skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I was a kid, I had friends of all ages: other kids, young adults, older adults. As an adult, I have friends who are much younger than me, about the same age, and older: currently teenage to mid-60s. Age is just not an issue.

Geeks are a different sort of person. We don't care about your ethnic group, your age, how popular you are, or even (much) about your gender. Whatever, all we care about is beautiful design and deep ideas. We instantly recognize others who think this way, and we stay this way our whole lives. Maybe it's neoteny.
Podcasts from www.venturevoice.com.

Great interviews with entrepreneurs, and they're each about an hour long -- perfect for road trips.

Complete list here: http://www.venturevoice.com/library.html
This makes some sense if making the transaction has a fixed cost. If I had to spend the same amount of time to fill out a 14 day loan as a multi-year one, I'd need to price the shorter one higher even if I wanted the same APR otherwise.
Yes, if you want to spend no time on the wife the the three children.

It's never too late, but you need to lift anchor and set sail!
I actually meant a longer timescale...like leaving the problem alone for a week while I work on some other aspect of the product, and then coming back to it. Like if I'm stuck on a UI library, I'll go work on backend stuff instead. About half the time, the solution to my original problem is obvious when I return to it, and another quarter of the time, the problem is irrelevant and I need to rewrite it anyway.

If I'm stuck on everything, I'll work on a side project. That's how Scrutiny, Bootstrapacitor, ArcLite, and Randomicity were done. (Most of the time, the side project itself amounts to nothing, but it serves its purpose of getting me unblocked.)

This is one reason why I find projects often accelerate as I get farther along in them: they generate other productive tasks that I can do when I get stuck. I'm less likely to work on something completely unrelated then, so overall project velocity increases.
We may well bring in a partner who has more sales skills.

However, I'm not looking for tips or advice (right now), I'm just looking for stories of how techie types with subscription web sites actually got their first customer.
How did you find your first beta tester?
> Does anyone agree with me?

The law doesn't even agree with you. Copyright is not a natural right, it's an exchange of monopoly for the hope that your artistic achievement will advance the natural arts of our society. If the terms of that grant are onerous and society derives no benefit from it, then it is not immoral or unethical for society to revoke your monopoly.

In this case, if everyone is pirating, then it's absolutely moral for an individual to do it.
I'm sure this is hopelessly old-fashioned, but we advertised. Our web business is aimed specifically at artists, so we advertised in print magazines aimed at artists, handed out fliers at art exhibitions etc.
think the people who are not hackers view the term "hackers" as more of a person who makes something from nothing. hacking in my mind has a lot of allusions to trying to get through a jungle with a machete. It's a rough quick way to get something done.

I don't think many on this site see their hacker status having anything to do with quick and dirty but I think perhaps the general populous views it that way.
Flash 10 p2p and CDNs – Deeper Analysis
Swiss man soars above Alps with jet-powered wing
I had the same issue. But now am in the habit of taking my watch off when I'm infront of my laptop.
I totally disagree. Building a handheld application requires getting into the mindset of the UI that it requires. I say this having worked on handhelds for, um, 15 years now.

And you're badly undervaluing delight.

Let me give a concrete example from my own work.

A buddy an I wrote a text-adventure parser so you could play stuff like Zork and HHGTTG on the Newton. It worked really well and was reasonably popular at least partly based on the interface.

Understand that you always have access to a keyboard on the Newton -- there was even an external one.

But what we did was to have a word automatically entered on the input box when you tapped on that word above in the description.

That was scads faster than tapping something out. And made users wicked happy.
My first customer was not a paying customer. It was probably my 4th or 5th that actually paid. The first people are really beta testers.

I knew people liked it when they asked what it cost.

Disclaimer: I'm still a long way from profitable, and I'm not totally committed to the subscription model. In 2007 my subscription revenue was $70.50 and ad revenue was $2.05.
You can probably find and get rid of one of a kind/rare items already. What's harder, is dealing with used generic items. I have a bunch of electronics I wouldn't mind selling, and a bunch I would like to have, but it would be more hassle than its worse to go through eBay or craigslist. This thing looks well implemented, with the focus on the type of item, rather than each discrete item in particular (like existing listing sites). This is a good fit for mass produced items, whose differences are basically limited to just condition.
Find an active community website(call it X) that is related to your product and post some messages in the boards offering a free trial to X members. For instance, if your product is for investors, post some messages on Fool.com or MoneyMakersGroup. If your product is for gamers, maybe something on the IGN boards. For hackers, this site would do. For car buffs, maybe CarForums.net.

If it's a B2B offering, find a related vertical and look for forums or industry websites for that vertical. Again, offer a free trial or some kind of benefit to entice these customers to sign up and keep them satisfied while you work out the bugs.

