Frocer

Well, according to TechCrunch, they are averaging 3M check-in's per day. Even if the average check-in per user is 1, that's 3M DAUs (which is highly unlikely). My guess is between 1M-2M DAUs with average of 1-3 check-in's per user per day.

Aw, no Pascal?

Congrats!! Always great to see another Cornellian entrepreneur :)

Similar story with some hard number forecasts:

http://blog.flurry.com/bid/28872/Move-over-Black-Friday-and-...

I have been experimenting with various iPhone marketing strategies. In the past few months, I worked with some very talented iPhone game devs and learned some more interesting marketing / promotion tricks they employed. I thought I'd summarized the ones I found most effective and share with you all.

Hopefully this would help some of iPhone game devs in marketing your next game this holiday season. I'd love to hear what you guys think as well. If you have any additional thoughts / tips you'd like to share please let me know!

PlayHaven is hiring multiple positions (devs, UI/UX engineers): http://www.playhaven.com/about/jobs/

We are a small team based in San Mateo, CA. If you love games, web, and iPhone. And love to solve challenging issues, please shoot me an Email! My contact info is in my profile.

p.s. We were part of the LaunchBox Digital 08 program.

That's one of our strategies.

While we are actively pursuing opportunities with developers, but we also want community to flourish even without the developers present.

I am one of the co-founders. The problem we are trying to solve is right now the App Store is a black box and the developers are flying blind in there. We want to connect developers directly with their customers, and help them build a passionate fan base. As a result, help them establish turn their customers into their greatest marketing asset.

Developers are welcome to send us an Email to "claim" their community, and they can also bring the entire community into the game. Our in-game app is a web application that runs inside the game itself utilizing UIWebView, as far as we know, we are the first one who do this. There are a lot of advantages over SDK.

I have been with the HN community for a long time, so I value you guys' inputs. Any thoughts would be appreciated!

Can't you get an iPhone for $99 now? Seems like a much better deal with more functionality.

Yes, very expensive as well.

All of these angel groups are pretty much a total joke.

By the way, here is a very similar discussion on this topic a few months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=782980

Is it really 2.5 years? I am always skeptical of these numbers because they are always way shorten for PR purposes.I am really curious on how much time Aaron spent during his spare time working on Mint before he started seeking funding. Pre "Garage" phase in his own terms.

Btw if you haven't watch this video yet, you should. Definitely well worth it.

Wow... stealth mode and already profitable?

It's the new way to get free coverage on TC:

1. Create a study based on your users without having any background in statistics or economics

2. Make a ridiculous and outrageous claim

3. ...

4. Profit! Free PR on TC!

This is one of the best quotes I've read on HN. Very true!

I have also seen much crazier things. A friend of mine from college who is a stand up comedian, decided to hitchhike his way from NYC to LA to "find Tom" of MySpace. He filmed his entire journey and shared it on the web. Additionally, he also crashed with all his MySpace friends the whole way so his cost is practically 0 (besides the bus tickets).

It's definitely doable on an even smaller budget :) Good luck and let me know when you arrive at the valley!

Two of my biggest use of LinkedIn right now:

1. Request for introductions. If there's anyone I want to get connected with, first place I go to is LinkedIn and see if he is friends with any of my friends. If a friend of mine knows him, I will ask my friend to send a personal intro.

2. Look for outside experts. Yesterday I was looking to connect with some iPhone game devs. I posted a discussion on 2 LinkedIn groups (GameDevs, and Social Game Devs), and I have received over 10 messages already.

It's a really powerful tool to create professional relationships.

LinkedIn actually makes a lot of money from ads, their CPM is crazy... ~$75 last I read.

Think of their demographics

While this irks me because I use LI quite a bit, but this is the reason why LinkedIn > Facebook. They know how to monetize really well.

I have always wondered why Facebook doesn't charge annual fee for their service. They are at the point where if they charge me $20/year, I am too dependent on it to not pay that fee. While you can argue another free service may come along and take all that away from Facebook, but building a 250M user base is not trivial...

