
Bootstrapacitor - A meta-startup to keep your energy levels up - nostrademons
http://www.bootstrapacitor.com/
======
nostrademons
This is the renamed, rebranded, and relaunched RejectedByYC.com, previously
announced here ( <http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=16234> ).

Bootstrapacitor provides a place to show off your work to a bunch of other
startup founders without necessarily launching for the whole world to see.
When you register your startup, you're randomly assigned to a "demo group" of
up to 8 other startups. (The assignment algorithm tries to put startups in the
same geographic area together, to facilitate RL meetups.) You can then post
feature announcements of everything you implement, and get instant feedback
from the members of your group. Until you list your startup as "launched",
these announcements are visible _only_ to your group members, so you can put
your startup up well before it might be considered ready for the public. You
_and your group_ get "karma" based on how many features you push out and how
many people look at them or comment on them, so it's to your advantage to
release early and release often.

Our intent is to create the sort of friendly competitive atmosphere of a math
competition or hacker lab. To me, this is the biggest advantage of YCombinator
and clones: they create a peer group of motivated, passionate people that show
off their work to each other. IMHO, that's far more valuable than money or
even the advice and connections: most startups fail because the founders give
up, not because they make a single mistake or can't get VC.

~~~
bootload
_'... Our intent is to create the sort of friendly competitive atmosphere of a
math competition or hacker lab. To me, this is the biggest advantage of
YCombinator and clones: they create a peer group of motivated, passionate
people that show off their work to each other. ...'_

Nice work. I'll check it out when the login lets me in. Is there an RSS post
per user?

~~~
nostrademons
No RSS feed yet, but I could probably rig one up fairly quickly.

Is there something wrong with the login? Your login status says "Active"...

~~~
bootload
_'... Your login status says "Active"... ...'_

think I made the comment on/around the same time. Login is OK.

------
danielha
Good thing you don't have to be able to pronounce the name to sign up.

~~~
nostrademons
That's what just about everybody we ran it by said. We went through several
dozen possibilities, but they all either sucked or were just totally
nonsensical (startupduck.com?) This seemed like the best option we could come
up with.

Ironically, the coworkers I ran it by said "I liked RejectedByYC better". Ah
well.

~~~
whacked_new
How did you come up with that name? I agree with danielha. It took me a while
to figure out what the name came from. It's been a long time since I typed
capacitor (this is the suffix right?) and now it takes me more than half a
second to type.

What about the more web2.0 style names? untaken: bootstrappd, bootstrapping,
bwootstrap... to name a few

~~~
nostrademons
It's from bootstrap + capacitor, as you figured out. We were looking for
something that connotes "keeping your energy levels up". I threw out a bunch
of physics-related terms, but if you saw particleinabox.com or
blackbodyradiation.com you'd think physics and not startups. A lot of our
potential names had that problem: there was nothing in them that really
suggested "startup".

Then there were names that had the opposite problem: they didn't suggest
anything _but_ startups, and the added suffix was just completely random.
Startupduck.com fits in this category. So would bootstrappd, bootstrapping,
bwootstrap, etc, IMHO. My cofounder also suggested startup-orphans.com, which
I nixed as too negative, since negativity was what everyone jumped on
RejectedByYC.com for.

My cofounder also proposed dotcamaraderie.com, which I liked, but we didn't
think anyone would be able to spell "camaraderie". We also considered
shortening it to "dotcomrade.com", but it sounded too communist for me.

------
dfens
Did anyone else see the logo and start daydreaming about having electric
boots?

