

Ask YC: Status of your startup - robmnl

Hi!  Want to get some conversations going here.  How's your startup doing right now?<p>Any planned launch dates?<p>What's your startup anyway?<p>We're quite busy with ours, we were ready to release a beta, but choose to redesign and refactor things again. What about yours?
======
cousin_it
I launched <http://openphotovr.org> (virtual reality from photos) very quietly
yesterday night. A non-profit, my midnight oil hobby project. After two months
of development I feel it's time to go online, maybe get some visitors. No
rush. Already see glaring mistakes in the UI :-)

~~~
codeLullaby
LOVE IT! ( _reminds me of the Photosynth demo @ Ted Talks_ )

~~~
cousin_it
Yes, Photosynth was the inspiration, but I managed to avoid the stages of
image analysis and 3D reconstruction =)

The main problem right now is non-intuitive interface. It's hard to predict
where the camera will go when you click. Working on it.

------
secorp
We are doing online backup and storage. We have an open source project
(<http://allmydata.org>) that we are building a commercial product
(<http://allmydata.com>) on top of. We have a fair amount of beta users (10K)
and have our new architecture beta release due out mid-February. We will then
be fixing any major issues, testing usability, and then going full release.

We've had good feedback from our users which has helped shape our usability
and also which features were important to them (like having ftp access for
example).

Hope this helps, Peter

~~~
robmnl
Hey Peter, how did you promote your beta to get to 10k users?

Appreciate your sharing.

~~~
bootload
_"... how did you promote your beta to get to 10k users? ..."_

Firstly reliable data backup is a real problem. Anything that can help solve
this for users is going to attract attention. Writing your own backup script
that reliably backs up your data with RSync and remote servers for example is
doable but wastes time and effort. Secondly you can download the software, try
it out, change it. But most consumers are not developers and are not
interested in playing with software and hardware themselves so they look for a
company that provides the service.

So the key bits here are

\- Solving a users problem

\- Show don't tell.

\- Provide a service that users can use if they don't do it themselves.

\- Have something that will continually attract new users (articles, software,
discussion, etc)

The technical bits make for a good read and can be found here ~
[http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk/docs/architecture.tx...](http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk/docs/architecture.txt)

~~~
robmnl
that's really good insight, thank you.

------
fendale
I have been toiling away for what seems like ages on a source code review app,
aimed at helping cube dwellers who can code sort out some of the horrible
outsourced code they have to review (something I have to do in my cube too
often, and was frustrated with the tools out there to do it).

Its just a part time thing for me these days (still stuck in my cube), but I
hope to get a beta release out there in a month or so. Things that are making
me nervous/holding me back:

* Can't come up with a decent name for thing!

* While I don't think my app is ugly, its certainly not anywhere near as shiny as many of the other web 2.0 apps out there

* I keep tweaking and adding features instead of polishing what is there and getting the beta finished.

I am pretty pleased with what I have go so far, so at the least I will have
learned Rails and created a tool I can use in my current day job.

~~~
dcminter
> Can't come up with a decent name for thing!

"Turd Polisher" ? :-)

------
ericb
I'm building a hosted load testing solution at the moment. There's a little
more to it, but that's the idea. I'm close to where I thought I'd be--I need
about another month to get it really going and a month or so after to tune and
iterate.

<http://testomatix.com>

My solution will require no hardware, be based on an open source tool people
might already be using and be ridiculously easy to use if I hit my mark. I'd
like to make it self service too.

~~~
robmnl
That's pretty cool. Can you let me know when you launch? I might use it

~~~
ericb
Thanks and absolutely. Can you shoot me your email? I'm 'ebeland' on gmail.

~~~
ericb
A few people have emailed me already, which is great! For the sake of saying
so more directly, anyone who is interested in trying out testomatix when it
launches can email me at ebeland at gmail.com.

------
bhb
We just launched seekler.com on January 7th. Seekler is a collection of
community-built lists that make it really fast and easy to find new stuff like
movies, music, etc.

We had some good early traffic (from a few great links to one of our lists),
but unfortunately things have slowed down a lot in the past few weeks. We
think the basic concept is great, but we're wondering if the UI is keeping
people from really digging into our content. We're going to probably release a
slightly tweaked interface on Monday. And, as always, we're always looking for
feedback on how we could make Seekler better.

~~~
aaroneous
I took a look at Seekler again, and I'm a little confused on who your audience
is.

The home page appears to be a generic destination, as in, "if you want lists
of stuff, we've got 'em" But, I don't think people just want lists of "stuff",
they want lists of a few things that are relevant to them.

