UPDATE: after discussing with several well-informed people who contacted me through this post, we've found that there's nothing I can do as an independent developer. The patent I have pending for World View Wallpaper primarily covers my unique time dilation algorithm (where the position of the sun is matched from the captured photos to your current time using location and season). Assuming Apple doesn't use that same algorithm, the idea of showing pictures based on time alone is considered common knowledge. Well, at least I can now say that I made something Apple deemed worth highlighting in their keynote! Now that they have the same idea running through their heads... maybe we can get them to listen to us and add live wallpaper capabilities to iOS so that World View Wallpaper can live on as an iOS app?

My name is Todd Medema, inventor of World View Wallpaper, a Window/Mac/Android/Chrome app I developed while in school back in 2012. The app uses photographs captured over 24 hours as a method of telling time.

Today at WWDC, Apple announced a new "Time Lapse" watch face for the Apple Watch.

At first look, they appear to be very similar. Which is surprising, since Apple rejected my iOS app several times, stating that the app "didn't provide enough value to users."

I was a college student who wanted to create something that would make peoples' lives just a little more beautiful. After receiving positive feedback on the idea, I poured hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars into building the apps and capturing the photographs.

Apple appears to have taken my idea without giving me any credit. In fact, Apple has a history of stealing ideas from apps that they reject.

Please share this story on social media in hopes that Apple may hear the voice of a small, independent developer who has been wronged. While I'm pleased to see that so many people will now be able to enjoy the idea I've worked so hard for, Apple's handling of this violates the spirit of innovation in this country. That's something worth fighting for.

http://toddmedema.com/blog/does-this-idea-look-familiar/

Basically rich ppl (investors) funding rich ppl (privileged founders).

And guys like me are left with nothing... And I know several founders in my situation lol. I even know a successful tech guy who agrees with me.

It's an inbred network and there's no new ideas, because it's the same ppl giving the same ppl fr

Lol bro and many privileged founders don't seem to want to help underprivileged overlooked founders......

We constantly analyze what VCs, founders and operators do/say to get successful. But we can often learn more from people/companies outside of our industry:

a) If we only consume the same information others do, we can only derive the same strategies/tactics

b) It's a lot of fun to analyze celebrities/non-startups as if they were startups!

I recently did this with none other than Taylor Swift lol.

Here's a few things I found:

1. Her team is tiny!
   Good startups often do a lot with little. Taylor only has like 10-20 full time team members. That's crazy when you think about how she brings in billions. Apparently her mom and brother are full time while her dad is only a consultant—must make for awkward dinner conversations lol

2. Shipping a lot
   In the startup world, a lot of companies are proud of how often they release. TS is super prolific too—many successful artists rest on their laurels and stop making new stuff, she keeps at it and works hard, releasing almost an album per year.
   A lot of artists get stuck and use "creative blocks" or overanalysis to wait forever before releasing anything. She seems much more like a startup—constantly shipping, whether it's perfect or not.

3. Not being afraid to "pivot"
   Taylor Swift has worked in a lot of different genres, the same way a startup starts with a small segment (like when Taylor Swift was a country singer as a teenager). Once they've won that, they move on to bigger segments.
   And what did T Swizzle do? She moved onto pop—a bigger market!

There are a few more lessons I found during my (way too long) research into the business of Taylor Swift. You can read the full thing here if you want (hope this is allowed).

Our team recently migrated from "pickcrew.com" to "crew.co". It was the short domain we wanted, and we were pretty stoked about it—especially since it cost us a bunch of money.

As it turns out, setting up the new domain isn't all violets and daisies. We ended up having to shelve out another $1,200 for Google Accounts, but that wasn't even the worst part.

As everyone who’s really lived will tell you: when you move a site, use a 301 redirect. Hell, I think I did my first 301 before I lost my virginity.

If though, unlike me, you didn’t spend your teenage Friday nights reading about html status codes, let me explain: When you type an address into a browser, the browser can get a bunch of different statuses back from the server.

