Over the past six months, I’ve lived and breathed the startup life, working full-time as lead designer/frontend engineer for a pre-Series-A startup in Silicon Valley. I’m back on the East Coast now tending to some family issues, but I wanted to take some time to reflect on what I’ve learned over the past few months.
And we’re back! First off, apologies for the dry spell in new blog posts over the past 3 months – I’ve been incredibly busy with a new job, moving to the Bay area, family/personal issues and a buildup of client work (all at once!). Thankfully things have settled down quite a bit and I should have some time each week to dedicate to DevGrow and my other pet projects.
So it turns out you guys really like Notepad++. It was the clear leader of our last poll, with over 31% of the total votes. What surprised me, however, was that Dreamweaver was second in popularity, followed by Eclipse.
One of the most important characteristics you’ll find in successful individuals (especially entrepreneurs) is belief in themselves. It’s no secret, many athletes use it to give them an edge to beat competitors and current billionaires have used it in the lowest moments of their lives as motivation to keep going. A lot of us know the importance of this important trait yet fail to make use of it in our daily lives.
Jason Calcanis provided some really useful tips a while back about how to save money when running a startup. While they’re great tips, a lot of them don’t apply to budding entrepreneurs who are simply trying to save money during the actual “startup” part (buy an expresso meeting for how much?).
What is the difference between passion and obsession? For starters, an obsession is usually an act that you are always (and sometimes uncontrollably) preoccupied with. A passion, on the other hand, is a strong love that can be the pathway to a healthy relationship or to a harmful obsession.
It turns out that the majority of readers here use either GoDaddy, Linode, MediaTemple or Host Gator as your current shared or VPS hosting provider. Somehow GoDaddy had the most votes (by a small margin) and, at least for me, is the most surprising result. Here’s a pretty pie graph of the complete spread:
Last night at a dinner party, I spoke with someone who makes a living selling relatively cheap goods on eBay. As soon as I told him that I make websites for a living, he asked me if having his own personal storefront could improve his business. After hearing his current pain points and coming up with a quick strategy to improve on them, it hit me that there are a lot of other small businesses facing the same dilemma: is it worthwhile to invest in your own storefront?
There is an interesting discussion brewing over at HackerNews on whether it’s worthy to pursue a remarkable, “world-changing” idea that you think will never make any money. Having worked seriously on at least one non-profit project over the past few years, I’ve gone through the same thought process before and ultimately realized that if your idea is really that much of a game changer, there’s always a way to make money.
Last month’s survey asked a simple question: How much do you charge for a simple, custom-designed, WordPress-powered website? Much to my surprise (and dismay), a large portion of readers charge less than $300 for their services. Fellow web developers, you are hurting the entire community by charging too little.
DevGrow is a journal on web design, development and usability written by Monji Dolon.
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