taprun

Reading books won't help as much as practice speaking and tailored feedback. Why not join a Toastmasters club? They're pretty cheap and will make you much better at both ipromptu and prepared speaking. http://www.toastmasters.org/

Repeat after me: I am not selling training. I am selling a more capable, more efficient development shop.

If you're teaching a group of twenty developers and you're going to make them just 10% more efficient, then guess what. You've just made the company AVERAGE_YEARLY_SALARY * 20 People * 10% == AVERAGE_YEARLY_SALARY * 2 (that's the benefit to the company).

The better question to ask is, how much do I charge for handing the company $300,000 (or whatever it is you're saving them).

I would think the first thing to do would be to figure out what "unfair advantage" you'd have as an online incubator. One option would be to to find an affluent geographic area without a big tech community and then be "the only guy in town" for raising angel money.

You could own the "supply side" of money for the region and then advertise yourself as being someone who is able to fund people living in low cost places.

I picked a very narrow problem, set myself a tiny budget ($50), forced myself into a tiny schedule (7 days) and am blogging about the process on reddit - http://www.reddit.com/r/EntrepreneurRideAlong/comments/2nbvc...

I suspect that having very tight, formalized and public deadlines will force me to put something out. Even putting out something "not good" would be preferable to me not releasing anything while people are watching.

I would like to receive an email every time someone writes a post on hacker news that matches the following expression ((software OR startup) AND (price, pricing, "how much can")). That would be awesome. If you let other users create their own expressions, they might like it too.

I would imagine that items that are very important and have short deadlines would be the least likely to be farmed out by a company. Certainly, they would be the least likely to be made available to companies with no shared history.

If I wanted to pursue jobs like these, I would come up with a pitch and introduce myself to small contracting companies. You'll probably have more luck if you can provide evidence of your prior successes and can demonstrate a very niche skill.

I feel like I can speak on the subject, since I just wrote a book on pricing software.

First, it's often a very bad idea to simply take a competitor's price - both Timex and Rolex would go bankrupt trying to match the other's price.

Here's the short version of what I suggest:

* Write down the pain point that your product solves in 1 sentence. * Write down the types of people who have that pain. * Rank each type by their willingness to pay and their ability to pay. Willingness will be partially based upon how well you can convince them that you'll save / earn them money. Ability will be based upon how much cash is burning a hole in their pockets.

Come up with three tiers, one for each group with the highest value for willingness*ability to pay. You may need to alter it a bit, if any of the groups prove too small.

I have two product pricing teardowns listed at my site ( http://taprun.com ) that might help you think more about pricing.

Even if three other companies are working on the same idea, it doesn't mean that they're going after the same customers.

Does Ferrari compete with Toyota? Does Levi Strauss compete with tailors creating bespoke suits? Does a mountain bike compete with a road bike?

Rather than thinking about which one is "better", think about which story will accomplish your goals.

The ycombinator folks are probably just looking for stories to help figure out a) who is smart, b) who is creative, c) who gets things done, d) who is excited about things

The second story accomplishes each of the above better than the first.

Hackathons promote the fact that your coding style should change depending upon the constraints of the programmer.

Having spent most of my career in R&D, I am constantly amazed by the fact that most folks keep the very same methodology no matter the budget, deadline, risk or importance of a project. Such people are one trick ponies that can only survive in a narrow set of environments.

Hackathons promote adaptation of approach. Spaghetti code is simply one possible result.

Might not apply, but if you have a free legacy account at Google, you can host multiple domains on that account.

I think it would be easier for developers to just form small companies. All the advantages of a union with none of the disadvantages.

I think that such a thing would be very difficult to apply to all startups. When assigning percentages, it should be based upon value provided by each party. I've seen startups where the prototype is something that any developer could kick out in a week. I've seen others where the prototype took months of effort by people with very specialized knowledge.

Go to meetup.com - Type in the name of your city and search for groups involved in "programming". I live in a technology backwater, and I'm attending two tech events this week.

So what? Isn't it more important that their employees are doing a piss-poor job?

Managers should be concerned with what salaried employees produce, not how much time it takes them to produce it.

If you're burned out, try to find some tasks that are really easy for you and are relatively short in duration and well defined.

For instance: setting up google apps for small companies.

Pricing is a big interest of mine (30,000 words into writing a guide on it). Understanding your ideal pricing depends upon understanding your customers and your value proposition.

We need more information before we can tell you what to charge and how to charge it.

I get the feeling that this product would be really good for people who are moving about quite a bit - delivery folks, plumbers, surveyors, etc. Are you going to call out specific types of people who would be best served by this?

Also, minor grammatical nitpick: "LESS MESSAGES" should probably be "FEWER MESSAGES".

Almost certainly. The entire economy is running on smoke and mirrors.

Take a look at this article that describes how companies are borrowing money to buy stock in themselves in order to push up their own share prices: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/companies-tur...

Great idea! I like how you'll email me about upcoming opportunities.

I just wish I could add my zip code and get opportunities within a fixed range of my address.

Learn how to analyze a business problem and come up with a solution. See my blog for a rant -http://taprun.com/blog/business-of-programming

This looks similar to idonethis.com

There was a lot of discussion about it in prior threads. Long story short, I guess the need for your product is already validated.

Could you point out some problems companies have when localizing for Korea? Being able to point out how others have failed, and how you can help us succeed would be a great argument for hiring you. (note: I'm not in a position to hire anyone at the moment)

Also, I spoke to a Brazilian guy a few years ago. He said he took an idea from an American website, translated it to Brazilian had a profitable business in no time.

I made a list of some useful free tools: http://taprun.com/guides/seo/

I once inherited a big desktop app. It was a mess (everything was in one package, all methods and data were public, it didn't compile and there was no versioning history).

I started by breaking down the code into a few major sections and isolating them into their own modules. This helped me focus on one section of the code at a time without having to understand the whole thing. Then I made as much of the code as possible private. As long as the interfaces were clean, I could fix up the internals at my leisure - or hand them out for others to fix. Then I tried to get it to compile. Then whenever I ran into a runtime problem, I was cleanup that section of code while I fixed the bug.

tl;dr - Divide and conquer. Julius Caesar for the win!

Could he start a hacklab? Find an old warehouse, put in some big tables and some equipment then invite people to come in and learn about engineering?

Some people got together nearby, got a government grant and setup a building to do just that. Charge a monthly fee to members and BAM! He's a business owner doing what he loves.

It's not clear what pain you're solving, or what you system does. I think it has something to do with converting the format of my email, but I'm not sure how that help me.

I'm also not sure why I'd want to give up the flexibility of using my own email address for one on a domain I don't control. Also, if this is a valid pain point, I highly doubt that software engineers would feel this pain any more than a dozen other professional classes. Would accountants not have this pain?

It might just be a matter of picking out a better use case.

How about if it listens for someone screaming for help and calls an ambulance? Assuming you can limit false positives, you could probably sell it for use with the elderly and the infirm.

It's funny that no one mentioned the following:

This guy is going to lie to his client and wants you to lie too, but you feel like you can trust him (to provide you with more work).

One more possibility - as human populations get wealthier and more educated, their population growth rate decreases.

Maybe by the time lifeforms get the technology to travel to other stars, they find that they don't need to expand.

There are many places (even within the USA) that we have the technology to colonize, but not the desire.