vantran

Location: HCMC, Vietnam

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Rails, HTML, CSS, JS, React, Mobile

Email: vantran53@gmail.com

We're 2 developers with more than 8 years of working with Rails stack. You'll get full-stack Rails development, including Dev Op work for a very reasonable rate.

25. Uber for food

We're working on that right now at munchery.com

Emailed. I lost contact with you some time ago, but we were always wondering when the service would become publicly available. Glad to hear it's coming soon!

Perhaps I wasn't clear. Collecting email addresses is fine, but make sure you're really getting people who are genuinely interested in your product. My point is that people shouldn't focus on hoarding emails. The focus should be on testing certain message, certain angle of the product, whether they like the future vision, etc...

I used to do what you did too. Pure PHP without frameworks projects always grow unmaintainable. At least go with a framework like CodeIgniter. Rails is great too if you prefer Ruby (which I do).

Wow, thank you everyone for the incredible responses and support. I'm really glad people found the post useful.

I didn't link to Munchery because I intended to write something to help future interviewees, not to promote the company. But it's really encouraging that people seem to like the idea :)

I don't see why you can't just work on your idea while in college. Would be far better than dropping out while there's nothing to show for it.

Investing in people over their ideas is always advisable. But let's not forget how brilliant people can still fail. Tons of bright kids come out of MIT, Harvard, Stanford, etc... Should you blindly invest in all of them?

Instead, I prefer Mark Suster's "invest in lines, not dots" strategy. You really have to spend more time to have a better idea on whether you should invest.

In hindsight, of course Drew Houston would be a good investment.

Definitely. We're continually signing up new chefs and try to get the Bay Area covered soon. I'll keep you posted.

Also, if you know any chefs, do refer them to us, we'll get them up and running.

Clickable: http://gomunchery.com/via/yc

Hi Mike. The way we solve that problem is by having fixed price per meal for each chef.

Give us some time and we'll open it up to other areas too. Meanwhile we've love any chef leads you have. What's your email? (Mine is in my HN profile)

I'd suggest doing at least email-based registration. Email is still the most common form of communication online. Although a lot of people have Twitter accounts, there aren't as many power users as email.

I am disappointed that there's still nothing in there regarding foreign founders, who account for a fairly large percentage of new startups. Are foreign founders supposed to just plunge themselves into it and hope they don't get removed from the US after their visa runs out? What can they do if they want to start a company in the US right now?

I understand immigration is a complicated topic, but if the US plans on retaking the lead without the help of immigrants, it'll have very little chance of success.

It's not that Mark is wrong. He doesn't try to answer THE question, because there is no right or wrong answer. It's not so black and white, yes you should do it or no you should not. What he did was giving great advice that should seriously be considered, but the choice is up to you.

Read his advice, he tells it like it is. If you choose to do it, then you have answered the question for yourself. If Mark advises against it and you think he's right, indeed you're not an entrepreneur. If you do it anyway, simply prove that it's the right answer.

I used to be like you, not using a framework for exactly the same reasons: I wrote everything myself, and since it's PHP, it wasn't that hard. I knew how to exactly when something was going wrong, I didn't have that power of clarity when I was using a framework. But over time I've learnt the following lessons:

1. I was naive to think that my code would be better than the code of an established frameworks that have undergone through extensive testing by a big community.

2. It's a lot harder to bring people on board to help with coding. I can navigate my code very easily, but many people who are used to how to do things in a framework found it very hard.

3. Without the help of a community, I had to code EVERYTHING myself. There is no gem or plugin to install, which will REALLY help speed things along. In a startup environment, speed is a real competitive advantage, every bit of speed you can gain over your competitor should be pursued. I can't stress this enough.

4. When you run into serious problems, Google search is unlikely to help if you don't use a framework. You're likely the only one with that problem. Whereas if you use a framework, there's a very high chance other people have run into the problem before, and the error thrown out will be in a Stack Overflow or a bug tracker somewhere. Your life will be much easier when trying to track down serious bugs.

