Ten Lessons from GitHub's First Year. NOTE: This post was written in late December of 2008, more than two years ago. It has stayed in my drafts folder since then, waiting for the last 2% to be written. Why I never published it is beyond my reckoning, but it serves as a great reminder of how I perceived the world back then. In the time since I wrote this we’ve grown from four people to twenty-six, settled into an office, installed a kegerator, and still never taken outside funding. In some ways, things have changed a great deal, but in the most important ways, things are still exactly the same. The end of the year is a great time to sit down with a glass of your favorite beverage, dim the lights, snuggle up next to the fire and think about what you’ve learned over the past twelve months.
For me, 2008 was the year that I helped design, develop, and launch GitHub. Start Early When Chris and I started working on GitHub in late 2007, Git was largely unknown as a version control system. And so GitHub was born. Have Fun. Not_available. Like Twitter, AddToAny turns five years old this week. It doesn’t garner even a fraction of the attention that venture-backed competitors like Clearspring (AddThis), Gigya and ShareThis do, but it has definitely put its stake in the social sharing widget ground. Note: the above-cited rivals have raised roughly $90 million combined, while AddToAny has never taken outside financing since it was founded back in 2006. Still, the AddToAny button is one of the most distributed widgets on the web, and according to the company the most distributed widget from a bootstrapped startup.
AddToAny is now even a lucrative business, and has gotten to that point without spending a dime on marketing. How is the service monetized? AddToAny sells (anonymous) aggregate sharing data, which is used by clients to increase the relevancy of their ads. Founder Pat Diven II says he has never felt the need to raise outside funding, although he reckons it might be fairly easy to secure financing if he wanted to.
The Freshdesk story - How a simple comment on Hacker News motivated me to resign from my comfortable well paying job and launch my own startup? - Fresh Thoughts. Bio My name is Girish Mathrubootham and I am the Founder and CEO of Freshdesk. I am 36 years old, married and live with my wife and two boys in Chennai, India. This is the story of how I quit my comfortable job and launched my own startup. Hope you like it. My last job For the last 9 years I was fortunate to be an employee of Zoho Corporation (was called AdventNet when I joined in 2001 as a PreSales Engineer) and in my last role I was VP of Product Management at the ManageEngine division of Zoho Corp.
I have been building on-premise helpdesk systems since 2004. How it all started? Sometime in the middle of last year I was reading this article on Hacker News – This article was about Zendesk raising their prices 60 – 300% and how their users were unhappy about it. I was just reading this as a news article and browsing through the comments on HN when a simple comment from user megamark caught my attention That comment was like a slap on my face.
The Team. Founder Institute: How To Launch In 10 Steps With Less Than $2,000. For any entrepreneur, the challenge of taking an idea to launch can be a daunting and expensive journey. Fortunately, Adeo Ressi, founder of TheFunded and startup accelerator, Founder Institute, has a ten step plan. While there is no foolproof recipe for every launch, Ressi says his template will help any tech entrepreneur get a business off the ground for less than $2,000. The program, which Ressi recently presented at the Founder Institute’s Boston location, is a bare bones guide to securing your startup’s online identity, enhancing your appearance of legitimacy (through low-cost but well designed logos and marketing materials), understanding your startup’s priorities and target consumer, and finally, getting it to the point of a rough web launch.
Given that the presentation occasionally offers very specific advice (for example, step 3 centers on the use of 99designs for your logo), the ten step plan will hardly work for everyone. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Paul Graham’s Checklist, Would You Make The Cut? [Video]