Generally there are very active and loyal members at these sites that are very interested in new tools that would appeal to their niche community.
too funny and about time we have president that "gets it"
Wigix: please get rid of the stock photo on the front.
Then they should focus on lowering the default rate, not increasing the interest rate. The Grameen bank gets repayment rates of over 98%.

Assuming a cost of capital of 3%, if they need to charge 70% interest to make a profit then roughly 40% of their loans are defaulting. A 40% default rate means people are using these loans for consumption, not investment. You need better financial education then, not better access to credit.
The good thing about moving apps onto the web, is that it gives centralized control, and gets rid of the concept of software piracy. Sure you could hack the website, or steal an account possibly, but that's easy enough to fix once found.

I think 'software piracy' is such a broad term there's no easy way to have a blanket opinion on it.
Copying DVDs and cover art and selling hard copies is clearly wrong. But say preventing a machine from emitting UDP packets so you can run 2 copies of the same software on a home network... Well, the only person who even knows about that piracy is yourself, and if you didn't do it, you probably wouldn't buy 2 copies anyway. In that instance there is no damage, no lost sale, and so I'd say it was ok.
No contest. Pepsi. Coke has a very sinister aftertaste.
always great to see a group of tech enthusiasts putting on their own show and learning together!

I have to say, the list of topics is a great one--something for everyone, hell bring your gf!
Switching to SwitchABit
It's ok if your costs are that high (70% of 50US$ is just 3.5US$ which even with a very little salary is hardly enough to do due dilligence). Usually the rate of return for micro-entrepreneurs is far above 100% so it's still a good deal. The alternative would be not to give any loans which would hurt the poor most.

If you are interested in this topic you check out my master thesis of 2004 (if you don't mind my crappy English) here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/92714/Microfinance

It covers exactly that topic.
You mean this one:

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=woman+with+lapto...

Seems like a pretty good idea, though.
Yes - The king, the mice and the cheese.
These sound like fine ideas. Are they how you got your first customer? How did that happen? I'm interested in hearing the story from start to end.
This American Life shows/podcasts.
Thanks! What web business is it?
Install AntiRSI http://tech.inhelsinki.nl/antirsi/ and follow the breaks rigorously. I.e. 8 min break each hour and mini breaks for stretching. Then fire up itunes with "Ambient 1: Music for Airports" by Brian Eno set to a very low volume. Then work! [and read http://seoblackhat.com/2007/01/29/do-it-fucking-now/]
So did it work? Can you tell us more?
Chatbot Game: A web 2.0 approach to building a chatbot.
A chatbot that you can improve by playing a game:

http://chatbotgame.com

In fact, it's a bit like a social news site. To play the game, you submit chat rules, which you can think of as being similar to news submissions. Voting on these chat rules occurs during the chats. Your score corresponds to karma in social news sites.
take your idea and create a product around it, if it works then the answer is "yes" - if the product doesn't get built or doesn't attract users then the answer is "no" - the only way to find out is to do it.
There's more too.

There's a boatload of research in CHI and Human Factors about input mechanisms. Much of it is crappy. Some of the best was done in the last 60's and revolved around the "McRuer Crossover Model".

There's a neat bit of work looking at what kind of models a user has to create in order to control a noisy system efficiently. It turns out that you can cleanly calculate when the task gets too hard. This has since been corroborated with the flight testing of (among other things) fighter aircraft.

The bottom line is that it says that the less (mental) work you have to do to, the better you'll do.

Each integration is considered work, and by this:

touchscreen < [mouse|trackpad] < [joystick|nubbin]

With a mouse, you have to think "I have to move it for this amount of time to get to where I want". You integrate its motion to get the final position.

Joysticks & pointing nubbins are one step worse: "I have to hold it in this deflection to cause it to move the cursor for this amount of time."

Touch typing on a keyboard fall outside this space because there is no pointing/tracking task at all.

And, for reference, reversing a two-stage tractor trailer is 5 levels of integration. Getting an oil tanker into harbor is 6!
Be sure your wife is on board all the way. Starting a startup is more difficult than you think and will take longer than you expect. It will be her journey as well.
You may find "The Happiness Hypothesis" by Johnathan Haidt of some interest.
Adwords! It's converting profitably for a subscription site I'm helping out with. Can't wait to qualify for Google CPA - http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=60150...
Bingo. That was the major problem I saw with this as well. Your iPod and my iPod may have been bought on the same day and at the same location. But you left your's on your desk for 3 years, and I took mine on my deployment to Iraq. There are two very different values there.
And yet, ants == hackers.
From the point of view of a customer/beta-tester:

If your problem solves someone's need chances are they will find you. If posting a link on one or more sites frequented by your target audience doesn't generate a single beta tester you might want to re-evaluate what you're building.

