chrisgo

Mailgun is great!

Wells Fargo ... I use their Billpay service to pay vendors (I have lots of subcontractors ~1000 and I pay ~60 of them every week) it's almost free and the checks have a MEMO field! They also have a DirectPay (kind of like direct deposit) which kind of sucks. I do NOT use their merchant account.

My experience with Linode has been great and they even refunded me some money (I paid for a month for a bunch of servers, canceled after a couple of days) which I was NOT expecting. Linode is VPS, not cloud so I was expecting that the monthly payment is the monthly payment. They ended up prorating all my unused credits and I had 2-3 months that I didn't have to pay anything (spun up a lot of extra servers). So this may just be a bug on their system but I didn't have to call or email anybody to get this process.

Any experience with web2py?

Don't worry about the hours, it's the 5% you should be thinking about, specifically dilution. Watch the movie "The Social Network" and what (allegedly) happens to Eduardo. He had 30% and then ultimately had 0.03% ... unfortunately you have to watch the whole movie to see how that works.

Here's Fred Wilson: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/10/employee-equity-dilution.htm...

I just read about these guys http://www.getmefast.com (from the blog of http://www.freshdesk.com/) -- they're in India but seems to have done a ton of work

Accountability - find a buddy (or anybody) that is remotely interested in what you are doing. Your boss (and even other people you interact with) probably asked you when it's going to be done and you are eager to "please". You may be one of those people that feel that if nobody else cares about your project, why should you. So find a person to work with on this project ... maybe a future client or user with the problem you are trying to solve.

You can try for an E5 Visa (investor) -- the companies here are not exactly high tech but you need $500k

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/smallbusiness/0907/galle...