wow.
I usually have a lot to say, but today it’s mostly just wow.
And, thanks.
This is truly a great day for design lovers and for anyone who believes that it is possible for a company to go from zero to hero really quickly.
It’s humbling for us as a team.
1 year ago we were running a small…
Since I’m one guy on a laptop, my first goal is to not have to host or manage anything. While I don’t mind digging around launch scripts and hacking on an apache setup, I don’t think I’m going to revolutionize anything by doing so. As a matter of fact, I think I’ll do a pretty bad job of managing a single machine, much less a whole cluster of them. I was watching the y-combinator startup school the other day and heard James Lindenbaum, the founder of Heroku, giving a talk. After listening to the talk, I decided to check out the site.
My initial reaction is wow. Seriously. If they’ve pulled this off as well as it looks, it’s an obvious choice for me.
The first thing I love is the git push. I’m starting to use git for my personal repos (github saw to that) and being able to deploy to the server with a single command is pretty cool.
The second thing that’s great are the pluggins. Seriously well done. I started browsing packages and services that I didn’t even know existed. Within an hour of first going to the Heroku website, I had a “hello world” python application up and running with mongoDB (using the mongoHQ service). That’s pretty sweet. Of course Heroku is a cloud service, so scaling from a single web process to hundreds (or thousands) is just a question of cost. They handle all of the heavy lifting for making sure things are locked down, patched and up to date.
With a live application running in the cloud, mongo set up and even postgres an option, I’m off to the races. I just need to finalize the rest of my stack.
I’ve previously worked in trading and have long been fascinated by market dynamics. This interest has lead me to my business idea.
The problem with fixed pricing websites is that true price is anything but fixed. Sellers go through periods of needing cash over inventory, give volume discounts, and are willing to take losses on individual products for marketing purposes. All of the subtleties of the market are lost in a single price model. You just have to look at the landscape of auctions, penny auctions and groupons to realize that sellers are looking for better ways of pricing goods.
On a real exchange you can get all sorts of information about the market by looking at open orders. You can see how much interest there is, how much they’re willing to pay and how much sellers want for the item. You can also easily join the market at your own price by placing an order off the inside.
I think this model of bids and offers is a much better way to model prices and it would be very interesting to try to apply to e-commerce. Since most markets don’t inherently have an expiration, orders can sit around for as long as there’s interest in the item.
The seed of my idea is to enable pricing flexibility for everyday goods. I’d like to reduce the barrier to placing a bid on an item, and allow multiple sellers to join the market as well.
While my concept is still a bit rough around the edges, I’ve started talking to people about the idea and soliciting feedback. I think there’s huge potential in this space, as demonstrated by the success of so many e-commerce buy model variants.
I recently found myself in the great position of not having a full time job. The thrill of feeling like you can do anything with your life, and the terror of knowing you have nothing to do all at once. At first I took a couple of months to travel, of course. But now I’ve decided I wan’t to buckle down and build something. The only questions left are what and how! I’ve never been one for working for other people, and am certainly not risk averse, so the choice of doing my own start up is obvious.
I’m amazed at how far the startup community has come in just the last couple of years, and am fascinated by the idea of being able to bootstrap a company for almost no capital investment. The landscape couldn’t be better, we have accelerators, incubators and combinators, we also have cloud computing, distributed NoSQL databases and viral marketing tools. What I hope to do here is document the tools and process that I go through in order to launch my new venture.
But, where to begin?
