

1 year ago: living with no heat, no electricity - in the middle of a crime scene - tomasien
http://tommy.authpad.com/the-one-year-anniversary-of-sleeping-in-the-freezing-cold-without-power-or-heat-in-the-middle-of-a-crime-scene

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iopuy
Seeing how this is Ycombinator, I should have expected this to be about a
start up; however, I can't help but feel I was slightly mislead by the title.

Why was there no electricity? What about the crimes? Those sound darn
interesting and I'm willing to wager that's the reason most people clicked on
the link.

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dkersten
_Why was there no electricity? What about the crimes? Those sound darn
interesting_

I, too, would like to hear about this stuff!

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Retric
Umm, did we read the same thing? It said _in the robbery... his roommate was
shot_ leading to blood on the walls and his apartment becoming a crime scene.

no electricity or heat was from having no money.

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eric_bullington
Do you think that ABC boards in other states will come to the same conclusion
about the concept behind CitySwig (helping connect bar and store owners with
stock to sell at discount with customers)? I commented on what on your
previous posts that I think CitySwig a really good idea, and I still think so.
I'm curious what direction you are taking now.

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tomasien
1\. No. There are about 35 states where TCS could work relatively uninhibited.
Our flash deals model is something bars want very badly and I believe strongly
someone will get it right.

2\. We built too many features. The app was too feature rich and we couldn't
iterate fast enough. That said, with a solid seed round we would move into
other states and start killing it with the news apps we've finished (but
haven't released).

However, investors don't care about that, it's too unknown and our model would
take a long time to scale. I fully support and understand their perspective,
and I wish we could have done what we needed to do in Virginia to prove them
wrong. We couldn't, and now we're going to move on with something else we're
really excited about.

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nicholassmith
Came for gory details, stayed for the warm and fuzzies.

For every startup that has a nice clear run at it I imagine there's a dozen
swimming in poop. In some cases, like this one, going through the worst
possible circumstances that can happen, and you either sink or swim.

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tomasien
I think I wrote this badly, but you got exactly the point I was going for: for
every Airbnb there's someone exactly as resilient that is NOT Airbnb.

However, not dying has its own merits and has huge upside, so I recommend
adopting it as a philosophy and constantly doing everything you can to turn
"not dying" into "living large".

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kstenerud
Absolutely. Falling to the deepest depths and surviving has the side effect of
making you more fearless, and thus stronger.

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mirkules
Can you describe exactly what is "Virginia's ABC"? And how were they able to
shut you down? That part of the story was completely lost on me - I feel like
there is some context that I might have missed.

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noonespecial
That's harsh. I thought "don't die" was strictly metaphorical. You did it most
literally as well. I'd like to hear more about your troubles with ABC.

Stay strong.

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tomasien
Thanks man, we will!

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batgaijin
What did PG mean when he said "go to your users"?

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sk5t
There's no lesson here... people already work hard to stay alive, and serious
tenacity is a well-known component to getting a business off the ground.

