naithemilkman

Glad that helped :). But again this is from my point of view which I really want to hammer home -- the 'startup entreprenuer' archetype.

At one point he was saying that a particular data viz too him a better part of 1 month and it only occupied 2 pages in his book. Oh man, thats determination!

This sounds interesting to me. There was a period of time I wanted to visualise the networks of relationships on my social network just to see if there was any thing interesting. I tried to do it myself but couldnt get anything meaningful or substantiate out of the dataset due to my lack of knowledge and time. I also couldnt tie that time spent messing around with the data sets to the company KPI.

So some suggestions that will aid a startup entrepreneur archetype:

1) How can visualising data help increase my KPI at various stages. I suspect not so much for a pre product market fit company but thats something for you to think about.

2) Instead of hiding the samples behind your main column, bring them to the front.

I remember watching video on TED about this journalist turned data visualisation evangelist a while ago. You won't happen to be him would you? :)

It has to be first and foremost useful to people. So IMO you gotta fake it till you make it and here here's my suggestion: create 'fake accounts' and start scraping tons of recipes online to populate your site. Start working the SEO so when people show up, it doesn't look like the site is dead.

You have to invest time into the bloggers and try to incentivise then to join your site. You can start by listing the food bloggers that you like on the site (do follow) and slowly build up a relationship with them by regularly commenting on their posts.

Your first 1000 active users are going to be super important and will set the culture for the next 1000000 users. So even if the the current marketing efforts dont 'scale' very well, you still need to put in the grunt work to get escape velocity and some level of critical mass in your community.

How about going to events where there might be many of your target audience present to establish comms with them as well?

While Im at it, I think your homepage doesnt have a clear message. I can guess what the site is about from the food pictures but as Steve Krug says, what make me think?

You mean it just takes a fixed amount of time to internalise yourself with a new field of study just like anything else? And for programming that lead time is about 6 months to get up to speed?

google is so going to buy twitter.

thanks for the list guys

I am currently one of these guys in transition. Using Gladwell's 10,000 hour as a proxy for mastery. I estimate getting between 100 - 250 hours of programming time is good enough to get a working MVP out.

Does anyone think this is overly optimistic or unrealistic?

yeah thats a max figure for sure. scary isnt it? i was trying to be conservative :P

True that. But I suppose the lure of the city has always been in place for a student with a debt of £1k or £10k.

The problem is systemic.

1. Startups can't recruit overseas students or highly skilled workers anymore without applying for a tier 2 sponsorship license. Talking about lead time of 1 1/2 months and jumping through admin hoops for approval.

2. Local students are starting school with a bigger debt due to increases in tuition fees. Now if I was a young talented programmer with a big debt (average debt of a student now is around £18K. I estimate this to increase to about £24K), the glowing lights of the city looks very attractive.

I've always felt academics and entrepreneurs are really cut from the same ilk.

As entrepreneurs, we try to increase the overall wealth of the economy and if we are able to push it out by a little, we've succeeded. In the same way, academics are trying to increase the boundary of human knowledge and if they are able to contribute something new and unique to their field, they be considered to be successful.

However, once in a while, an entrepreneur/academic makes a complete earth shattering business/discovery that takes the game to a whole new level. Think Facebook and Newtonian laws for examples.

The first rule of working at Apple - No one talks about Apple.

thank you for confirming my suspicions

Broadly speaking, its hard to get a job at a VC straight out of school. This applies to PE/HF as well. If you look at the resume of the associates (the lowest position) at such firms, you would see that they would have had a few years of experience at either an investment bank or a consultancy firm. So, to answer your question, stopping short of doing something remarkable, apply for a position in an bank and look to move after 2-3 years.

sorry, catster beat you to it!

I've been thinking about this for a long time too. One of the questions Im sure other people in a similar boat would ask is: which programming language?