robfitz

I get lazy when I have that much time. Have tried it! :)

I spent 5 years living like that at my first couple companies. These days, however, my life is no longer organised in a way where that's viable. So 2-2.5k it is. If I was in a real pinch, I could temporarily get to 1.5k, but I feel like 4 months is about the right period of time for this anyway.

Nice -- my email is in my profile if you're up for some sort of occasional peer support

Let me know when you guys get started. If I'm in a position to help, I will!

Django/jquery/sendgrid, I have no idea (yet!), and yes. On the first idea the main stuff I'm pulling from lean is analytics, but if this one doesn't work out I'll do more custdev and in-person stuff as appropriate.

Hey guys! Thanks for the support. You caught me pretty early in the process, so not terribly much to show just yet, but I hope you'll stick around for the ride.

If you're curious, the first product I'm trying to make profitable (and the one whose numbers I reference in the video) is at http://whattowrite.org

But, as I say, the stats on it are pretty bleak at the moment (I need to improve the funnel performance by ~1000%). I may end up spending 2 weeks invalidating it and then move on to greener pastures.

Regarding the amount of money and number of months it gives me, I chose the amount (10k) in order to give myself 4 months, rather than the other way around. 4 months feels about right. If I could live happily on £1k per month, I would have made it the £4k bootstrap challenge ;)

Thanks again!

I try to avoid self-referencing, but since it does answer your question, here's my idea creation/testing thought process[1] and a walkthrough of an example I'm currently working on[2].

Joel (of Buffer) also did an awesome write-up of how he validated that idea[3], which is probably the best practice for freemium or subscription ideas.

[1] http://thestartuptoolkit.com/blog/2011/12/how-i-come-up-with...

[2] http://thestartuptoolkit.com/blog/2012/02/an-example-of-how-...

[3] http://blog.bufferapp.com/idea-to-paying-customers-in-7-week...

Assuming the other terms of the deal are fine, you should accept both offers.

More money will always help. Revenue will appear and grow more slowly than you hope.

There's no reasonable way to calculate expenses because to do so, you need to accurately predict how your team & business will develop for the next 18 months, which can't really be done.

Just take whatever you can get on reasonable terms and move on with building the company.

New year's resolution: supermodel cofounder.

I will also admit that I was/am surprised to see this one submitted, for basically the same reasons. Not that I mind, exactly :)

I originally had a bunch of extra analysis/commentary with the links, but it made the post insanely long and wasn't very easy to read.

Will probably try tweaking the format a bit in subsequent weeks. Thanks for the input.

Regarding the site slowness: A while back, I changed the blog from a subdomain to a directory and didn't update the caching. It was caching pages at the wrong URL and thus being entirely useless.

It's fixed now -- sorry for the annoyance to anyone who got held up.

Hey Joe -- thanks for taking the time to share your story w/ me. Both the tale & the app are great.

Hopefully the HN crowd can figure out how to help in some other wonderful & unexpected ways ;) (hint hint)

Yeah, I tweet it and post a subset (maybe 1 in 5) to HN if I think it's good and relevant to most people.

I haven't really dug into RSS metrics, but you get those in realtime via feedburner, so that could be another valid source.

I've been trying to start on videos[1] because I also feel it's got a lot of potential reach. Even though the view numbers are significantly lower on my videos than my blog, I get many more emails and comments about the videos. I guess people respond better to a face and a voice than to text.

It's definitely something I'll be putting significantly more time toward exploring in the new year.

[1] About 30 videos up so far at http://youtube.com/robfitzpatrickable

Hey JS, I think you've got two fallacies baked into your perspective.

First, that blogs have to be unprofessional. That's simply not true -- for more "serious" industries, you can treat the content like mini-whitepapers or slices of a conference presentation.

Second, that non-technical people can't appreciate and share good content. They can, although it goes through email rather than rss. If you provide the mini-report and analysis which helps someone win an intra-management dispute, you're going to have an evangelist forever.

