thedob

This is really great. Kudos to Stripe. I'm curious about what the ideal scenario is at the conclusion of the 3 months? Some options are...

- The project has progressed significantly to the point where the developer can hope to find continued sponsorship at Stripe or elsewhere.

- The project has progressed to the point where it no longer needs the tender loving care of the maintainer full time. Either it got more contributors or has reached a new level of stability.

- The developer joins Stripe (or somewhere else) full time and the project is left better off, but without a full time contributor/maintainer

Any thinking about what the end-game is from the developer's perspective. Either way, it's an incredible opportunity.

Congrats to MongoHQ.

I often wonder why the hosted Mongo services aren't offering dedicated servers yet. It seems like an easy opportunity to provide service, automation, and monitoring value add at a high price point. Is the thinking that most customers who would opt for the dedicated instance would just run it themselves to save money?

A mistake that first time entrepreneurs often make is to try and identify their startup by researching gaps in various hot markets, or they try to identify something that sucks and improve it. These are both good starting points on their own, however there needs to be an additional qualifier: Is the founder passionate about the problem and the larger market area they're entering in? Are they excited to work within this market for the next 5+ years and are they naturally going to spend all their free time thinking about the problem?

I know that I've made the mistake multiple times before of stumbling upon a good idea, getting started on it, only to have it turn into more of a side project than a business. Passion around the market and problem area is something that I wouldn't participate in a business without going forward.

Did a writeup including winners at blog.dougpetkanics.com

Thanks for the feedback, and I agree that if we ever create more problems it'd be a good idea to help people learn along the way.

Re the spammy comments, our entire team are longtime HN users so we all know those hurt way more than they help, but think one of our "fans" wanted to "help" a little too much. Love their enthusiasm though.

We thought this would be fun to make and fun to work on for an hour or two. Let us know if you have any feedback or questions.