jwblackwell

I think the author nails the key flaw for me - what experiences are you going to miss out on by living so frugally? Would I have gone travelling round the world had I'd been worried about saving 70% of my income? Or risked it on a new startup idea? Probably not. And by retiring so early surely you're condemning yourself to a life of careful spending so you don't run out of cash? No thanks.

It's worth avoiding unnecessary indulgence and everyone should probably save more but I personally feel a better strategy is to find a happy work/life balance and try and set some passive income streams up so you can at least relax earlier if not entirely retire.

Good article. I semi expected a list of tools to work remotely but instead got some really useful advice. I've freelanced for about two years and it's still easy to fall into traps regarding rates and aims.

It's not so much my issues with Toggl. I actually think it's a very good little app.

I've just found it very annoying working on multiple projects at once and constantly stopping and starting the timer due to distractions, phone calls from different clients etc. It's very easy to forget to stop or start it and then I have to go back and manually edit all the time which is guess work anyway.

Working on reducing distractions and allocating blocks of time better would probably help but I've gone back to just using a simple spreadsheet now and rounding up hours throughout the day. It just feels less pressured and it's something less to worry about.

I have to agree. This probably isn't all that difficult to work out when you're in the zone, home alone but in an interview is completely different. You're in a completely different state and it's hardly reflective of a normal working environment.

I think if you are going to give this to people in an interview you should a) make sure you've told them to expect puzzles and b) give them a few questions, some as a warm up with plenty of time to settle in.

The best thing you can do would be to either call the respective tax authorities (here in the UK that's HMRC) or seek professional advice. You situation likely isn't that complicated or hard to sort out but you don't want to screw up based on the advice of an anonymous HN user.

If you ring up the tax man asking to pay tax I'm pretty sure they will be able to help :) If you think you can save money by reorganising finances then get an accountant.

Having a meaningful and interesting project to complete that can also grow with you helps a lot. I was fortunate enough to be paid as well.

When you need to get something done to complete the job it's a lot easier to force yourself to concentrate and learn. I can imagine if I didn't have that motivator I'd be too tempted to just leave features out if they were too difficult.

This is awesome to see more "native" Linux hardware coming out.

I'd love to be able to use Linux more, every time I've tried to make a switch though I've inevitably had to jump back to Windows because some bit of hardware just isn't compatible or working well enough.

Another great point. There's so much obsession with billing credit cards I've never seen this mentioned in any pricing blog.

I think the OP makes some very important points here. There's definitely a somewhat fixed mentality when it comes to SaaS pricing and it's easy to fall into the trap that you should be charging something akin to 37signals.

Pricing isn't actually something that's as easy to change as you'd believe either. It has huge implications on your actual product, your target market and sales strategy - as the OP points out.

Imagine you were suddenly told you had to charge 10x more for your product. You might initially think it would kill you but think about what that would change. Would it necessarily be a bad thing?

If you're anything like me, it's easy to assume everyone lives in a world where $10 for Spotify is a pretty big deal. My friends moan about that price for unlimited music. $200 a month seems huge to me for anything I'd buy. It's only recently I've fully started to appreciate just how much money enterprise clients willing drop on "simple" products that meet their needs.

I really think there is a lack of good advice on pricing and how alternative pricing strategies could be used to open up new markets for SaaS type businesses. Sure, you may need a slightly "less scalable" sales strategy but with increasing competition in the web-app marketplace, moving to a different customer base with more cash may well be worth a few sales phone calls.

Glad you've found a use for it! drop me any feedback at james [at] jetrank.com if you find any issues or ways to improve it and I'll get on it.

It will only find it if the account is mentioned on the page as well. What's your URL? I've only tested this on a handful of sites so there's no doubt tons of ways to improve it's accuracy :)

It's aimed at SEOs and online marketers - have a list of blogs you want to contact to review your startup? Just paste them in and start following :)

Thanks! Quick grammar patch released :)

Hey guys - James the creator here. It's just a fun little tool I put together this morning so sorry for the lack of explanation.

It's aimed at anyone doing SEO or trying to reach out to a load of bloggers. It scrapes the pages you enter for common Twitter "follow me" type links and also matches up any Twitter accounts found with the domain name so it's a little more accurate than a thoughtless Twitter link scraper.

I didn't really expect this to make front page! I built it to help promote my startup; JetRank.com, which is a new SEO platform for online marketers, check it out! Feedback however honest is welcomed :)

I've found Linkedin to be pretty good at getting the odd job. Just connect with any one who looks like they might have occasional freelance gigs (e.g. agency directors, recruiters etc).

