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Share your weekend/part-time startup (December 2012)

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Re: Share your weekend/part-time startup (December 2012)

#41
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good take! Been thinking about it for some years. What's your plan on handling distribution?

Thanks! Us too – it's something that we feel just hasn't been executed in the right way yet. We're focussing first on creating a platform for local producers & consumers to connect before we tackle distribution. We've got some interesting ideas on the cards though when the time comes. Would be great to hear your thoughts on it.

I like your approach: test the market without taking risks, and learn on how locals handle it themselves.

Can't think on a better way of doing it. Distribution can kill your idea. At the same time, it's the best selling point of it. If users are buying through the website, they expect a quality deliver, which is not always easy to get, and is expensive too.

On a sidenote: let sellers express themselves. I would not buy groceries from a craigslist-sort site. I would if I can see photos, location, and know more about the product and the business ethics of the seller.

Re: Share your weekend/part-time startup (December 2012)

#42
Two related projects:

1. https://github.com/armhold/ocarina - a Ruby gem for doing simple OCR.

2. http://wordhelper.net/contact - helps you win at Letterpress. Uses my OCR library to find playable words on the board. Have only tested it on an gameboards generated on an iPhone 5.

I created the first project just to see if I could write a simple OCR library (yay, I can!) I created Wordhelper mostly to find a practical use for Ocarina.

Re: Share your weekend/part-time startup (December 2012)

#43
post #3

The first startup I'm seriously trying to build: http://folkrobots.com It's only a landing page at the moment, working on finishing the MVP within this month. What I'm trying to build is a SEO tool that analyze your inbound traffic and gives you a list of keywords to target. It'll analyze the keywords and related keywords and check how competitive they are for you, automatically. Give me lots of feedback please. If a…

Don't bet too heavily on this...HitTail is having a rough time with Google's (very slow but incremental) roll-out of removing the search phrase from the inbound referrer headers...

Re: Share your weekend/part-time startup (December 2012)

#45

I made AppLens (formely AppSnap) a iphone app that lets you install any other iphone app by taking a picture of its icon (on other phones or laptop screens or anything else). It's a free app + ads, most of its users are from china and japan. Money-wise definitely not an hit! I spent quite a bit on time to develop the backend part (in C) and optimized it to query 3mil icons in few ms on a commodity server (cheap). htt…

This is incredibly awesome.

Re: Share your weekend/part-time startup (December 2012)

#46
post #43
post #3

The first startup I'm seriously trying to build: http://folkrobots.com It's only a landing page at the moment, working on finishing the MVP within this month. What I'm trying to build is a SEO tool that analyze your inbound traffic and gives you a list of keywords to target. It'll analyze the keywords and related keywords and check how competitive they are for you, automatically. Give me lots of feedback please. If a…

Don't bet too heavily on this...HitTail is having a rough time with Google's (very slow but incremental) roll-out of removing the search phrase from the inbound referrer headers...

If this becomes a problem do you have any suggestions for a slight pivot?

Re: Share your weekend/part-time startup (December 2012)

#48
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Us too – it's something that we feel just hasn't been executed in the right way yet. We're focussing first on creating a platform for local producers & consumers to connect before we tackle distribution. We've got some interesting ideas on the cards though when the time comes. Would be great to hear your thoughts on it.

I like your approach: test the market without taking risks, and learn on how locals handle it themselves. Can't think on a better way of doing it. Distribution can kill your idea. At the same time, it's the best selling point of it. If users are buying through the website, they expect a quality deliver, which is not always easy to get, and is expensive too. On a sidenote: let sellers express themselves. I would not b…

Those were exactly our thoughts.

For sure – something we really want to emphasise is the people behind the produce, their story and what makes the things they sell so good.

Re: Share your weekend/part-time startup (December 2012)

#50
post #14
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit like Hittail?

Actually, it turns out it's almost exactly like hittail. I guess it means there's a market for it.

I tried Hittail a year ago, and didn't quite work for me. I ended up writing a few scripts myself. But I heard in Rob's latest podcast that Hittail is growing 30% per month.
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