nemrow

Woflow | Full Stack / Front End Engineer | San Francisco | Full Time | Onsite

Looking to add an engineer to our small team to help us keep up with growth!

Tech: Ember.js / Ruby on Rails

We are building the data backbone of the food delivery industry and have proven ourselves in the market with the worlds largest food delivery companies.

https://www.woflow.com jordan@woflow.com

Woflow is hiring full stack engineers!

San Francisco | React | Rails | GraphQL

We power the worlds largest food delivery companies by helping them build and maintain their restaurant menu data.

Looking to add a few more engineers to our 2-person founding team to start 2019 off right!

Reach out to jordan@woflow.com

This is extremely helpful.

fullcontact.com has some accuracy in there searches. They are not free, and it is not a consumer facing company though.

I butt heads with folks every day over the importance of validation before building begins. I have always been a believer in BUILDING first. The only way to really validate the product is to the put it in REAL hands and see how it does. Well said Gary!

Way cool! I am impressed.

Props on the innovation. Devil's Advocate: Barcodes were put in place to speed up mass quantity entry. This might cause a lineup as the ticket-taker is now a 'bouncer' and has to verify each persons physical identity. Have you tested this model at any fairly large events?

Thats a pretty sweet way to utilize startup strategies you have learned on the job to benefit you personally.

I love these kind of projects! Keep up the "point"-less work! :)

I just began blogging myself, and it really helps me take a step back and realize / think about what I learn on a day to day basis.

I totally agree with that! There are tons of companies that "win the lottery", and build a product with no validation and succeed. It is obviously not the "right" way to do it, but sometimes it does work.

Bingo! :)

I hear what you are saying. I have tons of pages of lessons I learned that I will touch on in later posts. I tried to summarize the whole experience in to one page. My experiences took me to business meeting after business meeting, and opened my eyes to the entire tech / music startup scene. The main lesson I learned was not listening to feedback early on, but I also have insight on co-founder issues, legal issues, budgeting issues, personal/work dilemmas, etc.

All of these things I DO agree with. And yes, we are young. We might not use the word "shit" on our homepage next time. But Hell, I used the word "fuck" on the title of this article, and it sure turned alot of heads.

We were a middle-man to the artists. We had it setup so when a fan bought their music all of the money went directly to us, and then we paid out the artist. That is where we went wrong. You need to use "recipient tokens" so the money is split by Amazon. This way the money goes directly to the artist and we get sent a cut directly from amazon.

Yes, Bandcamp was for sure our competitor. Simple to use, and well known. Our added value was the dynamic pricing (which we found out was not a value at all). There are many pain points for artists. The main one is "no one is buying my music". That pain point hasn't yet been solved in an easy way, and as time goes on, it seems its getting harder and harder.

Dans right (he's my co-founder). Amazon allowed for a much larger period of time between authorization and capturing. They are the only processor that had the technology on hand for us.

I did want to open source it, but the problem is all of our passwords and keys for amazon and everything are in the code. Is there a way to get around that?

We were a middle-man to the artists. We had to setup so when a fan bought their music all of the money went directly to us, and then we paid out the artist. That is where we went wrong. You need to use "recipient tokens" so the money is split by Amazon. This was the money goes directly to the artist and we get send a cut directly from amazon

Hahaha, i'll take the honesty!

I like where this discussion has gone. I feel like the vast majority of us are stating that we didn't understand our market well enough and didn't get validation early enough.

Our product relied heavily on the technology behind (it needed to be fully coded before being functional). So how do you all think we should go about validating a market using an MVP without having the product coded out?

Sure. First off if your business model relies heavily on the sales of actual music, you are most likely doomed. The majority of the world thinks of music as a free right, not as a paid privilege.

If people do pay for music, it is predominantly streaming servies where they get all the music they want and pay one company.

Don't get me wrong, there will be startups that thrive in the music industry in the years to come, but they won't be selling music. They will be the companies that begin to think way outside the box and revolutionize the commerce in the space (however that may be).

I think this is a fuckin' great idea! I started out as a front-end developer and I would get discouraged when I couldn't see my work deployed in action. Wish this was around a few years ago!

I feel ya! Did you spend your 4k on developers? Or are you a programmer?

Good call.

My startup failed because our team (who worked in the music industry, but were not musicians) assumed we knew our audience (who were musicians) and made our development decisions based off that assumption. If we put a "minimal viable product" out to our audience sooner we would have been able to pivot heavily and possibly create a product they would want to use. Also never work in the music space! Ever!! :)

I have always been fascinated in affecting the masses in a positive way. From there it took years to mold the concept before a small team and I took the plunge.

A year later, we realized it didn't affect the masses in the way we would have hoped.

My answer on "Why did you END your startup" would probably be much more insightful and informative. I think I'll throw that question up myself!

I bookmarked this for sure! I'm the WORST at having tons of duplicate declarations!

I've worked at a startup in Santa Barbara CA, and one in the Bay Area. The reason I push to the Bay is for energy purposes. The inspiration of the startup community really boosted everyones energy up and pumped us up to work harder! It easier to work out with others that are working out rather than doing it alone in your living room.

"We're 90% finished with our product, which leaves us with only 90% to go!" - me

I personally think it is a great idea. The hardest part is making the email look genuine and not like a mass email. We used this tactic at my last startup and quickly found out that our assumptions about our audience were very false, and we quickly pivoted which avoided a long drawn-out period of time failing.