Well, the easiest way perhaps is blogging. Blog about the stuff you like, include some ads into your blog and start earning. Earning might not be a lot (depends) but should enough to buy you a pretty good meal.
I started blogging few years ago and since last year I've stop blogging (to focus on my startup) but I'm still earning around $200/month.
Super simple it may seems to most of us -- simple website, etc but the work, effort, energy needed behind the scene is whole lot than you think. This is real human calling every day, not a computer-cron job call.
I believe there is no such thing as super simple, deploy and forget money making product. The amount of time, effort, energy are the key things that make the money counts.
HN is build around the web startup community. So, almost all stuff you read here geared towards web stuff.
> At the end of the day it is about the percentage return on investment, correct?
For me, at the end of the day it is about the satisfaction and happiness I get from my startup. Money certainly matters but it's not primary for me. That said, I'm not saying it's OK to do unprofitable startup. Put a balance to that.
The bottom line is to look for what you're passionate about & what is meaningful to you, whether it's web apps, software, selling stuff, etc and make a startup out of it.
Guy Kawasaki once said: "It's been my observation that most companies founded on this concept of making money pretty much fail. They attract the wrong kind of co-founders and early employees. Entrepreneurs should focus on making their product or service mean something beyond the sum of its components -- and the money may very well follow"
- There are many things you cant do with Graph, so I'm still sticking on using the old REST Api.
- Facebook OAuth 2.0 implementation is incomplete, e.g. no refresh access_token method provided.
- Current support for iFrame Facebook.com apps is premature.
With all these, they even planned to remove old authentication method & going full force on iFrame end of this year. Hopefully they really can fix all those problems by then.
I do agree that find a good domain name for a project/startup is hard especially you dont have lots of cash in hand (to acquire registered domains) but I don't agree with you that other shorter/sweeter/nicer domains didn't exist anymore in the wild. This might be true for 4-char, one syllable name but not all. I think it's fine if your domain is not directly related to the service/content of your project as long as it's reasonable/logical (e.g. if your project is about news don't use a domain like tropicaljuice.com)
You can always go for 5-7 chars, 2 syllables name. You can use tools like Dotomator or Domainr to find a good, fresh name for your project.
BTW, if you are willing to tell HN your "next big thing", we are more than happy to help you brainstorm a good name.
my next big thing is..uhm.. basically a job listing site :)
I'm in the process of tidying up the environment, fixing obvious bugs and dressing up the site a little bit before going public. When done, will be back here requesting for critics :)
I believe that, as you've also mentioned, when product becomes well known, an upgrade to domain name will not be that problematic. what i fear is a way wrong name at the beginning might prevent it from gaining public liking.
I guess I'll stick to a simple general name, then will try to rename if it still bothers me.
From an SEO standpoint changing your domain is always a headache. Even with tools from Google/Bing to facilitate the transfer your listings can go offline for a while before they re-index and hopefully pass your PageRank along.
If SEO is not a concern and you're strictly talking about your brand, I think you have more flexibility as many people will simply be unaware of your service until your achieve a certain level of visibility.
rentacoder has changed it's name to vworker, yet still keeping rentacoder name and domain and related links pointing
to vworker. Of course i'll not be updating the name every two weeks, but may be in time it might be a necessity to rename the service.
Also i'm seeing this solution for "how to not postpone the project for not finding an awesomely awesome domain name" problem. So seo is not a main concern for now, before going public :)
A general name should be good for a new startup. Do make sure to check the name of your choosing properly to make sure it's totally 'free' from any trademark names.
I second this. I had a similar problem before, and yes I mis-configured my apache. In my case it was random crashes instead of hourly.
I would suggest you to post your problem to your hosting community forum with related info (logs, conf files, server setup info, etc). In my case, it's the Linode forum. I'm sure the community is more than happy to assist you.
Well the book has a lot more to offer. It is the super set of the 'Last Lecture' (video). More stories I can say.
I happened to bump onto the video at first (and watched over and over again) and finally decided to grab the book. Reading the book really like having myself in the story.
You don't need to be a guru in programming to start a startup. You learn (a whole lot more than reading programming books) while working on your startup or projects.
Learning is part of startup and that drives you forward to be better.
I was with them for a while and they are rock solid. Servers are hosted at Softlayer datacenters.