Shoutt @shouttinc - Tumblr Blog

So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish

We started Shoutt in June 2012 to be an incredibly easy way to ask for help. We initially launched at Stanford, then to Indie Filmmakers, and ultimately to Indians in the bay area. We've been actively running for Indians since August 2013.

Shoutt really grew into a proper platform post the Indians launch. The support was great right from the start. We've seen folks help over 40 people with their everyday questions! Everytime we see someone get helped, it makes our day.

Unfortunately, the growth wasn't sustainable. We failed at rapidly scaling the user base required for a social network. Then, something unexpected happened. In order to pursue Shoutt full time, two of the co-founders moved to India because of the never-ending visa issues. While in India, we had a new opportunity knock on our door....that's when we started DoctorC.

We thank you for all your support with Shoutt. As we won't be able to do justice to Shoutt while we work on our new venture, Shoutt will be shutdown on May 15th.

Cheers, Neehar, Karan, Mansi

P.S - Do checkout DoctorC - India's first online healthcare aggregator. We bring transparency and affordability to healthcare services. We are currently live in Hyderabad and will expand to other cities by end of this year.

P.P.S - You will be able to login and retrieve any data till the 15th of May. All your data will be safely and securely deleted after that.

In town Thanksgiving week? Here are some great things you can do

Photo Credit: Erik Fitzpatrick

If you're staying in town this Thanksgiving, here's a list of things you could do with your family/friends. We have not included the usual 17 mile drive, Carmel by the Sea, Big Sur, Napa, Tahoe trips...if you haven't done that we totally recommend them!

Holiday Ice Rink

Go ice skating with your family. The best places at this time of the year is The Embarcadero Center. Keep in mind that they're not open on Thursday and Friday, so make a plan only for the weekend. Cost: $14 (incl. rentals). $10 for kids. Event Website

Love Animals?

If you're family (kids especially) love animals, be sure to check out the many animal farms around the bay area. The Oakland Zoo is having a special Thanksgiving ZooCamp. Our personal favorite - Safari West. A little expensive and far, but the experience is unforgettable. If you feel like splurging, try and stay overnight. www.safariwest.com

Segway Tour

See San Francisco like never before. If you have friends visiting - they'll absolutely love it. So will kids. Remember to book it in advance, they have limited slots. Cost: $70. Company Website

ROMP by LEVYdance

LEVYdance is a SF-based contemporary dance company. At ROMP, dancers and audience members sit together at banquet tables making the dance both surreal and hyper expressive. Includes dinner and drinks. Till Nov 24th. Cost: $40-$50. Event Website

Govinda Alaa Re

Party with the Bollywood star on Nov 30th in San Jose.

Cost: $30-$130. Event Website

NAACH V

Party the night away at San Francisco's newest monthly Bollywood party. Bay Area's very own celebrity DJ - DJ Precaution - will be playing Bollywood, Electro, International, Bhangra & Top 40 all night long. Cost: $0-$10. Event Website

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#shoutt #bay area #thanksgiving #indians

New things around the Bay Area - Bollytude

We all love Bollywood movies. I mean common, who doesn't? It's such a integral part of being Indian...whether you like Ram Gopal Varma or Anurag Kashyap.

Our friends at Bollytude are creating the coolest products ever. Inspired from Bollywood movies, with wacky designs and quirky twists to the cliches, their Bollytude products make a fashion statement like no other!

After checking out their designs, we really couldn't figure out how this didn't exist earlier! Remember the Tantra t-shirts? This is that, but version 2.0. More flair, more humor, and amazing design.

The four entrepreneurs - Ajeenkya Bhatalkar, Akshit Shah, Pankaj Dubey, Varghese Mathai - are running an IndieGoGo campaign to help reach their dreams. Help them out in whatever way you can. In return, get some kick-ass merchandise and good karma :)

Check them out: www.bollytude.com

Coming up in the next post -- offbeat, last minute thanksgiving plans. Sign up with Shoutt to stay tuned to the latest Indian related stuff.

#bollytude #bollywood #shoutt #indians

The All New Shoutt Website

New User Interface

A completely redesigned 3-tone user interface to make navigating the website super easy.

Community Pages

View shoutts by communities. Browse and join the ones you find helpful.

Help Metrics, Search & More

#website #shoutt #updates

Is Thunderclap a good channel to market your product?

