trussi's comments

Quite interesting!

At first, I didn't understand why you only wanted a 200x200 image. I expected it to cut a big picture up into smaller squares and lay them out in a table.

But I was wrong! :)

It actually creates a 200 row by 200 column table and changes the background of each cell to match the image's color at that pixel.

I'd recommend improving the description of the service on the site. It took me a couple tries to get it to work (I used too big of a picture), but finally got it to work. Glad I did.

Thanks for sharing.

What are the roles of each person? Is the younger person the hacker and the older person the bizdev? Or vice versa?

If the older person is the bizdev and has a lot of domain expertise, then it's a HUGE advantage!

The problem I think you are trying to solve isn't much of a problem.

I've been developing with CMS applications for 12+ years and have never once ran into any of the issues you described above (failed upgrades, hackings, site-jackings, buggy plugins) to such a degree that I wanted/needed to completely switch the CMS platform.

I'd urge you to NOT build a product for developers. I know it's tempting because the ideas we (developers) come up with follow the 'scratch your itch' advice. I wrote a blog post about this: http://www.travisdoes.com/you-itch-sucks-scratch-somebody-el...

I'd highly recommend you focus your efforts on building a B2B SaaS product. There are millions of great opportunities to build boring, but profitable niche products.

If you need help finding some ideas, shoot me an email.

Next time... :)

Make sure all co-founders' equity is vested.

Don't do a 50-50 split. One person needs to have a majority stake. Otherwise, you spend too much effort being a democracy instead of a startup.

If you give 40% to a designer, how much are you going to give to your biz dev person (when you need one in three months when your beta is done)?

If you both use equity to give to the biz dev and the biz dev requires more than 20% to retain, you just lost majority of your business. :(

40% is way too high for a designer.

Also, make damn sure you vest any equity you give out.

Remember, you can only give it away once, so do so sparingly.

Car-as-a-service. Nice.

Build and install a scaled out application. Multiple AWS instances in a load balanced configuration. Use small instances to purposely bottleneck the available resource pool.

Use something like Blitz.io to beat the hell out of the application. This is your baseline

Use performance monitoring and optimization tools to improve the architecture and application. Go through each layer of the application to see where the biggest gains can be found. Also look/test for data consistency.

Rinse and repeat with blitz.io.

Also, test how well the architecture responds to various types of server failures.

And make sure you test a viable backup process as well.

Lastly, once you have a nice, performant architecture, increase system resources both up (more resources per server) and out (more servers) to see how well the system actually scales. :)

Agreed.

Based on lots of experience dealing with off-shore developers, the problem has always been communication.

Once a company figures out how to properly communicate the right level of detail, outsourcing becomes a significant force.

The opportunity gap of $15/hr versus $50/hr is too great to ignore.

Nice work.

Glad to see somebody implementing a solution to pretty up QR codes.

Only potential issue is the contrast between the foreground and background needs to be enough to properly scan.

Check out the specials listed on WebHostingTalk.com.

I use unmanaged dedicated servers.

Going price for a dedicated Quad Core i7, 12 GB of ECC RAM, 4x2TB is under $150/mo. That's a wicked cheap price for those specs.

Obviously if you are going from $10/mo hosting, you won't bite the bullet on a $150/mo server, but it's the only price point I know.

Are you interested in building cutting edge technology or building a business?

If you're interested in building a business, then there's a huge amount of opportunity the online communications space!

I could probably think of 5 cushy niches that will print $20k-60k per month with a very small team. Just look around you and identify occupations that involve communication and build a communication product around that occupation's process.

It's a relatively simple and straight-forward process to building a business that lots of technical folks overlook because it's not sexy. I'll take profitable over sexy any day.

Take a look at Tableau. It's super expensive and desktop-based. But it allows for some very powerful, customized data analysis.

Build a SaaS version of Tableau and you have a good starting point.

You still need to find the problem you are solving. Try to find one or two niches, like university labs or government research facilities.

Personally, I'd find the problem this solves well, then actually solve that problem (instead of helping others solve that problem). Take credit card interest rates; instead of building a tool tailored to credit card issuers or resellers, build a site that provides the data (using your tool) in a value-added way.

It's like you're creating your itch, so you can scratch it with your idea. A bit backwards, but crazy enough it might just work.

As a developer, I love writing code and solving problems. I spend my Friday nights writing code. I routinely pull all nighters writing code. Did I mention I love writing code?

