caseorganic

SXSW is a very efficient place to go if you stick to the sidelines, hang out at a nearby coffeeshop and do work. You end up meeting more people that way, seeing familiar faces, and getting more done. Every year I've been there I've gotten things done more quickly (business deals, press meetings, customer feedback) simply because of the sheer volume of people there.

The key is to pick a spot to camp out at, and invite people to meet you there. It creates stability and easy collaboration. I am always surprised by the new and old people I run into there. Easier than spending a week or month going back and forth on E-mails trying to meet.

Allowing serendipity to run it's course is quite efficient. The creativity comes from the conversations and living knowledge in small groups and hangout sessions vs. the panels and the ads. There are many layers to big events like this.

Thanks! I wanted to request that too.

I always tense up when I see people quit their job with no revenue plan, no prototype, and no idea of a team. 

I'd much rather have the experience of building a bunch of test projects and really exploring who I worked well with in my free time after work and on weekends, and have a definite fundraising, demo or beta with users, or other traction before deciding to quit my job. It not only makes the move easier, but it also is a good test of the people you're working with. Are they interested enough in the idea to spend their free time on it? Do you enjoy the work? Is it fun? Are you solving a core problem? 

I've seen people leave their day jobs for a "to do list app" "startup". That is not a startup. It is a project for understanding how to build things and gather people around and idea so that when you're ready to do the thing you want to do, you have made enough mistakes with little projects that you don't waste your time doing them when it really matters. 

Bottom line is this: leave your job when you have a solid plan, not a dream. Study the start of Adobe Systems. They knew when to leave and when to stay. 

Geoloqi was a dedicated SimpleGeo customer, and when we heard SimpleGeo would be shutting down their service, we had to build our own to replace what would be shut down. We figured others might also have the same issue, so offered a simple importer.

As for pricing: there's more to putting pricing up on a website. We have to calculate our own people and server costs, as well as build and integrate a billing system into the site. In addition, developers need a way of knowing how many API calls they've used, and a way to pay for the service.

In conclusion, simply putting pricing up and then having to change it later because we rushed to put it up in the first place would be worse than just waiting until the date we planned on releasing the site. I hope this makes sense, and we really appreciate your comments and concerns.

Cool! We're looking to solve that problem too. We'll release a toolset for non-developers in December (along with a suite of tools for developers). There are so many people out there that want to do scavenger hunts, but it is very difficult to do it from scratch.

The newest work session is here: http://caseorganic.com/2rQ

If you live in Portland and are interested in working with him on it, there are short work sessions. http://pin13.net/2pj

Thanks so much for this.

This is helpful information and something I always wanted to see side-by-side. It's also very nice to see that it seems like in some cases it is worth making an Android port, but that you, even as a Java/.NET developer by profession find it more difficult to create a quality app on Android.

I've been able to make apps with Tropo really quickly, and it's been invaluable to my team and I as we tackle difficult hackathons, client projects and our main software project, Geoloqi. It integrates well with everything out there, and the support is incredibly strong.

The Tropo IRC channel is always available with more than a few Tropo representatives there. There have been multiple occasions where our requests have resulted in immediate action and changes to Tropo.

They've make awesome power available to their users, and they're really making strides into increased documentation and usability every day. It's fun to watch them evolve.

Though they are similar, Tropo offers more features, more stable support and scales better than Twilio. http://pin13.net/1qJ