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Doctor w-rw-rw-
Jun 24, 2008
My $0.02: You're probably doomed. Recruiters probably won't use it.

Were I connected to my computer at the moment I might be more clear and specific, but basically I don't know what this product is supposed to do that isn't already done much better by someone else, and at a larger scale. If this were not a recruiting app I might not kill it off in my mind so hastily, but recruiting is a money and numbers game from the start, and that is where all of its utility lies.

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Huragok
Sep 14, 2011
If its any consolation, I hate recruiters. I guess it's not really for recruiters because it encourages 1:1 contact between the hirer and applicant / talent. Thanks for the link though, it's interesting food for thought.

Nam Taf
Jun 25, 2005

I am Fat Man, hear me roar!


That's fascinating, thanks for the article!

Space Crabs
Mar 10, 2007

by FactsAreUseless

Drive By posted:

Can you give us more detail on your project?

I'm not the most experienced founder, but it seems to me like getting funded really depends on your local investment scene. Take the advice you read in Silicon Valley oriented books and articles very lightly, and look for someone local to you who's already done it before.

If anything, really look into your hypothesis: do you actually need funding? read the books by 37signals and other bootstrappers, identify your MVP; build and release it as soon as possible and see what kind of traction you can get without spending money.

Any advice on what to do when getting zero traction? I self funded but my app sits at <150 downloads 3 months later.

unixbeard
Dec 29, 2004

Who is your market and how are you reaching them?

Drive By
Feb 26, 2004

Dinosaur Gum

Space Crabs posted:

Any advice on what to do when getting zero traction? I self funded but my app sits at <150 downloads 3 months later.


A lot could be happening for you to get zero traction. Off the top of my head:

-You're not exposing your product to anyone.
-You're not exposing your product to the right people.
-People are getting to your site/whatever but they can't see a proper path to action.
-People think you look sketchy.
-People can't see where your app's value is.
-Your app sucks too much for any of the billion smartphone users to install. (this is probably not true)

Give us more detail: what is it; how much money are you spending on publicizing, what kind of page views are you getting, how many clickthroughs...poo poo, give yourself some free advertising by pitching us, maybe you'll get to 151 downloads!

hello dog
Jul 14, 2012
I need some advice.

It seems that people don’t usually discuss adult (ie porn related) startups in the same places that general starup stuff is discussed, which I guess makes sense for many reasons. Since my questions are more startup related than porn related, I’ll just post it here anyway.

I’m a programmer building an adult related product. It is essential a :nws: clips4sale :nws: clone. As you can see that site is pretty crappy looking with pretty high fees for producers (40%!). I realize a much better looking, much easier to use site with a much nicer experience for sellers and buyers with smaller fees is by no means a guarantee that I will be able to carve out any market share for myself, especially since this is porn and who cares about that stuff, but after a bit of experimenting selling content I own on clips4sale and similar sites starting about six months ago, I just had to try. I’m maybe 75% done with the site and I’m pretty happy with how it’s coming out.

So my predicament is this: I’m broke. I’ve been mainly working on this the past couple months and don’t really have any money saved. I have a small bit of income from other endeavours but not quite enough to live off of, though I could probably continue scraping by for a few months without a ton of trouble. I know, you could argue that this is dumb and I should just get a job for a while, which I probably could do, but I’d really like to explore other options.

The expense I’m most worried about in getting this thing off the ground is legal fees. I have no experience really dealing with lawyers, and while I’m familiar enough with the minimal requirements to sell my own adult material online, I’m positive it gets much more complicated once you start allowing others to offer content under your site. Looking at the disclaimer/legal info on clips4sale is pretty scary. Not only that but I have to establish myself as a business, probably an LLC?

I do have experience with running online businesses but they have been small sole proprietorship type things and I feel that this one warrants more attention to making sure all my ducks are in a row wrt establishment as a business entity, due to the possibility that beastiality may appear on properties under my control (in practice I will be manually approving all content for as long as it is feasible, but still).

And so my idea is to seek a partner. My short time in this industry has given me SOME credibility in the small corner of the depths of internet porn in which I have been operating, and there are people (other producers/site owners within my niche) more experienced than I who I would feel comfortable soliciting for a potential partnership, and who I even feel would have a non-zero percent chance of accepting some such deal. Obviously they would be heavily screened/interviewed.

