wastedbrains

I feel it is almost part of my responcibility at this site to help review other start ups. So I try to check out all the feedback on X posts.

I just don't have a need for this one at the time but could see how it would be useful. So I just tried to look around and notice whatever I could.

* The find groups in this location should empty and be ready for you to type a zip after you click in it * If it finds no results (which it didn't for my location 80304) perhaps don't show an empty map but show a "sorry but here are our most active locations" Sometimes it is cool to look at locations I used to live or my family/friends live. * are there any example communities to look at? I tried zooming all the way out and couldn't find anything? Do you have to log in to see existing groups?

That is about all I could see for now since I couldn't get in further... nice clean design easy to follow and start searching for communities... Good luck

We are both on HN so if anyone has any questions feel free to ask.

We do distributed ruby systems. We were working with DRb for awhile but now we actually do everything over Beanstalkd queues. Making little distributed systems in Ruby is a pleasure, but trying to deal with all error cases and failure scenarios gets pretty tricky quite fast.

right after I posted I saw that I had missed you already recommending this site. Yeah not the disourse, but a well done and interesting way to find good new music.

voting and such just like reddit, HN, or DIGG but with embeddable songs to listen to...

http://cherrypeel.com/

Cool analysis. It is always incredibly hard to put a value on something. The value is really what someone is willing to pay for it. Obviously, it is in their interests to go for as high of valuation as possible.

If they are pulling 4K a month and lets say that is a peak month for them and their growth is slowing. Then they might only be pulling 48K a year. When I sold a site in the past I got 2 1/2 times yearly revenue for it. Which would only give 125K valuation.

It is kind of amazing how just looking at a couple different numbers we have valuation ranges from $38,000 - $500,000

Kiko wasn't valued on users or anything, but on development time costs. What it would take to implement the same solution in house, which is another interesting way to look at it. I would love to see a write up about how happy they are with that purchase now that have been using it awhile.

Either way it should be fun to follow and see how this works out for them...

seems like a cheap way for weebly to get some more users... depending on what the final sale price goes to... And they could pick off any interesting features or code they liked.

Clutter.me was an interesting site, sorry to see you guys moving on.

In this case we would likely be thinking of the person as a mini founder, with a significant amount of equity. So hopefully the ownership of their work would help with the self motivation.

Yeah if we hired remotely we think we would have a two week or so on site period. We would also probably hire as a 3 month trial period that allows for reevaluation at the end of the 3 months.

Interview process

Wow you might want to research the author before making such claims. He founded a SEO company which he sold off a few years ago. He now is VP of Business Development at Lijit and helping them market and brand Lijit.

Anyways, he is directly involved in marketing websites for a living. Also, knows SEO pretty well as he built a company based on it.

http://www.lijit.com/who_we_are

True at our company of two both the CEO and CTO are the programmers. CEO does a little more with the business side of the world. CTO spends a little more time on architecture. I assume the roles will become a little different and more defined as the company grows

I sold a site doing 4,500 uniques a day, but a much lower page views and incoming profit for about 2.25 X yearly revenue. It was a good call on selling as the sites growth was starting to stall.

I like the album that Modest Mouse album quite a bit...

OK for Modest Mouse it is actually, "Good New for People who Love Bad News"

http://www.amazon.com/Good-News-People-Who-Love/dp/B0001M7P7...

Very cool write up. I always find it interesting with small changes to code can result in significant improvements. Even when it might lead to a little be less natural code (loosing the compare_faces(face1,face2) function)

Petercooper shared a great list here are some of my thoughts...

We failed to promote our last start up very well (Seekler.com), and our new start doesn't rely on eyeballs so we aren't really promoting it. That being said we did learn a few things. Some of these are probably specific to our type of site which was silly / interesting lists, other tips might be more generalizable.

* Focus more niche, whenever we specifically targeted and marketed based around a niche we were far more successful (batman comics vs. comics http://seekler.com/lists/Best+Batman+Graphic+Novels+(Comics) )

* Engage highly motivated users, we wanted to make a great horror movie list and we found a couple horror movie blogs, forums, and fans and got them involved in the process from the beginning and after they all thought it was good we promoted it.

* Time you promotion, some days are better than others to announce a link / site / news. Figure out what days are best for your kind of content. Then try to focus all of the announcements across various sites into one day. Single day focus always did much better for us than slowly stringing along a few links here and there. (likely because of the larger social news and voting effects)

* Get a good relationship with a couple bloggers that write about your topics. We had a few that we could email at any time and they were happy to add a link pointing out our new announcement or release.

* Blog and Twitter we have had a few blog articles drive as much traffic to the site as any marketing attempt. I have also been amazed at how many people will sign up to follow site announcements via twitter if you don't abuse it by posting all the time.

* One in awhile go for something edgy, some of our mainstream lists did well, but some of our weirder ones were easier to get links for.

* Share the wealth if you get some good traffic from other sites link back to people, you will find them more likely to mention something you do if you have been showing them some love.

* Spend a little time making sure you site is OK at SEO, just good enough that you aren't hurting yourself when you do get linked up for various topics.

Anyways just a couple tips off the top of my head, our attempts where never hugely successful but we had a handful of good traffic hear and there. Hope some of my thoughts help.

I saw ads for this when I was scuba diving and Honduras, kind of funny to see this story on CNN about a year later.

Jay Fields also has an excellent collection of blog posts on Ruby particularly useful stuff when you are looking into doing better Ruby testing.

Some I have found interesting http://blog.jayfields.com/2007/09/rails-how-we-test.html http://blog.jayfields.com/2007/11/ruby-testing-private-metho... http://blog.jayfields.com/2007/05/ruby-unit-testing-delegati... http://blog.jayfields.com/2008/01/testing-one-expectation-pe...

I have been really impressed with everything coming out of Backtype, keep it up you guys are doing some amazing work.

We got some small funding, and have been working to raise a larger round.

We also are hoping we ca start making break even revenue pretty soon.

It feels weird not applying to YC since I have applied for all the cycles in the last 2 years. Good luck to everyone I know how nervous I would get waiting after applying.

I guess the good news is that I am not applying because we are doing well with out startup and moving forward with customers.

Awesome built in demo, made it way more interesting to get to play around with the idea a bit.

Take the ads that work in GMail and are sort of based on your conversations. Apply to twitter streams... Done, seriously I am sure it would make a decent amount of money.

If I am talking about a restaurant in Boulder and it shows me other places to eat, I might even finally click an ad on the internet.

Excellent post, interesting to here the issues another startup has gone through... I get the complaints other have, but still thought this was an interesting read.

Nanite, looks cool we have built a similar system for requesting and completing jobs, but it would be nice to work on top of a well built and maintained framework.

The Ruby meetup in SF is huge. There are also smaller more elite Ruby groups in SF if you can find them. Out there it seems there is a large need for good Ruby talent, so if your good you just need to get the word out in the Ruby community.

Boulder has the Bouler.me ( http://boulder.me ) going on but I think it just ended. Otherwise there is a Boulder Ruby meetup and the Boulder New TechMeetup both of which would be great places to look. I will keep an ear open for Rails specific work in Boulder.

I find interesting stuff on dzone once in awhile, especially Ruby dzone

Yeah I think the posts about Rails developers doing fine during the downturn applies to any of the fast growing scripting languages. Certainly Python, I am less sure about the current growth of PHP.

People are really working to find and hire Ruby/Rails devs in SF and Boulder

Currently on SVN switching to git soon, just don't have the time at the moment. git looks like the best choice, and if I was starting anything new I would start with git now.