March 2010
21 posts
FourSquare: We are all developers.
I have been thinking about the FourSquare platform a lot recently. I think that’s partially because of the work I did last weekend at Twilio HQ, their publicity at SXSW and also because of their 1 year anniversary.
They’ve made a huge amount of progress in 1 year. The number of users and venues has exploded. It’s got a brilliant API that’s RESTful and they have OAuth...
Quitting my job. Kinda.
This post has been a long time coming. And here it is.
I’ve been struggling with a cluster dilemmas for weeks/months now and I’ve finally resolved part of it but it has not been an easy. The stress of it all has really taken a toll on my sleep patterns and my attitude / patience with others.
There were 3 major issues facing me. This is the first of them.
I’ve been very...
Watcha young woman was taken off our plane in a wheelchair after our plane returned to the gate. I hope she’s ok!
3 tags
OtherNum Loves Chirbit
Image via CrunchBase
One of the great things about attending startup community events is that you run into other entrepreneurs and you think of ideas to mash your technology together to create something new and different.
That’s where the mashup of OtherNum and Chirbit came from.
I met Ivan Reyes, founder of Chirbit, at StartupRiot in February and again at StartupAtlanta in March. We...
Toyota Guy == Balloon Boy's Future
This guy is a total sham. What kinds of sad, twisted childhood must this guy have had? How desperate and lonely do you have to be to pull a stunt like this?
Phone Number Removal!
Finally switched on a feature that let’s users de-provision phone numbers themselves. Now you have total control over phone numbers in OtherNumber.
Who owns your brain?
Image by gurdonark via Flickr
Does the company you work for automatically own everything you create, just because you work for them? What if you thought of it at night and you didn’t use any company resources to develop it? Can they just claim ownership of it?
This is all purely hypothetical.
Right.
7 tags
At A Crossroads
Image via CrunchBase
I sat down tonight to renew my hosting contract for OtherNumber with A Small Orange and I realized that it had been 1 year since I first got started.
I started originally with a concept I called SayHQ (pronounced Saitsh Queue) and it was going to be a collection of relatively trivial solutions for stupid things like automated reminders and such using the Twilio API.
...
5 tags
A Story of Two Products
Imagine your an investor and you are evaluating two possible products to invest in.
Product A
You’re a real estate agent and you have 20 homes on the market. With Product A You can assign a seperate number to each house. People driving past the house can call the number on the sign to get more information about the house by pressing 1. They can subscribe to SMS updates about open houses...
3 tags
I just want to CRUSH IT SO HARD.
So being an entrepreneur with a day job didn’t sound hard before I started doing it.
I work full time doing software engineering at a huge company. I come home and eat dinner with the wife and kids, help bathe them, shape their young and impressionable minds and put them to bed spend a few minutes doing chores and talking to my wife then get back on the computer and work on my startup. I...
bijan sabet: Scale first, monetize second →
This seems mutually exclusive of the LeanStartup “start charging for your service immediately” camp.
With every (venture backed) consumer web startup there is always the question of when to start thinking about monetization.
If the monthly burn is modest, I usually suggest that startups focus on reaching scale first.
It’s not because I don’t care about revenue or because I embrace...
Are Entrepreneurs the Source of Economic Crises?
This should be a lively topic for discussion around ATDC… :)
Entrepreneurship is often depicted as the solution to society’s problems, the sure path to higher economic growth for nations. Countless journal articles and books have glorified entrepreneurs, turning the Gateses and Zuckerbergs of the world into celebrities and icons. In this concert of praises, casting a critical eye onto...
Of course they distance themselves NOW. Why not... →
Pitch Perfection
UPDATE: Like my pitch, this blog post has iterated due to feedback.
I’ve had the great fortune of being able to pitch my company OtherNumber in front of large audiences three times in the past 3 weeks. First there was Startup Riot, then Startup Atlanta #OnStage and then there was This Week in Startups with Jason Calacanis.
It was, in a word, fantastic.
I was not a stranger to public...
bijan sabet: Startup Adolescence →
In the earliest days of a startup, the assignment for the company is straightforward. Most, if not all, of the resources of the company are devoted to building the product and getting traction with early users.
In a world of constrained resources and limited funding, the focus is clear, decisions…
I’ve seen this happen. It’s especially hard if some of your key...