What I’m currently thinking of is offering 33% of the [yet to be officially established] company to a partner. For this I would like to get, at minimum, a monthly stipend of $500-$1000 to pay for living expenses (the middle of this range would be ideal but honestly I’d probably accept 500). If possible I would also like to get an investment in the business to pay for legal costs or other expenses. Lastly, this person would be expected (or contractually required?) to provide advice and bounce ideas off me based on their industry experience. If they would handle some aspects on the business side of things that would be cool, but I don’t think I would definitely require legwork from them, I don’t mind doing all the real work for now as long as I have an experienced person with a personal interest in the success of this to bounce ideas of.

In return, I will work full time on the site, using most of my time programming but also handling some of the business side of things, acquiring business, etc.

So I guess my main questions is: is this realistic, and how do I go about making this happen?

I realize that this would depend on a lot of variables. Let’s assume first that my software is of good enough quality, and that the site would have cost $2000 (really conservative) to have programmed from scratch, and that I will be able to acquire 3 new content sellers per month, and that each content seller results in $20 net profit per month. These are estimates I’m pulling out of my rear end but are conservative based on my own sales numbers and what I've been able to gather about the sales numbers of other people. But if these numbers are correct, would $750/month + $1000 investment be a fair deal for 33% equity? If not, what would be fairer? Obviously some negotiation would happen but I’m just trying to see if this scheme which I sort of completely invented is something that might be feasible in real life? I would probably have a sort of business plan where I make better estimates and attempt to justify them to show potential partners.

And once I have a basic thing to offer people, how do I make it happen? Do I first get an LLC established, then go to a lawyer and basically tell him what I just typed here, and he’ll make up a contract, which I can then offer someone once I go through a screening process of potential partners? How much would all that cost, roughly?

This came out longer than I expected. Thanks in advance for any guidance.

hello dog fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Jul 14, 2012

snagger
Aug 14, 2004

hello dog posted:

I need some advice.

Negotiate what you're willing to give up for what you need to get. There aren't guidelines for this kind of thing. I also don't know why you're approaching competitors to pitch them, but I trust you know your scene better than I.

Since this is porn, and possibly an open marketplace, you better have all kinds of legal work done regarding copyright and legality of actors.

Talk to a lawyer sooner than later.

unixbeard
Dec 29, 2004

hello dog posted:

This came out longer than I expected. Thanks in advance for any guidance.

Since you don't need that much money could you hit up friends or family? Or get a personal loan? If $6k is going to let you work on it full time for 6 months, it's not that much money. Or just try and save it up if your current income lets you. Seems like it would save a lot of hassle regarding lawyers and contracts etc.

Have you tried any industry forums or groups (like trade shows or whatever) to network and find a mentor type deal? For my stuff I am a member of one paid forum and have a paid mentor who offers it as a service, some people balk at the idea of these but in terms of ROI it is easily the best money I have ever spent.

I think a lot of people operate in a fairly cowboy like way wrt legality and stuff. In your case I would definitely make sure you are complying with age related laws, but for the other stuff what is going to happen? If you get sued it doesn't really sound like you have any assets anyway. I'm not recommending this, but you wouldn't be the first person operating in such a manner. You have enough on your plate and limited funds so be very careful about what you do with your capital, make sure whatever you spend it on is really worth it. Later if/when you get more income you can address outstanding items.

musclecoder
Oct 23, 2006

I'm all about meeting girls. I'm all about meeting guys.
I just launched my first product - Accthub!

Everyone is building mobile apps these days and most of them need some type of platform to power the backend of their app. Accthub provides a simple API for mobile developers to build their applications on top of.

As users register for your app, you would create an account for them on Accthub. You then add data to their account as they use your app more and more.

The major use case for this is developers who want to create an app and not have to worry about building, securing, and managing a backend platform at the same time.

Accthub is priced on the number of accounts you have in the system, not on the number of API calls you make. Your first 100 accounts are free, and every account after that is 1 penny.

If you're a developer or just have a moment to check it out, I'd love to get your feedback. Thank you!

unixbeard
Dec 29, 2004

That looks really cool, you should post it in the "Stuff you're working on" thread in CoC you might get additional feedback there.