Once you get a couple of clients that have regular work your pretty much set

Full disclosure: This is my app, it's almost ready for beta testing and I'll be giving anyone who signs up a _massive_ discount when it goes public.

AMA

I like it. It would be nice to be able to refresh the entire day's meal, I know you can hit generate again but I spent a minute looking for a "refresh all" button and I'm sure others might as well. Perhaps at the bottom after the user has scrolled down.

Another key (IMO) perhaps paid feature should be the ability to exclude ingredients.

I'm allergic to peanuts for example, plus plenty of people just outright dislike certain foods so it would be nice to save them the hassle and exclude them. Also the inverse of this, a favourite food option, would be really nice.

Edit: Just seen the food filter, this works for the exclude but a favourite food option might be good still.

Nice idea, browsing through Themeforest is a bit of a painful, multi tab experience most of the time.

How about adding a text search as well? I regularly search for stuff like "admin" or "app" to narrow the search.

This is just a poor attempt to try and damage the biggest online advertising network and their number one competitor - Google.

Realistically the DNT header will do nothing for user privacy.

Just when you think MS is making progress with IE and the web they pull this stunt.

Obviously it's a hack but it wouldn't be that hard to set up an IFTTT email alert to a dedicated account, parse the email for a specified code you set when creating the alert and then do whatever you wanted...

Key takeaway: The devil is in the detail.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/05/this-is-all-your-ap...

I have to admit I forgot they put they switched over to magnet entirely (I'm not actually that bigger torrent user).

But yeah same effect - although links may need to be shortened - it wouldn't be hard to knock up a quick redirect service to make nice friendly short urls.

They would then have extra space for number of seeders, leeches and any other descriptive info.

*edited title

We need to start making a distinction between computer science grads and web application developers.

Nobody really believes that you can learn everything you would on a CS degree in 3 months. But with awesome frameworks like RoR, jQuery, JMVC and Codeigniter, a wealth of online knowledge and big communities it's now possible to achieve an awful lot without any formal CS education.

I think that's the point they are trying to make.

While mobile apps can certainly provide a better user experience for _some_ tasks, people often seem to forget that everyone in offices across the world still sit at desks and use a desktop pcs (or a decent sized laptop).

This isn't going to change. I can't work on an iPad or on my phone. While we all have two arms and two legs people will be working at desks and while people work at desks they will also occasionally browse social sites at their desks.

Mobile is big, but it's not ever going to completely replace web applications designed to be viewed at desks. We haven't even begun to see the start cloud based software, this is all on top of the fact that a huge percentage of the worlds population isn't even on the internet yet.

The web is changing, as ever, but outrageous claims like this are either a product of ignorance or shameless marketing.

I read this and thought the exact same thing. I'd be willing to bet the author has absolutely no idea about the size of Amazons web infrastructure business.

I would try and use a couple of methods. Firstly highly targeted ads are pretty much a no brainer. Look at ultimate-guitar.com - they are constantly pushing video lessons etc.

Use the data you have and display the most relevant ads possible a la Facebook.

Secondly, I would consider a low cost premium model. Most musicians are desperate to promote themselves so a few dollars a month to get in front of nearly half a million viewers is good value.

You might find many people are looking for band mates as well, a premium model could make this process easier for them and I think would be well worth a few dollars. With half a million users you don't need to get many premium subscribers to earn a decent living from this.

Finally, I would try and contact some advertisers and maybe even record labels or something directly and see if they have any suggestions. They likely have more experience and will probably bite at your ankles to get some exposure on such a targeted network.

Bottom line, try multiple revenue streams and test, test test!

Good luck!

This must be the third time this has been posted.

Looks nice, keep it simple though. There are already a lot of feature full frameworks about that to be honest you can't compete with. I've never used a really lightweight framework like this but I would definitely consider it if I had a project that was the right size.

I think it's a little unfair to make a comparison to something that is essentially illegal against something that is not. I know Spotify has it's flaws both in its business model and catalog but as someone who has used virtually every illegal filesharing method going in the past and has now been converted to Spotify I think they should be given a little more credit.

It's not the fault of Spotify that the collection is limited. At least they are trying to move the music industry into the future - whether it will work or not who knows but I'm sure we will all look back in hindsight and see Spotify as the pioneer of whatever comes.

Very inspiring. If you watch the video interview (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFaCkCRhl2I) she talks about generating traffic and using inbound marketing (including some sneaky tactics!).

They are doing 350,000 uniques a month now with ZERO paid marketing.

Rand from SEOmoz would be proud.