

Instant Company - jstedfast
http://nat.org/blog/2011/06/instant-company/

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nikcub
I think these 'what products and services does your startup use' type articles
are more interesting than the usesthis series about what tools developers use.

Somebody should setup a blog where they interview a startup founder each week
and just ask them to list services they use along with a mini single-paragraph
review of each.

Edit: after thinking about it, I might just do this as a weekend project. A
quick search and I couldn't find anything similar, the closest I remember is
the Ajaxian blog startup interviews which they stopped doing. If you would
like your startup featured email me, ill be reaching out to a few people so if
there is interest I will likely get it going

~~~
mattmanser
These pop up quite often and personally I find them quite boring.

A lot of it is personal choice, e.g. IRC & campfire being 'laggy', for me
Google apps is meh apart from mail/calendar, you better pony up for MS office
if you're dealing with a lot of other businesses, themeforest I find extremely
hard to find a decent looking, _well written_ html template, most of them are
div crazy, extremely heavy CSS/js payloads or use cufon, kerrschpitt.

And assistly looks like a total rip off at $69 p/m per user (to _me_ anyway).

I mean swipe might make an interesting submission in itself, but the homepage
is light on details, looks like it's in a closed beta, which probably means US
only, no good for me.

Anyway tl;dr is that the tools your business uses are very personal choices of
services many of us already know about, I find them dull.

What's more interesting is what's missing, no accounting system, no bug
tracking, no server uptime monitor, no analytics, no A/B testing.

~~~
patrickod
You're right; Swipe is in closed beta at the moment. An email never hurts
though

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seats
Great list, but to me the last two items aren't like the others. Everything
about starting tech companies has gotten easier and cheaper, but accountants
and lawyers haven't really changed all that much.

He didn't specify exactly how much they are paying for those two, but it still
sounds like it will be a fairly beefy hourly rate or a retainer + equity. I
think for a boostrapped company these are still your two really big overhang
costs where people end up weighing going without or dyi versus committing to
legal or accounting as your biggest up front operating expense.

Of the two, I'd say accounting has probably changed the most, there are plenty
of workable software solutions for keeping books that aren't too bad and it
seems like there are plenty of people trying to build startups around that
particular problem. Can't say the same on the legal item though.

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mcdowall
Great list! Using a few of those myself

If i can be cheeky I'd love an intro to the guys at Stripe, think it was a
fair few months ago I registered my email for their Beta and would love to
implement it for my startup.

~~~
saikat
Hey (Saikat from Stripe) -- not cheeky at all, but certainly flattering.

Sorry we've been kind of quiet (we do read Hacker News, though). We're just
working hard to implement the feedback we've been getting from our existing
users, and we want to make sure our product scales well and gets better as new
people use it.

Here's a question: any chance you would be interested in having us watch you
integrate Stripe? We've been doing this lately to try to make sure our first-
run experience is really good. Send me an e-mail (saikat@stripe.com) either
way.

~~~
s00pcan
Stripe was something on the article I hadn't heard of before. It just seems so
logical for cardholder information to go directly from the customer to the
payment processor using javascript that I wonder why it hasn't been done
before and what you're doing differently. Can you explain?

~~~
kolektiv
Well, hosted payment is not a new thing at all - so you iframe or link to a
page you don't host which the customer uses - thus ensuring that card details
don't hit your servers and don't give you a PCI surface.

This is a fairly logical extension, I would guess that the reason it hasn't
caught on more is because a JS requirement has typically been a red flag in
e-commerce - 3% of users not being able to pay you once they got to that point
of a funnel could be seen as disaster. Interesting, because we're looking at
mandating JS in our new developments (background: company I work for does a
lot of high end e-commerce - we're specialists).

In theory it's a good idea (that side of it at least) but I don't know how
security perception and customer acceptance rates will go.

~~~
s00pcan
Oh, of course. I completely forgot that there are some crazy people out there
who browse without javascript. I was just jumping at the idea of reducing PCI
compliance issues - I've had to deal with them and it's a huge project.

------
there
now someone needs to make something to use the APIs of all these sites to be
able to control users across all of them from a single location.

bringing on new employees or terminating existing ones and having to do it
across half a dozen different sites sounds kind of tedious and error-prone.

~~~
tripzilch
Great point. I noticed the same thing. First you get your Google Apps account,
and then the passwords for the other accounts are mailed to there, then two
weeks later you find that one of the systems has been replaced in favour of
another one.

Indeed tedious and error-prone.

And that's just from the employee's point of view, the administrator having to
create all these different accounts is probably even less happy about it.

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benjohnson
eFAX !?!?? eFAX is evil when you try to close your service - you have to go
through their horrid 'chat' system and even then I had to cancel my credit
card to get them to stop charging.

And no... it's not just me: <http://daviddahl.blogspot.com/2006/05/efax-
sucks.html>

~~~
rabidonrails
Launched <http://phaxio.com> into beta a couple of weeks ago...shoot me an
email if you'd like an invite (email in profile)

~~~
pbreit
Any way to upload or email a PDF?

~~~
rabidonrails
Absolutely! We have an API that allows you to POST files to fax.

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kinkora
For a web-based company, I would add Amazon Web Services(AWS) at the top of
the list.

AWS is relatively expensive but if you are a startup with a limited amount of
capital and need to scale quickly, it allows you to utilize a corporate grade
web/computing/server/database infrastructure without having to build one
yourself.

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athst
Interesting list, I'd be interested to see what other "stacks" companies are
running on.

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spullara
We don't list out all the business services, though we should add them now,
but we do have our technology and services stack for production:

<http://bagcheck.com/bag/382-bagcheck-technology>

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timsally
It's an interesting contrast how cheap the technical tools are compared to the
financial and legal skills retained. I'm not sure if Ropes & Gray does
something special for early stage companies, but they are a top and expensive
firm.

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statictype
What advantage do these group chat apps have over something like Skype?

~~~
alanh
No spammers, for one. Skype’s iOS app is absolutely terrible for chat, too;
HipChat’s is passable, and of course with IRC you will have a few options.

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vijaymv_in
Amazing list. I am wondering how do you handle signatures

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omouse
Their committment to free/open source software is astounding! </sarcasm>

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clistctrl
I didn't really find the article that interesting, however looking at this
<http://xamarin.com/> company I'm extremely intrigued by the product.

