HN user
Co-founder at http://dcovery.com Twitter @mattbellemare
What's outrageous to me is the government has to pass laws to make sure the banks police their customers. It's non-sense. You should have the right to deposit money with no questions asked.
Law enforcement shouldn't have to rely on the banks to disclose anything to them unless they come with a court order and ask specific questions.
The laws are put a strain on day-to-day business for everyone and it's tiring.
We also want to see taketake thrive and we are doing everything we can to see that happen. My co-founder and I simply can't be leading it anymore. We're burned out and skid off our cash runway. We did take a week(s) off. This is not an easy decision.
By getting another team to take over, it's almost as if we were getting one/two other co-founders to come on board. My co-founder and I will take an advisory role and that's why it's fair that the new team gets a majority stake in the company. We would retain 10-15% of common stock each.
For people who are serious about it, have the right skillset and contact me by email this will be provided :)
It didn't cross my mind to be honest. Had much more serious stuff on my mind than April's fool when I posted this. It's not a prank.
It's 100% real and not a prank, but yeah I guess I should have waited a day before making my post.
We're not giving away 100% of it. We don't want to have an active role anymore and are willing to give away a majority equity stake to a qualified and competent team who would be taking charge of it. It's almost as if we were taking another co-founder on board. But because we would be taking an advisory role, it's just fair that (after vesting) the new people in charge have the majority stake in it.
Hopefully we can get a team to take over and then possibly be at Echelon in Singapore. We will see how things develop in the next few days :)
The site is not completely ready and we got stuck into that non-sense of making everything perfect before we opened it.
That's a cool idea and we will certainly consider it if we can't find a rockstar team to take over. Whoever wants to take over taketake would need to understand well the technology we built it with.
I'm hoping we can find a team to take over. My co-founder and I will certainly be there to help with all the technical stuff and the business model.
They haven't been sent out yet.
$5k is cheap, epipheos aren't cheap.
Well, made a lot of mistakes. Discovered the lean startup principles too late. We should have released an MVP earlier and iterate. Instead we were never really happy with what we built and started from scratch too many times. We became really frustrated with not being able to execute up to our expectations. Waited too long and slid off our cash runway.
I will probably write a more thorough post about it later on, but right now we're trying to focus on finding a team to take over and save taketake.
Beginning of January.
I'd rather not say here, but it's a bit on the pricy side but totally worth it.
It's not :)
We use Redis and MongoDB for two different purposes.
Redis is used for our messaging queue (resque), sessions and caching. MongoDB is used to store our user data. Redis could be used to store our user data as well but we feel that MongoDB is a lot easier to work with because of its query language.
MongoDB fits better to store our user data and Redis fits better for our messaging queue, sessions and caching. We have yet completed migrating from MySQL to MongoDB which is why I've listed both in my post.
It's no April's fool joke! Thanks for the kind words :)
I would go where Grooveshark users are. Find who they are and reach to them. Use twitter search and other social monitoring tools to find them. http://lithium.com has got a good social monitoring tool you can use free for 14 days. Should be plenty of time for you to find enough of them.
Once you found them, ask them if they would part take into grapev.in mavens. Tell them you are looking for feedback from heavy grooveshark users and in return they will be the only ones with early access to some grapev.in features.
Create them a special account, give them a place where they can connect to each other. Make them super fans by iterating and get to market fit with them.
They will evangelize your product for you - sounds like a good starting point.
+1 on the auto complete. I don't know Grooveshark all that well. I'm still unsure how to create my playlist... so I type the title of the song? How does it work?
Thanks for the feedback! The idea started back in Fall of 2008 when we bought the domain name. The original idea was to create a place where people would give their take - review products they have and had.
The idea spun from our internet marketing efforts at the time. Lots of people are searching for reviews online and there's so much spam content out there... we set to find a solution. It's only about a year later that we started to work full-time on the idea. It was the first time for us to work on a project like this and made all sorts of mistakes along the way. But we're finally done and releasing it!
Feel free to email me at matt at taketake, perhaps we can help each other in the space! Cheers!
Good point. You can watch the video on YouTube which has the transcribed captions, but I'll look into making this better. Thanks for the feedback! Cheers!
Cheers, thanks and we're thrilled you love it!
It's funny how we thought of it. We felt the footer was a bit empty and decided to "reserve" that space to show blogs/publications who would talk about us.
Then when we're about to put the site live and had to remove the placeholders... it felt strange looking. So we came up with this idea!
I agree, we've been pulling our hairs out with this one. We plan on split testing a few and see how it impacts the bounce rate and invitation requests. Thanks for the feedback!
Thanks for the feedback, really. The video was created by http://www.epipheostudios.com/
For the lack of content part we will be launching city by city and will be showing wants and haves from people living around your area. We are also working on our taste engine to show you things that we think you are interested in.
We've built a database of things, we've got about 50,000 things so far. Those were manually reviewed and curated by our team. So there will be some content on there that we will suggest you check out upon joining.
Yes, each product has its own page with takes, conversations, etc. We've also partnered up with woot.com so their users can automatically import all the stuff they bought into taketake.
The fundamental for me is to adequately track hours worked for my remote workers. The screenshot feature is a tool to verify that the hours logged were for actual work.
I want to be able to track time without relying on the user to submit it manually. I want a tool that submits automatically with me controlling the idle time and if I want screenshots or not.
After a while when you develop a trust relationship with your remote workers you don't necessarily want to take screenshots all the time and/or for all projects. Screenshots are not always necessary and can, if used all the time, wear down morale.
If you work with a new remote workers on a quick project, sure why not. But when these remote workers becomes part of your company and are working 40+ hours a week for several months, it's overkill.
Also for sensitive projects - I don't necessarily want screenshots published on a 3rd party site and/or be submitted over an unencrypted connection.
I like it, and will probably end-up using it and wouldn't mind paying for it. I know you just got your MVP out the door, but a couple things that I would like to see before I start using it:
* Delete/Edit button for projects created; * SSL option (on/off in account settings); * Mac/Linux client; * Option to turn off the screen capture per project or per user.