The less your industry does it already, the more value I see in you breaking the mould. Which supplier are you going to pick up the phone and call? The one you've heard very highly of, or the one whose report you just spent the morning poring over?

Hey Ray, thanks. I've tried chartbeat, gosquared, and google's realtime. They're all fine, but now I mostly just get it via twitter.

It's not "analytics" per se, but the first 10 minutes worth of retweets is a better indicator of whether a post has legs or not than anything else.

With the proper realtime tools, I would basically just watch for irregular spikes after I pushed a post. The actual numbers never really mattered.

A quick SMS saying the post was doing better than 80% of my other posts would do the trick too.

Thanks, Siqi - totally agreed. There's always a process behind the person and you get a lot less heartbreak and vitriol when focused on fixing the former.

Haha, yeah, outside perspective is priceless. Even being able to ask someone for help is a step in the right direction, since it suggests (at least to) that you've identified a problem outside of your own incompetence ;)

If this struck a chord, you should definitely check out Steven Pressfield's Do the Work book linked in the post. His reading of it is super awesome.

Shoot me an email (in profile) if it would be useful to bounce some ideas around about it.

This is now my new failure mantra: "At least I haven't personally disappointed and been individually called out as a nontrepreneur by Steve Blank"

;)

Completely agreed.

If you don't have a product, the benefits are more along the lines of finding your voice, learning what resonates with the people you care about, and getting comfortable putting content out where people will see it.

I mentioned the numbers in the sense that I used to think traffic and on-site behaviour was a magical thing that "happened". It was more about having that "aha moment" of how it all works than about doing anything particularly profitable.

Given all that, I think new & future founders would do well to try blogging for a while, reaching out to whoever your future customers would be. It lays a bunch of strong foundational skills that are tough to internalize through reading case studies.

I didn't really mention timescales, but in my case he added the various complications gradually over about 4 years. It was never something I sat down and "learned". Whenever I started to drift away via boredom, a fun new twist would mysteriously appear.

Love what you're doing w/ the gum machines -- think it's an amazing approach.

From my perspective, it doesn't make a huge difference whether the idea was independently discovered by my dad or inspired by something he read--what matters is the effect it had on me.

I'd have to ask my mom to be totally sure, but I'd estimate I ran the machine for roughly 4 years beginning when I was 7 or 8.

I looked into this a bit (I wanted to take the same ideas and package them for elementary schools to teach to students).

Vending machines are far from ideal, although they're still plausible if you have a friend who owns a car repair shop or something similar with a few steady workers plus customer traffic.

If I was doing it today, I would take one of the single-serving coffee machines. Some of them have coin slots, pricing controls, and protected inventory. They're a bit expensive to buy individually (a couple grand) but might make sense to share the responsibilities and decisions among a class or a group of family friends.

Because of the smaller footprint, also easy to add to a teacher's lounge, office, etc and it's possible the manufacturer would cut you a break for doing something so PR-able, especially if you turn it into a repeatable school program.

Drop me a note if anyone decides to pursue something like this -- I'd be happy to help where I can: developing the curriculum, yelling at suppliers, or coming up with new lower-cost hardware.

I think a lot of students just aren't aware it's possible... All through uni, literally zero people told me startups even existed as an option. No professor, no career counsellor, no guest speaker... nobody.

I accidentally signed up for a course called "project proposal" thinking it was about submitting research to conferences, but it was actually about pitching ideas to VCs. Rocked my world.

Although it wasn't quite what I imagine they were hoping for, I dropped out after that semester and have spent the last 5 years happily entrenched in startups.

My best guess would be that they do not know the option exists and/or they do not believe they can do it. It does and they can.

So spread the word!

Beautifully articulated. Couldn't agree more.

0.2% to 1.8%

I prefer DDG for general search, but google was too good at digging up obscure code errors. I end up spending more time looking for errors than general stuff (which I guess means I'm a terrible programmer), so grudgingly switched back to the googs.