Before the iPad and iPad mini, they had the iPod, iPod Nano, iPod Shuffle, iPod Touch, and then the iPhone that could do everything that the iPod Touch does. Guess what? They all still exist today.
Actually a cyclical stock market cycle typically last 4 years. It's generally accepted that we've been in a bull cycle for the last few years, which is prone to shift, with the lackluster Facebook IPO as "the warning sign". If you're raising VC now, you've probably been in business for 1 to 2 years, which means if you exit in another 4 years, it could very well be a terrible secondary market by then. At least some investors will think so.
Poor market sentiment also affects M&A. I remember from my banking days in 2008, where one of my clients with $2 billion in cash wouldn't even fork over $100 million to acquire a company at 9x revenue with 80% revenue growth.
So over all exit options are appearing less attractive for VCs, thus they're likely to fund less companies at lower valuations.
I would think QE 1 + 2, where the abundant institutional capital eventually flowed to VCs since the private markets in the tech sector was the only thing that was really performing post early 2009.
My accelerated method is to do both at the same time: outsource and learn to code. My very first project ever which was a relatively simple PHP site that I outsourced. I learned HTML, CSS and JS as a freelancer in the mean time. Once I got the code base I learned how the front-end works with the server quickly. Doing so I was able to build new features whenever I wanted at a reasonable pace after like 3-4 months.
That's just the tip-of the iceberg though. There're so many programming discipline that newbies need to learn if they're serious about building a great product and being a project manager.
Love the idea. I see the initial challenge being that there are many different breeds and many dog-lovers just have very distinct taste.
For example, my ex absolutely adores the pugs/bulldogs family, but has a mysterious distaste for poodles. A comparison limited to the same breed will give you better ratings, but also makes it harder till you hit critical mass.
Thanks for all the input guys. I like your way of thinking on a per user basis, and also raising the concern with how effective the "influencers" will truly be.
Launch party is just part of the strategy. I'm definitely leveraging many low cost channels as well. Just needed some outside perspective :)
Grossly overused and misused overall. Too many newbies these days call themselves "hackers" just cuz they know how to edit some CSS.
For me, if you can use the terminal freely and build something functional REAL quickly by tweaking frameworks/apis, then you are at the starting point of a "hacker".
I think if you have high Karma on HN, you probably care enough about the topics here to be a true Hacker.
As a self-taught programmer I used to hail PHP as God's gift to mankind until I recruited a team and attempted rapid deployments. The language is just poorly designed compared to Ruby and Python. In face it can encourage some really bad habits for soon-to-be engineers.
On a side note, Coffeescript is one of my fav for it's ease of fixing common bugs concerning global variables, semicolons and equality comparisons. But I am a little turned of by its overblown hype on simplied syntax by its fanboys. They need to realize that, sometimes typing function in JS is just as easy as typing -> in most IDEs.