kineticac

If you check-in or pick a team, you are given the option to connect to Facebook. It will then give you a preview of the cross post once you're all connected.

Let me know if that seems confusing (it definitely might be). Great feedback!

That's true Micah, we're actually actively on our way to getting a .com for our next big launch. Thanks for the feedback!

hah, good catch!

we went with copying what works rather than spending too much time trying to re-invent a good homepage. we launched pretty quick, so we tried to focus as much on the core features first as possible.

Hi HN: We just launched FanPulse this morning! It's been an awesome ride so far in the Summer 2010 batch with YC! Please give us any feedback you may have, we hope to build this out so you guys will love it.

Volunteer! Volunteering is awesome. You and your company can go out and do something together with a purpose. It's good to get away from work for a bit, but even better if you're all helping the community out with your time and effort.

I'd highly recommend it. It's so much fun and very rewarding. Many times it is also very humbling.

As a coder, there's a few things I look for:

1. The business person needs to understand that they can't make all the shots. Because they're business doesn't mean they handle all of it, especially product 2. Passionate about your idea, but understand that a technical point of view can greatly change the idea 3. Don't act like an enterprise business person. Don't think about team size as a measure of success for example. 4. Show you can bring more than ideas and opinion to the table. You need to be able to close deals, raise money, talk and persuade, have user acquisition plans that you can execute without code, have a very popular blog, twitter account, and a following of people who respect you already.

Zipties have been awesome for me. When I'm working on a car, when I'm setting anything up, zip ties are strong and reliable, as well as disposable and cheap. You can get the long ones that just work for everything, and if you need longer, just chain them together.

Hey Dan, We started off hosting on Heroku, which at the time defaulted to using postgres. It now supports mysql as well I believe. We never really needed to worry about the db using a framework like Rails.

In my experience, MySQL and PostgresSQL are both awesome choices, and the community support behind them is huge.

That's awesome, I actually didn't know you were at TechCrunch before!

heading down to areas in San Jose, like Mountain View, Cupertino, etc. yields tons of people in every cafe talking / working on tech. Going to a random cafe in Mountain View, you'll be sure to hear people talking about something related to tech and code.

That kind of data may be hard to find for free, at least in a nicely digestible way. At FanPulse, we pay for a feed of stats, which includes live stats as well as historic data as well. These stats providers keep their info tightly cutoff from non-paying clients. I wonder where else you could find it.

Some stats providers we know include: xmlteam and sportsdirectinc.com

I used to obsess over computer games, but one day coding up fun projects and being able to brag about them to my friends was the best game of all. It wasn't so cool to have a high score in a game, at the end of the day it was lame.

Now I play games to study the way they make people obsessed so I can apply it to my own projects.

I'm pretty hooked on a few ngmoco games these days, they have their game engine down to a science!

God has posed many problems for me in the past. I saw all the same problems "there" saw. It would slow down our entire slice on slicehost to a standstill after a few days of running. It was using more resources than everything else combined. I'm not sure how it is now, but we switched to Monit after God and it's been awesome.

I wrote a quick snippet on how we setup the basics of Monit and also talked about God as well: http://artchang.com/?sort=&search=monit

I used to use Monit a lot, but recently started going simpler. We run our entire backend / platform on Heroku, and all our processes are actually DelayedJob workers that run constantly. Using a begin/rescue/ensure we can make sure the "process" here keeps going. It's a little harder to work in a cloud environment, but doing this has saved us from needing any type of sys admin work at all.

It's great using tools like Heroku, who then teams up with awesome other services and then provides great tools to really make life easy as a developer.

They are selective, and it's not actually free. Prices vary depending on what you need. There are some "scholarship" desks from what I know, which are truly free, but that's yet another program. Get in touch with Ryan Spoon / Polaris for info =) They also have Dogpatch Labs in NY and Boston.

Me and my cofounders are residents at Dogpatch Labs in San Francisco. The experience is awesome. The community feel and support is there, and it's so motivating to be around other startups. The coffee, meeting rooms, Internet, and awesome location on a pier in SF is awesome.

I think these environments are great!

I work there 2 or 3 times a week, otherwise i work out of my home office the whole day banging out code. But there are times you just need human interaction and meeting rooms. It's slightly embarrassing asking people to meet with you at home. Being at dogpatchlabs is much more professional :)

Wake

Try to remember what day of the week it is

Check my email from phone

Realize what time it is

Reply to chats and quick urgent stuff from cofounders through meebo iPhone app

Get out of bed and get ready for the day

Then who knows. Work, play, eat, meetings. It's different every day.

