TimothyBurgess

Perfect.

After reading a number posts/articles similar to this, I feel like I'm pretty lucky to have gone the route I've taken. Being young and full of myself and thinking I can do pretty much anything I put my mind to is also a big factor, I'm sure. But it's also of course had negative impacts.

When I left my old lifestyle ("rockstar" lol emphasis on the quotations) I immediately dove into the little side project I was working on while in the band... and said, "Alright I'm gonna turn this into an actual business. Should be pretty easy... there's definitely tons of bands and management out there who would use it and I've already gotten most of it done." Little did I know, after working on it for a month, I saw vast potential in the basis of the project and decided to start over but make everything insanely flexible. Being arrogant as I was, I figured it wouldn't take more than a month or two. But of course it added on a few more months of (hard!) work and now almost 8 months later I'm literally less than a day away from actual release. (Look out for a rate my startup thread, hopefully tomorrow! ;))

Now, my determination (more like obsession) to get it 99% to what I'd imagined it to be months ago has led me to probably a situation that could be better. I probably could have released the app months ago at 50% and received awesome feedback along the way molding its design to exactly as customers want... while having a much larger customer-base and awareness than I do currently (practically none! :()... but I was afraid it would get a bad reputation early on and turn off more customers in the long run. But now in retrospect, if I'd known this from the beginning I'd have gone in a direction that allowed me to release much earlier without compromising the app's reputation. My mind was just so set on that one full idea I had from the beginning. I guess next time I'll be more prepared!

I just checked it out for a couple of minutes... And what's even more interesting is that when you were browsing HN my browser had obviously loaded it as if I were browsing. (We definitely saw 2 different things... My guess is that you record mouse coordinates, scroll positions, and url changes.) With that said, I could see this as a potential security risk - unless there are protocols already in place of which I am unaware. I was curious to see if you'd start typing or post a comment or something but I didn't stick around long enough. I think browsers natively have measures to prevent security breaches like this but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a way around it.

The focus of my project is "laser-sharp" and streamlining things like faxes are just background processes that don't get in the way of the actual user functionality at all. Users take less than 30 seconds to set that part up and never have to think about it again. So if anything, in my particular case, it actually only makes me stand out more in the competitive environment as you say.

There is of course no way you would have known that, so excellent post otherwise. Everyone here should know that too many features can definitely break an application (coders' brains too lol)... the only time tons of features are beneficial is when they don't get in the way.

Perhaps I should apply to ycombinator...

I'm not a big twitterer (sp? lol) but this makes me wonder if there are similar apps that do pretty much the same thing but allow you to specify your focus (e.g., #wiunion)... I mean I'm sure there are but how well-done are they? And what's the proper terminology?

It's hard to deny that we've all (those who've been reading for a while) noticed even the slightest decline in quality and an increase in unbiased contributions.

Decline is inevitable but minimizing the rate thereof is not.

The quote you've provided is somewhat misleading, as the required level is not truly dynamic/automatic. It may "rise over time" but it is solely dependent on administrators/moderators manually raising the threshold.

As I said in the original post, the threshold should vary from user to user... not be a static, arbitrary number (currently 500) adjusted over time by administrators/moderators. Admins/mods should however tweak the algorithm that determines the threshold. And this threshold should change by the day, maybe even hour... even if only by a fraction of 1 karma point.

I just pulled up their suburbs song on youtube and now I'm even more at a loss. It's a mad world out there, man.

I'm a big metalhead though. That's my excuse. It'd be cool if metal could win album of the year! ...for technical prowess. It's pretty hard to beat metal in that respect - but it does depend on the subgenre of metal. Jazz is the only other genre that comes close.

...And once I grow tired of it, I'll install Linux on it and learn how to program all those cores. 8)

I've lived in NC my entire life but a number of factors have basically been saying, "You need to get the hell outta there, dude!" Entrepreneurship is the main one. And maybe it's just me but I haven't come across many people here throughout my entire life who have a similar mindset to my own.

People out west seem very chill. California would probably be my first choice but I'll definitely look into the others as well.

I'm not gonna lie... it was pretty entertaining watching Jennings squirm every time Watson beat him to the buzzer.

Also, there wasn't any mention of Watson having adaptive artificial intelligence but I would guess it's safe to say IBM was smart enough to include something like that. That in itself would be crazy hard to implement given the magnitude of what it's already doing... but not impossible. Maybe there are a few corrective algorithms in there somewhere.

It'd be a super long shot, but I'd bet that with some generous donations and a proper campaign, a viral petition could get thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands) of signatures requesting that something seriously be done about IE. Could Steve Balmer and Microsoft ignore hundreds of thousands of people? Sure. Would they? Maybe. They do seem to think they know what's best for everyone. Would it hurt to try? Definitely not.

IE struck out a long time ago and I think it would truly benefit mankind if they were benched permanently while letting one of the big boys take its place at bat as the default Windows browser. Sadly the chances of that happening are slim to none... without consumer action. ;) And that's why I'm upvoting this. I've wanted a browser revolution for a long time now!

