My co-founder once put 1.5 hours of coding on YouTube. Quite some enthusiastic responses on YouTube and HN. Recently we got the idea of streaming more code sessions. Didn't execute on it yet. You find his video here: http://youtu.be/cYrbc-g6R-U
Judging from the responses there is a place for a platform that shows long coding sessions as a tool for people to learn. With all the online courses available today, these kind of video's are a nice way to facilitate further learning and practice.
Somehow, and I know it may sound nitpicky, when you make a point about privacy and then require me to 'connect with google' to create an account, doesn't feel good. I'm not that big on privacy, but perhaps this might be an example of a webservice that should provide at least a way to create an account without connecting to any other service (google / facebook etc).
I'd expect a bit more visualization or explanation on what info the e-mail would provide me with.
From my standpoint, someone that works with people with their own schedule spread over different locations this looks useful.
Thanks for the feedback! Would you feel better if we had a (semi-functioning) demo app for you to play around with before signing up? Since we aggregate information from all your team applications, your email would be empty without connecting at least one account.
I am pretty used to everyone being on google apps, so (selfishly) this isn't a problem for me, although I do agree it probably makes sense to support more options since you're catering to businesses who will probably have specific needs.
However, commenting 'cause this seems awesome, but as per your comment I definitely need more info before I want to sign you up, give you access to all those information sources, and start getting e-mails from you. A demo is pretty complex; just as good to get me started might be (for people who want to dig deeper, not for everyone) an example for each service of the information you can currently summarize and pack into an e-mail. Hell, you could offer to send me a one-time example e-mail so I can actually receive one and see what it'll be like.
I think the flaw here is that I won't use Google to import data for the email. But would want to connect Basecamp for example. Now I first need to connect Google (for which I have no purpose other than accessing the service) and then connect Basecamp. Doesn't make much sense.
Yeah that's a good point. Although, we don't make it very clear, you can connect your Google account and then opt to only get changes from your Basecamp account. But yes, you would always need to sign in using your Google account. Thanks a lot for the feedback.
Perhaps create somekind of call to action that's more like this: 'Connect your Basecamp account', they end up by creating a normal account and then after that the first step is to connect their Basecamp account. This gives you a way to learn what webservice people would connect first. But hey, enough ideas. It's all about execution. Good luck!
Perhaps combine. Make it open source for personal / non-commercial use. License it for companies who will use it commercially. I don't know the details of the product (complexity for example) but might be worth it test if people are interested in workshops / training. Not sure if you're interested in offering that of course.
Edit: Also, think of what is more important now. Getting people to use the framework or make the perfect decision on how to make money with it.
Perhaps you're right, it's an edge case. But for other open source projects it can be interesting to use or at least try.
What I'm not sure about is, how do people try the library. Buying a library without testing it might be a big step. In my experience developers like to try something in their apps and then pay for it when they have commercial use for it.
One of the points in the article is that having your team across timezones, all speaking the same language makes it possible to collaborate when in different locations. Why would it matter which employee is more expensive than the other, in the end it's about the results. Running Marketing and Sales in Barcelona might make it harder to find the clients they have today.
OP here. Ditto to that, we like our culture in Barcelona and didn't want to replace it. We don't see it as a matter of cost, but a matter of possibility.
Since we didn't have a solid marketing or sales team, we decided to land it where our main market is. It just made sense.
Social status, I could see that with teams in the capital and development teams in smaller cities.
Also it's difficult when the customers are big companies, they tend to culturally suck the sales in corporate thinking where the product team try to get an underdog, get-shit-done, we'll-fuck-your-bureaucracy-for-your-own-good attitude.
Our team visited Pablo back in 2010 when he was just working with some remote developers and was based in Barcelona himself. He was already talking about thinking bigger and had some good strategies in mind. It's awesome to see it played out well.
I think he is a great example of an Entrepreneur not just talking about it, but doing it.
I think it depends on the market and country you're in. If you're in the right vertical or solve a very difficult problem you might earn enough to not go international.
For product development, remote working is one solution. I work remote with my team all the time. Sometimes you need to see each other face to face, then meet up somewhere where it's affordable. Could make for a good team field trip even!
The transparency in this article is something we can learn from. It's sad to see a service like Everpix go as they were making money. But if you look at the other numbers, they just staffed up too quickly. Salaries, personnel and payrolling costs of together $3.7 million in two years is just way to much compared to the money they were making.
What I'm curious about is that the cost per user (storing photos) is what killed them, or a burn-rate simply to high for what they're doing.
But then again it's easy to look at this as an outsider and try to point out their flaws. I'm hoping to learn more about how they monitored specific business metrics to test their business model.
If they were paying $35K/mo to AWS for hosting and storage, they could have paid about that much for a year of hosting on their own machines. There's a lot we don't know about this angle, but suffice it to say they were throwing money away on infrastructure.
Yes. We moved back to our own infrastructure as well. But AWS has a broad range of services. I can imagine storing photos on S3 makes sense for a startup like Everpix. Because, you don't need to worry scaling on storage level. Sometimes it makes sense to pay a premium, but it should really be tied to your growth metrics. If you see a month to month growth to which you can't keep up with updating and migrating your own infrastructure, then make the move to AWS or another big cloud vendor.
Judging from the responses there is a place for a platform that shows long coding sessions as a tool for people to learn. With all the online courses available today, these kind of video's are a nice way to facilitate further learning and practice.