penguin_gab

For those of you who answered yes - could you elaborate more? And also shed some light to new founders on what to look out for, questions to ask, red flags to look out for, and advice in general when choosing investors?

how do I integrate your service into my app? do I have to use API calls & is there an admin panel that's exposed?

OP what is your startup? curious!

do you have examples?

where did you get your stats from?

Wow! Your app looks impressive.. I think your team stands a good chance of being invited for an interview. How long have you been hacking on it?

that's a good suggestion.. will look into it. am just worried that it won't give me a deep enough understanding/customisation compared to Opsworks..

thanks! it looks like a good guide to getting started with Opsworks and Chef

We are trying to create a mobile-first (tablet and iPhone) solution to managing sales pipelines for small/medium companies. This is because we personally found salesforce too bloated for our needs. I would love to chat more with you about your needs, and see if we could tailor our upcoming products to what you need.. (and do some customer development!)

Email me at gabriel@gettingrail.com if you want to chat more! :)

Startups are overrated. Start a service-based business. Start alone. For the first 3 - 6 months, focus on building a portfolio of good work and references. For the next 6 - 12 months, focus on steadily increasing your rates/prices and bring on-board one or two technical people to help you on a freelance basis. You must continue to do sales and ask for referrals. The next 12 - 24 months, focus on scaling your services and capacity. I know it's easier said than done - but this is what worked for me.

Background: 25 years old this year, software development firm made $500k in revenue so far in 2013.

Caveat: 1 million dollars revenue != 1 million dollars profit. Huge difference.

What is your company called? Have a URL? Just curious..

And come back as interim CEO?

nice to hear that rdouble! how did you get hired, and were you hacking on your own projects/code before that?

Hey tptacek, I read some of your previous posts regarding consulting and I must say they were very useful. Do you have any tips for myself who is running a 18-month old consulting firm that does mobile development work for businesses, and used to charge per project (and got burnt badly), and now is moving towards charging weekly/ per feature?

We didn't really manage it well, and it was not sustainable beyond a year.

I remember feeling stressed out and exhausted all the time, having to manage client expectations and still keep working on my product.

What I would do is that I would start work at 12 p.m. everyday, and work until 12 a.m. from Monday to Saturday. Then I would crash on Sunday, and repeat the cycle.

We did this from Dec 2012 till end of Apr 2013, until our product was bringing in at least consistently four-figures a month, and we drastically scaled back on client work.

Yes, totally agree with this. Consulting kinda softens the blow of your product taking time to gain traction. For startups, there is calendar time and labor time. Certain things, like SEO, marketing, email lists and credibility take time to build up, no matter how hard and fast you work.

Having a consulting business to take the edge off and still have income coming in really does help.

My team and I also tried this same approach for my mobile education startup - but differently.

The issue with working one week on, and three weeks off is that the client is willing to accommodate you flying off the radar for three weeks, and that makes it hard for them to plan their product according to your timing.

What we tried at App Ninja was to work a normal six day week, 12 hours a day. We would work on our product for the first 8 hours of the day, and the remaining 4 hours, we will work on our client projects.

I am an iOS developer and am fluent with web backends. So I was doing everything from iOS development to Ruby on Rails web apps. We charged by the project instead of hourly, and at one point in time, I actually earned USD $2,000 in 4 hours by completing a project in that time span.

If you work fast, charging by the project, instead of hourly can actually be beneficial.

We did this for almost 5 months to get our product off the ground, and other than being absolutely physically exhausting, it worked pretty well. Our clients were none the wiser, as we still delivered projects on time and on schedule.

Check out http://www.getappninja.com/ which currently features an iOS for Absolute Beginners video screencast series that takes you from zero knowledge to building a Zombie Pet game from scratch.

Also Ray Wenderlich resources are great IMO.

Disclaimer: I am the founder of App Ninja :)

Very nice. I totally agree. The reason why I picked up programming in the first place is not to become an 'uber geek', but simply to build cool things.

Apparently this same sentiment is held by Zuckerberg as well in his code.org video. "It didn't start off as this mission to learn all of Computer Science, but rather build something cool that me and my sisters could use."

"This force field deflects solar winds and all kinds of other space radiation away from the Earth. Without it, our atmosphere would slowly be blown away, turning our environment cold and dead, like Mars."

The source code for the script for infected drones is at Github, it should be easy to identify a hacked drone -

function () { up(Math.random() * 2 - 1) }, function () { left(Math.random() * 2 - 1) }, function () { turn(Math.random() * 2 - 1) },

A scary thought would be U.S military drones ever getting infected by terrorists, and the source code goes -

function firePredatorMissile(coordinates) { ... }

firePredatorMissile(computedLargestCivilianCluster.coordinates)

And if you combine this with the fact that it can hack nearby drones and control them as well..

I run an iOS development company that does exactly what you describe. Our clients range from large corporations to scrappy startups. But I can attest to one thing, the only people who are making STEADY PROFITS are developers like myself. It's too much of a crap shoot for any single app to be noticed and profitable in the App Store.

It's kind of like the story of the California Gold Rush isn't it? Here's an excerpt -

"Recent scholarship confirms that merchants made far more money than miners during the Gold Rush. The wealthiest man in California during the early years of the Gold Rush was Samuel Brannan, the tireless self-promoter, shopkeeper and newspaper publisher. Brannan opened the first supply stores in Sacramento, Coloma, and other spots in the gold fields. Just as the Gold Rush began, he purchased all the prospecting supplies available in San Francisco and re-sold them at a substantial profit. However, substantial money was made by some gold-seekers as well."

Tell me you can't see the similarities with the modern day digital mobile gold rush.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush#Profits

This is very inspiring. One of the better replies to encourage OP to continue on his current path

Learn about HTML5, CSS3 and a little bit of Javascript, enough to understand and utilize jQuery like what bartonfink said. This is as front-end as front-end gets for web development.

Do not worry about design or templating, knowing a bit of Photoshop/ Illustrator is good, but it should not be your priority considering you can buy high quality templates from ThemeForest.net for $10 - $30, or even hire a designer if your budget allows.

Also, you may want to consider working with a web framework to make your life easier, like Django or Flask.

This is from someone who comes from a similar background as you. My background was in C, C++ and Objective-C, and I do mainly embedded systems and low level programming. It took me a few weeks to learn HTML/CSS/JS and another few more to get comfortable with Ruby on Rails, and 1 year later now, I can basically build and prototype any web application I can think of.