iamclovin

Another piece of interesting feedback we received was to place the price plans in descending order so that we can achieve the "price anchoring" effect. Is this true? - to be honest I haven't seen many sites which do this.

Thanks for the feedback. Yup we're working on a 'Tour' page and like you said, it can't come soon enough :)

We demoed a similar product we are using internally at gameplanapp.com called fergie and demoed it at the Singapore ruby brigade meeting a couple of months ago. Definitely not pretty but it has a plug and play architecture for different stats to track.

http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/gameplanapp/gameplans-panic...

I'd recommend brew over macports any day of the week. http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew much faster and much more momentum

Yes doing consulting gigs is a great way to fill the coffers and we do that too but strictly speaking it's not your product which is profitable, right?

We are running at very bare costs but our biggest expenses are salaries for ourselves (which in an expensive city like Singapore) can drain your finances pretty quickly.

"You're about to give up quickly" is the hardest thing to judge really. Especially when you're a bootstrapped entrepreneur running out of cash, persistence becomes very tricky.

Would love to hear how fellow bootstrapped HN'ers dealt with such a situation.

Ah ok, yes it did show me an ad just that it wasn't relevant. (PHP Job Ad when I don't have a single PHP repo)

But it was a telecommute job so maybe it took into account the fact that I'm located in Singapore.

I was expecting to do it's contextual-job-ad magic without me having to upload a resume, so was disappointed.

But a great product nonetheless.

Even Foursquare/Gowalla look like features which can be out of business by either Facebook/Twitter

We (http://gameplanapp.com) work from a spare room in @andycroll's apartment. It's very functional, we do pair programming so it's great for focus, and we launched our MVP in 3 months so I guess it's been going great so far.

P.S. Shameless plug - you can read more about us at NakedStartup http://nakedstartup.com

lol, quality.

Thanks John for the insights. We've realized the bit of pre-paying and the fact that the scheduling/setting up a league is probably the most difficult part of setting up a league.

The point about schools being difficult is an interesting one, we have meetings lined up with some of the local schools here, so will let you know how that goes.

Thanks again for sharing!

Thanks, yes we're definitely doing our share of cold-calling right now - although we could do a lot more. Since we're still a little way away from launching - cold-calling people outside your city (or country) without a launched-product they can try out, feels like it won't work, but would definitely try it out.

Right. May I ask what kind of conversions do you get on cold calls/emails? As in what percentage return calls or reply to emails, what percentage would want to sign up but think pricing is an issue, and what percentage actually sign up?

How persistent are you with cold-calling/emailing? If people don't respond, do you try to call them one more time?

<Sorry for the spate of questions>

Btw, love your company logo :)

Thanks! We're based out of Singapore, so trips to the US at this point are probably something we might not consider, but we're planning to hit a few of the sports conferences in South East Asia to spread the word.

I'd be especially interested in apps whose potential customers included people who weren't web savvy. For e.g. in our situation, a huge number of people use Excel to manage their sports leagues right now and they are people who aren't tuned necessarily into Twitter, blogs, etc.

Never mind, forgot that it's bad for SEO if you try to accommodate case-insensitive finds for stuff such as permalinks (which is what I needed it for).

We should be redirecting to the lowercase URL instead. Using Refraction to do that which is an awesome gem (http://github.com/pivotal/refraction)

I'm generally wary of method_missing and alias_method_chain but this seems to be a good-enough solution (which is database agnostic). How would you do case-insensitive #find?

I was on the fence about getting an iPad. Now that zombocom works, I'm all set.

I agree with more-or-less with Jason Fried. It's easier to succeed when expectations are low and you exceed expectations. I guess the more money you raise, the more the expectations are, and hence it's difficult to exceed them.

Then again, it's not Diaspora guys' fault that the press seem to have taken to them as saviours of the world.

On a related note, @jacobian has predicted Diaspora to be the new Chandler :) http://twitter.com/jacobian/status/14120142558

I would think that a stylus would be awesome on the iPad for drawing applications (or even prototyping apps such as Omnigraffle). I haven't used an iPad yet but I imagine drawing with my index finger to be a little clumsy.

Wow didn't know about Heroku plugins. Thanks for the link!

Especially useful for laptops, I've had mine fail after the first-year warranty period.

But afaik, you can purchase AppleCare anytime within the first year (and not just at the time of purchase).

A. Actually we don't really change seats that much, but we do change 'drivers' so each of us takes turns to type in stuff, but again this isn't based on any specific guideline.

B. Yes, it is slightly more taxing than working solo, but the advantage is that you feel more productive and better about yourself because you've completed a lot of stuff in a day.

Just to illustrate this - we've done four sprints of one-week each so far, and in every sprint we've achieved more than we had planned to do (even though are targets are quite ambitious).

Great points as we're looking to launch our first product in the next two months.

Helps us to aspire to a higher standard.

You're right about them being redundant if run in succession. Fixed in the post, thanks!

+1 for lamson. Closest I've seen to what an email-app framework must represent

lol thanks, i'm a big fan of superbad :)

I'm not sure if I understand the problem correctly but will using canonical URLs help solve the problem? The gist of canonical URLs is that you let google know there might be duplicate content, but the base url to index is your canonical URL. Quite easy to implement as well.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalizatio...

Hope that helps.

Just to clarify before-hand, i.canhazthread.com is a clone of a.tinythread.com to demo CouchDB's capabilities for a talk I was giving at a dev conference called #geekcampsg at Singapore.