eddy_chan

Sorry, maybe my reaction to the post title was so visceral I didn't read the finer points. My concerns that I wrote down were actually my wifes concerns, they always seem to have the final say in who takes care of the kids if both parents aren't around. I'm sure my level of trust will improve as my daughter gets older but at this age (2) I wouldn't leave her with anybody for her sake and for the sitters sake.

With respect to AirBnB and car-sharing schemes and the like - there's an order of magnitude difference in how much I care if my house/car gets trashed vs something happening to my daughter. Sure I care in the first case, but I personally can see tech overcoming that.

Do you have kids yourself? I don't want to be condescending but, this is one of those things where you have to be part of the target market to understand that the protective instinct you have over your own kids is so strong and so raw that it would be really hard to overcome inside an on-demand transactional marketplace.

You will also understand that kids up to school age (toddlers) generally only trust people they're very familiar with, it's a process that takes days, not hours or minutes.

No matter how good the checks and due diligence you have in place are - because the majority of parents will not entrust kids to a stranger at the drop of a hat. As codegeek said, trust takes time to build, especially so between the child and sitter. In the process of putting my 2 year old into daycare it wasn't just a matter of dropping them off - there was a month long process where either I or my wife were taking time off work to introduce her to her new carers, making sure she was comfortable with them etc and that was after vetting 4 different care centers.

With sitters, we'd only allow grandparents or my wifes older sister who has similar aged kids too.

[Edit: 2nd para - putting myself in my own kids shoes]

Thanks for the insight into the world of ODesk 'Agencies', you've confirmed for me what my hunch was all along.

Recently I put a Django Ecommerce site job there for $10k USD and you won't believe how many phone calls/emails/linkedin requests I received from 'Agencies' primarily in India/Pakistan but some from Eastern Europe as well promising me the world for my $10k.

When you have to sift through all of this the cookie cutter scripts everything becomes apparent and you realise it's a thin veil of bullshit, the product managers (middlemen) that call you up in reality have a team of very lowly paid junior devs who are incapable of doing the project. (Evidenced by me asking some moderately difficult technical/architectural questions) And very few have a track record of getting shit done and delivering. I would never hire an 'dev agency' via Odesk after this experience, it's too hard to sort the good from the bad as an employer in a 1st world country.

I ended up interviewing freelancers only and liked what I saw/heard - I thought the freelancers on ODesk were of quite a high standard actually. Ended up hiring a fairly senior engineer for the project. If he pulls through I will offer him ongoing work for $2-$3k a month.

Guys, a bit misleading - On your site, I was expecting to see example/s of products with engaged users that you've built together.

Perhaps 'hire.me' would've been a more apt domain name as acquihire implies there's a company with a product to be acquired.

The part about not starting something new out of fear of failure is the best advice ever. Even if your startup 'fails' you would've gained a hell of a lot skills out of building it, call it 'personal capital' and the best thing you could do is reinvest it in a new startup instead of letting it go to waste.

I'd add Stephen Elop to that list as well, he will be judged in due time

When you create a company that acts as an agent or marketplace between 2 parties you have to take on some of the risk in the transaction if you're profiting from it.

AirBnB struck a goldmine in apartments cos it's pretty hard to 'steal' an apartment and take it away or damage it beyond all repair through normal expected use. I would gather most places are 'uninsured' for the duration of the sublease because the normal conditions have been broken but owners feel that that is a risk worth taking on for the expected return.

Cars that sit around are a different story - I feel for these guys http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/01/luxury-car-sharing-service-... but the truth of the matter is that with the next tier of high value illiquid stuff below apartments such as luxury cars and boats the perceived risk of letting somebody 'borrow' it is much higher. It is entirely feasible that whatever you're leasing out could get destroyed/sunk/totaled/stolen in normal use for its intended purpose. To provide such a market you would have to provide the insurance that goes with it and that's the hard bit.

This is why zipcar et al has stitched up the lower end of the car market. The car is 'common property' and they have the insurance to cover all who drive it.

Not saying it shouldn't be done - I'd actually love to build AirBnB for boats cos I sail but I can't afford my own boat or the charter prices being asked.

In my experience of being part of the acquiree, you can get acquired for a gross earnings multiple of between 30 and 40. So as long you're only spending 2.5m per year to get your 5 mil run rate then yep, find the right acquirer and you can get that 100m valuation but there's a lot luck involved.

Totally agree with this post, I make CRUD-dy web apps and my dev box is a mirror of my production stack (nginx, apache, postgres, python/django + associated tools) with the desktop stuff like browsers, chat clients bolted on.

Having a desktop like this means I get to practice all the intricacies of sys-admining (nginx configs etc) just by turning my machine on and running my apps on localhost and it shows when I compare my sysadmin skills to all my peers using MBPs

Don't miss anything from Macbooks except the battery life but I'm on a bootstrapped budget so my beater will have to do until we get enough customers to pay for a new computer.

Screen size must be 1920 wide? It's a known issue, we've had a hell of a time trying to get our CSS to be responsive to all the different screen sizes out there.

