tbod

I'm surprised that nobody has yet commented on the second website mentioned on the application specific password section... nice touch to a great article!

Great concept - as a dog owner (and father of 2 young kids) always hard to solve both sides of the equation (babysitter + dogsitter, often they are mutually exclusive)... when will it come to the uk... or maybe I will just..

and http://www.tripbod.com

Could this be 'remarketing' http://www.google.com/ads/innovations/remarketing.html?

I have worked remotely for 6 years - in one case working for a UK company and living in Australia. Once you get the hang of it (especially as an engineer) it is significantly more productive. BUT it does take the right sort of mindset - I am self-disciplined in terms of starting hours, I do not get distracted by things around me.

Of course the downside though is that the work/life line gets significantly blurred. At least working at a office when finishing work I 'finished' working remotely it doesn't work like that.. just will finish this one last thing then I will stop... and I don't.. I have a family now so its great to be near to see them grow up... but sometimes families still don't get the fact you are 'working' can you just drop so and so off to school etc...

Great discussion - would be an interesting poll to see exactly what hardware setups HN users run. When looking at options for our bootstrapped startup, was very surprised to find the costs of Amazon compared to dedicated boxes, or even a couple of dedicated VPS instances. It appears so many people I have spoken to who use AWS do not even automatically spin up instances when they need them, so have to manually react and then bring them up... And another startup who have automatically scaled up the instances have also had massive bills when someone found a loophole and distributed manga art via their services.

There may well be many startups which have a great design and no substance - but then there is also the situation where multiple startups exist in a similar space competing for traction - and in that situation having the design 'edge' is never a bad thing..

Personally I find myself in that situation, early stage startup where whilst I have the tech background, design has never come easily to me (and my co-founders are even worst). As we have bootstrapped we didnt have the money for great design and did the best we could! That said it hasnt been the make or break as we have executed well, however first impressions always count... and when looking for investment we have more than once had potential investors misjudge how far we have come or compare us negatively to others in our space as we did not have the design 'edge'. Its a shame, but its a fact of life appearances mean a lot..

Perhaps off topic but be interesting to know how others have managed to overcome gaps in skillsets when bootstrapping? we dont seem to have any contacts with good design skills and available time..