We (at Olark) are wondering the same thing. We just recently talked to Poll Everywhere (S'08) - they are also bootstrapped and well over $1m / year in revenue. Wufoo was as well (they were acquired in 2011).
If you're a bootstrapped company (let's say < $100k in outside funding) and you have revenues >> $1m / year, we'd love to hear from you!
Does it count if you raise after you hit $1m / year in revenue? I'll let you decide.
I wouldn't say raising money is necessarily a "good thing". Sure it gives you a bit of validation that someone would take a risk on you/your idea. But the data shows most companies will just burn through the money and never make a return.
Making profit is a "good thing". Raising money is just this side process that may or may not be necessary for your company.
If you're feeling adventurous, carry a tape measure and check out the size and shape of furniture around you.
If you really start getting in to designing furniture "The Measure of Man and Woman" (http://www.amazon.com/Measure-Man-Woman-Factors-Design/dp/04...) is full of useful measurements and ranges that tables and chairs should satisfy for average, 1 percentile, and 99 percentile humans.
Wood is actually pretty forgiving. You can prototype the size of something in cheap pine, and remember, it's always easier to cut off another inch from those table legs then it is to add one!
I only recently realized how easy it was to run your own PyPI - it just has to handle a few HTTP GET / POSTs.
If you want to run your own PyPI internally, here's a very simple PyPI server (~150 lines of Python) that I wrote:
https://github.com/steiza/simplepypi
What I've personally been looking for is an easy to setup caching proxy for PyPI. Something that is pip-compatible and serves files if it has them but will also fetch and then store packages if it doesn't. That way you could build up a collection of 3rd party packages over time, without having to explicitly manage it.
It probably wouldn't be hard to roll my own with a reverse proxy but it never gets moved to the front burner.
- Ruby on Rails Engineer / Architect: you've worked before on an at-scale Rails app and love making it easier for our customers to use our app and make it easier for your fellow developers to contribute improvements.
- Graphic Designer: you'd like to apply your understanding of both functionality and aesthetic to improve our website and chat window.
- Marketing Communications: you'll help us educate the world about how the meaning of customer service is changing
### What's our culture like?
- Our all-hands retreat in August combined team outings (winery tours / biking / canoeing) with talking about the future of interacting with customers and how we were going to change it.
- Engaging with our customers! At conferences, answering e-mailed questions, and (of course) chatting with them on Olark. Interacting with our customers has repeatedly gave us insights that couldn't have come from simply writing code.
- We have project-based teams that shift (roughly) quarterly. We want to give our teams enough time to make sizable changes, but experience has taught us that iterations need an end date so we can collect feedback from real-world usage.
Detroit is not, as some comments are suggesting, in a state of anarchy.
Yes, there is crime, similar to other major American cities with crime problems (like St. Louis or Atlanta). Yes, because of depopulation it is hard to get groceries, do your banking, or catch public transportation. But this does not mean the 700,000ish Americans who live in the city proper live in "anarchy".
In Michigan's Upper Peninsula there are also many roads that don't get salted and plowed, and long waits for ambulances - do those people also live in anarchy?
If you have a city that gets comparable service as relatively remote rural areas, then yeah, it pretty much is an anarchy.
The only thing that you can fairly compare a city to is other cities. As far as cities in America goes, I think it is fair to say that many attributes of Detroit are very reminiscent of an anarchy. There may be better examples, but Detroit stands out for its former prominence.
I can assure you Detroit has "normal" services like city water, garbage collection, electricity, and the majority of roads are maintained (even if 100% of them don't get plowed during the winter). I still don't see how anyone can say that is "reminiscent of anarchy". Is there an anarchy you lived in that it is reminiscent of?
Downtown Detroit has two major sports teams (the Tigers and the Red Wings), renown cultural attractions like the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the world headquarters of a few companies like Quicken Loans and General Motors... the characterization of downtown in this thread is really bordering on the absurd...
I don't intend to be harsh, but all of those things are basically baseline expectations. I can't help but think that you are damning the city with faint praise.
Living in Atlanta, I wouldn't think to compare our current crime state to anywhere near Detroit or St. Louis, but this post made me curious how we actually compare. A quick check of homicide and rape stats show both cities at twice or more our rate. I think the real story is the incomes per city:
Atlanta, Median household: $45k, Per capita: $35k
St Louis, Median household: $29k, Per capita: $18k
Detroit, Median household: $25k, Per capita: $14k
I suspect like Atlanta's reputation for crime, Detroit's is also overblown, but there seems to be a real difference that shows Detroit is still a bit farther behind on the path to urban revitalization.
Only now as an adult, having grown up in southwest Michigan, do I appreciate how unusual the region is.
The amount of culture and philanthropy in area is very high considering the population. In Kalamazoo there's the Kalamazoo Area Math and Science Center (thank you Upjohn family), the Gilmore Keyboard Festival (thank you Gilmore family), the philanthropic work of the Stryker family, ... the list goes on and on.
About an hour north of Kalamazoo is Grand Rapids, another major Michigan metro area, which is also defined by philanthropy: Art Prize (thank you DeVos family) and the Fredrick Meijer sculpture park (thank you Meijer family), just to name a few.
Zach from Olark here, sorry to hear you were having issues some time ago! Honestly, I'm not sure what could have been causing issues for you back then, but rest assured we take message delivery extremely seriously - whenever you're using Olark if you ever have any issues please let us know so we can dive in to the logs and take a look!
Most of our users routinely have many, many more than 10 simultaneous visitors - I can assure you we work in that case. : )
This was a lunch keynote at codemash.org on January 14th, 2011, although it may not have been the first time it was given.
For any HN'ers in the midwest, CodeMash is an awesome polygot conference that takes place January every year in Sandusky, Ohio. I've never been at any other conference where you meet experts in Python, Ruby, Haskel, and other languages in the same session.
Not only that, but the selection committee asked for clarification and gave extremely detailed feedback on the talk proposals; I think my proposal went through two major edits/reworks. Hopefully this will mean better talks all around.
If you're a bootstrapped company (let's say < $100k in outside funding) and you have revenues >> $1m / year, we'd love to hear from you!
Does it count if you raise after you hit $1m / year in revenue? I'll let you decide.