Appreciate the link, that was one of the contests we checked out while thinking about the SXSW concept. I think that the design and interactive nature (no video) of vator's contest could be improved a bit but it is a good example.
If you look at Japan, one of the big reasons they were able to get so far ahead with mobile payments being ubiquitous was NTT docomo's subsidizing of the NFC units for merchants. Whether it will be Google, Verifone, or someone else is yet to be seen, but NFC is coming one way or another.
Thought the article made it clear, but we specifically went out and got designers we thought were good, especially from competing platforms. In total I believe that it ended up being around 10-15 messages that we sent out. I thought the auto-text completer was a useful tool for things I would be repeating anyway.
Also in the post you will note that we tried to stress giving feedback, if you don't like something you don't waste a designers time and you move on or they will come back with something else.
I understand designer's frustration with crowdsourcing, but this post was for other startup folks who don't/can't spend a great deal on a designer.
Finally, this wasn't a minimal time process. I spent a few hours every day for a few weeks responding, giving feedback, and iterating. It would have been much more simple to offload this to a designer who took care of everything, but at the end of the day I was happy with the result.
Well I guess that is more job security depending on what you want. You can always go back to doing startups, plus you will know a bunch of other engineers who may hop on board with you.
Couldn't agree more. I work at Thomvest Ventures and almost every portfolio company we have is hiring (a few additional aren't listed because they are in stealth but are about to go into ramp mode). Have quite a few friends working on funded startups who are looking to hire as well.
If you know the type of work you want to do, have a list of some of the stuff you have coded/what languages you know, and/or are interested in a specific company we have feel free to shoot me an email and I will try to help out (info is on Nathan's blog).
Appreciate the feedback, new to hacker news and I titled it that way because of the sentence "What amazes me is how poorly crafted many of these presentations are." Apologize if it wasn't best practice.
Agree that the number 4 bullet seemed vague. The way I read "value" was "cheapness" rather than creating value-add, but I might be reading it wrong.