owkaye

> I think my co-founder registered an LLC ...

Why don't you go out and do a little research, so you will know for a FACT whether he did or not?

They do not, and that's one of the primary causes of problems like this. Just because it's the intelligent thing to do does NOT mean that intelligent people actually do it!

> You can afford to grandfather old accounts if you can still at least break even on those accounts.

They could have grandfathered the existing accounts for at least 6 months or so, but giving any user -- whether a paying customer or a free user -- only 30 days to start paying $100 a month when many of them expected to be paying little or nothing for quite some time? Well, I think that is the height of arrogance and disrespect for the customers on which your business is built -- and an exceptionally effective way to alienate all those free users who MIGHT have become paying customers if only they had been given a reasonable amount of time to adjust to the change ... or even a reasonable new rate for small volume users.

Why not offer something like $5 a month for up to 10 subscribers instead of basically kicking all their free users in the groin? Most small businesses would not bat an eye at such a small charge even if they had only 30 days to start paying or abandon Chargify. But did they offer such a service?

No, the fact remains that the guys at Chargify appear to be way too naive for any serious business to trust or rely on them at this stage of the game. They didn't "get it" when they made their blunder and from what I have seen they still don't "get it".

But no worries, there are others that will pick up the slack ...

My haircuts in the Philippines were 30 pesos while I was there. That's only a couple years ago and prices haven't changed a bit, which means they are still only about 60 cents US.

Wishing won't do it. If you REALLY want to live in a place like that just move.

You should get out NOW so you can settle on a different company's services -- one that treats its customers better.

Even giving me 5 customers free would encourage me to try them, but they can forget that now -- because I'm not going to commit to anything close to $99 a month unless I actually have hundreds of paying customers. Just my personal point of view, but it feels like they have so much business now that they no longer care about getting any new customers.

Of course you're not the only one who reads his emails. JabavuAdams is FOS as far as I'm concerned. I've been a developer for almost two decades and I always read my emails -- CAREFULLY.

In fact I have every client agree with me from the beginning that our emails serve as the written terms our agreements when we both agree in writing. And I ask them to always save every email they send me and every email they receive from me, so that we will both have a written trail of correspondence to refer to when (not if) there are any misunderstandings.

This system has served me well for many many years, so for someone to make an all-encompassing claim that no one reads emails is just plain ridiculous.

> We've considered meeting with the small businesses individually but that's just really time intensive.

If you're not willing to work for it you'll fail. Sometimes you actually have to invest time -- lots of time in the right areas -- whether you think you have the time or not. Or would you rather just give up and fail?

> I just finished my business degree and > want to get into tech start-ups.

Do you have a specific concept for a business? Most people actually have a clear concept of what they want to do before they start asking how to find a programmer. If you have such a concept please email me and tell me about it, my email address is in my profile.

if not this one then one practically identical which I learned about here on HN. What others are creating a nearly identical service?

I registered last week to see if there's any value in such a service, but after doing a search I cannot find myself in their database. What's up with that?

Do more boat designing, building and sailing.

"Everyone around you treats you like you have a flexible schedule and asks you to do things during it."

If you have any self-control you just ignore them or tell them you're not available, then you do what you're supposed to be doing.

Using the term "kick-ass service" once is probably too much, but you use it several times and it sounds very immature and unprofessional to me. Here are some other phrases I have a problem with:

"It's super simple"

"We look after you big-time don't we!"

"Servers are yucky"

"Things couldn't be easier!"

It all sounds very childish, but that's just the tip of the iceberg ...

Where do you address the issues of discounts based on time or quantity or shipping or percent of the price, local and state taxes, shipping, and all the other issues REAL online store owners have to deal with and decide upon?

On the one hand you keep repeating the mantra "Things couldn't be easier!" because apparently you want people to think you've taken care of all these issues, but then you're apparently leaving all the difficult issues in selling online -- but in reality you're leaving it all up to the sellers themselves -- which makes your platform anything but "simple".

Personally I would not want to sign up before learning how you handle these issues if I actually had something to sell, yet I cannot find any facts or substance to show me how (or if) you're going to do anything to help me with these issues.

Perhaps the most important issue is that you seem to be dictating the "rules" by which the shop owners must run their online stores ("In accordance with the Shop Owners Agreement you agree to ship all orders within 7 days of receipt") ... but if you stick your nose into your store owner's businesses too much the regulators and tax authorities are going to determine that YOU are the merchant -- not the suppliers that you're referring to as store owners. Then you'll not only be paying all the taxes that your suppliers are not paying, but you will also inherit liability for things you probably didn't want or expect.

I think you have a lot to re-think and reconsider before getting into this business the way you've described it here. I've been in eCommerce for nearly two decades and it disturbs me the way you're going about this, because I'm concerned about the legal and technical issues you don't seem to be addressing.

Maybe so. I've lived in the Philippines and it's not a developed country so this isolation problem is not much of an issue there (yet). But their culture is becoming more and more 'American' and gradually losing the closeness of friends and family and I'm afraid of what it's going to be like years in the future. I hope it doesn't become another USA but it very well could, or even worse.

