noodle

Force yourself to go to the gym on a regular schedule and work out for an hour a day M-F. Before work, after work, whenever. Just schedule it and do it.

For me, the key has been to realize that I'm not "wasting" or "losing" the time I spend at the gym. I feel like shit when I haven't done any physical activity, so I'm investing a few hours a week so that I can get more done in the normal work day.

This is going to be correlated to what the web developer is doing more than anything else.

Doing .net work? Windows.

Doing Rails? Probably OSX.

Doing Python? Slight edge towards linux.

Java? Toss up.

Etc..

This is sane advice if you're playing the standard VC game where you shop around for a co-founder, raise funds, and build a product (not necessarily in that order).

OP's situation sounds more like a bootstrapped small business where he invested his life savings and blood/sweat/tears. I'm not sure that vesting shares is ideal there -- perhaps a well defined shotgun clause or similar is more reasonable to handle unruly founders.

> I invested all my personal wealth.

I think this is being overlooked. You invested all your personal wealth into this company and in return you got unvested shares?

I was sort of spitball including that in there in my calculations, but yes. This is an important thing for people to understand when dealing with or becoming a contractor/freelancer.

I think that a lot of people don't realize things like this when they do their back of the napkin calculations for freelancers/contractors. $50/hour != $100k salary.

I wonder if they're including people who have a full-time salaried position with the job title of "Consultant" in this mix. It would make the numbers make more sense.

> That's what an average consultant likely makes as a salary.

No, that is what a highly productive (100% utilized) consultant at $42/h makes as revenue. If you were to convert it into something comparable to a salary and account for realistic work schedule it would probably end up being in the 60-70k range.

> ActionController::Live still feels pretty half baked.

It is very half-baked. I put it into a production system and had tons of headaches.

the google web fonts used in the body text seem to be acting weird.

Yes, I worked on a reverse-engineered annotations project at some point in time, among other things. The YT space is definitely under-represented here, though I can't say I'm surprised. All the related startups are hybrid tech and media companies who tend to do (public) business more like media companies than tech companies.

I also attended Playlist Live last year (or the year before? I forget). Nice to talk to you Kevin :)

The vast majority do rep themselves. Only the top talent are catered to by the MCNs like Maker.

Then why would a small YouTube star want to join an MCN? The studios do still tend to provide a support structure and tech stack to help you grow your channel. Generally speaking, of course -- there are a lot of MCNs out there and each one operates differently.

I think the problem people seem to have is that it is standard, stereotypical advice. The entire premise is built upon the fact that you have a job that pays enough money to allow you to do the things he's suggesting -- people with untapped upward mobility.

If you're in a situation where you're working multiple jobs (or can't find any jobs) just to be able to "eat poorly", you won't have the time or money to network, invest in your future, travel, or save up.

1) There's a difference between on-demand and spot instances.

2) Well... yes. My entire premise is based upon not making any long-term leases/purchases, as I stated. Hence, if you bought a 1 year reserved instance, you're doing long-term leasing, and therefore your situation doesn't fall into what I was discussing. So, I'm not sure what your point is.

Could you elaborate on this?

It's also risk mitigation. You can spin those AWS instances up and down smoothly depending on your needs.

You can't get rid of a 1+ year lease agreement, or something that you purchased. Nor is it a good idea to buy/lease more quickly without really thinking about the long-term financials.

I like the idea of the product and your pricing is fine. But you just have to figure out a way to hit your target market. In this case, your target market is probably freelance developers.

I know that I've evaluated http://letsfreckle.com/ and other similar options in the past. Their copy appeals to me and it easily lets me know what it is they do and how it is valuable to me. But it isn't what I was looking for.

If you can explain yourself similarly, I suspect you'll have success.

I'm trying the product out myself right now, it scratches an itch I've had for a while. Starting on Free plan, might upgrade to paid.

I'm not sure what "team features" are on the Team plan that would warrant such a huge jump in cost. You might want to elaborate on that.

Just speaking off the top of my head here, but services like HireFire ping the Heroku API to poll for information on when to scale. The Heroku API is a little rate limited. You'll probably get a more responsive result using GA.

I'd say two things:

One is that you're correct, it has been happening for years within the industry, so it's kind of weird to see an article almost in the style of an "expose" on the practice.

Two is that it really isn't getting huge market traction. Or it wasn't at the time when I was working more closely with it. It was considered more like a value-add or diversification strategy alongside other media buys and not a primary strategy.

Saved up.

Edit: I also wanted to note that it really is important for a founder to take a salary eventually.

Specifically, its a risk to the company. You shouldn't be putting yourself in a place to have money problems, nor should you be putting yourself in a place to have to make decisions about the company through the lens of your dire financial straits.

> So I'm curious. Founders, how many of you truly take no salary?

I currently take no salary. The company is profitable and we're looking to hire soon, but my co-founder and I promised to not take any salary for a predetermined length of time in order to gather some padding in our company bank account.

It's just an easy way to invest in your own company without actually transferring money.

Edit: We will be drawing salary eventually. Its just a transitional phase, and that is probably the case with most startups. You pay yourself nothing for a little while until you make money. Once you earn/raise some money, you pay yourself.

A "recall" is usually used in reference to a product being physically returned to the supplier in some form. A vehicle recall means you have to take the vehicle to the manufacturer or dealer so they can take physical action on it for you.

This isn't a recall because you're not taking your vehicle anywhere. They're sending you something. I don't really know what to actually call it, though.

I think they were YC rejects who then went to TechStars.

sendgrid, iirc

I'd simplify it further. HN likes things that are new, interesting and novel. Not even necessarily things that encompass "hack values".

You could submit a Show post that has an excellent idea that would make you rich, but it would get ignored and passed over if it were a B2B app written in Java for a niche market.

This is the best answer. You can scale any language to 100k pageviews/day. Some scale easier than others, but almost anything reasonable will hit those numbers with the proper infrastructure.

New languages and frameworks have their pitfalls. Pick what you know so that you don't get tangled up in the weeds while trying to build out a product quickly.

I've been working on raising one of my quotas for the past 10 months. Filled with regular meetings with Google reps about it.

I'm impressed that the quota was lifted so readily. I've hit quota limit issues with other Google API services and hit brick walls regarding raising them.

That is a very valid point, but it is not the point that was brought up in this thread.

Please note that I didn't say "Play", I said "app store" and my parent said "app store equivalent". Amazon Appstore falls under both umbrellas.