Travis

61 ms·

511.
by Travis 17y ago
Great advice anigbrowl! I especially like the emphasis on GETTING IT IN WRITING. Another point of anigbrowl's I'd like to emphasize: write the first draft yourself. Discuss transfer of IP from them to you, then write the doc yourself. Tw
512.
by Travis 17y ago
Not just you. I see it on my Mac and Windows at work. There are times when it just goes unresponsive for 3-10 seconds, then unfreezes and runs fine. But it's def. a slow bloated POS at this point (and IMO).
513.
by Travis 17y ago
We've had very good luck with making our system an invite only beta. The main site is setup to very clearly explain our product, and it has a form to fill out requesting an invite to the beta. Then we go through the requests and slowly gra
514.
by Travis 17y ago
NP. Really, this is where you hopefully have the rest of your business figured out. If you want to target corporate IT, free probably won't work. But you could do a freemium, or an ad-supported site (prob. not a good idea; people won't l
515.
by Travis 17y ago
Lots of businesses prefer to pay a small fee. It puts a(n implicit) contract in play. I pay you money, you operate this for me. Free apps are scary from the POV that they could either disappear, or are insecure. Something about a company
516.
by Travis 17y ago
A friend of mine is part of the team at groupon.com, which is a great group buying site. They've been extremely successful because they've managed to know and target their prime demograpic perfectly. Also, they localize their deals to a c
517.
by Travis 17y ago
Fun trick my dad taught me. It's inconsistent, but when it works, it's pretty cool. Before bed (when you're done reading and ready to flip out the light), close your eyes and visualize a clock (old kind, with the arms). Picture it at the
518.
by Travis 17y ago
Amazon offers public datasets at http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/ They include census data, as well as a dump of freebase's data (which mirrors things like wikipedia). They also have some genome data.
519.
by Travis 17y ago
Why put a month in on a trial that isn't useful to anyone (esp. not the stakeholders) when you can put that month into the product itself? I don't think PG / YC judges feel they can't differentiate between a good applicant and a bad one. Al
520.
by Travis 17y ago
If other students are relying on it, why not have them pass their credentials into the app, then have your app use their login to acquire the data? If you are secure about it, you should be able to avoid the uni's wrath while still keeping
521.
by Travis 17y ago
Very astute observation, sharpn. In business school they call it "top 2 boxes". When you ask a question like, "How likely are you to use this product..." with a 1-5 scale, you want 95% of your responses to be 4 or 5 (top two boxes). The r
522.
Ask HN: What analytics service do you use?
9 points by Travis 17y ago|5 comments
523.
by Travis 17y ago
reddit, digg if i'm bored. Bensbargains.net
524.
by Travis 17y ago
Get a good lawyer. Really it boils down to this: can you build and market the product without their assistance? Will you find angel / seed / VC funding on your own? Can you bootstrap? If those answers are yes, I'd say do it on your own.
525.
by Travis 17y ago
Not working for me either.
526.
by Travis 17y ago
Web developer for a nonprofit. VP Technology at a startup. Trying to write as much as I can. Doubled in CompSci and English at a strong U.S. uni.
527.
by Travis 17y ago
I was checking out massify.com from your comment, and must say how valuable it looks. I'm a producer on a documentary (noapologiesmovie.com) and will def. be using massify's site for some of our upcoming work. Thanks!
528.
by Travis 17y ago
LLCs are the "hot" structure right now for a lot of things, but they don't necessarily have the case law to back them up. So it's possible that you could come up with a situation where there is no precedent. That said, my co-founder (an at
529.
by Travis 17y ago
Sorry, I don't think I could recommend any of those as legitimate money making ideas to you.
530.
by Travis 17y ago
Sounds like he's the kind of guy who might use super simple passwords. Ask him what kind of pw it was -- if it was a single word, etc. He may have some fuzzy memories, which could help you out. You could brute force his password if it's s
531.
by Travis 17y ago
Replying to myself feels weird. Anyway, if he's asking you to sign NDAs, he's probably off his rocker. IMO, the NDA in the startup world is a red flag that somebody is clueless how little their idea is worth. It's execution that matters
532.
by Travis 17y ago
Sounds like you've hit a rough patch, but that doesn't mean you should skip out on the idea if you believe in it. You need to establish expectations for your venture. Simplest is hours / week; if he's working on it full-time, he'll be putt
533.
by Travis 17y ago
Remember to actually solve a problem, rather than implement your idea. I'm in the same situation, and we keep motivating ourselves by refocusing on the customer centric model proposed by Steve Blank. Small iterative cycles, actually talki
534.
by Travis 17y ago
Heck, that's what reseller accounts are for with most hosting providers. Part of your business model should be to (re-)sell them hosting; it'll give you recurring (monthly) income for the lean times. Plus, there really aren't any one-and-d
535.
by Travis 17y ago
From my understanding, this is kind of a squid / load balancer in one? Or is it really just Yahoo's version of squid?
536.
by Travis 17y ago
I've seen people discuss on HN how they've used Amazon MechTurk to do this as well. I believe their conclusion was that they weren't particularly happy with it. Realistically, if you're looking for tech compatibility, you may need to do it
537.
by Travis 17y ago
10% isn't unreasonable for what you described. You'll learn a lot from them by being involved, it sounds like. And again, it's a long shot as with any startup. My startup has offered 2% pre-dilution to a coder who will put ~200 hours into
538.
by Travis 17y ago
Don't forget that Amazon also allows you to rate the ratings, with their "Was this review helpful to you?" link. While it doesn't affect the "score", it is very helpful to bubble up/down people's reviews to show.
539.
by Travis 17y ago
In my startup ( http://industrialinterface.com ), we started by manually creating invoices in Paypal and emailing them out. That got lukewarm response. I'm the lead dev, so I buckled down and figured out the merchant stuff. There can be 1
540.
by Travis 17y ago
Lighthouseapp.com works well for me and my team.

More ›