How did you decide on the pricing? I think it is good because it is so clear, but I wonder how many accounts you would need registered to make it worth your while, you dont want to sell yourself short. Even just a one off $10 signup/registration is still really cheap, and there will always be support stuff that needs to be covered.

musclecoder
Oct 23, 2006

I'm all about meeting girls. I'm all about meeting guys.

unixbeard posted:

That looks really cool, you should post it in the "Stuff you're working on" thread in CoC you might get additional feedback there.

How did you decide on the pricing? I think it is good because it is so clear, but I wonder how many accounts you would need registered to make it worth your while, you dont want to sell yourself short. Even just a one off $10 signup/registration is still really cheap, and there will always be support stuff that needs to be covered.

Thanks, I'll cross post it in there.

I wanted to go with more of an Amazon AWS'ish pricing model where you only pay for the resources you use (though they do charge per API request, it's very cheap). Unfortunately, the thing we can beat our competitors (Parse and Stackmob) over is price. That's not to say I think we have a bad product or I'm going to jack the price up when our product matures, they just have millions in venture capital and have more mature products.

That's a good point about a small registration fee.

I also want to go after enterprise customers who may not feel comfortable letting us do all of the hosting and would like to purchase a license of the software to run on their own servers.

Thanks for your feedback.

unixbeard
Dec 29, 2004

Yeah that is cool, pricing can be really tricky. I remember listening to some podcast that was interviewing this guy who had done research on how successful startups take on incumbents. He basically said successful ones started off by being worse and cheaper, using salesforce as an example. It lacked a lot of features of all the big CRMs but was cheap and filled a niche, until eventually it ended up eclipsing a lot of the more entrenched ones.

Busy Bee
Jul 13, 2004
I need some advice.

I am currently in the process of starting a Medical Marijuana Delivery Service in WA state. I have talked to numerous lawyers and the best method to go through with this is to register as a non-profit corporation in the state of WA.

In one section of the application form it asks for the following information:

"Registered Office Street Address

Important: Using a P.O. Box or Private Mailbox service will cause this Application to be Rejected. Each corporation must provide a registered office street address at which the registered agent is available for the service of process. See RCW 24.03.050"

Obviously, I would like to not have my actual street address as my registered address. I understand that all of this is public information and can easily be found through their website.

My question is: what are some methods to not have to post my actual street address when filing as a non profit?
It asks for my mailing address (If different) right below that, and I have already purchased a PO box as the mailing address.

edit: I did some research and it seems like I can incorporate with a Registered Agent of WA state and have them use their address. What are the pro's and con's of this besides the fee that they charge?

Busy Bee fucked around with this message at 01:29 on Jul 23, 2012

hello dog
Jul 14, 2012


Thanks a lot for the advice guys. The legal stuff is something I have to figure out. And the mentorship advice is good and something I hadn't really considered. It probably will be easier to go that route without a business partner, if possible.

I'm just trying to polish off a demo before I really start trying to solicit help. I'll probably post a g-rated demo version here in a week or so, the feedback here seems top notch.

Scaramouche
Mar 26, 2001

SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

Busy Bee posted:

edit: I did some research and it seems like I can incorporate with a Registered Agent of WA state and have them use their address. What are the pro's and con's of this besides the fee that they charge?

You kind of already got the solution. I believe lawyers/accountants with the right certifications can act as registered agents as well.

There's only two cons that I know of:
1. It looks shady to people researching your company for trustworthiness; an agent means usually one of two things: out of state company only there for nexus/sales tax reasons or shell company/penny stock fraud/hide the identity of the operators/etc. This might not matter to you since I'm guessing your business will be mostly referral and word of mouth, but there is that.
2. Your agent could be a jerk. I know a guy who ran a medium sized Amazon Marketplace business who got in a lot of hot water because his 'agent' never forwarded mail or other correspondence, and there were some legal documents that were kind of necessary that never got delivered. This is mostly the case with out of state though, it sounds like you're in state and will be able to actually physically interact with your agent so it shouldn't be as much of a concern.

