

Meet The People You Follow On Twitter With Conference Directory Lanyrd (YC W11) - razin
http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/31/lanyrd/

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simonw
We're pretty excited to be the first YC company to launch following the big
funding announcement. It will be interesting to see if it affects the amount
of attention we get from the launch.

~~~
petervandijck
This quote had me laughing:

"Founded by Django creator Simon Willison and his wife Downe after finding
themselves stuck on their honeymoon in Casablanca with nothing else to do".

:) Congrats on the launch!

ps: the site is pretty slow right now, can you crank up some instances or
something?

~~~
natbat
hehe :)

It was a long term honeymoon - we gave up our flat in Brighton and just set
off into the world with just our backpacks and laptops. We were also ill in
Casablanca (and it was Ramadan so couldn't find any restaurants open) so we
rented a flat for two weeks to cook for ourselves and built and launched the
first version of Lanyrd.

~~~
mcdowall
Congrats on the site, didn't realise until now it was yc.

Out of curiosity (I was considering the same) where else did you travel to?.
Being that my principle goals are to do a round the world trip and finish my
startup, I figured the best way would be for me to do them both at the same
time.

~~~
simonw
We spent six months travelling, starting in Europe (a proper honeymoon in
Corsica, then through France and Spain) and then moving to North Africa:
Morocco and Egypt.

We were travelling slowly - almost all overland without flying, and in no
hurry to leave somewhere if we liked it. We ended up spending 7 weeks in
Morocco because we were enjoying it so much (the original plan was just 2-3
weeks).

We would have kept going, but since the site was taking off we applied for YC
from Egypt and ended up having to fly from Cairo to San Francisco for the
interview - then back to Johannesburg for a pre-arranged road trip with
friends.

Working on a startup while travelling actually worked surprisingly well for
us. The two require different parts of your brain - startuping is very
creative, while travel is very reactive. We'd go out and explore Marrakech for
a few hours, talk about Lanyrd stuff, then head back to the Riad for a few
hours to build things. It was actually pretty productive!

Hacking while travelling can be quite limiting though - you're carting around
a lot of expensive gear, which makes some destinations / some cheap
accommodation less of a good idea. We decided to put off our planned trip to
Mali for a while for example.

I'm pretty glad we got out of Egypt before they turned off the internet
though!

~~~
mcdowall
Wow, thanks so much for the insight. Are you guys from Brighton then? am based
in Bournemouth.

I was looking at n.america / Asia and aus, the application to yc depends on my
ability to stop procrastinating and actually get something ready!.

~~~
simonw
Yup, we lived in Brighton for two and a half years before we started
travelling.

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vidar
Cool! I have been following Lanyrd for a while but didn't realize they were
with YC.

~~~
Swannie
I guess a launch had to happen soon. What with photos of them (& others) at
the YC Yuri event popping up on the web :-)

~~~
natbat
yeah I was so sure that someone would recognise me! I am the only girl in the
front row in that photo, Simon is on my right

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rriepe
Started on a honeymoon. Great story. They say a co-founder is like a spouse
and a startup is like a marriage, but you two are bringing it to a whole new
level.

------
kmfrk
You've done a really great job with the site. Three things:

1) I reaaally hate the yellow buttons. Surely you can code or find some images
that look better. :)

2) I'd love to be able to follow/track a person and the events s/he is
arranging.

3) I'd also be interested to track events by some other measure - topic or
location perhaps. A lot of things don't happen in my country outside the US,
so I'd love to be able to monitor events in the capital without using RSS.

All in all a great job - there have been people before you to think of this,
but none of them have made a site that was genuinely interesting and useful.

~~~
simonw
Thanks for the feedback.

1) I'm rather fond of our yellow buttons myself.

2) You can track a person's events by following them on Twitter - at the
moment the Lanyrd social graph and the Twitter graph are the same thing. We're
going to add "follow" buttons on Lanyrd to make it easier to follow someone
without having to go to Twitter to do it.

3) That's definitely coming. For the moment, you can use our RSS feeds for
that (on the place pages, topic pages and even the topic-in-place pages) but
it won't be an RSS-only feature forever.

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petervandijck
Time to update the blog Simon :) <http://simonwillison.net/>

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Tichy
Any ideas how to memorize that name? Does it have a meaning I don't get (non-
native speaker)?

~~~
kmort
It's a "Web 2.0"-style dropped-vowel spelling of "lanyard". (Lanyards being
commonly used at conferences to hold ID cards.)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanyard>

~~~
Tichy
Thanks - lanyard was a word I didn't know yet.

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spazmaster
Is Lanyrd built using Django?

~~~
natbat
It is indeed, also uses all sorts of other exciting back-end moving parts -
take a look at our colophon for more details: <http://lanyrd.com/colophon>

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noodle
reimnds me of eventvue before it died.

~~~
simonw
We read the EventVue postmortem with interest:
<http://blog.eventvue.com/post/372936164/post-mortem>

We're not really in the social-network-for-your-event market, though some of
our functionality might address part of that problem space. Services like
EventVue are limited in terms of growth because they need to convince
conferences to sign up (and pay for the service) one at a time - it's a sales
problem.

With Lanyrd, the event itself doesn't need to have anything to do with the
site for a profile to be created - and the more events we have listed, the
more valuable the service is to our users. We have over 5,000 events listed
already, all entered by our community.

Thanks to Start Fund, we've got a healthy runway to figure out our business
model. We have a bunch of options and we're confident we can find something
that works for us.

~~~
noodle
it seemed that the pivot they were taking at the end was in a similar
direction to what lanyrd is doing. just a thought, is all.

