Nice hack, Arshad! I remember you when you were still a student selling naps :)
Thanks, Andrew!
How I built a business in a weekend (Or, the benefits of shared workspaces)
21–29 of 29 posts
Re: How I built a business in a weekend (Or, the benefits of shared workspaces)
#22Is texting really easier for people than hand writing on a sheet of dead tree? Kids these days.. Personally I would much prefer writing over texting a random number (with a follow-up text for my email), but I guess an advantage is that it avoids queues at the sign-in sheet.
You're right... I'm trying to figure out how this can be useful. I used it at a recent Meetup to divide people into committees, and that worked well. But yeah, the hunt for more use cases is on.
Re: How I built a business in a weekend (Or, the benefits of shared workspaces)
#23Very 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 t…
Thanks, Dhimes. I'll update the language to be more accurate. How embarrassing! - Arshad
Re: How I built a business in a weekend (Or, the benefits of shared workspaces)
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
We started off asking people to send their email along with the code word but that was really confusing. However, we only ask people for their emails once; from then on RollCallMe remembers the email. - Arshad
Re: How I built a business in a weekend (Or, the benefits of shared workspaces)
#25You don't build a business in a weekend.
You're right in that it's not a profitable business yet. It's only a business in that we offer a service and we charge for it. We definitely don't do that profitably yet! We've built a minimum viable product that we'll use as a basis to explore and define demand.
Re: How I built a business in a weekend (Or, the benefits of shared workspaces)
#26This is not a business yet.
Re: How I built a business in a weekend (Or, the benefits of shared workspaces)
#27So 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).
".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)."
..and they are disposable. Most startups I see I know won't be around in 2 years.
Re: How I built a business in a weekend (Or, the benefits of shared workspaces)
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
".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)." ..and they are disposable. Most startups I see I know won't be around in 2 years.
.and they are disposable. Most startups I see I know won't be around in 2 years.
they won't be around not because of the external services they've used but because they wont find the right business model. It's like saying that every ecommerce around will fail because they're using and external payment processor like Paypal. Maybe some of them can fail because of a Paypal "horror story" (account blocked etc..) but most of them will fail because they are not profitable.
I partially agree with you that relying on external services could be a risk, but in this case they've chosen services for some part that are not so easy to implement internally, and for that they've picked two new but highly growing services.
Re: How I built a business in a weekend (Or, the benefits of shared workspaces)
#29You don't build a business in a weekend.
You're right in that it's not a profitable business yet. It's only a business in that we offer a service and we charge for it. We definitely don't do that profitably yet! We've built a minimum viable product that we'll use as a basis to explore and define demand.
That's cool, what you've built in such a short time is great and I wouldn't take away from the achievement... I'd just change the post title :-).