• A 200 means, “hey bro, thanks for coming, here’s that page you wanted.”

• A 301 means, “uh, sorry bro, that page packed his shit and moved permanently.”

• A 302 means, “uh, sorry bro, that page is crashing at some chick’s house tonight.”

(Side note: yes, web servers really do talk like your college roommate.)

Both the 301 and 302 status bros know the forwarding address and so you can still get to the page you wanted. However, there is one very important difference:

A site’s Google search street cred (aka link juice) will carry forward through a 301, but it will not follow through a 302. (Maybe that aforementioned chick is Google’s ex.)

So when transferring a site to a new address, you have to use 301 redirects. Which we did when we forwarded pickcrew.com to crew.co.

However, what you might not realize (and what slipped past us unfortunately) is that a 302 can sneak into the middle of your proper, clean 301 redirect, ruining your delicious Google street cred.

If you're interested, I have some graphs showing how our domain switch impacted our traffic 👉here👈, as well as a bit more detail on what happened.

Tl;dr: Make sure you look into Google’s documents on switching domains and clearly understand the potential consequences of what you’re doing before you make the switch.

1. Reddit is a link sharing site.

2. Sharing links is what makes Reddit different/better and the key reason to come here vs other forums. You know, the competitive advantage...

3. Half the submissions have links anyway. Click, then click again is piss poor UX.

4. Knee jerk reactions (like banning types of questions) doesn't increase quality. It adds bureaucracy and workload for the admins. Sometimes the answer is less rules, not more.

5. Content quality has gone down since the switch to self posts only.

6. When all you can do is submit self posts, what kind of submissions do you think you'll get?

Fin.

Thoughts?

Hi, I know I'm late to this AI race
I'm building a prompt library, have some exciting features in mind but, just starting with a mvp now. I'm trying to build this mvp in 72 hours and launch it. Super excited to build this in public. Wish me luck!

I'll post updates soon!

Hi, everyone! Yesterday I wrote and posted a blog post about my entrepreneurial journey and a huge mistake I almost made. I thought you guy's might find it interesting/useful. Please check it out and let me know what you think!

I cut a few parts to make it readable. You can see the full post here.

In early November of 2013, I was sitting at my desk at one of the largest financial firms in the world thinking about the conversation I was about to have. I kept playing and replaying over and over again how I was going to tell my boss that my startup had just received a seed round of funding (if you can call $100k a seed round these days) and that I was putting in two weeks notice. I was 15 minutes away from taking the plunge and pursuing my dreams. Then I got a text:

Hey man, our angel just pulled out.

Crushed.

I sat at my desk for 20 minutes or so trying to understand my feelings. I was stunned that the deal I worked so hard to put together fell through, and I was horrified that I was 15 minutes away from quitting my job for a startup with $0 in the bank. I had an amazing role at a prestigious financial company, an amazing and supportive girlfriend (now fiancé), and a whole host of expenses to pay for. Not the least being an engagement ring for said fiancé. So what was I doing nearly throwing away the career and life I had worked so hard to obtain?

I deeply love entrepreneurship. I love the thought of building something that I have ownership of, and I love being in the trenches, fighting for traction with my cofounders.

That love, however, nearly betrayed me. Because I nearly dropped everything for an idea that not even I was sold on and a team that would eventually dissolve due to petty disputes. Looking back, I assumed we’d just figure it all out, but we never did. I was ready to jump before we had any validation. I was ready to jump before I validated whether the product would make any money (just because an angel gives you money, doesn’t mean you have a product that will sell). I wanted to jump before I validated whether or not I was truly passionate about the idea and was ready to spend the next five years of my life building. Most importantly, I wanted to jump before I validated whether myself and my family were personally ready to take this journey.

My love of entrepreneurship nearly drove me to make the same mistake I feel thousands of otherwise brilliant entrepreneurs are making. Quitting your day job before you truly have validation.

