ShoutOut City helps businesses connect with local influencers and request shoutouts to help grow their business. We are launching in Chicago and will soon expand to other US cities. We are a distributed company, team is on 3 continents.
We just launched our MVP and are looking for 2-3 full-stack engineers to join our team. It's still early days and a great opportunity to have a meaningful influence into how the product is shaped.
Starting salary is around $5-6K range (depending on seniority) per month + generous equity package.
Commercial aviation is a tightly knit community of people, thriving on collaboration, knowledge sharing and operational excellence.
When COVID-19 hit -- and it hit hard -- leaders had to make tough decisions to let people go in order to ensure their organisations' survival. Despite these tough actions, the community not only lives on but is getting stronger by the day, becoming ever more important.
We are announcing the launch of We Work In Aviation -- a directory and community of aviation professionals that literally moved aviation before they were let go. We want to see them do it again when the industry comes calling -- because it will, it is only a matter of time.
Anyone who worked in aviation and was let go recently is invited to register for free, to increase their chances of being found by new employers.
We use Discourse for all complex conversations that can happen asynchronously (meaning not urgent) and we want to capture/document decisions for. Discourse is also great as internal knowledge base.
Moving this sort of comms out of Slack has also made Slack better for us, as there is less FOMO and thus more deep work.
3 months is indeed a long time for us to have to wait for revenue. However, it's good for users because if they get to the 100 transaction limit, it means that they use it, which means that they get value out of it and would be more willing to pay to continue to use it.
Or at least that's our line of thought.
Also, it takes at least a month of transactions to be able to look at stats and get some insights from your spendings.
For existing users, we'll set the transaction counter at 0 (zero) when we launch this. Also, we are thinking of offering them 50% lifetime discount.
HN karma would be a great metric for vetting experience and track-record. It's one of the trickiest things when trying to hire above-average talent.
May I recommend using jobberBase (http://www.jobberbase.com) as a platform? Also open-source, with a great community around it.
Disclaimer: I've built jobberBase, so I'm biased :).
Thank you, great insight!
I think I'll go ahead and contact existing users and see if there's a business opportunity there.
Regarding the 3 approaches:
1. Support is tough and it's not scalable. Maybe we could make a living out of it, but barely stay afloat.
2. We've actually built a prototype of a hosted version, but when we looked at the numbers (cashflow projections), they didn't look too good. However, it's still the one approach I believe can work.
3. Oh, we did that almost 2 years ago and it was a disaster. We created a premium version, with a few important extra features, and sold licenses. We sold 5 of them in 2 months. Our focus shifted towards the premium version and we neglected the open-source version. The community was angry, we were loosing "karma" and not even earning money.
I'm using both http://www.intovps.com/ and http://www.linode.com/ currently, and I'm super-happy with both!
IntoVPS is the cheapest VPS you can find, but their quality and uptime is outstanding. Linode... well... awesome.
Yes, there is, through the same 3rd-party service that Mint and InDinero use: Yodlee.com. However, they have a high set up fee and we're not willing to make that investment, yet.
Until we do, we'll soon let users import bank statements exported from their existing internet banking apps.
We're focusing on making data-entry as painless as possible, indeed.
You should look into Appcelerator Titanium (http://www.appcelerator.com/) and PhoneGap (http://www.phonegap.com/). They allow you to build native mobile apps using HTML/JavaScript, by exposing device specific API's (camera, location, address book etc.) to JavaScript.
Thanks!
We're considering this approach because it's not traditional and it can generate more buzz.
On the other hand, I believe that this might decrease the final excitement, when the entire book is done.