Beyond Tabletop is designed to let you use your mobile devices for in-person gaming.
A friend and I built this after we bought dry erase mat for our home game. We realized that we had a dozen mobile devices in the room and we were still using pen and paper for gaming.
I have both a .Net start-up which is a Bizspark member and a non-.Net start-up.
It's not the software costs for me it's the development costs of using .Net that make it tough.
.Net developers get paid a lot which means it's expensive to quit your .Net job and form a start-up and it's expensive to hire people to work on your project.
I totally agree with you about the problem with "go-with-the-flow" rating systems. You should not simply be able to perform well by picking highly rated stocks. This is one of the problems we're trying to solve.
Our rating system actually has an internal pricing mechanism which is designed to drive the ratings toward zero and prevent piling on behavior. If you just follow the crowd you won't do well as a real investor and you won't score well on our site.
Judging by the feedback we've been getting that's not nearly as obvious as it needs to be and we're trying to figure out how to best show that.
Right now we're not doing anything special. We just send the emails from the server as we need to. A lot of the emails are set up as nightly jobs which we queue up in a DB before we send.
Thanks for the feedback. This is one of the main things we're trying to get right.
To answer your question about the scores, we are using collective intelligence to generate the stock ratings. Ideally the scores will be a kind of average opinion of everyone on the site.
One thing that makes StockYoyo different than other collective intelligence rating sites is that our ratings actually affect how you score when you pick the stock. We reward contrarian opinion and try to drive the ratings to zero. With enough users that means any non-zero rating should hopefully be a meaningful indicator of sentiment.
Unfortunately, we're not sure any of this is very clear and we're not entirely sure how to make it clear without users having to read our scoring FAQ. Better UI? Tool tips? walkthrough?
I'm not sure what your suggestion here is instead of TDD. Just wing it?
Your whole premise is based on the the idea that your startup is going to fail. In that case why write any code at all?
If your startup doesn't fail then you've really made things extra hard on yourself. One of my favorite things about working on my startup is getting to learn and apply good practices.
It's just as easy to write good code as it is to write bad code. I find that TDD speeds me up not slows me down. It's not as much overhead as people seem to suggest.
You can write new code and then keep running the program to see if it works. Or you could write the code and keep running a test until it works. The test is typically faster for this because you don't have to deal with the rest of the program which is unrelated to what you're working on. Once you have working unit tests the implementation is typically trivial.
In practice, I don't write tests for everything but I code in a way that means I could test everything if I wanted to.
A friend and I built this after we bought dry erase mat for our home game. We realized that we had a dozen mobile devices in the room and we were still using pen and paper for gaming.