For example I was a beta tester for GitHub and converted to a paying customer after the beta period. Someone must have put an announcement here about the site and since it solved my need for git hosting I immediately signed up.
Thanks! Interesting data point that you didn't charge your first few customers.

What is your site?
I was wondering when to splurge for one; now I know.
Loic Le Meur’s advice to internet startups
Wow, so AdWords has actually worked for a subscription site. Is this how you got your first customer, or how you expanded the business after the initial few customers?

I'm looking for how to get that evolutionary-feedback process started.
Offer a compelling free service that reels users in and then sell added-extras in the subscription account that they can't live without - aka the "freemium" model.

This is what 37Signals do so well, we operate a similar model at Zamzar and more recently Animoto seem to have struck gold with this approach - with them you can cut a 30 second video mix of photos and music, but if you need more time you have to pay.
"not because telling them gains me anything"

You are gaining something, indirectly, even if you don't realise it - more users for Pandora, for example, means they are less likely to go out of business. Also, it may not mean anything to you, but there's a certain cachet in being the one in your social circle who recommends 'cool' new products.

Most people are flattered to be asked for advice, and would like to think that their recommendations show what good taste they have.
Angus King and His 10 Principles of Effective Leadership
It's http://ourdoings.com/

It's in my profile. I strongly suggest everybody edit your profiles to include yours.
I not too recently became a big proponent of zsh (http://www.zsh.org/) and as such would like to recommend the book "From Bash to Z Shell" (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1590593766/ref...) as it covers both of these popular shells and how to "Conquer" them.
Yes, for a project I'm currently working on. It's targeted toward consumers in a small niche medical community. I Google'd until I found a handful of active forums for this niche. Then I posted to the most active one. I offered a free year's trial to the first beta users. I got 12 from that site. Then after a few days I repeated that process on another forum and got 8 more. I'm working out a lot of bugs but having real users is great. So far they've been active and enthusiastic with feedback. I'm not sure whether this is the right niche for my product, but am improving it a lot with their help. I haven't charged anyone yet(in fact, haven't even setup the payment system yet), and may run into difficulty when I do launch the public product since it seems consumers are very reluctant to pay for things online. But that's why it's great to have beta users from my target market who can help me get the product to a point where it's good enough to charge.
Wow, these are great!
Well, your self righteousness might be a tad misplaced. Let me explain. I know people, small charities and welfare organizations, who need to use computers for work but barely have the money. When they get donations, they spend it on something like feeding the poor rather than buying a copy of Windows.
Its easy to take the moral high-ground...and classify the world in four scenarios - many more exist.
You talk about age being irrelevant, and then suggest that people of different ages will necessarily have different viewpoints - isn't this a little contradictory?
We sell boxed software (a 'virtual' box) in my main business. To combat piracy, among lots of other reasons, we also offer an open source edition. We sell primarily to businesses, but I know some businesses have pirated our commercial version in the past.

One local company we found out about recently was pirating our stuff for years and reselling it to his clients, but we only found out when they went out of business and all these companies with technically illegal copies of our software needed help. I could have asked them to fork over some cash, but I think that would have been more wrong. Forcing an extra fee when someone is in a bind is definitely wrong. So we helped those we could.

In the end I don't worry about whether piracy is wrong (I think our copyright laws need serious reform anyway), and while I do pay for lots of software, I don't bother worrying about it for myself. It's a loss of potential money, but not of real money you ever saw. So it's not the same as actually stealing money from me. I also never bothered to put license key verification into the software either, not worth the effort. If I did that, it says I don't trust anyone, and it would only be wasting effort which is actually costing me something. It comes down to focusing on preventing piracy or focusing on moving your business forward. Easy decision there.
My product is based on a subscription model. Here's what we did.
First: Make something that people want and would be willing to pay for.
Second: Tell everyone you know that's what your doing. Ask people who they know that might be interested. People are usually willing to help and give you a name or two.
Third: Don't count-out old-school marketing. Cold calls, business events, etc, go to them. Meet your competitors, usually they won't be adverse to this and you shouldn't be either, you can always learn something from them.

Know your competitors very well, and know what they do well and what they do poorly (or at least what you do better). This is important.

Third: Have a working demo. I don't give away free trials, I have a demo. This may or may not work for your product.

Fourth: Follow up with everybody, always send thank you notes, and follow up a week later, every week until they give you some straight answer.

I'm a coder who is very new to sales, but I've had some good people around me that were quite good at sales. Meet those people, show them your product, ask for some help.
It's definitely a great exercise to see how much you spend/lose on gadgets and stuff.
Good to see that this is being blogged about. There's been a lot of research done to find the most efficient button sizes for handheld touchscreens. I think the next big push is going to involve design guidelines for truly mobile apps, apps you use while actually navigating the world and not stopping to work.