In any case, thanks for taking the time to check it out. Much appreciated

Thanks for the compliment on the website. I'm just a bit worried she might get lost inside the product - could you pass my email to her eddy [at] zenbookings.com in case she needs help/explaining.

I've worked very closely with our beta customers so far because my goal is to make sure they have a good experience so they're able to give us suggestions on how to make things easier rather than giving up.

Hey HN - we just launched our rough MVP yesterday. Looking for some honest feedback on our website, our product and the overall vibe/pitch.

My motivation for building a relatively lowtech CRM/CMS'y startup was that I couldn't risk it all cos I have a young family. It's my first startup so I had to build a bootstrapped B2B product in the style of 37signals that is a better solution for a well known problem in a crowded market.

If only big corporations took the same line as you. I can't believe the last company I worked for (starts with A, one that Steve Jobs hated) re-appropriated my 3 year old scuffed, dented, damaged MBP to a new employee after I left.

I thought I could keep it as a write-off when I left the company cos I had warped the case in a bicycle accident and dropped a video camera on the keyboard so a few of the plastic keycaps had been smashed. It still worked fine and meant a lot to me but I wouldn't be too impressed if I had received that computer as an employee. It would show a basic lack of respect for the work I will be contributing.

I might add that if you make and sell your own products, then a degree is completely unnecessary for you given the amount of 'free' education that can be obtained via the internet today.

For 99% of people out there, a degree is a institutional stamp of approval that employers seek because it's what every other employer out there does. People get a degree because it is necessary for a BigCorp job, it's a self perpetuating cycle.

But it sounds like you want to learn and research to satisfy your a curiosity within yourself which is the only case I would say an academic degree is a good thing to strive for.

I forgot to add - if you work with someone else or a couple of other people (cofounders in a startup) rotate the role of 'motivational taskmaster'.

Basically it's this persons jobs to drive projects by saying to everyone else - 'Where the F is this? you said you'd have it done last week, don't do anything else until you've got this done. Oh you need help? let's jump in together and do it together now!'.

Only works in small teams and everybody considers their peers to be equal. I have an awesome cofounder who's a woman who nags me to do stuff sometimes. The more she nags the more gets done so I don't mind :)

Some general advice that's helped me improve productivity since I started working for myself rather than for the man.

1) Don't "multi-task" ever. Make a plan and then do everything on the plan in serial and make sure you focus 100% effort at the task/project at hand. My immediate to-do list is only ever 2 items long. 2 items only because I am working on #1 and when I finish #1 I need to know that #2 is the next thing that needs to be done. When #2 becomes your focus you move it to #1 and add a new item.

I do this at the macro level i.e my startup has 2 big projects to be shipped, I'm not going to put any effort/thought into anything that comes after, only what I need to finish right now. I also do it on the micro level, each feature has X user stories, I only have have 2 of these on my daily to-do list at any time.

2) Use timers like Pomodoro technique - I don't subscribe to the whole philosophy, I just enjoy the fact that a physical 25min timer gets me over the 'procrastination hump' for getting started. Keep working in 25 min chunks till said task at hand from (1) is done.

3) For pesky ongoing stuff add some rules to your life e.g I must publish a blog post every Wednesday (and I'm not going home till I do)

4) Whenever you finish a large project that might've taken you a few weeks to complete, give yourself some time to decompress and admire the work you've done.

Yep, Googles Compute Engine might be the latest new and shiny service in town but that isn't enough reason to move.

I gotta give Amazon a plug here just cos they secured my loyalty through what I thought was empowered customer support instead of seeing everything as black and white.

I then locked myself in for 1 year reserved instance pricing it's working out to be less than half of what I would pay for their spot instances over the entire year. I haven't seen too many other vendors offer this kind of discounting or maybe others could enlighten me?

It's much harder to comparison shop but it's also a much harder effort for the OEM to manage their SEO. Same product with thousands of different codes would make quality online reviews worthless I reckon. It would also mess up user/fan forums.

I was in the market recently for a high-end camera and it would've been really bad for the OEM to have different codes for it in different countries let alone different stores because it meant it would've been too hard to do research.

The cost to the OEM would be too high to bear to appease the mom & pop store at the other end, at the end of the day they don't care who retails their unit as long as they ship more at the wholesale rate.

I'm 30 and I spend a lot of my time trying to drum most of this list into my 24 year old brother so it's not far off the mark.

The problem with self help advice like this is that you have to arrive at these conclusions through your own experiences and only then does it make sense (through hindsight).

Saying that, I think the most important point is #11, you want to accumulate as many experiences as deeply and as fully as possible. That's what sets you apart from the status quo and the average. Everything else on that list follows from that as you get older.

As the adage goes, you never regret the things you do, only the things you don't do.

I really think the poster has missed one important difference between the baby boomer generation and their kids. The baby boomers have gone through a period of life where a car is absolutely necessity because they were raising families whereas to people under 30 a car is an increasingly 'nice-to-have' that affords personal freedom and social status both of which are becoming more questionable. The abovementioned 'period of necessity' changes your view on cars.

