

Ask HN: Your Startup Progress (December 2011) - james-fend

Just like last month:<p>What progress have you made on your startup for the month of December?? (full-time or on the side)
Launch something? Almost launching? Got featured on a great blog?<p>Guess I'll start off: Parted ways after getting ripped off by a terrible Ruby on Rails programmer and decided to learn myself Rails and have hacked away at Freelanceful.com. Hopefully will launch in a couple weeks.
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md1515
I guess I'll just use December to summarize the entire year. As a non-
technical co-founder I helped acquire 5-figure investment from a billion-
dollar hedge fund, organize a team to form another bootstrapped one and came
very close to closing a deal with another simple project that cost me $10 to
start...

...then I butted-heads with the investor in the first project and have all but
been pushed to the side. Then my technical co-founder for the bootstrapped
project started to beef up his own profitable project instead of working
together with me, then the deal fell through on my $10 investment. The
greatest part was that I even took some time off from school for that (and
other things)!

I know - sounds like a failure. Well, it was. In any case I learned a TON
about things I like doing, things that do and do not work, and most
importantly, I learned a lot about myself.

I'm working on some projects on the side, but I am re-entering school full
time in Jan. to get my BA degree. Let us all hope 2012 is prosperous.

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leslyn
December was a good month for us!! 2nd full month post launch and we doubled
our user database, got exposure from a BBC Travel Blog had more Spanish
translations than anything, lol. We contracted a demo video, a home page
redesign, and some copy editing which went great. I am the non-tech co-founder
and have been marketing my fanny off with a budget of $200/mo. What I have
concentrated on is blogging and building a Twitter presence (I need
followers.)

When we started, we Beta tested with friends and family... roughly 30 people
who were afraid of hurting our feelings - not a good idea! Then we soft
launched into a Public Beta, got picked up by Killer Start-ups but we were
still learning about promotion copy and I can't say it was our very best foot
forward but had some traffic and got some users. By the end of Nov. we had 100
- today it is over 200 so if this trend continues then by the end of 2012 we
will have 1.6 Million users - not bad for a year old app!

I think a lot of us hit the ground wanting instant success - there is a big
part of me that does but as I define 'instant' in terms of realistic time -
one year is pretty darn 'instant'. So... I plug along and learn, read, learn &
read some more. I connect, comment, blog, and believe.

uencounter.me went from an idea to a concept to a project to a fully realized
app in 10 months time. When we get to 1.6 million users by this time next year
... that will be 'instant' enough for me.

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dgunn
The month of December was good for us. We weren't going to launch until Jan
but a chef contacted us and wanted to get started right away. We gave an
amazing deal on the first event and sold out. We ultimately had 3 events in
Dec which increase in price each time and we sold out every one.

This early start caused us hack together the unfinished bits of the site very
quickly and helped us find and squash a ton of bugs in the code and actually
parts of the UX. We even had a chef from another country try to start using
our site. (we're still trying to determine if it was the right thing to do to
support another country since we initially planned to focus on NYC and keep it
small right now Thoughts?)

We're still doing the "official" launch in Jan where we'll roll out our actual
roster of chefs but it's encouraging that our service got picked up by word of
mouth and attracted chefs and diners pretty much on its own, especially
considering we've had zero press to date. Also it's nice to see revenue a
month prior to launch since we planned for the worse and didn't expect revenue
until March at the earliest.

[edit] the service is soupnextdoor.com. Contact me if you want a discount
code. Email in the profile.

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aespinoza
We have been successful in several fronts:

* We reached private beta status (We had been on alpha for a while). * We released two new features for the beta users. * We were able to create documentation and video tutorials to help users jump in. * We have gather a lot of data on how our users are using our service and began doing experiments to continue learning.

We have had some rough times. After not getting into Y Combinator, the team
lost faith and we almost parted ways. I was working alone for a while. I do
believe the idea is great, and the plan we have for execution has been working
great. But I can't do it alone. After a couple of meeting I am happy to say
the team is intact and continuing on track. I can say that is our biggest
success after all.

I can tell you that the technical aspects of our service are challenging but
exciting, people problems, on the other hand, like trying to keep the
motivation up after a big disappointment has been though, it has been hell.

But iKnode is still alive and kicking, and we are ready for anything. What
doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right?

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polyfractal
This is more like a side-project, but I'm proud of it. I've been building a
newsletter email list that interviews startups that are hiring.

I launched it at the beginning of December and have grown from 0 subscribers
to just over 100. I've sent out two interviews so far, and I have a few more
waiting to be sent out.

The very beginning was a rough chicken/egg problem. People were hesitant to
signup for a new list. Startups are busy and didn't want to devote time for an
interview that would only reach a handful of applicants. Because of this, I
cold-called _a lot_ of startups for interviews in the beginning. I also tried
hard to drum up subscriber numbers at the same time.

Luckily, I found some startups that thought it was a good idea...despite the
low subscriber number. These guys were great and gave me interviews knowing
they (probably) weren't going to find an applicant from the list. They also
provided some great feedback on the type of questions I was asking.

Subscribers are trickling in between 1-3 a day, so things are going to get
easier as I move forward.

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MarcinMieszek
December was a breakthrough month for <http://ninjaCI.com> !

We have spent past month thinking how software development could be simplified
and made faster. Mid December we finally launched beta version that supports
Django, MySQL and Git and we are giving away free access codes right now.
People using these technologies get their complete server infrastructure ready
in a second, all tied together by our Continuous Integration platform.

After not getting into YCombinator we see that we finally get momentum which
is very good and we are way ahead of competition that is starting the field as
well.

If you have any questions you can reach me at marcin.mieszek@ninjaci.com

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amac
9 months into my latest startup, Lion.

Started this year with the intention of programming more after a break since
college. Hired another programmer to help work on the website. The site itself
will be a social business website; a community.

My aim is to do consulting and investing full-time using my website as a
vehicle to help with both. Hopefully it can be useful to other founders too,
especially in the UK.

I would like to launch before January 2012 is out.

