

Philly-Based Incubator DreamIt Ventures Graduates 14 Startups - edw519
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/11/philly-based-incubator-dreamit-ventures-graduates-ten-startups/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

======
mbateman
Incidentally, GiveLoop (one of DreamIt's graduates) looks like a great
service. I would actually like to donate more money than I do, but I often
don't precisely because this kind of transparency and feedback are typically
absent.

~~~
Coax
I don't mean to nitpick, but why is that incidental?

~~~
gphil
Confusingly, "incidentally" isn't always used to describe an action as being
incidental. Consider the following definition from a Google search of "define:
incidentally":

Used when a person has something more to say, or is about to add a remark
unconnected to the current subject; by the way

------
megamark16
Any graduates on HN? Just curious if we can get an inside perspective.

~~~
Alex3917
Not a graduate, but I met one of the founders of Postling at PR Camp last year
and he spoke very highly of the program. It was a while ago, but I think he
was saying that compared to YC there was more of a focus on business advice,
and there were more contact hours with the mentors. I'm not sure to what
extent that is true, but it certainly seems like a quality program that was
run this way would be useful to some founders. Obviously different founders
have different levels of experience and skills, so there probably isn't one
best model, at least from the perspective of the founders.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
This is my second year as a Dreamit mentor, and I really like the program. All
the startups work in one big room, which fosters collaboration. And the
partners really try hard with the mentoring portion.

------
jackowayed
I'm interested to see AppNowGo (private beta, so I can't see it yet). That's
something I've thought about building, but it seems like a very hard problem.

Any solution that's doesn't require programming is going to have constraints.
So even if the platform is fine for building v1, if they keep adding to it,
eventually they're going to hit a wall where they must add feature X, which is
impossible to do with the programming-free platform. And then what? They'll
have to rewrite the whole thing from scratch, I guess. And somehow get their
data.

So I think you pretty much need to let them export their data. Better yet
would be letting them export the actual app they've built where they get PHP
or Rails code. But then you stop making money off of that person. I guess you
could charge for the code export so that you at least get one last lump sum
before they leave, but it seems dirty to charge people to leave your platform.

Another option would be to somehow allow programming as an advanced feature in
such a way that they could do almost anything, but that would be pretty
difficult to do, and you'd need some kind of sandbox to keep them from
breaking your servers.

~~~
mboyle
Hey all, I'm one of the developers at AppNowGo.

All good points here. In the short term we're focusing on servicing customers
with simpler data-driven app needs, e.g. member directories, job listings,
knowledge bases, recipe books, etc. Applications in this class don't require
any custom programming to fulfill their requirements and most of the customer
discovery we've done so far indicates these are the types of apps that most
people are looking to build. It's the old 80/20.

Data exporting is going to be available at any time; you'll be able to export
data from the application in a variety of formats (spreadsheet, csv, xml, etc)
and even re-import it with new/updated data to update your apps. We've also
kicked around the idea of exporting an application's entire schema in some
sort of format that other "application builders" could presumably read.
Openness and portability are important to us.

The front end of AppNowGo that you'd use to build your applications is built
entirely on top of our APIs and we're dedicated to making them very powerful.
It's possible a lot of the custom programming needs power users might have
could be solved with some creative use of the APIs; if anyone would like to
chat more about what they'd like to see along those lines I'd be happy to
start a dialog.

If anyone in here would like to check out the beta, fill out the form here:
<http://appnowgo.com/beta-signup/> and mention hacker news; I'll make sure you
get an invite ASAP. Also, please feel free to email me at mike-at-appnowgo.com
with any questions or comments.

~~~
adelevie
AppNowGo is stunningly amazing. I played around for about 15 minutes and built
a simple app to keep track of my textbook sales. It's like Wufoo on steroids
with a dash of Smartsheet.

Suggestion: add support for select APIs. For example, you could let creators
add a button for submitting a book as an Amazon listing. You could also
support the twitter api and let creators pull in tweets into their
applications.

I see a ton of potential here. Just my $0.02.

------
dzlobin
Sqoot seems to be identical to a project that a HNer just posted.

On another note: These look pretty impressive. I'm particularly interested in
what MatchLend will be like.

~~~
sankim83
That's actually the one - they changed their name from "86." Pretty sure they
incorporated a lot of HN feedback in their last few iterations

~~~
dzlobin
I think I'm thinking of something else, that guy posted it just earlier this
week

~~~
sankim83
Was it phrased as "aspirational 4sq"?

------
raheemm
Yes, another non-SV based startup funder. If talent and funding can come
together, there is no reason we should have to move to SV.

