pushkargaikwad

I have built a simplified inbound marketing product called inBoundio and had written a post about this too http://www.inboundio.com/blog/51-inbound-marketing-ways-to-m..., this should be able to help you take off.

Feel free to mail me at "pushkar (at) inboundio(dot)com" too, will be more than happy to help you

Incubators are Bullshit, Startup Accelerators are Scams

Barring few in US and India, you can put the rest in the above two categories. Most of the people running these incubators/accelerators are there for Kicks, Greed, Ego and Entertainment only and themselves don't understand the challenges of building a business. Unfortunately most of the startup founders are too naive and in hyper state of mind so get sucked into these.

I am running inBoundio - http://www.inboundio.com (I call it basecamp of marketing) and is the only guy so I do all the work.

I am really not that worried about slow growth or not making much money, I am enjoying what I am doing, works on average 6 hours a day and can spend rest of my time on learning new things and thinking about life and philosophy.

I started because I felt that market (and so do I) need such simplified software. Most of the options were too complicated and were very costly.

I will soon be touching 100 paying customers so will write a detailed post and share it on hackernews.

I know this won't get any upvotes but still thought to share it with the HN users, may be someone find it useful

Most of the domain owners often ask for ridiculous prices and that domain certainly won't be worth even 5% of what he is asking for.

If you are looking to build a product/company, you want to avoid going with .net (specially if .com is owned by someone else who is looking to sell it at premium anyway)

My advice would be to go with some other name, as the domain registrar/parking companies also inflate the price by 3x-5x so the real price of the .net is probably 1k

BusinessInsider is garbage, I see similar posts on reddit too. The article has absolutely zero info, is < 300 words, has a stock/irrelevant image, a quote from an anonymous founder of an anonymous startup who approached an anonymous Google employee. I mean honestly they are not even trying to make the post informative.

Similar thread/conversation happening at http://growthhackers.com/growth-hacking-is-bullshit/

anyway I always felt Growth hacking is very generic term whose definition will always be different depending on the context.

My Story - I was doing freelancing stuff back in college years from my hostel room, got hooked to it and kept on doing without doing/taking any job offer. It is been 8-9 years now and it is been a good ride albeit with many ups and downs. Working from home has its advantages as you have all the freedom of thought but it do some serious damage to your social and communication skills and can make you uni-dimensional.

I think this "tell a story" has been extremely generalized, it will work in some cases, it won't in some other cases. Stories are good to get attention and for entertainment (blogs/seminars/presentations), but there are not too many who are able to sell their product just on the basis of story. Telling stories is nice as long as you have something solid to back it up.

Looks very nice, I see there are no Asian courier service provider, hope to see them added soon as I can certainly see real world usage of shippo

>> Never, ever, buy a TV. If you own one, throw it out. If you live with someone who has a TV, move out. If you GF has one, get a new GF. It's that big a deal.

You will end up not having a TV and not having a GF too :)

@OP - stick to rescuetime (in windows) and toggl (on ubuntu), do not get sucked into productivity porn

I am above average developer who learnt by myself, to answer your questions -

1) How did you learn to code? Totally self taught from books and RTFM // Self taught plus MOOCs or comparable resources // Some classes in college but no CS degree, remainder self-taught // Self taught plus a developer bootcamp or some non-degree related formal education // CS degree and personal efforts

Unfortunately I never worked in any company so had to learn all the coding by myself and I strongly feels, if you want to be a good developer, you should work in a company and on real world applications with people who knows more than you which speeds up the learning. Though I am working full time on my own marketing product, if given a change, I would love to work part time in any company for free. There are few things which you can never learn from books and tutorial videos

2) When did you start learning (perhaps informative because of the recent rise of MOOCs)?

I do have a computer science degree from a reputed engineering college but I learnt nothing there, though I do have exposure towards programming for 10 years, I only started building real world apps in last 12 months.

3) At what point (if yet) did you start working as a programmer professionally relative to your initial efforts?

last 12 months, I am learning and writing code in parallel.

@shire - Personal development and every day learning is something which excites me so let me give you an answer from own experience and what I do.

1. Have awareness - smartness is nothing but being aware of yourself, your knowledge and surroundings. Way too many of us are living a routine life and we have trained our minds to keep working at certain optimum level. People who are aware often looks smart and more importantly make smarter decisions.

2. Read and Learn - your smartness and decision making skills is directly proportional on how much you know, people who knows more will always look and make smarter decisions.

Btw, one thing I can assure you, smartness can not be taught through books and classes, be your own teacher, make your own lessons.

"my Page had 338,050 Likes, my Support Group had 13,360 members, and my Interest List had 1.47 Million followers. But all of that work was wiped out in an instant when Facebook decided to shut it down without notice."

