How I built a startup while working full-time in Finance • Hacker News Board

Re: How I built a startup while working full-time in Finance

#71

Post by kappaknight » Fri, Mar 16, 2012, 9:06 AM UTC

Interesting post indeed. However, I was expecting you to quit your day job once this was able to pay for itself and the salary of three people. I did not expect to see you quit it to launch this.

Am I missing something? What's your monetization plan? How long before you're profitable?

Re: How I built a startup while working full-time in Finance

#72

Post by fatihdonmez » Fri, Mar 16, 2012, 3:41 PM UTC

jakeonthemove wrote: post #69

lusr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people underestimate how much you can get done if you commit to at least 1-2 hours during the week EVERY DAY, and at least another 12-16 hours on the weekend. Working during the week is critical, even if it's difficult, simply because it keeps the momentum going and motivation fresh (in my experience of trying it every other way). It's also a deceptive 30-80% additional capacity than what you have merely work…

Yeah, but doing it after you come home tired from a stressful job is not that easy - even if you have the drive, your brain is too tired to think clearly...

yes I feel that alot, as an engineer it's really hard to concentrate on your project after work.. But I realize something for me, maybe it's also for others but if i manage to start it somehow, i can go further more than i expected actually.. hardest thing is for me is beginnig..To figure out beginning I just check my checkouts on plastic source control and realise that we already done alot, is just fix everything and it's your fuel now you can go :)

Re: How I built a startup while working full-time in Finance

#73

Post by arscan » Fri, Mar 16, 2012, 3:50 PM UTC

lusr wrote: post #40

arscan wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds good in practice, but I have a real hard time building anything in 1 hour increments. I need a good 3-4 hours scheduled to make solid progress on any of my side projects. I have a feeling others may have the same problem... and PG described this pretty well in his "makers schedule" essay.

I used to believe that too but while 5 blocks of 1 hour each aren't as efficient as 1 block of 5 hours, it's still better than 0 hours. Today I've managed to get Hadoop set up in pseudo-distributed mode in 1.5 hours on a fresh VM I just installed, while reading a tutorial in the background waiting for stuff to download and install. Tomorrow I'll think more about how I want to convert my crawler prototype from C# over…

Thanks, I appreciate the examples. I think a lot of it comes down to organization -- with some planning I certainly could find smaller items that fit into 1 hour blocks (configuration, writing tests, documentation, etc). Depends on the nature of the project though.

Good point on capturing and reviewing progress. I'm always trying to get better at that.

Re: How I built a startup while working full-time in Finance

#74

Post by corkill » Sat, Mar 17, 2012, 5:27 PM UTC

Seems to me like you can win by default for people like me.

Just want to click a website and start playing music that's decent in one click, I can't be stuffed researching or downloading albums. In europe all the sites I liked in the USA have we are coming soon banners, aka massive opportunity to win by default at the moment in terms of traffic (although to be honest I have no idea how you would get me to buy something, guilt me into supporting artists by showing them pictures of their kids maybe).

Minus points:

Keeps playing the same songs, I don't really even notice because I am music retarded, but my gf will kill me if I put your website back up.

Tried to login with facebook to see if that would play me some different ones, says it wants permission to post to my wall. No way in hell am I giving you that.