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Total copies of the SARS-CoV-2 RNA sequence in existence.

I think that's kind of the point of the article - there's going to be a massive shift in the structure of the economy when 10 million jobs disappear.

That being said, I think pretty much all of silicon valley is built on the principle that the future will "reward people with access to capital and/or technology."

I actually helped these guys with their beta and one of the founders is a buddy of mine. They did some really advanced statistics and analysis of our customers that we would never have been able to do on our own. The TC article makes it sound a bit fluffy, but they do an awesome statistical deep dive.

Thanks - that's always been my guiding tenant as an entrepreneur - start a business that makes money right away.

Our primary marketing is currently focused on the business owner, since they're the one that pays us for the subscription. However, we are launching a feature that lets buyers refer other businesses in exchange for Amazon gift cards ("Like buying this way? Tell your other suppliers!")

Good thought on going after the 4HWW community - this is perfect for a sub-10 employee business that doesn't have a lot of manpower to waste on pushing paper.

The idea came about since I also own several manufacturing businesses. We couldn't find ANYTHING that addressed this market - all the solutions were either old school (desktop software), or very focused on the fashion market (nuOrder, Joor).

So being that I have a startup/tech background, we started to build our own solution. I made the decision early on to put in the extra effort to built it multi-tenant as a SaaS app so others could use it too.

So yes, it's built directly to scratch our own itch - and it's an itch I know others have as well from chatting with other business owners over the last few years. There was nothing out there for it, so we built it :)

Thanks for chiming in - you're definitely our target market exactly. Good points on POs coming from QB. We thought of QB in that we already built an integration for the seller to push invoices into QB automatically, but I hadn't thought about it from the buyer's perspective with POs. We currently allow you to enter a PO number on each order in OrderCircle so it can be traced back, but I see the need for deeper integration if possible.

Very familiar with NowCommerce - they're really the only one out there doing it even close to correctly (though they're very limited and locked into QB). Also fairly expensive, yes?

Great thought on a QB PO importer/reader. It's a bit tough since POs are free-form and you'd need to somehow automatically map it to the seller's SKUs. But we'll definitely put that on the list to think through further.

Your email isn't in your profile as far as I can see :)

Working on getting these onto the website, but wanted to drop a few for the HN community here:

http://cl.ly/XpGt/Screen%20Shot%202014-10-01%20at%203.41.09%...

http://cl.ly/XozQ/Screen%20Shot%202014-10-01%20at%203.41.30%...

http://cl.ly/Xpl2/Screen%20Shot%202014-10-01%20at%203.42.00%...

Worked with an Elancer actually and got it done for $1k exactly. Quite the steal :)

Direct sales is really tough, but here's the plan:

1.) Seed to about 10-15 businesses I know personally - these guys have been using it for about a month in private beta and giving feedback.

2.) I'm a frequent guest on several ecommerce podcasts and blogs - going to use the opportunity to speak about the difficulties of wholesale for small brands, with a small link to OrderCircle at the end.

3.) Building integrations to Shopify and Bigcommerce, which should help us get listed in their app stores and drive traffic.

Open to any other suggestions!

Thanks for checking it out Jonah - you're absolutely right that integrations are key. I've been working in ecommerce for a while and the one thing I figured out is that absolutely everyone has a different setup - which is why we went API first.

But you're totally right - we've got integrations with Bigcommerce and Shopify on the roadmap so users can pull in their products and make getting started easier.

For inventory, API is the best bet for now. When we launch our cart integrations, we'll probably treat the carts as "the truth" and decrement their inventory levels for wholesale transactions. Our early users are telling us they use their carts primarily to manage inventory.

Hey all - I'm the founder and have been working on this for months, solo (all bootstrapped). Would love to chat with anyone from the community and hear what you think!

And yes, I'm even taking BTC as payment :)

AskAllOf.us - a platform for you to share comments you made on other blogs that needed answers. Sort of a hybrid of Disqus and Quora. Never did anything with it, I'd sell it if anyone wants it.

1orZero.com - think Hot or Not, but a much simpler scale. Would you or wouldn't you...

Almost all of these are directly related to running my business, but here we go: Shopify, Zendesk, Mailchimp, Highrise, KISSmetrics, Recurly.

Other "stuff" I pay for that's not quite SaaS: Linode, Twilio, ThemeForest.

Be careful, the IRS is on the lookout for misclassification of employees as independent contractors. It wouldn't be too hard to figure out either, since the majority of your income would be coming from a single "client" on your tax returns, and that amount would match the totals for the company. Make sure you read and understand the rules or you could end up liable for penalties and back taxes.

http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=99921,00.h...

Me too Papa - I've never had a single entrepreneur miss a payment. It's really remarkable the drive these people have to succeed and honor their commitments. That's why I keep coming back and giving to microfinance.

Congrats! Thanks for pitching in. Make sure you check back over the life of the loan to see how they're doing.

Great analogy with the bike - continued pedaling is absolutely key. I think the skydiving analogy is trying to capture that feeling you have when you're teetering on the edge of the plane that makes a lot of people turn back or never jump.

After the jump though - the parachute and landing zone become critical.

An excerpt from the article:

When starting a company, probably the last thing any entrepreneur thinks about is his exit strategy. The exit strategy, sometimes referred to as a “liquidity event” or “harvest strategy” is basically the entrepreneur’s way of “cashing out” of their company. This is the part where years of hard work come to fruition and turn into profit. Cashing out is often not as simple as it seems. There are numerous ways of converting the non-liquid asset of equity in a private company to the liquid asset of cash, and each is fraught with it’s own unique pitfalls.

Bill here - I wrote the article linked above and designed this kill switch.

It's been helpful to me several times when I've had trouble collecting from clients, but I only use it as a last resort. There's a pretty good comment thread on the post debating the ethics of the matter.

Also Acid_bath - I recognize what you're saying about validating over HTTP. It would not be acceptable for all my clients' sites to go down if my validation server goes down. That's why my code is configured to only disable a site if it is able to explicitly retrieve a KILL signal. No response from my server is interpreted as a lack of KILL signal, thus the site stays up.

I wrote this post after I quit my job in investment banking and moved over to a dotcom tech company. I realized that so many of us define success as "having" things (money, cars, houses), whereas the things that really contribute to happiness are experiences you have (friends, trips, etc).

The goal of this exercise is to create a list of 30 experiences to "have" by the time you're 30 years old - before you're tied down with family, career, and mortgage. You can use my list as a model, or write your own. Now, go out there and do them - don't waste another day.

Congrats.

May want to invest in some web design though, your site layout is pretty obviously copied from 37Signals' Basecamp...

http://www.basecamphq.com/