but this sort of thing seems to keep happening to me
Very respectfully, you strike me as the kind of person who is easily discouraged.
Let me tell you a story about discouragement (or the absence of). When I was in high school my parents told me the didn't have anything saved for me and I'd have to pay for college. I spent my entire junior and senior years applying for scholarships. There was one really big $20k scholarship in particular though that I thought I was a shoe-in for.
Well, the notification date passed and I hadn't heard anything. So I called and called, trying to find out what was going on. The obvious answer was someone else had won all of the 5 scholarships they awarded. But I wouldn't stop until I knew for sure. Finally, I found out that they had all been given out, but that 3 students had declined (they were school-specific). These 3 were going to go back into the budget for next year. I pleaded my case with one of the administrators, and within 24 hours, one of those awards was mine. $20k just like that. And there were 2 more just sitting there if anyone else would have done as I had.
When a magazine ignores your article, it's up to you to make it impossible to ignore.
Anyway, back to your question... ask your partners to hand over the company. If that doesn't work, buy them out. How much? Well, how long would it take you to start over, and how much is your time worth? (i.e. (time to recreate) * (value of your time) * (their ownership of the company) = buyout at this point, because you don't have any realistic valuation criteria beyond that)
It might be a good idea to start something new. And don't let things happen to you, make them happen.
I think I must be missing something here. Don't people set their screens to higher resolutions because they want to see more stuff on their screen.
I always assume that people set their resolutions such that they can read normal-sized (12-14pt) text. If that's too small for their eyes, they would have set their screens to a lower resolution. As someone who likes to see a lot at once, this would probably irritate me.
We've been keeping quiet for the last few months while we brought in our new singer, but are about to start performing again... Moment of Inertia (http://www.moirocks.net)
It doesn't seem like anyone's problems are really being solved. I accomplish all of this with Hacker News, Delicious, Digg, and my own browser bookmarks. If I tried to become involved in every company whose products I use, I would not have time to create my own company/products.
I can appreciate your enthusiasm for community and the web, but I think your passion may be better served elsewhere.
edit Then again, maybe I'm just not your target user/owner.
I got two engineering degrees (ME and EE), and you know what I learned? I learned that engineering is an amazing field and a boring career (for me anyway)!
So, I started doing something else. I now own two companies and in the 6 months since quitting my engineering job, I've doubled my income. No regrets, just decisions and action.
I wouldn't be here had I not went to school and gotten my degrees. Sure, I could probably be somewhere else equally exciting, but this is what I've done, and I enjoyed all of it greatly. When I realized I wasn't enjoying my path at any point, I figured out why and turned.
My one piece of advice is this: don't turn until you've figured out exactly why you're not happy.
That looks like an excellent idea and very well executed. I really liked that it literally only took 1 click to vote (as opposed to usual where you have to click the radio input, and then click a submit button).
I have two suggestions for it:
1. Make it an embeddable javascript widget instead of an iframe. I think it would be more universally acceptable, and anyone could then simply use CSS to stylize the poll however they please.
2. I don't know if you do this already or not, but maybe track IP addresses of those who vote and geocode them onto a map or something. Comments usually have names to go along with them, it would be nice to have some sort of vague automatic identification to go along with the votes.
I was in your exact same boat, though I stopped just shy of multivariate calculus in High School, and after the first 2 calc classes, took statistics and whatnot.
Anyway, I would suggest staying in high school and enjoying it. I ended up only going to school for half the day my senior year along with a buddy who was in a similar situation. Then a few days a week, we'd attend a college class in town. The other days, we'd go to the beach, or really anywhere and just relax. Those are days we'll never get back, but it's ok, because I think we spent them properly the first time around :-)
Ayn Rand's philosophy is that of a free economy that stresses the importance of the individual. A democracy is a political institution that stresses the rule of the majority. Rand idealized the self-sustaining individual. A democracy by definition cannot be sustained by one individual. So, it's a difficult analogy to make.
A better analogy would be like saying that a king has a right to abolish his monarchy.
Also, it is only self-defeating if the original goal was only to amass the wealth.
To continue the analogy to this point, a king abolishing his monarchy would only be self-defeating if his only goal was to be a king. However, if his goal as king was to make life better for his country, then abolishing his monarchy in favor of a democracy would be a very good move and not self-defeating at all.
Likewise, if the person's original goal was to produce and then dispose of the rewards as he wished, then doing so is not self-defeating. It's only self-defeating if his original goal was to simply have wealth.
<edit>
The other part of Rand's argument is that the individual has the right to dispose of their wealth however they please, because they produced it and they own it. A democracy would only have a right to dispose of itself provided it was the democracy that created itself in the first place.
</edit>
I think that according to Rand, fairness is a moot point when it comes to this situation. She is saying that if you are capable of achieving wealth, then you will achieve it no matter where you start from in our society. She also explains that those who are capable of achieving are concerned only with their own achievements and awards, and those of others only so far as they help to achieve their own.
If you put all of this together, you end up with the person of achievement not caring where others started (or what they inherited) in relation to themselves. Fairness only holds value when the person getting shafted cares enough to give it value.
