AnthonyJoseph

For every dollar that a "Steve Jobs" type produces, 10 are produced by people "launch and iterate". Business is about making good decisions as often as possible, which the latter methodology seems to do better.

I am going to play devils advocate here, as I loved the book, "Trust Me, Im Lying", and a lot of what is written in there pertains to this "drama". The person controlling that twitter account is probably a little too emotionally invested, and probably a little immature. I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing, its passion, just misdirected (not everyone is passionate about their product, no matter what gets said on these types of forums). I would be curious about the internet habits of people who do not want their tests shared (a TOS/Disclaimer should have been listed on the site), but I would guess between gmail/facebook etc, betapunch is the least of their worries. I just assumed that a tech-savvy audience assumes that anything they put online is fair game...because...well, it is. On the other hand, its better to be emotionally invested in something you have built, but never reveal those emotions I would think.

tldr; if you can raise ANY doubt about who is in the right, and who is in the wrong, and get a shit load of hits, controversy may not be such a bad thing.

Stripe has a great subscription option fwiw.

Be careful. Sound advice in any situation. But, most things I have found that are the right thing to do cause physical/emotional harm, at least in the short term.

The biggest problem with forums like this, is the tendency for people to answer questions that the OP didn't ask.

You can do an "on demand" submission at any time, typically though, it is not cost effective. 99% of our work is done via screen printers, which is a time consuming process, some will bid a small number like that, some won't. Everything is guaranteed, if you are not happy with the print quality, we refund 100% of the purchase. Quality tees are a catch-22, in that on demand (1 or 2 at a time) is not cost effective, but how do you know the design will sell, etc, so there is risk involved. If you have an specific questions about selling your own designs (I assume that's why you were asking), let me know. Eventually I would like to have printers save screens, or keep a rotation that I can send out to allow small ecommerce sites to do 1-2 at a time, as orders come in, but Im not there just yet.

Much thanks, I really appreciate it!

We haven't formalized "sign up" per se with the printers, we have relationships with with a bunch though, the site says 100s, its not quite there just yet, but hope to be in the next couple of weeks.

At this point, its all pretty personal. There are only two of us on the team, and the 888 number actually gets directed straight to my cell. I hear what you are saying though, the plan is to build it out, but I wanted to get in front of customers right away, and figured this was a good compromise. I thought about things as a "fancy" landing page.

Wait until you hear it said in a commercial. It really makes you hate.

I am a fan of chef, we use it at cloudpokerdb.com for all of our configuration management. The Ruby Scripts vs Config Files rings true (at least it did when I first compared the two a while back). Im sure you can do it with puppet, but chef allows us to auto-deploy and setup any type of server environment (using openstack) one could need, via a couple recipes, and databags.

clickable: http://cloudpokerdb.com

I had to open up a new tab, to come back to hackernews because I didnt want the song to stop.

Do one for mashups similar to Kap Slap's spring break mix, and you can have my first born.

http://www.garagesellr.com/merchants/1 (very early stages); it is essentially craigslist but allows anyone to accept credit cards using stripe (I charge 1$ per transaction, and stripe charges their usual fees). Every time you list, you will have the option to tweet/FB it; You can only login with FB or twitter to buy, sellers login with stripe/fb/twitter. You "make an offer" and the seller decides whether they want to accept or not, based on your FB friends etc, to eliminate scamming. Every seller has their own "merchant account" through stripe.

I started building this, then stopped due to a lot of negative feed back, anyone think this is worth pursuing? Anyone have any feedback?

Why not?

"who I think as a whole were shitty savers and rather shitty parents."

I agree, also except for mine, who was for all intents an purposes an immigrant.

This was a really great post. Look to the people who grew up with nothing to learn that it really isn't that bad to have "nothing". (I wish I could make those quotes even more sarcastic).

Does anyone have any information on what their infrastructure looks like? What do they use to manage their servers? I guess a lot of this information would be "proprietary" but scaling something this large would be a great read. I manage about 1000 non-critical (think kiosks) servers, and deploy the code to them; and it is relatively painless, I would be curious to know how the big boys do things.

Love this, any more recco's?

In my experience, I think you are assuming wrongly. The efficiency comes from speed, and nothing else in my opinion. It could be because I am too dumb to grasp theory, and can not learn without doing and failing/succeeding and then subsequently learning from the outcomes (be it good or bad), but the most efficient way is to speed up the doing, speed up the getting to an outcome, speeding up the learning , and then speeding up the full cycle.

Thanks! I probably posted that prematurely, as those things are all on the list of "shit to fix".

Would also love some constructive feedback: picdazzler.com

Note: still waiting for the before/afters and copy to get here, disregard that please.

This is scalable, I am not sure why people are saying it isn't. In its current form, no, but if he puts it into high gear and takes it to the next level, there is no reason he couldn't repeat this model, hire managers etc and be completely hands off. But, that is not what I would do necessarily, I would get my franchise papers in order ASAP, and start marketing this online, there are a lot of good keywords to go after (how to start a cleaning company etc). Get it to the point where he knows exactly how to repeat this in any city and make XX,XXX$/yr for the "owner". Figure out a franchising model, where the owner of the franchise can learn how to repeat your success, and you get part of the profits/or a franchise fee (hell you could "loan" them the money at interest). Nothing sells better than telling people that you can teach them how to leave their job, make 60,000$/yr, and actually be able to do it.

This. 100 times this. For the people who actually matter (for non design/web related projects).... the customers, they do not even notice. If you aren't going after designers, or web devs themselves, bootstrap looks very professional....and I for one, am not here to stroke designers egos, but to make money.

I worked full time in a DC for a couple years, and pretty much all of the above is possible, but you will pay for what you don't do yourself. Most servers in the wild, at least where I work, are Dell or HP (both with 4 hour hardware replacement plans for about 1k/yr) If you buy your own, you should set it up, and configure it before you ship it out, and typically there will just be a racking fee (0-100$), if you just send out bare metal, the OS install etc, will be extra. Typically, colo's will have a KVM available for you to rent/use for setup or troubleshooting hardware issues (ie boot problems), if you want to go that route. EVERYTHING is negotiable. Not being a dick client goes a long way in getting things done. Ie, if the colo has a policy that any work being done is X$/hr, if you are cool, don't open tickets for inane things, and exhausted all your options, you can typically squeeze a lot of free work out of us.

How were you burnt w/ the dedicated server? IME, those are guaranteed NO downtime, and hardware failure is replaced at no charge and immediately , and a dedicated server failure takes top priority for the guys on the shift. Working in a fairly high pressure/low reward/24x7 environment is taxing, I sometimes miss it, but I like dev a lot more.