For example, I may be a movie buff who's very excited about the 2008
anticipated movie list, but charities, books, and comic books are of no use to
me. It seems that it'd be better to offer the data on your site targeted to
the respective niche audiences that they serve in an easily consumable way (FB
App, Blog widget, etc), rather than expecting that there are people who just
crave information because it's in a list format.

I'm generally a design snob, but I think your UI is fine for the stage you're
at (though it sort of reminds me of a domain landing page). My advice is to
refine what the value you're actually adding is, and then find ways to
appropriately serve those people looking for your utility.

~~~
bhb
Good question regarding our audience. We don't really intend to make Seekler a
place you would visit every day (as you noticed, we have quite a few gaps in
our content, so for any niche, you'll probably only find a few lists that
interest you right now) - instead, we're trying to make it resource, more like
Wikipedia, but for opinions. The idea is that if you're looking for something
in particular niche, you'll start your search on Seekler. Our goal is save you
time - instead of spending 20-30 minutes finding your next movie, book,
whatever, we can make that 5 minutes or so.

Of course, until we get a lot more data, people won't really start their
search at Seekler. But we're starting to show up pretty high on Google results
for a number of our lists, so we are trying to get our initial traffic that
way.

Your point about the widget and FB is interesting. We have a widget that is
being tested and we're strongly considering building a FB app to play up the
social angle. For instance, right now the 'Best Movies' list merges the lists
of all users - would it be interesting to see a list created from just the
lists of your FB friends?

Thanks for the questions and feedback. We're learning something new every
day...

~~~
aaroneous
I get that you're becoming a warehouse of categorical "opinion-based" data,
but the trick seems like it's going to be how that data can be accessed once
it's stored. Lists of things my friends like, seems it'd be more useful than
getting a list of what random strangers like.

I think there's a lot more you can do in that direction, and I encourage you
to look into it :]

~~~
bhb
Awesome, thanks for the advice. This is pretty much our biggest question right
now (whether or not to go for the social angle and implement a facebook app),
so I appreciate the feedback.

------
dkokelley
I've got a startup that brings college bulletin boards online for students to
buy and sell their used textbooks. It's eBay meets Craiglist for college
textbooks. Check out our alpha project at cocunderground.com (COC is for
college of the canyons, the school that this project is directed at). All
feedback is welcome!

~~~
wumi
a prominently-featured search bar would help find textbooks, vs. filling out
every detail in a form

~~~
dkokelley
Thanks! The search form doesn't require every field, but if that's not
obvious, I should make sure to make it obvious. I suppose I could also put a
simple Section>Course # search field on a side bar. "Quick Search"

------
thorax
We launched <http://bug.gd> in late 2007 as a way for everyone to search and
capture solutions to error messages. Happily, it was covered on TechCrunch,
Digg, Mashable, etc. Exciting stuff. We recently created a full Firefox
extension that makes it even more natural. <http://bug.gd/download>

bug.gd plans to drive its revenue through corporate intranet sales of our
software and P2P helpdesk solutions. The public-facing error database is
expected to always be free and ad-free as a consequence.

Interesting primarily to places like YC, we're about to announce our
<http://featurelist.org> which is really just a tool we use for our feature
tracking and thought we'd open it up to the world. It's a free little Reddit-
inspired site for startups and open source projects to let their community
vote on features. Anyone can host a project there and have users visit
<http://featurelist.org/MYPROJECT> to request/vote on features. This will
probably go public beta in a couple of weeks, but it's really just a gift back
to the community more than anything we want to make $$$ with.

Very, very busy lately. Back to work. :)

------
liliyal
We've just launched our social news site for women, with a focus on fashion,
beauty, and celebrity gossip. That means lots of pretty photos!

Initial users seem to like it so far :)

<http://www.prettysocial.net/>

~~~
wozer
The site doesn't look so good if the user's default background color is not
white because the logo has a white background. You should use something like
<body bgcolor="white">.

On the other hand, probably less than 1% of users have a custom default
background color...

~~~
liliyal
Thanks for the tip! I haven't seen a grey background in a while... except in
webalizer :)

------
gibsonf1
We have select users now and plan to open up the private beta in about 3 weeks
- our deadline as we have a presentation that day. We've been coding for a
year now, and we're excited to be on the verge of finally raising the curtain.
:) <http://streamfocus.com>

~~~
robmnl
yes I remember you :) lmk when you launch

------
sadiq
I'm working on a web-based MMO. We're about 75% through the game logic,
artwork requirements is going out to the art studio in the next week.

We should hit our beta milestone at the end of March.

