timharding

This is cool but, oh boy, a mute button that makes a sound when you click it is user hostile.

This is more or less what my lawyer suggested when I set up my will with her.

Apparently very few people have ever asked her about this.

I don’t think it has yet become part of the checklist for arranging one’s affairs.

Nerdiest gang signs ever.

Unreadable.

Either that or you have a pretty fucked up model for love.

Dude, it really isn't like seeing someone you love dying from cancer.

Tea bags on strings make steeping time really controllable.

There are pack-your-own tea bag systems too here in the UK but I think most people would rather just have something good/familiar rather than blend their own weird tea.

Note that he wants to create a lifestyle business, not a startup. Not sure how important scalability is for that.

Programmers are really boring analogy whalers, out at sea forever hunting their perfect, elusive, bloody boring, analogs.

I just finished reading Dark Star — an entertaining scifi noir epic poem set on a planet with a dead sun. It isn't going to tell you about the practicalities of this type of thing but it is a good yarn.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dark-Star-Oliver-Langmead/dp/1907389...

I interviewed someone who had a failed startup. He couldn't tell me what he would do differently if he was to do it all over again. It didn't fill me with confidence that he's learned anything during the experience.

Make sure you can answer that question when you start interviewing.

You could turn off bluetooth, that would lock Coin, after a period.

Fascinating. Thanks for the post. Not sure what your unfair advantage is here, perhaps being part of the community?

What barriers do you have to competition from a one or two person company w/ lower costs?

This is an excellent talk about what it takes to get out there and find the set of customers outside this bubble that will get you to $50k/mo.

http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-...

Why on Earth would you want to be notified about email?

Letting other people choose when you can be interrupted sounds awful.

Our entire cash outlay, pre-revenue, not including founders time, was about £1,000. We bought a VM, a domain name, a copy of Flash to build an little interactive game our domain required and paid some admin fees on content we acquired.

We made up our first logo, 10 minutes in Photoshop—it was as ugly as sin but it didn't matter.

We lived with a VM because there was going to be no load on our servers until we had traffic.

The really expensive bit was the time me and my co-founder put in. To a degree, if you don't factor lifestyle (and you should), we're still recouping that.

On finding a business partner: do some sort of tangible work with them before you start on a larger project, make sure you've got some seriously deep social validation of them and be sure you have a complimentary skill set. Oh, and liking them helps.

My business partner and I were able to spend all our time arguing about the product rather than whose contribution was bigger.

Finding a business partner you trust and who shares a vision for the company and then getting the fuck on with it seems like a better approach.

I agree with @hmurakami on this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4940379

I think that "be a payment provider" is a much easier thing to think than it is to do.

While it may be easy to build the customer side of the equation you've got to build a vast network of merchants willing to accept payment and that's hard work. Especially if you're trying to convince them to re-price in Facebook Credits?

Sure, you could charge 1% but people have added credits to their Facebook account at some point and it probably cost you more than 1% to allow them to do that. How do people buy credits right now? All those cost Facebook more than 1%, right? I buy $100 of credits, it costs F8 a couple of bucks, I then spend $100 of credits and they recoup $1 of it in merchant fees? Doesn't sound like a good business model.

Beyond the need to create a financial model that makes sense and then go out to find merchants and convince them there's a massive risk of merchant fraud.

Fraudulent merchant X signs up for a F8 Merchant Account. Fraudulent customers A, B, C buy something with stolen credit cards for $100 each. Everyone disappears after merchant X receives settlement. F8 is out of pocket to the tune of the original $300, another $300 in reversals to their bank and then $30-$60 of chargeback fees. If that happens enough then F8 might even have its merchant account revoked... though they're probably big enough to avoid that.

It's an excellent money laundering channel too and there's a lot of financial regulation to navigate around that.

I know that this stuff can be overcome but it is hard to do and would be a major piece of work. This type of thing nearly sank PayPal back in the day.

Perhaps I'm missing the point here though?

I'd add that everyone knows about paying for a subscription to a magazine and everyone knows about paying for advertising so you won't have to teach people about the value (or not) of those two things.

Alternatively just copy the Hacker Monthly business model, apply it to your content. It seems to work and it would be easy to copy.

You're overcomplicating things. Pick the simplest idea to implement and then test it by offering it to the market. See if it works, go from there. And just do one thing to start with.

Is there a plan to profit share with authors at some point?

Will the editor simply continue to rule out those that ask for payment for their work?

Presumably there's some reasonable profit that the editor must take out for himself to sustain and grow the magazine and there are reasonable costs beyond that. What after that?

I fully understand that authors opt-in. I understand that authors have varied reasons for opting-in. Just curious to see if there's a business model that feeds back into the community.

Charge money for it.

Charge money for advertising in it.

No. I think the tech industry should learn how congress works and beat these fuckers at their own game.

Again, it's not the fixed cost. It's your per transaction pricing that has doubled so over the lifetime of your business and as you grow you'll pay 40c instead of 20c every month for every customer.

None of these guys pay the banks. Their customers are already paying a for payment gateway for that service, they sit on top providing recurring billing and subscription management.

It's not so much the rise in monthly fixed costs that's the problem.

It's the doubling of per transaction pricing (that will just sting month after month) and the lack of features compared to now cheaper competition. Recurly at 10c vs. Spreedly at 40c.

London, UK - Product/Marketing Manager, Well Informed Ltd.

Come and work directly with the founders running the business side our successful, profitable, SaaS business.

http://blog.theorytestpro.co.uk/2011/08/01/were-hiring-onlin...

Here's how you do it. 1) Stop reading Hacker News. 2) Pay attention to problems people have. 3) Build a solution and charge money for it. 4) Spend 2 years marketing it (i.e., talking to your market and learning) and making it better.

It worked alright for me and my business partners and we spent the first year working part time on it.

Don't forget that you don't have to cash out of a successful business to move on to other things. You can install managers to grow a business once you figured it out and become an owner rather than a doer.

You can check which password has been crypted without posting it to a website using:

ruby -e 'puts "hackern".crypt("8h")' #=> 8h48GPxmwy.EA