skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You should have a confirmation email in your inbox in just a few minutes.

I found a bug.
I actually really like the Bay area as pleasant place to be. My argument is that you shouldn't move there to start a company of the product/price/profit variety.

And this doesn't really have anything to do with cost. 37signals is a multi-million dollar company and we (including the founders) could certainly afford to move to San Francisco.
Selling the startup - how to proceed
The situation is the following:

I have started a startup in the Netherlands with two other guys from college. All students in Computer Science. The product is done - we have a website and we have a couple of customers.

The market is growing, but we suspect that some strong players will enter the field and crush our business. We don't have any patents (no software patents in Europe), so we can't really fight the larger companies.

So really, we have the technical expertise, but from a business point of view we can't proceed. So we're thinking that we should sell all our software (Windows client app + freebsd based server software). The money we raise this way we can invest in our future products. We believe that (larger) companies can greatly benefit from buying our product: that way they can enter the market with a head start.

We don't know how to proceed. We don't have any money.

- How do we get people interested?
- How do we valuate our product?
- What would you do?
- How long does it take to sell a product?

Kiko sold itself via eBay (which is awesome), but is that really the way to get the most out of it?
1. Explain what it does on the main page - if I'd seen the link somewhere else, I never would've gone past the front page.

2. Maybe some screenshots of the embeddable widget - it sounds cool but I'm not exactly sure what it does.

3. A bookmarklet or something might be a good idea, so I can tag/add stuff as I browse other sites.

Overall seems pretty good, the UI looked really complicated at first but the help area was pretty good at explaining that.
Why do I have to go out and do another startup? I don't work at a startup, I work at a company.

I think this mentality is a big part of what's wrong with the startup culture in the Bay area. This notion that it's inevitable that you have to work for a long string of companies, better not get too attached to any one of them.

Jason and I intend to make 37signals a company that'll last for 20 years. Maybe we won't succeed, lots of businesses fail, but that's at least our goal.

It's a sad state of affair where such a simple goal is looked upon with suspicion and disbelief.
Unless you want to sell, I think that you might be selling yourself short.

If you already have paying customers then you already are doing better than the suspected strong players that might enter the market.

My vote is to continue and see if the competition comes to you.

Unless you want to quit. You're not a quitter are you? ;-) (wink)
Let possible users get a taste of using it before requiring registration. As is, I would never sign up.
Nope. ;-)

I understand why you don't like this, if you're highly security conscious or mad about the spam you get. But my privacy policy is very simple and clear, and it's linked right next to the text input for the email. Some site features use your email address, and future features will, too.
"u've" has got to be the most interesting grammatical construct I've seen online. I mean look at it, it's like he's trying to be correct, but not at the same time.
EBay sues Craigslist for diluting its stake
FYI. It also prevents unwanted pregnancies, herpes, AIDS and might help you to go to heaven.
AWS Lowers Data Transfer Prices
It does look like a good tutorial. In the meantime, you can take a small (ok, trivial) step by not spelling it "LISP" (a pet peeve of many Lisp hackers).
I searched through the many list things out there, and none of them gave me the flexibility I wanted. This is something I wrote for myself, and I decided to make it something everyone can use.

Most other list apps are one-dimensional. You have a shopping list and a to-do list. This is a tree that lets you make lists of lists of lists. You can put your entire life into your Simplist and it won't be overwhelming or difficult to manage. My Simplist is seven layers deep in some places, which I didn't even realize until I counted.
I visited your site, looked around the front page, and wanted to leave. Don't make me click to find out what your product is about. Use all that wasted banner space to explain what the product is with a few images to give me an idea of what I'm dealing with. That banner image looks a bit cheap and doesn't even come close to explaining to me what's going on. Anything in my life can be simpler. Keep it down to one nice looking logo, and widen the site up so you get more space to show images/demo.

