nowfound

Work · March 30, 2012

IM

I'm a non-hacker "idea guy" and my weekend project took 1,670 + days

I am a non-hacker "idea guy" with zero discernible talent. Like most, the story starts with me doing things the hard way. I dreamt of a tool that would save me countless hours. Like most of my ideas, it was supposed to die in a couple of hours, but this one had some legs.... "If I needed this, surely others did too" kept looping in my head. Could I get this built? Could I build it myself? Nah...too lazy to learn how, but before I did anything, I had to promise myself one thing: No more ideas! If ideas were sit-ups, I would have a six pack instead of this tire. It was a constant mental…

Alternativestop 18% of March 2012

What it does

In the maker’s words, at launch

I am a non-hacker "idea guy" with zero discernible talent. Like most, the story starts with me doing things the hard way. I dreamt of a tool that would save me countless hours. Like most of my ideas, it was supposed to die in a couple of hours, but this one had some legs.... "If I needed this, surely others did too" kept looping in my head. Could I get this built? Could I build it myself? Nah...too lazy to learn how, but before I did anything, I had to promise myself one thing: No more ideas! If ideas were sit-ups, I would have a six pack instead of this tire. It was a constant mental exercise. Ideas would peep in, I would spend 5 seconds and if it wasn’t related to THE TOOL, I had to throw it out. That's it. Focus achieved. I've been idea sober for 1670 straight days. I was now ready to find the right people that are the exact opposite of me. Translated: People that actually do stuff. I went through tons of people, but I finally got the team together: 1 backend, 1 front end, 1 designer and hired an n number of freelancers whenever we needed it. I paid for this with my consulting day job. We “launched" 18 months ago, got some decent press and yc feedback http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2010/07/tutorials-made-easy-with-iorad.php http://lifehacker.com/5584834/iorad-creates-your-step+by+step-computer-instructions-for-others http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1437395 Thousands of people signed up, but the tool just sucked and it didn't really work the way it should. This was most definitely my fault. While I've been non-related idea sober for 1670 days, if it was related I had to try it, which means adding half-baked features on top of half-baked features. Anyway, the only good thing that came out of the whole experience: it validated that lots of people had the same problem and needed this solution. We regrouped and simplified, simplified and then simplified some mo. The result: www.iorad.com - “instant application instructions”. What the...? Translation: There's no easy way to show somebody how to do something in an app and share your knowledge. Screencasting sucks and is hard to follow along. Copy/pasting/emailing screenshots is painful. Desktop share is hard to schedule. Our goal is to let you create easy to follow instructions (both interactive and print) for your application in minutes so your users know what they’re doing and you can get back to doing things that matter. Give it a try and let me know what you think, what sucks and if you think it can save you some time. PS if there are other "useless idea guys" mixed in with the YC Hacker community (that actually does shit), and you are semi-interested in some of my story, maybe I can start blogging it.

Does the same job

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    hackerByte - Newsletter for Start-up Folks (A weekend Project)2011 · ▲21

    Friends, Romans, HNers! Link: http://hackerbyte.com This is my first “weekend project” and it was really fun doing it. The sleepless weekends nights when all my friends were our partying or something we (me and two friends) were busy creating ‘hackerByte’ - a weekly newsletter to share inspiration with start-up people. Nothing fancy - just we’d like to share some really nice stuff we read and some news with you, every week. We know that newsletters like these already exist so why one more? Because we are not really satisfied with what they are doing and here is our version of the wheel. We…

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    I’m a non-technical idea guy and a business guy that has been successful in my work for other startups. As someone who has been a founding employee at more than one startup, I’ve gotten to a point where I am sitting on ideas I think are brilliant and would love to build. I’ve noticed how difficult it is to find a technical co-founder, let alone convince them to come on board with an idea. That turned into a project for me, learn to build something myself. So I built a site that is meant to help idea/marketing guys connect with technical co-founders and vice versa.…

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