keenahn

I'm actually very excited about this as an education tool where you can actually learn by coding.

Gotta be honest, I don't see the point of this app. As it is right now, it's useless to me. What benefit is it to me to see that someone "blacklisted" UPS? Guess what, I still have to ship packages occasionally, I'm still going to use them.

Complaints about airlines... I'm guessing all airlines will be "blacklisted" eventually because guess what, delays are part of flying.

It just looks like a slightly more organized version of what Twitter and the Internet already largely is: people complaining. There already exist the BBB, ripoffreport, yelp.

So... what value does your app provide? How will you make money?

Remap 1 to l, O to 0 and vice versa (but only one out of three times)

I've never checked references. The best test for a developer, after interviewing them, is to work with them, for pay, for a few days or a week. That should quickly reveal any character faults or inefficiencies with working with your team.

Hire slow, fire fast :)

My one comment would be, I wonder how the customer feels receiving a message from the Founder of the company. One of two possible reactions:

1) Wow I'm really special to receive personal attention from the founder.

2) This company must be small potatoes if the founder has time to be writing emails.

I wonder if you could follow up with an A/B test, same exact message from you and from a "Community Manager"

Thanks for the encouragement! Do you have any critical feedback for us? :)

Haha, thank you sir. That's what we were going for :). I had to sell magazine subscriptions and it suuuuuuuuuuucked. The funny thing is that kids are still using those tactics TODAY.

We are the only platform that is 100% focused on kids. Kids have challenges that are not being addressed by the other crowdfunding platforms.

1) Kids under 13 need stricter privacy controls and need to give parents access.

2) Kids oftentimes don't understand how best to tell their story and engage their audience. We help them with that.

3) Kickstarter is fantastic for pre-selling products. While we do have a few young entrepreneurs on our site, most of the kids are not selling anything. We encourage them to give low-cost, high emotional value gifts like signed photographs of their team.

4) We are one of the few platforms that is built from the ground up around teams. The team leader has special abilities to coordinate the team members and can poke them and motivate them.

5) Kids also need a bit more prodding than adults do, so we've built in a bit of light gamification to make it fun for them.

I do program at work, so I have logged many "flight hours" so to speak.

I learned CS basics over time, but I created my first webapp in two weeks, knowing nothing of web technologies before that. The education and tools are a lot better now, so I think someone trying to learn now would have everything they need to make a basic app in a month.

As for building something that other people want to use, well that is a separate question :) sounds like you are well on your way.

I feel bad for you son, but I can't completely blame the recruiter and the company in this case.

Complaint 1: The recruiter asked you questions you didn't find relevant. I have often asked "curveball" questions just to see how a potential hire thinks on his feet or perhaps to see how he handles a situation in which he doesn't know the answer to something (the correct way being "I don't know that off the top of my head, good thing for Google and Stack Overflow, right?"), so it's not really up to you to determine which questions are relevant. Then again, he could have just been a dick, but not necessarily.

Complaint 2: The company had to be prompted and prodded to respond to you Certainly, this isn't very professional, and it would also leave a bad taste in my mouth, but know this: the company doesn't owe you a damn thing. Silence = rejection, simple as that. If there was anything to follow up with, I would have emailed the company that day, and then promptly put them out of my mind until they replied and kept applying to other jobs.

Complaint 3: The company didn't get back to you in a timely fashion. Unfortunately, this is simple supply and demand. Or, the company is terribly incompetent. But it seems to me that they would prioritize reviewing candidates if they had a small number who were qualified. If there was already a week backlog of candidates, they were probably getting plenty of them already.

I understand the point of your piece, that you believe the recruiter failed the company by not properly interviewing you, and that you believe that the company shot itself in the foot by not giving you a real chance. OK. Then do you really want to work at a place like that?

A month to get started, years to master (and most never will master).

If you don't live in a "startup hub," it might be difficult but not impossible. Here in San Francisco, there are tons of tech meetups on meetup.com. If you can't find any tech meetups in your city, start one! A simple one to start is simply, "Shut up and code!" or something similar, where you literally just sit in a coffee shop, cowork, and talk to each other if you want to.

That reminds me, coworking spaces will usually give you a day pass or a few days. Check those out.

Good luck!

Best is if you know someone in San Francisco. Where are you located currently? It can be hard to find short term rentals in San Francisco unless they are horrid corporate housing apartments (stay away from any Trinity managed properties).

What problem are you solving? What stage are you at in development? Are you looking for basic validation of your idea or getting validation for potential features/tweaks?

If you are still early on, I would start with "What do you use currently to ________?" Where the blank is the problem you're trying to solve better than it is currently being solved.

Nice! And easy enough to do with git or a similar CVS. Just check out your code from a year ago and see how you've improved.