I used to use PHP for about 5 years, and I think the problem with PHP and frameworks is that there are so many frameworks around, and we just don't know which one are the one to use. So many developers have this question. Code Igniter or Kohana or CakePHP or... 20 other frameworks out there? It really sucks when you have to put in the time to figure out which frameworks work for you, and it's one of the reasons why people don't use a framework in the first place. Where as for Python, Django is a clear winner and Ruby, there's RoR. Those languages have many other frameworks too, but they have a clear winner with a large community who could help you.

As for me? I'm now doing almost everything in Ruby and Rails, and not looking back. I feel very good about the way I work now. I have become as good with Rails as I was with my own code, and it only took a few months. I suggest you give it another try. It will be time consuming at first, but it's very worthwhile in the long run.

Wow, same as everyone, I'm most productive at night until morning.

Is your goal to do a startup, or become a programmer?

If it's the former, I strongly recommend simply learning HTML/CSS/Javascript and make a killer front-end of your product without the back-end logic. Trust me on this.

Not only is it faster, it's the pretty front end that gets other developers to understand your product. Don't worry if your "product" lacks logic at first. Static content serves the purpose just fine. At the same time, this will convince people that you can carry your own weight in the startup. Now you have something real useful to offer and contribute instead of just an idea.

You could also try out http://www.appcelerator.com/ It is similar to Phone Gap, and a lot of people use it to build simple iphone apps.

that's harsh :(

Checked out your blog some time ago when I was looking at Citizen Space website. It's interesting, just posted some comments ;)

If you expect interns to do meaningful work, you should pay them something. It does not have to be money. Room and board is a great starting point. Is it full time internship? Then either add a small stipend or at least feed them

Beer is also a great motivator too. In general, have a fully stocked fridge and your intern will come to work happy and more likely to produce great stuffs.

What are you looking to do? What do you want to learn about?

There are tons of work in a startup, it's important to have some ideas of what you want to get out of the experience. Otherwise I'm afraid you might end up just doing the majority of grunt work, where you don't learn much. You certainly don't want that if you're not getting paid!

I've done unpaid internship at a startup before, and I don't think you want to be treated like an intern. Your time is not valued (since they aren't paying you). They listen to your ideas, but won't implement them, etc...

Instead, I suggest you work on your own projects, with experienced mentors guiding you. This way you have actual freedom on what you work, you can still learn, and most importantly you'll actually turn an idea to something concrete yourself, from start to finish.

Of course, finding mentors is the hard part. If you're around in SF, send me an email, perhaps I can help.

Hi David. The decision to go with SMS is because it was faster to develop (than a native iphone / android app) as well as supporting all phones.

Soon we'll be coming up with a mobile version of the site that lets you do the same thing without using SMS. We'll post again on HN when it's done.

Yeah we're on TextMarks Plus. I was going to use Twilio but they don't have short code yet.

No revenue plan atm, we originally built it to scratch our own itch. Then we thought we should share it with others. :)

Sure thing. I'll shoot you an email ;)

Allergies is certainly something we're preparing to deal with. Thanks for confirming it :)

And I agree with your last point, will keep it in mind when I talk to the chefs.

1) I knew it was a bad idea to move away from Chicago!

2) Yup, I went to Chipotle regularly while downtown. I think I ate there for lunch like 3 times a week regularly for months. It's fine in the beginning, but there's gotta be a way to get some variety into our diet.

You can subscribe to as many chefs as you want. Since it's a weekly subscription, you pay up front each week.

Here's an example:

My subscription to Chef 1: Monday: 1 meal - Wednesday: 1 meal - Friday: 2 meals

My subscription to Chef 2: Tuesday: 1 meal - Thursday: 1 meal

As you see, you can mix and match to get a great deal of variety. Currently our system accommodates both pickups and deliveries, but it'll depend on the chefs if he or she can deliver or not.

How much would you pay for this kind of service? We're working to keep prices down. Tipping is also not expected, should be pretty affordable.

This is great! I wanted to do something like this a while ago, and YouTube API is powerful enough to build on top of, but never had time.

Why don't you have a quick Thumbs up / Thumbs down feature, so you can store data of videos people like to use for recommendations?

I'm in almost the exact same situation as you. Just graduated this year, worked for a startup, then moved to SF with a relative to work on our own startup. Would love to meet you and chat, let me know.