After careful manipulation of the front page, you'll be able to fit all the content from 'what's a simplist' and 'how does simplist work.' Incorporate your links nicely, not just a stack at the bottom, too.
Maybe an easier way to frame it:

The most important thing is to add value to the customers of the business user.
For pete's sake, screenshots! I have no idea what this thing does. sounds like a todo list, but the interface is the differentiator in this market, so you need to SHOW us what it looks like!
http://web20.originalsignal.com/
FaceBook Chat For YOU!
Wp-Content Wordpress Trojan READ THIS!
How much money are you making now? If the answer is nothing then you can pretty much forget about selling your business as a going concern, what you have is a pile of software not a business.

Kiko is a special case, essentially what they did was not build a company but rather an extended exercise in building consultingware. It's very easy to see how to fit a flashy calendar component in to any number of existing businesses (not that I've seen hide nor hair of it since the acquisition... does Kiko still exist in any meaningful form?) but that probably doesn't apply to what ever it is you've built.

The best way to sell your business is to not need to sell your business. If you just continue as you are, building a decent revenue stream then eventually you'll almost certainly start getting offers. Most of the time, though, acquisitions are made as much to acquire the talent as the technology. Not including the people who built a successful product in the deal substantially reduces your value.
Hey, that's a subtle observation. I wonder what linguists would call this. It looks a bit like an overcorrection (the classic example of that is when people use "I" as an object, as in Bill Clinton's famous campaign line, "That's very important to Al Gore and I"). But I'm not sure it's the same thing.
Guitar Hero Handheld Game
No More Excuse for Not Keeping Up | Mr Brooks
I started with C and then quickly realized that BASIC was much more fun, precisely because it was easier and therefore more fun.
John Grubman commemorates Casady & Greene
Make Money Online With Blogs - No.1 Resources
What percentage of users do you want to turn away automatically? It's not a privacy issue.
See also: http://www.atpm.com/9.08/cg.shtml
We have paying customers, but only a few. Finding customers is harder than we thought it would be.

That's the thing. We want to sell. If we sell we have a little money we can use to grow our second product. Hire freelancers for graphic design, and so on.

Unfortunately, we picked a market where selling is pretty difficult for startups. It doesn't really sell via the web, so we need to call people for sales. If we could start again we would not make this mistake.

So basically, we picked the wrong market. We're still trying to graduate (MSc) and we think we can do a much better job when we try again.
"The best way to sell your business is to not need to sell your business."

I agree. That would be the ideal scenario. But we think a different product would work out better for us. So selling the product and starting fresh is tempting.

As for the money we're making. Not much at all. Our customers are just friends and family at this point. We haven't really tried to sell the product. No marketing campaign to speak of - once again because we're a bit "inexperienced".
Simplist is old is it not?

edit: ahh..i was thinking simpy the social bookmarking site
Ipod Touch ipTexter
Ipod Touch Tricks and Tips!
"Some of them will make millions of dollars each year "

And some will go broke...
Caching needs to be built into WordPress? Hrm, I guess great minds think alike - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=168268 ;)

And to say that WordPress is not sloppily programmed is to say that you have never actually looked at the source code. I dare you, I double dare you. Wake up and smell the ashes.
Life is too short to work at a job you hate, but everyone has to do something someone else is willing to pay them for.
Your site put a lot on weight keyword ‘simple’ and fail to tell the user what it’s all about. I understand as your building the product you are convinced anyone should get it as much as you do; I’ve been there too, I think you must find people, have them try it and get usability feedback.

Also I think it has a lot of TV-commercial-like aspect to it with the oversized banner; I think it people don’t like overkill signs. Make it a bit user friendly, use colors and a bit of style.

Overall I think the idea is pretty cool.
I was looking for something like this, thanks!
Two conflicting quotes:

"If all you get from your job is a paycheck, you're underpaid."

