thetrumanshow

Put up a landing page now so you can collect emails from interested folks.

Interesting, and perhaps related, is the tendency of people who aren't socially inclined (and tend not to enjoy small-talk) to employ the ask-a-million questions technique. This is how many-an-engineer can muscle through the most awkward social interactions with ease. The upsides of this approach are: 1) you will seem genuinely interested and come across as personable, and 2) you get to learn new things.

I think I can be of service here...

pjmlp stated "All forms of software development are fine, as long as the developers manage to have some form of sustained earnings from it, which is not so easy as many think." .. in which, in context, he likely meant that those who are inclined to look askance at closed-source companies should realize that there is much sustained value to be derived from such activities. Our community tends to frown on people who advocate the Jim Gray[1] closed-source perspective, so pjmlp was naturally inclined to be defensive.

icebraining was simply taking issue with the portion that reads "All forms of software development are fine, as long as the developers manage to have some form of sustained earnings from it" which, if taken literally, suggests that extreme cases like software that kills kittens is morally good as long as someone makes a buck from it. I am pretty sure that pjmlp did not mean it in exactly this way.

[1] http://www.infoworld.com/t/platforms/microsoft-exec-open-sou...

Does it make sense, given your architecture and business plans, to move in the direction of shipping/eval'ing the js for each type of app? I ask because we have considered doing this and would like to know any pros/cons that you're aware of.

Thanks for offering.

If you're building an app maker and not just an event app creator, I might assume you're shipping JS code and storing in the db or something along those lines. My question is, how much of your code is bundled with the app in the store and how much of it is fetched and eval'd at install/run time?

Interesting that Facebook has quietly evolved into what is basically an alternative for email list marketing. On the plus side, they are effectively training businesses to see the value of such things. Given that a certain % of those folks aren't going to want to pay Facebook due to their bait and switch tactics, I would expect companies like Constant Contact to be sitting on the verge of another round of explosive growth.

Christoph Janz, by the way, was an angel investor in our company CalendarHub (an early YC applicant who lost out to Justin Kan's Kiko, I believe). We were lucky to land him, but we weren't at all prepared to take advantage of Christoph's deep knowledge and insight (neither of us were willing to take the leap to full-time), else we might have been far more successful than we were.

Christoph was boots-on-the-ground the whole time. Hell, I would say he was in the trenches with us, but that is giving us too much credit. I think he was practically the only one in the fire-fight at times. He was tenacious and bold and he operated on a completely different level than us. At the very least, I got my first glimpse of what a real driven tech entrepreneur looked like.

Nir, this was a great video. I took a lot of notes. Great stuff!

The day I realized that my transactional business model needed to process $1MM a month in sales to be interesting to me AT ALL was the day I became slightly less enthusiastic about it. Thus, my short-term focus remains solidly on subscription-based businesses.

Hi Elastic, welcome to the sales business. We're working on a sales process standardization system, which we assume will be a component of your business going forward, so it will be interesting to track your progress. We probably won't be getting anywhere near the sales-team-as-a-service area. Best of luck! Edit: removed a baseless assumption.

Hmmm. Maybe I'm the minority, but I can't extrapolate those data points to even begin to understand the ballpark. I have an app tucked away somewhere that has a huge amount of traffic and a great rank in its marketplace. If I were to provide the stats and the context, you might assume I was making a killing, and you'd be wrong.

They encourage groups outside of the US to participate, so can't imagine they'd exclude a stateside group. I plan to participate remotely myself.

Signed up. Very interested in sharing what we've been trying in our tiny (profitable) venture and hoping to learn a few things from others. Here's to hoping that a real community forms out of this.

Yes, but consider, they may very well alter their effort-level to suit the salary you pay them, thereby saving energy for things that matter more to them.

Kinda wish they would keep FriendConnect. It is a nice container to run Javascript apps on 3rd party sites (it proxies your requests so you can call your home server and serve up data). Also, the polling and newsletter apps that are baked into the FriendConnect toolset was sure nice.

