natgordon

This is really great. I like the "exploding" treasuries a lot.

What was your motivation? If you're looking for more exposure you can write a blog post for the Etsy blog. I did that for my app and it drove a lot of traffic (http://www.etsy.com/blog/en/2011/handmade-code-babylist/)

The difference with tv and radio is that you can still play with your child with the radio on.

Resources: For myself, Hacker News and Mixergy podcasts have been hugely influential. I can't believe how long it took me to find these resources.

Lesson: Market matters more than product. Even if something seems like a cool product it doesn't mean that the market is there. I've launched products in the language learning space and the pregnancy/baby space. The pregnancy/baby market is much, much bigger and thus it's easier to be successful.

From the article you posted from by Svpply blog: "It’s going to be very difficult for them to grow beyond puppies and photos of Ryan Gosling."

Wow. What a complete disregard for women as a desirable demographic. When companies act like this it's an opportunity for the rest of us.

I've been using pinterest the same way I use twitter; as social media for my business (whose target demographic is women 22-35).

People want to give gifts, not gift cards. :) Make sure that it's a stand-alone product (eg. a 6-month subscription) that can then be extended or upgraded, not $50 towards a membership.

I think this is a killer idea. I have a 6-month old and the only picture we have of him on the fridge is an ultrasound picture.

I would recommend making this as easy to gift as possible. A subscription like this might be more popular as a shower gift than something new parents purchase themselves. (Citrus Lane does an excellent job at this.)

Here's my personal experience. In my opinion internships are a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity because you get to try out companies and they get to try out you before committing to either full-time. I went to University of Waterloo which has a strong internship program (with 6 4-month internship terms before graduation).

In my case, I was offered a full-time position at my last internship (Amazon) which I accepted. I started the job 6 months after graduation. During that time I traveled cheaply (in Asia and Central America) on student loans which I knew I could pay off because of my job. I did some of that solo and some with a friend.

I always knew I wanted to take a big trip again before I was 30. I left my job and did just that from 2008 - 2010. I had saved a lot of money while working just by living below my means. During this time I also worked on coding projects that have been fulfilling.

It's just my experience. It seems like you know what you want. As long as you prioritize these goals you'll see the world.

Here's a great interview with the founder of JackThreads - http://mixergy.com/jason-ross-jackthreads-interview/

He goes into sourcing product etc.

I launched a site using Community Engine which is a Ruby on Rails plugin - http://communityengine.org/

I've looked at launching a community site on Ning. It sounds like your team has coding chops. I was frustrated with Ning because if you wanted functionality that was out of the box and you were able to create it, at the time you couldn't add it to the site. I'm not sure if that's changed.

I was a #1 story on HN this week too. I wrote up a postmortem here - http://natgordon.posterous.com/hackernews-post-mortem

I'm kind of worried about the logos. But a cease and desist would happen before a lawsuit.

Could you send me more details about your system? I don't see any issue with the works with icons on my Chrome. (natalie@babyli.st)

Thanks for the advice. I've thought the same thing about the bookmarklet. I'll probably create chrome and ff plugins before scraping web-pages server-side.

Hosted at slicehost. It's Ruby on Rails with Passenger. Product images are stored in S3.

Obviously you've thought a lot about this. Once I've had users actually use the site as their baby registry (fingers-crossed) I'll see what the actual percentages of the problems you've described are.

1 - when you reserve you enter your name and email address. you then get an email (that i currently don't make you confirm, but could) that says "you have promised to purchase X"

2 - This is an issue with in-store registries as well. I am not currently solving this issue, but it is technically feasible to do so.

3 - I'm depending on the older relatives to give us cash for baby's college fund :) I'm definitely not trying to solve e-commerce for an older generation.

4 - That's a good point. Hopefully this is a small percentage or items/online stores.

Thanks for the feedback.

Thanks :)

I was aware of a lot of that at the beginning and I have no regrets. I would use BabyList for my own registry and for various reasons wouldn't use the others. We'll see how it goes.

pre-HN :) (which was a small number)

From my POV, I waited until I was sure that the designs were what I was going to go forward with (this took about 4-5 weeks, maybe 2-3 iterations of different pages and colors). Then I proposed a % of revenue for x amount of time and it was accepted.

The project has moved slower than if I'd hired a designer (for example Lindsey is currently defending her thesis at school and is 100% focused on that). But I maybe always had the trump card by being like "We need to launch before I have a baby".

Overall I think I got lucky and I'm not sure what advice I'd give. Forrst is like HN for (hungry) designers though.

Thanks for both pieces of advice. :)

Thanks for letting me know. I see the error in the logs and I'll be able to fix the root cause.

Thanks. That's how I'm doing all the branding on the site now. I'm not appearing in google yet, but I'm paying for ads with one of their $100 off coupons.

That's awful. Babylist has a settings tab with a big delete button for that reason.

Yeah, it doesn't support that.

I think the next step would be that when you add a product to the registry there's a checkbox like "let people buy this from other stores" which is default checked on amazon/babys-r-us and default unchecked on etsy.com. Then in the registry display you would see multiple offers for one product. Then there would still be the challenge you describe but it wouldn't be a UI problem, it would be a data challenge.

I just tried to buy babylist.net and it's taken :)

So there are 2 groups of people.

1. registrants (people having babies) - branding here is important and the name could bite me. Let me know if you have any suggestions for other names.

2. people buying the registrant gifts - BabyList doesn't even have search which is a default wishlist/registry feature. I think giving someone a pretty url slug and letting them email it/share it/link to it, is not going to be a problem.

They can add their address to their babylist. The list itself has no privacy controls so I'm not sure if people will enter it. And there's no integration b/t the address they entered on the site and online stores.

That makes sense. It does that because if you're logged in and have a baby registry i just redirect you there. By clicking the logo you can get to the landing page.

That's a JS bug. Thanks for finding it.

I'm a member, but not actively.

I had the idea for the site and posted it (http://forrst.com/posts/Any_designers_interested_on_collabor... but I don't think this link will work if you're not logged in)

This is what I wrote:

Hey,

I'm a ruby on rails developer and I'm 5 months pregnant.

Today I created a baby registry and it was a nightmare. I ended up using the amazon.com universal wishlist. It's a bookmarklet that lets you add any product on the web to an amazon wishlist. Unlike a registry, your friends and family "reserve" an item instead of actually buying it from the specific store that has the registry.

My idea is to create a new website "baby registry anywhere" (terrible name) where you can add and reserve items similar to the universal wishlist. I think it would also be cool to be able to add more than one link for an item, so your friends/family could choose where to purchase it.

I could probably code a minimal, launchable version in a week (or 5 Fridays). In the past I've hired designers for projects but I'd love to work with someone as partners on this.

---

I had a kind of overwhelming response and clicked with one designer via text chat and we went forward. In retrospect, I've spent way more than 5 days on this.

I know. I contacted the owner of babylist.com (it's a mirror of babylist.co.uk) and they never got back to me.

This is the #1 thing on the TODO. So far all sign-ups (which are not many) have successfully added products, which has surprised me.