------
dshah
My startup (<http://www.HubSpot.com>) launched its product in November, 2007.
It's a web hosted solution for inbound marketing for small businesses.

Revenues are growing steadily. The team is 26 people (22 in Cambridge, MA) and
we're getting deeper into search engine algorithms, Facebook apps for business
and English text analysis.

Challenge right now is making sure the system will scale as we continue to
grow our customers/usage. High quality problem.

------
shafqat
We've been hacking away building the technology for our startup since late
last fall. We're finally close to launch time (end Feb hopefully). We're more
focused on getting a product launched as quickly as possible and then letting
our community have it's say re: what works and doesnt work.

Development took longer than I hoped, but we used our blog to really spread
the word and get the 'movement' started in the meantime.

We're NewsCred, a digital newspaper that brings you news based on credibility
from your favorite sources. Unlike Digg, which uses popularity, our primary
criterion is quality/credibility. Plus we're an online newspaper, not a social
news site. Whats the difference? Hopefully you'll be able to see for yourself
soon!

Loved reading everyone else's ideas. Let me know what you guys think!
<http://www.newscred.com>

------
eusman
how about answering your own questions first!

~~~
robmnl
We're really excited to launch. We kept pushing dates back, as there is just
more work than expected. We're working on a complete ondemand solution. So
instead of signing up for project management, crm, invoicing separately, we'll
provide an all in one solution. Plus it's a platform, so it's extensible.
We're working to go into private beta this month.

~~~
eusman
i already upmodded the thread before making the comment, so it wasnt meant to
be hostile, if it felt like that.

pre-launch phase for a startup its very exciting time. Hopefully you will keep
up your work with the same mood right after launching, and won't get
dissapointed by the attack of anyone or non-immediate massive response of your
application.

for everyone else, i think its interesting to pariticipate in commenting other
startups as it helps them kept focused also in their starup efforts, so i
suppose we wil hear from you again here.

~~~
robmnl
Oh it's all good. :)

It is exciting. We're pretty committed. We're good with a low key response
first, while we're a semi public beta phase.

Appreciate the comments, for sure you'll hear back from me. :)

------
amrithk
Interesting to see the things people are doing.

A few months ago, 2 of my friends from college and I came up with an idea for
allowing people to create polls online and give them tools to look at the
results in more detail. Only problem was none of us knew anything about web
programming and design. We learnt a lot from reading forums, through w3schools
and other websites. After more than 6 months of tinkering and working pretty
much on weekends (2 of us work as bankers), we came up with PollBag
(www.pollbag.com). Its probably a bit amateur but would love to know what you
think. We are always looking to get constructive feedback.

------
DarrenStuart
1\. its going ok but its just me at the moment and its self funded, I am
working 50/50 client work and startup work at the moment.

2\. first product very soon, just need to do the final tweak and get some beta
testing done to make sure its easy to use and hard to break :p

3\. small simple web apps, I plan to release more than 1 app under my
companies brand.

4\. I just did a redesign of the first app and am happy with the look now. I
am also working on tech demos for other products in my portfolio.

Next week I should release my first app.

------
a-priori
My startup's going fine so far. Tech side's coming along (slower than I'd like
of course), but the business side's going crazy.

We're aiming for a beta in the spring. I wish I could say what it is, but
we're all hush-hush now (can't even say what it's called right now). Maybe in
a few months :)

On a side-note, I'm looking for a programmer, particularly with for UI and
design stuff. Let me know if you or someone you know may be interested.

------
simianstyle
<http://redsultan.com>

Amazon Mechanical Turk competitor in the works (it also happens to be my
senior thesis).

~~~
robmnl
Give us some more info :) Sounds interesting

------
imsteve
Launching major site next week. You can hold me to that. Will be awesome site
that you'll all want to use. Not sure if I'll do it under this alias.

------
carpo
I plan on launching an initial version of my site in March. I started full
time in December, and gave myself 3 months to have something out the door. Im
pretty well on track. I initally cut some things that were in the original
design, to make sure 3 months would do it. That was probably the hardest part
of the whole thing - determining at the beginning what to leave out.

------
geldedus
Mine is Photoree, the collaborative image recommendation system (
<http://www.photoree.com> ). Just got reviewed by KillerStartups
[http://www.killerstartups.com/Video-Music-
Photo/Photoreecom-...](http://www.killerstartups.com/Video-Music-
Photo/Photoreecom---A-Photo-Recommendation-Service/)

------
r7000
Rolling along with about 25 new users per day. Getting ready to launch the
first round of user-requested and pre-planned features. So far it has been a
lot of fun! My main problem is I built the site to scratch an itch and now
that it exists I use it myself so much I don't work on features enough.

