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

theappifier.com

141–150 of 204 posts

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

#141
post #94

Have you run this past Apple with regards to their App Store approval policy? I'd be worried about clause 2.12: "2.12 Apps that are not very useful, are simply web sites bundled as apps, or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected"

I'd be more worried about the Sandbox app getting pulled. It basically presents as its own app environment, which is a huge no-no with Apple and I'm surprised it even was approved.

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

#143
Congratulations on the move to startup life! Great looking website and nice user experience for publishing.

Posting the service on HN is one of those things I wish I had thought of a few months ago, I still have a lot to learn - thankfully a friend sent me this link since he knew what we were doing. TainoApp (http://gettainoapp.com) does all that (Wordpress to native iOS app), plus full platform support for Windows Phone 7, and Android (wrapping up Blackberry and MeeGo support as of this posting) you can see it at work here - http://goo.gl/nuZcm. So far, it seems we're the only ones that can do Windows Phone 7 - hopefully someone in the community can point out other projects we haven't heard from that already does it, so that we can continue learning from others.

We have the tech specs ready for implementing support for most of the CMSs out there (Tumblr, Posterous, and others including Tresite - heavily used in latinamerica), but decided to focus on Wordpress installs first since the install base was larger we were able to churn out an mvp faster since we were more familiar with the wp architecture.

Our focus had been on engaging one on one with customers and quietly testing out different revenue models - but this kind of torrent of feedback would have been truly welcome. It wasn't until the start of the new year that we decided to test an introductory offer for the platform - aimed at the latinamerican market first (it's google translate friendly - http://goo.gl/Y5JZL). I felt we were missing a lot of the features I wanted, so I held back from doing a public push to get feedback - that was a big mistake. Seeing everyone's comments for Appifier has been an uplifting experience - so keep at it!!! One of the toughest things I've felt is being out there and being open to scrutiny by other startups. Maybe we can chat sometime and talk a bit more about some of the mistakes we've done along the way - drop me a line at jramphis at gettainoapp dot com. Best of luck!

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

#144
post #107

Nice demo video, although I am not sold on the idea people want or need to consume blogs natively on their phones. But, hey, hat tip for testing the idea in real time :)

Fortunately for OP, it doesn't matter if people want or need to consume blogs natively on their phones. It matters if business owners want to be able to tell people that their business has an iPhone app. And they do.

Good point! :)

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

#145
post #107

Nice demo video, although I am not sold on the idea people want or need to consume blogs natively on their phones. But, hey, hat tip for testing the idea in real time :)

Fortunately for OP, it doesn't matter if people want or need to consume blogs natively on their phones. It matters if business owners want to be able to tell people that their business has an iPhone app. And they do.

Good point! :)

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

#146

Go Montreal ! :) Slight issue though - I created an app, says everything went well, downloaded the sandbox, but nothing appears under "My projects". Does it take time to update ? Also, "Push composer" and "Analytics" in my admin panel link to "#". Are these just placeholder links to let users know that the functionality is coming ? Good job on shipping the product !

go mtl!

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

#147

Congratulations on the move to startup life! Great looking website and nice user experience for publishing. Posting the service on HN is one of those things I wish I had thought of a few months ago, I still have a lot to learn - thankfully a friend sent me this link since he knew what we were doing. TainoApp ( http://gettainoapp.com ) does all that (Wordpress to native iOS app), plus full platform support for Windows…

Don't you think you should've posted this in a seperate link? It seems like you're trying to hang off Appifier's coattails...

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

#148
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone who's been hackernews'd done an analysis on the load numbers? Back in the day there was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect#Notes_and_refer...

Rob "CmdTaco" did some analysis - http://cmdrtaco.net/2011/10/then-along-came-hacker-news/ John Sheehan mentioned numbers the other day too - https://twitter.com/#!/johnsheehan/status/156271988195860480 Seems like the "Hacker News 10K" would be an approximate general number or its going to approach that soon.

I never got 10K from Hacker News alone, but on my blog I got 10K from HN combined with Reddit, with the links being submitted at aprox. the same time, for 3 articles I wrote.

My website is static, with no MySQL or PHP to speak of (by means of Jekyll), right now hosted on an AWS micro instance, served by Nginx. Prior to this it was hosted on Heroku's free plan, with offloading of static assets to GAE. For free and it didn't even blink.

Seeing how people are talking about caching, load-balancing, clusters, beefy servers and so on, just makes me think how extremely awful and bloated Wordpress is.

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

#150
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i don't think his intention is to move content, but rather just to make that content more easily accessible and visible to mobile users. the problem with mobile websites is that they have to compete with the app store. if an iphone user wants a train schedule, are they more likely to open up a browser and search google for "train schedule iphone" and scroll around clicking on random sites? or would they just open the…

When I want to look at the train schedule, I just touch the bookmark on my home screen, which takes me to the web page with the schedule.

And if every iPhone user understands bookmarks as well as you do, perhaps this service will fail.

But I hear rumors that a lot of App Store apps get lots of downloads, even if they're nothing but links to existing web sites wrapped in an app shell. Many customers don't understand bookmarks.

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