dcpdx

Our initial thought was to focus on consumer demographic statistics for small/med size companies to use when evaluating consumer habits and trends. Currently, that information is all over the place in different reports costing up to $5K a piece. We were thinking about a freemium/subscription model and open the market to businesses that don't necessarily want to spend $5K on one report; statistics like "29% of college students in the U.S. own smartphones".

Wolfram Alpha is more of a computational search engine than a stat search engine, so IMO the overlap is minimal.

Good idea to talk to B-School students; that's definitely a segment of the market that might be interested in something like this.

This looks like a really positive step in the right direction. Email is becoming the telegraph of the tech realm, with people using it just because they have to but no real solution to address the underlying reasons for its use. At work, we use SMS and hipchat in addition to email, but I always cringe when I go into my inbox and see that long list of messages, especially when there's a thread. I'm really looking forward to checking out Copilot and hope it's good enough to become a part of my everyday work. Kudos for trying to tackle a huge problem!

I'm not a hacker (I do know some code though), but I just started doing biz dev for a YC startup and will be looking to move to SF within the next couple months or so. Find my email in my profile and shoot me a message!

I remember reading a little while back that if you get marked as a troll, you can continue to comment on articles but nobody else will see them but you. This makes the troll effectively a ghost, thinking they are commenting normally but really the comments are going into a void. Maybe you were incorrectly designated as such?

I think there's a lot of potential here, especially in terms of tying specific thoughts/ideas/moods to websites you were checking out at the time. If you could add links to your "thoughts" and recall the context under which you were having those thoughts, it would trigger more lucid memories and an instant recollection of the resource which you could then re-read. Sort of like an "enhanced bookmark" tool which allows you to annotate resources with your thoughts and recall them later either at random or intentionally. Then, create a visual "tree" around your specific hashtags by date which would basically take you through a historical account of your discovery process over a period of time. So, if your hashtag was #startup, you would be able to recall every resource you read and every idea you had and know exactly when those ideas came into mind and what they were tied to. Neat.

tl;dr: Write like crap, get passed over.

I'm not about hiring at the lowest hourly rate; I'd rather pay more for quality, usable code that can be iterated on than pay less for garbage.

Do you have anybody you'd feel comfortable recommending? I'm looking for proficiency in Rails, Javascript, jQuery, AJAX, and at least the basics of HTML/CSS. I'm not completely clueless about the development process either as I've been working alongside my current freelance dev to write the front-end as he codes the backend (we use git for VCS). I can speak the language (at least at a basic level) and can provide a full spec and HTML mocks if needed.

If you have anybody in mind, feel free to email me at claydani [at] gmail [dot] com

Any advice on how to word it? I've tried the "seeking technical cofounder" thing which didn't go anywhere but I have cash and am looking to build out a core feature set. Some of the work is already done so they would be taking the reigns with the code.

Welcome to Texas. I had never even seen a cockroach before moving to Houston from Michigan in 2008, but I saw my first one within the first three days of living there (and I was living in a $1,200/mo apt. in a nice area). Maybe to reduce your burn rate you could catch a few and roast them over a fire to save on food costs :)

claydani

I'm currently working with a freelance Rails dev on an hourly basis to build my MVP and the thing that bothers me most is not knowing how much time it will take to get to the point I want to be. I have every screen mocked up in Illustrator and most of the pages coded in HTML/CSS.

Depending on how much work had to go into the app, I'd be willing to pay $5,000 or more for a service like this. The challenge would be putting together a structure that allows for payment flexibility according to how complex the project is; comparing any two projects side-by-side, the amount of work required would vary greatly and it'd be hard to be able to throw out a universal price for everyone.

Check out http://ibuildmvps.com/ , it looks like this guy is doing exactly what you're proposing.

If you're looking for some work get in touch, I'd be interested in hearing more about what sorts of projects you'd like to work on and what your capabilities are. Email's in the profile.

