imp

> they make money hats

Where do you get these phrases? You're making me laugh at work :)

Are your projects making any money yet? Without any other details, I would say that no, it's not practical. Possible, yes, but not practical. If you're at zero dollars today, and you actually have one decent product, I would guess three years to get to 40K. You may get there in 6 months, or you may never get there. Hard to predict. My best estimate though would be 3 years.

My only suggestion would be to start making money ASAP. As soon as you have three months worth of actual revenue data then you'll be MUCH better prepared to make financial projections. They'll still be sketchy, but you at least need a baseline to work from. Every app and website is unique.

Despite the down votes from others, I appreciate the correction. I didn't know that it's anyway, not anyways. I appreciate the help. Thanks.

I love that quote because his son went on to study politics and war anyways: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Quincy_Adams

While you're small, you can use a combination of PayPal, Google Checkout, or Amazon Payments. His mistake is not upgrading to his own merchant account once he started making a bunch of money.

Gym membership, books, GeekDesk, services that save me time (doggy daycare, gutter cleaner, etc.).

Do you have ideas for a solution? What could "we" do differently, given that the US is really a collection of individual businesses each acting in their own best interests.

Count me as interested. Whatever business model you end up with, it sounds like you can find decent names, which I would gladly pay a small premium for.

Since this post will fade away soon, you should set up a basic email list so that people here can at least follow what you plan to do.

Scrambled eggs and cheese. Glass of milk.

Wow, I'm surprised that a book on pricing is so expensive. Since they're the experts, perhaps they think that all books would be more profitable if they were priced higher. I wonder if many books are priced lower because they hope to get on a bestseller list.

That wasn't clear from your title. Thanks for the clarification.

Every application is going to be different, so comparing to other sites is only moderately useful. The more important question is whether your % of active users is increasing over time. That's way more important than how it compares to everyone else.

I'm working on a site for that. It's Curious Reef: http://curiousreef.com

It's pretty geared towards programming now, with the OCW Intro to Comp Sci class being the most popular, followed by SICP. I would be interested to hear if that's the kind of website you're looking for.

And that sounds like what the author of the OP said here:

"I’m willing to bet, at some nebulous point in the future, long after Drexler and I are dead, someone may eventually develop a technology sort of vaguely like what he imagines."

It's been a while since I read Drexler's books, but if I remember correctly he alluded to more mechanical processes than biological ones. The article you linked to is purely biology and not really what Drexler was arguing for.

Build a free application that draws people in to the site. Not necessarily like the freemium model, just offer something cool for free. Either give away great software, or become an authoritative source of data, or both.

This worked amazingly well for me with my fantasy football website. I made software to let people do free mock drafts. Over the last five years it's grown substantially with virtually zero advertising. I then sell premium fantasy football software to those visitors. Also, I aggregate data and have become a reliable source that people link to. Building the free app and becoming a source of data has led to my site becoming the #1 result in Google for just about any search term that I care about.

It's sort of a twist on the freemium model. The conversion rate is very low, but the customer acquisition cost is virtually zero, so it is still profitable.

Not everyone can be ramen profitable in their first year. I think his point is that people assume it's easy to get to profitability and end up out of cash when they don't get there right away.

He seems to be doing okay with building initial products and then selling them off if they have potential but don't interest him anymore. I would guess that adding a co-founder would put more pressure on him to stay with a project that he wasn't committed to. At least he's honest and aware of his dedication to each project.

I've been using emacs for a few years for php/js/css/html. I think it's great as-is without any extra addons. I don't like context completion or tag generation though. Just not my thing.

#4 already exists: http://www.theonion.com/articles/desperate-pandora-employees...

The MIT course for Intro to Comp. Sci is pretty good too. There's a bunch of people working through it on my website, Curious Reef, if anyone is interested: http://curiousreef.com/class/mit-opencourseware-600-introduc...

In the US, I think it's less than 10% graduate with no debt.

That's much different though. Those people were at least manually clicking on the amazon links and not having their cookie stuffed secretly in the background. I have a low-traffic book review website that makes $2/month from Amazon affiliates, and around Christmas someone bought a Kindle and I got credit for that, which was a nice surprise. All I ever linked to were books, but if someone starts browsing around Aamzon then you'll get credit for whatever they end up buying.

I lurk on a weightlifting forum, and this flow chart is the most concise description of bulking that I've seen:

http://images.t-nation.com/forum_images/auto/r/350x0/c/9/c98...

taken from here: http://tnation.t-nation.com/free_online_forum/sports_body_tr...

edit: also, try searching the fitness subreddit, which is pretty active, for vegetarian info: http://reddit.com/r/fitness

Yeah, that's a good one too. I learned that lesson the hard way a while back. Checklists are a great idea.

The Innovator's Solution: http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Solution-Creating-Sustainin...

Apple? Yahoo?

They are owned by a public company though, so they may have some sort of rules in place for talking about acquisitions before they happen.

I've been tracking my diet and exercise routines on Daily Burn, and I like it a lot. It's an easy way to track calories and macronutrients. You'll learn a lot about what you eat after you track it for a few days.

http://dailyburn.com/

Yeah, I once asked about that kind of review at a company that didn't have it, and everyone automatically assumed that I hated my manager and wanted to get her in trouble. In fact, the opposite was true. For some reason people think that the only purpose of upward feedback is to rat on your boss.

One good way to learn is to watch others manage a project. I worked at GE for two years, and project management is pretty much built into the culture. I got to improve a lot in my own work by watching how more experienced people managed projects.

Here are some general PM thoughts that I picked up. Managing software has it's own issues of course, but these are a good start:

* Err on the side of over communicating. Don't assume anything.

* Get organized. It's impossible to be too organized.

* Make sure everyone is aware of the project's overall progress.

* If something can go wrong (or be delayed) it will.

* Be a friendly, flexible person to work with. It'll help you when you need favors later. One manager sent the local DHL office a bouquet of flowers at Christmas because shipping things timely was important to his projects.

* Trust the people you work with.

* If something goes wrong, it's probably your fault because you didn't communicate clearly/thoroughly enough.