True Validation Always requires a credit card

My team spent months building a product we thought customers wanted. We conducted customer interviews, released surveys, and drove traffic to a landing page to validate our little SaaS App. We got people to sign up to a mailing list… so we must have a validated idea and product/market fit, right?

Wrong.

We released our product to our list of over 1,000 signups and received very little interest, and 100% churn from those who chose to sign-up. Still, we thought with a seed round of investment we could “figure it out.” So we took our business to some angel investors and somehow got a bite.

The problem with this plan, however, is we’d be burning investor money while we continued to attempt to pivot and find some traction. This means by the time we found any sort of traction, we’d likely need even more investment in order to scale. As a startup, you should be scaling with other people’s money, not trying to figure out what it is that you can build that people will want to buy. While you have a steady income from a day job, you need to HUSTLE to gain traction. For SaaS, that means sales because at the end of the day that’s the only thing that matters.

Our lack of customer validation through traction was a huge red flag, but not the only red flag.

Validate Your Own Passion

I like music. I listen to Spotify for a few hours a day while I work and while I’m at the gym, and I’ll attend a concert every now and then. I however have never met a concert promoter and I’m not even sure how the concert event industry works. Yet I was going to be the main co-founder of a company that sold an app in the concert venue space.

That wasn’t the real issue, however. The real problem is I didn’t want to learn anything about the concert venue industry. I didn’t want to learn about the industry because I didn’t have a passion for the space or the product. I was happy to rely on my team to have industry expertise, and I’d just learn what I needed to from them. Even worst than that, I was already thinking about an exit. Nevermind the naivety of even thinking we had a shot at a profitable exit at that point. How could I be starting a business that I couldn’t wait to exit because I didn’t like the industry it was in?

Looking back, I cringe at the excuses I would make in my head as to why I was even pursuing this idea. I wasn’t excited about the thought of coming home from my day job and working hours to build this business. I tried to be excited, but I never validated my passion for that product.

We’ve talked about product/founder fit in the past on the Nugget blog, and this was my first-hand lesson in how important it was If you aren’t willing and excited to work nights and weekends like a sleepless maniac to launch your startup, you haven’t validated your passion. If you don’t dream of working in your space for at least the next 20 years, then you haven’t validated your passion.

Want to build a million dollar business? You better have passion.

Check Your Personal Validation. Are You Really Ready?

The people closest to me have always been encouraging when talking about my entrepreneurial aspirations. However, when it’s time to quit your job, tones tend to change. Those that once were your biggest cheerleaders may turn into the one’s questioning you the most. You can’t just lump them all into the “They just don’t get it” category because most of them are truly concerned with your future.

I have a supportive family and a wonderful fiance that I thought would be 100% onboard with the idea of giving up the huge raise, signing bonus, and benefits that I spent $100k and four years in school getting. Unsurprisingly, they were less than enthusiastic. It probably didn’t help that I only had about four months of personal runway to live off of, and as stated above, clearly no passion for the space.

It’s critical to have a support system around you when you are making such a drastic decision, emotionally and financially. You don’t want to be worried about where your next meal ticket will be coming from while you’re trying to build a unicorn, and you’re going to need someone to vent to when another growth project goes up in flames. So make sure that you are financially ready to pursue your dream. Have an exit strategy that includes going back to a paying job, and please, embrace your family, don’t push them away. You’ll need them to pick you up when you fall.

How do you know?

Read actionable steps here

Hey y'all.

The AI cold calling startup I've been working on for 3-4 months now just got a $2,500 angel investment, and we have 2 current customers, a credit card processing broker and a hospital equipment rental company based out of Texas. We have around $1,500 revenue so far, but we're having lots of trouble fulfilling the contracts because our tech just isn't "there" yet.

I'm the Chief Tech Officer, and I'm also running some operations. The other main person in this is the CEO who has a strong sales background and came up with the idea. I've been working purely remotely, and it's great having some income because I'm stuck at home because I'm disabled, basically...

