adyus

Getting your first job from connections is indeed much easier. But as the other commenters mentioned, the ability to sell is crucial for a small business owner like yourself (someone else suggested not calling yourself the f-word :).

Here's my suggestion. Pick a local small business that you like, but that could use a better website or web app (something simple, like an appointment scheduler, etc.). More specifically, pick a business that you feel would grow tremendously if only they were more visible online. Pitch a new website for cheap, or even in exchange for goods or services. If they turn you down, don't take it personally, just brush it off and find another potential client.

Now for the good part: measure everything about the current state of their business, from visitors to revenue to ROI on advertising, etc. Build their website, then measure how much your solution improved their numbers.

Make a portfolio with this business as your case study and brag about those numbers. Rinse, repeat.

Don't forget the part about not taking it personally and brushing it off if you get turned down. Good luck.

http://ezsend.it - the quickest, easiest way to print a stamp or shipping label. I'm using the easypost API and focusing on UX. highlights include reverse geocoding for less typing and showing the closest drop off location.

Yes, but how do you get inbound traffic to the interesting stuff you wrote? In other words, the problem is being discovered.

If you don't want to bother with VMs and other Windows workarounds, I can suggest signing up for http://action.io and getting a basic development server. You can then use PuTTY or their own web IDE to connect to the machine and start developing.

Coincidentally, I just finished setting up Gitlab and Gitlab CI on a private server. If I could set up repo mirroring between it and Github, it would add a layer of protection for getting critical work done (security by distribution?).

Just a couple of thoughts.

If you're aiming for small, non-tech-savvy local businesses, I suggest shortening both the headline and the paragraphs. Say less, and address their pain points directly ("My web apps will save you money. Here's how.")

Also, small business owners will likely not know what Github, AngelList, coderwall and such mean. You need to provide cases studies (perhaps with screenshots) and explain what you did, and how it increased revenue or saved money for your employers.

Lastly, are you tracking clicks on the Call To Action? How many visits are coming from your surrounding area? How can you increase that number?

Good luck!

I'll jump in here as I recently started a side business shooting weddings.

You're dealing with an old school photographer who expects to cover his costs (salary, rent, equipment, etc.) from print and album sales, rather than scare you away with a large initial cost.

It's true that photographers prefer to withhold RAWs because they're unprocessed and in bulk, but that's not your photographer's issue.

I also mention upfront that I only provide web-quality images for the quoted cost, as I believe I can offer my expertise to provide better quality prints when requested, or any other image processing needs (slideshows, albums, collages, etc.). This also provides me with another much needed revenue stream, albeit it's often perceived as greed. I should note, however, that I charge much much less than $4k, as I am in a different market.

What do you intend to do with the RAW files if you get them?

Hi summerlunch,

You're right that you should build something that you could show off, however I suggest something other than a Facebook (or any other) clone.

Is there something you need to scratch your own itch? Perhaps a simple personal finance manager, or something that interacts with the Netflix API. Solve your own problem using Rails, and you'll also have something to show.

Make sure you write clean code, and make it easily available on Github or such. An employer would be less interested in how your app looks than in how it's written.

Good luck!

What's to stop a botnet operator from incorporating that data scientist's findings into their bot behavior? It's a chicken & egg problem, and it will hopefully lead to a better alternative to online advertising (perhaps something more user-centric).

That's certainly a legitimate concern, but keep in mind that it's hosted on and sponsored by Github, who already have access to your private repos.

I think the current email protocol should not be changed, for maximum backwards compatibility. The solution should be a web (or native, why not) client that does all those things based on the email content.

The difference would be giving feedback to the sender ("your email has been marked as important" or "your email has been converted to a task" etc.), with obvious incentives to convert to said email client. Thus, if both recipient and sender use the solution, this feedback happens in-app, without emails being sent back and forth.

There's a lot of room for creativity when designing a client. I liked someone else's idea of integrating with the various web apps such as todo lists, calendars etc. to keep from reinventing the wheel.

I think the solution to that is simple on the client side. Any text that repeats itself in two emails from the same person (including one's own) can be considered a signature and hidden. Gmail does a pretty good job of that.

There was a story (I think it was on reddit, not HN) of an entrepreneur who bootstrapped a local cleaning business in something like three months, by hiring his maid as his first employee. The guy does not mop up himself, but runs an incredibly successful business with a web-based reservation system. The rest of his job is people and asset management.

So even with janitorial work, an educated graduate can turn it into a profitable business, without actually doing the cleaning himself.

Edit: his site is http://www.maidsinblack.com/ and he does a great job of documenting his startup experience step by step on reddit. If I find the thread, I'll post it here.

