trussi

Quite interesting!

At first, I didn't understand why you only wanted a 200x200 image. I expected it to cut a big picture up into smaller squares and lay them out in a table.

But I was wrong! :)

It actually creates a 200 row by 200 column table and changes the background of each cell to match the image's color at that pixel.

I'd recommend improving the description of the service on the site. It took me a couple tries to get it to work (I used too big of a picture), but finally got it to work. Glad I did.

Thanks for sharing.

What are the roles of each person? Is the younger person the hacker and the older person the bizdev? Or vice versa?

If the older person is the bizdev and has a lot of domain expertise, then it's a HUGE advantage!

Next time... :)

Make sure all co-founders' equity is vested.

Don't do a 50-50 split. One person needs to have a majority stake. Otherwise, you spend too much effort being a democracy instead of a startup.

If you give 40% to a designer, how much are you going to give to your biz dev person (when you need one in three months when your beta is done)?

If you both use equity to give to the biz dev and the biz dev requires more than 20% to retain, you just lost majority of your business. :(

40% is way too high for a designer.

Also, make damn sure you vest any equity you give out.

Remember, you can only give it away once, so do so sparingly.

Car-as-a-service. Nice.

Build and install a scaled out application. Multiple AWS instances in a load balanced configuration. Use small instances to purposely bottleneck the available resource pool.

Use something like Blitz.io to beat the hell out of the application. This is your baseline

Use performance monitoring and optimization tools to improve the architecture and application. Go through each layer of the application to see where the biggest gains can be found. Also look/test for data consistency.

Rinse and repeat with blitz.io.

Also, test how well the architecture responds to various types of server failures.

And make sure you test a viable backup process as well.

Lastly, once you have a nice, performant architecture, increase system resources both up (more resources per server) and out (more servers) to see how well the system actually scales. :)

Agreed.

Based on lots of experience dealing with off-shore developers, the problem has always been communication.

Once a company figures out how to properly communicate the right level of detail, outsourcing becomes a significant force.

The opportunity gap of $15/hr versus $50/hr is too great to ignore.

Nice work.

Glad to see somebody implementing a solution to pretty up QR codes.

Only potential issue is the contrast between the foreground and background needs to be enough to properly scan.

Check out the specials listed on WebHostingTalk.com.

I use unmanaged dedicated servers.

Going price for a dedicated Quad Core i7, 12 GB of ECC RAM, 4x2TB is under $150/mo. That's a wicked cheap price for those specs.

Obviously if you are going from $10/mo hosting, you won't bite the bullet on a $150/mo server, but it's the only price point I know.

Are you interested in building cutting edge technology or building a business?

If you're interested in building a business, then there's a huge amount of opportunity the online communications space!

I could probably think of 5 cushy niches that will print $20k-60k per month with a very small team. Just look around you and identify occupations that involve communication and build a communication product around that occupation's process.

It's a relatively simple and straight-forward process to building a business that lots of technical folks overlook because it's not sexy. I'll take profitable over sexy any day.

Take a look at Tableau. It's super expensive and desktop-based. But it allows for some very powerful, customized data analysis.

Build a SaaS version of Tableau and you have a good starting point.

You still need to find the problem you are solving. Try to find one or two niches, like university labs or government research facilities.

Personally, I'd find the problem this solves well, then actually solve that problem (instead of helping others solve that problem). Take credit card interest rates; instead of building a tool tailored to credit card issuers or resellers, build a site that provides the data (using your tool) in a value-added way.

It's like you're creating your itch, so you can scratch it with your idea. A bit backwards, but crazy enough it might just work.

As a developer, I love writing code and solving problems. I spend my Friday nights writing code. I routinely pull all nighters writing code. Did I mention I love writing code?

I am going solo on my current project, so I'm having to do all the non-tech stuff (marketing, financing, sales, operations, customer support). I like doing it, but I'd rather not. My time is much better spent solving technical problems.

The non-tech stuff is equally hard and equally important. I might not be the best BizDev guy, but I'm definitely not going to trust it to just anybody.

Based on my experience, you have to be the best BizDev person I've ever met. That's actually not that high of a bar; most "BizDev" folks have no idea what hustle looks like.

Here's how I'd define that...

1) How well defined is your product? How have you evaluated the product/market fit? If you aren't regularly engaging with customers, you haven't even started yet. I want to see significant customer-facing interaction on a regular basis.

2) How well have you thought out the marketing plan? What distribution channels have you identified? Have you created marketing collateral for those channels yet? If not, get busy.

3) Where's your business plan? Don't laugh; I'm serious. Anybody that scoffs at a business plan is a fool (and they've probably never done one before, which is a very bad sign). It's a litmus test that shows you have gone through the business planning process. And it's actually quite informative for me to better understand how thoroughly you have thought through your idea.

4) Show me your financial projections. These had better be rock solid. If my accountant laughs when reading your financials, not good.

5) Tell me where you personally want to be in 3 years. What are your life goals, your financial goals, etc?

6) Show me your mock-ups, prototypes, wireframes, etc. You should already have these (sourced via crowdsourcing/outsourcing) and are actively iterating them as part of your conversation with customers.

7) You should have spent at least $5k of your own money on this project. I don't care what you spent it on (conference fees, outsourcing, travel, etc). I want to see you with some skin in the game.

I think that's a reasonable first draft list of things I'm looking for in a BizDev person. I'll add more as I think of them.

Does that help?