nader

looks promising

From personal experience with a family (two kids) my best time to work on a side project was always between 0am and 2/3am. The only downside is that this doesn't work for a longer period of time as you are getting more and more burned out.

The mornings don't work for me as they start pretty early.

Even though I mostly end up in the middle of nowhere this surely makes me want to travel :)

I'm using Arq as well. Easy to setup, reliable through AWS S3 and encrypted on the client.

Rent has exploded in Berlin and is continuing to climb in Berlin. Also if you look outside the city center, i.e. in Friedrichshain, Kreuzberg oder Prenzlauer Berg.

As single developer you wouldn't need 85qm, true. As a couple you probably want to have min. 50-60qm. My personal taste obviously, but I have a family with two kids and we need more than that :)

yes that would be awesome and I'd join as well.

Avg. rent in Berlin is €1000, Avg. Lunch 8€, Beer 0.80€, Internet €23 ... more info here: http://bondero.com/startup-cost-comparison

pretty cool. how do you syndicate products? through amazon's API or by hand?

we tried box and dropbox and went with dropbox as it supports LAN-Sync (tremendously helpful when you are shoving around Photoshop files) which box didn't at the time and the Linux client.

Income is often called passive but essentially there is always something you need to do, monitor, improve or change in order to keep cash flow steady. If you don't, your income will decrease over time until reaching zero. It is surely easier to maintain "passive income" than to start from scratch.

Much better, now they just need to get their client interface modernised :)

"Don't half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing", i.e. "Kill early and often, keeping it alive is not good enough":

http://bondero.com/kill-early-and-often-startup-methodology

It is not my last name, actually my last name is too complicated to even type it into a browser (cserny) :)

Thanks for your feedback!

:) probably negative right?

Berlin, definitely. It is the best mix of everything you need.

have you tried our thinkery.me yet?

If you are from the USA then this might be very true!

Your hiring process sounds great from a company perspective. I just wonder how it really works out and if you find enough people this way. I've experienced that when you take too much time to screen devs, put too much test-effort on them, evaluate for a longer period of time ... they might just as well go to work somewhere else.

the first question to ask back would be what you consider a "successful launch on HN"?

with our service thinkery.me we had what we would define as success after launching on HN: we got initial traction, a lot of great feedback and signups. we have been refining the service and growing since then.

If you haven't done anything like this for the past I would say that as much as it is a pain in the ass you probably can also learn a lot from it and you will get out of the job with a lot of experience in refactoring, testing, bugfixing and deploying. You could also see it as a chance to establish a long lasting relationship and a boost in confidence and salary if you do it right.

You could just use thinkery.me and make your stream public for that.

I use thinkery.me

Our own: http://thinkery.me

This is a work in progress and early beta but maybe a useful experiment. I came up with it after Google announced they would be looking at ad placements on websites.

I hope you won't find any embarassing errors :-)

I'm very happy to hear your feedback on what could be improved (like looking at multi-multi-word links, following cloaked affiliate links, etc.)

This will surely impact a lot of those typical adsense-optimized niche websites. In case you're interested I wrote a longer piece here: http://www.brandinfection.com/2012/01/20/google-improves-ran...

Sounds very handy, looks unfinished. How far aka functional is it?

the results were pretty good, actually

Congrats! The hard part is to retain a couple of those new readers though :)

Gumroad looks a bit more polished but what I'm missing with all those services is some sort of browse section. (is that only after logging in?) ... Ok you can share it via twitter or other networks but browsing around makes me impulsively buy more than just seeing one link on twitter :)

Has anybody seen venture capital firms invest in webcoding / outsourcing providers yet?