Does anyone know where to follow this project, or perhaps if there's a Kickstarter or something? I can't seem to find anything outside of this one article. I would pay very good money for something like this. Ground floor apartments on major streets are awful. :-(
This is incredibly well written and 100% on-point with my own personal experiences. This paragraph stood out the most to me:
"As a techie individual contributor in a larger company, I could go to work everyday and execute 99% predictably. As a founder, I had to find ways to plead your case over and over — to employees, investors, candidates, advertisers, users — and I got rejected a lot. For an introvert, the amount of pleading and subsequent rejection came as quite a shock."
That's probably one of the most difficult adjustments I've had to make moving from 16 years of plain-old-coding into being a founder.
The author never used any of these adjectives to describe himself (except entrepreneur, which he is entitled to use since he started his own company). I agree with you that they are highly annoying terms to use and diminish our profession. That, however, does not excuse your hostile and unnecessary comment.
This is a great article, Sidu. All of your points speak true to what I have learned going through the same process. I've only been doing the business thing for about 10 months, but already I notice a difference in perspective when speaking to non-entrepreneur engineers. Thanks for writing this.
This all happened during the final negotiations of our round. That last bit takes obnoxiously long as lawyers have to talk to one another. That was the awkward chasm we fell into: running out of cash as the final documents for the round were being finalized.
It's funny that you mention that, as that is my personal beef with many startups as well. Funding is not a measure of success; revenue is. However, this article is not about revenue. It's about the funding process. Talking about our revenue (which we didn't have at the time, but we do have now) would have been off topic.
Right now, those are the essentials. Those two things are huge barriers to entry for many people trying to write mobile apps, and people love when we do it for them. Right now we are trying to cover our bases with the basic things that almost all mobile apps need, and then we will start exploring more exotic offerings. Keep on the lookout!
If you have any questions, please feel free to email us directly at team at cloudmine dot me.
You got it! No storage costs. We have a soft limit of 20k per object, but I doubt many people are going to come close to brushing that. And it's all free right now anyway.
Someone just tweeted at us earlier about GeoJSON (http://geojson.org/) which looks pretty awesome for storing polygon data. It sparked a conversation internally about a feature like that, especially since SimpleGeo (which offered that, I believe) is gone.
That point aside, geofencing queries are coming soon. That means that instead of just giving a center point and radius in your query, you can query with a polygon defined by arbitrary points and we will return your objects that exist inside that shape. Perhaps that could hold you over for the time being?
We've gotten a lot of great feedback about the copy on our website, and we know it definitely has room for improvement. It's in the works. :)
In the meantime, there are a few examples in our other blog posts that you could take a look at. Also feel free to email us directly (team at cloudmine dot me) if you have any specific questions and I'd be glad to explain our offerings in more detail.
Thanks! Glad you know about us now. One of our big differences from Parse is our focus on server-side requirements as well as client-side. Case in point, our server side code execution environment. Check it out if you're interested.
http://blog.cloudmine.me/post/15748285350/server-side-superp...
Build as little as you can get away with on your own. Focus on the core value of your business and not the incidentals, if you can help it. Use Dropbox or Box.net for file sharing, Github for version control, Google Apps for calendaring/email/contacts, and use S3 to backup your EC2 servers nightly. We also use the Github wiki for our various projects.
Of course, you can make your own choices in all of the above tech. I was just providing a list for the sake of examples. The point is, each of these things is the core value of these other businesses and they do them better than you will be able to. It's absolutely worth the small fees they charge to keep you focused on your core product.
And the skilled developers aren't the young cats, they are the old dogs. Don't confuse what's popular with what's good.
Personally, I know just as many terrible old developers as I know young and just as many excellent young developers as old. What you're saying here is passing judgement on a group of people due to their age just the same as the OP appears to be passing judgement on a group of people due to their development platform preference.
