zio99

This was talked about on HN before, but some of the problems/solutions mentioned about not just mobile news, but online news in general:

1. S/N (signal to noise ratio) of news aggregators.

2. Monetization: Sponsored posts? (Techmeme) Intrusive ads?

3. Mobile first: Think readability.com

4. Opportunity discovery: News to startup founders was leveraging emerging trends before others became aware of them.

5. Personalized news: I think personalization is the reason why zerply.com, dreamforge.me, vastrm.com are doing well right now.

Self-plug: I'm trying to solve the mobile news problem with http://dinopost.com but I need help. Anyone interested in working with me and applying to a future YC class with this? (Open to pivots).

Edit: Subscription box broken. Email me, addy in HN profile.

Oh my, I've been saying cottaging all this time! But in my defence, I'm Canadian, see #7 here:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cottaging&...

  British/Canadian term for going to the cottage, chalet or 
  camp located in a rural or semi-rural area.

Thanks for pointing it out. Definitely saved me some embarrassment down the road, like the time I asked the cashier at the grocery store to "bag" me.

You convinced me when I turned on captions :-)

Edit: YC W12

http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4393921

Add two more to the list:

1. No documentation

2. Over-engineering

I believe EDD affects everyone from the large corps right down to the one and two-person teams. Take a look at highest upvoted hacker ideas here: http://www.todaystopthing.com/hackerideas/top

They tend to satisfy the "technically challenging" and EDD trap. Now check out the flop ideas: http://www.todaystopthing.com/hackerideas/flop

Some of these products exist and are profitable. "Simplifying" a problem/solution doesn't make it any less of a project worth pursuing. Great read +1.

Great job Ian (+1'd), any plans on opening up the source code? Or writing up a tutorial?

I used a google doc to split some payments when I went cottaging last week, so this is exactly what I was looking for. Pretty much: I drove person X and Y, so they owed me for gas, but I also bought food for 6 people, so they all owe for food, but 3 others bought food - so you write X and Y in the last column for gas, but "all" for food, for myself and those 3 others. Forget the buttons, just tab across the fields and the Ajax sorcery takes care of splitting up the bills, really handy +1.

I think you may have misunderstood. I wasn't agreeing with the OP. And I wouldn't be naïve to recognize that Groupon is in the business of selling. There are a lot of skeletons in the closet for MySpace as well (their cursor icons that you downloaded in the 90s would be labelled as spyware today since they snooped on users and sold the information). I am not discounting that, but if the OP is to say that our solution to our stagnation is to simply "make software more meaningful" and has an Amy Hoy quote to back up his claim, then I would have to respectfully disagree with some examples below:

From YC's recent batch, sure, we've got Makr.io and ReelSurfer that would be classified as "startup porn" by the OP, but you cannot discount Double, Dreamforge, Coco Controller are in the business of selling, addressing customer's pain points and actually being meaningful to its users. Customers are not naïve. His gross oversimplication of the startup industry by quoting Pinterest as dumbification of society is what bothers me.

Exactly! This article just belittles the work of startups and is demeaning to all the work that founders are putting in. Groupon didn’t think that selling 2-for-1 pizza coupons were beneath them - that’s how they started out. And that’s how a lot of companies got to where they are now - through a series of incremental and attainable steps, often riddled with failures and in industries they are no longer in now. But each lesson helps them gain traction and find product/market fit along the way. It's not that 140 characters is of less value than a spaceship. The important thing is to start, not lose hope, and keep on trucking. Or we wouldn't have any of the conglomerates we have today.

Agree with you Chuck. That's exactly the point made in Startup Principles: http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/25124056077/startup-... That companies like Google, RIM and 3M take the world by storm by solving real pressure/pain points of customers in a small and disruptive way. There is no overnight success as a case study on 3M concludes: http://brownieinmotion.ca/3m.html

Was bitgym funded by YC? Really impressed by your business proposition and your bike hack: http://blog.bitgym.com/2012/03/our-first-lean-hypothesis/ After 23 blog posts in 2 years, I'm sure there's more where that came from. Would you mind sharing your backstory here? Or a 1 minute rundown via email aaron [at] brownieinmotion [dot] ca. I would be honoured to spotlight bitgym in my book: http://sellfy.com/p/9j2z A bit of background: http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/29634915106/what-i-l... Thanks Alex!

