ritwikt's comments

1. You have not failed in life 2. The tone of the post seems like you have emotionally accepted that your current endeavor has failed and you are looking for external validation - but lets keep that aside for a moment -- Are you getting pull from customers about what you are building ? Is it growing at say >10% monthly rate? If not and your energy is running out .. Take a deep breath be pragmatic and think where do you want to leave an impact

It could be in the current area or another one and it is for you to decide. Hope this helps

Have been on similar boat and started my own ~7 mos back. Here are couple of points: 1. Be prepared for your savings to Last >1yr, unless you can get seed funding now 2. Is your gf/spouse ready for this 3. A start-up will not eat into your somewhat of social life, unless you want it to. IMHO I would say please hold on to it. You need that support. 4. PG talks about the weekend project thing .. didn't work for me coz they just loose steam 5. For the leaving NOW decision I would also consider if you have someone with somewhat of complementary skills ready to jump ship, If not I will spend the next 6 months finding that person and then quit [together]

Would be nice to know why RabbitMQ/ZeroMQ didn't fit the bill [scale/speed?] -- I can somewhat understand the not relying on SQS but then there is anyways a reliance on EC2 right ?

In plain english can one explain whats broken with iMap/current email and how Inbox fixes it ? I m missing something sure here

Please get a legal counsel and fire the CTO. At this early stage trust and respect is the only glue and he seems to have none for you at least.

The point to discuss not really looking for a perfect answer :)

@bmull you might want to check out what we are doing in the space @http://www.informion.com - we are essentially using relevance as a key driver for engagement.

Would love to connect @ritwiktewari

Excellent post on lifting the opt-in rate for push .. The opposite side of the spectrum is user annoyance and app abandons when these channels[specially push] are used to spam

Didn't work with my LinkedIn .. bug or too early for that?

Gives me At the moment, your network is not eligible for full access. You can try to integrate more networks to improve your score to 50 or check out our startup toolbox.

+1 to that Bizspark is an awesome program for startups. We are running linux on it w/o any issues [~3 servers come free] Best part - there are no restrictions on what s/w stack you run..

This if done right could really be a game changer - think getting an API where I could send a word and get back what it meant ...

AirBnB and Oculus create value one by disruption and the other by innovation ... They are better left off from King lane which is more ephemeral ..

'99 was more of a tide where everything rose - look @ how King got punished in the market, would that have happened in '99?

You might want to answer what you want from the accelerator - you seem to be hinting @ growth - you might want to qualify that further since you seem to be covered on market access and possibly money

Coffee-script is awesome but suffers from it's roots as a preprocessed layer on top .. and that essentially leads to poor overall tool chain support .. I actually enjoyed writing code in it .. debugging not so much .. Would love some of the constructs to make into JS

It's a good start but MSFT has a lot of cultural unlearning to do for it to really become the formidable force that it was .. Years of somber have crept into the culture - and shaking that up in going to be a challenge - good thing though is that they are able to attract great talent.

PS: I have spent a decade working @ MSFT

We really have none of these - yet wanted to apply and encourage others like us to apply. We laid out our reasons with the hope to encourage a few more to polish their customer pitches using the framework we used ...

For us it came to two things: a. Did we FEEL that the guys running the accelerator cared b. Had we developed respect for their OPINIONS As I said we found 3 fitting our criteria and YC was only one

That Ethos seems to be have been lost :( ..

I had written the post yesterday and submitted it - now the email list is STS [Seattle tech startups] and on that we are fairly active and know personally almost all the active members [seattle has a relatively small startup community]

All I said was up-vote if you like – isn’t that what we do anyways. This is an alias for fellow founders/entrepreneurs it would have been stupid to expect I would game the system there using these people -- we genuinely felt we had put in some thought behind the post ...

On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 8:19 PM, Ritwik Tewari <[email protected]> wrote: Given we are in the season of accelerator applications & that there is a perceived disadvantage to Seattle entrepreneurs like us coming from big cos. I thought some of you might find our story helpful. The post is @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484234 – In case you happen to like it please up-vote or re-tweet. [If HN has issues try https://medium.com/p/d639607056f6] Techstars shares similar attributes hence much of the reasoning applies there too & yes it is amongst the other two I mention in my post.  …

Today a friend re-posted the link from my Facebook feed https://www.facebook.com/ritwik.tewari/posts/101522829864591...

this was a place I could have asked for free upvotes -- please see that I really did not

Think of us in some positive light and you might find us with a different take - not one that you may like but different none the less :)

Please view the site as a precursor to our customer development conversation or an add-on to the cold call. It's not for inbound marketing, in-fact we have spent Zero dollars on advertising.

1. The service exists as a bunch of Java and Python scripts running on data sets in zip files. We needed just enough to get the core algorithms. We totally stopped development there and then forced ourselves to do customer conversations – we knew we could build this but not sure if people cared. 2. We were experimenting here and used to change the tag line every 20 or so cold emails to see which one worked better. It ranged from “Increase CTR…”, “Customer Success Platform”, “Interrupt to Please” – We monitored our conversions and asked our prospects what worked for them. We do not have a ton of data[12 customer conversations] to prove one way or other but found a provocative line to work better to pull them in the conversation than the most matter of fact explanation – discussions always were about specifics.

Would more than appreciate getting specific feedback [email protected] or @ritwiktewari.

3. This is an interesting one – we had two choices 1. Create make belief scenarios and try explaining that 2. Showcase examples where companies had done this well. We started with 1 but almost never heard positive things in our conversations – we switched to 2 knowing that we could really NOT dupe someone since at this stage no one could sign up on the site besides a conversation -> demo followed by a pilot. We have only one target in next 8 weeks replace this with a real customer testimonial .. Please do understand that we just started and yes we might have crossed the line here. If many share the feeling we would be more than happy to revert.

4. This one we have really put a lot of pain into so let me defend this  .. We asked our prospects 1. How much they would value the service @ - the answer was around 1K/mo 2. How much do they pay for compete/researched all the alternatives and the fact is that 1-3K is an average [Not really accounting for the difference between us and compete.] From there we put in $599 – so that we are competitive yet account for the risk a company would take on an early stage startup PS: Closes compete charges 3c/user – and we are targeting >100Kma 5. Well it might surely be – but being in Microsoft till date meant people outside rarely knew about the cool tech that was built – it is not the case with Google/FB/Twitter et al. I had 6 points and Microsoft was just one which was specifically related to • Have Non-existent open source profiles [Didn't we say Microsoft ☺] I think that’s a fact – I am more than glad that things are changing rapidly for good at MSFT.

I must say that we really didn't plan it this way we wrote this yesterday given we felt strongly about it.

The intent was not necessarily to talk about YC but to:

1. Spell out the framework we used to evaluate accelerators so others could use it as appropriate For us it came to two things: a. Did we FEEL that the guys running the accelerator cared b. Had we developed respect for their OPINIONS As I said we found 3 fitting our criteria and YC was one among those – it depends on what pre-access founders get to these guys/their thoughts – being in Seattle guys @ 9 mile have helped us out from even before we left our day jobs, similarly Andy and Techstars alum has been nothing but vested. Thought this will be helpful for others deciding on accelerators.

2. Using YCs app as a tool for improving sales/pitches We found YCs application & what they expect to have most resonance with what customers asked and expected – I would concur that almost all applications have these questions in one form of the other but PG has done well to express what they expect in his essay – we found him echoing what our customers expected but never demanded – so the app could be a tool one could use to refine the sales call/pitch.

Good point and well 30 yo's applying to YC was funny .. Fixed it in the original post.