OnStartups

Hi rgbrenner. Co-founder of Redbeard here. I really appreciate and definitely agree with this comment. I have a great post saved from a few years ago by Alex of GrooveHQ which also mentions the same sentiment: http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/96361/Getting-Crunched-Mashed-Or-…

this is a classic http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/80121/How-To-Get-Media-Coverage-F…

About Perl http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/115851/is-perl-still-a-… PHP vs Python article from 2 years ago http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/20493/Why-PHP-Is-Fun-and-Easy-But… If you are going to use PHP, Laravel 4 framework is probably the best choice https://tutsplus.com/tutorial/why-laravel-is-taking-the-php-community-… Symfony 2 and Silex (for small projects) are great frameworks too But if you already know and love Python, stick to that. It's a great language.

That's a good one. And it seems you've made the common mistake to email news@. My general advice is: Never, ever email news@. A news site doesn't cover you, a writer does. So go after writers, not publications. This article should outline all the steps you need to follow: http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/80121/How-To-Get-Media-Coverage-F… (It should be easy to get a post based on the traction you have shown above)

My co-founder Leo wrote a great guest post (could you have guessed?) on how to get started with guest blogging :-) Here it is - http://askaaronlee.com/bufferapp/ Also he wrote an article for OnStartups about getting press, which might also be useful - http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/80121/How-To-Get-Media-Coverage-F… Hope that helps :-) Good luck.

http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/80121/How-To-Get-Media-Coverage-F… That is a pretty great article for this topic from the cofounder of Buffer who is really good at gaming the tech media. Here is the condensed version I emailed to a friend who had just raised a big funding round: Target writers themselves, not the publications they work for. Reach out to them on Twitter, ask if you can contact them about your story (so your email gets opened). Don't go after famous bloggers/writers (they are super busy). Choose timing carefully (friday > monday).

I think http://onstartups.com run by Dharmesh Shah is probably the closest thing to what you're seeking.

Both technical folks and business folks both have value that exist on a slider, and their value increases with experience. Judge anyone you want to work with on what you think they can do now, how much / how fast they can grow, and how in sync with you they are. Keeping that in mind, look for tangible skills that could help push the company forward. Experience in Design, Product Management, Marketing/Sales, or some other useful skill is great. Experience with running companies, recruiting, fundraising are all positives. Some ability to generate PR (through fame or connections) is a positive. If those were successful ventures, even better. Here's two good posts on it: - http://www.quora.com/Startup-Advice-Strategy/What-is-the-perfect-start… - http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/13808/The-Magical-Founding-Team-M…

Agreed, the headline was great. If you like articles about pricing, I read a really good one last night: http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/37737/Secrets-Of-Freemium-Pricing… Care to share any good articles you have read recently?

This article is a good read on pricing: http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/37737/Secrets-Of-Freemium-Pricing… Per-device pricing means your users need to make a pricing decision every time they add another device, which they may hate and try to avoid.

I was wondering about this too after reading: http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/17702/17-Mutable-Suggestions-For-… Great advice in this article on the whole I think, but I did wonder about the rational for removing hyphens. Could it just be they are out of fashion? I remember when they used to be much more popular way back when. Also thanks for all the comments so far guys!

As part of my crusade to get more people and companies blogging (http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/14208/Why-Every-Entrepreneur-Shou… I helped Noah put together an awesome blogging bundle. Basically went and got every tool you should have to get started writing :). Email [email protected] and we'll give you 10% off. Oh also, if you're an HN user and have a wordpress theme/plugin or any piece of software related to blogging, email me: [email protected], would love to get it included. Helps aspiring writers and helps you get visibility. Happiness all around :)

Dharmesh Shah touched on this at Startup Bootcamp last year and expands on what petervandijck discusses. Effectively, there is a financial benefit (based on longevity) and financial cost (acquisition) to pricing, and the goal is to make the two overlap as little as possible. I highly recommend watching his talk: http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/11042/Dharmesh-On-Startup-Marketi…

that is an excellent read! Dharmesh Shah posted a synopsis of the book here: http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/11097/How-To-Price-Software-Witho…

Totally agree. Plus, I find that hobbies & activities unrelated to my startup can actually help. I'm a big believer in lateral thinking, and one great way to practice lateral thinking is to shift your mind onto other, unrelated topics. I was reading this article from the founder of Kayak earlier today: http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/12604/Startup-Insights-From-Paul-… and he mentioned something interesting. Despite being a travel startup, he avoids hiring people from the travel industry. I believe that's because he sees value in having people with different modes of thinking. And in a way, that's kind of what a hobby does for you. It puts you into a different mode of thinking, which can come back and benefit your startup. :) Just my $0.02.

