kineticac

Even if you lived on Sandhill next to all the big VC's, it's not like you're going to be able to raise money from all of them any better.

Fanvibe's backend is hosted on Heroku. We have 10 processes pulling in real-time sport stats every 1.25 seconds each. Our product has also been adopted by the NBA (yes, the national basketball association) and we power all of their apps across all mobile and web. In a nutshell, we're serving tons of users, and have huge peak times during the evenings when there's tons of games, and everything works great.

We have stats, an API, web / mobile destinations, and a boatload of users.

At Fanvibe, we do have an office, but I'm only there 3 or 4 times a week, and I work from coffee shops wherever I can go.

Recently I wrote a quick article about spending a week in Hawaii doing good work.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1991010

gmail, news.ycombinator.com, fanvibe.com, localhost:3000, and a million google search results

being very creative would work, but would it be bad to travel and work? I wonder if there's a cost efficient way. I didn't rent an office, I basically just paid for some coffee and camped out at a few cafes.

pattern seems to be yc alumni

definitely. i'll see you in hawaii ;)

This looks pretty cool. As a startup, any savings is worth it. Problem is, my app is too matured to try a few things that aren't proven / stable yet. I will wait to see if Heroku official includes this as an add-on. If so, I'm totally down.

I could implement it myself, but if it's coming and implemented by a team who's dedicated a lot more time than I can, then it's worth it.

Just my take on going to a nice place to work.

It's hard to see this work for smaller startups. Dropbox has always been for smaller consumers, at least the free version. Dropbox for Teams seems like a good step for bigger companies that share a lot of large files. Internet startups probably can just upgrade their individual plans and manage their files wisely.

I'd like a small team version, that would be pretty sweet. 50GB would suffice.

Congratulations Crowdbooster team!

These guys are awesome, they helped a lot of companies out already with their social media optimization.

If you ever modify libraries or extend them, you should spend just a little more time submitting those somehow. You learn a lot by taking a few small cycles in making it worthy of adding to open source projects. If the modifications are production ready, then they should definitely be good enough contribute.

if you're looking for upvotes and horrahs just for the sake of "great idea," it won't be here on HN. If this service helps and benefits the HN community, you will get feedback. Like you said, value real customer feedback.

If your glory was hinging on HN feedback, I hope they are your main target users. If not, then it's not a problem at all.

All day! If I can, I try to only set timers for 8 hours. Not that I always sleep 8 hours, just that I goto bed whenever I'm tired, and wakeup when I'm well rested. The rest of the time I work.

That being said, I also take a day off, an afternoon off, etc. just to keep myself from burning out.

Some people don't work well in a routine manner. Startups are so dynamic too, so if you're in that realm of things, it's almost impossible to have a routine schedule.

Going to bed every night, knowing you won't have to wakeup for 8 hours, is really comforting. I usually wakeup before my timer goes off, but it's way better sleep.

Unfortunately this can't always happen, especially with meetings and such.

What if what you really hate is getting other opinions on how good it is? You say "in my opinion at least," and you hate trying to convince people, and finding a winning strategy. What if instead of trying to force yourself in, you figure out why these people aren't responding and how you can make them come to you? Maybe your idea only sounds good to you. Marketing, selling, etc. is not just trying to get something through to someone else, it's learning what they actually think is good and cool, or what is bad and needs to change. Your mentality and approach could be wrong. Not sure if this is the case, just a possible scenario.

For hiring, sometimes I just want to see the candidate's github account and tech blog. That will say more than the old school resumes.

Fanvibe (YCs10) was a late application. We interviewed at the late interview weekend round.

Joe and I had applied the year before with an idea that didn't make it. We were a bit discouraged, and our next venture, which was Fanvibe, was already doing pretty well. We didn't think we needed YC, but boy were we wrong.

YC was the best thing we could have done for Fanvibe! We had metup with Harj the week before the late interviews, and he let us know that YC would absolutely be perfect for us.

That was good enough for us to immediately try for it.

I made a blog post about our experience here: http://artchang.com/y-combinator-experience

it will fail when you realize you aren't 100% passionate about what you're doing.

we fail every day, maybe every hour. If you realize you're failing, that actually translates to you being aware enough to know what's going wrong.

By knowing what's wrong, you can fix it. If you're totally dedicated and obsessed, failure is just part of the process.

Failure also happens often, there's just one massive failure at the end which is basically representative of an individual who has finally found an excuse to quit something they're not totally in love with.

Startups end as a failure because the founders choose to see it that way. There's no other concrete reason why.

Load Olark and really any other third party script after the DOM is ready!

it's another source of motivation. we each push each other to do more and more. of course the best source is a regular set of users telling you want they want, but the need to show new improvements each week is akin to making parents/friends proud of something you worked on.

who knew so many of us were trying for it again!

I think you should reapply. Joe and I applied the year before and got an interview, but it was on a totally different idea, and we were rejected.

We came back again with a much better product, and it showed that even though that first idea failed hard, we still were working together and improved a lot more.

Just make sure if it's the same idea, it's dramatically better.

there's a video at the end that's worth watching btw ;)

never thought about using it as a tool for flirting or breaking the ice. but sounds like a perfect way for geeks to have fun!

There's often a lot more under the surface of what goes on at a YC company. Sure it's just a few more iPad games, but the unique aspects of them were not accidental.

awesome coverage everywhere for inDinero! Looks to really be catching on as something people need and want to use.

It's really rare to see a 1 founder startup do so well, but if you ever meet Ray in person, you'll know he's completely capable!

Ray's helped Fanvibe's SEO out so far, we're loving his tools! Try out Ginzametrics, it's really slick.

This is really nice. I love how it's easily integrated UNO third parties!

Definitely going to be using the YCommonApp in the near future for hiring to Fanvibe! This is an awesome way to find potential hires.

Nice work guys.

Someone put together a pretty good google spreadsheet of YCombinator (and other early stage investment groups) startups at least: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkkhSN3vaY4jdF90b1l1...

As you can see, this list gets ridiculously large. It's probably not that useful to see every single startup.