We launched Shoutt last month. We've been testing various marketing channels and strategies to gain traction through social media.

I came across Thunderclap a few months ago and thought it could be a great way to gain exposure for Shoutt. Thunderclap is like Kickstarter for Facebook shares & Tweets. You start a campaign and get supporters. If your campaign is successful Thunderclap sends out a blast of Facebook shares and Tweets all at the same time...amplifying the power of the message.

Thunderclap states that its works best for campaigns that raise awareness, inspire action, demand change or enlist help. Though we are none of the above, we wanted to test it since the concept was intriguing.

Our Campaign

Target - 100 supporters in 10 days. Result - 120 supporters with a reach of 72,264 (the sum total of the number of friends and/or followers of every supporter)

We achieved this relatively easily by reaching out to our family and friends. On June 7th, our campaign was successfully completed and Thunderclap blasted out 120 facebook shares & tweets with a direct link to the Shoutt website

The Analysis

To analyze the success of the tool, we considered 72 hours following the blast on June 7th. This time period should more than accomodate the life of a Facebook share/Tweet.

Last year, Techcrunch reported that the average Facebook post reached only 12% of a user's friends. For the sake of simplicity, I'm assuming that the same is true of Twitter.

12% of the reach of our supporters = 12% of 72,264 ~ 8670

When someone clicked a Facebook share/Tweet from our campaign, they went to the Shoutt website.

Potential eyes on our campaign - 8670 No. of unique pageviews on our website - 378 No. of unique pageviews in the US - 255 (we are available only on the US App Store) No. of downloads of our app - 36

Result

120 people sharing simultaneously resulted in 36 downloads.

We were very excited about Thunderclap and our campaign, but this result left us disappointed. At the scale of a 100 supporters, Thunderclap is not a good channel to market your product. I suspect the same will hold true at a larger scale as well. As Thunderclap stated, it might be more suited for social causes and less for products.

We'd like to thank all our friends and family who extended their support to us and supported our campaign. You guys rock!

Cheers, - Neehar

#shoutt #Neehar

Know your tools, Love your tools.

I've been coding for 8 years now. I worked in the industry for about 4 and developed 6 iOS apps on the side prior to Shoutt. I've coded in C, C++, Java, C#, Objective-C and a bunch of other languages. I've always used whatever environment was available - Visual Studio, Eclipse, Xcode etc. I consider myself to be very efficient, productive and good at what I do. And honestly, I never really cared much about the tools I used.

Our CTO at Shoutt is an uber-geek. Combined with awesome software and keyboard shortcuts, he dances around his computer with dexterity like Tony Stark on his incredible interfaces.

He'd always say "Know your tools". I'd think "Stop showing off. So you learnt a few keyboard shortcuts".

Anyway, I decided to learn the keyboard shortcuts for XCode. I did some quick googling and found the must knows

Open Quickly - Shift-Command-O

Go Forward - Control-Command-Right Arrow

Go Back - Control-Command-Left Arrow

Jump to Counterpart - Control-Command-Up Arrow

and so on.

I felt awesome. I started to do things quicker. I felt like an "expert user".

Over the last couple of days, I decided to explore Xcode further and I discovered keyboard shortcuts were just the beginning ....

Tab based tasks - lets you create tabs that maintain their own state. So I can have different tabs for different things and navigate between each tab using simple keyboard shortcuts.

I setup an Edit tab for writing code with a primary & assistant editor, a Design tab to always opens to my xib files and a Debug tab to open to the call stack, the debug and the output consoles.

Behaviors - lets you control how Xcode behaves while building, testing or running code.

I've configured my XCode to open the Debug tab when a breakpoint is hit. So I have everything thing that I need (call stack, debug and output consoles) but only when I actually need to use them.

Version Editor - lets you compare code changes since your last commit right within Xcode.

I have a tab for Review so that I can visualize my code changes and edit them inline. (Previously, I used p4merge but Version Editor has won me over)

Built-in Git Integration, assistant editors etc etc etc.There is so much more to XCode than initially meets the eye.

Today, my workflow has completely changed. Let me give a quick example.

I want to add a button in my app, which when pressed logs a user into my application & changes its title from "Login" to "Logout". Then I want to review my code and check it in.

