wolfrom

The division isn't intuitive to me at this point, but maybe I rely too much on actual labels/headers. I think it's little things that throw me off, like Digg being separate from its counterparts on the Tech page.

It seems like a good approach. The only thing that throws me off is the two columns with tabs; which tabs go where seems arbitrary to me (but maybe it's not and I just don't know that). I wonder if it would work to split it between the types of channels, with one column for social/submitted/aggregated news (Digg, Slashdot, HN) and another for the primary sources.

I don't think I know any active Yahoo! users who consider it a search company (not that I know that many Yahoo users). When I think Yahoo, I think Mail and Flickr. Besides that, there is always room in the market for different styles for a product. Look at the Travel search engine space and compare Travelocity to Kayak; can't both find a user base?

SAMBA: Hamster Burial Kits & 998 Other Business Ideas - http://www.sixmonthmba.com/2009/02/999ideas.html

We just registered a .CO as the main address for our new startup. We think of it somewhat as a placeholder, as we hope to one day purchase the .COM since it's not actively in use by its current owner (but we haven't tried to contact yet). When we started, we had always called the product Rugby, but since the .COM is owned by Polo Ralph Lauren, Rugby.com would never be an option.

I think that had the .COM for our startup been taken by a pre-existing company with deep pockets and a strong brand, we would have simply chosen a different name. Incidentally, Rugby.co was already registered, and by a COLOMBIAN of all people. :)

We've all heard of sites that started with less-than-ideal domain names and upgraded when they had the money, and we rarely hear any of them complain about how much they spent.

I think the difference in motivation is important. Early adoption of startups is based in part on trying out something that could be the next big thing. Is that something just one of many side projects, or maybe a one-night coding session that someone uploaded and has no plans for iteration or pivot based on feedback/market development?

Especially in the age of Facebook Connect, I am becoming increasingly wary of trying out most new apps because I'm having difficulty gauging the motivation of the founder(s).

In truth, I usually go through several pages of an app's development blog before I even think of trying something out. If there's no dev blog, I generally assume that it's just a "project", and not something that will grow or change too much.

I think a good question on HN would be to whom here is pg not a hero in some way? Isn't that why people want to draft him for Congress / get his advice on everything / build statues of him out of old sim cards?

That being said, I did enjoy reading "I like the way Paul Graham quacks". And I do wonder if there are other people in the startup/investor community who have the same positive cred as pg.

I think that there are important distinctions between incremental and revolutionary products, and I agree that this advice may not work for the latter... now, how do you stop founders from thinking their latest idea is revolutionary just because they haven't done enough research to know any better? (This is what I wonder about with my ideas)

I think there is an exception to this idea for startups that require data-centric scaling. If you are planning to grab as much data as you can and as quickly as possible, this could require scaling even when the user count itself is small. I had a startup that ground to a halt because I hadn't anticipated the sheer amount of data that the app would collect even before I had more than a handful of users. Of course, that isn't the traditional kind of scaling that people talk about.