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SEEKING PROJECTS - Distributed Remote Team

We have extensive experience implementing and teaching lean principles. We primarily handle backend work, but have a designer and UX guy at our disposal. We love analytics and customer feedback.

Email: bweber@spinuplabs.com skype: spinuplabs


so wait, your domain expired, you ignore the emails sent, then after the redemption period is over, GoDaddy legally sells it. Somehow they are the bad guy. I know that is an oversimplification, but do their terms and conditions say they guarantee to change the nameservers during redemption? That way if you happen to ignore the other methods of communication, you will notice that?


Wow, I didn't even notice that I got that wrong.


I thought the article was intriguing and understand the underlying principles, but the photos look so obviously photoshopped. I don't understand writing the story and faking the photos. Did any of it even happen?

Photos -> http://www.redbubble.com/people/sikhcaptain/works/10813204-c...


They look HDR'd to me which is all the rage these days. I too thought the article interesting though. Although the narrative of Captain America is that he enlisted in the 40's so chances of him having a turban and a beard are really really low, but it the dissonance effect is one that can be used to great advantage by artists to surface presumptions we don't know we are holding.


> Although the narrative of Captain America is that he enlisted in the 40's so chances of him having a turban and a beard are really really low

Interestingly, one of the first known Sikhs in the US army was Bhagat Singh Thind[1] during the first world war. He was also involved in a legal battle[2][3] for naturalization which eventually lead to the landmark decision to allow "non-whites" to naturalize as US citizens.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagat_Singh_Thind

[2] http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/261/204/case.html

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Bhagat_Singh_T...


Didn't say it was impossible, just low :-).


Yes, though I want badly for them to be true, the photos do look to me at the very least manipulated and at worst very poorly composited. I haven't looked too closely at any of the images, and I don't even have my glasses on :) But my initial sense is that the powerful frontal speculars and weird foot contact in the first photo look totally bogus (beyond strong lens-axis flash bogus due to the feet); As he walks up the stairs from the subway, the illumination on his legs is the opposite of the lambertian falloff you might expect (furthermore, how can the sides of the stairwell illuminate his legs?), and the frontal diffuse light on him and speculars on the shield don't fit with the illumination of the railings to me; on Puerto Rico day, you would expect the strong speculars on his shield to register similarly on the glasses and jewelry of the woman next to him (and also, the diffuse light on both appears to be falling from slightly different directions); Jumping out of FDNY truck, illumination again seems reversed, and though the left-hand door has a shadow, he doesn't; Meditating in the park, possibly just really strong strobe. Maybe there's just some really janky flash work combined with over-zealous post-processing going on here, but I feel that most of them can't be real. Well, he does at least pop out in every shot!

That said, I'm not sure I care if the images are bogus. Faking the imagery would be a kind of metatheater that could somehow seem appropriate here. At the very least, we're all going to be scrutinizing the image of a turbaned Captain America, and debating the authenticity of the image, feeling that on some level, whatever the ostensible manipulations, the image is in fact real, and hoping that others will perceive it as such.


The photos look unrealistic because the photographer used flash. They used something to diffuse the light, which makes it harder to recognize as flash, but the color temperature gives it away.


The second one looked artificial to me; the other two look realistic.

Honestly, my main dissonance is that he's so skinny.


> Honestly, my main dissonance is that he's so skinny.

Steve Rogers was skinny before he took the super soldier serum...which made him buff... So we are just missing a step here, but I think its a cool concept, since America is quite diverse.


I'm aware. But the gestalt of "Captain America" in my brain is a muscley dude wearing a flag.

I don't get (as) much dissonance from his lack of blonde-blue-eyedness; his skinniness is actually washing out any other dissonance I can perceive.


A full pipeline with fun work and great rates.

You might think about narrowing your question down a bit.


So the hardest part of freelancing for you is keeping the pipeline full? What do you currently do to keep it full?


offline networking, blogging, word of mouth = 90%


Pretty cool. Much easier to drive when going offroad doesn't slow you down. :D


hehe, that's true for now. xD

Thanks!


I don't know of anything like that, but could definitely see a market for it.

We do some of that in a consultancy masterclass I am part of, but nothing that organized.


So I've never been apart of a group of consultants, I usually just have personal connections that would fit well taking over the contract. I imagine this is commonly done with other consultants, but I'm not sure of the frequency.

Sometimes I just want to get rid of a client and it would be nice to find an exact fit than refer a friend who isn't totally qualified for the position.


> could definitely see a market for it

Yep me too, I'd definitely buy some of the contracts as work is tough to come by here in Scotland!


1. Pick a niche or industry you want to work with.

2. Get in touch with owners/managers in your chosen area.

3. Take them to lunch and discuss their business. Watch their face and when they show you a pain point, try to pinpoint the cause.

4. You should discover more than a few problems they would spend money to have solved if you talk to enough of them.

5. Follow up with an email thanking them for their time and mention again how you have been giving some thought to a particular pain point. Try to find an article, software package, etc that attempts to solve their pain point and send them the link.

6. Build a true MVP (should be embarrassing, yet offer value to them), and follow-up with an email. Tell them you have been thinking more about their problem and wrote up a quick dirty app that might help them. Offer to demo it for them. While demoing discuss how much their pain costs their business.

7. Iterate based on their collective feedback.

8. Based on the discussion about pain costs, come up with a value-based price for your solution.

9. Refine your MVP, follow-up with another demo. Sell them a subscription to your solution. It may still be rough, but you should be able to demonstrate value and savings compared to their pain costs. CLOSE THE DEAL.

10. Follow-up

11. Iterate

12. Follow-up

13. Iterate

14. Follow-up

15. Iterate

16...Rinse... Repeat.


Thanks, that looks like a good way to find a profitable startup idea. But here I'm just looking for a small side project idea, and I'd like to find it quickly. So taking random people to lunch seems a bit overkill.


Do it anyway.

You learn far far more about an industry talking to someone immersed in it than any other way.

If you just want to spend the next few weeks coding, there are any number of github projects. If you want a side project - trust me, it will run and run for months if not years.

Get your linkedin page up, and find an admin at a local hospital, a CEO at a local charity. Take them to lunch.

go.


If you actually read the story you would see that this happened in South Africa. USA may in fact be worse than Russia for gays, but your proof needs to be more thoroughly vetted.


I think a class like Noah Kagan's "How to make your first dollar" would be good for you.

There are problems all around us that need solved. Most people only want to solve the sexy problems, but find a niche that you know well and start doing interviews with people in the field. Talk to enough of them and you should discover a problem they will pay you to solve.


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