
Lanyrd: From idea to exit – the story of our startup - simonw
http://blog.natbat.net/post/61658401806/lanyrd-from-idea-to-exit-the-story-of-our-startup
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simonw
Natalie put a lot of work in to this (and we're suposed to be on holiday!).
There's lots of great stuff in here - not just about the overall startup
experience, but also advice on talking to press, raising money and building
out the company.

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Macsenour
I'd love to hear your thoughts on single founder startups.

I don't think I can do it all, I just I can start it by myself and then
attract the right partner. Crazy?

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yumraj
I'm currently working on a single-founder startup. And, as with everything
there are pros and cons. So, in one word, Crazy, NO!!.. difficult, yes, but
startups are hard anyway..

I'm a software engineer, as well as an MBA (finishing up) so I can do most of
the stuff myself which I believe to be a plus.

When I was starting I found finding a co-founder to be a lot more work with
nothing to show for, but since I believed in my idea I just decided to get
started and do as much as I could.

I'm about to incorporate, am currently in a soft launch mode to get direct
customer input and make fixes. I just divide my time between meeting people
(customers etc.) and developing, and yes I have a day job (and a new born).
So, my hands are more than full.

Whether I'll be successful or not, I don't know, but the journey has been very
rewarding so far.

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javajosh
_> Over time he completely re-architected the app to have a UI that is driven
entirely from the server and doesn’t need to go through the various app stores
to release changes._

So I'm reading this and wondering: this differs from a webapp how exactly?

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tantalor
There's more to a web app than the UI.

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recursive
True, but the UI is the only part that defines it as a web app.

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tantalor
You can also define a web app by the capabilities of a modern web browser,
e.g., storage, network, graphics.

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Toenex
As a Brit working in a UK start-up it really is great to hear fellow Brits
making it happen. Well done, you are spreading a little hope.

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nswanberg
"An immensely useful lesson to learn is how to correlate all the conflicting
advice and apply it to your own situation."

This appears to be the single most important way to get use from YCombinator
(or from reading Hacker News). Even if it seems obvious, keeping this advice
in mind also helps to avoid posting indignant comments on other startup advice
threads.

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jcampbell1
Wow, thanks for putting this together. I really liked seeing the image of the
press pack. It seems like a excellent example of what to do.

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govind201
That was refreshing. Congratulations on the journey and the exit Lanyrd!

~~~
natbat
Thanks!

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Samuel_Michon
Reading this brought back a memory for me too, even if just as a bystander. I
was lucky to be able to attend dConstruct 2010, it was the most wonderful
design conference I’ve been to so far. All the presentations, by the likes of
Merlin Mann, John Gruber, and David McCandless, were very inspiring.

It was a one day event and all the talks were held in the same space. At one
point, the guys from Lanyrd came on stage and explained how the site worked.
They asked all the attendees to tweet to @lanyrd and write that they are
attending dConstruct. That way, everyone got automatically added on the Lanyrd
site as attendees, with profile and everything. It was an impressive demo.

Until now, I didn’t know that was the event when Lanyrd officially launched,
it come across to me like they’d been polishing the app for ages.

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danvoell
Good Story! Your next startup should be one in which someone can easily add
text on top of photos in their blog, and then allow readers to easily share
those (nuggets of wisdom) photos on Social Media with the click of a button.

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reillyse
Can't help but notice from the "one click deploy" part that you are still
using Jenkins!

Check out circleci.com you can do some really neat stuff around testing and
deploying and it's a whole lot less painful.

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johns
Great post, thanks for taking the time to write it up.

I'm curious how the discussions got started with Eventbrite. Were you
discussing another kind of partnership first? How close were your existing
contacts?

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simonw
We were introduced to Kevin (their CEO) by YC for advice when we were raising
our seed round. We worked a little with their business development team on an
API integration project, then got to know their engineering team.

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ludicast
Congrats, a very sweet story. My wife is not interested in tech (though she
has a very strong science background...) but working together would be a lot
of fun (and stress).

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julianpye
This is a wonderful and inspiring story. Congrats to you both!

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jjoe
Congratulations! Has the sum been disclosed?

Thanks

~~~
natbat
Thanks! We're not disclosing the sum, but we are happy and so are our
investors.

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kitanata
So at its peak right now, how many speakers are actively using lanyrd?
Updating their profile, collaborating, etc?

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Kiro
> One-click deploys

How is this typically achieved?

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daker
Greeting from Morocco :)

