tkiley

The short answer: we can't. Sometimes, we miss the guaranteed appointment time. However, we do everything we can to ensure that our predictions are accurate, and we do everything we can to ensure that the patient experience is still as smooth as possible if we're wrong.

At this point, we have a 99.9% success rate with that guarantee: less than 1 out of every 1,000 patients has requested a write-off of the bill.

Right now, we're use a manual workflow; we provide patients' preregistration data to nurses and registration staff through a web interface. Direct EHR integration is my next priority.

We're implementing at relatively low-volume locations (in the neighborhood of 25-35k pts per year), and so far we've used the same manual workflow at all locations without any problems, but I think we need full integration for long-term growth.

I'd love to talk further by email -- can you send me a note at tyler@mystartupdomain?

The key phrase here is "middle of the night". How many areas have drugstore clinics that are open at 2am?

This is a very good question, and a very complicated one. In many markets, retail clinics and urgent care centers are open 60 hours per week at best; nights and weekends, treatment options are scarce.

Additionally, many hospitals operate onsite "fast-track" clinics which are connected to the ED, so low-acuity conditions are essentially treated in something resembling a retail clinic.

Our goal is to make the emergency medical treatment experience as efficient as possible. Parents don't want to be sitting in the waiting room half the night, potentially exposing their children to contagious diseases in the er. Professionals lose valuable time to ER visits that drag on forever. We're trying to recapture that lost time and give the patients more control of the treatment process.

Thanks for reporting this, it's been fixed, and we did receive your hospital suggestion. :)

This is my startup. 100% bootstrapped and ramen profitable. Questions and comments encouraged. Thanks for checking it out!

Granted, this hack relies on a bug in old borland library code which means it's not effective in all situations, but it's still pretty cool.

This article singles out Safari on the iPhone, saying that it supports "tabs". Ironically, iPhone Safari's "tabs" behave exactly like this broken back button behavior -- I've noticed that often when I switch back to an old tab on my iphone, the page is often refetched (losing my position and any form content) because it was unloaded while I was browsing on another tab.

To me, it goes like this: If your environment, genes, family, and children are such that your children fall in the category of "students who must attend classes class for the benefit of the other students", you should homeschool, period. If the educational system is going to hold your children back for the benefit of the other students, you should get them out. However, if that's not the case, then I would leave them in a more traditional school system.

That's arguably a pretty selfish way to evaluate things, but speaking as a K-12 homeschooled student, I think it's the best way to make the most of the options in front of you.

That's pretty amazing. I wonder what happens to revenue in the weeks following the sale; do sales dry up completely, or do they stay strong as players recruit their friends, perhaps?

Part of the 3000% jump was probably due to the fact that this particular sale made the front page of reddit and digg, but still, it's quite impressive.

The Youtube clip is from an interview with Branford Marsalis in the documentary film "Before The Music Dies". The whole thing is definitely worth seeing, if you have any interest in music or business. It's available for $3 as an indie download.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0760307/ http://www.beforethemusicdies.com/blog/b4md

Not really. ;-)

Our goal is to make lots of things very, very easy for new users, and make lots of other things readily available for well-informed users. Right now, we aren't aiming to make in-depth analytics very, very easy, because we don't currently believe it's critical for our new users (after all, if you don't have enough of an understanding of the world wide web to make some minor code edits, you probably aren't going to be deriving much value from sophisticated analytics anyway).

With that said, our theming/templating architecture plays well with google analytics, so it's readily available for well-informed users, and we'll be releasing some basic integrated stats soonish.

Usability! ;-)

In all seriousness, Viviti and typeroom share some of the same features, but it looks like typeroom is an editing tool, not a hosted solution, and that's not a market we're interested in.

Synthasite is also a useful tool, but when it comes right down to it, the design of any tool makes some things impossible, some things doable, and some things easy. We're aiming to make some previously impossible things doable and some previously hard things easy, and I think so far, we're succeeding. ;-)

Heh, I've spent so much time working on that model that I didn't even realize that word was there. Thanks for pointing it out!

