moeamaya

Architect + Technologist here.

When I saw the OMA and DS+R logos on your marketing site, I thought no way it's the Architecture firms...prob some niche technology companies in Europe.

But lo and behold, you guys did build their new websites! For the HN crowd, OMA and DS+R are at the top of the field...as a tech analog maybe comparable to Stripe and OpenAI.

I've been diving deep into the finding the right headless CMS and so far have found most either lacking or too expensive (Contentful anyone?). At the moment, hacking away at Netlify's React CMS, but it's a struggle.

Excited to check out your product especially since it's used for architecture firms I love and respect!

Both ourselves and our fellow bootstrap friends have eerily similar tales of CC debt as our first investors. $30k for a nearly profitable bootstrap founder is rocket fuel.

Similarly didn't understand the value add of Netlify, until I tried it. Now I can't imagine going back to the S3 bucket + Cloudfront setup.

BTW on our Middleman Netlify app, the assets generated are served up by a Cloudfront domain, so I'm assuming that's what they are using. You can inspect the page: https://monograph.io/

JSONB in pgSQL fills in so nicely for steps 1-4. Once you need columns and relationships, the relational store is already there!

Agreed Invision can be way too feature rich. Redpen (https://redpen.io/) does an amazing job of filling that void. They boast tens of thousands of paying users, how are you planning to market based on Invision and Redpen as incumbents?

Checked out your profile, is your side hustle a combination of books and teaching or do you have another product?

Solid ideas but I think they may struggle with lower margins. With flights you save X00s but with Amazon X0s. Saw this with all the Airbnb for...since hotel replacement is similarly a higher margin/value purchase.

On that note you may be able to this with cars, hotels, real estate, luxury watches, computers, etc

And HNers wonder "Why do so few people major in computer science?"

Enabling potential CS Majors to encounter technically-unencumbered problems is a great first step!

Unfortunately seemed like there were hints of this eventual demise when Gagan was interviewed by Jason Calacanis: http://thisweekinstartups.com/gagan-biyani-sprig/.

YC-backed SpoonRocket had just announced their shutdown, and Gagan was put on the defensive. Touting unit economics, an optimized menu, and food delivery innovation, the reality was, as others have mentioned, the company was a glorified restaurant with delivery. Ultimately I do think these companies made an impact but may have been a few years to early (pre self-driving). High-quality, healthy, on demand food is an inevitability but the labor costs are still prohibitive. I'm genuinely excited for the day I can get a delivered grilled, free-range chicken breast and seasonal veggies for $6!

Routinely spent $40 on a taxi from Boston (Logan) Airport to Cambridge (Central Square) as a student. Couldn't really afford it but redeyes often leave one lacking for options. To your point of regulation and pricing, I'd happily accept less "professionalism" for a sensible discount—say $10-15 rides.

Damn, we do the same. Their marketing truly is powerful that we pay for something we'll need "real soon"

Ah okay that makes a ton of sense with how dynamic the site now is. Looking back now, would you have still gone with a static site generator or started with something dynamic (question we're pondering now with monograph.io which is middleman)?

Also on the marketing team, I got head-faked by the growth freelancer, and assumed you went with a dynamic CMS to get more help. But man impressed with how much you still do!

Hey Jonnie! I'm super curious about the move away from Siteleaf (esp since you're so close to the Oak guys), and how you+marketing team ended up on Craft?

Kickstarter was especially lucky to have you from the beginning. Because of the humble person you are you would never state this but I would attribute a decent amount of their success to your empathetic nature. Sustaining (note not growing) a community of creative makers is not about code and product, but of communication. Congrats on all your accomplishments and contributions. We need more people like you in tech!

The tough thing about running a maker community is makers don't want to sit around all day to browse products and comment. But you know who does? Growth Hackers.

I say this coming from my own experience growing a community of hardware hackers who have even less of an inclination to chat since they aren't always in front of a computer.

Most likely referring to the deeply segregated neighborhood population percentages.

http://graphics.wsj.com/baltimore-demographics/ http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/data/bal-baltimore-segregat... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/28/baltimore-segregate...

Short answer yes. We make it a point to add the processing fees to the client's invoice. Since we use Stripe its 2.9% + 30¢.

There's a bunch of different ways to invoice your client with a credit card option. The two we've used are our accounting software https://www.xero.com/and one time invoice with https://slimvoice.co/ (which as an additional $1 to the fees).

