norbu09

One of the more funny ideas that came out of Startup Weekend Christchurch. Hate away :)

we got around this by agreeing on one salary level for everyone. works so far: http://blog.iwantmyname.com/2014/05/culture-at-iwmn-part-one...

On the issue of talent pool we have another experiment going. We don't require anyone to work from our office, work from wherever you feel like. I'll blog about that next but to answer your question, it has an extremely positive effect on hiring highly skilled people.

I absolutely agree with your second point but your first point is pretty centred around your personal point of view. I, for one, don't see defensive registrations as a smart way of spending money. your costumers know that if you are a mail hosting provider you are most probably not trading under a .bike domain, so why bother blocking that name on every TLD no matter if it is relevant to your business or not.

We see new regs coming in that go nTLD only. new customer, finds an awesome .guru domain and wants to use it, instead, and that is important, a .com or a regional alternative. We would really like to make it easy for that customer to use that domain but seems like many just missed the whole topic.

ok, you won, Wellington is clearly less remote than Arrowtown. iWantMyName is based in NZ and we love it. I see the valley not as a requirement to be a successful startup "in the US".

at iWantMyName we use:

- email/calendar/docs: google

- hosting: slicehost, rackspace cloud, cloudprovider, dedicated servers

- accounting: xero

- analytics: google

- project management/ bug tracking: redmine

- file sharing: dropbox

- version control: git

- IM: jabber

- stack: perl, CouchDB, RabbitMQ

changes in the last year or so:

mail -> google (from zimbra)

hosting -> +rackspace

accounting -> xero (from home grown)

file shareing -> dropbox (from VPN/own server)

stack -> -PostgreSQL

for my personal projects i also use:

time tracking: minutedock + xero (-> from freshbooks)

it is funny to see that you go for a masters degree but want actual coders that have experience. in my experience hireing developers you are on the wrong track. if you want good coders in the mid cost tier you go for those guys that dropped out of uni and actually did coding for a while compared to those that did uni but never touched an editor. also, if you want good guys, think of maing them. expecting to get only the good ones without investing into education is a bit arrogant in my view. get the most promising ones and get one really good senior guy who mentors the rest. a team of heros will never get anything done ... they only fight for the best algorhythm :-)

http://iWantMyName.com - built by 2 1/2 guys over the last two years out of frustration with the domain registrar business practices. we are not hugely profitable yet but we can live off it and work on our own project which is rewarding enough for the moment.

only works in the US. amazon payments would another one but US only as well. both insist in a US bank account

i try to go down that track now - decided to bill them for business analysis and see how things turn out ... i'll report here :-) billing only for the hours would be under value i think, i simply see it as a business analysis and even offer them to give them deeper insight in their own business if desired - simply change the seats ... lets see.

my shift key is fine (programming in erlang actually forces me to use it) but growing up in a non english country - and being forced to a lot more capitalization than english has - made me decide to refuse the capitalization thing entirely. it was a mix of movement and point against overly stressing the beginning of sentences and i somehow stuck with it. did not think that is was that much of a problem though :-)

your number one task as a manager is to find suitable sub tasks a developer can estimate on. this implies that you actually know your developers and their skills and give them only the amount of work to judge on they are comfortable with. i can judge on a project that is worth some months of work easily, a junior developer probably only looks about 2-3 days ahead.

we had the same issue as we are in NZ and US based companies often have that panic that everything non US is not controllable. we went with worldpay and have no issues with them. we currently accept visa/master in USD, NZD and EUR via them.

sometimes it is a shame that NZ is nice and beautiful but far away ... i take there is nothing planned for NZ, is there? Wellington is a living city with many startups we only meet way to rarely.

moved from germany to new zealand some years ago - have a small company now and love my life again - think i'll stay :-)