It is so refreshing to see a genuine writeup about a project that's still in the works as opposed to a fully done bootstrap page that's more part of a marketing campaign than an actual effort to share and exchange info. Kudos to you. I love the idea and I totally get the problem here because there's not a single app on android that actually looks good and stays minimal. Keep on polishing! :)
This is bizzarely coincidental. I've been at a hackathon for the last 14 hours and I'm working on a static blog based cms. All the benefits of having a CMS with the output of a blazingly fast and stable static website. Will be open sourcing it when it gets to version "CRUD ready"
I haven't given a long answer in a while. So here's one.
Everything. Almost. I work in an ecommerce company and through an odd set of circumstances joined to head the production team. That's the team that takes photos and QCs stuff and finally uploads things to the site. I inherited a team of 10 and despite work levels climbing to over 20x of what it was at the time I joined the company, the team size is still 10. I was originally hired to streamline processes and convert the roles in the production team into jobs that could be done in an A-B-C "follow-the-manual" way. The purpose was to make the production team low cost with easily replaceable members. If we wanted to scale with the work load, we'd just hire more people since it would be a low paying role anyway.
I opted to approach the problem differently (and I took a big risk in doing so). Instead of making people replaceable, I trained them to be irreplaceable. And to assist them in doing so I built over 30 applications during my 2 years that I have been here.
Some of the applications I built:
1. Newsletter Generator:
Since the company started as a daily deals company, we had a daily newsletter to send to our database of users. The database would be broken into "interest based subsets" and the content of the newsletter would change slightly depending on which subset it was going to (ex- people purchasing deals on hotels would get travel related products on their newsletter). Building newsletters would mean editing HTML manually and this process would take up to 2 and a half hours to complete each day (including QC and error correction time). I built an application where the content admin would simply choose what template blocks to use, arrange them, and just paste the product URL and image URL in and then click "generate". The newsletter generator visits those URLs, scrapes info out of the pages, and constructs the newsletter in a matter of seconds. Oh and the links get saved, so if you want to redo a newsletter or include similar products in the next newsletter, you just choose from the saved list. The entire process was brought down to 10 minutes.
2. Converting products to CSVs:
This is my personal favourite. We started a shopify like concept where we sign up merchants to have a store on our site. We don't have the infrastructure though to let them have their own portal to manage products. Instead they send CSVs with products to us to upload. Problem is, the product lists were huge. The content admin in charge of this had a top speed of 25 SKUs per day. We were looking at hundreds of SKUs from several merchants each. Thankfully our ecommerce backend supports CSV uploads. Obviously the format for the system couldn't be the one given to the customer. I built a CSV generator to convert the merchant's CSV to a system compatible CSV. To give an idea of how much this saved time, a merchant with 9640 hours worth of work was completed in 3 hours (I had some manual verification work to do with images that took time. The actual CSV generation and upload time took 10 minutes). Our backlog of merchants was cleared in under a week (We were looking a over a 18 months of work prior to this)
3. Resizing images
Our graphics guys get cropped images which they then center on a white background and resize to 3 different sizes. When we started the business model described in the previous point, we were overloaded with 1000s of images to process. We were looking at months of work. I spent a weekend writing a script to plug into adobe illustrator that would iterate through a folder and its sub folders, and scoop up psds, jpegs, and pngs, and do the resizing. This weekend worth of work converted the months of work to about half an hour of the computer being left to work by itself while we chilled on bean bags
4. Competitor analysis
While we were heavily into the daily deal business, I wrote a script to visit our competitors websites, track their deals, categorise them, get the numbers sold, and at what prices, and look for changes in deals (such as pricing). This was all written to an sqlite db that connected to an excel sheet from which we were able to generate pretty reports of rate of sales and such stuff on our reports. I eventually decommissioned this after all the other daily deal businesses went out of business. I went on to build a lot of other competitor analysis tools that checked on inventory, merchants and other kinds of information that we could use. Yes, this part was kinda dodgy.
5. Automated QCing
After uploading the products to the site (this was during the low volume time) I built a little app to read the word document that we were sent with details of the deal to upload. It read it, visited the URL (the path was also in the document), compared the uploaded deal to the details on the word document and gave a QC report.
The final result of me building this stuff was that I got to build a team full of awesomeness as opposed to a team of boring cogs. I kept my job. But most importantly, I actually invented a new niche job for myself and I was given autonomy to walk around the company and help other departments by automating their processes and creating applications for them to use. Been thinking of doing this as a consultancy but not sure how I'd go about it :-/ . But there you have it. Non techie stuff automated all over.