"Work doesn't necessarily make you happy but it may give you means (money) to do the stuff that makes you happy"
The irony of this is that Blaine Cook is one of the leads on OAuth, IIRC.
Solid design. Don't necessarily get the value prop. in a world of Google Docs/wikis - try to make that more obvious. Good start though.
I've got a month or so on you. Will you listen to me? I thought not. ;)
I am sorry, but I have to be the bearer of an antithesis to all this "Start a small little business, produce good products, and live a happy life" talk that has, of late, become more accepted on news.y.

I think all of you need to go back and read wealth.html . In short: If you don't want to create a lot of wealth, chances are, you won't create any.
Thanks for the suggestions! I put a screenshot on the home page and basically moved the "what" page content there, too.
Notepad + tabbed indenting, anyone? ^^
I think that's just from all the people tweeting 'Hillary beat Obama in Pennsylvania,' etc.
And then they will go out and get a new job and probably be more employable as a result of their experiences ...

Clearly a few will make millions, some will make enough and most will go broke, but that's the way business is.

Now, to some how figure out a product that people want and get the courage to quit my job ... not easy!
Embought write-up on How to Split an Atom
Tree expanding/collapsing, emailing, Quicklist (like bookmarks), widget, mobile version... No, notepad can't do all that! At least Vim could do folding ;-)
If you are doing a webbased service, and your plan is to make billions do you really need outside capital?

I think the answer for a lot of businesses might be no.

By now it is common knowledge that a webbased company can be started by a couple of good hackers in a few months - just look at some of the Y-combinator companies. So the next stage after building your product is marketing and growth. Common wisdom tells us that growth requires a lot of money - but I think this is often a fallacy extrapolated from a world ten years ago that was very different than todays. What do you need the money for? If you have a webservice your income goes up as you gain users (if it doesn't you might need to rethink your business model) so hardware costs can be paid for this way. Marketing is often a question of having a good product and being smart in your marketing - having a lot of money doesn't always help you. Look at how well pets.com did with all their marketing and contrast it to google that did no marketing at all but had a great product.

Besides having investors is a timesink, and you will spend time that you could have spent marketing or making your product better on reports and financial statements for your investors.

Chase customers instead of chasing investors, unless you are doing something that truly requires capital.
I like that we live in a time where it is getting easier for people to make their living doing what they love.

Personally, I think it's pretty obvious that we haven't been able to practically accomplish this for very long, and there are a lot of factors that influence whether or not someone will be successful.

Hopefully, society will continue to move in this direction, what with information about how to do just about anything at just about everyones fingertips just about all the time.
Another question would be - why would you want your shopping list inside a to-do list?

(www.protopage.com has great to-do list functionality)
That's relevant to his complaints about observed CPU usage but irrelevant to the observation that WordPress makes excessive database calls and doesn't cache intelligently.
Even better - let us create them without registering as people said earlier. One idea is to make them expire within 24hrs if they don't register.
Ok, how would you suggest I change it? I would really like to have a valid email address because, as I said above, some site functionality depends on it. Should I allow them to immediately use the Simplist and just disable email-dependent features until it's confirmed?
Why not...or how about todoist.com
The reason venture investors want a return of capital rather than dividends is not so much that it's faster, but that it's harder to spoof. Investors will accept dividends from a large, public company, because they're so highly regulated. But in a small private company it would be too easy for the guys running it to divert (what would have been) profits to their own uses.

This is why medieval venture investors were willing to back sea voyages but not factories. In a sea voyage everyone got liquid at the end of each trip, and it was very clear what was on each ship.

I'm not suggesting of course that 37 Signals would take advantage of investors. I'm just explaining why, structurally, venture investors are not interested in dividends.
8 Best opensource shopping carts
I guess that's the real problem here: people assume this is a to-do list. It's a tree that can contain any type of list. Do I need to make that more clear in the docs?

