How I built a business in a weekend (Or, the benefits of shared workspaces)
arshadchowdhury.com
How I built a business in a weekend (Or, the benefits of shared workspaces)
1–10 of 29 posts
Re: How I built a business in a weekend (Or, the benefits of shared workspaces)
#2Looks interesting.
I can certainly see the benefits for conference organisers. I also think it might be popular for restaurants/bars who normally obtain business cards (to add to mailing list) for entry into monthly prize draws.
How are you obtaining a person's email address from a text message?
Re: How I built a business in a weekend (Or, the benefits of shared workspaces)
#3Perhaps I'm missing something really basic here, but if all the 'troops' have to do is text a given codeword to a number, how do you get both their phone number and their email address?
Where are you getting the email addresses from?
Re: How I built a business in a weekend (Or, the benefits of shared workspaces)
#4You don't build a business in a weekend.
Re: How I built a business in a weekend (Or, the benefits of shared workspaces)
#5You don't build a business in a weekend.
Exactly. Kudos on building a fairly complex application over the weekend, but the journey has just begun. 'Build it and they will come' does not apply (usually) for revenue generating businesses with real customers.
Re: How I built a business in a weekend (Or, the benefits of shared workspaces)
#6Very interesting project. It shows well the value of collaborators and having people in one place. It's also a very well written piece. aes256 (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3733968) and robinjfisher (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3733913) asked a key technical question, so I'll give a little feedback on the linked page itself:
typo: Dogpatch Labs by no means normal. It’s a small, tight community of tech entrepreneurs who love to help eachother
"eachother" should be two words
I doubt it: Everything was done within 30 square feet
A bit picky here, but you may as well get it right: 30 square feet is a tiny area for a workspace: for example, a room (closet, really) measuring 5ft by 6ft would have an area of 30 square feet. I doubt that's what you meant. You probably meant that everybody was within 30 ft of everybody else, or something of this nature.
Re: How I built a business in a weekend (Or, the benefits of shared workspaces)
#7Perhaps I'm missing something really basic here, but if all the 'troops' have to do is text a given codeword to a number, how do you get both their phone number and their email address? Where are you getting the email addresses from?
I tested it out and this is what it says:
"Thanks! You can reach me at [my number]. Could you please reply with your email so we can add it to our list?"
Re: How I built a business in a weekend (Or, the benefits of shared workspaces)
#8So you built your business entirely relying on third-party services. Not only is this dangerous (if they change their rates one day, you will need to scramble), but, your business has virtually no barrier to entry.
Now that you wrote an article on it, there will be other people that will build a similar business in a weekend and compete with you.
Re: How I built a business in a weekend (Or, the benefits of shared workspaces)
#9Perhaps I'm missing something really basic here, but if all the 'troops' have to do is text a given codeword to a number, how do you get both their phone number and their email address? Where are you getting the email addresses from?
I tested it out and this is what it says: "Thanks! You can reach me at [my number]. Could you please reply with your email so we can add it to our list?"
The marketing page really needs to be changed to make it clear that it doesn't automatically gather email addresses.
I can see the benefits of the pitch that people only need to text the codeword but you could presumably extend the service to offer greater parsing of message content e.g. people can text the codeword, name and email and you parse them out rather than ask people to reply again with their email address.
Re: How I built a business in a weekend (Or, the benefits of shared workspaces)
#10So you built your business entirely relying on third-party services. Not only is this dangerous (if they change their rates one day, you will need to scramble), but, your business has virtually no barrier to entry. Now that you wrote an article on it, there will be other people that will build a similar business in a weekend and compete with you.
So you built your business entirely relying on third-party services. Not only is this dangerous (if they change their rates one day, you will need to scramble), but, your business has virtually no barrier to entry.
..as tons of other startups do, and actually the only external services they use are Twilio and Stripe, others cited are just opensource frameworks/technologies (RoR, Bootstrap).