Most successful entrepreneurs failed at least once until they made it. I can only speak from experience, the startup founder that I worked for had three failed attempts before he made it (relatively) big.

My other point was exactly that. Most small businesses will fail, but the ones that succeed will be the job creators (I hate that buzzword!) and hire the ones that didn't make it.

After having worked for a startup myself for a while, I am now ready to try it on my own. If I fail, there's always other successful startups I could work for. If I succeed, I'll need good employees, and someone who tried and failed (but learned from the experience) would be a prime candidate.

Alas, entrepreneurial disruption in this field is made near impossible by the need for governmental oversight of all things related to education.

Until "official" degrees stop being an unspoken requirement when considering job applicants, startups such as Khan Academy will remain useful, but ultimately powerless to truly disrupt education.

I think the OP's comment held a seed of wisdom, even though it wasn't properly expressed.

The point I got from his post was that recently graduated and unemployed kids should stop waiting to be offered jobs that obviously don't exist anymore, and bring out the entrepreneurial spirit that made this country great (a long time ago).

The point is not to mop floors for $20, but to create a website (essentially a business) that solves somebody else's pain. That is the essential idea. Find a pain, fix it, charge enough to make a profit and move on to the next pain point that needs fixing.

And the SEC is right to do so. One of the provisions of this new law is that companies seeking unqualified investor funding (i.e. crowdfunding) are not required to disclose their finances for up to five years after going public.

As to simply buying stocks, IANAFinance Guy, but I believe there is an upper limit on the amount you can invest before having to be certified as an investor. Could anyone contribute a proper explanation of that?

The law that allows this to actually happen has been signed last week I believe. The barriers to investment have been greatly reduced, and with HN's collective wisdom, a PG-backed crowd-investing venture would steer clear of scammers and actually thrive.

Voted up.

It would seem easy to retrofit using something like Foundation (http://foundation.zurb.com/).

Music does not need to be free (as in beer). Artists need to make a living too. Mind you, a living shouldn't mean an episode on MTV Cribs, but still.

The solution could be to sell music directly to the listener, without middlemen and labels. But then, who handles promotion? Public Relations? Placement? Concert booking? Marketing? When all of these will become individually offered services, like most other web-related services have become, we may see the music revolution begin.

I'd recommend a middle way. Disclose the fee at the end, but have a progress indicator throughout the fill in process, where a step should be clearly labeled "Payment" or "Fee". That way, they can opt to continue the process and learn about the payment.

IMHO, it all depends on who your customer base is. If it's mostly well-educated, savvy web users, they might react better to upfront disclosure, while less experienced users might indeed be turned away.

I vote for upfront disclosure, at least until you can set up A/B tests.

In your first paragraph, you're assuming that there are predetermined rules for what a good photo represents. You even mention a mysterious "mood."

In the second, you hit the nail on the head. The only thing that truly matters is whether the photographer likes their own photos, and if the people important to him like their photos.

If this doesn't happen, in the first case, they will seek to improve their images, and will naturally come by the same information that you and me consider defines "good" photos.

In the second, they may either care that others dislike their images (in which case, see above), or they may disregard their opinions and keep taking the same quality of photos (which we may subjectively judge as "good" or "bad," among other nuances).

There should be a collection of Jay Maisel sayings published as a book. Throw in a couple of Arnold Newman quips, and you've got a bestseller :)

All humor aside, there is much wisdom in these sayings. W.Eugene Smith's "Available light is any damn light that's available!" comes to mind.

I think technological development in photography is both a blessing and a curse. Sometimes it gets in the way of taking really great photos, despite its intentions.

I agree with your last statement. The main reason Cartier-Bresson and others were able to create such powerful images was the fact that their cameras didn't get in the way.

The X100 is a good example of the principle working in the other direction. While the subject can relax more when approached with a more modest device, the photographer is also influenced by camera choice, and the X100 is a perfect example of taking better photos simply by feeling good about the camera.

(edit) Used 'camera' too many times :)

A good idea would be to have slightly friendlier tweets i.e. instead of 'Buy!' have users say 'I just bought X from @y'. That way it makes sense when someone checks their timeline, instead of a cryptic one-word tweet.

None or very few. Apple was not a startup when it was polishing products to perfection. For a startup, the first imperative should be to stay afloat, or to generate enough revenue to even begin thinking about features that may be "nice" sometime in the future.

Variation:

The cloud went down

Cannot get to my work

Throwing birds at pigs

Let's hope it has enough velocity to escape Earth's field and carry on. I'm sure it does, but I'll keep my fingers crossed, just in case.

Heh, it seems that people who still use RSS or have an interest in it also share the same reading lists.

Newsblur should just convert to a blog aggregator. Then it could change its name, say, to Hacker News? :)