We're using 11labs, openai, google speech to text, and a sh*tty online dialer right now to run the first MVP which runs locally on our "botrunners" computers, and we're developing a web app with django python + javascript react.

Our plan is, after we get the webapp working better, to hire more botrunners for $3 per hour from countries like Phillipines and India, and we're going to try to track all the actions the botrunners take to be able to train the AI to run it fully automated.

The biggest problem we're facing right now with the tech is reducing latency, it started at 27 seconds to get a response and I've been able to get it down to 6 seconds, but people are still hanging up. We're trying several ways to mitigate this, including having pre-rendered speech playing something like "Okay" or "As an artificial representative, I'm still learning to be quicker on the pickup. We appreciate your patience."

One of the industries we want to target is international web development and digital marketing companies, and we want to use the bot to cold-call businesses to pitch them our services.

The goal is to replace $30 an hour cold-callers from the USA with $3 per hour total-cost automation. Apparently the CEO was given a $5 million valuation from the strength of the MVP from a VC. Our investment so far was at a $300k valuation tho. It's exciting.

Trying to get Twilio working to be able to make calls programmatically instead of using our hacky workaround.

Let me know if you have any questions.

I just wanted to share this awesome news!

Let's be real. Big Tech can pay a $100k/year fee for an engineer without even noticing. It's a rounding error for them.

For a startup, it's a death sentence. It makes hiring the best global talent impossible.

This isn't an immigration policy, it's a massive gift to the giants, giving them a government-enforced moat to monopolize talent. It's designed to make sure the next Google can never be built.

Am I missing something here?

This is a story about how I pitched my startup at Harvard and other universities by using roundabout techniques. All of this is relevant to how you can get your startup in front of the eyes of a wider audience and mistakes I learned so others can replicate the positive and avoid the negative. I hope that you can learn from the principles I used here and apply them to your own business so that you can get in front of audiences you never thought possible.

Roughly 3 years ago I was invited to speak at Harvard Business School, Cornell, Upenn Wharton School of Business and Rutgers university despite having 0 experience, 0 credibility, and knowing 0 people there.

How did I do it?

It was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be.

In a nutshell my business was as follows - Find top talent from top US universities and convince them to work with startups in India and SE Asia that needed their expertise.

My strategy was to get access to their Listserv so I could send blast emails to students in hopes that this would drive traffic to the website, which would then get people to send me their resume.

I quickly got access to the listserv but my email blasts didn’t deliver any meaningful results. Every experiment I ran was a dud. Complete flop. I think my first 3 email blasts got around 5 replies.

I had to try something new.

I discovered that most universities have a job board, so I began asking career services departments if I could post my job descriptions there. They complied. 💪

Then one day when speaking to someone from the Career Services Department at Harvard Business School, he asked me if I would be interested in speaking to student groups directly.

Within a week I had three student groups collaborating together to put me in front of an audience. Within a month I had the speaking opportunity arranged and I had 0 responsibility to promote or do any marketing. They did it all for me.

Once I saw that this worked with HBS, one of the best universities in the world, I was convinced I could make it happen at other universities I was already in contact with.

The gears started churning and I went back to work. I began re-initiating conversations with every university I had previously connected with.

By the time I went home for Thanksgiving in November I had lined up additional speaking opportunities at Cornell, Rutgers School of Social work, and Wharton School of Business.

At each university I had an audience of around +/- 30 students. Cornell was the biggest hands down with around 50 or so. I received a positive response and was able to collect resumes from about ⅓ of the total attendees, and many reached out to me months later once they were interested in working abroad.

Did I end up converting anyone specifically from these pitches? I’ll admit, no I did not.

Did I get paid for any of these opportunities? No, I did not.

But to be honest….who cares!?!? If you get an opportunity to be able to say that you spoke at any of these universities you jump at it — and then it stays on your resume for the rest of your life!

