzinglive.com for weekly updates on how the business has been built)

Oops I guess the domain was an original cost $9

Hacker News Age Distribution

http://koldfront.dk/misc/hn/age.png

Ok, if this article is correct then it's a big problem for Google. Because their entire revenue model is based on earning money from from advertising... I can't imagine enterprise level organisations allowing Google to Earn money via advertising.

I know that Google have made some efforts to make money by directly charging Enterprises but that represents a tiny part of their revenue to date.

In other words, is Wave a much smaller opportunity than they had hoped? And if so, it might just end up being a "side project"...

I thought lots of people who don't have booths pay for a ticket with the express purpose of networking. I didn't think you could get in without paying $1.5-$3k for a ticket? Maybe I'm wrong but that was the impression I had.

Yes It seems so hypocritical that he's waging a war against people doing something very similar to what he does. I wonder if it makes him so angry because he recognises on a subconscious level that he's doing something quite similar.

I generally agree with Jason's sentiments.

However, given how Jason feels that startups should NEVER have to pay to be in a room full of investors... then why charge $1500 per ticket for Techcrunch?!

Surely all the budding entrepreneurs should get into Techcrunch for FREE!!!

After all that $1500 could go along way toward their start-up right?

but they chose to give it to Techcrunch in order to network (i.e, in the case of Techcrunch people see value in giving a large chunk of money to be in a room with lots of investors and well networked people)

What I like about Hacker News is that its 100% abstracted from the actual websites - and also that it's verrrry minimalist.

Can't quite put my finger on it, but for some reason it just doesn't feel right to couple the content with the feed (IMHO)

Also, I like HN just the way it is!

Over the next few months this feature will be added to http://tweetminer.net - one way or another.

Of course it would be great to use a service like this to do the heavy lifting rather than code it myself...

But why would I pay $400 per month for 500 searches per month... when

a) 500 searches per month cost of $4,800 per year

b) 500 searches wouldn't be enough to service my target user-base of 10,000 users.

c) I could roll my own in less than 2 weeks

To be viable for an app developer like myself - the pricing structure would need to make it impossible for me to even consider rolling my own.

BTW - I'm not trying to dis the service, looks nice, just pointing out the pricing structure seems to be wayyyy too high

It's an RSS reader fully integrated with Twitter. It makes it easy to follow your RSS feeds and click a button to Tweet stories (and schedule those Tweets)

I wasn't really implying that they were knowingly "lying". What I was mainly questioning was that they had some kind of internal cut off point or fair usage policy.

You get 10000. Here's bumpf from their site....

--------

What are compute cycles?

Compute cycles measure how much processing time your applications require on the Rackspace Cloud. Using 10,000 compute cycles in a month is roughly equivalent to running a server with a 2.8 GHz modern processor for the same period of time.

How many compute cycles will my applications use?

Since web applications vary so greatly, it's hard to make a perfect guess. However, there are some guidelines that can help. First, you can think of 10,000 compute cycles as being about the same processing power as you'd get from a decent dedicated server or Amazon EC2 instance. For example 10,000 compute cycles would power:

    * about 2.1 million page views using a database-driven content management system

    * about 11 million page views of rackspacecloud.com

    * about 25 million requests for a static 15KB image

Thx, that's a very interesting perspective, and gives me much food for thought :)

Yeah I have to agree it would be used for no good ;)

Hmm, maybe I'll just send him a link to this thread so that he can see that his behaviour does actually effect people.

@yan I had a number of conversations with him, in all of which which he seemed like a really nice guy and perfectly reasonable. Each time he assured me that he had every intention of finishing the work, and there was only a few hours left.

He knew very well that the work was meant to have been completed in seven days. He explained to me that the project had overrun because my friend supplied the artwork late. Which was a perfectly valid explanation for 1 week of overrun. The other 6 weeks, however, are not so clear...

The problem is he's incredibly eloquent and it's hard to believe that he's anything other than a decent bloke. It's only by personally experiencing the promise of "I'll check in the completed work tonight" for two weeks that I actually believed my friend.

Also, If I was to in any way publicly denounce another person it would probably have more negative effect on me than them :)

It's down for me too I think HN effect may have knocked it over.

Even from a mere statistical point of view it's interesting.

Take bayesian spam analysis for example. When we examine the corpus, the words that we find "interesting" are the ones that appear "less" in the data-set.

Just because I say something's interesting it doesn't mean I'm being sexist - perhaps it's just interesting.

Ok, let's reverse this. Is there any profession or hobby that you would find interesting if a male excelled and generally kicked ass at it?

No one is Awesome by default. We all suck when we start out. No one is "expected" to be awesome - be they male or female. So I don't see how "Awesome Female Coder" implies that females are not expected to be awesome.

In the world of coders (where males far out-number females) I think it is a very interesting fact that the lead developer of the halo 3D engine is female.

It's not something you see every day. That's why I put it in the title. I thought the point of creating a title was to highlight the interesting aspects of a story?