I use it for everything--to-dos, favorites, projects, priorities, packing lists, shopping lists...
Pretty much everything Matt said about Twitter applied to blogs as well.
I was in the market for a good shopping cart, (currently looking to get away from ASPdotNetStoreFront ..) any suggestions all these (besides Magento) look weak..
Because you don't always know the IM name of the person you want to message.
Amateur Hour At Twitter- Blaine cook out?
How to build a SaaS Rails site in an hour
if you're a dev, artima.com, lambda-the-ultimate, http://c2.com/cgi/wiki. Find some delicious, magnolia, etc user whose interests align with yours. Build your own Google custom search engine.
Cheap Infrastructure Helps Startups Scale
ok, am I the only one getting a bit annoyed about 37 signals rant about their mode is the best in the world and no one elses?

They don't have to rant daily about this. For every successful Thai restaurant, I can show you 4 that failed [or more].

There are many ways to Rome, 37 signals likes to walk to Rome while others take a lot riskier route. For each his own.
Walking to Rome might be a very risky proposition if you have to cross any crosswalks.
Protalk- Every object can be used as a class, the class of an object can change after instantiation
"OAuth began in November 2006, during which Blaine Cook was developing the Twitter OpenID implementation" [0]

Now that is most strange. Perhaps it's still in development?

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OAuth
yes. Only ask for stuff when you really need it.
http://askyc.wordpress.com/2008/04/23/intro-to-advertising/
Get Blown On Facebook
Amateur Hour Over At Twitter?
Well, remember that Coding Horror is more of a classical personal blog or online diary style work, rather than a medium for delivering essays. Jeff freely admits he tends to shoot from the hip, in contrast to guys like PG or Joel Spolsky (Jeff talked about this briefly in the first stackoverflow.com podcast). As a result from time to time you get posts that more emotionally driven by Jeff's issue du jour.

For me I just tend to take Jeff's tone with a grain of salt rather than expecting each post to be dispassionate analysis. Jeff simply doesn't vet his material the same way as PG, but we end up with more of it from which occasionally really good observations and discussions result.
I was just amazed of a good idea I just saw: they charge you 10 usd a month for being in the front page of about 50 small search engines, so the result is that you get a good amount of traffic and these guys have a mini adsense and probably making a decent living.
It appears as I wrote this, Blaine has left twitter
DHH: Hacker Crack
Craigslist CEO keeps focus on service
So, Metacafe payments start at $100 for 20,000 views ($5 CPM?) and YouTube is doing $1,600 for 2 million views ($0.80 CPM?).

Does anyone know the rates of other sites, and why does YouTube pay so little?
BooRah - a smarter way to find great restaurants
you must continue doing what you are doing ... try growing your business even if its 0.01% a month - blog about your product as much as possible - avail all the avenues of free advertising and marketing - more the people know about your product the more you will be publicity and eventually someone will notice you and may be offer you to buyout.
Even worse is chyrp. For reasons unbeknownst to me, they designed it in such a way that it ends up making 55 queries to render http://chyrp.net/blog/. This only increases when more content is added (so my assumption is that the authors don't know what a join is). Also, the last time I looked, it took your password, md5'd it (without a salt) and put it in a cookie for authentication to the admin. WordPress looks amazing compared to that.
Cook was directly responsible for scaling Twitter, and he very much failed in his job.

While I agree that Twitter should theoretically have all their scaling problems solved by now, slamming Blaine Cook to that extent seems a bit gratuitous. Cook and his team were among the first to tackle the problem of scaling a Rails application to handle such massive traffic spikes. I don't know that it's fair to discount the level to which their team has solved its architectural problems.
Better solution: Build caching into the DB. Then every program using the DB gets free data caching and there is more general code reuse. Interesting how RDBMS's like Postgres and Oracle already have it.
IETester is a free web browser that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE
yeah, hes fucking brilliant. met him at FOWA. keep this in mind: he left right before this weekend. First problems, and the worst ones for a while were this weekend...right AFTER he left.
This is really great stuff. I've had a few interactions with Benjamin in the past and he's a real pro.