I'm almost 30 with a pregnant partner and I've watched my car usage steadily increase over the last 12 months as my life is changing. I used to be a bike-to-work, walk-to-buy-groceries sorta guy who spent a period only using zipcars, taxis and public transport at necessary times and loved it. I really wanted this life to continue but...

Throw having kids into the mix and all of a sudden you're visiting your own elderly parents a lot more, going to the hospital regularly, and I'll bet the car that as the kids are growing up they'll need ferrying to extra-curricular activities, friends places and driving holidays become much more economical. At first I tried to get by on a clunker but issues like your families safety come to the fore and I caved and bought a brand new car.

It's just impossible to live close to everything. You'll have such a diverse range of destinations and reasons to go to those places (a lot of times at short notice which makes zipcar unappealing) that even if you take public transport to work or walk/bike you'll still _depend_ on a car unless you live somewhere as dense as Hong Kong, Tokyo or Manhattan

Really depends on how big your angel round is. If you've raised 200k and you've got 3 founders who all require 60k salaries each you'll get a year of runway which isn't very long and that's not even taking into account the possibility or need for taking on more employees.

I recognised early on that 'end of runway' anxiety is very real for me, as it creeps up it really affects your decision making on product direction and how you spend your time.

I would prefer to work backwards and do whatever it takes to make the angel round cash last at least 24 months without sizeable revenue with the salary capped at somewhere between 60-70k if the angel round was big.

If that cuts your salary from 60k to 30k so be it, make the necessary adjustments, it might even include taking a part-time gig consulting/designing/selling or whatever it is your skillset allows you do. In the same vein that the cash you spend now is 'expensive', any cash you earn on the side is should be viewed as a necessary investment of time to help you reap the returns later if your startup salary can't stretch to cover all your costs.

This - is totally the text editor I used to learn Python, now I'm using it for jQuery tutorials.

For an IDE suggestion, I'd vote for PyCharm once you're developing more complex stuff http://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/. Most worthwhile $100 I've ever spent when I compare the number of hours I'm on it with its purchase cost.

I wrote a basic primer for django on EC2 to take advantage of the free tier last week here: http://eddychan.com/post/18484749431/minimum-viable-ops-depl...

Glad somebody's reading it :) Thank you.

Looking at Amazon's pricing page (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing) if you stick with 1 micro Linux instance past the free first year it's $0.02 per hour which works out to $14/month. Add some data in/out costs and I reckon you'd be looking at about $16/month.

Move up a step to the small Linux instance at $0.085c per hour and it becomes ~$70 per month but I imagine that could support a fair few users.

This is a very well articulated post on why there are so many startups today. Even my previous boss, an (exited) founder who started in the bad old days when you HAD to build out your own hardware made a particularly memorable quote last time we met up: 'every dude and his dog is a founder now'.

I know myself that I wouldn't have taken the leap if I had to put serious money on the table for hardware investment 1990s/early 2000s style. Being able to build a proof-of-concept on a free Amazon Micro instance knowing that you can scale up to larger sizes as needed later and also split out into multiple instances on demand only when you have the customers means that 2 or 3 founders can literally code in a bedroom surviving on ramen with no other costs except for a few domains and pycharm licenses.

The thought of the only real investment being founders' time (and the opportunity cost of using said time) is much more palatable than having to put cash on the table upfront for hardware.

The cloud has literally turned hardware provisioning into a problem that you tackle as a cost optimization when you've got decent revenue coming already rather than an upfront investment that you're not sure you can get a return on.

Thank you for being such an inspiration - and a therapist, I'm working on an online reservation tool for small business service providers cos the rest of them as you say 'suck goatnuggets' (LOL) but it's all too easy to get depressed reading HN about all the 'cool stuff that other startups are doing'.

TIL that I've got to put the right mental filter on before coming to HN.

One question, obviously you don't have any high-touch sales going on, what do you do for marketing to find and convert new customers?

I was a product manager for a CMS so i was already familiar with http, js but I rely only designer cofounder to actually produce all of it, I just stick the template variables, control flow and looping where necessary.

As for web programming practices i picked up the stuff on cookies, stateless servers, sessions by reading up on django middleware along the way as i started coding the app and had to add things like user registration.

When I was at uni java was the language of choice for intro to programming, basic data structures and algorithms. We used C for operating systems, C++ for OO programming, oracle pl/SQL for databases. I wrote my thesis on formal methods, they were very much the flavors of the day. I did touch on web programming but we were using j2ee and I almost flunked that course. Overall I achieved above average college student experience (which wasn't very much) in all those things above and then I became an excel jockey at Accenture for my first job and never coded after that

It was about 5-6 dedicated very focused hours per day, 5 days per week. I didn't have the stamina to go beyond that each day because there's so much learning and the mind (my mind) needed time to absorb the new material.

If you can already code the google one is better only for the fact it has those exercises which by doing them gives you more of those 'a-ha, I get python' moments. It's more learning by doing rather than learning by reading.

I just skimmed the python.org tutorial for the first time and it reads like the tl:dr version of full reference docs.