You could go for abstract or literal, but don't mix the two. Read guide to naming your startup: http://jonpolygon.com/2011/07/guide-to-naming-your-startup/

Snap Point

Condo Connect

Thanks Zach, will email you this afternoon, or in case I forget aaron [at] brownieinmotion [dot] ca. We def should connect.

Related to how Hacker News changes lives: How a simple comment on Hacker News motivated me to resign from my comfortable well paying job and launch my own startup http://blog.freshdesk.com/the-freshdesk-story-how-a-simple-c...

The rest of our discussion on Hacker News/startup lessons here: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4426093 (An interesting take on addressing the pain points of customers).

#2 was originally "Listen to users." And it skipped my mind on how hard getting users to give feedback was (this was 10 years ago). What I did instead was check out my reference competitor's forums for threads like "bug fixes" and "feature requests." I wasn't listening to what users said they wanted, and I built my product anyways, without their requests in mind. In retrospect, it seems obvious that users were dealing with problems with existing solutions, and there was a pain point I could address. If I didn't address these points, it would mean my product would drop to just as much irrelevance as my competitors were doing at the time. This leads me to another lesson: Establish a reference competitor. It shows validation for a product/market fit, and is less expensive for you to copy+improve than innovate from scratch (I call it the first mover disadvantage).

Girish talks about addressing pain points here: http://blog.freshdesk.com/the-freshdesk-story-how-a-simple-c... coincidentally from a user comment he discovered on our very own hackernews, and then built a profitable business out of it.

Actually, there's Hackernest: http://www.meetup.com/hackernest/ in Toronto on Monday, August 27, 2012 (8 pm EST). I'll be there promoting my book: Ice Cream Startups http://sellfy.com/p/9j2z The event's free, and if there's anyone in Toronto in the startup scene, esp. if you tried applying to YC S12 like I did this summer: (http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/29634915106/what-i-l...) I'd be interested in hooking up.

I would add three more lessons (from my failed startup):

1. Cash is King

2. Get feedback early

3. Business = Trust

3.5 Design is just as important as functionality.

The first one I learned the hard way - I put off monetization in the hopes of advertising revenue picking up [See Footnote 1]. The second one I realized was probably more crucial to attract and retain evangelic customers [Footnote 2]. And the third was went my server crashed and I lost everyone's data [3]. The last I learnt a lot more recently when I launched my book: Ice Cream Startups: http://sellfy.com/p/9j2z The reason for this was explained in great length here: http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/26696517701/design-a... and Joel's take on usability: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/NotJustUsability.html Short version: Affordance is the user being able to intuitively use your software/product through it's shape/design/etc. One example is how horizontal bars on doors suggest a "push" action, and a vertical bar suggests a "pull" action. Developers, myself included, often ignore this only to eventually learn: if a product feature requires a user manual, scrap it.

--

[1] [PDF] Case study on Tivo - Freemium vs Advertising models: http://w4.stern.nyu.edu/emplibrary/ModelingTheEffectsOfAdAvo...

[2] Guy Kawaski's The Art of Being a Mensch - Chapter 11 in The Art of the Start, Richard Branson's advice on freebies: http://www.canadianbusiness.com/article/74952--good-customer... and Zappos: Delivering Happiness: http://deliveringhappiness.com on creating evangelic customers.

[3] Not everyone get's it right: http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-pick/500000-gmail-accounts...

Oddly enough, the company ended up hiring manual labour that took 4 people and 2 weeks to do something my application did on a coffee break. Reason being - that project was assigned to another department. I guess what I'm trying to say is - not to worry, things work out for the best, and karma always comes back around.

Make it open source under BSD.

