drop19

Seaside (because I want to implement some heavy desktop-like capabilities)

Baltimore, 2, 29 & 30

Work like hell on the idea and see if people want what I'm making. Re-apply in the fall if I still need the help.

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!

I'm only thinking in terms of what's possible. Can I build something like that without continuations? What's what I'm wondering.

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?

We should all be planning to fly under big companies anyway and not targeting these kinds of large organizations at first.

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

This seems like too big of a distraction; file it away on your to do list until it matters.

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)

I love it, it reminds me of Guy Kawasaki's article about avoid stupid things that slow users down..

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/01/the_top_ten_stu.html

very refreshing to not have to type extra crap in.

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:

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/blogspotting/archives/2005/08/the_business_ex.html

The original site is:

http://www.thebusinessexperiment.com/

http://www.thebusinessexperiment.com/

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)

I've actually never read anyone discussing the elasticity of demand for web services. Here's a thank-you to my econ teacher in college!

Sobering quote: "The biggest gap in any venture is that between a service that is free and one that costs a penny."

well, all I can tell you is that from looking at the logs, there are a lot of people out there who are searching for someone with common interests that they must not be finding through normal channels. I'm especially seeing it with people overseas -- that was a surprise for me. I think that is a strong indicator that YCombinator has large overseas following.

I joined the entrepeneur meetup group and have been to one meeting; it was 3 people who were in business to cater to small businesses (like accountants and marketing people), and everyone else was technical, so it was a good experience for me. Those three nontechnical people were really good contacts to make. The list you're talking about doesn't sound too promising though.

thanks for pointing this out! It turned out to be a bug in the way I was indexing; I had a memory leak. How embarassing!

Based on the feedack I've received, I changed the questions to be more general. I just realized I need to change the tag line as well.

This has been a really interesting 17 hours. I've only posted here and startupping.com and I've received a lot of traffic (a lot for me anyway). One thing I did not anticipate was all of the international visitors. So far there's Sweden, UK, Spain, and Canada. So I am going to add a Country field ASAP. I've never done an international site; are there other things I should keep in mind?

interesting! I never thought of coding it up a la a dating site. I wonder what sort of algorithm would work best for that. I don't want it become like eHarmony!

I could add such a questionnaire as an optional part of the process.

I thought so, because you might want to look for someone who's not as good at something as you are. That's something to consider though; if that ends up giving too many garbage results I can always remove it from the index.

This seems like it could be an interesting feature idea -- maybe I could include a way for people to solve a problem together after they introduce themselves?

I'm halfway through Founders at Work and the conclusion I am getting is an overwhelming yes. The chapter on Hotmail is pretty illuminating -- nobody else they talked to thought web-based e-mail was remotely a good idea.

This points out an unexamined assumption on my part, which was 'getting a large amount of people interested in starting companies in the same room is bound to lead to interesting interactions'. I also assumed people would vet each other, but you're right, it would be more valuable to have other kinds of assessment available.

It sounds like you are saying that the interaction problem is best handled off-line, so is there any website that can really do that?

I recently joined a Meetup group in Baltimore and have already had some great interactions that way. There are far more technical people in my area than I had realized.

True; I'm just hoping to help make that first introduction. I chose to mimic the craiglist home page by listing cities on the right. I'm hoping that people like me will see their city name their and get inspired to make a connection.