mooders

The Economist - required reading for global economic news and opinion.

Prospect - Excellent array of current affairs articles, all of which are thought-provoking.

Private Eye - Long-standing satirical magazine aimed squarely at the UK establishment.

Wired - Seemed a good idea at the time, not sure how much value I get from it. Probably won't renew next year.

New Scientist - interesting read for an armchair science geek, but even I'm wondering if it is dumbing-down ever so slightly these days. 50/50 chance of renewing next year.

I also get regular access to Harvard Business Review as a business school alumnus, which is always worth a read, even if it is just a reminder as to why I took my MBA and said goodbye to corporate life :)

Two things - the design is, well, okay but extremely simple.. It just doesn't have that finished look about it.

And the app itself is incredibly simple, which makes me second guess myself as to whether it is too simplistic that users won't pay the few bucks I intend to charge for it. I keep telling myself that they pay for value, not the number of lines of code...

Back when text messaging capability was a rarity on mobile phones, which were themselves rare, I was testing an SMS-based weather forecast service that I had written on behalf of one of the mobile network operators.

The testing worked well on the emulator so I decided to test it over the public network to an actual handset. Only I forgot to advance a recordset through which I was looping, so the code never hit the end of recordset condition. It took me some time to notice there was a problem...

The fact that I crippled a national SMS network for a few hours was bad.

The fact that my company had to pay for each SMS, wiping out out profit for that month was worse.

The fact the handset was mine and on my first date with a girl later that evening (whom I later married) my handset kept beeping with incoming text messages (about 96,000 if I remember) was the ultimate.

The handset didn't have a silent-no vibrate function (either it beeped or it vibrated or it did both) and the SMS inbox filled up after 200 or so messages meant it took days for the inbox to fill up, me to clear it message by message, then fill up again ad nauseam.

Still, I laugh about it now...

http://www.twitread.com

Started to gain some traction, but beyond a (very) few amazon affiliate sales, I couldn't really see how to effectively monetise it.

What does the user care about? In your example, I guess they care about bandwidth usage and personal data. So in that light, I would inform them that a small amount of game-specific, non-personal info needs to be sent to the website (server is jargon, so should be avoided) to record the score.

My point is that as much info as the user cares about should be provided in a clear, accessible manner.

Where personal data and/or legal disclosure laws apply, then more transparency and info is better.

Unfortunately, it is not unnecessary to point out that all information of all types at all times should always be rigorously honest. If you're going to tell your users something, be truthful.

Could simplification be helpful? I'm thinking that in a conservative B2B industry, offering too much too quickly from an unknown probably gets your target's risk radar bleeping.

I spent a lot of time consulting for, managing projects in and selling into the wholesale banking industry - pretty conservative, slow to change and hard to break into. I found that simplifying both my offering and my message to focus on one or two major points of functionality and pain helped pique interest enough that I could get a decent conversation going, during which I could gently introduce other features and benefits.

In terms of long lead times I would suggest, if it's at all possible for your product or service, offering risk-free trials for a month or two. Manage the install, the maintenance, the training yourself, so the prospect has little or no reason to say no. Once they become users, and assuming your product or service is good, it will be easier to upgrade them to paying status.

A major feature of selling into the B2B space is to know who your buyer is. It is rarely an IT manager. It is rarely an HR manager. It is not always the Operations manager. It is very often, however, the Finance guy. This is not always true, of course, and many people have more or less influence over a given purchasing decision, but you need to know who those people are, what they care about and how to communicate with them in terms they each understand and care about.

To answer your question about how you decide whether to give up, I would advise you to do the above until you are 3-months from zero net worth. At that point, find a paying gig (consultancy, full-time job, whatever you need to do to keep your head above water), then use those three months to go all in on your startup - phone clients and push them hard, phone/email/meet with as many prospects as possible, and push, push, push. If it's going to fail, there is little harm in being harder-nosed / cheekier about the sales process. I would also, in that last 3-month period, look for a buyer for your technology, to at least get some return back on your investment. If, however, you land a contract or two during those three months, you can cancel the paying gig and continue with the startup.

Really good luck, whatever happens! Please do post an update - I think your story will be of interest to pretty much the whole of HN!

If it helps, I spend a reasonable amount of time helping people formulate business and marketing strategy. Happy to offer a specific opinion and ideas (gratis, of course) if you want to email me.

