jseims

I'm sure others have achieved significant gains... I just haven't experienced them, and it sounds like you haven't, either.

What I found does move the needle are: 1) Changing how much I charge, including adding upsells, and 2) Getting new sources of traffic.

I own a subscription-based online business, and I've done many A/B tests of new designs, and my conclusions is pretty similar to yours.

Namely, it's always way more work than you expect, especially when you have legacy customers with prior expectations.

And results hardly ever budge.

My hypothesis is A/B testing can move the needle for light engagement, like "try a free trial". But pulling out a credit card requires a lot of motivation, and the 0.1% of your visitors that have this motivation are relatively unaffected by your design.

Not sure if this is helpful, but I feel this is the wrong crowd to ask. Developer needs are pretty efficiently met. I'd suggest asking other groups, such as doctors, lawyers, moms.

According to Facebook's S1 filings, their expenses correspond to roughly $1 per user per year, and their revenue is $4 per user per year.

I would pay > $4 per year if it meant I controlled my Facebook data (i.e., I was the customer, not the product).

I think this is an inherent side effect of advertising-based revenue models. As they say "if you're not paying for it, you're the product being sold".

If you sell something for money, there's a single moment where your interests diverge from your customers -- when you accept payment. But the rest of you customer interactions are all about adding value.

I'd add micropayments to this list. If someone built a system (and -- the hard part -- it got widespread adoption) to charge a few cents with low friction, it could disrupt advertising.

I'm starting to work on a platform for people to explicitly state who they want to connect with, and to handle the social flow from "hello stranger" to "let's talk".

Anyone interested in helping out, please message me (josh at tristara dot com).

It would be REALLY interesting to flip this model.

In other words, AT&T redistributes a portion of their subscription revenue to app makers based on the bandwidth they get people to use.

Then, app makers would have a direct financial incentive to drive usage, without all the hassles of explicit billing.

From the perspective of a web developer, what I don't like about Facebook Connect is I give up ownership of my user accounts.

In other words (unless I ask for and maintain separate user tables), all the login credentials stay with Facebook. And if they ever decide to stop supporting my site, I lose all my users.

I'd be willing to pay for a FB Connect like service if I trusted it (which would probably mean the ability to download login info on anyone who connected, so I could roll my own user management whenever I wanted).

What gets me is it's 2012 and we still have to keep solving account management over and over. It's a big bucket of word dealing with multiple signup methods, resetting passwords, profile pictures, etc.

I wish there were an open source project that unified best practices (in various tech stacks).

Then you'll need a native app.

You may be able to use the Google Hangout API.

Does anyone have any insight as to why the W3C has taken over 10 years to converge on the spec for rounded corners? Any info more than just "bureaucracy"?

If you're doing live conferencing, and don't want to force people to install a plugin, you'll need Flash. Which won't work on a phone. Is that ok?

IMO, the hard part isn't rendering enough polygons to be photorealistic.

It's crossing the uncanny valley of human facial expressions, so they look natural rather than creepy.

As someone who works with both Flash and HTML5, this news makes me sad.

Flash just works for much better. There are no cross-browser issues (except those that don't support it at all -- thanks, Apple). And ActionScript is a better language for building complex apps than JavaScript.

Thank you, thank you!

I used to teach the first CS course at both Harvard and University of Washington. I didn't have this issue at Harvard, but at UW there was definitely a bimodal distribution in abilities. Roughly half the students had what I feel is a more visual / associative way of thinking vs. the focused structure you need to program.

The concept that the "non programmers" could never understand was the abstraction of functions. Like:

foo(a) { // stuff }

foo(b);

would confuse them because they'd get hung up on foo's parameter declared as 'a', but called with 'b'.

This is how I work.

As an "army of one" you can be almost as fast as a small team, and you can execute with much higher conceptual coherence. I.e., you can aim better.

It is important to filter out ideas you're not interested in running, even if they could make money.

And once you start getting traction, it's important to focus hard on exploiting it.

Making $1000 per month is harder than scaling that to $100,000 per month (if the market size is large enough).

There are many dimensions to "how good you are as a programmer".

How you approach a 1000 line project is different from a 100,000 line project.

The best practices for a good solo developer are different from a team developer.

And most importantly, the internal elegance of your code is independent from how useful / cool your product is.

I was using SuperCache, and that seemed sufficient when I did some load tests.

I think what killed me was the micro instance only has ~617 megs of ram. The medium instance is holding up fine.

I just wanted to say you guys crashed my site with all your traffic.

Lesson learned: don't send HN to an EC2 micro instance. I upgraded to a medium instance, let's see how it works...

I've been in your situation.

What worked for me is I just hacked on fun personal projects. Like "hmm, that's a new API, let's try it out". I did it for fun, not to achieve a larger goal.

And gradually ideas would pop up, like "now that works, I wonder what if I also combined it with this..." and after a few months larger ideas started coalescing.

Given that you've had some success, you probably should look for something that resonates more strongly as "you're passionate about it" vs. "it can make money".

And once you have an idea that could develop into a real product, all your experience starting a company becomes highly valuable. Don't just be a code monkey for someone else :)