mcorrand's comments

I agree with you, somewhat: there is not much of a server component to this game and we should get to play it forever and ever, and it is frustrating that we didn't know for sure ahead of time this was a 6 months license only.

However, as a solo entrepreneur, I agree even more with the creator of the game. He gets to price his creation however he likes, and he probably needs to make money like the rest of us. His game teaches a super valuable skill that has saved me well over the price in typing efficiency. Again, I'm fine with the price tag. Just wish he had the option to renew for a month after the initial purchase to brush up. Probably leaving money on the table!

I'd renew for a month to refresh the less usual commands in a heartbeat if it was $2-3 bucks! $25 is hard to swallow. I do feel like I got my $25 worth at the time though. It was a great way to learn and I use a lot of it daily.

Same here. I bought when it had just launched, wasn't complete yet and there was no mention of the license not being perpetual. Disappointing, but I did get a lot of value from it though!

Gotcha. The gap between hobby-grade solutions and business-grade solutions blows my mind every time.

Possibly not, right? If you don't sort but instead use the machine to do the inventory of your bins, then you could have your software tell you which bins you are going to need to fulfill your orders for the day. The big "if" in that scenario is that your machine is not categorizing anymore but identifying. I don't have the experience to assess how much harder it is.

Then you'd go and pick the bins, run them through, and the machine assembles the sets from those bins. That's similar to the way Amazon does it. Now they have the shelves on robotic trolleys that bring them directly to the packers, but that's just a required efficiency at their scale.

I guess the problem with this scheme is that you move the problem from classifying to identifying... twice. So the precision requirement goes up. I don't know how big your dataset would need to be to require minimum human intervention.

Ditto. I think that's definitely what would sell at the best value.

Coincidentally, it kind of simplifies the sorting problem too. Just do like Amazon and don't sort!

Instead, use the machine to figure out exactly what was in that bin you just bought. Give the bin an ID, and store it as is. Then, when putting together a set, have your software find the minimum number of bins you need to pull from to assemble the set. Run them through, and have the machine pull the parts.

Second that! Vultr offers OpenVPN as a one click app, it's super easy to get it running on a $5 vps.

This is a hard problem to solve perfectly. I'm still stuck at the ID verification step, after sending in my documents. Never heard back. I'm the perfect corner case though, having gotten a green card recently, left a job, moved to another state, so on so forth...

I used a sole proprietorship until the money started getting more substantial; that may not be a good idea if your business has large risks though.

Some other resources that have served me well - not for incorporation per se, but the next few steps in setting up a healthy corporation:

- Docracy.com has some good templates (contributed by some incubator I can't recall) for bylaws, ip assignation, founder terms, terms of service and privacy policy and customer contracts, etc.

- Listing a phone number with one of the large online directories helps with various verifications (including EV SSL if you need it and facebook page)

- insureon.com to shop for insurance.

- Get bookkeeping software. Right away, and keep it up to date

Edit: the docracy docs are by Techstars: https://www.docracy.com/userprofile/show?userId=30 and Orrick, a law firm: https://www.docracy.com/p/10881/orrick

I have no doubt things will keep chugging along, but the time and energy wasted through customs for the commuter working in Spain would be a major pain.

My post was not bringing much to the discussion - I edited it to clarify my thinking. As British as the people of Gibraltar may feel, I don't think their patriotism will prevail over the prospect of being stuck from the main landmass by a border garded by a revengeful EU... Revengeful being the operative word, since there was always a crossing since the UK is not part of Schengen; but at least they were part of the EU.

Gibraltar may want out too, they voted almost unanimously to remain and they probably won't want to be locked into their detroit by a UE border

From my experience so far, sending an email to Charley is essentially the same as finding the info online since he answers so quickly! Great onboarding, I was really impressed!

Plaid provides a better verification and authentication flow.

Users authenticate with bank username and password rather than routing and account number so they don't have to hunt those down, and there are no worries about mistyping (failed ACH payments cost $4).

The bank account is verified straight away, which bypasses the microdeposits flow that takes a couple business days.

I'm working on adding ACH payments to my Stripe Connect app, and I'm planning on adding only the Plaid Link flow because the routing/account number + microdeposits flow just seems like too much of a headache.

How would you work out the visas and taxes though?

Yep, enterprise apps definitely fall under the "serious" umbrella :).

If a middle tier is a foreseeable requirement then this architecture does lose a lot of its charm.

I do think there has to be a way to easily strangle out the prototype but I haven't done much thinking about that yet. Maybe start reading from a pouchdb instance and proxy writes through a middle tier?

For really small projects, a proper backend is not always necessary and talking directly to the db can speed up development. I wouldn't dare do that for anything serious though.

Couchdb is also a really nice way to do this, since it provides you with an extensive (an extensible) rest api out of the box, serves your site and even gets you a nice heroku like deployment workflow with the Couchapp project (https://github.com/couchapp/couchapp). Sticking it behind varnish is really easy too.

I was expecting a "man careers" easter egg. Bitter disappointment :(

We need to educate ourselves.

Such a startup weekend would be a wonderful occasion. Why organizers do not draw up a simple legal checklist is beyond me.

Just drafting a paper signed by the whole team at the beginning of the event stating "I am going to put ~30 to 40 hours at my hourly rate of $X and thus my contributions can be bought for $Y", or whatever stock terms float your boat, would set clear expectations. They actually were less naive than most since they had that "handshake deal", but they should have gotten it in writing.

That, and realizing "Applicant tracking system in an original niche" is not a revolutionary idea. They owed that Billy guy absolutely nothing and should probably have kicked him out.