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I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.

theappifier.com

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Re: I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.

#41

Post by phugoid »

gozman wrote: post #13
BigCanOfTuna wrote: post #8

Nice idea. I'd be interested to know (and if you're willing to share with the community): 1. What was your job. 2. How much did you get paid. 3. How much savings(runway) do you have to support this product. Thanks!

1. I was a software engineer that got an MBA and was doing management consulting. 2. Over 80k / year 3. My runway is private, but we financed ourselves by taking on short-term iOS/Wordpress dev/design consulting gigs to stay fed.

I'm in a similar situation (quit high-paying job, following startup dream).

May I ask how you broke into dev/design consulting? I'll have to go that way too, and soon. But I'm still a bit mystified about where one finds consulting gigs... Places like ODesk/Elancer?

Re: I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.

#42

Post by gozman »

ajjuliani wrote: post #39
larrys wrote: post #30

You need to move this site to a host that can handle the load today. I'm getting timeouts and finally got the home page to load. I can't get any of the other pages to load either.

I can't even get on the site.

Sorry guys! We weren't expecting this kind of load. I'm doing everything I can to redirect traffic to http://engine.theappifier.com

Re: I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.

#43

Post by jeffcouturier »

dangrossman wrote: post #24
jeffcouturier wrote: post #18

I'm not sure I see the benefit of converting a website into a pseudo-app, then charging for that app. Users would effectively be paying for the wrapper when the same content is available without charge via a browser. I realize this happens all the time and there are a plethora of site shortcuts-as-apps in the app store, but the fact that they are abundant doesn't make the practice any better. I'm honestly curious abo…

The site owner wouldn't have to charge for the app (unless I missed something). They just now have a native app for their website. Native app interaction speed and offline use are obvious advantages over using the blog in the mobile browser, so there's definitely value here. And the number of WordPress sites is so huge (over 70 million) that there's undoubtedly a market for this.

Unless the app auto-updates its content to be sure it is always in sync with the website, having native app speed and offline use grows increasingly less desirable the farther out you get from the date the app was created. For Wordpress sites one would expect new content daily. If Appifier pulls content and makes it all available offline that's great, until/unless the site being "appified" has new content. Will the app re-roll itself to incorporate that new content for offline and/or native access? If not then an appified site is useless the moment the app is generated.

I’m not questioning whether there is a market for this. I’m questioning the purpose and value to the user if it’s really nothing more than a snapshot of a dynamic site or just a site shortcut.

Re: I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.

#44

Post by larrys »

ajjuliani wrote: post #39
larrys wrote: post #30

You need to move this site to a host that can handle the load today. I'm getting timeouts and finally got the home page to load. I can't get any of the other pages to load either.

I can't even get on the site.

Here's a screen grab that was done:

http://www.klonix.org/jan2012/appifier.com-20120111-104926a-...

Re: I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.

#45

Post by rushfrisby »

BigCanOfTuna wrote: post #17
gozman wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. I was a software engineer that got an MBA and was doing management consulting. 2. Over 80k / year 3. My runway is private, but we financed ourselves by taking on short-term iOS/Wordpress dev/design consulting gigs to stay fed.

Thanks. Did you change your standard of living to to follow your dream? If so, to what extent? Are you now eating raman? Also, do you have any dependents (wife, children)? Oh, and how old are you? Sorry, I know you are really interested in sharing your product but many of us want to know what people are willing to give up to chase their dreams. Thanks again.

+1 "many of us want to know what people are willing to give up to chase their dreams."

Re: I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.

#48

Post by john-n »

gozman wrote: post #16
lucian1900 wrote: post #14

Interesting. This looks like a container similar to PhoneGap, but more specialised to some sort of feed from the WP website, perhaps RSS. Is there really that large a market for this sort of thing?

It's not a container at all. We leverage a plugin that provides a JSON representation of the Wordpress site content. We consume the JSON to display the Wordpress content within a fully native UI and give access to all the speed, features, and benefits that a fully native app has to offer over web or hybrid apps.

Assuming this is one of the standard JSON plugins for wordpress, be cautious of what this may do to the main sites load. The default install can force calls to skip the total-caching plugin most sites use, as it wont use the cache on any request with parameters.

Re: I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.

#49

Post by agentgt »

At what point is it okay to post you have started a new website / business on hacker news?

Here goes my karma. Since we are doing shameless plugs here are my two (and yes I quit very high paying jobs ... 1.5~2 times more than @gozman ...):

http://snaphop.com

http://evocatus.com

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