mbym

I’m super excited for this! That demo site is so fast (I love Next.js).

And this is awesome: “No additional tools and no [separate] databases - just Next.js and Stripe… Stripe handles the backend”. I once built a website where I stored everything in Stripe. It made it so quick to get started, and I can use the Stripe admin dashboard to make edits.

Podcasters! I'm cheating a bit with this answer, because this is really the industry I've worked in for the past 3+ years. But it still strikes me what camaraderie there is between audio producers, and even great goodwill/respect between tech platforms that are ostensibly competitors. I think both phenomena are a function of the fact that the industry is more concerned with growth, improving podcasting tech, and attracting new listeners/advertisers (rather than just competing for existing ears/dollars). Result: podcasters genuinely try to help each other, and enjoy meeting like-minded souls at meet-ups. Also, see online communities like "Podcast Movement Community - For Podcasters" Facebook group (14,000+ members) and many more online groups with thousands of members. There's a StackOverflow-level generosity of knowledge/advice sharing. Example: I shared this "Grateful for friendships" post after an industry conference https://www.instagram.com/p/BlxX3pjgr06/?taken-by=awesoundap...

“When you pick something like a pen up off a table, the first thing you touch is the table.” I stopped reading for a good two minutes of experimentation.

Prolific (http://prolific.ac/) is designed specifically for science research, but I've used used it for two different use cases: 1. Product research, quickly testing appetite for an idea. 2. Micro tasks (a "survey" with at least one participant, where basically the only question was "have you done the task (on external page)?" The task in question was editing a public transcript, so confidentiality wasn't even a concern.

Each time I was impressed with the quality of the responses. In the optional open-ended text fields for the research survey, in particular, I was impressed with how people took time to free-write their thoughts, rather than just rushing on to the next question / to complete the survey. Point is I do think you get what you pay for...

From my experience, it seems Prolific's ethical approach (e.g., insisting on decent minimum payment rates) leads to overall higher quality of participants as well as responses (vs. race-to-the-bottom micro-task platforms like MTurk). [Disclaimer: I'm friends with the founders -- so I'm quite familiar with the amount of resources devoted to ensuring truthful/quality responses.]

Would love to see Awesound listed. I see it's not in US, UK or Ireland lists. (I was in Ireland before YCF2). Thanks!

Same story for me here today (reporting from Cork, Ireland)

"users who extensively tweak their settings from the defaults may be actually making their browsers considerably easier to uniquely fingerprint" ...interesting comment in section, "User-dependent behaviors and preferences"

@Sien, completely agree with you. This is a solution Awesound (currently in YC Fellowship) is building: a good, clean way to dynamically put targeted ads into podcasts. We also enable publishers to accept payments from listeners. Say hi! (email mark@awesound or twitter @awesoundapp)

Oh, this is really cool. So when I create a "card" on zube, it automatically creates an issue on github. And when I drag the card to "done" on your trello-like board, it marks the issue as closed in github. The zube interface definitely adds a lot of clarity with colours and birds-eye view. I'm excited to use this! I think the onboarding could make it easier to quickly understand this much (initially, I falsely assumed a "ticket" corresponded to one github issue).

I just pushed to github with a commit message that closed the issue, (git commit -m "... closes #1", as per https://help.github.com/articles/closing-issues-via-commit-m...) and sure enough, the "card" is now marked as complete in zube, with a handy hyperlink to the corresponding commit in github. The instant email confirmation ("Ticket #n closed") from Zube could be pretty handy too, as the team grows. Nice work!

Very helpful, cheers. "The more progress you make on the business, the easier it will be to get a great cofounder" -- agreed -- and being accepted to YC would itself more than help convince people to join the team also :) I hope there are more Drew Houstons out there with confidence to apply.

Question re solo founders: "A startup is too much work for one person" and if you can't convince even one friend to join you, that doesn't speak well for your idea! On the other hand, a bad hire/partnership can ruin the company. YC gives signal it really prefers to look at teams than individual applications. Q: Do you have have advice or rules of thumb re how much time a solo founder should put into finding partner(s)? Or thoughts re how much to prioritise this, vs. just writing code and talking to users to finish initial version yourself? I don't mean this to be just focused on "getting into YC" but more in general: what's the right way to think about fixing this problem (being a solo founder) vs tackling other things like actually building something initial users can be using? For software ideas surely it is occasionally sensible to make at least a prototype and actually get some users before ever buddying up? Or if I've got this far but am basically still going it alone, am I doing something wrong?