I was wondering why nobody had mentioned Chargebee here yet. If you're building a subscription business, I'd say this is the way to go. Unless you want to worry about managing recurring billings, maintaining legacy pricing tiers everytime you change your plans, one-off discounts, etc.
Just make sure you have a recurring billing system in place right from the start instead of hacking it on top of your gateway yourself. You should be able to focus on your product right now - not the billing, and the tech debt if you choose to move when the wheels are spinning is just not worth it.
[Source: Hacked a system in my last org and burnt fingers, before happily moving to Chargebee]
I understand the feeling when a competitor pretty much photocopies what you did and tries to claim credit... But aren't we taking the whole ripping off thing a bit more personal than we should?
After all, most businesses are copies with just a minor differentiator - that ends up making all the difference.
Did you look at the screenshots in the linked post? They took the copy and the layout of the original site and did little more than to change the background color. To then state in interviews that their's is an original idea is plagiarism. If an author did this they would lose their credibility as an author and likely end up in a lawyer-on-lawyer situation that doesn't get sexy at any point. This isn't a minor differentiation in an otherwise obvious trade like plumbing or selling books, it is something else.
Look at it another way, if this were two video games, which would you buy and which would you take a dim view of? The one with the original dialog and voice acting and story-line, or the one that ripped it off?
I've had to struggle with procrastination since highschool (now 10+ yrs in the workforce). A couple of things I've noticed about myself and the teams I've worked with:
- We always find time to do things we love doing. So the trick is to simply fill your bucket with things you genuinely enjoy.
- Always have a backlog. It might be a note or a sheet on Excel - but always have a list of things that need to get done. Keep adding the new stuff into this as they come, and spend a couple of hours once a week running through this.
- Get in the flow. Plan your backlog so you have a mix of high, medium and low complexity stuff on your plate.
- Figure out your "in-the-zone" time. For me, I've noticed that I'm most charged up for creative work later in the evening. Make sure you don't have any meetings or distractions lined up during and at least an hour before your zone time.
- Get your temple. Everybody needs a place where they can go, zone in and get work done.
- Have a daily standup where you discuss what you planned to do yesterday, what you did, and what you plan to do today. Do this EVERY SINGLE DAY.
I've noticed most organized/ disciplined folks just do this automatically. For us procrastinators, it's like starting a workout routine after your BMI has hit the ceiling - you need a system, and you need a system that you'd actually enjoy if you want to stick to it!
I'd have to agree. To add to your points though, I like to think of Ideas and Execution lying in a spectrum between Genius and Obvious.
You can take an obvious idea (a social network to connect friends circa 2004), add genius execution to it in terms of adoption and growth, and win.
You can take a genius idea (crunch every page in the web and spit out search results in seconds), keep the execution in terms of UI and experience really obvious and win.
You can even take an obvious idea, apply an obvious execution strategy to it, and steadily grow (or at least play a strong catch up).
The scary part is when you mix a genius idea with genius execution - and risk getting having brilliant app fly over the head.
IMHO bad things start to happen when we start falling blindly in love with our own intellect.
I've been using tenreads on the web for almost 6 months now - great way to get my morning news fix. Only complaint is sometimes the articles don't pick up the best cover image... Hope it's fixed with the iOS update.
I think PH as a community has grown - with more users, visibility and products added every day. And that means the only way to keep the community clean is by putting up some walls.
When you throw a few hundred great products, their makers, and thousands of tech enthusiasts into one place, it's not easy to strike a balance between "content policing" and "random garbage". Somebody IS going to be hurt...
Our product was submitted by a user and won well over 100 votes last year (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/germio) - when it was still way too early for us to even dream of that kind of spotlight. ProductHunt was a great source of feedback and traffic then - as it is now, and I think this is one of the most beautiful tech communities alive today.
Your definition of "good" and "bad" is probably off tangent. As a manager, you take up a new role of being the "coach". It's your job to help your team play at the best performance they possibly can.
Letting go of someone is the simplest thing anyone can do... but if you look back at your own career, chances are you'll find more than a couple of instances when your peers put up, tolerated, and coached you to where you are today - just don't close the doors you walked through.
That's what we're building with our startup germ.io [http://germ.io] - as a product to help you log your ideas, evolve them with more detailed sub-ideas, and move them through incubation to execution.
Why? I think the key is exactly what you've said - to think linearly. Ideas often mushroom to end us up in a place drastically different from where we started, so the end result is not really linear. But we need to think about the next step in an idea linearly if we ever want to get something done. That is where mind maps (non-linear all the way) and traditional task-based tools (too linear) fall short.
Check out what we have at germ.io, signup and if you'd like in on what we're building right now just ding me a message.
Just make sure you have a recurring billing system in place right from the start instead of hacking it on top of your gateway yourself. You should be able to focus on your product right now - not the billing, and the tech debt if you choose to move when the wheels are spinning is just not worth it.
[Source: Hacked a system in my last org and burnt fingers, before happily moving to Chargebee]