My old workflow

1. Open the .h file 2. Declare the button 3. Open the .m file 4. Define the method to run on click - Log the user into the application and change title of button in this method 5. Open the .xib file(user interface file) 6. Connect the button with its declaration and the method to be run on clicking it. 7. Run and Test 8. Goto Terminal 9. cd into the project directory 10. Use p4merge to verify your code changes 11. Commit & push

My new workflow

Here are a few tabs from my setup.

Edit Tab with an assitant editor (I can view the .h & .m files at the same time) Design Tab for designing the user interface Review Tab for Code Review.

1. In Edit Tab, Open .m file. The .h file is opened automatically in the Assistant Editor. 2. Declare the button in the .h file & the method to run on click in the .m file 3. Change to Design Tab and open the .xib file 4. Connect the button with its declaration & the method to be run on clicking it. 5. Change to the Review Tab & verify code changes. 6. Commit & Push

Now, this might not seem like it would save much time. But let me ask you a question? What if I want to rename the button, or change its position or make some other modification.( It's really annoying when this happens and this happens more often than I'd like.) Previously, I would have to re-open all the files one after the other and make the changes I wanted. Now, with tab based tasks, I have all the files open and ready for me. I just need to switch to appropriate tab and make changes.

Further, when I would run the application, the output console would automatically open up if I had any logging statements. So I'd have to keep closing the console when I resumed coding. Now I have a Build tab and a Edit tab. The build tab is automatically selected when running the app so my Edit tab is never affected.

With my new workflow, I have now become atleast twice as efficient. I have come to not only Know my tools, but also Love my tools. So, to those, like me, who don't give a damn about the tools they use - take the time to get to know your tools, to understand them and to play with them. And you'll fall in love, just like I did.

- Neehar

P.S - Though I've spoken about only XCode, I'm certain there are other IDE's which we can all fall in love with.

P.P.S - If you'd like to learn more about XCode, I'd recommend watching "Working efficiently with Xcode"(You'll need to have a developer account to watch this video).

#coding #Neehar

Why you should never ever ever have Managers in your class name

Or for that matter, why you should be careful about anything that ends with -er. Before I go any further, please go and read Steve Yegge's blog post on the overuse of Nouns in Javaland.

Most coders I know do not give naming things the importance it deserves. It is highly critical to get the class/method name right the first time. The name will affect the way you structure your code base, think about it further down the line, how you refactor and extend it. Nothing creates technical debt faster than choosing a wrong name for your class. It will come back and bite you very painfully.

The name of a class will determine how you delegate responsibilities to that class. Let me illustrate. Lets say you are designing the iOS client for Shoutt. The client needs to establish a connection to the server, fork over the data and then handle the response. At this point many coders will say - "Aha! What we need is a ConnectionManager which manages all these tasks." So we go ahead and create that class with the required functionality.

It works fine until we realize that the app requires multiple simultaneous connections to the server. Now because you have a ConnectionManager, you go ahead and introduce an array inside the class which maintains the state of all the open connections to the server. The code is a tad little bit more complex because each connection is established by a different object in the client and the response needs to be routed to the appropriate caller.

Fine so far... Oh wait, but now the client also needs to handle retries in case of failure. What do you do if one of the connections fail? You introduce a hashmap in ConnectionManager which maintains the number of retries a particular connection has made to the server.

Oh crap, what if the object establishing the connection wants to end it before MAX_RETRIES is reached? So now you have a connection_id which is stored on each view and is used every time you want to cancel the connection. Also, did I mention that sometimes connections need to be asynchronous and sometimes synchronous (this requirement crops up two weeks into building the app btw). So now, in your code base, when you want asynchronous connections, there is an event thrown in the ConnectionManager with the connection_id that shows the response. But in case of synchronous connections it returns the response immediately. So you have two methods on ConnectionManager object called establish_sync_conn() and establish_async_conn().

At this point, your ConnectionManager object has an array, a hashmap, probably another hashmap to track connection types and two different methods just to create a connection. Its a very complex thing to look at. Even worse is the fact that if someone else looks at your code, it will take them a while to figure out whats happening where and how everything is linked together. It also makes you prone to make mistakes and have more bugs/complexity in your code.

What would have happened if you had named the class just Connection instead of ConnectionManager? Just because of the name being Connection you think of it as a proper object (like a proper connection - think of it as an information pipeline between the client and server). You need multiple connections? Just create another object of connection. What about a single connection for the entire app? You just create a global connection variable which has that object. Retrying is also maintained by each connection object independently. How about max retries? You just have an internal max_retries variable in the class. So each connection maintains it's state internally. Since we have separate objects for each connection, each object can just handle that connection on its own and terminate it without worrying about whether there are any other connections or not. What about the sync and async type of connections? The answer is in the word type. You pass in the type of connection you want in the constructor and the object is setup accordingly.