Here's a great article on the subject from Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot founder). http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/11097/How-To-Price-Software-Witho…

That's a tough one that I'm looking at too. My thoughts on advertising is you need A LOT of traffic to make it worth your while. Or extremely good targeting. Which makes the ad model work for targeted blogs and sites with loads of content with some good SEO. This is a great article on the topic in general: http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/170/Startup-Pricing-Models-Free-F… This is also a fantastic video: http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hansson-at-sta…

Very useful look at the dynamics of the social news business. This sector had a lot of activity last year, but seems to have slowed down (in terms of new startups popping up). But, that could just be me. By the way, if any YC hacker types are in the Cambridge, MA area and want to work on a cool social news app (reddit-like, but different), drop me a note. http://OnStartups.com

the following 2 links should help you - good luck http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/223/The-Startup-Name-Game.as… http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/02/the_name_game.html

A good alternative: http://www.dailyhub.com/ from the owner of http://www.onstartups.com/

I can tell you've got a ton of emotion behind this post. Hopefully writing it all down helped put it all into perspective. Not getting YC funding is definitely not the end of the world. There are a ton of reasons why you might not have gotten funding, and many of them aren't really related to how great a hacker/startupper you might be. There are plenty of folks around here who are going to press on despite the setback [2]. No matter what you do, you're going to run into roadblocks, and part of being successful is getting past them without losing heart. Don't give up now, and good luck in the future. [1] http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/1350/Why-Not-All-Great-Hacke… [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=11551

Answer can be found at this URL: http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/198/Game-Theory-and-Software-Star… While I'm not sure that I buy the author's advice, I have been thinking about ways in which founders can think outside the box in attracting funding and signaling as part of negotiating a funding round - if they want to go the VC route. Obviously a huge part of getting the highest valuation and the best terms out of a VC round rest on how the founders can directly sell investors on the prospects for their business by talking about the technology, market, financials/projections, etc... But negotiating a funding round is still just that - a negotiation. Professional investors are well-aware of this and are strategic negotiators. From the founder side, I see much less of the type of strategic negotiation thinking than I do on the investor side. Curious if other agree or disagree.

Rewriting is (almost) always a bad idea. (and you're planning some kind of a rewrite, since the new system will replace the old one) Let's assume that Team A will work on the newer version, while Team B will continue to work on the old version. Team A will start working and implementing stuff. Team B will keep working on the old project and add new features. Team A will need to keep up and add new features that Team B added, and so on. > Those members are eager and passionate to contribute ANYONE is eager to contribute to a brand-new project! -------- How I'd do it? 1) Incremental changes on existing product. Unless you're using some ancient programming language and you have troubles on finding programmers (or you have some licensing options, or the product is locked on a certain platform; e.g. is written in obj.C and you want it ported on Windows and/or Linux), probably this is the best approach. If the system is too big to add features at first, start improving existing code. Clean up. Add unit tests. Clean up even more and start adding features. 2) If you're set on rewriting and this is the only option to consider, feature-freeze the existing project and move all developers to the new project (every once in a while, pull a developer to fix critical bugs _only_). Don't pull the same developer twice in a row though and don't ask them to fix trivial stuff. ------- Additional lecture (in no particular order): -…

http://www.onstartups.com by dharmesh shah.

we: 1. picked a list of 50-60 words/prefixes/suffixes we liked 2. wrote a python script to generate permutations, and then 3. ran dig -f on the text file to see which weren't taken 4. scraped buydomains search results to see which ones were easily for sale. absolutely everything else was a waste of time, although we're also working with a naming agency and that might be promising (but expensive). amusingly, domains that were occupied by squatters or companies like buydomains were easier to deal with -- at least they're rational and the conversation, though annoying, is straightforward (arrive at a #.) domains that are occupied but unused (and don't have a 'for sale' sign hanging up) are generally hopeless. if you get a response, you'll generally get some whacko who either won't sell it, or who will only sell for millions of dollars or something. you'll probably not believe me, and will learn this the hard way (just as pg told us months ago :)) ok enough bad news -- some links that might help: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/02/the_name_game.html http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/223/The-Startup-Name-Game.as… http://foundread.com/2007/08/20/3-rules-for-naming-your-startup/ and last and best (a 100+ page guide) http://www.igorinternational.com/process/igor-naming-guide.pdf hope this helps -- it's a struggle :)

Relevant for new angel investors https://www.onstartups.com/a-weird-and-wacky-approach-to-angel-investi…

Spolsky's opinion: http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/97052/How-To-Survive-a-Ground-Up-… Experience with 2 parallel implementations: http://alexmartins.me/2016/07/28/lessons-learned-from-software-rewrite…

I just noticed when my RSS feed filled up with trucker software posts. http://onstartups.com/all still shows the original posts though.

I often refer to these two pieces when debating rebooting a project from scratch: Joel Spolksy Things You Should Never Do Part 1 http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html Darmesh Shah How To Survive a Ground-Up Rewrite Without Losing Your Sanity (a response to essay #1 13 years later) http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/97052/How-To-Survive-a-Ground-Up-… It's not always cut and dry when you should start over, but if you are make sure you are doing it in a way that starts presenting customer/user value ASAP.

I had read 2 articles when I was searching for devs for my own startup. Please go through these. Hope it helps! :) http://blog.sandglaz.com/a-guide-to-hiring-the-right-people-for-your-s… http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/87890/Startups-Stop-Trying-To-Hir…