Unless you guys are totally friends, and you don't have any clauses in your contracts about any side-projects being property of your current company, I would be careful!

Definitely double check any contracts you have with your company before anything too crazy.

That aside, I'd hate to see talent and potential partnerships get staunched by rules like this. If you have a good fit with someone, definitely hack your way through it to make it happen.

Hey no problem, if you have an Ubuntu box running on slicehost etc. you can follow the following to setup postfix: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Postfix

In terms of sending the mail, you'll need some kind of simple app to talk to the smtp server, for example a rails app that uses ActiveMailer. If you're familiar with rails, this will help: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionMailer/Base.html

Though there are probably even simpler services that can talk to SMTP servers even better, as rails is sort of a lot of overhead just for actionmailer.

Hope that helps!

A few tips I got from a talk at Dogpatch Labs with Jason from Techcrunch and Anthony from VentureBeat:

Talk about competitors to give them a quick understanding of what your product may be, they will be able to quickly see how you are different without trying to understand brand new idea.

Don't use buzzwords because those tend to make everything ambiguous

And the last thing I found out was, sometimes you just have to get lucky or know someone who can help put in a good word for you. FanPulse was able to get mentioned because we were launching right before the superbowl, mostly because the timing was perfect and we had some popular techie people using and promoting us.

It's realyy hard, i don't believe there is that one golden ticket that will for sure get you covered. It's going to be a combination of features, relevance, and outright popularity as an individual.

How many emails will you send? You can setup a small server on slicehost, run a smtp server (you set it up) and write something like a quick rails app to do the work. I believe the cheapest slice on slicehost would be fine at $20 a month. Or go with Heroku and launch a rails app on it for free. It might have enough power to send out daily emails using a Sendgrid service. Sendgrid solutions are basically SMTP servers that handle a lot of things like analytics for you. Easy REST API and ridiculously simple integration with Heroku would be awesome.

I also like the simplicity of jQuery's modules. Take a look of what else they have, it's solid.

YUI has some really amazing things as well, but it's a bit bloated with too many options. You can probably drag and drop something in YUI about 50 different ways, which is neat, but in the end you'll only really need 1.

posted up some thoughts about creating good admin pages (and not wasting time on them, yes, it's possible). Also have a semi step through of how to do it well and quickly with Pilu's web-app-theme generator for apps on the Ruby on Rails framework.

It's sometimes your own fault for being taken advantage of. If the most you can do is quit the job or post on HN about it, then you're not doing enough. You seem smart enough to know when you are being taken advantage of, it's you're fault for letting it happen.

Take risks, make demands, or else you'll never move up in life. Not just about doing your own startup, but even within an existing company. Make an impression, make demands, and if they're treating you badly just work 9-5pm and spend the rest of your time working on a startup idea. Really, there's plenty of ways around this.

It probably helps to just talk it through and see what other people say, but at some point you have to take care of yourself, nobody else will.

that's definitely a good point. balance between real life and work is a must, rather than trying to keep people only at the office. I like the foosball table because it lets everyone step away from work and do something together that's fun and totally different than what they were just doing before.

Punching bag is cool, helps promote health too! Good suggestion.

Glad you took a look at the blog, the fish tank is currently in my house, but if budget permits, I'd like to set one up in the office area too. Saltwater reefs are ridiculously soothing to watch and take care of.

breakfast together sounds like a fun idea =) do they go out somewhere? make it there? cater it?

Thank you for the suggestion. Dishonesty is definitely a much bigger factor to be considered.

The huge response Posterous gets from their fans for every micro feature they release is because they already have a fan base. The more community or users you have who depend on your service, the more they want a feature. If you start off with an empty blog platform with every feature wordpress has, nobody really cares. OR, if you start off with one really distinguishing feature (Post by Email) and you instantly gain a huge user base who like that, they wait in anticipation for all the small features you can find elsewhere.

Posterous has an awesome foundation to build off of, and because of that they have a real advantage. They can get feedback from a lot of users, including requests for features. What to build? That is easily solved just by listening to what people have to say. They can validate features to build, and are justified in their time by the constant requests for these features.

As soon as they release a feature, they know it's going to be big since the community has been asking. And when it's there, the community feels that they were just given what they've been wanting. Nobody blames them for not having it in the first place, knowing this is a growing app, and are glad to be early adopters.

These guys (garry and sachin) are in a great position, and it's nearly impossible for them to NOT build a great product with all the feedback they are getting.

Just a few quick notes on getting an API running with a rails app.