Validating Startup Ideas Posted on January 6, 2012 About 2 months ago, an article came across Hacker News about how to quickly validate startup ideas. The idea is basically as follows: Identify a potential problem you’d like to solve Create a landing page that states the problem and that you have the solution Give little or no insight in to your solution, just that it works Collect email addresses on your landing page Run ads tailored to your idea and landing page Tweak as needed to get conversions (sign-ups) Continue reading →
Ubuntu, Node and Heroku Posted on November 3, 2011 I recently started playing with Node.js, and while I can play locally just fine, I wanted to make sure I had a place to host once I had something worth hosting. Enter Heroku. Why? Because it’s free to host until you draw some real traffic, it has a really cool addon service and I knew other people using it so I could turn to them if I had problems. In order to get your application on their service, you need to install their command line tool, which requires Ruby. No problem, just install it all with apt-get and you’re good to go, right? Short answer, yes. Long answer, No. You’ll be using an unsupported version (the version of ruby in the Ubuntu repos is aged), so while it might work now, it may not in the future. If you do like I did, you’ll also end up with 1.8 and 1.9 on your machine, and while that didn’t cause any problems, it seemed silly. Poking around, I found this article which lays out how to use RVM to both install a newer version of Ruby as well as easily update it in the future. So, here’s the whole shebang: Continue reading →