The next year I was invited back to all of the universities to speak AGAIN. Of course I did.

So what can we learn from all of this? How can you apply this into your own life?

It’s a lot easier than you think to get in front of an audience of the top students in the world. If you have a product or idea and some minimal success or an interesting story, chances are you can convince someone to let you speak there.

Go after student groups — Student groups have the authority to do whatever they want. They have huge email lists, can get you in front of 100’s of students, and are more or less in your age range so they are much easier to talk with and relate to.

Flexibility in your pitch — Don’t come in with a rigid idea of what you want to talk about. Ask questions to discover what would be most interesting to them. Cater your pitch to the student group/person you’re speaking with.

Belief in yourself is everything – People only know who you are up until the point that they know otherwise. IF you can inspire a person over the phone, you can inspire an audience. Use this to get yourself into places again for the future 😉

Now go out there and line up some speaking opportunities for yourself!!!!

There seems to be some confusion about what an MBA contributes to your product...

http://i.imgur.com/RWauJOK.jpg

Happy to answer whatever questions you might have on how to run a successful startup like:

1. When to go after your first VC funding (pre or post $1k)

2. How to reinvest your profits from your first $1k and turn it into your second $1k (i.e. $2k total)

3. How to hire local or remote developers to engineer your application for $1k

4. How to decide what you want to comprise your team (e.g Should you hire three developers, a social media marketer and sales guy or 3 sales guys and 2 developers) and how to pay all their salaries with your $1k of revenues.

5. Should you release a series B once you make it to the $1k threshold

6. and so on

A lot of times some of a business greatest challenges are in their first $1k. I know Bill Gates said that Microsoft's first $1k was what he felt to be Microsoft's greatest legacy.

Anyway ask away!

I know a friend who hit their seed milestone and treated cash like a limitless fountain.

Pretty soon they’d onboarded way too many tools and signed up for fancy services nobody used.

Then one afternoon they noticed a sudden spike in their cloud bill. A couple of tiny charges for obscure API calls. An extra invoice for a monitoring service they’d forgotten to cancel. None of it seemed urgent, until runway vanished overnight.

They sat down and built a rolling 13-week cash forecast. Every Friday they’d update actuals versus projections and flag any line that crept over budget. They set up granular alerts on key accounts like hosting, data pipelines, contract workers, so they’d know the instant something jolted costs.

They also started quarterly vendor reviews. No more “set it and forget it.” Every tool, every subscription got a quick ROI score: are we using it 80 percent of the time? Could we switch to an open-source alternative? Would a smaller plan suffice? It only took an hour, but it saved thousands.

On the hiring side they introduced a trial contractor period. Before bringing someone on full-time, they’d work on a specific deliverable for a month. If it didn’t pan out, they shut it off without paying a long-term salary. That one change dropped hiring mistakes by half.

Cash leaks are sneaky. A small over-provisioned database here. A vanity metric dashboard there. Tighten one valve and another opens. The antidote is simple habits: weekly check-ins, ruthless vendor audits, contract trial runs. Do it now and you’ll thank yourself when you’re racing toward product-market fit rather than out of runway.

This is a rant.. It's been 7 months now that I've been trying through LinkedIn, naukri, Glassdoor and there's absolutely no luck. I recently graduated in 2024 with degree in BE in Artificial intelligence and Data Science with 9.2 cgpa. I was so motivated in the beginning to find job and navigate smoothly in my career .But now the patience, the motivation is just gone. The applications are rarely even viewed these days, I don't even get rejection mails at this point. I somehow even settled for lower paying jobs and roles that are irrelevant as per my education..but still no luck. I just feel as if I'm being a burden to my family at this point doing nothing, contributing nothing. The worst part is I've always liked to be productive and now I'm just doing the opposite. If anyone has any other options through which they have gotten their dream job pls help..

