exline

San Diego, CA. Remote. Klatu Networks (www.klatunetworks.com): A wireless sensor networking startup that focuses in biotech monitoring. We are a small, bootstrapped, profitable start up. We are very selective on our hiring so you will only be working with other great engineers.

The most important requirements is to be passionate about creating software and be able to quickly grasp new technologies. Other requirements include strong knowledge of Javacript, Java, experience with Ruby, SQL, Git. We filled our last position through a previous 'Who is hiring' post with great success and hoping to do it again.

Contact me directly if you are interested, email is in my profile.

I went through about 80K in savings. There was some extra stress on the marriage (wife, 2 kids, mortgage payments.) But I was working from home mostly except when pitching VC's. My wife was very supportive.

When the startup died, I moved into contracting. I was doing quite well contracting and then one of guys who was on our board of advisors needed some development work and that led to me having substantial equity in the company and still working from home.

So the start up was a total failure, but I learned a lot and it lead me to where I am today which is much better than where I started.

I think there is a viral angle. There were a group of friends at college, all CS majors and we competed on our grades. We all wanted to one up each other.

I can see the ability to have a score board of some kind where you can share your grades with friends. This could help spread the word a bit.

Its a huge plus. We are in the process right now of hiring and that is one of the first things we ask about. Do you have any open source code we can view? This tells us several things about the person

1) They are interested in coding. This was done on their own time, away from work. This means they actually like to code.

2) A lot of work is done to learn a new language/technology. This often shows desire to learn and the ability to at least hack together something that is new to them. This is important because we will be asking them to come up to speed quickly in our code base.

3) You can look at the code and get a feel for how they code. We are a small team and each developer will have the ability to have a big impact (for good or bad). Getting an idea of how they think, how they solve problems is a huge plus.

I don't think you need to have a lot of code available. Pick your favorite project, or 'best' project and make it available. I see very little downside.

This is important exercise. I was involved with startup that was ad based for revenue. On paper, you can make the numbers add up and everything looks good. Knowing what numbers you need to hit is important. The hard part is getting the 104,167 visitors. Saying 'all we need is 0.01% of facebook users and we are rich' is not addressing the situation.

How are you going to attract visitors?

That said, you've already made it this far which is a great firs step. Good luck.

We are pretty flexible if the fit is good. I sent you an email to dig into it a little more.

San Diego, CA. Remote ok. Klatu Networks (www.klatunetworks.com): A wireless sensor networking startup that focuses in biotech monitoring. We are a small, bootstrapped, profitable start up. We are very selective on our hiring so you will only be working with other great engineers.

The most important requirements is to be passionate about creating software and be able to quickly grasp new technologies. Other requirements include strong knowledge of Javacript, experience with Ruby, Java, SQL, Git.

Contact me directly if you are interested, email is in my profile.

San Diego, CA. Remote ok. Klatu Networks: A wireless sensor networking startup that focuses in biotech monitoring. We are a small, bootstrapped, profitable start up. We are very selective on our hiring so you will only be working with other great engineers.

The most important requirements is to be passionate about creating software and be able to quickly grasp new technologies. Other requirements include strong knowledge of Javacript, experience with Ruby, Java, SQL, Git.

Contact me directly if you are interested, email is in my profile.

www.klatunetworks.com is looking for paid intern in San Diego. local is best, but remote is also a possibility if the person is a good match. Looking for someone who can start soon, rather than waiting for the summer. Contact me directly if you are interested, cexline at klatunetworks dot com.

Not interested in raising any VC. I've been part of a startup dealing with VC's and had a second startup fail to get the required VC investment. In both experiences, it was not fun.

Its far better create a product and grow the business. I also like owning the whole business and calling the shots. I'll take a 50% chance at a moderate success over a 1% chance at a huge success.

You have to factor in other costs on top of the employee wage:Taxes, Insurance (liability/health,etc), Retirement/401k, Office Space (Rent & Utilities optional if running virtual)

I'm sure there are other costs some optional, some not. Depending on how lean you want to run you can have a very low overhead.

It also depends on what level of developer you are hiring.

What do you think the bulk of your customers will be, small or big companies? Small business tend to like static prices (plans) because it is easy to budget. It also makes it easy to offer 3/6/12 month subscriptions which can help lock in customers.