That's what I did when I was in your situation. This way, 1) You don't burn any bridges, 2) You're recognized for your work and 3) If you get other contributors to your project, your software will end up coming out on top.

1. Regarding pricing your services PitchRemix and NamingKings (btw, love the ideas, see potential to be more), check out Joel on Software's blog post: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie... I'll certainly be taking it into account now that most of my customers are saying that my book Ice Cream Startups: http://sellfy.com/p/9j2z is underpriced. See background information here: http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/29634915106/what-i-l...

2. If writing's your thing, check out http://fiverr.com/ for selling minified versions of your services. Winning projects at https://www.elance.com takes more than showcasing skills; it comes down to communication, which you're really good at, so I think you can win some bids there. Focus on the fact that English is your first language, because they're many on there that aren't fluent (and just auto-bid). Also set yourself up as a company, rather than as an individual.

3. Love your minimalistic approach (don't spin it as you're not a coder). Spin it as you've got that scrappy attitude that most hackers have. If you're looking into Python/Django, I'd start here: http://eddychan.com/post/15775730174/how-i-learnt-enough-pyt...

4. Finally, don't get a second food service job, but neither should you quit your current one. Having one job I feel gives you a network that you may not otherwise have access to, and keeps you sane in times of persisting amongst failures. Keep your second job to building your websites. It's not easy, I know - I'm a student working a day job, and on web projects as well - it tires the crap out of me - but you gotta love what you do (here's why: http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/29585034512/why-do-w...). Email me if you want to bounce more ideas off. Seems like you're in the boat I was in 2 months ago (I too got one year left of school with tuition money very hard to come by). You've got a lot of options, and it's great you're taking action to figure them out. Good luck. aaron [at] brownieinmotion [dot] ca.

It would be interesting then to do a Hacker News meetup, at least in Toronto, and we can reminisce on the recent HN front page articles. How great would that be? Thanks for the inspiration patio11. +1. Any one here from Toronto?

tmoertel, this was meant to be a lil' secret, but I was hoping to send a revised edition of my book to the early adopters, therefore the PayPal account. I'm investigating if other distribution channels allow any kind of delivering happiness on a 1-to-1 basis with your users. If the publishers do, I will certainly take it up. I'm just signing off for the day, so feel free to email me any questions at aaron [at] brownieinmotion [dot] ca. Thanks for the feedback! Means a lot.

Joseph, thank you for buying Ice Cream Startups. Ironically, it was partially inspired by Zappos: Delivering Happiness. Writing it was indeed a lot of late nights, which my significant other didn't take too kindly, and I hadn't meant to share the research originally (kinda selfish like that :p), so thank you for your kind words. The feeling of finally shipping and signing on early adopters is ecstatic! Will address the whole debate on pricing low in my blog once I catch up on some rest. If you have any questions, feel free to email me aaron [at] brownieinmotion [dot] ca. Thanks again!

Likewise, there's a lot I learned from conversations I've had with YC founders and other startups in the accelerator space. I just launched the book yesterday: http://sellfy.com/p/9j2z Here's some background on myself and the book: http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/29634915106/what-i-l... Loving what I'm reading so far. Very inspirational. +1.

Can you confirm whether you can definitely exercise the sell? Also, what is the length of the term of vesting? Taking that into consideration; do you see this company around at that time?

Usually current market value. It's discounted if it's considered high risk (and therefore has the possibility to tank).

My only concern is if Product A is failing, and you want to work on Product B, there would be a conflict of interest in killing Product A (there's people vested in), and it'll be hard to split your time to work on both products. There's the option to incorporate under the umbrella, but the fear of spreading yourself too thin. A dilemma nonetheless.

I guess for a startup, it would hard to track what was done on company time, and what was done as a side project. For example, coding a side project on my 9-5 job would require a consent form signed by my manager to claim they had no ownership on my project. But a startup founder working on the weekend on YC's project only to realize a need for something else that needed to be coded and monetized. That's gray area of who owns the assets.