Another thing to remember is that the registered agent does have to hand over your info to anyone legally powered to ask for it, so don't think of it as some kind of bullet proof privacy armor.

unixbeard
Dec 29, 2004

Here are 2 podcasts I thought I had posted

http://techzinglive.com/page/257/techzing-56-rob-walling-the-micropreneur-academy

quote:

Justin and Jason speak with Rob Walling, founder of the Micropreneur Academy, author of Start Small, Stay Small and co-host of the podcast Startups for the Rest of Us, about how to dramatically increase your odds of success when bootstrapping a microISV. Some of the topics discussed include the love of making things and the drive to create, how to pick a product niche and why not to create a horizontal offering, why the freemium model doesn’t work for bootstrapping startups and whether Justin should discontinue free accounts for Pluggio, the difficulty of competing against venture backed startups, how to create a landing page and build an email list, possible marketing and pricing strategies for AppIgnite, Google’s SEO guidelines, why software as a service is a better business than software as a product, how to buy websites and build a portfolio of web investments, outliers and why it’s better not to try to emulate them, the time, effort and talent required to create a personal platform (ala 37 signals and Joel Spolsky) and why email lists are so valuable.

http://techzinglive.com/page/463/76-techzing-interview-thomas-thurston-modeling-disruption this is the guy who talks about salesforce

quote:

Justin and Jason interview Thomas Thurston of Growth Science International, LLC about his “disruptive innovation” model for predicting whether a startup will succeed or fail.

Malevolence Jones
Mar 29, 2006

musclecoder posted:

I just launched my first product - Accthub!

Everyone is building mobile apps these days and most of them need some type of platform to power the backend of their app. Accthub provides a simple API for mobile developers to build their applications on top of.

As users register for your app, you would create an account for them on Accthub. You then add data to their account as they use your app more and more.

The major use case for this is developers who want to create an app and not have to worry about building, securing, and managing a backend platform at the same time.

Accthub is priced on the number of accounts you have in the system, not on the number of API calls you make. Your first 100 accounts are free, and every account after that is 1 penny.

If you're a developer or just have a moment to check it out, I'd love to get your feedback. Thank you!

Torn between responding here vs. CoC, but since I'm focusing more on the business than technical aspects, this thread seems more appropriate.

I'm curious to hear more about your plan to take on Stackmob, Parse, Urban Airship, etc. Unixbeard brought up a good point about Salesforce's ability to target a niche and price point to take on the incumbents. But in their case, the incumbents were behemoth enterprise corporations with six-figure minimum engagements and very slow release cycles. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see they were very vulnerable. Your competition is practically as inexpensive, extremely agile, and well-funded/staffed.

So, simply asked, why would someone choose Accthub over your competitors?

If it's price, what evidence/inferences suggest that your potential customers are a) price sensitive and b) ready and willing to sacrifice the more complex features that your competitors' platforms support?

There are hard questions about product positioning and customer acquisition that you'll need to face if this is going to be the sustainable business you envision.

musclecoder
Oct 23, 2006

I'm all about meeting girls. I'm all about meeting guys.

Malevolence Jones posted:

Torn between responding here vs. CoC, but since I'm focusing more on the business than technical aspects, this thread seems more appropriate.

I'm curious to hear more about your plan to take on Stackmob, Parse, Urban Airship, etc. Unixbeard brought up a good point about Salesforce's ability to target a niche and price point to take on the incumbents. But in their case, the incumbents were behemoth enterprise corporations with six-figure minimum engagements and very slow release cycles. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see they were very vulnerable. Your competition is practically as inexpensive, extremely agile, and well-funded/staffed.

So, simply asked, why would someone choose Accthub over your competitors?

If it's price, what evidence/inferences suggest that your potential customers are a) price sensitive and b) ready and willing to sacrifice the more complex features that your competitors' platforms support?

There are hard questions about product positioning and customer acquisition that you'll need to face if this is going to be the sustainable business you envision.

Right now, the biggest reason for using Accthub over any of our competitors is because you'll get a lot of hand holding and focused attention. You may get that at the other guys, but we'll work with you to get up and going quickly.

Although I was previously against it, maybe trying to get some venture capital to make us legitimate competitors isn't a bad idea (it seems like all of the companies in this space have raised around $7m).

And you're right, I need to take off my developer cap and put on my marketing and salesman cap and get out there and sell Accthub.

