Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 118 posts

Re: How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code

#101

Post by pandorastoreuk »

I was very pleased to find this site.I wanted to thank you for this great read!! I definitely enjoying every little bit of it and I have you bookmarked to check out new stuff you post.

http://www.pandorasaleuk.com; http://www.pandorasaleuk.com; http://www.pandorasaleuk.com;

http://www.pandorasaleuk.com/bracelets; http://www.pandorasaleuk.com/bracelets; http://www.pandorasaleuk.com/bracelets;

http://www.pandorasaleuk.com/charms; http://www.pandorasaleuk.com/charms; http://www.pandorasaleuk.com/charms;

http://www.pandorasaleuk.com/beads;

Re: How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code

#102

Post by jf »

zbowling wrote: post #85
seiji wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope: https://github.com/novas0x2a/devhouse

wow. neat! could of been useful. The version we used was C#.. First was a WPF app and the second as Silverlight app. The rewrite was a web version with a WPF frontend client.

We would have loved for you to use our code too!

Re: How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code

#103

Post by bdclimber14 »

neurotech1 wrote: post #74
gcheong wrote: post #31

I thought most badges are simply printed from the event registration data and I would have certainly expected the events you listed to have had badges already upon arrival, so I'm curious as to why they didn't have the badges printed already. But it's certainly a great story of how something they developed in order to promote what they thought was their main product ended up becoming the main product.

At TC Disrupt 2010, a very organized and well resourced event, I personally printed dozens of badges that didn't get printed from event pre-registration.

I was there doing the same. Amazed me. Sean is my name if we've met.

Re: How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code

#104

Post by LogicHoleFlaw »

soulclap wrote: post #88
MichaelGG wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Feb. 31 doesn't exist." Maybe they are using MySQL? http://sql-info.de/mysql/gotchas.html#1_14

One of my previous jobs was coding software for banks that handles financial transactions. And I am not entirely sure any more if it was Feb 30th or 31st but one day the product manager came to my office and asked me to change the validation routine in the library that handles the date-related calculations and consider Feb 31st as a valid date. Can't exactly remember what it was about but I think some banks or other…

When I wrote billing systems for telecoms, Feb 31st was a valid date... after a fashion. Billing cycles were stored as a cycle period "monthly", "quarterly", etc, with a "bill day" offset which was a number 1-31. If your "bill day" was the 31st then in February you would be billed on the last day of the month along with the customers with bill days 28-30. It was rare to do actual time calculations treating the bill day as an actual date, but not considered particularly strange.

And there you have it, at least for one small corner of the software world.

Re: How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code

#106

Post by soapdog »

SwellJoe wrote: post #24

I reached the end of this story and thought, "These guys have not fully learned the lesson of product failure. Nor have they learned to recognize product success." You made a product no one wanted, and in order to market it, you stumbled onto a product that lots of people wanted in a market where billions of dollars are spent each year (we spend about 10 grand a year on conferences, and we're a tiny company with a ti…

I just want to tell that I've been using virtualmin every day for some years now and it helps keep me sane while managing my virtual hosts. It is a great tool and worth every penny. Now, every time I see something like cPanel, I scream in horror. Thanks for your hard work!

Re: How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code

#107

Post by isurge »

cpeterso wrote: post #65
tlack wrote: post #7

Did you not see enough money in the event market to continue trying to build products in that space? View.io seems to be a bit of a departure from that.

Plus I could easily imagine a View.io-like app directed to event planners and attendees that leverages the badge printing service: an event-specific "mobile app that 'tells you what you need to know, wherever you are' could be useful for people networking (like their original business plan), visitors new to the conference city, or promotions of related events/services. When you have to turn away interested, paying cu…

There are quite a few of these already. The biggest difference(and most useful) is the level of integration between the event management and registration software and the app.

Re: How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code

#108

Post by Swannie »

zbowling wrote: post #89
Swannie wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, this is very snarky, but seriously (over)paraphrasing: ``We didn't really have anything to sell until "we rewrote everything [and] made it configurable". Would you say you could have sold without a rewrite? Did you try and sell before that and fail when the buyer started their due diligence?

We could of sold specific versions for different organizers (we did actually give out 2 versions for free to our first event organizers that are hardcoded as a thank you gesture to them and it is still in use). But we wanted something more flexible to sell to the people that contacted us in the past. We spent 2 weeks, cleaned it all up, and got it ready. At the last minute, we started to speak to someone we met at a…

Despite the 300LOC stuff, it's still a really inspiring story. You started with a hack, learned a bunch, wrote some code in two weeks, and sold it for, what sounds like, just over the non-trivial threshold. Good job :-)

Re: How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code

#109

Post by isurge »

Over the last ten+ years we have built a registration system very similar to cevent. Cevent got 50 million in funding and well it's just hard to compete with that. We plan on open sourcing the majority of the system soon(we started testing the installer yesterday - failed badly on godaddy). What I picked up from this article was that you had 'buzz' any ideas on how I can create buzz for this project?

Re: How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code

#110

Post by dfnkt »

felixchan wrote: post #82
tzm wrote: post #79

Wait... rural Missouri? I'm originally from Joplin (SW Mo). Glad to see you made the jump.

I'm from the rural areas of St. Louis. Yep, made the jump, hanging there, and loving it!

I'm from rural Missouri as well, about 3 hours away from St Louis though.
Post reply on HN