mion

The problem with startups and older folks is that they're usually not good early adopters. And a lot of them are not very fond of tech in general.

So, IMO it would be very hard to bring disruptive technology to a segment of the population that is very reluctant to change.

Obviously this won't be the case for our generation.

I guess I'm not the only one suffering from self-doubt. I think this is hard to notice since since people don't talk about it that much.

If you ask me, I'd say you have some pretty impressive accomplishments!

I wouldn't say it's obvious. A lot of people have self-doubt. I for one don't know if I would be able to build something like Dropbox, for instance. But I guess the key here is to try anyway and learn along the process. Paul Buchheit said he wasn't qualified to build Gmail when they asked him to.

Ok I'm taking your word. Amazing how a just few words can be so comforting.

Solely based on my post, I guess. I did apply to YC once with a stupid idea.

Let me quote Derek Sivers: "To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions."

http://sivers.org/multiply

Stuff like this make me wonder if we really need all the things we think we need to be happy, if we really need to "solve the money problem" or would a simple and humble life be enough?

I was (am) having the same problem, so recently I've decided to join other people to see if that helps me commit to an idea (wasn't even my own). And it does!

IMHO I think you should struggle some more with your discipline problem, and then join an institution such as a start-up, HackerSchool, etc. Internships and programs are great because of the experience you'll get, knowledge and so on, but your lack of discipline when nobody's watching you will still probably be there afterwards. But that's just my opinion!

I was asking myself the same question the other day.

Well, for now if you're using/know Rails, maybe you could take a look at this: https://github.com/RailsApps/rails-recurly-subscription-saas

There are also other great Ruby gems/Rails projects that do Authentication (https://github.com/plataformatec/devise) , E-commerce (https://github.com/spree/spree), etc! That's why I love the Ruby community.

Are you sure your number one issue is discipline? I'm in a similar position to you and I had also realized that I lacked discipline, but nowadays I think it's actually a matter of doing what you're into.

And recently I came across one of Paul Graham's essays that resonates with my thinking. Quoting pg (http://paulgraham.com/hs.html): "Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same with all of them. They have little discipline. They're all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they're not interested in. One still hasn't sent out his half of the thank-you notes from his wedding, four years ago. Another has 26,000 emails in her inbox.

I'm not saying you can get away with zero self-discipline. You probably need about the amount you need to go running. I'm often reluctant to go running, but once I do, I enjoy it. And if I don't run for several days, I feel ill. It's the same with people who do great things. They know they'll feel bad if they don't work, and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks to start working. But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary.

Do you think Shakespeare was gritting his teeth and diligently trying to write Great Literature? Of course not. He was having fun. That's why he's so good."

How can bug fixes and enhancements not impact their work?

I know it can be a pain in the ass when people ask you the same (stupid) thing over and over again, but still, IMHO a "leader" of any kind should never bash his "followers". Or he'll end up losing them.

with the expectation you'll improve before wasting the reviewer's time again When you insult people and act like a jerk I don't think you want them to come back ever again.

He's not talking about lowering the bar to entry, he's just saying you don't need to humiliate others when they are just trying to help you.

You could at least dismiss them in a friendly/neutral way. "Sorry, can't accept this: check out procedure X in the docs."

I second this, cool :)

This may be a stupid question but what do you mean by "Style Influence"? Googled it and still I couldn't figure it out :(

If you don't write code I'm sorry to disappoint you, but in real life one cannot "rotate" and "zoom in" certain parts of an algorithm.

I think that's pretty hard to answer shortly, but suppose you found out that from all your users, 70% of them created albums and played with it when you released that feature. Obviously this is something they want. When that percentage is lower but still significant it can be hard to tell, if that's what you mean. But then I think it depends a lot, it's very subjective indeed!

Sounds cool! :) And definitely not something easy to build. But why are you building this, why would someone want a web desktop? What problem are you trying to solve? <friendly and curious questions>

"but I filled mine out in under a half hour" See this: http://lloyd.tc/how-we-hacked-the-y-combinator-application-p...

It took them one month to fill out theirs.

if it's not, at least they got three schmucks talking about it

Are they all getting 500 emails/day?

Nice work on the UI. But I think what he meant with "to-do list" is that he has no control of what people can put on his inbox, and that he has to waste time reading emails before he knows what that person wants. To solve something like this you'd have to have this problem in the first place, so talking to a lot of powerful people is what I'd do in the beginning (and that's why it's a hard problem to attack IMO).

I'm thinking of taking a stab at this idea too.

I don't think so. At least for me the plane ticket is way over $600 (and I'm willing to spend a lot more just to be interviewed by these people)

There's not enough "hummm"

Well, do you like math?

I think the first thing you need to do is actually learn to like math. If you really enjoy doing math stuff, if you can see the beauty in it, then you can learn it from the shittiest of sources. I used to suck at math in high school, but after joining a prep course I started liking it and one year later I was teaching it to other people.

Suppose a friend of yours wanted to learn how to code, but he keeps telling you how he hates it. You can give him the best book on the XYZ language written by the most awesome hacker in the world, show him some more friendly resources like CodeSchool or whatever but it won't work. Have you ever heard of a programmer who doesn't like to code?

My two cents!

It looks cool and I'd totally use something like that, but the demo page has too many stuff on it which kinda scared me away.

"Ouch, Ruby! You need some aloe for that burn?" It seems like every language/framework should be able to handle 1.5 billion queries per day without problems. Otherwise it sucks, right?

Not sure if it can handle big repos very well, I just threw in Twitter vs Facebook for fun and I got stuck with the "secret of life" message. But it's pretty neat! :)

You're certainly right about users being turned off by a small user base, but as an entrepreneur you should "break the rules" now and then! Or be a little "naughty" as pg says.

I've had the same problem as you once so I created some fake users and some fake content just so it wouldn't look like an abandoned web site or something. I didn't read this in article or anything, but I'm pretty sure this helps to "break the ice" for new users!

There's a channel on YouTube called "Ask Jay" that has some interesting videos where Jay Adelson answers questions about investors, VC, etc. Could be useful!

Good luck on your second round.