HN user

ihatehandles

22 karma

Devtrepreneur

Posts5
Comments44
View on HN

Active with:

(http://tractionengine.co) A small SaaS for publishers/websites that want their direct ad sales automated (window shopping, purchasing, serving). Runs on a subdomain or root of your liking, branding plus). Works with several payment gateways (we no touch your money), allows real time previewing of slots, publishers can customize the look, texts and wording on the site, got an API, plays with DFP etc. Growth so far is strictly word of mouth (hence no attention to the marketing site), caught the attention of some massive publishers hoping on now. Paying customers. 0 hours/week for most weeks. [AngularJS/FatFree/GoLang] About 8/9 months in.

A news aggregator engine in python for anyone to build their news aggregator upon. Scores using social media vitality, hits & age. Example user http://www.topnews.co.zw [Python(flask)] Runs well on Heroku. Work on it here and there (by span of months)

More brewing...

Yup, for RSS there are ways to implement this out of the box. I was thinking more about regular people who don't know or use RSS, people that publishers would like to retain over the course of reporting a developing story. How do you think this could be accomplished?

How about this? I see a lot of breaking news websites (or blogs that post a story whose details they "update as details come in" have no way (ok, maybe I just haven't come across it) of retaining their readers - a way to subscribe to subsequent updates. So that means busy Bob will either completely forget to come back to the story letter or that he will search for the story again and go read on a competing publication.

So maybe a way for people to subscribe to these "developing stories"? An example implementation in WordPress would be that it adds next to the publish button a checkbox for indicating that this is a developing story. On the user end, all such posts show normally but with an email input and relevant messaging informing the user that the article will be updated as details come in and that they can be notified of them.

I don't know if this qualifies, but the 3D industry which I was pretty involved with for a time comes really close. It is just as "closed", in that they are as sure as developers are that what they are doing is something so awesome they wish everyone knew how awesome it is and should be doing it. And most of them find software development to be a lifeless and colour-less pain, well save for the few among them who can code.

Zimbabwean. Bootstrapping couple tech startups (some profitable) here in Africa for way over a year now.

Most (good) devs I know are self-taught. Employment opportunities pushing code are so scarce it's hopeless for most which is why most move out or go into sys admin/networking. The jobs don't pay that good as well but you can strike out well with consulting.

Thanks to the internet Git, SASS, Heroku, AngularJS, Golang, NodeJS, Docker and all other hacker goodness is adopted just as much (by the few willing) so it's not like we're making sites with bash. We also have a few tech podcasts and the occasional meetup.

Just that our communities are much much smaller and far apart that it's like we're not there at all (thanks economy). Good developers are also hard to find because most see no point in developing skills you never get to use. Things are picking up though

That won't make too many people happy, especially considering they're targeting a market that may have never heard of Stripe or aren't technical enough to pick the Stripe fee inclusion. This doesn't strike much confidence either for a more serious investment, from their terms:

Plasso reserves the right at any time, with or without notice, to modify or discontinue the Service, temporarily or permanently.

But great all around, using this on a project soon

Focus is key definitely, but isn't there elbow room a bit if you build (usually) SaaS products where it addresses some nichey problem so much there isn't much to be done feature-wise save for a few ad campaigns?

Great job you're doing with PostJobFree. From my experience you're right, one startup is more than handful if you need more features to stay competitive. Two? They've been breaking me to little pieces although one is about to reach feature-completeness.

Wow, five. Yeah it's a strain juggling client work and a startup, I decided a few months ago to die of kwashiorkor if that was what it would take for my startup to show me some (revenue) respect - because juggling that with client work was going to kill me anyway

Not master a new language, just dabble in an added few. Kill off an hour of bore learning some NodeJS or AngularJS, what's there to lose? If there's nothing to actually be gained. I do this from time to time and the knowledge I picked up later became the deciding competitive advantages for startups I work on.

Talking serious startups (not odd weekend hacks) I started 3.

The first had traction but no revenue (because of market challenges). So I pulled the plug on it and launched #2 to solve that challenge. #2 grew and is I do it full time now, also just launched #3 3 months ago which had revenue and paying customers from day 1. So I'm just about to re-launch #1 again, see if it will fly or die now that there's no revenue-model excuse

Do you live off of them full time?

Great gem there. I've noticed the same but hadn't had it stuck in my mind that the building stage is the most involving but after that (for most products) there is usually little to do.

Thanks for that. I have about 3 running. 1 for over a year with growing revenue and big customers (relative to small me), another enterprise one which is going extremely well for a 2 month old startup revenue-wise and last one is 6 months in with growing traffic but no revenue model yet. So yesterday after being bit hard by the startup bug I was working on a quick prototype of an idea I've had floating around for two years and decided to stop and ask before going further if this was a smart thing to do at this point. As you've seen it's only been a year running a profitable startup so I'm by no means experienced, and I wondered if at this point there was still room to tinker and toy with ideas.

Automate all the things, have someone handle those you can't. Gotcha, thanks again.

I have no idea, maybe they want the model of startup entrepreneurship they see outside (19 billion hint hint) and want that in their portfolio too.

"it has only accepted five or six companies in some classes due to a lack of fundable options"

In my experience with South Africa there are a LOT of people trying out their luck with accelerators. I don't think it's that they can't find options, but I suppose options they like: and the wider world offers that more than Africans themselves. Hmm.