There's also the thought of going after the enterprise developers. Maybe they aren't comfortable using a hosted service, but would be interested in licensing a copy of the software to run on their own machines (Github Enterprise, for example).

Thanks for asking the hard questions, I need to ask them more often myself.

unixbeard
Dec 29, 2004

Getting Real from 37signals appears to be free now (or at least only costs an email address) http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ I haven't read it yet

Drive By
Feb 26, 2004

Dinosaur Gum

unixbeard posted:

Getting Real from 37signals appears to be free now (or at least only costs an email address) http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ I haven't read it yet

I've found it's very much worth the time for their contrarian viewpoints, if nothing else. Rework isn't free but get that too if you like Getting Real.

BigDave
Jul 14, 2009

Taste the High Country
It looks like I found the right thread. I have a possible idea for my own small business, and I'm not sure if it's the best idea.

If you have a problem with a company and it's product or service, odds are pretty good your gonna run into a brick wall. Phone calls aren't returned, appointments are missed and transactions remain un-refunded. Sure, you could spend hours and hours on the phone trying to get your problem resolved, but if you are like everybody else, you arent't gonna have the time. This is where I come in.

For a one-time flat fee, I will work on your behalf to get you what you want. Samsung is refusing warranty service for your fridge? I can get it fixed. Best Buy is bungling your appliance installation? I can get it straightened out. Macy's says you can't bring back that dress? I can get you a refund.

What do you guys think? Is this a service you would be interested in paying for? Or am I brain dead schmuck with a bad idea?

interrodactyl
Nov 8, 2011

you have no dignity
You're competing against Taskrabbit. So the answer is yes, people will pay for things like that.

Nam Taf
Jun 25, 2005

I am Fat Man, hear me roar!

BigDave posted:

What do you guys think? Is this a service you would be interested in paying for? Or am I brain dead schmuck with a bad idea?
What happens if you don't get a satisfactory response for the customer? Does your company cover the cost for their desired outcome or do you just work on a 'no win no fee' basis?

This seems a very important point to me as it basically drives the entire risk profile of the start-up. If you have a few bad outcomes at the start, either you're working for free or fronting a lot of cash to have happy customers.

Scaramouche
Mar 26, 2001

SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

It's a weird space to be in, and you'll be rubbing elbows with tons of shady operators but it might be doable. The problem is that there's a lot of wannabe Rip Off Report style sites working this angle, and they're basically extortion rackets dressed up as consumer protection operations. You might want to check out these guys too, they seem to be doing something similar:
http://www.scambook.com/

BigDave
Jul 14, 2009

Taste the High Country

Scaramouche posted:

It's a weird space to be in, and you'll be rubbing elbows with tons of shady operators but it might be doable. The problem is that there's a lot of wannabe Rip Off Report style sites working this angle, and they're basically extortion rackets dressed up as consumer protection operations. You might want to check out these guys too, they seem to be doing something similar:
http://www.scambook.com/

:sigh: Well, poo poo. I guess it's true, every idea HAS been thought of.

Maluco Marinero
Jan 18, 2001

Damn that's a
fine elephant.
I'm in the process of launching my first project, Spanner. It's an online based Planned Maintenance for ships and mining and the like. It's a field saturated with overpriced solutions, and I wanted to try and tap into the lower end of the market that is typically stuck doing pretty much everything by hand because they can't afford to use any of the solutions out there. I got my domain experience from working on non profit sail training ships for about 8 years, and I saw an opportunity for some fresh ideas and approaches in the domain.

I'm in the somewhat difficult position of having started this project with only rudimentary programming and design skills. Also, I have pretty much zero capital, I look after my son by day while my wife wins the bread so at the moment I just keep working as hard as I can, being as thrifty as I can. I'm not really trying to garner sympathy or make excuses for myself, it's more or less a statement of fact and affects my approach to what I'm doing.

That said, it's been a year and I've decided to pull the trigger and just start making things happen. Those I've talked to have had positive feedback, but it's been slow so far. I'm doing my marketing through Facebook and email at present, once again the whole no budget thing comes in here at the moment.

While the fact that my being cheaper than the competition is a selling point, I'm not aiming on that being the focus of my marketing efforts. I think I have a quality product that can stand on it's own merits, the price is just meant to make it accessible to the lower end of the market.

