sandeepshetty

I'm using "solopreneur" to mean someone running a company of one.

qiip.me looks nice. How did you get Guy Kawasaki on board? What's your plan in terms of making money with it?

I gradually switched (since Jan 2011) to consulting part-time (I'm down to 2 days in a week) at my previous employer and I've got one product (http://apps.shopify.com/fliptabify) that makes a decent amount of money (enough to survive* but not yet comfortable) and I'm working on a few more.

Currently doing everything myself. Lucky to have a few friends I can bounce off ideas with.

Edit: * To add more context, I'm married and have a 17 month old daughter.

Based on your stats & the size of your dataset, I'm guessing you could easily host this at AppFog on their free tier: http://appfog.com/products/appfog/pricing/

Looks like you're a solopreneur like me. Would love to connect and exchange notes.

"NOTE: You may choose to validate assertions on your own server. While a bit more complicated you can reduce your dependencies on others. Refer to the specification and the source for the reference validator."

- https://github.com/mozilla/browserid/wiki/How-to-Use-Browser...

A better approach might be to go the CoffeeScript way or better still, contribute to php itself. Sure it might take longer but languages take years to catch on...

Its pretty good except for the battery. If you need decent time on it then you need to get an additional battery slice which makes it more expensive and bulkier but it also gives you a great keyboard angle.

Not having names and pictures or your physical address on your about page and just referring to yourself as "we" is a big trust issue for me especially for a product handling payments.

This is interesting if for nothing else than the hope that the record industry will take them to court and prove that digital content is not the same as physical goods and the same rules don't apply, hence contradicting their current stand.

http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/ElectronicFrontier/WineWith...

Here is Kent Beck's take on the four phases of startups where he talks about how these different phases require different development practices, principles, and technologies: http://www.threeriversinstitute.org/blog/?p=252

I'm using the hosting provider for email delivery and already hitting the limits :)

Was looking at moving to one of the email delivery services. Would love to talk. My email is in my profile.

That sounds like a great idea. Added to my todo. Thanks.

1. The tabs are like that because I will be adding more tabs to the left (e.g. "Owed by you" as a way to send IOUs to people, etc.)

2. Thanks will fix.

3. I'm trying to keep it as simple as possible so avoiding signup and login. Which just leaves me with the email to work with.

That idea has crossed my mind but you need a lot of users to make it viable.

No strategy yet. Just solving a problem and it doesn't cost me anything yet.

Nope. Looks great. Thanks.

Whosebill.com looks neat. I'm aiming for a simple, just-get-it-done approach. There isn't even a signup on mine.

Clickable: http://owe.to/

I know the post is by a competitor, but wouldn't telling Living Social about it first and giving them time to fix it before blogging be the "right thing" to do?

I switch to working 3 days a week at my regular gig from Jan 1. Looking forward to trying out stuff I've wanted to for a while and spending more time with the family. Mostly excited about cutting back on the "waste" generated in "going" to work.

Might help if location was an independent field to facilitate searching for hackers in my location and to auto-suggest based on matching location.

Most registrars give you a $50 facebook coupon when you buy a domain name.

Publishers, I'm guessing, want to avoid SPAM without inconveniencing their customers. This idea seems to be pitching the latter (making it easy for the customer) but says nothing about the former (SPAM!). Apart from the other issue of showing someone else's brand as part of a sites conversion process, I think the fact that it does not talk about the spam issue might be a concern for publisher.

That's an interesting question. I wonder how they decide which ads to show on a given site (imagine seeing a competitors ad on your sites CAPTCHA!)

Haven't got anything off the ground yet, but I've thought about this a lot, since I've heard this story before from friends that tried going down the single founder route.

The conclusion that I've come to, is that this is a business model problem. If you are a single founder and want to stay that way, then starting a consumer business whose success depends on getting a lot of customers doesn't seem like the way to go. When I do take the plunge and start something of my own, it's going to be something that caters to very few customers, who in turn sell something to a lot of customers (e.g., a publishing platform for authors where you make a cut of every book sold) or who I can charge a lot. Even better if the billing is recurring.

P.S. The single founders I've spoken to consistently also mention that something that got to them more than any of this, was a feeling of loneliness. Guess HN sorta solves that problem for some.

And in diaspora's case, customizations for your community.

You've summed up neatly what I've tried to do miserably in another comment. While I was fascinated when I first saw the video, the questions that kept bugging me were: What was this design optimized for? What were the design goals behind it?

While the original source does not answer these questions, I came across a lot of answers here in the comments but none of them are substantiated yet.

If the design is optimized for the 4 minutes effect (which it seems to be, based on the compromises made) then I do not think this is simple design and I wonder if it would have the same effect on everyone if they took over an hour to field strip an "actual, drivable condition" Jeep like you say.

Looks like I failed miserably at asking this earlier, but I'm just looking for a reference to the stated design goals. If it is the reason you state, I'm just looking for a reference to it.

Asking "what Jeeps are for" was meant to get at the design goals and I did not mean to dis what is otherwise a very fascinating design choice.

I hear you man, but to me good engineering is also about the problem it is trying to solve and I did not find a reference to that in the original source, so was just asking for more information.

The point I've been trying to make is that simplicity/great-design has a context and that context is missing in the original source. Everyone here seems to be adding context, but I have to take their word for it because they are not presenting it with any supporting facts. e.g., a reference to where the British army claims to be sticking with a 10yr old version of the land rover, to avoid having to deal with computerized engine management system malfunctions in hostile situations.

While I can see and agree with the point that people are making, I would just prefer if they were substantiated.