HN user
Founded Prospress (acq. by Automattic). Built Subscriptions for WooCommerce (>100K active installs). Father of 3 (and a puppy). Born to build.
If anyone wants to set it up, get in touch.
I write a free auction/marketplace WordPress plugin (called Prospress) that could be used to set up a working prototype in a couple of hours.
For starters, their marketing strategy included:
- not requiring a 37 step signup process
- not requiring a user to choose between a dozen different monthly plans before being able to sign-up
- not requiring a monthly subscription just to test and send the odd fax
It's been a while since I looked at the available options, but the few I previously evaluated required far too much overhead to make them effective.
Amsterdam NL - great for tech community and the cultural experience
Melbourne AU - also good for tech and culture, though it is closer to what you're used to (I'm assuming American)
New York US - hard to beat as a city
Important tips:
- live only in cities where you speak the local language, but visit countries where you don't.
- expect your productivty to be reduced by about half. Learning to live in a new country is surprisingly time consuming and the simplest of things can take hours.
- make sure you have at least a small social group (2+ people) or way to break into a social group in the new city.
I've lived in 4 cities across 3 countries in the last 2 years and in my opinion, moving to a foreign country while beginning a startup is like trying to swim while juggling.
I still say go for it, it'll be an experience, but starting a business is hard enough without having to learn to live in a new city, so if that is your ultimate goal, stay close to what you're familiar with.
If you'd be willing to take the time to dig something up on that I'd love to read it.
It seems surprising to me that potential damages would not be taken into account. By doing so, the accussed would essentially be rewarded based on chance - at least in this case.
And as Fannie Mae provided the inside-man with root access to all the main systems, it was apparently just as easy to destroy the backups.
Edit: also in reference to this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2054679
Can you share some of the best resources you've found for learning?
if you lost years of your life and have nothing to show for it
If you have nothing to show for it, you haven't actually started a startup. You may not get a 7 figure bank balance to show for it, but you'll get something out it. Be it a website you can show off, better anecdotes for job interviews & parties or a network of new friends.
It's only sustainable if it's making you money. It's always good, even when it's bad.
I really like startuply's idea and the execution is quite good.
I'm surprised we don't hear more about them though. I was surprised they'd been around for so long (03/2008 [1]) before I first heard of them a month or so ago.
I would gladly have 2-3 lines of relevant Google ads shown to me everytime I visit wikipedia if it meant I didn't have to see Jimmy staring back at me for a few days.
Yep, it sure is a great quote, shame he didn't attribute it to Reid Hoffman, who has been saying it since at least 2006: http://www.cambrianhouse.com/blog/startups-entrepreneurship/...
I'm submitting this article for the discussion from the HNers. I don't necessarily agree with its content or how the content is presented.
I'd love to hear more about the "alternative methodologies" and why they're more "efficient, extensible, and far more economical".
Also, do people think the fees are that outrageous? A common complaint about the .com TLD is that it is too cheap; thus, making it susceptible to squatting. I've no idea about the real costs involved in creating custom TLDs, but I wouldn't be surprised if the fees are in part set high to avoid people buying custom TLDs, like .inc or .fb (facebook) and squatting them.
I hate to be a cynic on a great contribution Jason, but I can't help think you're doing this To Get More Entrepreneurs Writing, About PadPressed. Or at least, more attention for PadPressed in the WordPress world.
Ulterior motives aside, it's a great offer, good work on putting it together. Best of luck with PadPressed.
Disclaimer: My thoughts are heavily influenced by having just read your piece on how to pitch TC and get press.
At first I liked the idea of market value based taxes and clearly a bunch of HN readers agree with the idea.
The biggest issue I see though is the implication for small projects.
For example, maybe in 1994 you snapped up pizza.com. You could have been using it ever since for a pizza price search engine which gets 100,000 unique visitors per month and earns you $5,000 per month. That's decent income, except the taxes on the domain's market value of $2.6 million[1] would be crippling. So despite using the domain in what most would think of as good way, you couldn't afford to have such a good domain. Now extrapolate this example for the thousands of sites that have a good domain name for a small project.
