Hot answers tagged webapp
18
Stop. This kind of thing just turns into a religious war. Why? Because there are millions of pros and cons on both sides, and you can argue and worry about the pros and cons for the rest of your life, and it won't make on iota of difference to the success of your business.
Flip a coin, pick one, and get on with building your business. You'll probably regret ...
12
Jeff, I don't mean to be ill mannered, but you're clearly not a technology guy. "Cheap" and "scale easily" don't go together in the same sentence.
There is no way to answer your question. You're not providing a level of detail even nearly close enough to make a solid architecture choice. And even if you did, the most important factor are the people ...
12
This is the same as with any product
Think of some... laundry washing... liquid... selling... product... mobile phone... Something! Or think of a car!
How many with seemingly same properties are there?
Lots!
And do they sell?
Hell yeah! Most of them do.
How come?
They either target different customers with different income, age etc. Some may be selling ...
11
Good answers in the thread already. I just want to add one element: If you just 'throw it over the wall' and into the realm of open source, then it will almost 100% certainly fail completely as an open source project. Open-sourcing and then running away is the same as killing the project outright.
There are way more open source projects than there are ...
11
The PDF requires login information, so I couldn't look at it.
But I think you've made a lot of the same mistakes I have as a bespoke developer:
Neither party has worked in this kind of relationship before. So neither of you can say, "this is how things are normally done". In such cases, miscommunications and misunderstandings are to be expected.
You've ...
8
Flippa is the most popular. It's a marketplace for selling websites. What you could do to maximize the sell price, is to run it for a while and demonstrate that it generates money (if it's that kind of a website). There are people looking to buy small but profitable business.
If you google for website marketplace, you'll find a lot more. Flippa is the one ...
7
This is an interesting question. It's hard to know the right answer for you without more details about your product, however I'm inclined to say you shouldn't open source your project. I only say this because the reasons you want to open source your app aren't realistic:
I like the idea of open source collaboration and making our code for our application ...
7
In most cases you would charge the employers a fee for listing their job openings, or for searching resumes and CVs. (See Monster.com, HotJobs, careers.stackoverflow.com, etc.) Most companies who place job listings are used to having to pay for them, especially in cases where the job seeker has special skills or is hard to find.
You might also consider ...
7
You are probably facing the same problem the wast majority of us do.
Having ideas is easy. Making them come true is hard.
What you really need to do is simple (well, not really...)
Focus on ONE project (this means you have to actually make a commitment and prioritize ONE project over all others - probably including projects related to other areas of ...
7
Yes, it is possible. If it is difficult depends on the work others have done. IF it is code and follows the "Clean Code" principles aswell as using standard frameworks then it should easy to take over the code.
If the previous programmers did not respect general coding conventions or use exotic frameworks, it might become difficult.
Personally I would ...
6
One big disadvantage is if you make your source code public under an open/free software license, you will be very unlikely to ever make money from it. Don't listen to the open source zealots who naively reference a couple of open source projects that made some money. I've been there and done it, it doesn't work for 99.99% of projects.
6
I wouldn't completely agree that open-sourcing stops you generating product revenue, as you could dual-license your product - say GPL and commercial, that way people can get to it who might never had paid for it anyway, but for firms that need to buy a formally supported product there is always the commercial offering. See this article by Michael Widenius, ...
6
Most entrepreneurs are nervous asking market value for their product. Almost every entrepreneur would do better charging more than they are charging.
In this particular business, if you're correct that similar products sell for $20,000, that's probably because there's a fairly limited audience for this kind of thing, and it's likely to be the kind of ...
6
They should not be allowed to downgrade until they drop the manager and clientele counts to the silver level.
If you were to enforce this, by dropping say the most recent managers (or least recent or even random managers) then the customer would have a right to complain. "Hey, you dropped my favorite one."
By prohibiting the downgrade, and instead popping ...
