This is really great. Kudos to Stripe. I'm curious about what the ideal scenario is at the conclusion of the 3 months? Some options are...
- The project has progressed significantly to the point where the developer can hope to find continued sponsorship at Stripe or elsewhere.
- The project has progressed to the point where it no longer needs the tender loving care of the maintainer full time. Either it got more contributors or has reached a new level of stability.
- The developer joins Stripe (or somewhere else) full time and the project is left better off, but without a full time contributor/maintainer
Any thinking about what the end-game is from the developer's perspective. Either way, it's an incredible opportunity.
I often wonder why the hosted Mongo services aren't offering dedicated servers yet. It seems like an easy opportunity to provide service, automation, and monitoring value add at a high price point. Is the thinking that most customers who would opt for the dedicated instance would just run it themselves to save money?
A mistake that first time entrepreneurs often make is to try and identify their startup by researching gaps in various hot markets, or they try to identify something that sucks and improve it. These are both good starting points on their own, however there needs to be an additional qualifier: Is the founder passionate about the problem and the larger market area they're entering in? Are they excited to work within this market for the next 5+ years and are they naturally going to spend all their free time thinking about the problem?
I know that I've made the mistake multiple times before of stumbling upon a good idea, getting started on it, only to have it turn into more of a side project than a business. Passion around the market and problem area is something that I wouldn't participate in a business without going forward.
Thanks for the feedback, and I agree that if we ever create more problems it'd be a good idea to help people learn along the way.
Re the spammy comments, our entire team are longtime HN users so we all know those hurt way more than they help, but think one of our "fans" wanted to "help" a little too much. Love their enthusiasm though.
Yah, we're working on it. More inventory will definitely be key. We'll be doing some marketing starting next week to get the word out about the $500 incentive we'll pay people for listing their apartments. In the meantime, if you let me know what you're looking for I'd be happy to keep an eye out and let you know first thing when something matching gets posted.
We're hiring at http://JumpPost.com. We currently have a product aimed at helping to solve the NYC apartment search process by connecting apartment hunters directly with vacating tenants, but we're also testing out some other products to connect local supply with demand. We're built in Ruby, running on Heroku, using AWS, working out of a cool meatpacking district loft, and are looking for some smart people to join our three man operation. Must be in NYC, but we can discuss relocation. Email [email protected] to chat.
This seems like the right way to work on hard problem. Super smart team builds a product, gets early customers to use it on large datasets while they polish, tune, and iterate over a period of time leading up to launch.
Interesting pricing model too. It's more costly than some of the other hosted database services, but they also provide a reasonable free version so people can experiment with it. Good luck guys.
All great use cases. In the case of a global commenting system, I think that rather than "everybody agreeing on one standard," there's an opportunity for one major player to define the standard simply by announcing support for a specific format, and implementing it into their product. Disqus would be a good candidate.
Anyone who wanted their tweets picked up by the hypothetical Disqus engine would need to annotate accordingly, third parties would build apps to support this annotation, and the cycle would perpetuate with everyone conforming to said standard.
While 90% of the time I agree with the ease of sandboxed and cloud-synced file management, there's still that 10% of the time that I'm annoyed by it.
If I want to copy, rename, share, or email a specific file I find it easiest to do it in the file. I find it almost as easy to do it in an app that facilitate it easily like iPhoto (with it's built in share and email buttons). I find it much more difficult to do it in an app that doesn't make it quite as easily facilitated through the UI, like iTunes.
I would love for the finder to go away, but I'd hate for it to go away at the expense of every app developer having to rebuild mechanisms into each app to expose general file manipulations that the finder handles quite well right now.
You're definitely correct about the first statement. It should be revised to "Heroku has a strong history of very little downtime."
Regarding the second though, I truly believe that the cost + time savings are tremendous from using their platform vs administering your own early on in a startup product lifecycle.
To answer your question without inciting the classic NYC vs. San Fran debate: Yes, there is enough tech talent in NYC. There's a stable and rapidly growing tech scene here with startups across various disciplines, and finding engineering talent is not an issue. The latest news.YC inspired Hackers & Founders meetup had over 100 people and a waiting list to boot, which is evidence of the entrepreneurial enthusiasm.
Is San Fran a better choice? It could be, but let's leave that to another thread.
Biggest additions I see here are the additional memory, cellular connectivity, and rear facing camera. The limited memory made multimedia application development a challenge on the N810, and the front facing camera was rather useless for photo taking. Now this will truly be a use-anywhere, do-anything mobile computing platform. Looking forward to developing on it.
Battery life was always a problem on the N810 with constant connectivity. We'll see how it holds up on the N900.
One thing that's confused me about the "Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage." question is the parenthesis. My guess is that they're included because you'll accept either a computer, or non-computer related example.
If it's confused me, chances are it may confuse others as well.
Is this not in direct competition with their "hire-by-acquisition" model? Generally, Google acquires companies early on for a price that is favorable to the founders, but wouldn't be favorable to any institutional VC since it wouldn't "move the needle" enough. If Google Ventures invests, then this means that they'd be hesitant to sell for a founder-friendly price to google itself.
Then again, maybe companies that say no to an early stage acquisition, are prime candidates for investment. Something that was impossible before Google Ventures.
- The project has progressed significantly to the point where the developer can hope to find continued sponsorship at Stripe or elsewhere.
- The project has progressed to the point where it no longer needs the tender loving care of the maintainer full time. Either it got more contributors or has reached a new level of stability.
- The developer joins Stripe (or somewhere else) full time and the project is left better off, but without a full time contributor/maintainer
Any thinking about what the end-game is from the developer's perspective. Either way, it's an incredible opportunity.