It has been fine for me. I've been using things like Xcode, sublime text, mamp, codekit, git, mail. Haven't used virtual machines much though so can't comment on that. I typically find the OS X betas easier to work with than iOS
If you come in under budget it won't help. The reasoning is that we should each be encouraged to experiment. One of us may go heavy on the art while the other focuses on marketing. Either way, there should be no punishment for trying as much as you can within the rules.
If one of us goes over, that will count against the final profit.
Not at all -- they are a necessity. I just feel that some developers implement them tastefully (map packs, new characters) while others are only focused on money. I'd like to offer IAP's that look like a mini expansion where at least a solid amount of dev effort is recognizable.
We did, but in the end this has to be treated as a business. All aspiring game developers have a fear of quitting their jobs, so money is probably the most important benchmark for anyone else who would try this out. And we have an agreement not to go into shady/unethical IAP territory, so we should still be proud of the final products.
If I had to pick one of those, it would be reducing work. People will pay for something that makes their job easier / efficient. Knowing what people want is hard though. I personally attribute it to day after day of paying attention to the details in support, design and all other areas of a business, which slowly builds trust and paying users.
If you actually need to change the markup on the form, then your only option would be to use our API to submit the data to our servers. Joe is correct in that we do have embedded methods that reduce the load on our server and allow you to handle the initial page load, but we do not have a method that allows you to use your own HTML (but you can use your own CSS). Posting to our servers DOES work, but if there are errors on submission they would be shown to the user on the hosted version of your form.
If our team is going to be away for a few hours, we usually do have a laptop on hand. Otherwise, we just do it through our phones (which is slow and painful), or ask another team member to cover for a few hours.
Side note to parent comment -- we do offer the same support to free and paid plans right now.
You bring up a good point. Right now, we're still small so everyone has a support day and talks to users almost daily. At this size, we all appreciate the close communication with the people using our product and we write those cards out of free will (not just a job description). Chris wrote more about it here:
Now, as the company grows, this may have to be adjusted. The cards did not start as some marketing stunt, and we never want that message to be sent to our users. When cards from developer X don't feel personal enough, we'll have to brainstorm some more creative ways to thank our users.
Early on, time was the limiting factor. The builder has been rewritten now to be standalone, so we will soon be testing the difference between current conversion rates of having to create an account and the rates that come as a result of playing with the builder first without an account. If we find anything interesting, we'll make note on Particletree.
Intype (http://intype.info/home/index.php) is worth keeping an eye on. They develop with the same philosophies as Textmate and plan to support the same bundle system. Development seems a bit sporadic though, so I haven't gotten my hopes up yet.
best decision we have made. YC takes away the distractions and responsibilities of daily life, which allows you to focus on building a product -- all while sharing the experience with great people.
When we lived out there, we rented a 2 bedroom townhouse for 3 people. Rent was $2100. Food was ~$500. Public transportation is good out there, so we used that exclusively for travel. And then another $100 for internet and bills. So ~$2700, but you could probably get that down to $2100 for just one person. This was in Mountain View.
That's about double what I pay to live in Florida.
I've run into this behavior/bug many times, so it is definitely a valid point. As far as I recall, it always happens, but if you're saying you don't run into the error then it may only be with objects. For example, create an object named bob, and an HTML element with an Id of bob. Then try to access the objects properties. IE6 will reference one or the other.
Untested, but it may also have to do with globally defined variables.