irrationaljared

I'm seeing a lot of sites now with a landing page that requires immediate registration or facebook connection to do anything. Are people seeing this as a successful way to get people registered, is it because there's not much to see other wise so they want you to register first?

Just seems like a terrible way to encourage registration, by making you "pay" in the form of a registration before really hooking you in.

I could be wrong, though. Would love to hear if other people have good or bad experiences with this type of flow.

Thanks :) Just trying to get it off the ground...

Where are you located? I've wrestled with this in the past as well. Finding a co-working spot can be a huge help. I was lucky enough to get Pivotal Labs to host me as I work on my startup and it's made a huge difference.

Nice, I like the idea. I've been exploring something similar on http://www.thematchinggame.com (it's only visible after you register), but I think there's a lot of room for an interest specific site, especially one that's not focused on dating.

I would suggest giving people a little more to play with up front. I'm hugely against not engaging people in some way at the start. There is the curiosity factor with a blank sign up page, but from my experience with various sites (http://about.me/jaredcosulich), giving people something to play with without registering does a lot better.

Big Scale: Build an organization that is capable of doing crazy shit (e.g. software company that opens a school) with the time flexibility built in to imagine/execute on crazy shit.

The fundamental requirement for doing this is that you make enough revenue off of certain products/services to allow you to feel comfortable doing crazy shit, and have enough staff that are well paid that no one is scared of losing their job by doing crazy shit.

You also probably have to avoid investors, as they may not like you doing crazy shit. It's possible that they'll be ok with it, but not likely. Of course this makes it harder to build the company up to a point where it's making enough revenue to do crazy shit.

Anyways, I've gotten started on it: http://www.irrationaldesign.com - but it's slow going...

Walk away from a tough problem

This one has served me well a number of times. I'll get stuck with a problem that I'm just banging my head against the wall trying to solve. Then as soon as I walk away (to go home for the night or to drive somewhere or something) I'll come up with a solution.

Since recognizing this pattern I'm pretty good at walking away from problems and letting my subconscious go to work. Can't tell you how many times it's worked.

I'm a ruby developer (mainly web apps), but definitely getting more interested in mobile apps (so java and objective-c) as well as the benefits of node.js

I think for a kid I would almost definitely start exploring mobile apps. There's a lot more room for creativity there, with the touch screen interface, location aware apps, spatially aware apps (with the gyroscope), etc.