San Diego, CA. Remote. Klatu Networks (www.klatunetworks.com): A wireless sensor networking startup that focuses in biotech monitoring. We are a small, bootstrapped, profitable start up. We are very selective on our hiring so you will only be working with other great engineers.
The most important requirements is to be passionate about creating software and be able to quickly grasp new technologies. Other requirements include strong knowledge of Javacript, Java, experience with Ruby, SQL, Git. We filled our last position through a previous 'Who is hiring' post with great success and hoping to do it again.
Contact me directly if you are interested, email is in my profile.
I went through about 80K in savings. There was some extra stress on the marriage (wife, 2 kids, mortgage payments.) But I was working from home mostly except when pitching VC's. My wife was very supportive.
When the startup died, I moved into contracting. I was doing quite well contracting and then one of guys who was on our board of advisors needed some development work and that led to me having substantial equity in the company and still working from home.
So the start up was a total failure, but I learned a lot and it lead me to where I am today which is much better than where I started.
I think there is a viral angle. There were a group of friends at college, all CS majors and we competed on our grades. We all wanted to one up each other.
I can see the ability to have a score board of some kind where you can share your grades with friends. This could help spread the word a bit.
Its a huge plus. We are in the process right now of hiring and that is one of the first things we ask about. Do you have any open source code we can view? This tells us several things about the person
1) They are interested in coding. This was done on their own time, away from work. This means they actually like to code.
2) A lot of work is done to learn a new language/technology. This often shows desire to learn and the ability to at least hack together something that is new to them. This is important because we will be asking them to come up to speed quickly in our code base.
3) You can look at the code and get a feel for how they code. We are a small team and each developer will have the ability to have a big impact (for good or bad). Getting an idea of how they think, how they solve problems is a huge plus.
I don't think you need to have a lot of code available. Pick your favorite project, or 'best' project and make it available. I see very little downside.
This is important exercise. I was involved with startup that was ad based for revenue. On paper, you can make the numbers add up and everything looks good. Knowing what numbers you need to hit is important. The hard part is getting the 104,167 visitors. Saying 'all we need is 0.01% of facebook users and we are rich' is not addressing the situation.
How are you going to attract visitors?
That said, you've already made it this far which is a great firs step. Good luck.
San Diego, CA. Remote ok. Klatu Networks (www.klatunetworks.com): A wireless sensor networking startup that focuses in biotech monitoring. We are a small, bootstrapped, profitable start up. We are very selective on our hiring so you will only be working with other great engineers.
The most important requirements is to be passionate about creating software and be able to quickly grasp new technologies. Other requirements include strong knowledge of Javacript, experience with Ruby, Java, SQL, Git.
Contact me directly if you are interested, email is in my profile.
San Diego, CA. Remote ok.
Klatu Networks: A wireless sensor networking startup that focuses in biotech monitoring. We are a small, bootstrapped, profitable start up. We are very selective on our hiring so you will only be working with other great engineers.
The most important requirements is to be passionate about creating software and be able to quickly grasp new technologies. Other requirements include strong knowledge of Javacript, experience with Ruby, Java, SQL, Git.
Contact me directly if you are interested, email is in my profile.
www.klatunetworks.com is looking for paid intern in San Diego. local is best, but remote is also a possibility if the person is a good match. Looking for someone who can start soon, rather than waiting for the summer. Contact me directly if you are interested, cexline at klatunetworks dot com.
Not interested in raising any VC. I've been part of a startup dealing with VC's and had a second startup fail to get the required VC investment. In both experiences, it was not fun.
Its far better create a product and grow the business. I also like owning the whole business and calling the shots. I'll take a 50% chance at a moderate success over a 1% chance at a huge success.
You have to factor in other costs on top of the employee wage:Taxes, Insurance (liability/health,etc), Retirement/401k, Office Space (Rent & Utilities optional if running virtual)
I'm sure there are other costs some optional, some not. Depending on how lean you want to run you can have a very low overhead.
It also depends on what level of developer you are hiring.
What do you think the bulk of your customers will be, small or big companies? Small business tend to like static prices (plans) because it is easy to budget. It also makes it easy to offer 3/6/12 month subscriptions which can help lock in customers.
If you price per user, but not everyone at a company needs the product, they will tend to restrict the use of the product to minimize the expense to them. With plans, you still have this, but to a lesser degree I believe.
unless the search capability is excellent, having 24/7 videos on the computer would not be useful. Without good search, you would have to know the time that you wanted to review. If it was just video, then it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
We are similar that 3 of us are in the same city, but not very close. The 4th is out of state, but travels at least once a month. The major difference is that we are all full time on our startup.
IM/Voip (Gtalk/Skype) for daily communication
Email (Pretty much goes without saying)
Skype Screen Share/ GoToMeeting when required to view things together.
RedMine for bug/issue tracking
We actually never use video calls, don't see it adding to much. I already know what they look like. When we have major design or planning sessions, we will get together for a face to face meetings, scheduled out in advanced. We also try to get together for lunch/dinner/meeting every month or so.
It depends on the the service. I use freshbooks, and their plans are roughly based on number of customers you have. I don't mind paying more the more customers I have, because it means I'm making more money. I don't mind spending money when I'm making money.
One thought is that the bigger your customer is, the more they can afford to pay for the service. You don't want to leave to much money on the table. Its pretty normal for people to undercharge for their services. Do you have any feel for if you are going to get more 1-3, 4-10, 11-25 users?
The things I don't like about tiered services, is that there is a big price jump when you move between tiers. Moving from 3 to 4 users in your example doubles the cost to the service. I'd make more gradual tiers rather than big jumps.
I've looked at several competing services. I look for screen shots, videos, test accounts and finally a real account.
Just keep in mind that you don't want to be too focused on what your competition is doing. Its ok to check them out, but focus on your customers. They are the ones that really matter.
From what I can tell EC2 instances are pretty under powered for the price. There are a lot of good things about EC2, but the small instances are not that great. The good thing is you can start small and quickly grow. You are right about needed 2 instances for Mongo. Design it so that you can turn on new front end instances to handle the load as needed. This way you can start as cheap as possible and add servers (and cost) as you grow.
It does take time. You say you have spent the last 5 months full time. How much of that has been in development vs marketing? How are you reaching out to restaurants to populate the site? You have the chicken and egg problem, people don't use it because there is not enough content, there is not enough content because people don't use it.
I'd focus on a few major markets and work hard to get as many menus up as possible. People are always looking for free advertisements and having their menu online is one form. I'd push that as much as possible. Since this is your full time effort, you may need to spend money on marketing to get the ball rolling. Perhaps enter the menu's yourself (or hire a VA to do it) and then drop the restaurant a note saying that their menu is now online and they can make changes at this website for free.
Other ideas, perhaps white label it to newspapers and/or city websites? In San Diego, there is a dining guide section at signonsandiego.com and this would fit into what they are doing. They also have someone who is doing reviews weekly, which could now include populating the full menu.
The fastest way would be contracting. Creating a webapp to earn that much a month could take a long time. I've had my webapp for a while and I'm not earning that much a month yet. Building a webapp is the easy part, marketing and getting paying customers is where the hard work is.
Paying customers is the best measure of success for me. Feedback is good, but I find that it's very hard to get feedback. I'm in a boring B2B market, so there is less people talking about it.
Returning paying customers, that is the gold standard.
The most important requirements is to be passionate about creating software and be able to quickly grasp new technologies. Other requirements include strong knowledge of Javacript, Java, experience with Ruby, SQL, Git. We filled our last position through a previous 'Who is hiring' post with great success and hoping to do it again.
Contact me directly if you are interested, email is in my profile.