jwblackwell

It's not even about marketing, just building something of actual value. I doubt this girl has spent much if anything on marketing.

London largely voted remain so not really. However I think youth are rightly frustrated about London prices

tl;dr "Everything Should Be Made as Simple as Possible, But Not Simpler" - Albert Einstein

Ironically I need to log in to view this

I can also back this up from experience reviewing a Packt book. By the end of the process I regretted starting after quickly realising the quality was so low.

A cool idea, but I think the business model is flawed. I would think about dropping the subscription. How many people can be free the same weekend several months in a row for more than a few months? Probably not very many who can also commit to £175 each month. Births, marriages, funerals and other social events will inevitably get in the way of even the most dedicated users.

Also, what I expected to see was an amazing trip that I could book, each month. So in a way a sort of groupon style deal. I think if you combined that with some sort of buddy up/social network aspect where you could meet and talk to the people going on the trip you'd be on to a winner.

Perhaps you could then have a cheaper membership that gave you a discount and entitled you to first dibs on available places etc.

Just my thoughts though from scanning the site quickly. So take all advice with caution! Good luck with it!

We use to use http://sendy.co/ which is a self hosted solution, but doesn't really offer anything in the way of templates and lacks some features. We ultimately left as we now use Intercom but I'd be interested in seeing how this service evolves.

Very important point, especially for the HN audience. There's some really good principals here but in reality you don't need to worry about most of these an an early startup. If you use modern frameworks then a lot is taken care of already.

Things like stale code on the client is simply not an issue until you've got a lot of people using your app. Don't worry about it.

Cool idea. Unfortunately I've yet to see sentiment analysis even really come close to providing any useful insights. It's just not accurate enough on 140 character tweets.

Perhaps what might also be a nice idea is offering something similar to startups from developing countries.

I'd imagine most students in the west are comparatively very rich.

The point about the type of work you're willing to accept is critical. In my experience freelancing, the clients that pay the best and offer the best projects will want to meet you occasionally at least. They'll also want commitment of a number of regular hours.

So seeing as that's out the window you'll probably end up having to fill the in between good project time with jobs from Elance etc . Be prepared to deal with some horrible code :)

This reminds me of the "directory submission" services SEOs used years ago. Personally I doubt it's worth submitting to more than a few, Crunchbase, Angellist etc. In any event, I've never seen any significant traffic from these.

Love this! But I'm surprised not to see main Spanish cities on here. I took a short trip to Seville and was amazed how cheap everything was (I live in London).

There was an abundance of Airbnb accommodation, eating out was cheap and you could get a bucket of beers for 5 euros in many places. About the same as a pint in London.

I'd make this list a little more interactive, perhaps have a forum/comments behind each city. Could become a really useful resource.

Campus london is a good place to hangout, but you need to get there quite early to get a space in the cafe as it gets busy and therefore can also be quite noisy.

If someone made a display, or some sort of filter for my macbook so I could see the screen properly outside, I'd be out there all the time!

Yep, the premise of this is pretty ridiculous. Out of 80k they only identified 2700 homes. How many of those are actually within a reachable distance and how can you be sure those people also live alone. I'd bet a large percentage of users posting on Instagram probably also live with their parents and therefore there's a chance the house won't be empty.

So what are you left with? A few hundred? That's assuming the average burglar would even bother to do any of this as opposed to just staking out a house for a few hours with poor security.

I like this, surprisingly I actually prefer the black and white versions of many sites. A reminder to keep things simple and not overdo it.

I thought this as well, really good way to explain the benefits and features - through common questions.

SEO takes a long time (compared to other strategies) to work. So for most startups it shouldn't be a priority. You also don't want to be relying on Google for traffic.

You're better focusing on building relationships with influencers in your industry, guest posting on their blogs and asking them for feedback to help build a good product. This in turn will encourage links anyway and make the SEO come naturally.

I wasn't aware you could do this and I'm sure many causal investors aren't. Plus this is not as user friendly: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093281?hl=en

Congratulations on launching! Cool idea and a good start. I think since you're targeting the non-professional market here, you need to focus on user experience a bit. Some feedback:

- Found it a bit slow, but guess that's partially the HN effect.

- As per above, I'd make the queries ajax rather than refreshing the whole page every search, should improve the UX a fair bit.

- I expected autopredict when I started to type $... to predict a ticker, would be nice to guess company names as well if no ticker is entered. Probably an essential feature for non-pros.

- You need a clear signup link. And the redirect when you run out of free credits should go to the signup page with small link to login, not the other way around.

- Also look at highcharts.com, they have a stock chart product as well. Hands down the best JS charts, mobile friendly, highly customisable etc.

Nice idea, I'd really miss the numbers for upvotes though

I don't really understand why there is a need to simplify something like AngularJS. Kudos for building something but I'd rather stick with the battle tested version thanks. If you're building a single page app then the initial payload isn't a big deal anyway, so I don't really care if it's a few KB less.

Your simple example is (IMO) more complicated than the AngularJS version, and Sentinel JS requires Jquery:

https://angularjs.org/

Please correct me if I'm wrong, just don't see the benefit of using this over AngularJS, you're ultimately going to want more functionality anyway.

If you're a developer and you absolutely loathe learning new technologies then you're in trouble, I'd find a new career. Otherwise, I think the key is striking a balance between recognising the hype and fads, then spending time learning the new technologies that are going to stick around, because they provide a substantial benefit over their predecessors.

Give technologies a chance to mature before you jump in. Look at what actual companies/sites are using, not just what people on HN say is cool.

I would have expected to see more bias towards under 30's. Perhaps it's just the way the graphic is laid out though.

Looks great! Good work.

Not really quite sure how this: https://www.dropbox.com/s/c9ksnlob416zloe/Screenshot%202014-...

translates to this: https://www.dropbox.com/s/s48mpnee9imy5qv/Screenshot%202014-...

This is the reason I made this! Strangely we'd be at 14 as well! I was quite impressed and surprised at how low most ranking are. Alexa isn't exactly the most accurate measure but still, I've seen ours rise suitably with traffic.

Auction pages don't really belong in search results. IMO. I think they had this coming.

Whether or not you should have a free plan really depends on your product.

In the case of trak.io, it's clear that the costs per user are too high for them to do it. Google Analytics can do it because it's backed by a big business and they can fund it. Many startups don't have this choice.

I'd just be wary of ditching a free plan. It's a great way to reach a lot of people with relatively little effort, just be careful you can support them with your business model.