We're witnessing a truly monumental event in human history and technological development.

Computers competing with humans on gameshows as if they are intellectually equivalent...

We live in the freaking future now, man.

Now that I think about it iirc, it was actually mostly my drums (mostly cymbals) that I had to drown out... the guitar cabs/PA levels varied depending on the venue setup.

I toured professionally as a drummer with a tech metal band and played with a click track every night. I used Ultimate Ears (high-quality earbuds) with ProTools through a rack amp. I had guitar tracks going behind the click track (metronome) for reference and let's put it this way... the reference guitar tracks had to be louder than the actual live amplifiers/PA and the click track had to be even louder than that. On a scale of 1 to 10, relative to the loudness of the vast majority of electronic music players (computers/mp3 players/phones/etc.)... I'd say my click track was at least 17. It hurts my ears just thinking about it now... constant TICK TICK TICK TICK TICK for 30 (sometimes 45) minutes every night for weeks at a time! I don't wish that upon my worst enemy.

If it was another style of music there's no doubt I could have had it turned down to a fraction of what it was... but it was tech metal so it was always loud and heavy and all over the place. Most of the time I'm playing upwards of 300 bpm and the tempo and time signatures were always changing so the click track was necessary. I remember I tried turning it down a few times and it didn't work out so well haha... Bye bye hearing! I miss you.

I (sadly) still use a Samsung Instinct and the OS is of their own design. If you've ever used Samsung's Instinct you'd know it's absolutely terrible and slow. I can't remember the last time I typed something - and I don't even type fast - and it wasn't at least a couple of seconds behind my fingers... pretty annoying when the touch screen won't calibrate and you make at least one typo every other word!

The only upside to the phone is the relative ease of "unlocking" it for use as a 4G modem.

Round #1 instructs you to place your phone on a hard surface, find a hammer of any kind, and hit your phone as hard as you can.

Rounds #2 and up instructs you to repeat Round #1.

A permanent blank screen indicates you have won and you may receive a prize (a brand new iPhone!!) if you can convince Apple your phone is malfunctioning because of something they did.

There are actually a couple of 1.5 minute long advertisements if you click play... that 9 minute vid is actually a tutorial for people who want to learn how to use it from start to finish.

How much have you talked to users in this time? Have you had any bands use some of the functionality while you were working on it to get an idea of what they really wanted?

My old band used the original version of this app (it was overall much more basic than this but with all of the same functionality - if that makes any sense)... not to mention I know bands and exactly how the majority of them think when it comes to this boring stuff - I've been planning on adding a more guided approach. I also know exactly what tour managers have to do... and the app takes care of 99% of it - which is actually mainly who this is for. You'll just have to take my word for it... this app is exactly what tour managers need. They do everything on paper first and transfer it to excel later.

I really like the idea of reducing the feature set,,, but at the same time I feel like the culmination of all of the features is really what's going to reel in the management, booking agencies, and record labels - which is who I'm really after (more money there!)... individual bands are a plus.

I should also mention that my app does something completely new for that market but it's my fault that you didn't know what it does.

Lastly, I actually don't plan on becoming a huge internet entrepreneur... just using this to have some kind of self-sustaining income so I can work on what I'm really good at: robotics.

The landing page uses the same framework as the actual app... I wanted to do that to keep things consistent and emphasize its flexibility.

I've also been trying to do something different/new but as everyone seems to be saying... maybe I should conform to a typical startup landing page. I just get tired of seeing such similar layouts all over the place. I'm sure it's for good reason though... so I'll probably end up conforming. I can actually do it myself and in a fraction of the time it took me to do all of this... but oh well. Just trying to break the mold! Maybe some other time haha...

This front page is using the same framework behind the rest of the app. I figured I'd do that to keep everything consistent. The free text field that says "Enter" is the name of that particular layout (it matches the smiley face icon)... I figured I'd leave all layouts editable on the front page just for people to tinker with if they wanted.

Video tutorial goes by pretty fast. How do I stop this video?

It's actually all javascript. :| I've considered adding pause/stop/forward/back buttons.

But I'll definitely have to figure out a way to satisfy all resolutions. I was trying to go for something atypical... not a big fan of the cookie cutter startup landing pages I see all over the place... but I guess there's a good reason they all look similar.

As for the forefront description, my app does a ton of stuff so I'm having a lot of trouble coming up with something short and sweet that describes it all.

As for the "REL-etc." stuff... in the first review, a couple of people asked what "RELA" stands for... (I had nothing explaining it)... and I actually came up with the name from all of those words so that's why I included them. I feel they each explain all of the different aspects of the app pretty well. Does that make sense or do you think I should still change it?

Maybe have 1 overview video where you gloss over most of the features and focus only on the critical ones

Those play buttons run through all of the critical features... did you click one of those?

And as for the information overload, the app does a ton of stuff. How can I properly explain what all it does concisely? I feel like I'd be leaving out a ton of important features (that would reel in most people) in a super-concise description.