To start with, this won't work for everyone mostly because not everyone works from home like I do.
I used to have this constant, nagging lower back pain when I used to sit at a desk working an office job. It wasn't the sort of back pain where you've pulled a muscle after a botched deadlift or you just twisted the wrong way picking up a sock off the floor, but it was the sort of pain where it just felt like there was a warm knot in your lower back that was not-quite-painful but incredibly uncomfortable. Hard to explain. It was hard to sit still and I had to change sitting positions after every 5-10 minutes which made it difficult to actually focus on work. I strengthened my core and tried various stretches but it never went away.
This went on for years until I started working from home. I figured, instead of trying to find the perfect way to sit, why sit at all? Maybe humans weren't built to sit for long periods of time but I sure don't have problems lying down! I got myself a laptop stand, started working while lying down, and I've never had lower back issues since.
I wouldn't mind having JP's set up in Grandma's Boy either actually (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHLR3faI7lU). Monitors at eye level to eliminate neck strain, seat all the way reclined to relieve lower back pressure, and keyboard at just the right height. Perfect.
I'm Asian and I could pass for Japanese if I really wanted to try at it. Also, my wife is Japanese so it isn't a hard leap for anyone in Japan to make when they see us together. This was more of a disadvantage to me than I had realized since Japanese are far more willing to make allowances in social lapses for obvious foreigners than say, a socially awkward Japanese. I find that instead of trying so hard to blend in, it might be easier to simply embrace standing out. So instead of a "konnichiwa", I start out with a confident "Hi!" in a cheery American tone (we all know that one) and proceed in broken Japanese. Even better when they hear me speaking unaccented English with my wife. That way, they know that I'm a clueless tourist and not a socially inept local.
I'm not local but I have friends there. The Chinese were accepting of the pollution at first because of the success they were experiencing on a world stage. They figured that if the politicians and the higher ups could deal with it, then the ordinary citizen can too. Then the average citizen started realizing that the elite didn't actually have to deal with it because they would buy expensive air purifiers for their homes, cars, and work places. There has been more of an outcry against the pollution that is now causing all forms of health problems as of late and despite the heavily authoritarian rule of the regime, the Chinese government is prudent enough to know that a largely dissatisfied citizenry is always a risk. So the various local and national governments are moving, albeit slowly, to try and reduce their pollution levels.
I opted to use CloudFlare almost as soon as they launched and they indeed had some uptime issues in the beginning. But I stuck with them and I haven't had any issues for a long while now even at 180M page views / month.
There was one time where I had just upgraded a server at a host and load averages just spiked. Host techs were clueless as well as the server admin I hired to diagnose the issue. They surmised that it was a DDoS attack and to turn off CloudFlare because it might be a cause (what?). Well I'm not a server admin so what do I know and I asked CloudFlare about it. They said there were no problems on their end. After a month of stressful, intermittent downtimes, I decided to just switch to Softlayer, and lo and behold, the issues went away. Turned out that one of the SSDs in the RAID array was dying but the techs at the other host just never bothered to look at it.
If you ever do figure out the issues, try giving them another shot. Their features are excellent and I hate to say it but my applications are now so dependent on them to the point where important parts will break if I even try to move to a competitor (and there are none).
I was pretty excited about Google Drive when it first came out due to its pricing and integration with my current Google account.
The syncing just isn't where Dropbox is right now and not where I need it to be. I would oftentimes get errors for small files that Google Drive couldn't sync but Drive would provide few cryptic descriptions as to why. I've switched back to Dropbox because I'm running multiple OSes and environments and I take their pricing as the cost of being able to use something that just works.
I'd be interested in a backup service directly from Amazon though...
I personally have a fear of making things nobody will use. I know that the act of working on something is not a waste of time since you learn from the process of building but I can't ignore the feeling that I wasted my time anyway.
The way I do my projects now is that I try to get a core group of influential people in their niche to get excited about the project I'm building and I leave it to them to tell their friends about it. I've never spent a dime on marketing. A lot of traffic to one of my sites comes from FB, for example, and mainly from fan-created pages.
With the new project I'm currently working on, I noticed a group of users trying to shoehorn their activities into an existing platform that didn't exactly fit them. The first thing I did was to contact a lot of these people personally and asked them questions about what they were doing. After getting a fairly good idea, I then asked them if they were interested in testing something that I'll make for them in the next few weeks which got a positive response.