------
motoko
Threw out something as fast possible to credibly sell our product, we've made
some sales, and now we're going back and fixing everything / adding
infrastructure & features.

We also secured a small seed round of funding ---enough to last us a few
months.

~~~
robmnl
What's your startup?

How do you deal with the loss of flexibility once launching? You really can't
make big architectural changes after launching in some cases. I.e., when were
you confident enough that it was a good time to launch?

~~~
motoko
This isn't the place to discuss the business itself, but our product isn't
software. We simply conduct business over the internet.

So, for example, instead of writing/installing/debugging a shopping cart, we
just posted Google Checkout buttons. Instead of creating a database backend
for orders, we have the form submit to email. Instead of creating the most
beautiful website with the best copy, we made something that looked OK and
populated it with some basic content.

------
dawnerd
I actually just started the registration phase of my company. But I already
have a few products near beta stage. Right now the company is 100% funded out
of my wallet, making living very hard. I might have to take out a loan to pay
for the server expenses.

------
verbal
we just launched <http://www.cellspin.net/> at the DEMO conference
(<http://www.demo.com>). it is a service that provides easy to use mobile
software for you to send your media from your phone to your favorite websites
(flickr, facebook, youtube, etc). we also have a website where you can manage
the content you have uploaded and keep track of what your friends have been
posting. check it out and let me what you think (ian [at] cellspinsoft [dot]
com). we're always looking for new sites to add as destinations. please give
me any feedback you have! i'd love to hear from you guys.

------
carpal
Slowly whittling away at an online accounting suite for small businesses.
Stubbed out the underpinnings, and just did the first major design iteration.
Should show it to the first potential users in a month or two.

~~~
dkokelley
Is this something designed to replace Quickbooks entirely? Something like this
would be nice for my situation. I can't run quickbooks from Ubuntu, and I
don't like booting into Windows whenever I need to do anything.

~~~
rms
Try GNUCash? It's not bad.

~~~
dkokelley
Yes I've used it, and it is pretty good. The problem is I need a platform
independent application... Or a dedicated windows computer to replace the
other partition on my notebook's hard drive.

~~~
rms
Yeah... I can't say I've tried it, but I think you can get older versions of
Quickbooks working in WINE. And there is always a virtual machine.

There's also a number of web based accounting software, like the online
version of Quickbooks, NetSuite, and Intacct.

------
stillmotion
Built the system, but then we realized we were hitting a common demographic.
Went back to the drawing board and begun to rewrite it. We're close to private
beta.

~~~
robmnl
What are you guys doing? Even just roughly.

------
inklesspen
Dead.

I need someone who knows his way around Photoshop, CSS, and visual design, and
I don't have a couple years to drop everything and go learn that.

~~~
daniel-cussen
Dude, it's nothing you can't learn in a few weeks, or maybe even one week. Get
GIMP, read a tutorial, fool around with it for a while, and try online
tutorials on how to make a web 2.0 button, say. That might take one, two days
tops.

CSS isn't rocket science either. It's a variant of html (sort of) where you
choose stuff like font and background color (style, I guess) in one master
document that all the other web pages refer to. It's like the Slide Master in
powerpoint. It has slightly different punctuation than html, but it's not that
special. It's just an easier system, and it's probably overhyped by design
bloggers.

Visual design: there's all kinds of "7 mistakes begginers make" type articles
in hacker news. Some are better than others. Just use common sense, good
taste, effort, and knowledge.

That should get you acquainted with all three problem areas. In fact, after a
few weeks one can design clones of homepages of Yahoo, Google, YC, delicious,
facebook, and so on. Of course, I don't know what level of mastery you're
talking about, and there's definitely a lot of fancy things you can do with
photoshop that take a lot of knowledge, but the kind of design chops one needs
to do a startup aren't that hard to get.

~~~
dkokelley
GIMP is good, there's no doubt, but I've found that 90% of the graphical
development for my project can be done in about an hour on Inkscape.

~~~
fendale
Good call on Inkscape - I have been looking for a decent Photoshop type app to
run on OSX for ages. Finally got my next and back arrows drawn without
starting up the windows box!

------
iamelgringo
It's in my head. Waiting for school to be done.

------
kogir
you should release the beta. Then you'll at least have user feedback for the
redesign.

~~~
robmnl
The redesign is really a user interface design, not looks. We'll confuse users
too much if we completely change the whole thing on them. But we're close to
launching anyway.

------
rokhayakebe
one month away from launch. improved messaging system

~~~
robmnl
can you go into more specifics? just so I get it

~~~
rokhayakebe
maybe email is really boring