I use gmail accounts so all my mail gets sent there first. Then I use POP3 to retrieve new messages as they arrive. I save the important downloaded messages in kmail on my desktop computer and I delete the rest locally. If I ever accidentally delete an important email locally I just login to the gmail web interface and retrieve a new copy.

It's a good system because it archives all my email on the gmail server first, saves copies of the important messages locally, and eliminates more than 99% of my SPAM so I never have to deal with it.

> We did actually look at doing this for spouses -- not to detect cheating (a cheating spouse will be even more motivated to subvert the system than a child), but to help out with stuff like "are you near the supermarket? Can you pick up some milk?", but fundamentally people don't seem all that interested in it.

They just call each other in this situation which means there's no need for some additional program on a special phone that they may not even own.

That answers showdead, noprocrast, maxvisit and minaway. How about notifo and delay?

> What is half of what you're expected to earn?

That's my question precisely. Maybe your expectations are out of line with reality? The programmers I used to manage overseas certainly had this problem. Nearly all of them fresh out of college expected the same salaries as those with 5+ years of real work experience. Graduating from college into the real world is a shocking "reality check" for some students.

I hope you don't do this, it just drags you down to an unethical level because you "think" they shouldn't pay you half what you expect to earn.

Are you actually worth what you expect to earn? Does the company have a valid reason for offering you less than what you expect? I think these are the questions you should be asking.

I ran an offshore outsourcing company for nearly a decade, and I can tell you something from that experience. The vast majority of applicants were not worth half what they expected. They seem to have come from an environment where they expected to graduate from college and immediately jump into the real world of programming at ridiculous salaries -- simply because they had graduated from college.

The reality was that they had learned a smattering of different languages but they were not proficient in one, so they were little more than "on the job trainees" to me, and in this situation they were lucky that I paid them half of what they "expected".

The bottom line here is that they had ridiculously unrealistic expectations, and they were disappointed to learn their true value in the real world.

It was an eye opening experience for most of them when I wouldn't even consider hiring them because of their lack of capabilities and their failure to perform simple programming tests without books and online references in front of them the whole time.

I'm not suggesting that you're worth less than what you expect, all I'm saying is that in my hiring experience many of my former programming applicants have failed to demonstrate that they are worth their perceived values.

In light of its recent meltdown I'm hacking the real estate industry to help stabilize the market, re-establish lost value, and avoid future foreclosures.

I seldom post, but I browse threads slowly, and I get the error page whenever I've waited too long to click the "more" link at the bottom of the page.

It seems that each time I click the "new" link it resets a cookie (or posts a hidden form field, I haven't checked which) that identifies the time of that click. Then when this time expires I get the error upon my next click of the "more" link.

I cannot just reload the page in this situation because the page being displayed is the error page, so I have to manually strip off the characters that appear in the URL after "http://news.ycombinator.com/ ... and when I do this I get the same new page as if I had clicked the "new" link. This is why I suggested providing a clickable "new" link on the error page.

I think you should just charge $99 as a one-time fee and forget about the monthly payment options. Just make the service worth it, that's all.

What software are you using to deliver the auction status updates which appear directly below the image of the $20 bill?

>For most intents and purposes, interim storage of electricity is science fiction. Batteries are woefully inadequate, and the solutions that we do have, like pumped storage, have so long turn-on times that they might as well not exist for spikes that fast.

Maybe the wind farms should install their own buffering systems. If they built reservoirs on hilltops then dumped their excess electricity into their own pumps they could avert this "all or nothing" issue by delivering power to the grid on a more consistent basis with fewer spikes.

The credit card companies dropped the ball years ago by not letting their card holders accept payments from other card holders in a hassle-free manner. If they had done this PayPal would not exist, and the world of credit card holders would be able to transact business directly with each other, rather than going through a "middleman" -- and theoretically anyways, everyone's rates would be lower, too.

"most people on the internet dont have twitter accounts - thus don't have a way to follow this tweets"

Uh ... it seems to me that if people on the internet actually want to follow twitter tweets they will get a twitter account.

I cannot understand how they will find your site before twitter, or even why they would want to. ???

"I had a conversation last weekend with one of my friends who always struggles to find good Ruby engineers ..."

Well then, doesn't it see that perhaps he is creating his own limitation by focusing on Ruby?

Just because a particular language may have too few experts in the USA does not mean there's a shortage of qualified programmers in other languages! I'm an exceptional programmer in the language I know best, but it is not Ruby. Your friend would not consider hiring me because of this too I'll bet -- yet I could probably build his site twice as fast as the best Ruby programmer.

You live with the limitations you impose upon yourself.

"If you only share a few hours per day, or not at all, the cycle times will be in terms of months instead of weeks."

Interesting theory but I find that just the opposite is true in my Asian outsourcing business ...

I communicate with clients in the USA early in the morning and/or late in the evening. While these guys are sleeping in the USA my team writes code. The clients seem to enjoy waking up the next morning and seeing the results of the work we did while they were sleeping ... :)