madmotive

A very long article...

One of the most significant bits for me:

Seedcamp do plan to open source their funding documents.

This underlines to me why it's essential to have technical founders.

You shouldn't expect them to remember what was in the application. If they do remember something it will probably only be one line.

You get an email when you don't get in with a nice couple of lines explaining why.

Our email came in the early hours of the morning. I'd encourage you not to respond to it, at least for a few days. I felt compelled at the time to send a few paragraphs the next morning responding to some of the criticisms. Retrospectively it probably wasn't that all that useful to anyone.

It must be an exhausting 3 days for the YC team. I don't think there are enough hours in the day for them to call all the unsuccessful interviewees. Especially when some of them (like us) will want to take more of their time responding to feedback.

The quantity and quality of the questions and feedback you get in the short 10 minute interview alone is brilliant. Even though we didn't get funded it's had a massive impact on the way I think about things. I'd fly out from the UK to do it again even if there wasn't any chance of funding.

This is exactly how our "interview" went.

Despite being given the same advice by others that had been through the process we still foolishly wasted time preparing a short 1 minute pitch.

We might have had a better result if we'd invested more time in getting the user experience in our demo right and answering the one critical question - "Why would people want this?"

Don't make the same mistake we did. :)

What approaches do other OAuth providers take to this problem? Revoking all OAuth tokens on a password change/reset takes away a good chunk of the value that many people get from using OAuth.

The costs have dropped to zero for many of the smaller low traffic sites because they don't currently need more resources than those provided by Herkou's basic free service. We can boost the resources almost instantly as and when they need it.

Heroku is the only business critical service I use that makes me smile almost everyday. I wish my telephone company, ISP and bank could provide such an excellent product with the same levels of customer service.

This week I finished migrating the last of my clients' applications over to Heroku from SliceHost. This has dropped the hosting fees for most of them down to zero while at the same time really impressing my clients with significant speed increases. I might have been able to get the same performance increase out of SliceHost if I was more skilled at sysadmin but I'm not a sysadmin.

Good point. So far about half have paid.

I guess the main reason this works for us is that we prefer smaller projects. We don't aspire to being a huge consulting company / agency taking on bigger and bigger projects. We like working on small projects that grow into bigger things.

Our approach is to respond to RFPs with a fixed-rate proposal development fee.

Anyone that's good enough to be in demand should do the same. Clients that expect you to do work for free will probably turn out to be difficult people to work with in the long term.

or, since it's on Heroku:

heroku logs

I find it amusing that they actually seem to think $60 is the right price point for "students, hobbyists, individual developers". How out of touch with the community can you get.

Looking at their visitor stats (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/wolframalpha.com/) I'd guess they have unused capacity for at least 2MM queries a month if back in May each visitor was hitting it twice. I don't get the impression they are using an infrastructure that they only pay for on demand.

If they want anyone to use their API (or their service as a whole) they should give away at least 1000 queries a month to the first 2000 developers that sign up.

This was one of the best talks at the Future of Web Apps. Well worth a watch.

I found the HTML5 forms demos much more interesting than the canvas (Flash killer) demos.

Uservoice has Single Sign-On http://uservoice.com/faq#sso Unfortunately it's only available on the more expensive plans.

Animoto are using it here: http://feedback.animoto.com/pages/9153-general

Dust-Me Selectors (http://www.sitepoint.com/dustmeselectors/) has worked for me along with getting organised in CSSEdit (http://macrabbit.com/cssedit/).

Best approach I've found to keep it all under control and avoid getting in a mess in the first place is to use SASS (http://sass-lang.com/) & Compass (http://wiki.github.com/chriseppstein/compass).

Sounds like they need to make their terms public in the same way YC does: http://ycombinator.com/seriesaa.html

Completely agree with you that #1 benefit of either Seedcamp or YC is the connections. I'm talking about the differences in approach here rather than the benefits.

Seems to me Seedcamp provides connections by surrounding teams with as many as possible. YC on the other hand seems to more carefully find the most useful connections for each individual startup so as not to create too many distractions for the teams. That said, being based in Silicon Valley has the effect of naturally surrounding teams with as many connections as possible.

I think Seedcamp's apparent interest in later stage business is not so much by design. It happens because of the way it is funded and the way funding decisions are made. They choose more mature looking startups because the funding committee collectively perceives them to be more likely to succeed.

Thank you for your comment. Good to hear other people share my view on the funding situation over here.

A couple of clarifications:

I'm not sure I'd say I'm someone who has been particularly close to Seedcamp. I've not personally taken part in any of their activities beyond networking events that happen around Seedcamp week. I am a keen observer though.

I don't see BootCycle, the 'vested interest' you mention, as being direct competition to Seedcamp. BootCycle is simply a peer support group for a small collection of pre-revenue and pre-investment startups that meets every week. BootCycle takes no equity in the startups and provides no funding. We do think some BootCycle participants are likely to go on to get funding from Seedcamp or Y Combinator. Y Combinator is more appealing for all participants except for the ones that have family commitments in the UK.

So what do you do when you are fresh out of university with a great idea and a great team with no cash. All you need is £15K to cover 3 months living expenses and roll out a first version of your app. You manage to convince some friends / family / fools to part with just enough to get you going.

The deal breaker is that everyone involved wants something on paper that they can trust covers their best interests. What goes on that piece of paper when there is no cash available to pay for a lawyer?

We've used this stuff all over our coworking space:

http://www.magicwhiteboard.co.uk/

Might be worth giving it a try before investing in paint. It sticks to almost anything through static cling.

This changed my life: http://freeagentcentral.com

Biggest benefits if you are UK based. Blew Freshbooks out of the water from my perspective.

Some were probably missed in the early hours of Wednesday.

Seb presented the story behind this at the 5K app competition final (http://fivepoundapp.com/wiki/5kapp/), held in our coworking space (http://theSkiff.org) in Brighton, UK last week. Absolutely brilliant!

+1 for Red Rock. Upstairs is an excellent place to work while in Mountain View. Twittered I was there this time last year and met all sorts of interesting people working on startups.

For even more check out: http://twitdom.com & http://twtbase.com

Really like the way the skills and locations are extracted out below each tweet.

I see the team is based in the UK. Would be great to have you along to the next Twitter Developer Nest: http://twitterdevelopernest.com You could do a demo in the "Show & Tweet" session.

Have you seen: http://www.twitterjobsearch.com also from a UK company?

Spreedly looks like an interesting alternative for outsourcing the hassle of subscription payments: http://spreedly.com/

Not used them myself yet.

I use this regularly. Fits much better than an NDA in most cases where people ask me to sign an NDA.

From the comment: "I'd like to issue a full and categorical denial of this. We've never had any request for such data by anyone, and if we did we wouldn't consent to it.

Of course we work with the major labels and provide them with broad statistics, as we would with any other label, but we'd never personally identify our users to a third party - that goes against everything we stand for.

As far as I'm concerned Techcrunch have made this whole story up."

Last.fm staff are denying this: http://www.last.fm/forum/21713/_/506518/1#f8660996