We never raised any corporate funding. Had raised crowdfunding of USD 1430 after 3 years. And finally, after many attempts, signup up a customer to advertise with our initiative, for a nominal charge of USD 5. These are very humble beginnings.

Would love to hear about others. If you need to check more details, check our profile.

It's clear that Facebook are in the mood for acquisitions currently, so we thought we would give it a punt. http://stupidstuffido.co.uk/weve-just-tried-to-sell-our-website-to-facebook-for-2-billion/

Ask me any questions about our valuation and I am certain my answer will not hold water at all.

We recently launched Meequity (www.meequity.co) a company that is paying the full tuition of select graduate students in exchange for a small percentage (less than 5%) of their future earning. We started the company because we have had way too many friends go to business and law schools and then feel pressured to take jobs they didn’t want in order to pay off their debt.

By graduating with no debt, you can

1. Pursue the career you want

2. Start saving money much earlier. These savings compound and mean purchases like buying a house become affordable much earlier in graduates careers

We recently launched and are part way through selecting our first 100 students. If you want to learn more or be considered, you can sign up at www.meequity.co

We would also be interested in any feedback or questions you have or help or ideas about how to spread the word to top law, business, and medical schools.

(We have applications from students from many of the top 20 business and law schools but want to be able to help as many students as possible).

RANT: the problem with startup companies and startup culture is this: they are too focused on building and making things and not actually selling things.

the whole VC funding/investment culture lets them indulge in this stupidity and leads to 'zombie startup' syndrome - companies who exist but don't actually do anything - forever 'starting up'.

there is no such thing as a 'startup' company. either you have an idea people are willing to pay for - now, or you are indulging in wishful thinking.

when i set up my first business it cost $200 to set up and made a $2000 profit in the first month. because i sold before i built. i didn't need a business plan because i already had people lined up ready to buy. selling comes before making.

the tech startup industry with VCs investing stupid money in stupid go nowhere businesses is such an obvious bubble waiting to burst.

Learn from former Facebook growth team member Andy Johns (now at Wealthfront) on the keys to growing massive consumer products: http://www.growtheverywhere.com/andy-johns/

A big part of my start up is to combat the use of AI in the entertainment industry. Because of this, I have a pretty strong stance of completely staying away from AI. This seems to be completely impossible with so many developers, engineers, and designers involved in the use of AI. Is this a moral hill I should not be willing to die on?

Felt like sharing here - just closed out $1million worth of raising.

Started in January. Raised $500k by Feb. spent the last few months building.

Turned down one investment- I don’t like the terms. I know what I have, wasn’t desperate.

Had target list of VCs - 5 of them. I sent them a message on LinkedIn every month - gave them a quick read.

Friday one responded.
I submitted info Monday.
Filled a data room with diligence docs Tuesday.
Offered today, my terms. $500k.

4 calls. 4 offers. Accepted 3.

Structure your shit right.
Be confident.
Answer fast.

We posture like a Series B and we are 4 months old. I feel it was a big reason for such a solid raise.

Who’s next?!

As a founder over 30, I really enjoyed this post. http://startupsanonymous.com/story/founder-salaries-get-off-your-high-horse-young-founder/

Only few weeks ago I was wondering if there's any downside to incorporating in the states. Now the thinking has completely reversed..

The way things are going in the states currently... I mean the political stuffs.. Everyone has been reading the news since the change of the guard. Wasn't great earlier either but...

I'm now looking to keep my business in Europe. Paying more taxes, working with less capital.. everything seems like workable in long term as long as the government do not make a mockery of human rights laws.

Which EU country would be the best to setup new business? In terms of the following:

local government funding support, investors, accelerators, employees with startup mindset, and tax benefits for startups

Please share your knowledge so that other founders can also look to move to Europe. Just a few things done right, entrepreneurs can thrive and grow business here

From what I've learned so far, Ireland and Portugal seem like very good options. But I want to know more details from entrepreneurs based in different EU countries.. also UK.