mendable

This looks really good and could see us using this, but the image upload front-end is essential for our needs.

Do you have an ETA on when you are going to be releasing the image upload front-end function?

I just submitted something that I need doing - looking forward to seeing what you guys are capable of doing.

EDIT: One feature I would like to see is for you to have an automatic email confirmation of a submission, including the original submission body itself as a record of what was requested.

Possibly the most impressive thing is the disclosure they are hosting 30,000 sites.

At the lowest monthly plan cost of $29/mo/site thats a $10MM+ annual revenue business created in just 2 years.

Good job!

It takes time for a startup to develop and refine the message and brand that it wants to communicate.

While that unique brand and vision is unclear and unrefined, the closet substitute likely to be "right" is the average of what everyone else is doing.

Have you thought to tap out the Japanese Expat market as an advertising/marketing opportunity?

That might include Japanese people living abroad, students, workers living in the middle east for 12 months, etc

The service could very easily appeal to people living abroad and wanting a reminder of home every month.

Nice idea.

What is the product you are working on?

You talked about about the numbers, but some general idea of the app would be interesting if we are going to follow along with your progress.

This Wired article[1] states that the first co-founder owned 40% of the company and the second co-founder owned 10% of the company at the time of acquisition.

This might suggest they started out with an 80/20 split.

Why? How did that split come about?

[1] http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/04/facebook-buys-instagr...

Nice idea of drag-dropping onto face icons.

You defo need to change the name ASAP to avoid any trademark infringement issues though.

Congrats on the launch!

I'm curious about the previous project - lifegrams.com - I was talking to my OH about a similar idea just a few hours ago.

Would be interested to see a lessons-learned for the previous project. Was it successful, if not as successful as hoped, why not, how much traction, what could have been done differently, etc.

Storing 50TB on Amazon S3 (US-EAST) Premium costs ~ $6,264

Storing 50TB on Amazon S3 (US-EAST) Reduced Redundancy costs ~ $4,160

Storing 50TB on Nimbus: $3,000

Is Nimbus's fault tolerance closer to the Premium S3 or the Reduced Redundancy S3?

(for completeness, Nimbus's transfer out is $0.06 per GB vs Amazon's $0.12 per GB).

This article is great, but it works on the premise that IE6 support is a purely rational discussion by two knowledgeable parties before a contract is signed.

--

In reality, you may develop a website, then the client is visiting their uncle bob one weekend who has an old computer with IE6 lying around, client + uncle bob open up the website to have a look, and it is "broken".

Client then sends you a hate mail about broken contracts.

You reply saying that you discussed IE6 lameness before you started the work.

Client says you were talking jargon, client didn't understand, and you need to fix their website so it loads on their uncle bob's computer otherwise they are suing you for not delivering a working website.

Good luck with that :)

If you are in the UK with a UK bank account, you are going to need a UK gateway and merchant account - unless you relocate. It's just part of the "know your customer" anti-money-laundering deal that all western countries have between their governments and their banks that make it difficult to set up abroad. It might be possible, but it's just extra headache.

I would suggest looking at Recurly as your integration endpoint for a few reasons:

1) Multi-currency. Some people claim it's "expensive" as as $200/mo add-on, but the extra conversions from geo-targetting visitors with their native currency make this a no-brainer, especially for UK companies.

2) Data portability. You can leave Recurly in 5 years if you want to write your own recurring billing app or switch to somewhere else and they will give you your data.

3) Not having your customer's CC details held at the gateway (Recurly are best described as a value-add intermediary) means you should be able to easily switch out gateways later on. This is a key architectural choice that I don't think people pay enough attention to, and Recurly really don't promote it enough. Chargify etc do not do this, instead they store your customer's details at the gateway and have no power to retrieve them ever again.

4) Supports VAT.

The down side to Recurly is their API is a bit messy. Their hosted payment pages and "transparent API" appear to be next to useless if you want to also record extra information (e.g, username) as part of the signup process in a seemless way.

With regards to payment gateway, pick any payment gateway from here: http://recurly.com/features/payment-gateway-support

The truth is, it really doesn't matter. As long as it is working, and your bank/merchant account doesn't put a hold or delay on your income.

Don't stress about the transaction fees. People get too hung up on a percentage point, with the frame of reference that "when we've got $10m in revenue, that 1% is worth $100,000)", but honestly, when you get to that point, you will have enough business savvy to re-negotiate or look for a better deal then. When you don't have any customers, it really doesn't matter.

What other areas need a Wufoo?

Asking the wrong question?

What about asking, "How has taking this amount of funding helped this business?"

Strategically, this much funding through all of the controversy it has generated, will guarantee this company/brand gets in front of nearly every early adopter over the next couple of weeks.

It will drive hundreds of thousands of people to try it out.

And that's before they've spent a penny of it.

Loads of Posts on HN alone excitedly linking to the app on Android etc (one on the front page right now).

After that, it will sink or swim on it's own merit.

Would that have happened if they hadn't taken this funding? No. It would have had 5 minutes on TechCrunch, and then been forgotten about because it may not have been remarkable.

Now all they need to do is implement a business model / some way to make money from it so their per-user revenue exceeds their cost of user acquisition, and use the remaining $38,000,000 as a marketing budget to spread it to everyone else. Profit.

Nice idea, have signed up to try it out.

Really would like a faceted search function to filter and search users with specific skills, the "browse users" list is fairly useless as-is.

Also needs a "close account" function.

Interesting idea. Also like the natural virality of the service.

If the system does not support it already, something worth considering is a function allowing the person making the list to upload a photo of themselves to be displayed on their wish list page.

This will re-assure the "buyers" they are on the correct page, not just some random list of products on the internet :)

+1, iSSH on the iPhone.

I am often intrigued by people debating what language should be the first language other dev's learn.

It seems as if people argue for the language they picked up first / have most experience in.

I believe the correct answer is not a direct answer, but something along the lines of "it doesn't matter, so long as you learn several, well".