Ahh... I see. I didn't even know such dictionaries existed! Thanks!

Ya, could someone explain how this algorithm works?

Exactly, because of those 3 points above the new employee also takes on significantly less risk in comparison to joining pre-Series A. It's very logical and I don't really get what the OP was trying to explain.

Ok, may be "scam" is too harsh. Keep in mind these angel groups are usually group of rich people who made their fortune from big corporations such as Cisco, IBM, etc. They are not the type of angels you read about on TechCrunch (Ron Conway, Ariel Poler, etc).

And typical corporate mindset is "processes". And an long application that no one ever reads is just part of that process. This is very similar to job applications -- no recruiters care about your cover letter, but you have to write one because it's the "way" it is.

Absolute waste of time. Please don't bother with it.

Absolutely right -- when we were fund raising we experienced the exact same thing. I am convinced these angel groups are the biggest scam to first-time entrepreneurs.

When we first moved out to the valley to fund raise, we didn't know the difference between angels vs. angel groups. So we thought, oh, what a great way to pitch to a bunch of angels all at once. When they started asking us to to fill out a 500-page online application (AngelSoft makes me want to puke), and asking for $5,000 per presentation, we immediately wrote them all off.

The idea of me having to pay to pitch disgusts me. I even ask one of the groups outright -- doesn't it make more sense to charge the angels rather than the entrepreneurs? I mean... they are the ones who have money while we are the ones starving right?

For all you first-time entrepreneurs out there, please do not waste your time talking to angel groups like we did. If you network well enough you can pitch to any angel / VC in the Valley without much problem - and most importantly, for free.

Well, I just officially tested the service.

According to FlightCaster my flight is 85% chance of being on-time, but after getting to the airport my flight is delayed. I am waiting at the gate right now, and no reasons were given by the airline.

I am sure it's not weather related since it's SF to LA... and the site still says it will be on-time. How frequently do you update the forecasts?

I am flying this Friday so I will make sure to test it out. That's a pretty steep price for the iPhone app though... if you guys can recommend me alternative routes then that would be worth paying for, but at the current stage I don't see myself paying for an app just to check if my flight will be delayed or not.

When I was a consultant, I used to travel every week. What irritated the heck out of me is these in-route weather conditions. So for instance, if I am flying from Dallas to NY, and there's bad weather somewhere in the middle, they will cancel the flight. If you can recommend me to get on a flight that will go around the problem (such as Dallas -> Miami, Miami -> NY), then it would be really useful. But this is probably only useful for business travelers since casual travelers probably won't be willing to shell out the extra airfare.

Good question. May be they could get sued for gender discrimination? Although I'd like to see two things before making any assumptions:

1. Do men really out number women drastically on dating sites (this is only assumed, but is it really true?) 2. Are there any services that charges differently by gender (I can't think of one on top of my head).

Depends on how you want to be perceived. One of the most interesting article I read talked about how this founder carries 2 business cards. When he meets prospective clients, his title on the card says "VP of Sales" so his organization seems much bigger than a 1 man shop. But if he is meeting investors, he uses his CEO title card so he seems to be the one in control.

I think this scenario would apply to you pretty well :)

I used to live in NYC, and I have sent this to all of my NYC friends. Awesome app!

For those of you who thinks this is stupid... trust me, New Yorkers value every second of their commute. And exiting from the wrong end of the exit could mean 5+ more min just to get out of the subway... considering the hundreds of people exiting the subway at the same time.

Great job, great idea, great execution!

Agreed, but I am not sure why. A couple of years ago, I would read almost every article / discussion posted on the front page of HN. But now days, I click through at most 10-20% of the content. Dunno if it's a shift in culture, or just the larger community has diluted the quality of content. Regardless, HN is still my favorite source of tech / startup news.

From what I have read, I think the PayPal and X.com merger did more harm than good. There were a ton of ego clashes, technology preference differences (unix vs. .net), etc.

But merging with the right team will certainly help, and I am sure the 2 teams coming out of the same YC class probably know each others' capabilities fairly well.