PG's thoughts on the matter: http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html

As a current Portland resident, I can say that the rain has one advantage: Your employees will have nothing else to do but stay inside and work. I know I've found myself trudging through work on multiple occasions just because it was so crummy outside. Of course, that's probably not ideal in the long term...

Hey there. What I've done in the past is make a long list of words that could be applied to what your company does, how it does it, who it's designed for, etc. Grab a thesaurus and look up synonyms for words that are particularly applicable. Then, start combining different words and see what you come up with. Swap some vowels (a's for e's, o's for i's, etc.) and get creative. Eventually, you'll come up with a list of names that are at least partially relevant to what your company does and hopefully look and sound decent. You may want to search for words in other languages as well (Latin is a good one) for more variety. It takes a long time to come up with a great name that you and your team like, that is at the same time not trademarked and also has a domain available relatively cheap.

No matter how arbitrary a name sounds, it almost always has direct meaning for the company. Google was originally called 'Googol', which is a very large number (10 to the hundredth power) and was meant to convey how much information Google indexed. Twitter is perfect because it implies that the service is about short bursts of information (tweets) much like a bird chirping (would the name Chirpr sound as good? Naw). You also have to think about how the name sounds when it's spoken, and if people can easily remember how to spell it when they go to type it in the address bar of their browser.

Guy Kawasaki wrote a decent article about naming companies a few years ago which you can find here: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/02/the_name_game.html#axzz1... . I can't agree with all of the points but there's some good stuff in there. Whatever you do, don't compromise on a great name. If you're embarrassed to tell people what your company is called, that's not a place you want to be in. Take the time to do it right and you'll reap the rewards tenfold down the road. Best of luck to you.

Shoot me an email; I'd love to learn more about the site. I majored in marketing and am working on my own startup but depending on the time commitment you're looking for I may be able to help. I see you're up in Seattle; I'm actually in Portland, OR myself. Cheers!

claydani [at] gmail.com

Congrats on the site. I'm not much of a fisherman, but I've been out on the Columbia here in Oregon a few times for Spring and Fall Chinook. Good eats.

I'm not formally a designer, but I fancy myself a fairly decent UX/UI guy and think I can offer some basic suggestions.

1) In your header, I would keep the Fishblab logo where it is, move the "Map Driven Fishing Community" tagline up next to/under the logo, and move the Login/New Account creation to the upper-right corner. Then, move your menu down to where the tagline and login currently reside. Right now, there's a lot of wasted space where the menu could be, and it seems awkwardly balanced to the left.

2) Remove the huge "Fishblab" logo in the main section. It's redundant, and doesn't really do anything for the users. What to put in its place? Add something for the user to do, like input their location or a type of fish they're looking for. Or, make this space a dynamic feed for other site content, like photos and forum posts.

3) Minimize your use of tag clouds. These were cool a few years ago and you still see them a bit today, but users may be overwhelmed at the sheer amount of them on your homepage. Think of your most prominent use cases for the site, and mold your homepage content around that.

4) Move the menu in the main section (Photos, Catch, etc.) over to the right or left side and turn them into actions the user can make. Instead of "Photos", make it "View and Submit Photos" or something like that.

5) Please, please allow for authentication from other sites like Facebook and Twitter. This will increase your trial and retention rates and allow you to leverage the size of those networks with your users and gain greater visibility. Let people tweet stuff and post stuff to Facebook!

6) Not really a UX/UI thing but it'd be really cool if you pulled information from each state's Fish & Wildlife Department website. You could probably write a fairly simple program to pull this info and dynamically display it on your site according to the user's location.

I could make a dozen other small suggestions but they'd mostly be nitpicking and personal opinion. Overall, I really like the concept and see a real need if there's nothing currently in this space (well, even if there is). I see you guys as a sort of "Yelp for fishermen"; you could probably take a few design and functional cues from their site to kickstart the ideation process.

Cheers and good luck!

I'm currently reading The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. Even if you won't be doing much work on the design side, it's a great study in why things are made the way they are and what constitutes good/bad design.

