I just engaged a local class company who’s Yelp reviews were atrocious. The reason was, 3 of the 4 were reviews of the guy’s driving, not his skills at changing a windshield. I went to FB, and saw reviews with pics of work and overwhelmingly positive scores. Gave him my business. Though, I did think about it a bit before hand. Also thought about Yelp’s relevance and the value of the very recent reviews that were all not for his work, but his driving.
$9 isn't the new black, variable pricing is. Happy to spend (and write off) more to learn some new stuff and support projects like this. I'd love to see a blog post about the pricing in a few weeks / months.
I hope this signals the end of folks walking on egg shells around Arrington. He's no longer a "newsman". He's no longer going to make or break every startup that ends up on AOLCrunch. He's just an investor hoping for deal flow. An investor who's proven he's probably not the guy you'd want to work with, probably not the guy you'd want to partner with, probably not the guy who will ever be on anyone's side but his own. Kudos to Zawinski for calling him out.
people walk on eggshells around arrington? i thought he was pretty much universally reviled, people are constantly calling him out for various crap. maybe not startup people who want his money/coverage, but bloggers and other hangers-on.
While not the case in this instance, it is completely normal for raising a round to take six months. The "check that day" folks are very, very, very outside the norm. Fundraising is almost always a slow slog.
This is a great example of 2 keys to success for startupts. 1. Hustle. Many people told Alex no before he got that first check, but he kept at it. Hit this milestone, get these sales, blah, blah, blah. He kept improving, kept serving customers and kept hustling. 2. He did what he had to do to get his co to the next step. When it was evident that SF was the place they had to be, the picked up and moved - and fast!
Boomerang rocks. It's the simple functionality that I've wanted in my inbox for YEARS. I get a cubic butt-load of email and the problem with it, is it's all on the schedule of someone else. I need to deal with things, but not right now, but if I don't, it gets lost below the fold. I've tried special labels (and compound special labels). I've tried starring things (and plus labels and compound special labels). I've tried reminders outside of email. I've failed at all of them. Inbox 1, Tom 0 - though it's more like Inbox 365, Tom 0. Failing at this is VERY bad for a bootstrapping startup founder. You cannot afford to drop these balls.
Boomerang started as a get stuff in your inbox when it's relevant tool and that's been the biggest win for me. But the scheduled sending is quickly rooting itself into my email workflow. I am almost always heads down coding late at night and will often take breaks to wade through some email. Replying to everything at 3am is not ideal as I then get caught in the 4 - 8am slam of crap email that fills everyone's inbox. Choosing to have my stuff hit an inbox at 10 or 11am, so I'm after the crap and before lunch rocks. Wait, did I just give up one of my super secret competitive advantages over all the rest of you startup folks?
Anyway, I've been using Boomerang since early in their alpha. I've also know the Baydin team really well (we went through TS together in 2009) for a while. Good guys working really hard to solve real problems and make email not suck.
Is it perfect? Not yet. It requires a new version of FF, the Boomerang button is on the left of the Save Now button when you're composing (change this please Alex!), and it can't reply to my email for me, but so far it's pretty freaking awesome. Inbox 0, Tom 1.
We've been users of Mogotest since they first launched their beta. Amazing time saver (especially if you dev on a Mac). I run automated tests across three sites as well as on demand after major pushes. It's especially helpful for our IE 6/7/8 testing. I used to keep VMWare open to test IE stuff and it killed my poor MB and was still a pita to have multiple IE versions happy in my test XP image. Haven't opened it in months ... don't miss it at all.
Hiring? Does that imply a salary? Cause yeah, we don't have that quite yet, but we're working on it.
What do we have? Small, fast, potential insane team going after the temporary staffing / contracting match-making market. It was $86B in revenue last year, a down year, and it's almost entirely offline. It's time to shake things up!
We're in Boston and you need to be to. We code primarily in Rails. The right person will be co-founder with significant equity. We're changing peoples lives. Come build a great company with us.
We're a TechStars 09 company. Have GREAT advisers with deep industry knowledge and major entrepreneurial success under their belts (seriously, rock stars).
Oh, and as this says (http://www.startuply.com/Jobs/Technical_Co_Founder_Rails_153...) I'm not another biz guy looking for someone to do the work. Career developer, 4 startups under my belt, looking to turn my focus more towards the fund raising and growing the biz. That's where you come in. Ping me. My email is in my profile.
I think this is an interesting concept, but man, making a mentorship match is HARD. You have to really hit it off with the person, on more of a personal level than anything at first. Then the rest works out. I'll be interested to hear some real feedback once you've made some matches. Please do give us a followup in a few months.
Do you know how many of these have been awarded in the last six months - especially with the stimulus package? Seriously, this is intractable. Find folks who are doing work that interests you, and then try and find their grants and their papers.