5
I think the part where you said not wanting to expose your site features to your competitor, is invalid - your competitor can easily pretend to be a customer, wolf hiding in sheep's clothing.
I think as a startup, you should not be afraid of your competitor, and don't go eye an eye with them - price, feature. It doesn't mean they are cheap then you should ...
5
What the general strategy tends to be is to offer a free version of the application for testing, and to build traction with your users, and then come out with a paid version once you have a significant user base. A portion of your existing user base will convert to the paid version, netting you income, and you wont piss of the rest of your customers.
...
5
The revenue streams that immediately spring to mind are:
Sell your own service (perhaps a premium level?)
Sell other people's stuff to people (affiliate marketing)
Sell eyeballs to other people (advertising space)
Sell good feelings to people (donation button)
Sell your soul (paid reviews for merchandise)
Sell good feelings to other companies (sponsorship)
...
5
good hosting and million of impressions cost money.
development (programming costs) If you want top developers x number of developers.
marketing - making a web product known by a lot of people cost a lot of marketing efforts.
rent, infrastructure, lawyers, etc...
5
For many eBusinesses, like Facebook for example, large sums of money are being put into the founders pockets.
Seriously a business is not valued simply on costs; many times a potential investor can see value in a business that is a lot more than simply what it cost to put together.
Suppose you spent a year building a web business and it attracted a million ...
5
The simple answer is no.
Grad school starts in August. They will want half the tuition then. So you need to build a complete business and generate $10k - $15K by August. That's basically 4 months from today.
You have no businesss experience. That means you aren't even aware of all the tasks you must accomplish in the next four months to make your product ...
5
I've worked on projects where there was an existing codebase - and sometimes I had to start over from scratch, but usually not. If possible, I prefer to use the existing codebase unless there is a really good reason not to.
A competent programmer, or team of programmers, should be able to inherit code and build on it. This should be the preferred approach, ...
5
I am thinking of a PaaS business, where the customers can work on their application that uses the framework
The problem with that is your customers would evaluate you on uptime track record, scalability, and vendor lock in risks. You'd need to handle all the concerns of a true PaaS platform like Amazon EC2 or Google App Engine. You could outsource some ...
4
In the United States and many other places, a copyright is automatically granted to the author of original work. Trademarks and patents need registration.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_copyright_law#Registration_of_copyright
Registration of copyright refers to
the act of registering the work with
the United States Copyright Office,
which ...
4
I would suggesting using a site like Stumbleupon.com. You can allocate a daily budget that will allow you to reach as many users as your budget allows. The users on the site also "stumble" based on the topics they are interested in. This will allow you to reach your target demographic in an efficient and cost effective manner.
4
I think the reason you don't know where to start is because you have this idea and you are planning to conquer all platforms in one fell swoop (which is daunting). My suggestion is to build the website yourself and then go from there. If you are low on funds, you aren't going to get many quality programmers to build the apps/site for you, which is really ...
4
To add to the excellent answers above:
finding that you have competition is an amazing thing when you think about it in the right way. It means your market is real enough, that other people are excited about it to. You can even use your competition as a form of social proof to investors, the fact that you have competition validates your idea, and your market ...
4
A lot depends on the type of customer (business or consumer) and cost of the service.
As a general rule the more ways you can engage your customers or prospective customers the better but the actual cost of the number is minimal compared to the cost of the time answering the calls that will come in.
If you can't afford to field the phone calls then ...
4
You will have a very hard time reaching critical mass through subscriptions, unless your product is a cure for cancer.
Real world numbers are a lot worse than your calculations. Based on Mailchimp newsletter statistics, 30% is the group that will at least open your beta invite email. Others won't even do that. Typically not more than 40% out of that 30% are ...
4
I don't think it's either unethical nor unreasonable to consider option 3 or a mix of some your other ones. This is just my opinion, it would be good to see what other people think, but I actually believe developing something for a client and then reusing the code for new projects can benefits both your client and your company.
It's quite frequent in ...
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