Obviously the ConnectionManager could be designed differently and made cleaner, but giving the name Manager makes defining the responsibility of the class ambiguous. On the other hand, naming the class Connection would make its responsibility clear and unambiguous.

Anything that has the name manager (or anything else that ends in -er) in it is usually (not always) a code smell that you haven't designed your application properly. Eliminating that type of class will automagically lead you to write much better code and keep things simple as you extend your application.

Picking the right name helps you keep your code structure clean. It also make it easy to extend as well as refactor. So next time you are naming a class, please give it an extra 5 minutes of thought before you start coding.

-- Grumpy Cat

Discuss this on HN or Reddit.

PS: The example was something we encountered while building Shoutt's iOS client.

#shoutt #managers #coding #design patterns #mistakes

Everything we did wrong with our 500 Startups Recommendation

At Shoutt, we decided to apply to a few incubators last month - YC, 500, Techstars. With incubators, recommendations from mentors or alums can go a long way. We asked a known 500 Startups mentor to recommend us, which he graciously did. And that's when our mistakes started --

Mistake #1 We didn't follow up to the recommendation email. We didn't reply or communicate about our company for a good 10 days. Why? Because we thought the initial email was enough. Stupid, of course.

Lesson #1 - Follow up, they're really busy people. Make sure you introduce yourself and your company.

Mistake #2 When we did reply, Outlook did a funky thing that screwed us over. Our recommendation email had [email protected] and [email protected], which Outlook converted changed into one email id - [email protected] <[email protected]>. So we basically replied to one partner instead of both!

Lessons #2 - Dont use Outlook (just kidding, read the bug below). Recheck email ids, subject lines, CC's etc.

Mistake #3 We didn't include our AngelList profile in our first email, so we had to re-reply with the required information!

Now, our application was via AngelList and our recommendation was via email. The email had no explicit mention of our application on AngelList. It was our job to make the connection explicit.

Lesson #3 - Think.

In hindsight, these were rookie mistakes that we shouldn't have made. But we did. We just wanted to put it out there in case it helps other entrepreneurs.

- Mansi

How to Reproduce the Outlook email bug (we've already reported it)

1. Type in "x@500 startups.com [email protected]" into Outlook & Gmail.

2. Gmail automatically recognizes them as 2 separate email ids, while Outlook combines them together because there is no comma separation. It makes [email protected] the name associated with the [email protected] email id.

Gmail:

vs Outlook:

#shoutt #mistakes #mansi

How to get awesome graphics within your budget

Let me preface this post by saying, that good graphics and design work does not come cheap. It takes time, talent, skill and a lot of creativity. The following are tips and tricks I've learnt over the last few years to reduce the dollar value that you pay for your graphics work.

TL;DR

Get multiple graphics designers not just one.

Have atleast one graphic designer on a retainer (the one you would use the most).

Learn Photoshop. It'll save you loads of money and time in the long run.

Long Version

Graphics becomes much cheaper when you have a designer you love and whose hourly rate you can afford. Personally, since we are bootstrapping at Shoutt, we can afford about $20-$25/hr.

1. Finding a designer

Resources I use - scoutzie (mobile designers), dribbble

Before you fall in love with a designer, make sure you can afford them. It's hard to guess what a designer charges without contacting them first. In most cases, you'll have to send them an email to find out their rates. However, on Scoutzie you can see the budget ranges that a designer charge. Find a range that fits in your budget. You can go one range higher. So if you are looking for designer whose range is <$1000. Also consider, the designers in the $1000 - $3000 range.

You'll find this is mostly people outside the US where the value of a dollar is higher. You can often use this as a filter to narrow down on any other website as well. It's important to find someone whose style you love and who preferably has experience in what you are looking far.

It'll take a while to find someone awesome but trust me they are out there. It usually takes me anywhere between 1 - 2 hrs to find 1 designer that appeals to me and fits in my budget. I send out about 6-8 emails before I finalize on one designer. On average, I spend about 8-10 hours on one designer. That may seem like a lot of searching but it's well worth the effort.