This inspired me with a crazy idea for an app:

You download the app. Every night, the app serves up ONE bar or club with a little description, pictures, reviews etc. The list is curated (and later down the line, businesses could pay for the privilege of being featured). The secret trick, though, is that there are actually two bars selected every night. For one, it gets 60% of the females and 40% of the males, for the other one, it gets 60% of the males and 40% of the females. There is no way to know which group you've been selected into every night. For many nights, though, you will be at the bar where there is a good ratio of people you're interested in (assuming a largely hetero or bi population), which will encourage you to open the app every night (variable reward, a la slot machines).

Of course, getting your first downloads will be tough, but that is a separate problem. Thoughts?

Well, you will inevitably get the advice that you should quit.

Barring that, I say create strict barriers for yourself to ease the mental context-switching. Say for example, you will focus 100% on your day job from 10AM to 7PM weeknights, and you will go nuts on your startup at all other times. Even just writing down these rules will help you focus. By working more effectively during the day, and assuming your boss isn't a nazi guarding your time, you can actually finish your work earlier and spend more time on your startup.

Another suggestion, wake up one or two hours earlier to work on your passion project. Since you mention being too tired when you come home at night, this is a way to make sure you are making incremental progress day by day.

Eventually, you really will have to "burn the boats" so to speak and quit. I'm not sure what's keeping you from quitting, but I'm assuming you have good reasons (mortgage, kids, debt). It will be tough to bootstrap all the way until profitability. Is there any way you can work on contract while you continue developing your startup?

Best of luck

Interesting idea, and one I've seen before, but there's little incentive to contribute to this system. Reminds me of gasbuddy. In order for this to be crowdsourced, there would have to be an incentive to input quality data (see http://www.factual.com/ a local data API that gives you credits for uploading quality data).

A better system might be to scrape foursquare, twitter, facebook checkins, and just measure the ratios. It would be more automatic (no behavior change required), but would also be skewed (say, for example, women tweet more than men do).

You're welcome.

...what?

Being overly critical of yourself is not only no fun, it's also not particularly effective. Sounds like if you constantly reinforce that you're not good enough, you will lose confidence and motivation to continue.

I'm thinking an easy reframe of this is competing with your past self. See if you can do better than you did yesterday, even by 1%. A 1% improvement every day leads to a doubling in 71 days.

Unfortunately, I'm not seeing how this is better or different from the millions of other "online marketing" programs I've seen advertised on Warrior Forum or similar. Except this one is an actual "bootcamp" style workshop that costs $11,000. OK.

But I am still not in any way assured how this would be different from other content courses.

What is your unfair advantage? Unfortunately, I don't recognize those names you mentioned, so that doesn't really sell me on it. If I'm going to plunk down $11K, I need to know why I am getting a return on my investment.

Best of luck

EDIT: I just saw that the top 4 students will be guaranteed market-rate job placement. That goes a long way to assuage my fears, but still, I'm not quite sure I'd pay $11K for this.

Sounds like a classic case-study for Lean Startup methodologies.

Why did you sink 6 months into this without knowing if people actually wanted it?

Stop coding. Now. Go out and talk to your potential customers. What problem are you solving? How are people solving it now?

Best of luck, and hopefully this can be salvaged, or else it is a learning experience for next time.

User acquisition is probably the biggest challenge for an early-stage startup (http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html). Your definition of "spamming," is pretty broad.

"Spamming" by itself is not malicious. In the case of Path, the app is only as valuable as my network of friends who is on it, so you can be damn sure I'm going to invite them. In the case of AirBnB, people saw the ads, signed up and ostensibly got value out of AirBnB, so what was the harm?

Not sure what your problem with "spamming," is (even though you have provided two examples that are pretty different), but I imagine that yes, startups will continue to grow at all costs because they have to in order to survive.

Here are my top three pieces of advice I wish I had at 15:

Remember: every website you use, every app on your phone, was built by people just like you. There is nothing magical or mystical about technology. Technology is just a tool, and you can learn to master it to solve problems.

If you can see problems in the world, be it not remembering to walk the dog, or being annoyed with washing your car, you probably have an idea for a business. It might not be a billion dollar business, but it will get you thinking.

Get in the habit of starting things. We spend so much of our life planning, waiting, when we should be trying, iterating.

I tend to agree with this viewpoint. In my opinion, the prevalence of Google Glass and similar devices will make the streets safer because people will know they can't get away with stuff.

Finally, using slot machine mechanics to my advantage. Thanks for this

I just spent way too long trying to figure out how to do something simple with facebook open graph. Haven't used codenow yet, but it looks like it could have saved me a ton of time.

Flippin sweet

I dig it, looks like a no brainer for rapid prototyping and iteration.