We use CakePHP. Our MVP was hacked from Drupal, but we trashed that quickly due to performance issues with our project management system.
I think there are plenty of startups using PHP. It just isn't quite as trendy, so you don't hear about it as much. There are many reasons to pick PHP over Ruby/Python. PHP and its frameworks tend to be quicker to start working with, and PHP often executes faster (sometimes much faster) than Ruby or Python ever will. Apps that need to scale would probably do better to use PHP/HipHop than Django or Rails. Plus, there are definitely more PHP programmers out there than Python/Ruby, so there is the added benefit of having a larger pool of talent to hire from.
I know the guys who put Dwolla together. It shows a lot of promise, and is a huge boon to merchants because of the extremely low transaction fees (flat $0.25 per transaction vs Paypal's 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction).
However, as pg said, it is hard to encourage adoption when buyers only use it if merchants support it and vice versa.
I faced a similar problem when I was starting college. My father is disabled and my mother passed away during my junior year of high school, so I had zero financial support from my family for school.
Due to financial considerations, I chose a state school where I had some scholarships instead of the big name tech school that accepted me. Let me tell you, I have regretted it ever since.
The simple fact is that if you -can- get into a top tier school like MIT then you should go. The caliber of your fellow students will be much, much higher than at a state school, and that alone is priceless. One of the best things about college is networking and, for hackers, finding like-minded individuals to make things with. Once you factor in faculties, facilities, and opportunities, it should be a no brainer.
Regarding money, almost no college students have credit history, but that doesn't stop almost all of them from getting loans. I would be very surprised if you didn't qualify for student loans, even if you have to get them from a private organization / bank. I would talk to MIT's admissions/financial aid office, as they can probably help you piece together how you can pay for things.
Don't let money stand between you and your education. The connections you'll make and the experiences you'll have at MIT will be worth the extra money you pay. Of course you'll also like college a hell of a lot more. I know plenty of people who, like me, settled for a state school and have been bored out of their minds.
tl;dr -- Go to MIT and find a way to make the finances work.
I've been using Catch (www.catch.com) to organize and record just about everything. Their mobile app is pretty well designed, so I'm able to record any random thoughts I'd like to revisit later without much of a hassle.
I'm primarily self-taught, and at the age of 21 I'm comfortable listing 8+ years of C/C++ development on my resume. I built my first web site when I was 11, and I started learning C when I was 13 so that I could add features to a multiplayer text-based game (MUD).
I spent a few years running a MUD, doing some coding competitions, taking on small freelance projects, and learning about data structures, networking, graphics, and other things. When I was 15 I created a full Win32-based 2D game engine for a school project. It even had a terribly designed scripting language for defining levels and game behavior. After that project I vowed to never touch Win32 development again.
When I was 16 they allowed me to take CS courses at our local university, and I thought I'd found my home. Unfortunately I realized most college students at our university don't really care about programming and are just there for the degree. We had no hacker culture, and I tutored several seniors who couldn't fix their own syntax errors.
I've been happily employed since I was 16. I've done freelance, small projects at our university, computer technician work, and embedded systems software development. When I was 19 I got recruited by Lockheed Martin to write flight control software for the FAA for a summer. It was amazing, but I didn't want to work at a big company in the long run, so I turned down the offer to return.
Last March I dropped my job and began working on my startup full time :) I should also note that I'm in college part-time as a CS/Economics double major.
I have to admit that most epic programmers I know didn't get a formal education in CS. Some have degrees in other fields, and some have no degree at all. I think passion for software and building things takes people further than a degree. However, most of the programmers I've worked with that had CS degrees did quality work and had a good understanding of CS concepts. They just rarely seem to be coding demons.
Investors and raising capital are the top ideas these days. I also think about how if I could go back in time and change one thing at my startup, it would forcing myself to get a co-founder.
As a solo founder it is already difficult to work on product development and handle business operations. You throw in raising capital to hire four people and your workday in the short-term hits 12+ hours if you want to make any progress.