Three books that really show the good, bad and ugly about building businesses from scratch and scaling them to significance:

1. How to Get Rich (http://bit.ly/xGdV8)

2. Small Giants (http://bit.ly/WpvGa)

3. The Knack (http://bit.ly/OcKa9)

[no affiliate links]

A warning though - many 'start-up to success' books are, in my view, hampered by what I consider exceptional circumstances in the story. So you'll find a sentence/paragraph/page that basically says "so then I managed to raise $350,000 from XYZ to get me started", or "then I got stuck in a lift with Jeff Bezos for 72 hours and managed to convince him to invest". Which is great for their story, but it may or may not reflect your story.

So if you are going to try to learn lessons from the stories of others, and just to be clear let me say I believe this is a good way of learning, make sure you understand the differences between their story and yours and how those differences change the dynamics of starting and scaling a business.

I really like the feel of the site. Agree with jjs - the sign-up form put me off. I want to get started now, and add info (eg Twitter, company name) later if I choose to do so.

A little more info around the jargon would be appreciated - what's a board, how does this influence project structure etc.

The pricing is confusing, as I don't really understand how you define a board, so I can't judge whether I need 1, 15, 50 or 32,767 boards.

I know you have a link to FMi, but a little info about you guys would go a long way. Make me feel like there are people like me behind this would help me trust you with my project data a little more.

I do like it though - keen to give it a try for my own projects!

Thanks for the correction, voltageek! And Smashing Mag is an excellent resource indeed.

I think where one's design skills can be considered lacking, as I very much consider my own, simplicity becomes increasingly important and attractive as a design philosphy.

Plenty of white space, clear typography, showing only what is needed, and aligning vertical and horizontal edges helps hugely.

Two tools that also help enormously: http://www.906.gs - a grid system for layout and http://www.colourlovers.com - Colour Lovers for awesome colour palettes.

1. Go on a diet. 2. Open [web|desktop] app. 3. Select diet plan (atkins; south beach; XYZ etc). 4. Select number of people in household. 5. Select number of people on diet. 6. Select dietary options (eg gluten-free). 7. Select budget. 8. Add credentials and payment details for preferred online grocery store. 9. App notes diet plan and previous shopping activity to reduce duplication, finds recipes and extracts ingredients 10. App creates shopping cart automagically based on the above (and probably more besides) and purchases. 11. App records purchases.

I've wondered for the last 4 or 5 years since I have had this idea whether this would actually be something to pitch to the retailers rather than the consumers.

It's a tough decision. You should not ignore where your passions lie, however as has been suggested elsewhere if you want this to be your core revenue stream you must understand the relevant metrics.

I've written about this on my blog, where I have discussed this and similar topics in greater depth: http://www.fourthirds.com/which-idea-to-bet-on/.

You might also be interested in reading Seth Godin's short book The Dip. This discusses ways in which you can decide when enough is enough.

I'm always happy to be a sounding board, in as confidential a manner as you wish, for ideas and offer advice on what to do next. Hit me up at the blog if you want to take the convo further.

Good luck!

Very much looking forward to being there! I don't have anything to pitch yet - just checking the scene out and expecting to meet some interesting people <looks pointedly at you guys>.

No bright orange shirt but I shall be tweeting the day as we go as @neilmoodley so do say hi!

Definitely - if you don't understand the market, the motivations for purchasing, the product development lifecycle and so on, how can you possibly sell anything beyond brute force and willpower?

Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm

Bosworth/Holland's Customer-Centric Selling

DO IT! I did exactly this after some soul-searching with my wife over xmas '08. We figured that with my energy, ambition, ideas and so forth I could make something good happen within a few months. Handed my notice in on 5th January. Left on the 12th. Happy as I have ever been on the 13th and stayed that way ever since :)

It would also be pretty cool to try and bring in some professional service providers, like accountants; solicitors and bankers, to provide advice and access to services.

BusinessLink has been mentioned, but I have yet to find the quality of service to be matched to the breadth of services offered.

I do like the idea of a real tech startups vs the rest of the world kind of feel. Maybe we could get a meetup arranged somewhere fairly central - Oxford? Anyone up for this?

I'm Southampton based and find I spend huge amounts of time scouring techcrunchUK, mashable and very few others for UK startup news. The Times online and The Guardian online are both good sources. The most fruitful is probably Twitter though.

Perhaps there is a need for us to band together and start driving more engagement - i.e. really champion a tech startup group?

GenX FTW!

This may sound glib, but have you asked him?

