I keep all my most important documents in the "cloud"!
675 karma · joined February 16, 2010
twitter: squeakytoy
My application is supposed to tell you when the train is coming, and it doesn't work once you walk down to the platform due to complete lack of cell service.
I chuckle at the ludicrous idea of "disrupting" something that doesn't actually work to begin with. If it worked, perhaps my app would be more useful.
I'm in a similar boat. I quit my day job and I'm living off of the (moderately) passive income that I receive from Routesy, my public transit iPhone app. I've got a few more things in the pipeline and I too am doing some freelancing in the meantime.
It's really nice to see a post from someone who's on the same path as me. I look forward to keeping up with your progress. :)
There's plenty of room for improvement, like the ability to schedule birthday greetings to be delivered to friends on their birthdays in the future, which I might get to someday.
I'm also aware of the implications of people not allowing apps to see their birthday (even with the 'friends_birthday' permission granted to the user), so not everyone will necessarily show up in the list in the app. Sadly, there's not a workaround that I'm aware of.
Anyway, let me know what you think! This is the first hack project I've posted to HN. :)
Also, look at their twitter feed: http://twitter.com/getwillet
It looks like they had some kind of weird spammy auto-retweet operation going on. Weird.
The tone of some of the comments made by public people (like pg) seemed to imply that EJ was lying, without saying it directly. Assuming that Airbnb's mea culpa about being "paralyzed" is true, I think EJ deserves an apology from some of these people that have characterized her as being less than honest, based on their friendships/personal connections with the Airbnb team.
I like Airbnb (I'm staying in one of their rentals right now!) and I hope that in the end this whole situation makes them more successful.
Apple is doing something smart here. My guess is that more people have iPhones than Macs and they're betting that switchers will understand these new features and turn into across-the-board Apple fans.
The problem of needing to partition one's social groups is very real, but the moralization in the deck rubbed me the wrong way.
Then again, San Francisco is a city where people bring their children to the gay pride parade, so maybe I'm just a wacko liberal with an incredibly biased perspective. :)
It's easy to forget that there are so many places where an American passport doesn't actually make it any easier to travel there.
How many times have you heard about entrepreneurs that think they have some grand vision for something that they're certain will change the world, so they go away and spend tons of VC money building something, and then it fails because no one actually wants it? It happens a LOT. Vision clouds judgment VERY often.
Eric taught me that ego gets in the way of finding out what will actually work as a viable business, and that I should question all of my assumptions (and those of the people working around me) about what's right and what's not. The metrics speak for themselves. It doesn't matter how good I think my landing page headline is -- the market will validate that through A/B testing. The trick to figuring out what will be successful is first realizing that your idea is only a hypothesis and has no merit until you validate it with customers.
Eric's and the IMVU team's willingness to let go of assumptions and try different things is the reason why IMVU today isn't a plugin that runs on top of AIM. Even though that was the original idea, it became clear really quickly that it wasn't going to work. Where many entrepreneurs would cling to an unworkable idea until the company burns through all its capital, the team decided that the idea was a failure and moved on to build something that has turned into a business that now makes more than $50mm per year.
I can totally understand the uncomfortable reaction you have, but that's kind of the point. When someone comes around and says "Hey, maybe the way that the establishment thinks things should be done is actually completely wrong," some people are excited and intrigued by the possibilities, and some have an visceral, negative response. Tim Ferriss and Dr. Atkins have both sold a ton of books exploring ideas that sound new and "out there".
I think it's unfair to classify Eric as someone who only has a reputation for "writing books and doing conferences". The "Lean Startup movement" is about keeping companies alive through the perils of infancy that usually lead to early destruction. Ask anyone who worked with Eric at IMVU and they will tell you that his passion for experimentation and validation of ideas, and his framework for building a scalable continuous deployment shop are still very much alive even after his departure. If you want to know more about the culture at IMVU, I'd be happy to comment on it.
Do any of you have any stories you can share about successes/failures in this area?