I pay it out of pocket along with some life and disability insurance; I think it's worth the peace of mind to enhance creativity and not worry about "what ifs".
You might have to hack your own alternative -- and believe it or not there is a lot of hope for you; I've had a lot of success here in Baltimore by making things, telling everyone I know about them, and also letting everyone in my network know that I want to start a company. Since starting to do that, I've heard from three really smart, really capable people who I could potentially start something with. So my advice is to do everything you can to put yourself into the path of creative people as well as rich people in your area, and not focus so much on conforming to YC's or anyone else's idea of what you need to do to succeed.
Absolutely it is; I spent a long time this year working with a small real estate company that uses very primitive software and analog techniques to track very complex business processes. Existing software that would help them is too cumbersome or requires too much training; they can't afford to hire a consultant to sort it all out for them.
This is the crux of my YC funding application, so I really hope the answer is yes!
Gang, I submitted a YC funding idea for a new app that would be highly interactive and ideal to put on the web. The closest thing I've seen to what I'm trying to do is DabbleDB; I won't be competing with it, but my idea is 'of a piece' with Dabble. It's implemented in Seaside, and the more I learn about Seaside and Squeak and Smalltalk in general, the more intrigued I am. But I really enjoy Ruby and I've really loved developing in Rails, so I guess my question is, has anyone tried to implement something as bad-ass as Dabble in Rails, or any other framework out there? How much of a factor should "love of language" play in choosing a framework?
Building small apps like this is a great learning experience -- I'd love to read more about what you learned by doing it, and what kind of traffic you are seeing
I work with people who mostly do not have a startup mindset, or even a work-for-yourself mindset, and I think my creativity had been suffering until I took it upon myself to be proactive. In my experience so far, anything you can do to spend more time around entrepreneurial people will help. Just by going to a couple of Meetups and talking to people I've been very inspired and had better ideas.
Maybe there's a whole category of apps to be built like this: they don't make money themselves, but they educate the creators and connect them to things that will make money (he mentioned three new opportunties).
Also, this shows an impressive ability for self-assessment; I'm curious to know whether he thinks we would have done better by quitting and jumping into it with both feet.
It seems like if you are building to flip you might get lucky, and at certain times (like 7 years ago) that's easier than others. But "build to last"/"build to work" are on the same side of the coin as "make something people want": the odds of succeeding and making money are better if you are aiming to build something great that's actually worth acquiring.
This shows the value of human relationships in startups -- the people who are most successful spend time cultivating them, and take a long-term approach to investing their time in them (I may not back this person today but I want to keep up with them to hear about their next big idea)
fonts are fine (that's an easy change for browser users to make because we have shortcuts), but visited links should be darker (more of a pain to change for just one site)
Amichail, there is a site that was a proto-version of what you're describing called The Business Experiment. It seems to be down right now, but here's an article about it:
I have to say this matches my experience with any shared host for a serious web app. TextDrive is super helpful with customer service but not being able to get root on your server cuts off a lot of solutions.
So my advice to anyone hosting a Rails app or any other web app would be to go with a dedicated host (where you at least have a virtual server or something)