Have you explored with him, with you in a Coaching/Mentoring role, where he sees himself heading; who he sees himself being; what effects he sees himself making over the next year / 2 years / 5 years / at retirement?

Once you have the answers to those (and he may not have fully considered these things himself, to that degree of clarity and detail), you can then work together to see if any options exist where you both get what you want.

For the same reason that so very few people start businesses - the FUD of the unknown.

Predictability is a great comforter for many risk-averse types, a category to which the great majority of engineer-types I have known belong.

Hmmm. No Mac (or, I assume, Linux) version yet. Windows only. No official word on a release date...

In retrospect, did you do it the hard way, or the easy way (whatever each constitutes in your context)?

What will you do differently next time?

How transparent are the founders in their info-sharing?

I posted bzplnr as a Rate My Startup, more as a beta program than an acrual launch, and I must say the feedback was terrific - detailed, honest and even a bit brutal, but without exception encouraging. I've made some changes (it's now http://www.fourthirds.com) accordingly and it's slowly starting to gather a few users who are tentatively having a go with it.

Aiming for a re-design and enhanced featureset soon, so I'll be back for more HN honesty!

Thanks to everyone for the comments.

I have taken the site down for a few days whilst I implement some of the good ideas here.

Be back soon with v2.0!

Cheers once again.

Overall, it looks okay. Nothing too offensive. Have a look at some colour scheme sites to get a palette of complementary colours. http://kuler.adobe.com works very well, as does http://www.colourlovers.com.

inertia? ignorance? distrust?

There are many reasons. Very few corporate P&L holders know much about software, the options, alternatives, benefits, actual TCO numbers, roadmaps, specific business need in terms of software requirements and so on.

In my experience, inertia is the biggie. "We've always done it this way", "we've invested $XXXXXXX in this", "it's all our people know" etc etc.

It's undoubtedly frustrating, but I have found it to be a useful reality check that in the real world, the vast majority of people do not enjoy (?) the same perspective as us on technology.

@tortilla - after n retries, we will lock the account and email a randomly-generated password to them that is valid for 24 hours. On login, they will need to enter a new password.

@bayareaguy - email offers two advantages over username. 1) it's unique and 2) it can be useful for communications.

To a large degree I believe they do. But I think this is mainly because they are at the bottom of a very large heap.

At the top, is industry. They need a way to filter the 'hands dirty' workers from the management, and the management from the Executive. So the 'old boys clubs' traditionally get the Executive, the Universities churn out the management and the high school system produces the blue collar workers.

So in order to meet this demand, the focus of schooling has to be those skills which are most likely to be of use to industry - English, Maths, Science. Followed by history, geography and foreign languages. Last, seen as necessary for a 'rounded' individual are the arts - music, art, drama and dance in that order (as Sir Ken points out).

Is this good, or right? Don't know. Is it likely to change? Probably not. After all, are you going to be the parent to turn your child's back on the traditional model of schooling to provide an alternative education, knowing this will probably make them a 'better' (define that how you will) person but possibly less employable as a result?

I know there is a lot of babble these days about the breakdown of the workplace but even the most avant-garde employer would prefer their employees to be literate, numerate and deeply knowledgeable in a given topic.

Sir Ken's central point, though, about educating the whole person is spot on. I do believe greater emphasis ought to be given to the softer subjects, such as the arts. However, there are only so many hours in the day and unless the very large majority of parents start reclaiming ownership of their children's education then little is likely to be demanded to change. By this I mean that the parents are so busy themselves (working, may be single-parent) that they have little time and energy to teach their 2 year old how to count and recite the alphabet and so forth. So the job is delegated to the primary education system who have to make room to bring the children to a standard of literacy and numeracy where they can start the 'real' learning.

I think I have a slightly different spin on the difference. I tend to see, rightly or wrongly, a Builder as someone who is going to see a job through to the finish - a details person, in essence. A Hacker, in YC parlance.

I see Entrepreneurs as those that create the ideas, or see the vision of how an idea could be used, implemented (on a broad level), or sold. I feel an Entrepreneur's skillset lends itself to creating the team, inspiring the vision and making the deals necessary to establish the company as a viable entity.

I also tend to see Entrepreneurs as quickly bored (perhaps that is just how I see myself) and eager to move onto the next thing.

I guess that's why I feel a startup generally needs two co-founders - a business person and a techie person. Ideally, they'll each have a degree of appreciation for the other's domain.