It's even harder to be open and honest with yourself, your employees, your customers and everyone else when shutting down. Perhaps somewhat weird, but I find it refreshing to see posts like these. I think it's the sign of a good and healthy entrepreneur/team (albeit hard to write).
I'm sure you and your team learned a lot, and I love the gesture to open source your software.
@encoder, to your point, this is exactly what we (Paid, www.paidapi.com) do. Definitely reach out to us if you have any questions. Would love to see how we can help you out.
1. Many of our customers get paid by checks. We receive checks for some of them, and our goal is to make as easy as possible to reconcile those payments.
2. If your customer's card is out of date, we prompt the customer to update their card and store it back to Stripe for you.
3. You aren't alone. Some customers use us for pieces of their transaction volume (i.e. only the invoiced customers or only customer paying via ACH)
4. A la #3, you can send us a portion or all. We're also happy to help you get started. It's free to get set up, so you can try it out. We also provide a test environment so you can play around with it as much as you want.
Having always been asked "Do you know someone who does X?" a lot, I have certainly found it most difficult to answer for those in hardware. Perhaps it's just from my perspective having been in software so long, but I am excited to see a focus on Hardware networking, particularly at the founder level.
Curious to hear how hardware people have found co-founders/early employees to date. Classmates? Former co-workers?
I was in the same shoes, and I decided to learn Rails. I haven't looked back since, but then again, I was in a startup and wanted to walk out with some new skills.
Rails is great, not for everything, but it does make standing up a new site pretty darn easy. Personally, I won't touch PHP again if I have my choice.
Thanks for the feedback spaghetti. To some extent, and for some positions, hard metrics such as revenue are definitely a very strong indicator of performance. However, this approach neglects the fact that businesses and types of employees are extremely nuanced.
Often times it is very difficult for an employee to identify the reasons why they are not performing up to expectations (this even applies to the revenue model).
In our research, we have also found that a culture driven only by numbers and money typically produce unhappy employees and decreased morale. Cultures that are driven on improvement and achievement through performance tend to produce happier employees that are excited to work for a what is likely unique company.
Ultimately, we created MicroEval to increase the conversations happening in the work place. And we want to provide the participants of those conversations concrete things to talk about. Having identified the nuances of one's performance gives them a clearer target for improvement.
I'll be really excited if this works for _truly top-notch_ restaurants. It would be awesome to avoid the lines and eat the same quality food in the comfort of my own home. Would make for an awesome dinner-party...
It's even harder to be open and honest with yourself, your employees, your customers and everyone else when shutting down. Perhaps somewhat weird, but I find it refreshing to see posts like these. I think it's the sign of a good and healthy entrepreneur/team (albeit hard to write).
I'm sure you and your team learned a lot, and I love the gesture to open source your software.
Best of luck on the next step!