manasnutcase

nope. not for free :)

Find some customers before building the product. Make sure you build what they think they need.. not what you think they need.

Sorry, by "resources", I meant "experienced ROR developers" and thats a statement specific to my city- Kolkata, India. Wish I was in Chicago or San Francisco. :) Indeed, online help is available, but its time consuming if the developer doesnt have sufficient experience. All large tech companies in India have Java practice, so Java developers are in abundance, and usually have better coding habits too. This may not be true in some other places.

I think FB Advertizing was awesome. It is expensive for USA/Europe but you can target Asia for less than 10 cents/click. We were converting close to 30%. So it wasnt bad at all. But the problem with Mingle Trips is that it is not viral. so I could only get people as long as I paid for it. That was not a great model for a bootstrapped startup. Also, it works much better than listing on Craigs List since you get much fewer perverts. From CL, etc, we were regularly getting prostitutes and guys who only wanted to get laid and were pretty crude. This may not be the general trend. It is only my limited experience.

I did some basic FB Advertizing and also reached out to bloggers - some of whom have written about us. I also spammed some travel sites a bit :D and posted on CL and various free online classifieds.

I did some basic FB Advertizing and also reached out to bloggers - some of whom have written about us. I also spammed some travel sites a bit :D So we have around 6k users and 500 fb likes so far. Thanks

Thats right. I do have more enthusiasm than money :) Thanks. I have reached out to bloggers on Linked in and gotten them to check out the site and recommend to their readers. I also contacted hostels in Europe but they didnt seem much interested so far. I will send many more mails now and see what converts. Thanks

Thanks.

Thanks Gee. We are currently on Linode. But now Im experimenting with PHPFog. Looks good so far.

Thanks Playhard. Any clue how I can see if any of my submissions were also marked as "dead"?

hey Sullichin... morgue file is not free.

Thanks

cool. thanks.

Basic Web Technology - PHP/ Ruby on Rails or ASP.Net is not that difficult to learn. It may be a good idea to know the basics. I am not a pure techie and am building a web app. It took more than a couple of months to find the right techie. In the mean time, I outsourced development on ODesk so that there is some momentum by the time I build my own tech team. Now we are almost at the verge of launching our first app. It is certainly do-able. Takes a little longer and costs a little more. But in any startup, the cost of building the first iteration of the product is not the most significant. But you absolutely must have clarity on what your product is and who is going to use it.

Denis, I love the site. Its both useful and well designed. You might like to check out Bitcasa. Manas

"Aren't you worried that it takes few weeks(days?) of coding for dropbox team and one update for your solution to become obsolete?" Wouldnt this logic apply to every project? What if Google Docs just builds a dropbox type app on top of it? Google certainly had more resources and superb tech talent. I think all companies have their focus and are already very busy getting their product right. If you think there is a need for which you have the right solution - build it. Who knows - Dropbox might just buy you out.