If you're based in California, we wrote detailed steps when we incorporated earlier this year: https://dixonandmoe.com/writing/how-to-form-an-llc-in-califo...

The $800/year is indeed painful but it's cost of doing business (and maintaining continuity).

In theory css parallax is brilliant and should replace all bloated js versions. In practice, it's unusable. We spent 40 hours as two experienced frontend engineers trying to get the example to work on a relatively simple example but it requires such a specific markup that it became too convoluted. Eventually I gave in and looked for a js solution but those were much larger and slower than we wanted. Ultimately, ended up writing a short 100-line open source vanilla js lib, and a bunch of folks seemed to be having our same issues: https://github.com/dixonandmoe/rellax. That said I still love to explore the extents of css' capabilities but this is one time where it fell short.

Well done Ooshma!!

Two-parter, what's your favorite dish at Gobble and will you be updating the Gobble branding to match the beautiful illustration work from your slides??

I was expecting a great technical product that needed a serious visual overhaul, but Pinegrow is already a very slick product! Also impressed/petrified by the story of going all in on the idea without any traction or an mvp, but what a great end result :)

Strangely enough, this happened last year. Ballast Point was somehow able to sell six-packs of beer @ $16 when all it's competitors were fighting each other around the $10-12 price point. Keep scaling those margins up then get bought out for $1 billion: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ballast-point-beer-dea...

Slightly confusing and elaborate position based on https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-j.... Do you mind expanding?

There was a YC company a few years back that got acquired by Palantir in February that did something very similar. https://www.kimonolabs.com/

This is a huge pain point when initially developing web applications—spinning up redis instance, pub/sub, dirtying up models/controllers. I mean even facebook struuugggled with their +1 notification bug for years.

If you can somehow normalize and create systematic best practices for notifications, this could be a very large SaaS product.

To be fair, Hacker School / Recurse Center is a considerably large brand name and is doing imperative work in the programming education sector.

Regardless your anecdote does parallel other YC companies' in that a Brian Chesky email is tantamount to a first year YC founder's or as you mentioned a founder from batches over half a decade old.

I generically agree with your sentiment, but there are often times where a simple question causes me to reconsider humanities' goals. These "boring" questions become stratified and ultimately challenge and provide friction to my strongly held beliefs, where that which was once uninteresting has become supremely relevant.

PG is a boss and has done more for startups than anyone I know, but he isn't beyond critique. Boring questions are ripe with depth outside the capacity of CS and tech entrepreneurs, and deal with the realities of everyday people.

Thanks for adding the links daveguy!

1) The stack is Rails and Postgres on Heroku, static assets (video/images) on S3/Cloudfront, and transloadit for video processing. $2500 isn't a crazy sum but the project doesn't make any money and the value for us is mostly the fact we created the website. Like any public project, the other non-intuitive costs are maintenance and customer support. We love that it's become a resource so we're moving everything to a static site and keeping the work archived.

The new beta is focused on B2B (with a need) and a lot of the manual processes of uploading and formatting projects has been automated, which is how we can offer the "human" element.

2) We had zero spend on advertising since the content is so damn compelling. A couple of projects hit the top of reddit/fb/HN.

3) The "main" project is our digital consultancy in SF which a small part came as a result of Monograph exposure. The business is growing, but we really enjoy building products so the beta is a primary focus for us this year.

As a poor Mexican from Arizona who went to MIT, this story hits close to home. But after much reflection, I believe the sad reality has a enduring positive legacy which has only begun.

While perhaps not following the paradigm of success we on HN often consider, the team's victory in the competition and subsequent publicity became a widely distributed step-function for an entire generation of down trodden Latinos. Although anecdotal, I've witnessed a large swath of family and friends become engineers, go to med school or start their own business. This viable reality was made possible by the previous generation taking chances and working incredibly hard.

I admit that I've been envious in the past of my immigrant friends with parents who are from India, China and Korea, where studiousness and achievement are default conditions for upbringing. But I'm excited to see an inflection point in the Mexican culture and it starts with stories like these!

Any write ups why your team moved from Ember to React? Seems like the recent tenets of Ember coincide with Reacts's componentized architecture and one-way data. Also if you were able to convince the team to go from Ember to React, appears as though the opportunity to switch to clojurescript was there (although react is the hotness right now so convincing was probably easier).