gozman

Glad you like it. There's much more to come! Reach out to me if you have any questions.

As I mentionned in my post, I realize that I was really lucky thanks to Quebec government subsidies and that the financial ramifications are significant. However, you can often have your employer subsidize part(or all) of your tuition.

Ultimately, the value of an MBA is significant but the decision to undertake one is very personal. You have to weigh your own value for education with the cost you'll incur.

ha! exactly!

http://gozman.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/hey-entrepreneur-plea...

I'm an MBA and startup founder. I wrote a response to this on my blog:

http://gozman.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/hey-entrepreneur-plea...

This is an awesome project and has fostered some great seed-stage projects. It's a key part of the ecosystem that's putting Montreal on the world stage for tech startups.

I think they can revoke a certificate, but I don't think these certs need to be signed by Apple to be effective. If they aren't, they probably just show a warning.

Set aside the debates on healthcare, the awful reality of this man have to raise funds to keep him alive, or any other political rhetoric.

Most of us, even the most starving bootstrapper of the bunch, has enough change in his/her pocket to make an impact on a real human life.

Let's not brag about what we donated, or how much, or if we donated at all. But please everyone, let's reach out for someone who needs us like every good human should.

Ridejoy looks great, but Canadians out there should really take a look at LiveRides (http://liverides.com)

Their app does what Ridejoy does and more - it even lets you securely communicate and track where a driver is when he/she is on his/her way to pick you up.

I'm really glad to see people in this space. I'm fed up of big oil and driving my car alone. Driving should be a social experience with friendly people that doesn't hurt the planet needlessly.

Appifier, Montreal (Canada) - Seed Funded

We're hiring a full-time iOS developer who wants to help bring visibility, discoverability and monetization to the millions of blogs and online publishers across the web by creating awesome mobile/tablet app experiences for them.

Details on our job posting are here:

http://matchfwd.com/opportunities/ios-developer-extraordinai...

Send your resume to jobs@theappifier.com Compensation is a fair mix of salary and equity.

We prefer local candidates or anyone who can relocate but are willing to consider remote working for the right dev.

I agree. You guys are definitely onto something. App discovery sucks right now. I can't wait to see it fixed!

Hey guys, great use of Pieceable to innovate the app feedback piece. I like your templates too!

How are you guarding against other upstarts in this space like ooomf (http://ooomf.com) that are also bringing great design to mobile app landing pages (where launchrock et. al. don't shine as much?)

Also, any hope to solve the app preview problem in a way that doesn't use Flash so that it can run on Mobile Safarai?

Great work Fred! Happy to be a client and a supporter of what you guys have pulled off. Good stuff!

Appifier, Montreal (Canada) - Seed Funded

We're hiring a full-time iOS developer who wants to help bring visibility, discoverability and monetization to the millions of blogs and online publishers across the web by creating awesome mobile/tablet app experiences for them.

Details on our job posting are here:

http://matchfwd.com/opportunities/ios-developer-extraordinai...

Send your resume to jobs@theappifier.com Compensation is a fair mix of salary and equity.

We prefer local candidates or anyone who can relocate but are willing to consider remote working for the right dev.

I've been thinking a lot about this as we finish up our tenure at a Canadian accelerator and are getting our seed round together.

In MBA school, you learn about stuff like discounted cash flows and how they are ultimately what is used to value a company. (Comparables and multipliers are really just proxies for the notion of what the present value of a company's cash flow is)

Then you get out and start raising a round, you throw valuations around in the air and to most outsiders it seems illogical. I think this comes about because many founders simply aren't financially literate enough to do more than say "If AirBnB is worth X, then we must be worth at least Y"

Some people get excited by these uninformed valuations, others write blog posts and call it a bubble. In my opinion, the truth is somewhere in the middle. This crop of entrepreneurs learned some big lessons from their older brothers. They've learned the importance of revenue and having an unfair advantage. With a few exceptions, my experience leads me to say that most entrepreneurs are trying to build real businesses and are not gaming the funding community. This is very different from the IPO fever of the dot-com bubble. (Not to mention the fact that the size of many seed rounds today would barely cover a month of runway in 1999)

Capital is out there but the funding environment is not loose and there is less cash in the system than there was the last time around. TechCrunch and YC make it look easy, but fundraising is still fucking hard. Anybody who's pounded the pavement or sat through months of due diligence only to miss closing date after closing date will confirm this.