2. Pitch your product

You need to sell your idea. When you write to your designer, you need to excite him. Pitch your product. Include references to past & present projects that'll excite him. He might not lower the rate, but he'll take the time to understand your product well and this will get you better designs.

3. Start with Individual Projects

Though this may cost a little more than the hourly rate, it'll give you a chance to work with each other and see how you like it. You should start with something small (maybe an ad campaign, a facebook cover page, or screenshots for your iPhone app or something else). The magic number that I've found that most designers respond to is $200. This is a good price-point for you to try out a couple of designers before you find the one.

4. Paint a clear vision

It's important that you communicate your idea well . It makes the process faster and infinitely more efficient. You need to paint a clear vision of what you need. Take the time to draw wireframes or sketches. This will also help you refine your idea. Provide a lot of references. An image is indeed worth a thousand words.

5. Creative Freedom

Give your designer creative freedom. Great Ideas are built together. Finding a designer whose instincts you can trust will save you tons of time and money in the long run.

6. Learn Photoshop

I can't insist how critical this is to lowering your cost. There is manual work in graphic design as well. For example, your designer has to slice the psd file he creates into individual images for you. You could save a bit of money by slicing the files your selves. Additionally, more often than not, you'll need to make small changes, changes that are too small to send across to your designer. Take the time to develop basic skills. It is an investment but you'll end up saving both time and money in the long run.

7. Get your designer on a retainer

Once you find a designer you like and work on a few projects together, start negotiating an hourly rate and get him on a retainer. Freelance Designers often look to get on retainers as it guarantees them a monthly income. The more hours you can guarantee your designer, the cheaper your costs become. It's like buying goods in bulk.

Further, this will create trust and help you feel like your batting on the same team.

8. Give work in batches

Once you have a designer on retainer, he might become your goto graphics guy. You might send across every little change you need (I initially did this a lot). Remember, your designer has other projects as well. He'll want to sit down for a couple of hours and just work on one project. Giving him small changes that only take a few minutes and he might try to squeeze them between other projects. Your project will not get the focus it deserves. This can be very frustrating to both of you and can strain your relationship.

9. Understand the work involved

Different kinds of designs cost differently. Marketing graphics (ads) are cheaper than UI/UX work. UI/UX work on web is cheaper than on mobile. Understanding the difference is important since you might have the same budget for all types of graphics.

10. Get multiple designers.

As I stated in my previous point, you might want to have different designers for different kinds of work. Understand what your designer excels at and give him exactly that kind of work. He'll work much faster as it comes naturally to him. This saves you a lot of time and consequently money. At Shoutt, We have separate designers for UI/UX work vs Marketing work

It's taken me a couple of years to learn these things and I continue to learn new things everyday. I still spend a lot of time looking for good designers and when I find them I hold onto them with great care. I know the value of good design and more importantly, the value of a good designer.

Discuss on HN

- Neehar

P.S - Once you find someone you love, then its' time to tango -

#shoutt #neehar #startup

Why it's so hard to stay fit while working from home

Neehar (my co-founder & husband) and I quit our day jobs a while back to work on Shoutt. We're currently bootstrapping and therefore work from home. It's pretty much the ideal situation - we save on rent, minimal expenses, no car, etc. But we soon starting noticing the downsides - lesser social interactions, lower daily activity, and the lack of need to wear anything other than our pajamas. (Well, actually the last point is both a plus and a minus)

Now, we like to measure everything. Two years of being around our Grumpy CTO has taught us that. Consequently, all three of us use the Nike Fuel Band to measure our daily activity.

Our biggest realization after quitting was that our daily activity had cut down to nearly half of what it used to be. The difference came from working at home vs going to work.

Here's what a month of working at Oracle looks like:

Here's what a month of bootstrapping form home looks like:

Turns out that getting ready, driving to work, walking around, meeting people, and attending meetings adds up to quite a bit of activity. Energy spent working from an office with no gym = Energy spent working from home + 1 hr of running.

I know we live a sedentary life, but now we need to work out twice as much just because we're bootstrapping and work from home!

-- Mansi

P.S - Neehar & I got married on Jan 6th and spent the last week of Dec preparing for it. Here's what a week of wedding preparation looks like:

#shoutt #startup #mansi

Analytics - Keeping track of the pulse of your startup

A startup's existence hinges on the ability to see what's working (or not working) and then quickly improve your product based on what you learned.

