I disagree. The biggest issue is that the (mindless) use of these apps subconsciously erodes the value people put on privacy. Dunno where but I saw a talk on combining twitter and foursquare activity to create profiles and it was pretty ****ing scarry stuff.

2014 will def. be the resurrection of paranoid me (which is why I brought an aluminum hat to our new years party).

I had to pretty much make all new hangout friends when I switched from waiting tables to a 9-5. So it might be a little more than just people who are new to the city.

Do venues pay for meetups from meetup.com? Also this sounds like you need a team of salespeople. I was thinking more along the lines of OP just wanting to make an app with very low overhead to see if it gets some traction.

The behavioral matching can be solved short term just by having people select things things they like from a list and then giving recos that match the list. If you say "sports" you get matched with a rock climbing place, etc. You can also just give people a list of everything if all else fails and they can choose things they want to do and you match them to people who selected the same things from the list.

Sort of tangentially related - I once heard the CEO of a running company (Run Keeper, maybe?) talking about how he knew he wanted to start a business but couldn't figure out an idea. He kept trying to figure out what he was passionate about and would go for long runs while trying to figure out what his company would do and it wasn't until months of doing this that he realized running is what he was passionate about and that that's what his company should be about.

Nchabazam, it sounds a bit like you're in the same predicament. You want to build some sort of MVP that has some chance of becoming a business but you don't really know what that is. What are some of the problems that you actually wish were solved?

Meetup.com is run kind of like a non-profit and individual meetup owners can do whatever they want so I'm guessing no. You're definitely right about a low overhead app - I was mostly warning against programming automation of activity selection or an elaborate attempt to design and implement a UI to allow the user to choose activities/venues.

I think this has to be done manually at first - you have to look at the data before you can design a sensible algorithm, but you don't have the data until you have users. Designing a minimal set of profile questions can be hard though. Luckily, this kind of app doesn't have to give an immediate feedback - you can stare at the data and manually match people and no one will know you're the backend. Or, if you really want to write the algorithm, have it run things by you first and filter out obviously ridiculous matches before they go live. Your first few real users can be super important, so recruit carefully and treat them well.

I like this story.

I also don't think it is a good idea to sit around and think of ideas. Just create something and see where it goes. Creating does not mean that you are marketing and promoting it: it just means that the idea is out of your brain and not interfering anymore.

It's basically the same as writing. You can think, but your brain is too non-linear to make sense of intangibles, so putting things into words makes things more concrete.

There is no such thing as an overnight success story. Just about every success story I've read or heard of is 99% failure, 1% getting it right. Going through a bunch of stupid ideas and seeing them vaporize is part of the training.

Yea, agreed with all of this. I was thinking he might not want to do it manually and take the time to build something simple up front.

This might work but I think it's dangerous line of thinking for a new entrepreneur, especially for a developer/technical founder. Developers are very good at building stuff they find cool but will never be viable businesses. That's what open source and hobby projects are for.

You can build very viable businesses around open source.

If someone is passionate about something and good at building stuff - figuring out a viable business will almost always come.

Thinking about how something is a viable business (which is different than figuring out a problem you're solving and who is interested in that problem) can be a major mistake if done too early. And realistically if you're solving a real problem for a non-trivial size group of people there will be lots of ways to make money off of it.

Edit: I should add that for any technical based startup I'd be more likely to invest if the CEO had a technical background than if they had an MBA/business type degree - even if they also had a CTO partner.

Almost the entirety of my current company is open source.

jjshabado, dont agree at all with your CEO thought.

I wouldn't let the lack of repeatability between "already matched" people stop you. That seems too long term.

There's over 300 million people in the US. 1% of that is 3 million. If you had those people paying you per month for a few months until everyone had a couple of matches and decided to stop using the service you would still make 3 million * $10/whatever * a few months.

3 million users is a lot but we're also talking ~100m+ here. You don't need that much money for your idea to be good.

I should be clear that this is an "everything being equal" type statement. So things like people skills, smarts, knowledge of basic business practices (like agile startup principles), etc. are all roughly equivalent.

But the thing is most startups don't need deep business knowledge. And if you have a CEO that actually understands how their product is being built and can give real input/direction to back up decisions the CTO is making than that's really valuable early on. And even better a CEO technical founder that was involved in some of the initial development will have really valuable insight into their product.

So to be clear, my little idea about the kind of activity based app is not just because I want to build something, but because it's something I would use that currently doesn't exist.

I'm building a game right now, and do enjoy working on open source projects... but I also don't really need a 9-5 income at the moment and am much more interested in building my own compan(y)ies than working for someone else. I'm just kind of looking for an idea of something to build or prototype in the next couple weeks because I have access to an amazing designer until the end of January, which is so much of what makes a site/app worth using.

I've tried to do some networking recently, and suggested splitting equity with someone to try and build an MVP for an interesting idea (non-tech people), and they have often scoffed at the idea of splitting it 50/50, even if they'd do nothing for a bit.

I'm going to try and meet a lot of interesting people in the new year, and make some interesting business connections to hopefully find some projects to work on/finance in the early stage. Mainly, it's just good to make connections and see what comes of it. I'm not really in a rush to do anything besides my free access to a designer.

My main long term goal is to use my technical skills to help out early stage companies by vetting technical cofounders, and getting involved on an angel investment scale of $5-30k per company. No rush, but it's where I want to be in a few years. If this means coding just a couple hours a day, or occasionally grinding with one of my companies, or just doing open source/pet projects, that all sounds better than 70 hours a week in code in some sprint for someone else. Coding is very interesting to me for about 4-5 hours a day, then becomes torturous.

successfulsoftware.net/2013/03/11/the-1-percent-fallacy/

Is this true of all coding, including your game and open-source and whatever or just the stuff you do for other people?

Yeah, 1% is kind of unrealistic but that's why I threw in the last sentence. You only need a few hundred people for it to be worth doing IMO.

Let's say you had 500 people at $10 per month. You could live like a king on $5,000/month in a lot of places, especially with something like this where it's 1 or 2 people doing everything.

strongly disagree with this

I'm hoping someone can answer this within the next few hours...

Anyone have experience with Google App Engine? I have an app developed, deployed and running on the Google App website. Locally I fixed a couple of bugs and want to redeploy my app, but I have a lot of data in the datastore already that I don't want to lose. Will redeploying wipe out the existing stored data? I don't think it will, but I can't find a clear answer and don't want to take the chance.

I don't really have time for a full explanation, but this is not a solid plan or outlook.

So do I.

I feel the same way, but that's probably because I only code after working. This is part of the reason I don't work as a programmer full time and generally look for things that wouldn't require me to be.

Confirmed datastore remains intact.

I mean if I'm really into a project I can often do it for a long time. I do better with new projects, as they're novel... but after something becomes old I get bored with it pretty quickly, and really don't want to stare at it. This is why I want to move into a role where I can start assisting on multiple projects/investing in them. The financial payoff of making $100k at one company is not super interesting to me. I'd rather make less money per year with the chance at scoring a big payday.

I also code really hard, so 4-5 hours a day is 4-5 hours with no breaks. I tend to be super productive, which is why I don't want to do it for more than 4-5 hours a day. I equate that to about a full 8 hour job at an office where there's plenty of time spent messing around.