soneill

CoFounderLabs.com is about as close as currently exists.

CoFounderLabs.com is an option.

As a business owner, if someone is offering you equity and no cash for an app, then they don't believe enough in their business and neither should you.

My suggestion: Abide by the NDA. Think this through. You're a small, early stage company. If a leak comes out, do you really think the buyer is going to believe that it came from anywhere but you? How does that make you look to them? What's more likely to happen: they're going to offer a much higher price as a result of a bidding war, or they're simply going to walk away? If you show yourself to be a person or business that doesn't negotiate in good faith, no one is going to be willing to work with you. The last thing you want is a large angry corporation with better, more expensive lawyers than you can afford coming after you for a breach of contract.

Long story short: Abide by the agreements you sign.

Not intended to be overly harsh. I like the idea, those are just my immediate thoughts as a potential user.

First Thought: As an FYI, the site doesn't seem to display correctly on the computer I'm using. Using IE9, everything seems to be stacking on top of each other (I'm guessing the black area is supposed to be below all the little squares and there shouldn't just be a big green mess in the middle of the screen).

Second Thought: Not sure how I feel about the pop-ups for "About", "Contact", etc. Maybe it's just me, but I'd much prefer those as links to actual pages.

Third Thought: Total nitpick, but spell check brother! In "How It Works", the first thing my eye was drawn towards was "recomendations". In the same section, I'd suggest losing some of the italics (maybe keep it for the hint).

I think it's more the former than the latter. Restricting or controlling the flow of information is a standard tool for authoritarian regimes; it's easier to control your population when you can control how they perceive the world. The Iranians have additional incentives in their national security concerns, as they'd obviously like to avoid a repeat of the Flame attack.

Ha, I should've guessed. I knew Cuba had a network like that, wasn't aware of North Korea's.

Such is the history of authoritarian regimes. If North Korea weren't so backwards, I imagine they'd be trying to do much the same thing.

It depends on exactly how you're contacting them. Electronic contact with personal email addresses are more likely to get a response than generic "info" addresses, let alone "contact us" pages. That said, a 10% rate is generally considered successful.

I know that's not encouraging, but I'd say that's the ballpark for success based on my experience.

I had not; thanks for the link!

Sure. I'm working on an online food ordering platform called Couchster. We're starting off in New Orleans as our initial market, with plans to expand further in the South (where the existing competition in this industry doesn't have much, if any, presence) in the future. We have some cool features, and our product has some competitive advantages over the existing competition in that our platform allows our restaurant partners to get paid immediately and directly (unlike Grubhub et al which process payments themselves and then pay out their partners afterwards). Everything is designed to scale and to maximize automation, so we should be able to grow fairly briskly once the existing loose ends are wrapped up.

At present, front end experience is a bit more of a priority to me than back end. While we'll have a complete MVP in the near future, there's plenty of room for improvement and added functionality. To date the site is all in PHP, Java and HTML5 (I believe), but if I found a permanent person, I'd be willing to change that as needed. I think our back end is fairly well put together, but then again, I'm not a developer so take that opinion FWIW.

I can be contacted at soneill at couchster.com.

No, that should be fine. Just be realistic in your expectations for replies; you're basically cold-calling, so expect the majority of your inquiries to be ignored.

This is all good advice, but a couple notes:

1) Don't lie to your co-workers or boss. You shouldn't talk about your business all the time, but don't be afraid to let them know what you're doing. This is really a context dependant situation, but personally, when I was starting my company while I was still working a 9-5, I didn't hide that fact which made it much easier to leave the company amicably when the time came to do so.

2) Make sure you have a lawyer you can run things by, but you don't necessarily need the accountant right off the bat. It depends on how quickly you'll be generating revenue and how, but you can do without an accountant for a while.

The contractors point is a very good one, and I can't stress it enough. If you can get away with bringing everyone on board as contractors, you can save yourself a ton of hassle and costs in HR, taxes, etc.

I believe this is correct. If the billing address you provide doesn't match up to what your creditor has on file, the creditor won't authorize the transaction.

Two part response: 1) There's nothing backing up those claims, and without hard data it's hard to know how seriously to take them. That said, those aren't uncommon claims to make against any poor immigrant group (in Eastern Europe, you'll hear much the same charges levied against the Roma, gypsies, with some regularity).

2) At the heart of it, the real issues are demographic and integration based, not religious. There's a reason you don't see those kind of claims in the US, Canada, or the UK: those countries are used to new immigrants and integrating them. Mainland Europe is not, and has struggled to figure out how to do so, and that lack of integration has consequences which typically manifest in crime.

Do they post their schedules on their site? If it's public domain information, you may be able to just post it yourselves even if you can't integrate directly with them. If you can generate some traffic for them, that may make them more open to working with you.

Secondly, how are you reaching out to them? Electronic contact is less likely to succeed than calling them and calling them to try and arrange an in-person discussion.

I don't know the figures offhand, but the percentage of Americans who don't believe in evolution is...disheartening to say the least. Hell, it's downright embarassing when you compare the percentage of Americans who don't believe in evolution to the percentage in other 1st world countries. Yay evangelical fundamentalism!

I'm located in the South (New Orleans), and from a hiring perspective it seems like a bit of a buyer's market down here. When I've posted ads for developers, I've gotten a lot of replies, and I've been able to dictate contract terms pretty easily thus far. From what I've seen, there's really a firm/freelancer divide; firms are charging incredible fees and don't really move off them, but freelancers have been easier to negotiate with and get at market (or slightly below market) rates.

Frankly, I don't even talk to firms anymore. From what I've seen, their quality isn't any better, and their fees are so much higher it isn't even worth talking to them.

Islamophobia is a virulent issue, particulary in Europe. There are a number of reasons behind this (most prevalently Continental Europe's lack of a history of immigration and integration, which has caused struggles throughout the Continent since large scale immigration from non-European countries began in the late 60s and 70s), but that doesn't excuse it.

I struggle to see why this merits a link. That said, there's a parallel I love to draw when people make this particular argument: is what they're saying about Muslims all that different from what 19th century Americans said about Italian and Irish immigrants and their "allegiance to the Pope above country"? Xenophobia is nothing new.

Agreed, it's really a Know Your Market situation. I think most business start-ups (that aren't mobile oriented) can reasonably assume that their customers won't be using those kind of devices, and don't need to design with that in mind. No reason to waste money designing for a market you're not planning on competing in.

I think it varies depending on the VC firm, but the impression I've gotten (I haven't actually gotten to the VC round with my company, so this is all second hand from talking with VCs and other entrepreneurs) is that the radio silence scenario is far from atypical.

I think that's the kind of lesson one should learn fairly quickly if you talk to experienced entrepreneurs. I was at a panel fairly recently where literally every single panel member (including a VC guy) mentioned you should never make the mistake of thinking that talks, no matter how advanced, with a VC mean a deal is forthcoming, and that you should always be continuing to look for other options until the pen hits the paper. You don't really need something like YC for that lesson; just talk to experienced entrepreneurs or other VCs (assuming you have some contacts with either camp).

Automattic (the company behind wordpress) has their privacy policy and ToS under a creative commons sharealike license, so they may be a good template for you to base yours on. I used it as a template for my startup, and it only took a couple hours of tweaking to adapt it to my purposes. In any event, it's a good resource: http://automattic.com/privacy/