The guy who won Entrepreneur magazine's Student Entrepreneur of the Year in 2009 did so with the idea of paperless/digital receipts. You can see his service here:
Burnout sucks, and it can be hard to deal with. I began work on my startup in my spare time in college because it was fun. Once I jumped into it full time it turned my life on its head. After several months I was tired of working solely on my product, and I was tired of being at the computer in general. To gain perspective, I unplugged for a while. I read more books. I took up running again. I watched talks on TED.com and rediscovered movies and TV shows. Most importantly, I began coding stuff for fun again -- stuff that was totally not related to work. I felt guilty at first, but I ended up being far more productive in the long run.
It turns out it's the little things in life that keep you sane.
Are you a founder? Do you hold a significant amount of equity? If so, you have the power to chill out and take some time off. If not, you should remind your employers that you are a human being who will work reasonable hours. Maybe that means extending your deadlines; maybe it means they need additional developers to help handle the work. The bottom line is this: if you aren't being compensated the same as the founders then you should not be expected to have their level of dedication.
Also this. I started teaching myself programming when I was in middle school, and by the time I got to college the only thing I found in our CS department was disappointment and boredom.
However, the economics department was fantastic. We also have an entrepreneurship program that is amazing. If you have a handle on Comp. Sci. stuff then I would say find some business/entrepreneurship related program to get involved in. You'll be much more prepared to launch viable products if you have some business background. Also, I think you'll find that networking is far more important (and worthwhile) in the business community at a college than in the CS community.
You are certainly not alone in this! The best way I've found to avoid burnout, even with things you enjoy, is to do things in a balanced manner and adopt good habits. Don't spend your life putting in tons of time squashing fires and then zonking out. Do your best to meet deadlines, but accept some consequences and transition towards a more balanced work ethic. Also, don't be too hard on yourself; that just fuels the paralysis. You are human like everyone else.
I was in a similar position at the end of high school. I opted for college/internships, and I often regret that decision. While college has some unique benefits, especially in the ways of networking and unusual opportunities, you will find that work experience and actual ability matters far more in the software world.
Pick the job you think you'll like the most and go for it. The startup will likely provide amazing real world learning opportunities in software and business, so I would vote for that one. Given your skill you might also consider giving your own startup a go.
Do keep in mind that college will always be there, so if a job doesn't work out you can always head off to college. Also, here's a piece of advice I wish someone would have given me: when picking a college, do not settle for any reason. Find a place that will challenge your abilities and help you actually learn more about computer science. For financial reasons I opted for a state school instead of a big name school (where I had been accepted) and I've been frustrated and bored to tears ever since.
Paying for Pandora has been one of the best investments I've ever made. With a little tuning you can get stations that play endless amounts of music you enjoy with no intervention on your part, and you never have to stop listening. If I had to guess I'd say I listen 50+ hours a week.
Their Android app also works pretty well. I use it when working out and when walking around campus. Using the app I was also able to listen to Pandora when some friends and I road tripped to Seattle this summer (3500+ miles round trip). No CDs or station flipping required :)
I would note that I'm not real prone to buying music, so Pandora tends to be my only music source. That makes it pretty easy to justify $36 a year.
My startup lives in the student business incubator at the University of Northern Iowa (along with 9 others). We don't get any startup funding like you would through YC (they are working on that), but we get a free office, furniture, computers, software, and, most importantly, a lot of free counseling. We have free access to professionals with backgrounds in marketing, venture capital, intellectual property, accountants, and more.
They also offer a number of programs/perks, like workshops on various aspects of business development, networking events, speakers, negotiated rates with lawyers and other services, classes on entrepreneurship, and access to grants and interest free loans. With their guidance I was able to win money in some business plan competitions and drop to part time in order to fully pursue the business. Recently they have helped us find a few angel investors as well.
Without them I'm not sure where I would be. I started out as a single founder and now I'm to the stage where I can bring on three or four friends/employees full time to help me take things to the next level.
Perhaps the best part is the constant ability to both collaborate and give back. There are opportunities everywhere for bouncing ideas around and helping other startups with their problems.