I spent a week building the core features that I thought were the most useful for them. All the core features worked but since I ported a lot of existing code from my old projects to speed things up, a lot of the other stuff was broken but that's okay. I hate building useless stuff so I needed to know right away if I was on the right track.
I invited the people I contacted to test it out. They didn't like it. Discouraging but expected. After a weekend of tweaks and discussions, they started getting more and more excited about the project as they started to see things progress. I made sure I involved them in all of the design discussions and tried to make them feel that this was their project as much as it is mine. Basically, tons of buy-in which also works wonders for my morale to keep going. They're excited, I'm excited, and now we're at the point where they've decided that they're going to bring all of their activities over to the new site.
It's a lot of upfront work to be sure, but this way, I can approach it more from a systems analysis standpoint now than a marketing exercise later.
TL;DR Find a key group of prospective users and involve them in your project from the beginning. Let them be a part of its creation, generate excitement, then let the marketing take care of itself from there.
As someone who's currently looking for a new hosting provider, I'm curious to know what made you go with Liquid Web. My experiences with them have been so-so and have been thinking of moving to SoftLayer for possibly more reliable, albeit more expensive, hardware.
A bit off-topic: As someone who has built a decent web company on top of PHP, I'm curious to know if you decided to leave it for something else and if so, what was your reasoning?
I'm of the mindset to stick with what I know best when I'd rather build a working product and get it out the door quickly. I don't actually personally care too much what language I use (I feel like database selection is more crucial) but I read about so many startups running on Python or Rails that I'm starting to wonder if there's something I'm missing and if there are business advantages to using other languages/frameworks.
Do you happen to use an ad manager that distributes traffic among all of those ad networks? I currently use Google's DFP and I realize that's not exactly all that safe either.
Is there a site that lists all of the candidates running against pro-SOPA/PIPA representatives? Better yet, a site that allows me to give money to their opponents for the next election cycle (provided they're not pro-SOPA either)?
I've started to find that I'm reaching the limits of my time constraints what with holding down a full time corporate job. I've been trying to expand my network to get in touch with good developers that I can pay on a part-time basis for now since I can't afford anyone full-time. Even harder to find a decent part-time sys/db admin here in NJ! Thanks very much for the insight.
I'm almost in the same boat right now. I built a niche Adsense-supported social networking site around mid-2009 and my approximate revenue by year is something like: $100 (Y1), $13.5k (Y2), $90k (this year). Assuming no growth next year, it should be around $130k.
I hope you don't mind me asking these questions since I'm in the thick of it myself at the moment. I'm new here so I hope I'm not breaking etiquette.
At what point did you realize you needed help and then decide that you can actually afford it?
What made you decide to hire your 1st employee rather than a co-founder?
Hi, I've been an HN lurker for a few months but finally signed up today just to inquire about mentors when I saw your comment. I am a complete beginner when it comes to startups. In fact, I happened to stumble into my niche rather accidentally. How do I go about finding great mentors or at least a group of like-minded people that I can learn from? If it helps, I'm currently located in NJ about 45 mins from NYC. I apologize in advance if this is a strange venue to ask this type of advice. Thanks!
I used to have this constant, nagging lower back pain when I used to sit at a desk working an office job. It wasn't the sort of back pain where you've pulled a muscle after a botched deadlift or you just twisted the wrong way picking up a sock off the floor, but it was the sort of pain where it just felt like there was a warm knot in your lower back that was not-quite-painful but incredibly uncomfortable. Hard to explain. It was hard to sit still and I had to change sitting positions after every 5-10 minutes which made it difficult to actually focus on work. I strengthened my core and tried various stretches but it never went away.
This went on for years until I started working from home. I figured, instead of trying to find the perfect way to sit, why sit at all? Maybe humans weren't built to sit for long periods of time but I sure don't have problems lying down! I got myself a laptop stand, started working while lying down, and I've never had lower back issues since.
I wouldn't mind having JP's set up in Grandma's Boy either actually (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHLR3faI7lU). Monitors at eye level to eliminate neck strain, seat all the way reclined to relieve lower back pressure, and keyboard at just the right height. Perfect.