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I like you and I wish you luck. Your target audience is a guy like patio11 who has a 500 dollar course with an ebook and videos and who will probably release more info products? My advice would be to talk to and/or try to sell patio11 on why he should use your service and then bring that back to your design and copy.

That looks pretty awesome! Thanks Jeff. Would you happen to know if you have to use the form builder or if you can just do HTML?

Very nice write up! :) It's really nice to see A/B testing promoted, as well as, a case for static sites integrated with web services. Those are the types of technologies I'm really looking forward to seeing grow in our industry.

I'm up voting this because I feel similar. However, I'm not sure if I feel Facebook is the main issue at play.

Yes! I think that was it! Thank you very much Giraquid! :)

I feel this is more a case of poor user experience. This is a company who couldn't mark their service up 10-20% to account for taxes and a unified price.

...And the fact that Stripe doesn't generate and email out PDF invoices FOR YOU? Common now.

I don't feel like loosely targeted PayPerAction ads will do all that well. From a publishers perspective it will almost definitely do worse than AdSense just based on the PPA component. For advertisers this might be nice, but why would they use this when publishers using other PPA platforms like CJ, CB, or LS can build custom tailored websites and landing pages per ad to convert users.

Seconding this. :) Definitely an excellent advice piece. I think we all overestimate the skill and time a project or an idea will take.

What's the point? I'm 24 years old. Education was expensive, so I worked my way up as a programmer and web developer right out of high school. I've worked at some pretty big corporations and now I'm looking to buy a house while my friends are just getting out of University with junior developer positions while living at home. My co-workers are all around 10-20 years older than I am. I've made senior developer, but I won't be able to move into any type of management positions for another 5-10 years just because of my age. There's no additional advancement or benefits to a slightly early head start on a career. People who give advice like this probably don't remember what it was like to be this age.

My advice? If you have the chance to see the world, have a cool college experience, or the opportunity to do something unique with your life follow through with it.

Climbing the corporate ladder in any field at any age is difficult at best, but doing so at twenty? Probably one of the main drives behind talented 'kids' joining startups now days.

Man! I'm noticing so many bugs and stuff. Not being able to change, fix, or edit this until next week is going to drive me crazy.

Some did. https://github.com/railsrumble/

Mine was: https://github.com/railsrumble/r12-team-263

I'm definitely looking forward to going through the other entries! :)

http://railsrumble.com/entries/263-ucommently http://ucommently.com/

Busy weekend but I was able to get my app out. My little brother was all like you should make textsfromlastnight for funny YouTube comments.... Probably wont win any awards, but I had a lot of fun! :) Its cool to see a lot of other people went solo too and came up with some cool stuff!

I want to second this comment. I spent my high school, and college years programming stupid shit and I had fun, but if I could go back I'd slap myself and learn some basic social skills and just be a kid. My social circle now days consists of senior programmers, managers, and BA's twice my age. You have your whole life to build up wealth, but I really feel I missed the boat by not building up some really good friendships during my school years.

TL;DR

Lasting happiness is having social skills and quality relationships; not an advanced software developer skill set.

The importance of learning some sort of social intelligence is so underrated. You see all these front page posts on hacker news "I taught my 5 year old son and daughter how to program in five different languages" like its something that will really better these children's lives. You want a happy successful kid? Teach them the art of being social and having meaningful interactions with other people. I've wasted so much of my life trying to be the best student or programmer I could possibly be. I turned 24 this year and I'm proud of how well I've done and what I've accomplished in my career to date, but without friends to enjoy it with, success is pretty shallow.

The saddest part about this, for us in Canada, is that when we see any American advertised cell phone or internet deals our natural response is "Damn, those Americans got it good over there." I pay around 90 a month for 200 minutes and 4gb of data with unlimited texting under Rogers. Canadian plans are a joke. Seeing this article with a $38.00 plan for phone, internet, and TV is just completely unfathomable for me. :P

I just wanted to say thank you for this summary! :) Very good overview in retrospective after having watched the video. Good start to the discussion.

Yeah, I'd believe it. In full disclosure I run my personal blog off an Amazon Micro instance. Its a Fedora instance running passenger, nginx, and rails. In production mode with assets cached it absolutely serves requests at a decent speed. Absolutely painful to run an integration test or development mode though. Probably just my fault for using Fedora and not the default "Amazon Linux". However, I setup a client with a small instance running RedHat and never experienced any latency.

>> My experience with EC2 is that you get more RAM for the buck when compared to Rackspace and others, but IO to disk and CPU is sub-par. As a result, I tend to prefer Rackspace who are also big players in the open source space.

Seconding this. And I'd recommend a hybrid solution if it's possible. Dedicated db server with some cloud webheads for your front end. I really think that's the best bang for your buck. Has anyone tried the Amazon RDS or the RackSpace R2 servers? I'd really like to know if they provide any advantages over just straight up hosting your database on another cloud instance.

I agree. I wouldn't completely write off those smaller servers and I think it serves as a very good entry point for learning Linux and server administration. If you're just starting out with Node or Rails its great.

I would recommend someone a Low End Box over a free Amazon Micro Instance any day, just because the CPU they limit you at is just bad. You start Apache or Nginx on those things or do a big yum install/apt-get and the terminal slows to a crawl.

Running a Production server off any low end box is definitely risky depending on who you're hosting with, but that goes without saying. I'd second BuyVM and Xen, I had a VPS with nordic and my cluster just died one day and was unrecoverable. They gave me a free small instance for half a year, but I opted to just switch instead.

My other recommendation is definitely Rackspace. Their low end service is only around 10 dollars a month, their chat support service is pretty good, and its fast and easy to scale. Database transactions on the cloud are still shit however. :( Really want a dedicated server if you're a larger or badly optimized site.