redguava

Why do you need to know how to setup and manage your own services. If it's not your expertise, spend your time where you can add the most value. I think Heroku is a perfectly fine option until you reach the point where you could hire a full time dev ops.

It's a pretty cheap way to have servers set up with 24/7 monitoring and technical support.

Apparently you did need more than one, because that's what stops your app idling.

I see no problem with their support response, it was accurate.

Heroku don't hide this, it's in their documentation https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dynos#dyno-idling.

Imagine how many free apps are created that are never used again. Should Heroku really devote resources to these apps? I think it's perfectly reasonable to idle them after a period of inactivity. If they didn't, they would need more resources and ultimately the customers would be paying for that. They aren't a charity, they are a business.

It's pretty simple, if you don't want your app to idle out after 1 hour of inactivity, buy a dyno for $35 p/month.

"Raganwald poses an interesting question. Why do some of the best minds in our industry spend time figuring out how to make people click more on ads?"

Your answer is:

"One simple answer to the question is Geography."

There are two problems with your answer:

1. He isn't asking how to get more people to click on ads, he is asking why our best minds are working on that problem.

2. Geography isn't the answer to people clicking on ads, it just happens to be very important if it's a job ad (according to your experience). There are plenty of ads that aren't for jobs and Geography is not the answer.

It is interesting to hear your findings about job ads, but the context of your post and the summary of the results don't seem to fit.

It sounds to me like your experience in a remote team was sub-par, but that doesn't make remote teams bad... just that one.

Culture, chatter, gossip, staying up all night to get a release done... all of this can be done with remote teams if you have the right tools and you build it into your culture.

Of course there are pros and cons for remote teams, but my experience is that the pros far outweigh the cons.

I work in a team that has us spread across 4 countries (Australia, Poland, UK and Brazil) and very clashing time zones. It works amazingly well.

We have much more talented people working in our team than we could have gotten if we restricted our search to the local area only. I am positive having better staff far outweighs any cons of being remote.

My recommendation to anyone but my competitors would be to seriously consider a remote team.

Getting a successful web app is tough, why add unnecessary constraints to make it harder?

One example is "I can only spend $5,000 of my own money in this entire process". If you could get an awesome programmer for $6,000 to build the whole thing, would you really say no just to stick to the arbitrary rules?

I think you need to go into a startup with the idea that you need to overcome all the obstacles that get in your way, not start with some arbitrary obstacles to make a game of it.

Good luck, but I think you are making a tough task even tougher, and unnecessarily.

That would never work for a competent interviewer. Sure if they just downloaded a checklist off the web, but is that really the kind of place you want a job at?

My experience has been that I interview worse for having "researched" interviewing. It gets me trying to answer what they want to hear rather than what I actually would normally say. That is a bad way to interview.

Also as an interviewer, the people trying to answer "the right way" never get past first round. I want someone that's genuine, not someone just trying to pick the right answers to get the job.

Following guides on how to answer interview questions does more harm than good.

Just be honest and be yourself.

I am not sure, my planning is for optimal circumstances and so far that's working out for me. Trusting your staff will do well by you does amazing things.

I like the idea of regularly evaluating what you would do to keep someone, and then just doing it. Perhaps make it a six monthly thing.

I think I came across this idea in a Netflix culture slide deck first and it stuck with me.

What services are safe? Companies that haven't taken funding and are profitable. If they have taken funding then they are forced to look for an exit (acquisition, IPO, etc.). It's a ticking time bomb.

Really nice to read an article like this that actually goes into detail and gives you some things you can take away and apply right away.

Thanks for sharing and great job on the website, loads super fast for me.

Your messaging isn't clear to me. I have read both:

"Notify friends with your game plans and keep up with theirs."

and

"GameCall makes it simple to notify your friends with your game plans, and keep up with theirs."

Neither of those make it clear to me what your app does exactly. When you talk about games, are you talking about sport? Game is pretty generic. I would try to simplify the messaging and make it as clear as possible.

The actual app looks nice from the screenshots.

Clickable link https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/gamecall-social-sports/id521...

I love the discount for them embedding your advertising on their site. Great idea. Good luck with it all.

@roel_v yes. Also a very relevant one to the conversation. See my profile.

I'm really not. I understand the context.

I disagree. Building software does mean something, it is what you are doing every day. If I am building software, I am writing code, testing, deploying and designing user experience workflows. All of that is the same no matter which industry my end users are in.

Sure your product is made to have some utility, but it doesn't have anywhere near the impact on your day to day activities that people think it does.

The industry defines a major part of what your software does, not as big a part of what you do. I think it's an important distinction.

I don't think you are making a correct analogy here. If you build software and that's what you enjoy, then build software, don't build audio systems or design furniture. The actual industry you build software for... well not as important, as long as you are building software as that is where your passion is.

Your day to day activities for your work are very similar if you are building software for a call centre or building software to manage coffee distribution (I am just assuming you might like coffee here). The industry plays a very small part in what you do, but it greatly impacts the chance of success.

So no-one should share advice or tips they have learnt to help them get by in a field that isn't their primary profession?

I like that they are sharing what they have learnt about a field that isn't theirs and doing so in a way that will appeal to other programmers.

I often find design tips from programmers much more relatable and usable for my skill set than I do design tips from designers.

It would be cool if your slogan "Finder for the cloud" was replaced with "Explorer for the cloud" (or whatever windows users call it) if they are on windows.

You could detect this pretty easily and it would prevent alienating a large percentage of visitors.

There is a lot of room between a 1-man show and Intel/Tesla. People really think it's all or nothing and there is so much room in between.

It doesn't mean it's a lifestyle business either, you can have a business earning over $10 million revenue p/year in this in between and with no funding. Is that really just a lifestyle business?

Agreed if I have to start pinching my door handle to lock it then I won't be impressed.

Consider me an optimist though, I have faith in our fellow developers... even if there are a few blemishes on their record.

"Not every startup should"... complete that sentence with almost anything and it will be true.

Rather than a bunch of articles on different topics, I hope we can just agree that there isn't one rule fits all or we would all follow that rule and be successful.

It's exactly why you can't just copy how someone else does things and hope to get the same result.

It's up to the developer to make it usable, that doesn't take away from the fact that it's pretty amazing technology and people will find really cool stuff to do with it.

I just wouldn't blame the tech for bad implementations.

Why are "None" and "Not Applicable" grouped into one answer? Surely they are significantly different responses.

Why aren't you a fan of trial periods? I much rather give it a shot before I commit to paying some money. In fact, I pass on many that don't have trials.

It's easy to talk the talk on a marketing website, a free trial shows the truth.

I don't know about how they do it, but I use both currently.

SendGrid for one-off emails (ie. a user signs up for an account, their welcome email).

MailChimp for email marketing (we send newsletters via them).

MailChimp has since released Mandrill that caters to the one-off emails, but we were already with SendGrid by then.

Great article but I think it's a fine line. I am so much more productive when I am doing something I enjoy.

Let's say I am 5 times faster working on what I love to do, but it's only 50% as effective for my business as what I should do. Well it's still better than being 5 times slower to do something that's only twice as important.

The hard part is working out those numbers and knowing what wins, but being aware of the concept is a great start.