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Going from $0 to $500k in 1 Year with no VC Money

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21–30 of 86 posts

Re: Going from $0 to $500k in 1 Year with no VC Money

#21

Is it just me or is the space of project/organization tools getting really swamped these days? Seems like every day I hear of a new one. I guess it is something that comes down to preference alot, and some are too opinionated to be flexible and offer all the options (i.e Basecamp), others too simple. But maybe they're all the "MS Project" of this generation. (Oh, and personally use Pivotal Tracker and love it)

It is getting swamped and not just by little guys: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international-busin...

Re: Going from $0 to $500k in 1 Year with no VC Money

#22
post #5
post #3

MetaLab is very high on my list of "people who do awesome work". They've been plugging away at products for years now, I remember Billy He / Ali Bosworth announced one of their first products on HN - ballpark ( http://getballpark.com ) + (hn thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=557028 ). You can catch an interview with Andrew Wilkinson here: http://5by5.tv/founderstalk/28 I've had the opportunity of having the…

re HN post: I know it was 4 years ago, but regarding to patio11 first post over there, even 4yrs ago SSL was really cheap. Having your customer decide whether they want to have their data securely transferred or not over such a minimal cost-difference made me wonder what were the owners thinking? yes, I know there is additional cost involved in encrypting/decryption but 4 years ago servers were not that much more exp…

It used to be a 'premium' feature of 37 signals products if I recall correctly. At the time it felt like others copied them, perhaps I'm remembering incorrectly. So I'm not surprised to see that.

I believe it was just a way to get people to upgrade. Views have changed in the meantime as it's dawned on everyone how bad an idea it is not to have SSL on for everyone given how negligible the cost is.

Re: Going from $0 to $500k in 1 Year with no VC Money

#24
post #15

This is great. However, did I read the article right - by the time they launched they had spent 300K? Here's a question - is it possible to ever do something like this without the requirement of finding 300K via consulting gigs first? I assume that given there were 3 of them and they spent only a few months building it, they didn't need all of the 300K on salaries. I suppose you would have to grow the product from a…

I wonder if that price was the opportunity cost of not being billed out at $x per day.

Re: Going from $0 to $500k in 1 Year with no VC Money

#25
Nice product and the team seems very talented. But whenever I read these stories (from 0 to $8 billion in 3 monthz!1!!!11), lots of important details are left out.

#1 How are you able to connect to 4,000+ paying customers so quickly?

Actually, that's it. I'm guessing any number of HN guys could create this product. But we don't know how to get people to buy it.

Re: Going from $0 to $500k in 1 Year with no VC Money

#28
post #17

Is it just me or is the space of project/organization tools getting really swamped these days? Seems like every day I hear of a new one. I guess it is something that comes down to preference alot, and some are too opinionated to be flexible and offer all the options (i.e Basecamp), others too simple. But maybe they're all the "MS Project" of this generation. (Oh, and personally use Pivotal Tracker and love it)

I still haven't found an ideal solution. The problem with most, including Flow, is that companies won't allow you to put data on the Internet (e.g. my office blocks Dropbox), which cuts most solutions. So you have to convince your IT to install it locally (for large corps don't try, you can't). What I'm looking for is a nice personal proj/org tool that would interface with email and calendar and would give a snapshot…

I use Workflowy and paste in Google Docs/Drive links to any file I need to reference. I love Workflowy's flexibility - it's amazing for everything from task management to taking meeting minutes to brainstorming... and then organizing it into one cohesive system.

Re: Going from $0 to $500k in 1 Year with no VC Money

#29
post #14

I've been playing around with flow. It looks like a cocoa app. Did they use Cappuccino by chance? Wondering what their stack was/is

From their technical lead on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Flow-web-application/What-JavaScript-fr...

jQuery, (customized) Backbone.js, socket.io, and a fair amount of other custom JS.

Re: Going from $0 to $500k in 1 Year with no VC Money

#30
Sorry, this is just a shameless ripoff of 37Signals and Rework. This whole "you only have to work a few hours a day" philosophy will only take you so far. That's just simple economics. If something is that easy to build it means there are very low barriers to entry. When there are very low barriers to entry, profits eventually get squashed to zero. The only exception to this is when you are first to market with something unique. It is virtually impossible to be first to market with something unique in the bloated project management saas space. Actually, this site is a perfect example- from what I can tell they went from nothing to competing with 37Signals in one year.
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