Yes, something like that as I believe a portion of the recurring fee is used to fund regulatory bodies like ICANN.
I'm not surprised to see my comment being both up and down voted, but anyone down voting my comment, at least take the time to share your reasons for disagreeing. If there is any place a well considered domain purchasing discussion should be able to occur it's HN.
My understanding of the domain market is this.
Regulators realised the best way to provide domains was to let the market determine their value and allow them to be traded at will (with respect for IP). So they wholesale at dirt cheap prices on a first-come first-served basis and people can then buy and sell them based on market value. Works for real estate so why not domains?
The problem derives from the initial price and the expectations that implants. Many expect a domain to cost $10. So when they are offered a price more than that, they are pissed off and blame the person selling it to them.
Nobody walks past a vacant block in a prime real estate location and goes "bastards, if they weren't squatting that land, I could snap it up". They know the land costs $x million and don't assume it should cost $10. However, because domains are a new real estate market and not every possible domain is out of wholesale, people base their expectation of price on the wholesale price.
Now, let's think of the alternative. Anyone who has tried to buy a top level domain for a country that heavily regulates the names would understand the pain of the alternative. It can cost hundreds or thousands for the wholesale price. You're required to own the trademark already (which adds additional cost for a new project) as well as have a registered company etc. I can think of dozens of my favourite projects/blogs which I'm sure don't have a company or trademark registered under that name. This system would not only be a pain for small business, it would stifle innovation on the web.
I'm not a domainer (I do own about a dozen though) and I get just as annoyed as the next guy when I come up with a name for a project and find some punk wants $15k for the domain. But then I think of the alternative.
I used to be in the "eww, PHP" crowd, but only until I really started using it.
It doesn't have to be the security blackhole or spaghetti monster it's made out to be.
Why not transition to a different language over time? One that more great programmers want to use? There's no reason they couldn't (over the course of years) move to another language
Probably because by the time they've transitioned to the more popular language, an entirely new programming language will be the one more great programmers want to use.
I found the movie's funding model far more interesting than the spin about why IMDb.
I agree. The sentence a few paragraphs in tells a very different story to the headline:
IMDb told the team that if a movie is not set up with a production company with a history of theatrically released movies, getting it listed at the early stages of development would not be possible
The reasoning didn't have much to do with it being released via bitTorrent only.
That is the only Google site I found it on.
15 minutes that would be better spent writing code? :)
Something not mentioned here is that you also get an idea of someone's "cultural fit" by looking at their code. I think code can provide an insight into personality, especially into work related character traits.
Any idea how Sprowtt was planning to get around the law if it is illegal?
Personality assassination is more likely.
What are people's thoughts on peer-to-peer startup funding? Is it ever going to happen?
By that I mean raising money with a larger number of smaller inputs from a marketplace or similar. Potentially still in exchange for equity though also possibly for debt or just belief, as with Kickstarter.
Diaspora and Kickstarter are a recent successful example, though that was something of a black swan event in my opinion.
I do think this type of exchange could solve some of the things founders dislike about raising money, but it certainly raises other problems.
I heard a while ago of a company called Sprowtt planning to do something like this, but researching again just now, they appear to have "hit the deadpool" http://www.crunchbase.com/company/sprowtt-marketplace
This exists: http://www.lifeat.com
Has done for some time: http://techcrunch.com/2007/10/16/does-your-building-need-a-s...
Since reading that article almost 3 years ago, I've not heard another thing about it. I guess it's pretty hard for hyper-local networks to spread like the wildfire of Facebook et. al.
I was trying to support reasonable use of editorial. I was not supporting "linkbait" editorial. There is a big difference.
The poster referenced a piece of the article. He/she did no use gratuitous link bait like "* * * TOP 5 DOMAIN CHOOSING TIPS [vid] * * * ". It's unfair to treat them like they did just because they changed the title.
It is editorialized, but I would not have followed a link titled "Domain Names" as it does not convey the quality of the article.
I think it's reasonable to use one of the more interesting points of the article when the original title is so vague.
Published 1st Apr 2010