While I haven't seen the actual code in the SaaS kit, I imagine it's top notch.

Billing is one of the trickiest things to get right. It's also a big time suck. $249 is nothing compared to the number of hours you'll spend writing, testing and re-writing your billing code. Believe me, you don't want to mess up your billing infrastructure.

(* Not a paid advertisement or a happy customer, just someone that has written billing systems over and over, and never been happy with the result.)
Well, the way to become experienced isn't by giving up at the first hurdle that's for sure. If you haven't tried to sell the product, then there's nothing anyone can do to pin a value to what you've created.

What you're trying to do is very difficult to begin with. Very few people will be interested in buying a piece of software without also having the people who built it continue to work on it. Added to that you're trying to foist the burden of marketing a completely untried product too. Purchasers are going to need at least some track record, people using it, revenue earned, that sort of thing. It's a completely unattractive proposition, to say the least.

You really have only two options, either make some effort to push the product in the marketplace and do at least one marketing, sales, feedback, improvement cycle or just forget about selling it, write it off and move on to the next thing you want to do.

If nothing else, writing it off as a commercial product gives you the opportunity to make it open source, and use it as a show piece for your talent.
> everyone has to do something someone else is willing to pay them for.

Subsistence farming - grow your own crops and eat them.

Banditry - take someone else's crops.

Proprietary trading - take someone else's money they got paid for their crops, legally
Xoost - a Google alternative to share your search skills with your friends
Most people don't want to create a lot of wealth. Most people just want to create enough wealth, and enjoy life.

It comes back to: Will I be any more happy with a billion over a (few) million in the bank? For most people, the answer is no.
Now if I could only get Vim on my cell phone...
Onaswarm Gives FriendFeed a Run For Its Money
Live in Pittsburgh, two kids. They go to a Catholic school a couple blocks away that we're happy with.

So, the choice becomes move to the suburbs, home school, or pay up for private schooling of some kind.

Pittsburgh has become a "college town" in some ways. There are several good to very good universities here, and the Oakland neighborhood with Pitt and Carnegie Mellon, has become the economic center of the city in my opinion.
MA is basically slamming him because Twitter hired 2 other engineers to help with their scaling issues. but the reason that he left wasn't that he's no good.. according to his blog post about leaving, it's because he had to relocate to UK due to his partner's visa and not able to work in the US
Is it a once off Payment of $249?
Behind the Scenes of Google Scalability
Wow, now techcruch is publicly shunning individuals based on their (perceived) job performance?

Given the valley, this probably hurts this guy's future employment prospects enough to be called slander/defamation. Mr. Arrington might want to watch how he uses the term "Amateur Hour".

Yet more evidence that TC should be Hacker News worthy.
Twitter’s Lead Architect Leaves: It’s Not You, It’s Me
Sorry to be a bit blunt, but if you don't have many paying customers, and the only users so far are friends and family, and you suspect that some strong players will enter the field and crush you, what makes you think you have something that somebody would want to buy? If you don't have a compelling answer to that question, you should consider this one a training exercise, and move on to your next idea.

If you do have a good answer to the first question, then the next question is: who would find this product valuable? Who are the companies that would get some strategic value out of offering your product? Find them, and contact them.
pg talks about startups all the time and no one complains. They're just doing their own form of self promotion and marketing. It's a lot easier for someone to buy your product if you've convinced them you're a genius.
Uh, I think it's John Gruber...
My point wasn't necessarily that it's hard to explain (though it is). It's that the look on their face always screams "why the hell would anyone want that?".
Scalable Web Architectures
Agreed. I've worked with Ben a bit as well (he actually did some tradeout work for RescueTime) and he's an absolute star. Great combination of talent and work ethic.

And he's probably done dozens of rails e-commerce implementations, so I can't imagine someone more qualified to build this than he is.