vacanti

Author of the post here. Agreed with the general criticism of the title and have changed it to "How I Learned to Code".

I don't think you're wrong. It's a personal choice based on one's perceived strengths. Some people don't think it's a lottery. They think they can replicate success.

Personally, I do think there is skill involved unlike a lottery. But, I still think there's a fair amount of luck, too. In the end, I'm not sure I would start another company that didn't have the option of becoming profitable right away.

That's a good question. If you can create a startup that's profitable day one, that's great.

But, there are lots of businesses that need a fixed cost base that only turn profitable after millions of users. But, they turn very profitable with tens of millions of users.

If you restrict yourself to just ideas that are profitable day one, that's great though you may miss out on some great ideas.

Sorry for the confusion. I just made it more clear by changing it to 1.5 to 3 actual months.

Assuming both parties are rationale, I would suggest the timeframe be more based on completion of a goal (e.g., transition someone else to the role or complete this project you were working on) rather than a specific time like two weeks.

The post was loosely based on our experience years ago. We now have many users and our conversion rates are much higher.

I just wanted people to know that getting some PR isn't the finish line, it's the start of the race.

ugh. sorry. looking into it. thanks for letting me know.

I would tell them to focus on a big problem that they are passionate about and have some credibility.

I just added reasoning next to each quote on why people regret saying them.

Of all the excuses I listed, I think fear of failure is the root cause.

Completely agree. I always try to tell entrepreneurs that I believe in them but then give the critical feedback on their idea / process.

That's good advice on getting married to the problem. We clearly weren't married to it.

That being said, you should still experiment on the problem you are solving as opposed to waiting for 6 months to roll something out.

Definitely not 100% conclusive evidence. But, after sending it to our almost 1,000 friends and families and seeing just 2 urls submitted after a week, we knew it was going to be widely used. After all, these are people very motivated to try the product (or I guess they could secretly not like us...)

We just posted on how Yipit handles settings: http://tech.yipit.com/2011/11/02/django-settings-what-to-do-...

First post on how Yipit handles Django Settings is up: http://tech.yipit.com/2011/11/02/django-settings-what-to-do-...

Headline could be improved.

While revenue fell in half, gross margin just increased 50%! In other words, this is just perception and has no bearing on the performance of the actual business.

Also, headline seems to imply that COO left because "revenue fell in half". There's no reason to believe that.

Google Cache Version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...

I've actually come to believe that, with what I know now, I could have gotten traction with a few of my earlier ideas. Impossible to know for sure.

Yeah. I built the first version using Django but my code has been re-written by our engineers. I'll have our CTO chime-in on the stack.

affiliate revenue, advertising revenue, data licensing revenue

Why is it a pain to read? (Always trying to improve our writing)

The author of the blog post is a head-hunter. Since the Ladders is disrupting head-hunters, he's not exactly an impartial participant in this conversation.

If you're a first-time entrepreneur and haven't gotten traction, it's going to be really hard to get you or anyone like you as an angel, mentor or advisor.

They care more whether the site has been covered by someone.

Agree though I was writing the post more from the perspective of getting first 1,000 users. Focusing on adwords, facebook is good for going from first 1,000 users to first 100,000 users.

And, investors will definitely get excited if you figure it out.

Thanks for this. Will update the post to explain that the main reason people should stop saying it is because it might be grammatically incorrect.

You also have to wait for the person to confirm before you can really put it down on your calendar definitively.

The real reason why Groupon is growing faster than Foursquare is because Groupon can and is aggressively buying users at $5 to $10. Foursquare can't.

You just have to make sure you're not asking them for money. You're just looking for feedback on your project.

Yeah, the space really helped.

With regards to meeting investors, it's actually fairly easy. It's their job to meet with you. I would recommend meeting with the young VC's at firms first. You can also find investors at most tech events.