Also it kinda sucks that I trusted them to handle the sign-in for my community. 12K users. {Sigh}

Sent you an email with my contact info.

I am seeing this comment pattern more often now; Its like the opening sentence is meant to insulate the commenter from being dinged in the event that this article turns out to be a honeypot.

Dang, ok, I'll be the dissenter. I like Godaddy.

Despite their slimy personna, their one saving grace is that when I am setting anything up that requires a DNS configuration (example: Heroku-hosted site), there is ALWAYS a Godaddy-specific tutorial available to help me get through it. For that reason alone, I bailed on Namecheap (et. al) and embraced Godaddy as a registrar.

Now, because the brand is so horribly raunchy, I rarely mention this to anyone... as it embarasses me personally.

Agreed. Its definitely hard to convince yourself to go heads down and full steam ahead on a good bet, when there is a chance that there are better bets somewhere out there.

They've probably bought into the idea that the U.S. government is organizing the revolt using the internet, just like China is suggesting: http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_18199122

Google has made some unpopular developer-facing moves lately (App Engine pricing changes come to mind), and it seems entirely out-of-character.

From now on, any API announcement from Google should be accompanied with a GIANT expiration date stamped all over it by default. Then, if it keeps going... happy surprise!

That is certainly so. However at the intersection of two sets {draws two circles}: 1) Idea guys with money, 2) idea guys who think programming is easy ... there probably isn't much interest in paying engineers.

The intersection is getting larger thanks in part to engineers self-deprecating like this, which is potentially good for innovation and potentially bad for my wallet.

"They both think that less skill is required (so the programmer doesn’t deserve much compensation) and that less time is required (effectively creating a very low hourly rate for the programmer, given the flat rates that are often proposed)."

I find it ironic how he points out that idea guys tend to undervalue the hard work of the programmer and then at the end he suggests that the idea guy should implement it himself.

So which is it? Is programming a hard-earned skill that should be paid well, or is it just so easy that a (presumably non-technical) idea guy can just pick it up and run with it? You're sending mixed messages.

"And not for nothing: I'll wager that your grandparents didn't work hard with the intention that their grandchildren would have to spend their lives working for a company that never gave them time off."

Very interesting. I had never thought of this... that the impetus for the former generations was, perhaps, to make it so that their children didn't have to work their asses off. But, instead, we took their dedication to work as some kind of example of how an 'honest day's work is done' and felt a moral obligation to do the same, and we pass this lesson on to our children.

Ah, so I'm assuming "zombie" was just a cute adjective then (as opposed to being an industry term)? Either way, thanks for explaining.

Whoa there, can you expand on this a bit?

Yeah, that post told me nothing about much I can expect my out-of-pocket to change... which is all I am really interested in knowing at this point.

It would be helpful if, before go-live, they allowed you to simulate the execution of your app under the new pricing framework to see how much it was going to cost. I don't want a big surprise the day of launch.

"Its hard, but not THAT hard!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY

6 years into building web-apps and finally I am just now seeing a few bucks rolling in (still <$1000 month).

I wasted lots of time, primarily pursuing the wrong kinds of business models (free!!!) or putting effort into the wrong areas of a business, ultimately burning out because things weren't working.

But, even if you've picked a good product with a good market, for the un-initiated engineer there's this mysterious delta between being able to build something (anything!), and making that something successful. My recommendation (because its working for me), is to find a co-founder who is a business guy employed at a successful small software company. Painting with broad strokes here, but try to pick a sales or marketing guy over a biz dev guy, I think they are connected better with the product.

You've heard this advice before. Its true. Engineers think of the world as meritocratic. But good product != success. You need someone to help you get past this way of thinking.

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I would care more about Facebook and Twitter if all my friends could easily tell that I was there long before any of them. The point is, I think early adopters take pride in being the first one in their social group to try something new, and they might invite their friends just so everyone would know they were first.

Yes, I do tend to think that they would be tolerant of sponsorships, but I'm not sure I could find a sponsorship that would make up the difference.