It definitely depends on what your product is. Some customers will not be very forgiving while others will be relentless champions for you.
Our approach has been somewhat unique. Our MVP is mostly a throw-away version we got out into the world as fast as possible to test the idea. As such, we didn't do much testing. We excluded most of the back-end stuff we'd like to have but was not absolutely essential for basic operations (mainly automation of some tasks). This worked because we can do most of the required tasks for a small number of customers by hand in the mean time. This has been very successful and has been helpful on a number of levels -- we know our core customers quite well, they get personalized service and seem to be very loyal, and we were able to launch much earlier. The idea was to avoid spending a lot of time in development/testing in case things didn't go well.
Now that we know there is a place in the world for our product we can build a 2.0 version with everything we want/need in it. Plus, given our experience in the field and with the customers, we have a much better idea of what exactly our software will need to handle. Rather than mod our product to fit the requirements, we'll just build a new one and migrate the existing data. In the mean time we have some grass roots growth and customers who give us constant feedback.
I would note that if you are seriously looking at the possibility of growing very quickly then you probably don't want to use a throw-away MVP. If we got hit hard right now we would be in a tough spot for a few weeks (maybe more). Since our niche is rather small we felt a bit more comfortable taking on this risk.
Combine steps 1 and 2. It is free to list your book with Amazon, so go ahead and do it from the start in addition to selling on your own site.
Alternatively, you can use a distribution service. I run Book Hatchery (www.bookhatchery.com), a web service that helps authors publish their books digitally. You can sign up for free and we'll format your book and get it listed on Amazon, B&N, and Apple. We also have a paid plan at $25/mo that provides you ISBNs (which normally cost $125 and required by Apple and some other ebook retailers), print on-demand help, and some other features. We are a startup working with an alpha product, so our service is constantly evolving. Of course we'd like all of the feedback we can get, especially from authors :)
Also, regarding question #2, that choice is up to you. For most authors selling ebooks you can simply operate as a sole proprietor (no fancy/expensive legal work required). If you ever make some reasonable money from your books you might consider forming an LLC.
One of the biggest reasons you see acquisitions is for realized gains for investors (including the founders). When you seek investors for your business, you'll find that they expect you to have an exit strategy; this is because they eventually need to get their money out (and then some), and an acquisition is one of the best (and easiest) ways to do that. Some investors may even build legal terms into the agreement governing your course of action when an acquisition might be possible.
For most founders, the acquisition is typically the end of the rainbow. You quite literally cash out/sell your investment. You stop assuming the risks of the venture, but you also give up your rights to future profits. Startups are very risky, and like any investment people gain the most by selling when times are good. A startup that is doing fine today could be dead in two years, or it could go on to be Google. Would you rather have $30 million today or a chance between $0 and $1 billion+ a few years from now?
Of course you don't have to be acquired. If you like what you are doing you can simply keep going (if you are profitable). If you have investors then you'll need to figure out an alternative way to compensate them.
As a founder I personally tell you that I'm more interested in building my products and business than I am running the business long term. I love my company and everything we are involved in, but the further we go the further I get away from my hacker roots. Someday I'll need to get back to that.
I've had tinnitus for as long as I can remember, so "silence" for me means non-stop high pitch ringing. Thus, I use Pandora just about every hour I'm awake and around a controllable sound source.
For coding I usually pick techno, electronica, soft rock, classical, or more piano/instrumental types. It mostly depends on mood. I tend to avoid things with lyrics for coding.
More specifically, I've been addicted to Explosions in the Sky and Trifonic for months now.
I think there are plenty of startups using PHP. It just isn't quite as trendy, so you don't hear about it as much. There are many reasons to pick PHP over Ruby/Python. PHP and its frameworks tend to be quicker to start working with, and PHP often executes faster (sometimes much faster) than Ruby or Python ever will. Apps that need to scale would probably do better to use PHP/HipHop than Django or Rails. Plus, there are definitely more PHP programmers out there than Python/Ruby, so there is the added benefit of having a larger pool of talent to hire from.