Instead of arguing on what our companies are worth, we should all be focussed on building a strong, diverse and healthy North American tech industry. It's time to get back to work and stop giving a flying fuck about what some investor thinks you're worth. Debating whether or not we are in a bubble are simply unproductive.

We're also in Montreal!

One big reason we went US was to avoid Bill 101 and all the language restrictions it entails. It was going to really slow us down. We also like the access to US capital that setting up in the States allows for.

An LLC is an amazing thing that we don't have in Canada. It provides limited liability while freeing you from the governance requirements that a corporation has. As a bootstrapped startup, it really sucks to have to deal with endless paperwork to keep your corporate veil in order.

Carl Mercier posted a really good blog entry from a local Quebec perspective, check it out:

http://blog.carlmercier.com/2011/08/29/us-incorporation-for-...

If you need any more details about how we set it up, send us a shout!

Great post Justin!

One of the reasons we formed a US LLC (we're Canadians) when building Appifier was to work with Stripe. They're simply the best way we've found to handle online payments without the headache.

I can confirm that at the moment our experience (other than some foreign ownership headaches that were promptly resolved by their support staff) has been entirely positive. Integration was a breeze and the reporting is top notch.

Best of luck!

You're right. We didn't anticipate this kind of traffic. We're working on it. Thanks for letting us know. :)

Sorry Magsafe, you need to have JSON API installed. This is written on the site.

Sorry about that. We redirected all of our traffic from our marketing vps to our appserver (heroku) to handle the load. Check back tomorrow for the terms or send us an email.

I did change my standard of living somewhat - I didn't travel this year as I usually do, cut out most useless expenses and took public transit whenever I could. We need surprisingly little to live when you think about it. At the same time, I made sure to take on small paid projects to keep fed.

I don't have any dependants, but I am married and contribute to the household financially. That hasn't stopped, I just had to take it into account when planning my runway.

I'm 28. At this point it's an experiement, If I can turn this into a business I will, if not, I'll dive back into the salaried way of life. It's a great way to live, but I just had to give my dream a shot.

our site is back up now. visit us at http://theappifier.com

Where do i sign up?

Server will be back online in a few minutes. We're scaling up.

Sorry guys! We weren't expecting this kind of load. I'm doing everything I can to redirect traffic to http://engine.theappifier.com

Our VPS is on fire - we didn't expect this kind of traffic. However our app is on heroku and running fine : http://engine.theappifier.com

hey mark!

it was strange to me too at first, but we built it in response to the fact that we kept on getting asked about getting onto the "app store" by small business owners who were going digital and building Wordpress sites. Everyone wants an app nowadays - so we're filling a niche.

In the end, browsers are great but mobile safari doesn't yet let you have access to everything you can get in Cocoa. We want to open those features up to anyone with a Wordpress site.

Mike

Thanks dholowiski!

Here's a few ways that we stand out: * Our apps can be distributed on the app store like all other native iOS apps. You can even charge for these apps and we won't take a penny. * We support push notifications. You can send messages to users of an app as long as they have it installed on their phone. * All content is available offline, even when the phone is in airplane mode. * Our architechture opens up the possibility of more interesting native features (text-to-speech among other things) * You can preview your app on your phone and get a really good feel for how it will look and operate once deployed. * When your app is deployed, you can change its parameters and branding at any time. Changes are updated across your installed base instantly.

It's not a container at all. We leverage a plugin that provides a JSON representation of the Wordpress site content.

We consume the JSON to display the Wordpress content within a fully native UI and give access to all the speed, features, and benefits that a fully native app has to offer over web or hybrid apps.

1. I was a software engineer that got an MBA and was doing management consulting. 2. Over 80k / year 3. My runway is private, but we financed ourselves by taking on short-term iOS/Wordpress dev/design consulting gigs to stay fed.

Our VPS that hosts the website seems to be on fire. However our app is up and running just fine - http://engine.theappifier.com