If anyone has some thoughts about what they see or think about what I'm doing go for it, working on your own tends to make it hard to be objective. Please be gentle. :)

musclecoder
Oct 23, 2006

I'm all about meeting girls. I'm all about meeting guys.

Maluco Marinero posted:

If anyone has some thoughts about what they see or think about what I'm doing go for it, working on your own tends to make it hard to be objective. Please be gentle. :)

Actually, I dig the design of your site. It's a refreshing change from every single other SaaS site out there. I especially dig the pricing page, a nice change from the vertical tables seen everywhere else.

Is there something stopping you from launching right this second? Right now it just looks like I can sign up to be notified when you launch. Are you charging any of the people registered so far?

Maluco Marinero
Jan 18, 2001

Damn that's a
fine elephant.

musclecoder posted:

Actually, I dig the design of your site. It's a refreshing change from every single other SaaS site out there. I especially dig the pricing page, a nice change from the vertical tables seen everywhere else.

Is there something stopping you from launching right this second? Right now it just looks like I can sign up to be notified when you launch. Are you charging any of the people registered so far?

Cheers, I was a bit uncertain because my design is very basic, but I'm mainly trying to work within my limitations without it looking straight out crap.

As far as being ready, basically I'm just in tidy up phase at the moment, the software is largely ready, (of course I couldn't have done the demo video if it wasn't), but I just have to clean up some interface elements, primarily in account management and other bits and pieces.

I'll be pulling the trigger before the end of this month, and then we'll see how things go. I was hoping to make it happen earlier but I didn't quite hit my target, so I'm just using this brief promotion period to gauge interest with my various contacts in the industry, and then make a concerted push once it's go time.

Konstantin
Jun 20, 2005
And the Lord said, "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.

Maluco Marinero posted:

If anyone has some thoughts about what they see or think about what I'm doing go for it, working on your own tends to make it hard to be objective. Please be gentle. :)

First of all, are you sure that all your potential customers will have access to the Internet whenever they need to use your application? A paper checklist works everywhere, and ships are mobile. I know nothing about how connected marinas generally are, but I can envision situations where smaller ships may be without Internet access for extended periods.

Second, one thing that would be convenient would be to have default maintenance schedules that correspond to government regulations and industry standards. It's a lot easier for users to modify good defaults rather than start from scratch.

Third, on your front page, the phrase "Spanner is designed and developed by James Rakich, that's me!" sounds rather unprofessional. I don't think a description of you really needs to be on the front page at all, I'd put a brief professional biography on an "about us" page instead.

Maluco Marinero
Jan 18, 2001

Damn that's a
fine elephant.

Konstantin posted:

First of all, are you sure that all your potential customers will have access to the Internet whenever they need to use your application? A paper checklist works everywhere, and ships are mobile. I know nothing about how connected marinas generally are, but I can envision situations where smaller ships may be without Internet access for extended periods.
Pretty much every ship has an internet connection these days, ussually 3G on a booster or satellite if they're the money. It's set up at the moment to automatically email everything they'd need to keep working (overview + checklists) every week.

In the future I'd like to set up an offline sync setup with HTML5 and Offline Storage, but Min Viable Product at the moment.

quote:

Second, one thing that would be convenient would be to have default maintenance schedules that correspond to government regulations and industry standards. It's a lot easier for users to modify good defaults rather than start from scratch.
Oh, absolutely. Again, MVP, but I'm definitely keen to move towards that. Big market though, with a lot of diversity between ships, so I'm just gonna stick with spreadsheet imports for the moment (which I have set up)


quote:

Third, on your front page, the phrase "Spanner is designed and developed by James Rakich, that's me!" sounds rather unprofessional. I don't think a description of you really needs to be on the front page at all, I'd put a brief professional biography on an "about us" page instead.
Fair enough. I was planning on reorganizing the promo pages to have an About page, and I still need to write up privacy and terms and the like as well. I want to be quite open about the fact that this is a single owner start up, rather than a big company, they're gonna figure it out anyway in dealing with me. If being open about that sounds unprofessional then ah well, but I guess I could think of a better way to word things when I write the about page.

unixbeard
Dec 29, 2004

Maluco Marinero posted:

I want to be quite open about the fact that this is a single owner start up, rather than a big company, they're gonna figure it out anyway in dealing with me. If being open about that sounds unprofessional then ah well, but I guess I could think of a better way to word things when I write the about page.

