
Bootstrapping a $30k profit/month company from our internship earnings (Part 2) - n9com
http://blog.fiplab.com/bootstrapping-a-30k-profitmonth-company-from
======
Robin_Message
The story with Barclays † is the kind of pernicious theft of IP that
unfortunately small businesses always face when dealing with big businesses,
and is what always makes me laugh when patents are suggested as a good way to
encourage innovation. A patent is worthless if you can't sue, and a small
company can't sue a big one.

Congratulations to the team for remaining philosophical though, and winning on
quality and timing. They truly are real artists.

† They were negotiating to sponsor the app, the developers sent them a roadmap
of their plans, all went quiet and then, a year later, Barclays released their
own app.

------
Sukotto

      Barclays ... develop[ed] their own app ... even went so far 
      as to add ‘fiplab’ as a keyword in their app description!
    

Can you takedown the Barclays version of the app claiming some sort of
infringement on the name "Fiplab"? I frequently hear about that happening to
little devs. It would be a nice turnabout to have it happen to someone big.
(Bonus points if they don't get told _why_ they got yanked... as seems to
happen so often to other small developers)

~~~
n9com
We could probably kick up a bit of trouble for their app, but frankly
speaking, is it really worth it? We've moved on to bigger and better things,
and despite their app launching, we've still got by far the biggest user base
of cycle hire app users, so why bother with them? But on second thoughts, we
may just do it for the lulz ;)

~~~
nonane
You can do this by reporting it to Apple. App search keywords can not be
trademarked or copyrighted names. I had this happen to me once - Apple gave me
a week to resolve the issue or have my app taken down. I had to update my
binary to remove the keyword.

------
davedx
It's always great to see startup success stories outside of San Francisco.
Well done fiplap! (cups of tea all round)

------
AlexMuir
Previous discussion on Part 1:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2955214>

------
muxxa
The Sponsors of the Dublin bike scheme (JC Decaux) were worse than Barcleys,
shutting down an independent app in 2009:
[http://www.lecraic.com/2009/09/22/dublin-bikes-app-pulled-
du...](http://www.lecraic.com/2009/09/22/dublin-bikes-app-pulled-due-to-
threat-of-legal-action-by-jc-decaux/)

------
sosuke
In the last thread someone mentioned they disliked posts being broken up into
parts. I'd like to see a Part 1 of X or Part 2 of X so I know when the series
is complete and I can read them all at that point.

Thanks for writing out Part 2 this quickly though now I want to read Part 3
where what I expected to read in Part 2 is presumed to be after discovering I
was on a multi-part post when I read Part 1 and was disappointed I had to wait
to finish the story.

~~~
illumen
You'd like to buy the whole boxed set of articles, rather than watch the
articles once per week with ads between?

Me too. But I also like the tease.

------
dpcan
"[..] we were really feeling the pressure to start making money, particularly
since all our friends had found jobs and were earning a good income. The
social stigma surrounding being 'unemployed' really sucked [...]"

Their motivation to make money was social? Their friends had jobs so they felt
inadequate?

I've never heard that one before.

I guess it's been a LONG time since I first forged out on my own, but every
year I take on new risks and search for new opportunities, and never do I
think, gosh, what will my friends think?

I'm not sure if this is somewhat off topic, or if I'm asking if this is a
common way of thinking, but I'm a little shocked that one entrepreneur's drive
to make money was only because their friends were earning good salaries.

~~~
matdwyer
I understand it perfectly - if my friends could all afford to go out and have
a pint on the weekend, go on a road trip, vacation, etc. and I was excluded
because I couldn't afford it then it would be upsetting to me, and motivate me
to earn a better income. That being said, people typically associate with
people in their economic class to avoid those types of issues, so I'd assume
if they weren't motivated the friends would eventually fade out (to an extent
of course)

~~~
dpcan
As I thought about it a little more, I came to this conclusion as well. It
could just be a young single-person's motivation, certainly.

I had kids before I even had a chance to know what it was like to be a young
single guy out of college, and I started my company when my first son was 1,
and my motivation was to be a success in his eyes at the time. Still is. I
started developing games because I wanted my kids to see that no matter how
far-fetched it may seem, go after your dreams, succeed on your own terms.

But I can see how having money for beer might have been a motivating force
when I was 21 and if I had no children at the time.

EDIT: I'm being sincere. That read-back as dickish, but I'm serious. I'm far
removed from that world, but I respect anyone's motivation for becoming a
success on their own terms, I just don't always grasp it right away.

~~~
n9com
It's not so much that we felt pressurised by our friends, but more to do with
the fact that we were disappointed in failing to live up to our OWN
expectations. Simply put, we graduated from two of the best Universities in
London, and here we were, earning $15 a day (split two ways!). Financially,
this was wrecking us. It wasn't about bragging rights or earning more than our
friends, we loved what we were doing and had foregone great salaries to live
out our dream - but not earning enough to even buy a week's worth of groceries
scared the crap out of us.

Sadly, quite often, people here in London seldom respect you when you say
you're running a startup, thinking you're probably just unemployed and can't
find a proper job.

I guess in the end, the fact that we couldn't contemplate failing really
pushed us to devise innovative strategies to succeed on the App Store with
very little money (we'll explain this in detail in part 3).

