Hi Guys, Flutterbud is my experiment while I was learning swift. The app lets you record videos and share with your friends at a scheduled showtime. The recipients cannot view the video before the showtime. I created the app using parse-server, S3, Heroku. Let me know if you have any questions.
Yunha, Great App! I have been using it every morning for more than a month now. I have explored Calm, Headspace, etc but I have finally settled upon Simple Habit. Easy to understand UX and great gamification.
I launched 2 websites before my current startup.
1. Drawmics.com. It was about social comic creation. It failed because I couldn't find enough creative people to post comic on the website nor could I get them to create comic on it. There was no organic traffic and people wouldn't share the comic. Didn't know how to sell.
2. Findero.us. It was location based QnA iPhone app. People could post questions defined by radius of city/state/country. Failed because I sucked at user-acquisition strategies.
Now that I am on my third start-up I could see what different things I could have done with my previous 2.
1. Build a product that solves a problem, however small, for a big audience. This means that you have to work on your product until you find that problem. If there is none, it will not work. I remember I read something about finding questions before finding answers. Questions are more important than finding answers.
2. Once you know you have the solution, go aggressive with user-acquisition and then fine-tune the product. People will complain about missing features, but you want scale before you go for product enhancements if you are solving a real problem.
I would be interested in knowing about what it includes and does not include. If it seems interesting, we may be interested in it. We are venture funded start-up.
I usually open up my Audible app and listen to books that are totally outside my field of work. Great way to make your brain think outside your domain.
For me, the acquisition is a failure on all levels. Failure to execute, failure in reaching beyond one's capacity to take the startup higher, failure in self-belief. Even though one may have earned money after an acquisition, the real aim of a startup is to change the world and not to get acquired and die.
But failure doesn't come cheap. For you to fail, you will need to put your heart and soul into the startup to succeed. And as spotman says "build something you believe in, that solves a real problem, and gain real traction", he didn't add that once you start getting offers for acquisition, stop believing in your idea and get lured by the offer and the riches.
I personally believe in one learning from "The hard thing about hard things" book by Ben Horowitz, is that you should sell your startup when you have reached your max capability to take the startup to the next level.
@xackpot I totally agree to what you are saying, but what I'm trying to figure out how to build startup/products that could be interesting for some big companies in order to get cash fast and build more bigger and more important startup / products. I'm a cofounder of software service company that I has been running for about 3 years now successfully, but the point of stable/ enough cash flow still a problem
> the real aim of a startup is to change the world
Honestly, not everyone is trying to change the world. The real world is full of businesses that provide a good living for their owners and their employees.
You can read books and articles about startups all you want, but those books aren't going to make choices for you. You have decide what is right for you and your business.
The real aim of a startup is to change the world either in the smallest, unnoticeable way or at perceptibly larger way. When you do a startup, you want to address a problem and change the world by solving that problem. If you don't want to change the world, what is your startup trying to achieve?
Btw, nobody reads books because they make choices for you, or teach you how to make choices. In fact, books don't teach anything if you are not ready to learn.
I don't care about 2014. My long term plan is to continue caring and loving my family and go IPO with my startup. One of the things gonna be tough but who wants an easy life?
Yeah, google comes to the rescue more often than not, but I also believe that such code that we put in leads to hacks which may bloat up as messy in the grand scheme of design/structure. For me a good code is something that has proper structure, good mechanism for communication between related modules and maybe, free from hacks :)