Besides, Rand's argument is that over the long run, it really doesn't matter, as the person who is capable of producing great wealth will do so, with or without an inheritance. The person who is not will quickly squander it all and end up right back where they started. Her point is simply that an inheritance does not change one's ability to produce.
Yes you are crazy. And yes, I say do it. It seems the vast majority of the time, that the less crazy an idea is, the less it's worth doing.
Also, I'm an entrepreneur in Ann Arbor, MI, which could be an option for a closer stop if you want to do a trial one close to home first. We have an extra couch you could crash on.
I don't think you would enjoy reading Rand (either you haven't yet read any of her work and are going based solely on what you read in this thread, or you just completely didn't understand her work).
As she argues, money is a means of trading human production and value. To be equal to your money is to provide production and value to society equal to the value of your money. According to Rand, if one who is barely capable of ever making more than $30k per year were to inherit $5m, it would not end well. And actually lottery statistics support this pretty consistently.
Thanks for the feedback. I'll definitely be sure to resubmit it down the road on a Friday afternoon (I also have to remember to keep in mind the time difference between me [EST] and the vast majority of Hacker Newsers).
And, yes, that is exactly why it doesn't do HTML emails. I've personally never liked them and always applauded Facebook for its text-only emails.
Not sure why my email isn't showing up though, it should be there and it shows up when I go to edit my profile.
Ayn Rand was able to name so much of what I've felt growing up. While she may have used the literary technique of exaggeration to heighten the contrast between her philosophical views of moral vs. immoral, I don't think she took it "too far" as others are commenting. I think that's like saying Philip K. Dick took the ideas of technological advances and psychic ability too far in his story, "Minority Report", or like saying Pablo Picasso took multi-perspective simplicity too far in his Cubist paintings. Of course they did, it's part of their literary freedom. Exaggeration helps to make an underlaying principle become self-evident by speeding along conclusions that could eventually be drawn from observation.
I'm also finishing Atlas Shrugged finally this week, having just finished The Fountainhead. Next on my list is Anthem, then I think I'll go back to some non-fiction for the next couple books... like Outliers and Capital and Freedom.
This looks really cool, I would definitely be one of your target market if I still worked at my job (which I quit half a year ago to focus on my own startup). I now use Apple iWork 09 almost exclusively, so as soon as you come out with a Numbers version, please let us know!
This really isn't a tough market to get into, as long as you have the experience and portfolio to back up your skills. As many people as are in it right now, the market is still booming. I do a lot of sub-contracting (I'm better at B2B sales than B2C), and one of the biggest problems I see isn't getting new clients, it's finding the developers to do the work.
1. Have a strong portfolio (or build one if you don't have one already).
2. Meet people. Go to networking business events in your area. Volunteer to speak/present at events and expert panels on marketing and web design.
3. It's a numbers game. The more people you send your resume/portfolio to, the better your chances of finding something worthwhile. Subscribe to RSS feeds for industry-specific job boards, read your local papers for potential opportunities with new companies, etc. You may even finding yourself developing software that automates this entire process to allow you to spend your time working instead of lining up new work. That's what I did anyway ;-)
I am in a very similar situation as you are. We have a very niche product that we sell to higher-ed. We sell it as a subscription model, which we allow them to pay X years upfront with a contract so that it more closely resembles a fixed-cost product to better fit their budgets.
As far as cold-calling goes, it really isn't worth it in this industry. The low conversion combined with the insanely long sales cycles just isn't right for a cold-call approach. That said, we've modified the cold-call approach by setting up Google Alerts for phrases which indicate a university that is ripe with need for our product, and then send them direct product information tailored to their specific needs.
We've also developed some internal software that helps automate this process. It has worked very well for us so far.
I would be very interested in talking with you further, as it seems we share a common market with common obstacles. Please feel free to shoot me an email.
Agreed that personal contacts and relationships are your best bet.
Beyond that, we use Google Alerts to RSS feed + LeadNuke for a continuous stream of new client leads. (disclosure: I developed LeadNuke expressly for this purpose)
Very respectfully, you strike me as the kind of person who is easily discouraged.
Let me tell you a story about discouragement (or the absence of). When I was in high school my parents told me the didn't have anything saved for me and I'd have to pay for college. I spent my entire junior and senior years applying for scholarships. There was one really big $20k scholarship in particular though that I thought I was a shoe-in for.
Well, the notification date passed and I hadn't heard anything. So I called and called, trying to find out what was going on. The obvious answer was someone else had won all of the 5 scholarships they awarded. But I wouldn't stop until I knew for sure. Finally, I found out that they had all been given out, but that 3 students had declined (they were school-specific). These 3 were going to go back into the budget for next year. I pleaded my case with one of the administrators, and within 24 hours, one of those awards was mine. $20k just like that. And there were 2 more just sitting there if anyone else would have done as I had.
When a magazine ignores your article, it's up to you to make it impossible to ignore.
Anyway, back to your question... ask your partners to hand over the company. If that doesn't work, buy them out. How much? Well, how long would it take you to start over, and how much is your time worth? (i.e. (time to recreate) * (value of your time) * (their ownership of the company) = buyout at this point, because you don't have any realistic valuation criteria beyond that)
It might be a good idea to start something new. And don't let things happen to you, make them happen.