Category Archives: Start-ups

Remember the Milk

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Starting the day with a post on your blog can be anti-productivity but I’ll take the risk today.

Something I wanted to talk for some time now is Remember the Milk. According to the authors its the best way to manage online to-do lists. But what I really wanted to talk is how I found it.

While browsing the PostgreSQL website I noticed the small bottom link they have to TinySofa and got curious. I then followed the link and discovered Remember the Milk and also their one Linux distro also called TinySofa. My first though was “real entrepreneurs these guys”.

This is great example of how helping open-source projects can be a good thing for company. I can only think how much web traffic they get from that small link and the money they are not spending on marketing.

As for the application itself, it’s the Web 2.0 thing you could expect.

Update: In a conversation with prla he brought up a good question. He thinks this is an excellent, excellent app., one of the best Web 2.0 examples, both in terms of interface and features. The question is, will the user be more happy with the long feature list of Remember The Milk or by the simplicity of TadaList?

How the Money Contest Failed, Graham and a Great Idea

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In the begining of the month I said I would live the whole month in Évora with 250€ (house rent excluded). That has failed miserably. It’s now the 23th and I’ve spend 270€ already.

The main reason for this failure I think was the fact that I didn’t use a separate account to manage the 250€. Lesson number one: Having more money favors more spending. Another lesson, rather obvious, is that by eating at home I save more. Since many times, especially at lunch there isn’t time to cook, eating at the University has become an alternative to other restaurants because it is rather cheap (less than 4€ for a meal).

Drive less, walk more! It’s the best way to save these days. The gas price has gone nuts.

On another note, I read the latest post on Graham’s blog and a quote caught my eye:

>“Here we are. So what is our purpose here? Well, we humans are as conspicuously different from other animals as the anteater. In our case the distinguishing feature is the ability to reason. So obviously that is what we should be doing, and a human who doesn’t is doing a bad job of being human– is no better than an animal.”

I wonder how this contradicts the search for emptyness, normally associated with Zen Budishm.

The guys at Steelpixel had a great idea. They are offering lifetime hosting starting at 150$, one-time fee. Read on because it is worth it:

>VC or not to VC, that is a tricky question. Chris and I made the decision long ago that we would never take VC. We don’t feel it allows you the freedom to run a company the way you think it should be run. If you can’t do that, what is the point of running your own company?

>We have kicked around a few ideas on how to get money to pay for things we need. We talked about borrowing Kevin Burton’s idea and setup adsense and have people use that for us. We decided we wanted to offer something in return for helping us out so we decided to use the same idea TextDrive did. We are offering two lifetime hosting packages to customers, starting now.

>The money we raise will allow us to add more server capacity, increase our support response time (by make this our full time gig), and to focus on ways to improve the entire hosting process for our customers.

Ryan Carson: Will your Web App Make Money?

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Ryan Carson, one of the developers behind DropSend, a well-known service for sending large files over the Web, in a piece called “Will your Web App Make Money”, talks about how people vastly overestimate the number of paying customers they’ll get when deploying a web app:

> If you’re offering a free plan to your customers (for example DropSend offers a free plan that enables users to send 5 free sends a month before they start paying) then expect to get around 98% or 99% of your customers on that plan. That means that you can only really bank on 1% or 2% of your total customers on the paying plan. In our experience this is true and other major players in the web app industry have agreed. This is about the industry average.

Coming from Ryan Carson this is especially interesting. DropSend currently has 17,000 users gained in just over five months. Their business model is based on subscription plans. Wouldn’t you expect more than 1% of the total customers would use the paying plan?

The article is published at ThinkVitamin, a new resource launched recently for web developers, designers and entrepreneurs, also powered by Ryan. I saw this via PlasticBag and as they say it’s already a pretty interesting looking site with some extremely cool people commenting and supporting the venture.

YouOS Web Operating System

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Via Jeremy Zawodny Blog - The guys at YouOS are pulling up a web operating-system. It’s still wayyyy alpha, as they say, but the about page is already funny :).

More seriously, I recommend everyone trying it. It already has many applications like chat, mail, browser (browser inside browser!), etc.. but what really made my eyes came out was the app IDE (web-based they have). Really cool, guys, congratulations. Things like that make Web 2.0 mean something.

Trying out Basecamp

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After listening to the Web 2.0 episode 9 podcast, I went over to Basecamp, a web-based application to manage collaborative projects, and decided to give it a try.

My review is: It’s nice, clean and simple. No feature overflow, just what the casual user will need. Recommended.

Just as the podcast tell us, the history behind Basecamp is really interesting. David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried started a web design firm called 37signals that was focused on clean, fast and usable designs. David Hansson later started worked on Basecamp that later became the foundation for Ruby on Rails, the well-known open source web application framework. They soon became a product company.

As Jason says in this O’Reilly interview:

Jason: We built Basecamp because we needed it. I’m a big believer in investing in what you know and what you need. We invested our time, energy, and focus into building a product that we knew we needed to run our own business. When you build what you know, and when you use what you build, you’ve got a head start on delivering a breakout product.

Good thinking, right?

“Basecamp’s success as a bootstrapped web-based application has made it a favorite of web designers and also a model for would-be entrepreneurs.”