pinksoda

A random salt? Are you sure about that?

In my opinion, Chrometa isn't at a point where it can claim it has traction. It sounds like they have 100 or so customers after 2 years. There are ~1.2M lawyers in the US and ~1.8M in the world.

They have to defend their trademark, or lose it. There's no way you can keep that domain. I don't think this falls under fair use either.

E-mail their lawyer, Laurence Wilson at lwilson@yelp.com.

All the good domains are taken by squatters and bootstrapped start-ups can't afford the good ones, so we get creative.

You probably missed the boat with this one. Google has been making it harder to rank with these kinds of sites. Sites like these are considered spam.

Create something of value, it's the only way!

I wouldn't worry about it.

Traffic sniffing is mostly a concern for computers connected to public wireless networks. A linux machine, in a datacenter, connected via an ethernet cable doesn't have much to worry about.

It's incredible how he keeps expanding into viable markets. Has he opened any "stack" sites that didn't get immediate traction?

No one is going to get excited over an idea. Let's see a prototype, a powerpoint presentation, a fancy user-interface, investor commitments, press traction, etc.

We can see clearly what you don't have. Now what do you have? Do you have anything? You don't want to talk about "high rewards" unless you have substantial factors that make us think, "Damn, he might actually pull this off." - big empty promises is a Craigslist thing.

Maybe they thought it was unfair to list their own sites.

I visit the page and have no desire to use it. It is very unappealing.

Got AIM or Gmail? Leave some contact info so developers can contact you.

Don't touch Bank of America with a ten foot pole.

He's using a small table with only 100,000 rows. Let's see him claim rand() is fast on 1m, 5m, or 10m rows.

DKIM is better than DomainKeys.

They're in "downvote first, ask questions later" mode.

If you read the blog, it was released early with only a small portion of the overall idea. I already know exactly how I'm going to make it profitable.

More than a million dollars a year from MovieForumz, primarily using Clickbank affiliate program. I targetted my users who were there to see movies, with an affiliate site that also offered movie downloads/viewing. I tried other affiliate programs like Netflix and Gamefly but it was an epic fail.

I've made more money from my other sites. MovieForumz was one of the smaller earners(except in the beginning, it was pretty significant).

Level 10? Noob!

It was running before there was court precedent that made it risky to link to movies hosted on sites like YouTube and Dailymotion. The shutdown was part of a strategic business decision.

I made money from it initially using Adwords. I remember my first month running it, only made about $400. They decided not to allow sites that linked to copyright videos, so I had to find alternatives, which turned out to be great.

I mostly used Clickbank and (briefly) Zango. I'm currently part of Clickbank's APEX program which is their super affiliate program for top earners.

It was ugly but it made a lot of money!

That's why it's closed.

When it was runnning, linking to copyright content(on sites like YouTube and DailyMotion) wasn't considered infringement. I made a strategic decision to shutdown after that changed (court precedents where set that could now be used against me)

I'll tell you guys about myself and you can let me know if you have any questions.

I'm a solo founder. I create all the sites myself as far as design/coding goes. I mostly use PHP/MySQL. I bootstrapped my first site with just cash and credit cards.

Ask me almost anything!

MovieForumz is a past success of mine and is no longer running. It has been closed for probably 2 years now and still receives about 5-10 thousand uniques per day even after all this time.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/movieforumz.com make sure you have it set to MAX and you'll see when it was ranked very well. It received about a million unique visitors per day.

You guys didn't even give me a chance to defend myself really. I was downvoted a bazillion times and couldn't post anymore.

Rough crowd in here!

That's a great question.

I started with pretty much zero. The first one is always the hardest because you don't have many connections or money. It's a lot of hard work but it gets easier the 2nd, 3rd, 4th time around, unless of course you're burnt out.

When you start with zero it just forces you to think a different way. Instead of just throwing money at something, you have to be creative and strategize.

Alright so the blog that got downvoted to hell before was http://www.sinkfloat.com/blog/

A few people contacted me with questions so I wanted to make this thread so they could ask them and maybe it could benefit more people.

You wouldn't listen to someone about being successful who had $1 in their pocket.

I thought this was a pretty good post but it didn't get any attention.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1299094

I think HN is too big now.