See http://www.mediateam.oulu.fi/publications/pdf/1076.pdf for a paper called "Target size study for one-handed thumb use on small touchscreen devices". It's a good starting point.

I had to think about this hard when we created Mobiphos, http://nirmalpatel.com/mobiphos.pdf to study mobile collocated photo sharing.
Nothing very interesting to the high tech sophisticates of Hacker News, I suspect. We're a one stop shop for artists who want their own websites - we'll register their domain name, sort out their hosting, give them access to our CMS so they can create and maintain their website. But the point of my post is that as long as you KNOW WHO YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE, you can be creative and find cheap ways to reach them. It costs us almost nothing to get some postcards printed up and spend a few hours enthusing about our service to artists at a local exhibition. And I'm sure you can do the same, even if your service is less tightly focused. If it's aimed at students and young people, think about legitimate ways (that won't get you thrown off campus) of handing out fliers to students at your local university. Then think about how you enthuse and incentivise your friends and friends of friends to do the same thing at the universities and schools they go to all over the country. If it's aimed at small businesses, write to or call in at one hundred local small businesess. It may sound hopelessly inefficient and low-tech, but it will get you your first customers. And we've found that word of mouth does work (despite what Seth Godin says). The other thing I can't emphasise enough for a subscription service is that it needs to be REALLY easy to sign up for and try out - Paul Graham has written an essay on this I think.
I think viral growth should be considered separate from word of mouth. And if you do make that distinction then there are very few products which became successful through word of mouth. Original Google Search, Napster come to mind, and maybe Gmail (like the sibling suggests, though not clear if it's really a commercial success). Note that all of the above gave out huge value for free.
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

Much of what makes an audiobook great is the reader's grasp of the material. Both of these books are great works of literature, but the skill of the reader makes them even better as audiobooks.
Google innovation across America: Find. Share. Secure.
As long as it's win+win should be fine.

Other considerations involve morals and equality of opportunities in education to be able to evaluate how unbalanced is the win+win. And that's a terrible ground for discussions.
Can't second this one enough. This is by far the best show on air.

As it relates to business: the show is a veritable collection of case studies revolving around people, culture, and science. Myself: I'd recommend the Space episode.
This is one of those headlines you want to send back in time to terrify people about the future.
sanj,

Your comments have been pretty insightful. Would you mind sharing a little more about your background wrt handheld development?
The Product Guy’s Weekend Reading (May 16, 2008)
Realise that may not be very helpful if you're shy. That's probably a whole other issue to work on.
Ok, to actually fully answer your question: My first customer walked into us. I've been doing websites for years, and I've set up some content-management systems. Most of the time people just don't like them. We made Servee, and took it to our current clients, and moved them over. Our next clients came from this above (cold calls, networking, and sales)
Asus: Linux Whether You Need it or Not
Your brain runs on chemicals.
Try IronRuby in your browser
We started with AdWords and it worked pretty well. Start researching what ads show up when you search for things that you think might lead to your site to get a sense of what ads you'll be running up against.

We made a big mistake when we launched to not have a free version that a lot of our competitors offer. Our ads would get clicked on, but they'd bounce almost immediately. Once we added the free version, our ad clicks went up substantially, and this time they actually created a free account and the increased volume and retention has led to more sales.
Yes, the comments seldom reach the quality of the articles. Some are downright scary. Perhaps they should restrict comments to people with a subscription? That should swing the ideologic balance in favor of hardline capitalists.

(Disclaimer: I have a dead tree subscription.)
That sounds like a good next step. Move from no access to capital to lousy access to better access. The attitude I saw from critics of the program was that some how people should go from no accss to good access, and if that's not possible they should stay with no access.
Bonnaroo. No advertising, 90k people attend the concert annually.
Wow, so you got your initial users by posting on-line! That's interesting. So far, I had been assuming that we would have to work through our networks of friends and/or make cold calls. Cold-calling is probably the hacker's worst nightmare, but I've been revving up: "I can learn to do ANYTHING!!"
With respect, you can't call someone a customer if they are not paying you. There is an enormous difference between a user and a customer (or a prospect and a customer). You should reserve the use of "customer" for folks who are actually paying you. Giving a service away doesn't create customers (it may be a part of your customer creation process but they become customers when they pay you). If a "beta customer" does not pay you they are not a customer (yet). There are distinct methodologies and processes for customer development in the same way that there are for product development: one excellent book on Customer Development is "Four Steps to the Epiphany" by Steve Blank, which is chock full of practical advice on developing early customers.
So, you believe everyone single movie download hurts someone? Note that this is a factual, not ethical, issue.
upvote if you prefer coke

edit: i don't think your english comprehension is very good :( if you prefer pepsi, upvote that other comment instead of downvoting this one.