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This is actually very interesting. Because you can just turn this around make sure that the person at home leaves their house at that time because someone is coming :) Out of curiosity are you also working on an appointment specific service?

Having a similar product (well somewhat) in the market it is great to see that there is quite a bit of interest in the market. I particularly liked the use of outsourcing part of your post. It is very obvious that the dream of one-man-shop is over.

One suggestion though, I think focusing on a single type of customer (mobile services that travel to the customer) might be more effective for the obvious financial loss they face for a customer who is not home at that time.

Who is the target market?

I really think this could be useful for not the average user but traveling service professionals. By looking at this data they can figure out where they are most of the time and maybe even create alternate routes or stations based on the hot spots.

Frankly, the average home user is more concerned with the amount of time they spend on the tasks rather than location. I believe RescueTime does something similar to what I am describing for the end user.

I am listening to it at the moment and I love it (Audible) 9 chapters in.

Honestly, I think that is the best approach. Because the market is so broad, it will be hard to reach out to everyone based on company size. I am currently focusing on 2 segments incidentally one of them is dentists the other is accountants.

Thank you for the links.

Yep, totally agreed. I will look into different email newsletters. In the mean time like I replied on another comment, the service is not for a specific vertical. It's more of a shared IT kind of service that targets very small businesses (low-cost service).

Do you have any pointers for me to take a look into specific newsletters?

The niche are 1-2 people service firms that work with clients on a schedule. So this is more of an infrastructure utility for a specific type of company rather than an entire vertical. For cold calling did you use a firm to do this?

Thanks for the extensive list.

Email newsletter is not really working for me since I only have a handful of customers at the moment. I do not want to go ahead and buy a list and spam people either since I find that rather unethical (I hate spam as much as the guy next door).

One thing I have not yet tried is the Forums. In terms of B2B Forums, is there a starting point that would let me do a more directed path or is Google my best friend in your opinion?

As per the SEO I am seriously considering doing that. Although most small businesses would not directly search for the service (since most of them are not aware of the need) I still think it would help greatly to rank on the first page. So I will definitely consider the Press Release.

Again, thanks for the input, I appreciate it.

Having programmed in C, C++, C#, Java and JS (if scripting counts) I applaud this. I have tried to get used to Objective-C but after using C# for the past 4 years or so, it just seems uncomfortable with me (probably a personal bias that cannot be generalized). I was considering developing my startup's first mobile app in Android since I did not want to touch Objective-C and go with an iPhone Web Page.

Considering the number of developers on the .NET/C# bandwagon I think we will be seeing another Gold Rush to the app-store. I really hope the app-review board can filter out the ugly, form and buttons type of applications that will come as part of this rush. Otherwise, AppStore will be the next Tucows.

This is a great idea! I really think this has potential, but one thing I'd suggest is to pick a vertical and enhance the system further. Because if all you do is integration between two existing services, barrier of entry is pretty low.

I'd suggest either adding more integration points, or developing an add-on service on top of this.

Once you do that, I think you can sell this to many startups including mine in the near future :)

If you are in an environment where there is decaf coffee I suggest mixing half caf/half decaf. You cannot really taste the decaf and get in half the caffeine, although it's not a real fix, it should help a little :)

I agree with the caffeine comment. Believe it or not there is a balance when it comes to coffee. Having a cup of tea/coffee every day is not the same as having a cup every 2 hours. As in everything, it is not strictly an on/off switch.

Other than that I totally agree that sleep exercise and food make a great difference. Eating fat with carbs for 3 meals a day will not help you get the mental focus either.

I really think there is a missing piece of context here. If you are creating the next social application charging for your application would be counterintuitive since you are banking on the number of users.

On the other hand if you have an application that actually makes money for someone or saves money (in other words translates to direct dollar amount) you might be better off charging as long as your user base perceives the value they get out of your application as more than what they pay for it.

I really think that me-too-free app mentality has to change. Startup founders (especially micro ISVs) need to understand the fact that coming up with a business model is the core of the business not an afterthought.

I pretty much started thinking along the same lines too after I talked to a couple of people. It seems like their pricing structure is exactly the same as PayPal and their API is pretty good. I will most likely go with them in the next couple of weeks. I might even release a little open source library that adds a thin layer on top of what Amazon gives to enable ASP.NET MVC integration. Thanks for all your help!

I looked at the fee structure, right now it looks like getting the merchant account is the first step.

Although I already have a business bank account I have not heard/come across "merchant account"term in any of my contracts.

It looks like this process would add another $100/month cost to my operating expenses. I guess just to avoid that I'd rather go with Amazon or PayPal.

In terms of switching from PayPal to Recurly, would one lose all the subscription information? It's one thing to want to save money but losing subscriber information is a no no. Can anyone comment?

rmoriz and atldev, thanks a lot for your input so far!

I am in the US. What was your experience with PayPal for a recurring payment business model?

I want a simple way to just set up the plans and have my users redirect to the payment provider's site to put in their card info and get charged.

I would like to get notified when new subscription starts/plan changes/gets cancelled. I want to minimize the amount of code I have to write to do all this since there is already a large list of items I need to address.

I guess so far Amazon and PayPal are the two candidates.

I think Amazon has better rates and API. I would like to get your opinion on the brand image of both companies too. I am afraid when people see the Amazon logo to make a payment they will freak out thinking that the application will be stealing their Amazon information. What do you think?

I would definitely recommend the following books:

- How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate by Andrew Hargadon

- Micro ISV by Bob Walsh

- Smart and Get Things Done by Joel Spolsky

- 4 Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris

and here is one that I used in school that has great intro level information on a variety of topics.

- The Portable MBA in Entrepreneurship by Andrew Zacharakis (check the spelling)

This is extremely useful feedback. Thanks for taking the time to write the review. On a closer look I truly agree with the comments you have provided and I will try to incorporate them in next weeks release! Thank you :)

Would you still follow the same strategy in the current real-estate market?

It is great to have a 15 year plan, but beware that as you plan for the distant future you might be missing opportunities that are right in front of you in the short term because of a focus mismatch.

Concentrate on the short term. The best way to get into IT is through internships. Can't find one? Get on an open-source project. Even if you can't contribute, keep reading other people's already reviewed code (open source tends to have better code than what you'll see in school). At least it will give you some experience in distinguishing good code from bad. IT is all about patterns, some of the newest coolest technologies you see around are based on the same ideas as the one that solved a similar problem 10 years ago. You will see patterns as you get more experience in reading/writing code. Once you feel comfortable and start making contributions to these projects, it will help with your resume as well.

In the mean time, keep doing what you do today. You have a gf, going to school, learning more. Take it one step at a time and keep a positive attitude. Also, talk to people from this first group that you mentioned. You will be surprised how much of a difference connections make in getting an internship, and maybe you'll get to work with a couple of them on good projects for school.

Good luck :)

It's funny how you beat me to it :) I am working on pretty much the same product, about to launch in two weeks. It's good to know that you saw an opportunity in this as well. Best of luck.

This is a very cool idea! The graphics look extremely good. One little thing you can fix: when I clicked on the "Sign Up" link, I received an SSL certificate alert in the browser. This might prevent people from proceeding further.

Good luck :)