At this point it really doesn't matter what title is given to who. What is important is that both of you try to understand if you can actually work together without having conflicting values. What's the first conversation you need to have?
Think about the idea by yourself for some time. Ask him to do the same. Time should be a week. You should be thinking of the future, the values of the company (this is super important), what are the unbreakable laws, along what vision (the one liner vision) does the company guide itself.
Both of you should be willing to think about this. If either you or your buddy are not, then I can tell you now it won't work out. Not as founders. Assume you get past the thinking stage. Put your ideas on the table. My general gut feel rule here is that both of you should be able to agree on each of the points. However, if there's a tinge of saying yes for the sake of it, then it isn't going to work out either. Confounding is marriage and the best of marriages will always have arguments in it because that's what truly helps the relationship grow. But the arguments also end in a common agreement with lessons learnt. In a cofounder relationship, agreeing to disagree will simply compound problems that will one day kill the entire thing.
The second part of the discussion should be that in the future you'd like to be CEO and if starting on the idea, you want to have it signed. This will test both of you. Especially you in your ability to carry out a strong decision while negotiating. If you can't do it, you are either not cut out for being CEO or your cofounder relationship was just never meant to be.
Hope that helped. If you want to get in touch, even if it's for idea validation, feel free to do so
PS - apologies for grammar errors and typos. Typed on mobile.
I'm a non alcoholic who suffered from the same problem of HN/ Reddit etc. While I won't advise for or against alcohol I will advise against using any kind of substance to solve a problem of distraction. That doesn't fix the real problem because the sources of distractions will always be there. Someday if you want to start your own company from home what are you going to do? Drink the whole day?
I'd suggest using the Pomodoro technique for two whole months instead of the alcohol and then re evaluating your requirements to stay focused. For me, I gave up coffee, took up Pomodoro and re discovered classical music to find my zen zone. Now even if I'm told that I can't have caffeine for medical reasons it doesn't matter.
Just chiming in with a question. If someone uses a security camera to peep into other people's private property isn't that illegal?
I'm fine with what he does with the camera in public... Somewhat fine. I'd just record him in return. But walking into classrooms and other private areas, walking on to a stage behind a musical performance... the latter may be pushing limits, but I don't get how the former is legal. Can someone explain it to me?
On another note.. Does anyone know where these videos are being taken?
Quick suggestion. Show the movie times screen as well on the web site. This is what it says after all
"It's simple.
Cinematic only shows the information you need when deciding to see a movie: the title, the length, the rating, and the showtimes. Nothing more"
I actually looked over the screen on the website twice to see if I missed the showtimes.
I think the problem is actually the way people are attempting to define an app the same way they tried to define a pc. The pc exists today and we are by no means in what many refer to as the post pc era. The form factor has changed but the pc remains. Similarly I think Dave has a point as to what is lacking in apps and assuming things like offline data storage get sorted along with better responsiveness and longer battery life, all that'll mean is that the form factor of the app has changed. Not that the app has lost and the web has won. I think web is simply the medium of delivery for an app like how the mobile OS is currently the medium for those apps to work in. Apps will remain the future. No matter how they change it'll still be the future.
I wouldn't agree with that. They sound like a "cut and dry straightforward we are confident with what we have" company. Made me wish I knew enough Ruby to apply. So yea, it's about the person who reads this. Doesn't fall under level arrogance
and to think that people were going on and on saying that something like this wouldn't work. 100k raised and an experience I have firmly supported and believed in from the beginning.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3203427
The conditions under which Google gave Wave to Apache weren't ideal in my opinion. It was a 3/4 effort with some bits staying with Google. Flex however is being given over entirely to the community. It makes a world of difference.
Also, Wave wasn't a development tool. There's a big difference in Open Source communities when it comes to dev tools and product with the former flourishing a lot better.
But it isn't entirely dead is it? It's simply stopped advancing under Adobe's care. More importantly it'll be under the Open Source community's care thus keeping it alive and moving forward (hopefully). It isn't entirely terrible is it?
what if I offer you some ideas to go work on it yourself. You are a developer with talent. I say go first with an idea you can make your own. Lemme know. I'm on twitter @area51research or mail [email protected]
I think there's a bigger lesson in all of this.. If you want to excel.. Drop the social media and other distractions during work.. Be amazed as work levels peak.. Laugh at how easy it was to achieve that.. And realise that when it comes to news you receive via your twitter and reader and and whatever other things you use, whether you check it every 2 minutes or 8 hours, the echo chambers of the internet ensure you really won't miss much.
Well in most cases most people don't read the TOS anyways much less find a real lawyer to comb through it for legal gotchas. So having this quick copy paste checker seems to be a huge step in a positive direction.