Most companies wont care if you're one man or not, and the ones that do you wont be working with anyway, so I'd leave it out. You should disassociate "you" from "a company that provides a useful service" because they are different things. It doesn't have to be a big thing, but people who will use your service want to deal with the latter, so you should try to present it as such.

Maluco Marinero
Jan 18, 2001

Damn that's a
fine elephant.

unixbeard posted:

Most companies wont care if you're one man or not, and the ones that do you wont be working with anyway, so I'd leave it out. You should disassociate "you" from "a company that provides a useful service" because they are different things. It doesn't have to be a big thing, but people who will use your service want to deal with the latter, so you should try to present it as such.

Fair enough. I don't want to separate myself too much as I want to draw upon my own experience in the industry as a selling point, but I hear what you're saying.

unixbeard
Dec 29, 2004

Yeah, its not a big thing. Overall your idea sounds good but i dont know anything about the industry you are in so my opinion is not worth much there. I also wouldn't worry about the design too much, a) i think it looks at least not-horrible, maybe even good, and b) id be willing to bet any existing software in the field probably was birthed in the 90s and looks like rear end so the bar is pretty low. Keep us up to date with how it goes.

Maluco Marinero
Jan 18, 2001

Damn that's a
fine elephant.
Cheers. I'm doing some testing in a couple of days and then its go go go after making adjustments from the feedback. I will keep coming back here, I don't really have friends in tech or design, seeing as how the majority of my life has been out of the field, so it's good to run ideas and implementations past people with more experience than myself.

Also I reorganized the site with an about page to cover what was in the footer.

musclecoder
Oct 23, 2006

I'm all about meeting girls. I'm all about meeting guys.
So a little over a month ago my partner and I launched a product named Accthub. It's been doing just about nothing since it's not competitive to other mobile platforms and we have not spent enough time marketing it.

That means, you know, time to pivot!

Accthub didn't originally start off as a mobile platform as a service (PaaS). Originally, it started off as an account management and authentication system that you would install on your own machines and any piece of software you controlled that worked with accounts could centralize them in Accthub.

How would this help me, you ask? Well, imagine you're at a software company that manages 10-20 ecommerce websites that are all on a similar platform (whether it be bespoke or an off the shelf solution, doesn't matter). Each of these ecommerce platforms have customers who create accounts and addresses and sign into the site. Now, when you've discovered a bug in the account management piece of your software, you have to go to each installation, fix it, and deploy it. It's time consuming and not fun. This exact scenario happened at the company I'm currently at which is what gave rise to Accthub.

I wrote Accthub to fix that problem. You install it on a server and then all of your software speaks to it through a REST API (and a nice client library in your language of choice).

I spent the last few weeks adding a nice admin panel to it so you can manage all of your sites account data. Here's a walkthrough of the admin panel on my blog - http://leftnode.com/entry/accthub-enterprise-walkthrough.html

What are your thoughts? Is this something you would find useful? If so, would you be interested in a copy to play around with? Right now it does require some Linux admin chops to get it installed, but it is straightforward.

Scaramouche
Mar 26, 2001

SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

You might get better feedback in the SH/SC post screenshots of what you're working thread again, this one doesn't get much traffic.

COUNTIN THE BILLIES
Jan 8, 2006

by Ion Helmet
I hadn't heard of airbnb and when I heard the gist of the idea I thought of how stupid it is. Then I checked out the site and did some more homework and it's pretty brilliant. That's what a good start-up is: something that makes you say "Hey this is stupid" and then realize it's stupid enough to work.

Really, the idea of airbnb is brilliant and probably the best one I've heard in awhile.

COUNTIN THE BILLIES fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Sep 15, 2012

sink
Sep 10, 2005

gerby gerb gerb in my mouf
They're hiring Ruby folks in SF if you're interested.

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COUNTIN THE BILLIES
Jan 8, 2006

by Ion Helmet
Yeah I am thanks for the heads up. Ruby is great.

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