Love the site; I too am in the process of making the transition from being just the "sales guy" into a semi-competent tech guy. Right now I'm paying a dev to build my MVP in Rails but have taught myself HTML, CSS, and am learning Javascript. I'd be curious to hear which resources you used to get proficient in Rails--I've checked out a little bit of Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby, Hackety Hack, and a few random tutorials but haven't immersed myself completely into learning the language just yet. Do you have any suggestions for steps to take to get to the level you're currently at? Also, about how many hours did it take? I'm still working my day job but learning/coding nights and on the weekends.

Also some suggestions:

-Include a truncated list of the latest submissions on the home page and put the input field on top, so users can see what else is being posted without having to click through (although I do appreciate the simplicity and I'm sure you debated that).

-When you get some time, put a basic logo together. Doesn't have to be too complicated, just some typeface/color tweaking a la TFLN.

-Include option to tweet out individual submissions (even if you're not the poster), maybe include custom hastag like #kickass or something.

Cheers and good luck!

Truer words have never been spoken.

Try http://balsamiq.com/

I'm a regular user of HelloFax; it's a lot easier than going to OfficeMax to fire off a couple-page document every now and then for my day job.

I think in the context of the video clip they are more referring to product/market fit. Many startups fail because they either don't recognize the real problem, they build the wrong product to address a problem, or they burn through their cash before they find the point where their solution intersects with the market problem. I believe this is also why domain experience is important to one or more startup founders; the company can build a solution to an understood problem rather than a solution looking for a problem.

And don't blame me for the headline; I just took it from Venturebeat :-)

If you're going to have people close to you testing it with no real worries about user activation, engagement, etc. just get an alpha out there and start getting feedback from real users. Once you've driven out most of the bugs and the app is fully functional, move it to beta and start actively trying to get users. During this stage, you should be continuing to fix bugs, listening to user feedback, and iterating as necessary. It will never be too early to "ruin it"; if the idea has legs, users will be more forgiving in the early stages and will most likely give you really good feedback on how to improve the app. Just get something out there and start learning from users. I too am a perfectionist, but you just have to bite the bullet and get it out there. Remember, "great artists ship."

Those are some pretty darn good names. Do you guys actually own these or are you an exchange service for the real owners?

I definitely see the benefit in offering straight-up, no-nonsense domains for a reasonable price, although I do think there's a chance that the owners will not get as much as they could have if the names were auctioned. Have you thought about a "Buy it now" type feature in addition to an open bidding/auction price? Seems like it would provide a chance for the owners to get more money out of the sale if the demand for a name is particularly high.

This is great. No more cmd+T to read a linked article in a new tab and then returning to HN. You got yourself a user.

Couple suggestions: -Create a style for visited links. I find this valuable when perusing the list. -Needs a "More" button at the bottom of the Home and New lists. -A pane to view/submit comments would be nice. Maybe re-size the article pane by half and add a comments pane when clicking a comment link for an article.

I'm sure you have all sorts of ideas as this is just a prototype, but I really like it so far.

Quick grammar fix: "let's" in the first paragraph should be "lets".

I go to mugasha.com and hit up the Myon & Shane 54 International Departures sets. Gets the blood flowing.

For what it's worth I work at a large multi-national company and have gone through antitrust training a couple of times. Even if the competitor is being "helpful", any discussion among competitors of pricing in the market violates antitrust law. Also, even if the results of the discussion would ultimately benefit consumers (such as "let's lower our price to x to move units"), this is still illegal. Bottom line, never engage in ANY discussions with competitors over price no matter what.

1. That's great stuff! It was bothering me how the images wouldn't load right away; when I tried it on my work comp (IE7) it was basically unusable as you had to roll the cursor over the divs suuuuuper slow. I will look into CSS sprites right away!

2. I had heard of jQuery and had a faint idea of how it works but now that I know you can display Star Wars effects I'll be all over it!

3. Good advice. I just registered at git thanks to @DTrejo.

Thanks for all the suggestions, I really appreciate it!

Thanks! I will definitely check it out as I move into JS.