"Not only did they remove the page, but they also blocked my personal account from posting anything for 12 hours (I can’t even Like anything). They also did the same for anyone who was an Administrator or Moderator of the Page – including my wife’s personal account! Members of the support team, who generously volunteer their time to help users, have been shut out as well. They did one big sweep, I guess."

I came here to post this story, it is unfortunate that this news is not getting more visibility. If possible, check "tell facebook what you think" and try to help Matt since he has worked very hard on this app

Mark, Can we improve the display of open issues ? say with description of the project. You can also left align the display to make it more readable.

Are you talking about online marketing or more traditional offline marketing ? People often talks about "Crossing the Chasm" and "The Long Tail", here are few more such books http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/top-10-marketing-books-of-... though these are not your Marketing 101 books.

IMO this list looks to have good How to marketing type of books http://www.amazon.com/Top-Marketing-Books-All-Time/lm/3JOLQU...

Getting Real http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ is a must read (it is also free)

Ideally we want to say "Businesses that started as blogs". SEOBook is a great example, Aaron started it as a blog in 2005 where he used to put daily seo news, then he slowly converted it into a business and is now offering tools and there is a paid forum. SEOMoz is another such example.

Looks to be a nice initiative, something is always better than nothing. I hope like many others, they just don't set the site and forget after 8 months.

Though I couldn't found it, I am sure it is non profit (it has to be), also are they giving some "no strings attached" money to the people ? and as @linvin said below, in India the problem is not creation but adoption. You just can't create apps/sites and expect people to start using it. It takes lot of time, marketing, effort, resources, people and money to make it happen.

Dilution will always happen with user submission sites as the number of users grow, specially if there is no moderation.

Digg/Reddit,they all started as some niche tech site and eventually turned into political/media/news sites (atleast digg was, reddit's savior is its subreddit feature) once the userbase increased.

The only way to keep HN niche is by introducing categories and let people subscribe/unsubscribe to those categories or through strict moderation.

Well I work from home (a single room) so nothing fancy like others but this is how it looks http://i.imgur.com/Aop0Xit.jpg and http://i.imgur.com/rCQdzfe.jpg. Couple of tables and a chair. for some reason, I like to keep things simple and seems comfortable working on a single laptop and doing all work from it. The third table I uses for reading books.

The laptops I uses are Sony vaio and Dell XPS which I bought in 2009, still going strong but I think I should retire it now and invest on better hardware.

viddio.com is not even worth $600 imo, if you are really looking for spelling hacks, do some searching on domain finding tools, you can better hacks for free but like as others said, in your case, I don't think the domain name doesn't matter that much.

I personally find music to be distracting while coding but yesterday found this thread on reddit http://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/1jke2r/whats_the_most..., this has some gems! I am sure you will find few good once

WP didn't made php popular as it was already #1 choice for entry level web developers and had active helpful community (all webmaster forums had a php or similar section), something which other languages lacked.

Wordpress became huge because it is modular, plug and play and the go to choice for beginners. Not to mention, it is also a huge marketplace and tens of thousands of people make money creating themes, PSD, custom design, plugins etc.

Excellent initiative and loved the concept. I really hope this picks up, we can do something similar for organ donors as well.

>> Is there anything I can do to save my SaaS startup?

Don't you think you have bigger things to worry about then your SaaS company ? I meant, you are about to lose your freedom which I feels should be your first priority.

I really feels to have a stronger case and to preserve your freedom, you should come out open with your name. International pressure and media do work as in Deborah Dalelv's case http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/19/marte-deborah-dalel...

SaaS companies normally don't have lot of overhead, so you can hand over the control to some local friend, do inform your customers about your current situation and the possible repercussions of it.

From my personal experience, You don't need rockstar programmers to build great software. I also believes you need to hire people with character over skills, as skills can be build in 6 months, character can not.

Just like Manish, I too do not agree with what Andrew is saying. It is ridiculous to compare DropBox, Linkedin, Quora, pinterest to the home page of some unknown startup. I am also not convinced you can do any kind of testing for homepages for startups which have very low volume traffic.

IMO, I think you should just stick to your gut feeling, do what looks and feels right for home page, if this mean putting more content, so be it.

As SteveJalim below said, don't bother asking, just do it :) I personally love bootstrap as I am not a great designer and can save lot of time, which is my main priority since I am building a one man company. If this means, having a site similar to thousands other with same buttons and login pages, I can live with it.

Here is the full 100 Minutes on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

EDIT - Mother Of All Demos - 18:57 Hyperlinks / 31:50 Mouse & VC 45:59 Video Conference / 1:03:59 Collaborative Working / 1:12:58 Collaborative Working with VC / 1:34:09 Cross Country WAN / Internet Concepts (via youtube)