Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part II | SaaS Adventures. A quick recap from where I left off in Part I: starting with all of the business ability of a dried plum, I developed an unpopular Twitter tool called TweetingMachine; after nine months, I was ready to scrap in its entirety and mark the whole sorry app as a failed experiment; just before I gave up, a friend pointed me towards ThemeForest, and suggested a couple of themes. October 2010: What a difference a design makes I bought the themes, and sat down to integrate them. I was expecting this to take a lot longer than it did: in the end, it took me a few hours over the course of the evening. Bedtime was approaching, and I chose to spend the last hour of the night harassing my ever-patient fiancée with over-enthusiastic demonstrations of TweetingMachine’s new-found greatness. You see, over the past few months, my hatred for TweetingMachine had built up day by day, its cheery colours and shiny logo only heightening my sense of failure.
Enough talking! So, cue wild happiness! Well! How I Raised $350k as a Solo Founder using these 4 Email Templates. Starting your Startup at FOWA Vegas 2011.
Justin Vincent — Bootstrappers’ Kickstarter Kit – No Investment Required. How to be a Consultant, a Freelancer, or an Independent Contractor. This is a series of pages that guide you through the creation and operation of a successful consulting business. I’ve written this after running a fairly successful consultancy business in the mid-90’s and reviving this business in 2008. I’m primarily active in software, so some of the things in here will be skewed in that direction, but I’ll do my best to keep it general, and to make it ‘location independent’.
The reason I wrote this up is because on the Hacker News forum people will post questions regarding freelancing, and given the nature of the medium it is not always feasible to put all the time and effort into writing an answer as good as possible. So, this is dedicated to all those HN’ers that help me with my questions, I hope this balanced the scales a bit. This book assumes several things: that you have a skill that this skill is marketable that you are willing to work reasonably hard that you have some self discipline You will also make a half decent living. Startup Tools. Startup Tools 1. Startup Tools Click Here 2. Lean LaunchPad Videos Click Here 3. Founding/Running Startup Advice Click Here 4. 5. 6. Startup Tools Getting Started Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything – Harvard Business ReviewThe Lean LaunchPad Online Class – FREEHow to Build a Web Startup – Lean Launchpad EditionHow to Create a $1M Web Business – Noah KaganWeb Fundamentals – Google developersQuickMVP – test your ideasFoundersSuite – Startup Mgmt SoftwareThe U.S.
Lists of Tools from Others Groups Startup Weekend – Launch a Startup in 54 hoursThe Lean Startup Machine – Launch a Startup in 48 hoursStartup Monthly – Launch a Startup in a monthStartup Grind – community looking to be educated, and network with the smartest startup mindsLean Startup Circle – Google Group for startup adviceWomen 2.0 – Launch a startup for womenMeetup – Meet people you’re interested inTop Startup Conferences (North America) Find a Co-Founder Developer Bootcamps Programing Bootcamp Finder – Thinkful Surveys Reddit. A Visitors Guide to Silicon Valley. If you’re a visiting dignitary whose country has a Gross National Product equal to or greater than the State of California, your visit to Silicon Valley consists of a lunch/dinner with some combination of the founders of Google, Facebook, Apple and Twitter and several brand name venture capitalists. If you have time, the President of Stanford will throw in a tour, and then you can drive by Intel or some Clean Tech firm for a photo op standing in front of an impressive looking piece of equipment.
The “official dignitary” tour of Silicon Valley is like taking the jungle cruise at Disneyland and saying you’ve been to Africa. Because you and your entourage don’t know the difference between large innovative companies who once were startups (Google, Facebook, et al) and a real startup, you never really get to see what makes the valley tick. I’m leaving out all the traditional stops that you can get from the guidebooks. Palo Alto – The Beating Heart 1Start your tour in Palo Alto. How To Get Your First 1,000 Users. Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit. Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them by subscribing via email or via twitter. The good news is that it’s easier than you think to get 1,000 people to try your site. The bad news is that it’s really hard to get those people to turn into users, users that create an account, users that come back repeatedly and users that tell their friends about your site.
This post is about how to get 1,000 people to try your site so you can find out what isn’t working, iterate and keep trying to build a site that people, other than your mom, actually come back to. I’ll write a future post on how to retain those users. Get Yourself a Domain Name and a Splash Page You should set up your splash page today. Once you get your domain name, you should use a service like unbounce to create a simple splash page. The goal of the splash page is to collect email addresses from visitors. Add Link to Your Email Signature. The unfortunate math behind consulting companies. Consulting can be a great way to fund a startup or make a bunch of cash. It’s easy to start; Just pick an hourly rate and jump in.
But someday soon you’ll notice there’s only so many billable hours in the day, and you’ll be tempted to expand. Maybe hire an employee for $30 per hour and re-bill them at $60. Easy money, right? Unfortunately the math doesn’t work that way. Here’s what really happens, and a few ways to combat it. Double is nothing Suppose you hire an employee at $60,000/year. Nominal Cost: $30/hour In terms of working days (WD), there’s 250 in a 50-week year. 20 WD/month, $31/hour We also have employment tax in America. 20 WD/month, $36/hour We’ve assumed an 8-hour work day, but any owner of a consulting company will tell you this rarely happens. 18 WD/month, $40/hour Then personal life intrudes. 16 WD/month, $45/hour We’ve assumed you’re able to keep your employee completely busy throughout the year without down-time between projects, but that’s unrealistic. 14 WD/month, $51/hour. Nice Summary @stanleytang 256 Must-Read Content For All Tech Entrepreneurs | Stanley Tang – The Journey of A Young Tech Entrepreneur - tappen 8 doubles.