Ask HN: Your Startup Progress (December 2011)

I guess I'll just use December to summarize the entire year. As a non-technical co-founder I helped acquire 5-figure investment from a billion-dollar hedge fund, organize a team to form another bootstrapped one and came very close to closing a deal with another simple project that cost me $10 to start...

...then I butted-heads with the investor in the first project and have all but been pushed to the side. Then my technical co-founder for the bootstrapped project started to beef up his own profitable project instead of working together with me, then the deal fell through on my $10 investment. The greatest part was that I even took some time off from school for that (and other things)!

I know - sounds like a failure. Well, it was. In any case I learned a TON about things I like doing, things that do and do not work, and most importantly, I learned a lot about myself.

I'm working on some projects on the side, but I am re-entering school full time in Jan. to get my BA degree. Let us all hope 2012 is prosperous.

We have been successful in several fronts:

* We reached private beta status (We had been on alpha for a while). * We released two new features for the beta users. * We were able to create documentation and video tutorials to help users jump in. * We have gather a lot of data on how our users are using our service and began doing experiments to continue learning.

We have had some rough times. After not getting into Y Combinator, the team lost faith and we almost parted ways. I was working alone for a while. I do believe the idea is great, and the plan we have for execution has been working great. But I can't do it alone. After a couple of meeting I am happy to say the team is intact and continuing on track. I can say that is our biggest success after all.

I can tell you that the technical aspects of our service are challenging but exciting, people problems, on the other hand, like trying to keep the motivation up after a big disappointment has been though, it has been hell.

But iKnode is still alive and kicking, and we are ready for anything. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right?

December was a good month for us!! 2nd full month post launch and we doubled our user database, got exposure from a BBC Travel Blog had more Spanish translations than anything, lol. We contracted a demo video, a home page redesign, and some copy editing which went great. I am the non-tech co-founder and have been marketing my fanny off with a budget of $200/mo. What I have concentrated on is blogging and building a Twitter presence (I need followers.)

When we started, we Beta tested with friends and family... roughly 30 people who were afraid of hurting our feelings - not a good idea! Then we soft launched into a Public Beta, got picked up by Killer Start-ups but we were still learning about promotion copy and I can't say it was our very best foot forward but had some traffic and got some users. By the end of Nov. we had 100 - today it is over 200 so if this trend continues then by the end of 2012 we will have 1.6 Million users - not bad for a year old app!

I think a lot of us hit the ground wanting instant success - there is a big part of me that does but as I define 'instant' in terms of realistic time - one year is pretty darn 'instant'. So... I plug along and learn, read, learn & read some more. I connect, comment, blog, and believe.

uencounter.me went from an idea to a concept to a project to a fully realized app in 10 months time. When we get to 1.6 million users by this time next year ... that will be 'instant' enough for me.

The month of December was good for us. We weren't going to launch until Jan but a chef contacted us and wanted to get started right away. We gave an amazing deal on the first event and sold out. We ultimately had 3 events in Dec which increase in price each time and we sold out every one.

This early start caused us hack together the unfinished bits of the site very quickly and helped us find and squash a ton of bugs in the code and actually parts of the UX. We even had a chef from another country try to start using our site. (we're still trying to determine if it was the right thing to do to support another country since we initially planned to focus on NYC and keep it small right now Thoughts?)

We're still doing the "official" launch in Jan where we'll roll out our actual roster of chefs but it's encouraging that our service got picked up by word of mouth and attracted chefs and diners pretty much on its own, especially considering we've had zero press to date. Also it's nice to see revenue a month prior to launch since we planned for the worse and didn't expect revenue until March at the earliest.

[edit] the service is soupnextdoor.com. Contact me if you want a discount code. Email in the profile.

9 months into my latest startup, Lion.

Started this year with the intention of programming more after a break since college. Hired another programmer to help work on the website. The site itself will be a social business website; a community.

My aim is to do consulting and investing full-time using my website as a vehicle to help with both. Hopefully it can be useful to other founders too, especially in the UK.

I would like to launch before January 2012 is out.

December was a breakthrough month for http://ninjaCI.com !

We have spent past month thinking how software development could be simplified and made faster. Mid December we finally launched beta version that supports Django, MySQL and Git and we are giving away free access codes right now. People using these technologies get their complete server infrastructure ready in a second, all tied together by our Continuous Integration platform.

After not getting into YCombinator we see that we finally get momentum which is very good and we are way ahead of competition that is starting the field as well.

If you have any questions you can reach me at marcin.mieszek@ninjaci.com

This is more like a side-project, but I'm proud of it. I've been building a newsletter email list that interviews startups that are hiring.

I launched it at the beginning of December and have grown from 0 subscribers to just over 100. I've sent out two interviews so far, and I have a few more waiting to be sent out.

The very beginning was a rough chicken/egg problem. People were hesitant to signup for a new list. Startups are busy and didn't want to devote time for an interview that would only reach a handful of applicants. Because of this, I cold-called a lot of startups for interviews in the beginning. I also tried hard to drum up subscriber numbers at the same time.

Luckily, I found some startups that thought it was a good idea...despite the low subscriber number. These guys were great and gave me interviews knowing they (probably) weren't going to find an applicant from the list. They also provided some great feedback on the type of questions I was asking.

Subscribers are trickling in between 1-3 a day, so things are going to get easier as I move forward.