vu0tran

How many users do you have? Do you have traction? Is it viral? Who else has invested in your startup? Did Sequoia pass? Why did Sequoia pass?

[Explain how your startup will make 90 billion dollars in the first year]

I'm sorry, I've already invested into too many companies, but if you know any other Y Companies, I would love to speak to them.

> Excluding for fun and educational purposes

"Experiment #2: Can I start a bank?"

I agree. I admit that the experiment is completely flawed and any sort of data will be completely subjective. Also, I want to be on record that there are a lot of people out there who are living truly desperate lives and I don't mean to undercut them in any way.

Yeah, I wrote that part as a half joke. The point I was trying convey though is better explained by Peter Thiel:

http://www.businessinsider.com/this-venn-diagram-shows-why-s...

Thanks for the suggestion on affiliate marketing. Funny thing is the idea I'm going to pursue is sort of like affiliate marketing. (I've also worked at an affiliate marketing SaaS in the past)

Yeah, you may be right. I wrote up the blog post and considered withdrawing it before anyone read it but it somehow managed to get its way here anyways because my co-founder thought it'd be funny to post.

If it cuts into my ability to work at my startup, I'll stop immediately as that's my #1 priority. You'll be surprised though that even putting in 60 hrs a week into a startup, exercising and having a significant other, if you work efficiently you still have time left. (168 hrs in a week - 60 - 8 hrs a day for sleep = 62 free hrs left. 1 hr a day for exercising and 2 hrs a day for an SO leaves 41 hrs left. )

But really though, I don't know. This might turn into a lesson about how distracting side projects can be while running a startup. Or how to optimize your time more efficiently. Or even how to run a bad experiment. If this turns out to be a really bad idea, I'll learn from it, share it with you guys and move on.

Thanks for watching out for me though. I appreciate your concern.

Yeah, for us, it's kind of like 20% time except you still do it on top of all of your work and don't get paid more. 120% time?

When I need to unwind from coding, I code. Some play games, some watch movies, I just like building things, learning about them and sharing the knowledge. So just like anything else we do on the side to keep ourselves sane, as long as it doesn't hinder our performance, we don't mind.

We actually try to encourage each other to try new things. It keeps us sharp. We usually end up open sourcing it and integrating it into TapIn.tv anyways. I'll probably end up learning a lot about efficient time management, managing customer relationship, and machine learning I can bring back to my team through this experiment.

Who knows, maybe if this works out, we'll try to be more desperate at TapIn.

Wow, didn't think anyone would post my own blog post here before me. I guess I now have no choice now.

How timely. I'm actually starting a challenge for myself to see if I can bootstrap something to at least $5,000 in revenue a month. I've tried and failed many times, but this time, I'm going to force myself to only live off what I can make with this product.

http://vutran.me/blog/desperation.html

Yeah, I knew I must have been missing something. That's why I put "search engine" in quotes. :)

Thanks for the tip. I was trying to remember what XSS was.

http://foobub.com/?s=xss

Bam. Foobub.

I'll get into more detail with a blog post tomorrow, but I just used Yahoo/Bing. It was a 3 hr project, figured I didn't need to reinvent the wheel :)

Hi, since there seems to be a lot of interest, I figured I could answer all of them at once in a blog post which I'll post sometime tomorrow.

To answer your question though, the backend is running on Python. There's no particular reason. I just find it a lot easier to script with. It's running on fCGI with nginx on the backend server. On the front is PHP... which is served through up by apache. I find it easier for me to do $_GET, hack around forms really fast and also just echo Javascript everywhere.

My site does not SEO well.

If it's really confident about a result, it'll only give 1 or 2 results. i.e. http://foobub.com/?s=cats

If it's kinda confused, it gives multiple results and ranks the site by most likely: http://foobub.com/?s=what%20is%20the%20answer%20to%20life%20...

If it has no what you're doing, it'll search it on Google for you: http://foobub.com/?s=foobub

My website is not yet self-aware. No need to worry, guys.

Yeah. After I 'unshitify' a bit of it.

I replied to this above. Just:

'Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, Google Answers (lawl), Quora, Stackoverflow.'

Stackoverflow comes up when you do coding questions, yahoo answers when you do just random questions. Although, Quora doesn't appear as often as I like. I need to do a bit of tweaking.

Here's an example where Quora comes up: http://foobub.com/?s=vu0tran

Thanks for the suggestion. It's in!

Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, Google Answers (lawl), Quora, Stackoverflow.

Try putting in a coding question and Stackoverflow will show: http://foobub.com/?s=python+xrange+vs+range

If you put in a random question, yahoo answers will probably appear: http://foobub.com/?s=why+does+sweat+smell+so+bad

Wikipedia just generally comes up first as the way it's weighted. It answers and provides knowledge for most queries.

Big surprise! Thanks! :)

The website isn't meant to be used for any real utility. What I wanted to demonstrate was just an alternate way to look at search.

I think we've just gotten so used to Google and its millions of results; I wondered, what would happen if I took that all away and presented only just a small handful of results?

The Zuck is sort of right though. There is no doubt that the iOS / Android FB app is pretty slow and buggy due to their dependence on HTML5. They've gotten grilled by their users in the past -- although props to them for really improving it recently.

I'm not saying that HTML5 is a bad technology or anything, it just isn't quite there yet.

Good article nonetheless.

Alright. I'll bite. I'll deploy it tomorrow and give it a whirl and see how it stands up :)

3D maps looks promising.

I haven't read through the iOS 6 dev manual, but I wonder what implication it has on MKMapKit and developers.

A bit bummed that Siri in iOS 6 won't be supporting iPhone 4

Not sure how I feel about the Facebook integration...

Am I the only one that thought their comment was in good humor? Maybe my sense of humor is twisted, but having attended many hackathons, I got a good chuckle as it was obvious that many of them turn out to be sausage fests. I felt this comment poked fun at this.

shut up and take my money

Just as an FYI, I've kept the sheet unchanged. For the most, this is what the users put in and this is the order they inputed them.

If you guys would like me to organize the chart better, i.e. by salary, or something, let me know please.

Here it is guys:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Av55q3freJTPdHk...