If you price per user, but not everyone at a company needs the product, they will tend to restrict the use of the product to minimize the expense to them. With plans, you still have this, but to a lesser degree I believe.

unless the search capability is excellent, having 24/7 videos on the computer would not be useful. Without good search, you would have to know the time that you wanted to review. If it was just video, then it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

We are similar that 3 of us are in the same city, but not very close. The 4th is out of state, but travels at least once a month. The major difference is that we are all full time on our startup.

IM/Voip (Gtalk/Skype) for daily communication Email (Pretty much goes without saying) Skype Screen Share/ GoToMeeting when required to view things together. RedMine for bug/issue tracking

We actually never use video calls, don't see it adding to much. I already know what they look like. When we have major design or planning sessions, we will get together for a face to face meetings, scheduled out in advanced. We also try to get together for lunch/dinner/meeting every month or so.

It depends on the the service. I use freshbooks, and their plans are roughly based on number of customers you have. I don't mind paying more the more customers I have, because it means I'm making more money. I don't mind spending money when I'm making money.

One thought is that the bigger your customer is, the more they can afford to pay for the service. You don't want to leave to much money on the table. Its pretty normal for people to undercharge for their services. Do you have any feel for if you are going to get more 1-3, 4-10, 11-25 users?

The things I don't like about tiered services, is that there is a big price jump when you move between tiers. Moving from 3 to 4 users in your example doubles the cost to the service. I'd make more gradual tiers rather than big jumps.

I've looked at several competing services. I look for screen shots, videos, test accounts and finally a real account.

Just keep in mind that you don't want to be too focused on what your competition is doing. Its ok to check them out, but focus on your customers. They are the ones that really matter.

From what I can tell EC2 instances are pretty under powered for the price. There are a lot of good things about EC2, but the small instances are not that great. The good thing is you can start small and quickly grow. You are right about needed 2 instances for Mongo. Design it so that you can turn on new front end instances to handle the load as needed. This way you can start as cheap as possible and add servers (and cost) as you grow.

It does take time. You say you have spent the last 5 months full time. How much of that has been in development vs marketing? How are you reaching out to restaurants to populate the site? You have the chicken and egg problem, people don't use it because there is not enough content, there is not enough content because people don't use it.

I'd focus on a few major markets and work hard to get as many menus up as possible. People are always looking for free advertisements and having their menu online is one form. I'd push that as much as possible. Since this is your full time effort, you may need to spend money on marketing to get the ball rolling. Perhaps enter the menu's yourself (or hire a VA to do it) and then drop the restaurant a note saying that their menu is now online and they can make changes at this website for free.

Other ideas, perhaps white label it to newspapers and/or city websites? In San Diego, there is a dining guide section at signonsandiego.com and this would fit into what they are doing. They also have someone who is doing reviews weekly, which could now include populating the full menu.

The fastest way would be contracting. Creating a webapp to earn that much a month could take a long time. I've had my webapp for a while and I'm not earning that much a month yet. Building a webapp is the easy part, marketing and getting paying customers is where the hard work is.

Paying customers is the best measure of success for me. Feedback is good, but I find that it's very hard to get feedback. I'm in a boring B2B market, so there is less people talking about it.

Returning paying customers, that is the gold standard.

Agree, great name for the product. I'm starting to see traction around QR Codes. Your timing might be very good.

The value proposition is not very clear. Why would I use your product, what is the benefit of using it. It appears that your business model is to target conferences, is that correct? Will it always be free to everyone else?

One minor issue, on the FAQ page, it says: "A Quirk is a type of QR code, a two-dimensional barcode represented by a pattern of black and white squares (like the one at the top of the page)." But there is no a QR code on the to of the page.

Take the cash. I've been burned in the past holding onto options/stock that turned out to be worthless. Having options is only worth value if there is a successful exit which are rare. I was involved in an exit, that was pretty good for the founders (7 digit purchase price), but worthless for just about every employee. I think I walked away with $600.

The valuation of each company should also be figured into equation. It really only matters when there is an exit, but it would effect your payout. Have the founders/owners had a successful exit before? Are they going to raise capital, thus diluting your ownership in the future? Given these questions and my past experience, I'd take the job that is more interesting to you. If both are equal, then take the higher salary.

The ideal time to launch was yesterday, but that's already over. So the next best option is today, followed by tomorrow. There are very few apps/products where launching early with out a big marketing pitch will hurt. Judging by the fact that you are asking for advice here, I'm guessing you do not have a million dollar marketing budget.

