mkull

Not saying that 15Billion isn't ridiculous, but the formula is n't nearly as simple as

value_per_user = valuation / num_users

+1 to SEO

Best way to get early free traffic is with good SEO. Organic traffic is free, optimize for it! (read semoz!)

Submit your site and it contents to every online directory / listing service possible. Submitting our product data to Google Product search (froogle) has worked out great for us (tons of free traffic)

Absolutely depends on what you are doing.. 3-4k hits (unique visitors) a day for an ecommerce website at a 1-2% conversion rate is 60-80 orders. I with an ecommerce startup. With that volume I'd be driving a lambo.

revzilla.com is a rails-based application on several dedicated servers hosted by Rackspace

Pricey, but they are good.

you have a long way to go.

I second edw, find a niche, don't try and compete with Amazon. Plenty of niche markets with relatively high margins.

Drop-ship availability will determine whether you can start out of your garage or not. (unless you have a reallly big garage and make that your fulfillment center)

It isn't weighted properly you are correct, however it is a good guideline to cover your bases.

I appreciate the tips, but at the moment we have pretty much all of your points covered

- We are currently using asset hosts (assets0..assets3.revzilla.com) (Rails provides this functionality out of the box with 2.0)

- All static content IS served by nginx, only the rails requests are being served by mongrel. All static assets are also sent with the appropriate cache headers

- css sprites are used sparingly where appropriate, however they are not a silver bullet, and you run into cross browser issues pretty quickly (namely safari)

- We are working on reducing the number of images at the moment. In general I would rather have a site which is true to the original design and then optimize from there, rather then cutting corners early on.

Yeah there have been many internal debates about this, and much effort has been spent on reducing the number of objects on the page while maintaining the look / feel.

Any suggestions are welcome!

Currently getting an 81 on yslow which isn't terrible for how hefty the site is

At the moment most items are drop shipped, eventually we will be moving to create our own fulfillment center

Hey guys, many long days and many long nights but we have finally launched. RevZilla is a motorsports superstore carrying 10's of thousands of different motorcycle, dirtbike and atv related products.

The system it is running off of was built from scratch in Rails, with a PostgreSQL backend. We are also heavily relying on Apache Solr (and the acts_as_solr plugin) to power our product browse / search pages, and use it to provide some very cool faceted search capabilities.

I applied for YC funding two years ago with a different idea and got rejected (for valid reasons). We did not apply for funding with this startup for two reasons, one was we did not need external funding, we have been able to bootstrap this far. The second reason was we wanted to stay in the Philadelphia area, our industry connections are here and we are also opening up a retail store. So since this is not a purely tech startup, the benefits of being in the valley or Boston are a bit less.

Please give us some feedback on what you guys think, and if anyone wants to chat about implementation or other specific details drop me a line, my email is in my profile.

you failed the puzzle

Authorize.NET (gateway) -> Paymentech (processor)

Riding the rails for http://www.revzilla.com

Yes, I would recommend it. Use the handy ActiveMerchant plugin. Do you have any special requirements? What is your expected transaction volume?

Rackspace had a big power outtage today which knocked us offline today for 2 hours. Looks like they were effected by the same problem.

---

 In a completely unrelated incident to this weekend's power problems in DFW, a traffic accident caused damage to a power transformer which provides utility power to our DFW data center. Here is the current sequence of events:

    * At approximately 6:00 p.m. CST utility power was lost to the DFW data center
    * Power automatically switched over to backup generators without disrupting service for any customers
    * When generator power was established two chillers within the data center failed to start back up
    * Utility power was re-established through a secondary utility source
    * As a result of temporary data center temperature increases, we proactively shutdown a number of customer servers to protect them from overheating

3.5GPA

May sound cocky, but did not put forth a whole lot of effort in my classes. I put in enough to get a B (or an A if the class was interesting or easy) but 90% of my time (and learning) was spent working on my own projects.

Work on your SEO Bountii! A big source of your traffic is going through your organic search rankings. Theres some very simple things you can do which will give you a big boost. http://www.websitegrader.com/wsgid/361302/default.aspx

Rewrite your urls, eg: http://bountii.com/search.php?item=ipod%20touch%208gb should be something like http://bountii.com/ipod-touch-8gb

Congrats on getting something up, you have a long way to go though.

Just to clarify a bit, he is being conservative, and it's 5 req/sec per mongrel (4 mongrels), which would come out to 20 req/sec for the vps setup.

nerds

24

Thats because Authorize.NET is sold through a network of resellers who pretty much dictate the rates. If you contact Authorize.NET directly though you will be directed to a sales rep who can disclose rates.

Heres a ballpark of what you can expect with them:

Merchant Account ~ 2.4% per transaction + $.25 per transaction + $10/month

Payment Gateway $100 setup + ~$20 a month and.10 per transaction

You will need them for a Payment Gateway, but you may have a merchant account with someone else (for instance Paymentech)

I have had good experience with Auth.NET in the past and they seem to be a good value for medium transaction volume ecommerce sites.

Yes, they were running coldfusion until about 2 years ago, at which point they switched to a hybrid solution of Blue Dragon (ColdFusion running on .NET) and ASP.NET.

http://highscalability.com/myspace-architecture

yes, they are.

Oracle and MSSQL are right off the table.

Personally I prefer PostgreSQL, but if you are a database newb I would recommend MySQL. (I really don't mean that in a bad way, MySQL is easier to use as a beginner, and it has proven it can scale)

I second the thought that 44mm seems like a ridiculously large round of financing for what they are trying to do. How could they possibly justify raising that much? (I'm honestly very curious) They must have something big and different planned

very nice site. congrats on the launch.

played with it a bit and it was very addictive, enjoyed the intro video as well haha

very cool idea.. was not expecting much but was pretty immediately hooked. I like it. get a designer and spruce up that UI!

Don't forget IAC (InterActiveCorp), they have been behind many acquisitions in the past several years.

Notably: Insider Pages, Expedia, CollegeHumor, Ask.com, Hotwire, LendingTree and many others

bullshit.

ideas are cheap, implementation is hard.

I am very competent web app developer, with several major applications under my belt. While on the surface you might think you will be able to whip out a clone of one of the popular web apps easily (let alone a brand new idea) but you will find the devil is in the details. What makes or breaks those sites are the thousands of minute implementation level decisions which build up to make a quality application.

rails + postgres

Hey Larry. Thanks for posting this. I could hear everything Paul said and that is good enough for me.

Do you have videos from any of the other lectures? If you do please post them, I am sure I (and everyone else who wasn't there) would be very appreciative