shafqat

32 ms·

1. 271.▲
   by shafqat 18y ago

   I really hope we get an answer to this -- really curious!
2. 272.▲
   by shafqat 18y ago

   I've never seen a result in Google that led me to Mahalo. Who are these 4M???
3. 273.▲
   by shafqat 18y ago

   That makes a lot of sense.
4. 274.▲
   Ask YC: Who here has done a rolling close on angel/seed round fundraising?

   3 points by shafqat 18y ago|3 comments
5. 275.▲
   by shafqat 18y ago

   Fundraising for NewsCred! It's actually fun and not as depressing as all the blog posts make it out to be.
6. 276.▲
   by shafqat 18y ago

   Everytime I hear this guy's story, I get more impressed. He was actually one of the guys I had in mind when I wrote my post on why its a good time to be in a startup. Talk about capital efficiency! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33252
7. 277.▲
   by shafqat 18y ago

   Thanks - I got fed up of listening to all the reasons why we shouldn't be working on startups. This is our time to shine!
8. 278.▲
   From a CEO: 10 Reasons This is the Best Time to Build a Startup(blog.newscred.com)

   11 points by shafqat 18y ago|4 comments
9. 279.▲
   by shafqat 18y ago

   Sitemaps only help the googlebot understand the link structure and contents of your site. It doesn't actually do any of the crawling or directly help indexing. It indirectly helps by telling the bot more about your site. Atleast this is fro
10. 280.▲
    by shafqat 18y ago

    That's great.. have read a lot about you on your blog. Are you guys generating revenue?
11. 281.▲
    by shafqat 18y ago

    I'll start: I'm cofounder of NewsCred. We are 100% boostrapped so far with very negligible burn rate. About to close a small angel round.
12. 282.▲
    Ask YC: Is your startup bootstrapped, funded, or both?

    10 points by shafqat 18y ago|16 comments
13. 283.▲
    by shafqat 18y ago

    I call bullshit on all of this doom and gloom for startups. We just need to buckle down, be cheap, creative and survive. Get to revenues quickly. But that doesn't mean its the end of the world. This is when startups are made. The big Web 2.
14. 284.▲
    by shafqat 18y ago

    That seems quite long. I thought debt financing was especially quick. Term sheets are supposed to be 2 pages instead of 15. But I guess you can't believe everything you read!
15. 285.▲
    Ask YC: How quickly did you close your seed/angel round?

    3 points by shafqat 18y ago|3 comments
16. 286.▲
    by shafqat 18y ago

    XMLReader::open( http://feeds.feedburner.com/DawdleBlog ) [<a href='function.XMLReader-open'>function.XMLReader-open</a>]: failed to open stream: Connection timed out
17. 287.▲
    by shafqat 18y ago

    Is the site down now?
18. 288.▲
    by shafqat 18y ago

    Agree completely that its all about depth of content. What's your startup? Don't see it mentioned in your profile!
19. 289.▲
    by shafqat 18y ago

    Haha... I never said having traffic is a bad thing! I'm just comparing what the merits of long tail SEO traffic is vs direct or SEM traffic.
20. 290.▲
    by shafqat 18y ago

    I love this guy. Yossi keeps it so real. He says he's lost so much money funding "great" business plans that he doesn't give a shit about them anymore. He invests in great teams. That keeps it simple.
21. 291.▲
    by shafqat 18y ago

    Good points all around. We definately have to focus on keeping these SEO users on the site longer. More importantly, to have a good acquisition funnel to convert them to registered/regular users. I'm not so sure all traffic is created equal
22. 292.▲
    by shafqat 18y ago

    Our monetization strategy is not dependent on traffic, although ad revenue from the consumer site is definately a bonus. As for our biz model, I'll post about it separately once we can disclose more.
23. 293.▲
    Ask YC: Is long-tail Google search traffic a good thing?

    3 points by shafqat 18y ago|9 comments
24. 294.▲
    by shafqat 18y ago

    Take it with a grain of salt, but Compete shows pretty nice user growth as well. http://siteanalytics.compete.com/ning.com/?metric=uv
25. 295.▲
    by shafqat 18y ago

    The CEO should be the bizdev person for as long as it's possible. At least that's how we do it. Once you moved up the Sales Learning Curve, you can start hiring bizdev and sales people to consolidate and grow like crazy.
26. 296.▲
    Ning keeps growing. Over half million networks now.(readwriteweb.com)

    16 points by shafqat 18y ago|8 comments
27. 297.▲
    by shafqat 18y ago

    What was the exact error? What kind of files were open? If you want to share, I'm sure lots of us would be interested to hear the details so we know what to look out for.
28. 298.▲
    by shafqat 18y ago

    Everything you said makes sense. In fact, I think your requirements should apply at all times, not just during tough market conditions. There's really no excuse for startups not to be lean, agile and cheap. Maximizing output from scarce res
29. 299.▲
    by shafqat 18y ago

    Thanks - there are certainly a lot of challenges, but so far things have gone great and we have hundreds of thousands of readers who have been supporting us. Thanks for the hat tip.
30. 300.▲
    by shafqat 18y ago

    This is a great read, and highlights a common thought circulating in the media industry: investigative journalism is dying because of cost cutting in newsrooms. But that is exactly the kind of journalism that can save newspapers. Rather tha