It would be far better to launch now, get some initial users, improve your product based on their feedback and then really turn on the marketing effort. The key thing is to get started now, start getting users. Find out how they use your product, find out what they like or don't like.

The layout could use a bit more work. There is a lot of wasted space on a wide browser and the main body hides if I shrink my browser window to much.

I registered for an account, but it didn't not automatically log me in. Not a huge deal, but little things add up. Then after I logged in, it kept me on the login page. You should redirect to the home page.

I like the idea. I think there have a been a number of posts both here at HN and other places basically saying, here is an idea for someone, or someone solve my problem. I would find those and use that to help populate it.

One feature/benefit that would be useful is to find how who liked/wanted the idea. Perhaps there needs to be 2 types of voting. 1 vote is 'that is a cool idea' the second is 'I would buy this now if it existed'. The second feedback is much more valuable than the first.

Its the classic catch 22, no work experience to put on the resume, hard to get a job to gain the experience.

But I think it is a lot easier now then it was in the past. There are lots of opportunities to work on open source projects. What I look for in student or recent graduate resume is decent list of technical skills (languages, db, methodologies, etc.) These you can pick up at school. The biggest issue for me is to see some code. You can learn a lot about a person by looking over their code. So I'd publish a few of your personal projects. Reference the website where the code and documentation sits on your resume.

I less concerned about buzzwords. They don't tell me anything. They may help you get past a resume screener, but they will not help you beyond that. If you have experience in the area, you should specifically list that.

I have a project for a client that has a need for exactly this tool, but the pricing per month is a sticking issue. The problem is that the conversion to PDF is not tied to revenue for the project. And because it would be an unknown cost (they don't know how many word docs they will be getting), the client would not like it.

That said it could in theory be up to 5-10K documents a month in a year from now, but right now it is probably only 100-200 a month. Currently we are using an open source tool and having decent results. Not great, but acceptable so far. The second option is to require their users to provide only PDF, which is not ideal, but also acceptable.

It seems like this is a commodity product, so figure out what the cost is per document (or per gig of data.) Then add in some profit and that is your price. You can have larger profit on smaller plans and less profit on the larger plans. To do this, I would charge by data not document, since you can determine costs by data, not document.

If you work for a typical company, health insurance isn't a huge deal, mostly because the company picks up most of the tab. Its part of the benefits package. You will still typically pay $100-400 a month out of pocket depending on if you have family and kids. That also may include dental and vision. Dental is common, vision is not.

If you are self employed or work at a small company, then insurance is a big deal. I'm going to pay $6K a year for crappy insurance and I'm still going to pay $7k out of pocket expensive this year because my son had to have surgery and our deductible is 7500. So I think the insurance situation sucks. And I got a notice yesterday that they are raising my rates again. For small business that want to cover the health insurance for their employees it is also a big expense and one that keeps rising. It amazes me that insurance companies can raise rates 15-40% a year and get away with it.

As far as saving up for college education, that is not as difficult because it is a matter of living within your means. Make it a priority and save. That said I have different views on fully paying for 4 years of college vs. having my kids pay part of their way. My parents put me through my first year of school and then I was on my own. I tended to work hard at school (to get it finished) than those I know who's parents were footing the bill.

I found some other singer founder friends online. We all had different startups and were not in competition with each other. This allowed us to share openly with each other and discuss ideas, issues, problems, etc. The group went slowly dissolved, but I still keep in contact with on of they guys. This was a big help early on.

I also got a lot of help from business communities online. Listening and learning from others that have been successful.

The single biggest factor was getting paying customers. This validates your product/service, and gives you a huge boost of energy and confidence. This is one reason to cut back requirements and get your MVP out the door as soon as possible. Also if you are stuck (or in a rut technically) pick something on the fringe of your project that is small and that you can quickly do. Making progress helps ease the frustration.

I've been using it for 2 days. I have it set up on 2 separate accounts. I'm still training it on what is a priority, but so far it seems to work well. It took a bit to get use to at first. But it is easy to switch between normal and priority mode.

Unrelated to your question, but this is the second site I've seen recently here at HN where the images flip past to fast. Perhaps I'm getting to old, but when you have images and words describing the images, I need more time to read it. I know the controls are there, but still by default, if you have text that you want me to read, then give me a chance to read it.

I think that you are going to get very different %'s based on the type of app. I have a SaaS so it's different, but for what its worth, my conversion rate from trial users to paying users (which are my active users) is less than 5%.

I'm curious what your business model is. I'm in your target market since I use google reader.