[jdawg77]

Interesting to see this and given I filed my first patent pending last month, thought I'd share my thoughts. I'm $100k+ in debt; I grew up poor. My parents live on a fixed income, I send them money every month and last year, in 2014, I made the least annual income I have made since 2003.

As a divorced father of two, who was fired from his last full time job, and can't disclose due to NDA prior work, I've been self employed the majority of my adult life since 2006. Since September, I'm a former alcoholic, which is news to many - I had drank regularly since I was 18 and only recently realized I could correlate a bit of my drinking to early communication issues that resulted in the "low end," classes in my first years of education.

I digress, though, as the first one in my family in three generations to receive a bachelor's degree, life in college and out is hard. In my family, during my "prime," my business expenses were over 100K per year in 2009 and 2010. However, things came crashing down and changed. It's a long, long story. Drinking helps zero.

Now, my software is free, I filed a patent pending because I need credibility. The world is flat, as Thomas Friedman said, and growing more so. Ten years ago I spent $50K on my own tools. If I had known then that I'd need them in 2013, and 2014 again, I would have done what I'm doing now.

Made them free. Open source. Given it away, hoping that with better tools, everybody benefits. That's the dream.

We got rejected by Ycombinator. I've worked with guys in the news way way more than I'll ever be, and I tell a lot of stories, incidentally, most are true.

Thanks for reading, I love this site and learn from it daily.

[treyfitty]

Fascinating. Mind chatting more about it? I'm genuinely interested how you dealt with all that. My email is in my profile

[jdawg77]

Actually, your email isn't (that I could see) in your profile. Odds are good, "Low karma." Geniuses built hacker news so that spammers like I used to be couldn't alter the system, have too much influence and more.

So no, I can't see your email, I can't mentally parse it from your username, etc. My contact info is in my profile - eg, if you know I'm Jeremy Goodrich, I'm not too hard to find. All too easy, in fact. I'm the only one of the sixty to one hundred folks with the same name who's been in digital marketing & search / information retrieval since finished college at University of Oregon. Feel free to write, I like chatting with people. Thanks for reading, listening and here's to a fun conversation.