We sure do. It's not yet a part of the sign-up process, but once you've created an account, you can add custom domain names.

This discussion is probably dead, but just in case:

Within the last year, I've been in the position of doing <$1k/month on a credit card processor, and it was actually a delightful experience. The company I originally worked with was bought/renamed or something and I haven't had to deal with them in quite a few months, but I can probably dig up a contact. Email me if you like.

This will be fixed in production later today. Thanks!

Thanks for pointing that out. We fixed the CSS issue, and we'll get it out to the production servers later today.

Funny that you would test the header image first. We've managed to do partial updates for most content on the pages, but right now we still do a full reload (window.location.reload(true), for you DOM junkies) for image replacements.

We haven't nailed down the pricing structure yet, but we will be announcing it very soon, and we'll definitely have a free version.

Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks for the feedback. We'll keep working on the password strength checker :) We're trying to make it a little fun so people will voluntarily choose stronger passwords.

Good points. Getting a demo video up on the homepage is a priority at this point; for orientation after sign-up, we're thinking about doing a quick overlay/popup that explains how to edit and add content. I don't think it should take more than a few hints to help people through creating their first few pages.

Thanks for checking it out.

Shamiq,

We're planning to put up an "about" page (as well as a more extended explanation of features) as soon as our designer can get it all put together visually. Should be sometime later this week.

In the meantime, check out the blog: http://blog.viviti.com/

There's quite a bit of info about the development of Viviti in there, plus links to the personal sites of all the developers.

Thanks for checking it out!

Viviti, our beloved new CMS/sitebuilder, has been under development for several years now. The CMS market is crowded, but we're going for a level of simplicity and flexibility that hasn't been achieved by any of the solutions out there right now.

Feedback is always welcome!

What about outsourcing graphic design?

I can code everything my startup needs, but we don't have a good graphic designer. I suspect that we could go a long way with a few mockups from a great designer.

Of course, good designers tend to be expensive, and I suspect hiring a really good one would blow through a good chunk of my savings :[

The main practical benefit of object wrapping (ActiveRecord in particular) is that it gives you a more structured way to lay out the model-related logic for your app. Callbacks, model validations, and associations in particular allow you to easily compartmentalize a lot of the details of your models. If you're looking for ways to reduce the complexity of the problem space in your head, ActiveRecord et al are great ways to do it.

(ymmv. If you eat, sleep, think, dream, and make love in SQL, I guess you might as well ditch the ORM)

It's great to hear that!

Sometimes, it seems like the products that succeed in a free market are not necessarily the products that will make consumers happiest in the long run.

For instance: Facebook has a ludicrously high valuation, but is it actually creating that much value? I don't think so -- the monetary valuation of Facebook is mostly due to the fact that it is addictive and contagious, rather than due to any substantial consumer betterment created by the service.

(That general critique is also applicable to most of the facebook apps out there so far, I think)

Do you care to offer better?

This question isn't really aimed at people who can afford to live in cardboard boxes while working on the Next Big Thing. Some of us need a relatively high baseline level of stability while we pursue chaotic business opportunities.

Waiting tables seems like a great one -- not a lot of "job security", but plenty of demand, so it should be fairly easy to match your amount of work to the amount of money you need to get back to work on more interesting things.

Firefighting seems to vary from city to city, but in many cities, it appears you can start as a firefighter with 6 mos. training, and the starting pay is decent ($55k in seattle, for example).

That brings up an interesting question, though: if you can make $55k/yr working 10 days out of every 30 in job x, are you less likely to succeed in your startup? How much of entrepreneurial success is motivated by need? (The existence of serial entrepreneurs would seem to indicate "not much".)

So far, the best one I've been able to come up with is firefighting. It provides enough money to survive, and requires 10 days of work per month (and my firefighter friend tells me station life is often quiet enough that you can often work on other things while on duty).

It doesn't provide much opportunity for networking or solving interesting problems on the job, but the job security, reasonable pay, benefits, and low hours seem like a great deal.

Any other ideas?