I am going solo on my current project, so I'm having to do all the non-tech stuff (marketing, financing, sales, operations, customer support). I like doing it, but I'd rather not. My time is much better spent solving technical problems.

The non-tech stuff is equally hard and equally important. I might not be the best BizDev guy, but I'm definitely not going to trust it to just anybody.

Based on my experience, you have to be the best BizDev person I've ever met. That's actually not that high of a bar; most "BizDev" folks have no idea what hustle looks like.

Here's how I'd define that...

1) How well defined is your product? How have you evaluated the product/market fit? If you aren't regularly engaging with customers, you haven't even started yet. I want to see significant customer-facing interaction on a regular basis.

2) How well have you thought out the marketing plan? What distribution channels have you identified? Have you created marketing collateral for those channels yet? If not, get busy.

3) Where's your business plan? Don't laugh; I'm serious. Anybody that scoffs at a business plan is a fool (and they've probably never done one before, which is a very bad sign). It's a litmus test that shows you have gone through the business planning process. And it's actually quite informative for me to better understand how thoroughly you have thought through your idea.

4) Show me your financial projections. These had better be rock solid. If my accountant laughs when reading your financials, not good.

5) Tell me where you personally want to be in 3 years. What are your life goals, your financial goals, etc?

6) Show me your mock-ups, prototypes, wireframes, etc. You should already have these (sourced via crowdsourcing/outsourcing) and are actively iterating them as part of your conversation with customers.

7) You should have spent at least $5k of your own money on this project. I don't care what you spent it on (conference fees, outsourcing, travel, etc). I want to see you with some skin in the game.

I think that's a reasonable first draft list of things I'm looking for in a BizDev person. I'll add more as I think of them.

Does that help?

+1 for ASCII art

You get even more bang for your buck if you combine two existing products.

Combine HootSuite and SocialOomph and you have a rockstar Twitter manager.

Synergy is a wonderful thing.

Single best post I have ever read on HN. Thanks for sharing!

Doing a .Net startup myself, I'd like to think I'm not the only one. I'd surmise that there's actually quite a few people using a Microsoft stack in the startup community. They just don't talk about it much.

Obviously, if you choose the .Net path, getting a developer job at a WAMP/RoR/Python/etc startup won't really be feasible.

But if you are a good developer, I would advise you NOT to join a startup that's already established. Why invest your heart and soul in somebody else's vision/company for a paltry equity percentage? It just doesn't add up in my mind.

Instead, start your own. Go find a hustler to partner with or just build your own product. If you get into a startup pre-development phase and you're the hacker on the team, then the technology you use is irrelevant. The only relevant thing is that you can deliver.

If you have clear technical requirements defined, use oDesk.

Put out a $25-50 test job. Make sure to invite as many contractors as you can (the oDesk UI is absolute garbage, so this is a slow, painful process). Pick the 10 best for the test job.

Look for ability to communicate, quickness of turnaround, level of hand-holding and the quality of their work.

Pick the best 2-3 and get busy. I personally prefer to use hourly workers because my requirements tend to change all the time.

There's a big difference between investors and a support network.

Very few (any?!) investors are really going to help you with the grunt work of making the business successful.

Never assume that a good investor is a good operations person or a good marketer or a good visionary.

I love working solo. Less distractions. Less wasted time. The only person I have to argue with is myself.

That is not to say I don't have help; I just use strategic help for specific purposes.

I found a bad-ass marketing guy that helps me develop my marketing strategy. I use him when I need him. No equity or long-term commitment.

Same for infrastructure issues and sales strategies.

I have people that hold me accountable to keep me laser-focused.

To answer your specific question about professional investors helping your chances of success, it depends on your definition of success.

If you're trying to build a lifestyle business (highly recommend), then investors will explicitly block your success.

If you're trying to build a high-growth, 3-5 year exit business, then investors might be able to help.

I would still stay away from early-stage investment though. Use professional investment for the growth stage; this is the place where their experience will be directly relevant to your objective (fast, hard growth).

Good point. My brain is hardwired to think product == SaaS product. So I'm only referring to using this strategy for a SaaS product.

I think it works with a SaaS product, assuming you keep all business related stuff (Domain registration, servers, business incorporation, bank accounts, etc) in another country (i.e. Sweden).

I just don't know which countries would be best...