That means you must MEASURE ALL THINGS. Well… not exactly. Although measuring everything sounds good in principle, it quickly overwhelms you and you are left floundering about trying to decide what the value of a particular metric means. Its not what you do in an early stage startup because all your focus is on finding the product-market fit for your product.

The importance of measuring things rather than just going "by your gut" cannot be understated. If you do not have the ability to measure a feature - do not ship it. Its important to elaborate further on what I exactly mean by measuring a feature. If you cannot make a decision on whether a particular feature is affecting the overall performance of your app/product then you are not measuring it correctly. Your metrics should always be actionable.

Its getting the last part that is extremely difficult for beginners. There are several wrong ways of measuring your metrics. Its also really easy to measure things so that it almost always confirms whatever "your gut said" (in scientific terms its called confirmation bias). Its equally easy to fall into the trap of measuring vanity metrics. These metrics make good soundbites… but they don't really matter since they do not measure your product. A good example of a vanity metric is MAU (Monthly Active Users). This metric is often touted by many companies as a way to say they have a large and active user base but it doesn't really matter because the performance of most mobile/web apps (not all) is dependent on DAU (Daily Active Users). There are, of course, exceptions to the rule but they are relatively rare.

First Among Equals

Your product will have one, maybe two, and in extremely rare cases, three, core metrics that are indicators of its overall performance. To determine whether that metric is a core metric or not, you should ask the following question:

Does this number help me answer the question "Is my product doing well or is it dying?"

In most cases, the metric is very specific to your product, so you need to have a very good understanding of what your product is trying to accomplish. For Twitter, a good candidate for that one core metric could be Number of Tweets per Active User. It captures the act of content creation that is critical for sustaining the whole eco-system. If the number of tweets generated per active user goes down, twitter is in deep trouble. Another good metric to measure would be the user retention, i.e. how many users come back after a certain number of time. It measures the engagement of a user, and indirectly the quality of the content being shared.

All the other metrics like the average number of followers for each user, number of photos attached, number of logins per day, length of a session for each login and so on, are secondary. They will not matter if the core metric is showing signs of trouble.

I have only talked about business metrics in this post. There is whole other set of metrics which is almost equally important. They are the technical metrics of your app. They are almost always interwoven with the business metrics. For example, the speed at which twitter's page loads might directly correlate with the number of tweets generated per active user (Its a good to time to bring up the fact that correlation does not equal to causation). It is really helpful to be aware about these kind of relationships in your product. Getting into the nitty gritty of those kind of metrics and how they might affect your product is left for another post.

At Shoutt, we use analytics continuously to monitor the health of our product. I hope that this post was informative on how analytics matter and why its extremely critical to get them right in order for your startup to succeed.

Discuss on HN.

-- The Grumpy Cat

#shoutt #analytics #startup #metrics #grumpycat

Producing an indie film is like running a bootstrapped startup

I started making short films about 3 years ago. Neehar was the one really into it, while to me it was more of a fun hobby.

When he asked me to produce The Green Bandits (TGB), I agreed quite happily. After all, it had always been fun, and Neehar was my boyfriend so my natural instinct was to help/support him. I had no fucking idea what I was getting into.

The role of an indie movie producer

Indie producers have many functions....we are pretty much the COOs of the movie.

As a producer, the lack of resources results in you doing everything - finding filming locations and creating schedules; handling the shoots; getting props and equipment; getting food for the crew; managing actors; raising money; writing a blog and managing social media; finding the best post-production crew you can; packaging the movie; screening and film festival submissions. And everything else that you can't find someone else for.

TGB was the first time I had taken on a purely managerial role. When I shifted roles in Shoutt from development to operations, I noticed the large intersection between the two fields. I could write an entire book about what I learnt from TGB, but here are some key take aways from a tech startup perspective:

Fear & Perseverance

A lot of people told us (and many more thought it), that we were trying to go too big with TGB. We should've gone smaller, with a simpler storyline and fewer actors, and definitely something that didn't involve renting a bank. It took us 2.5 years to finish the movie and it was well worth every bit of time and money we spent.

With Shoutt as well, when we quit our jobs, the general reaction was that we should've stuck with Oracle till we got funded. The fear of fulling putting yourselves out there will hold you back, but if you're willing to give it your all it's probably going to be worth it.

Hacking

We were hacking through everything and trying to get the best we could for the money at hand. We found the best locations, great actors, a fabulous DP, a dedicated crew, a committed and relentless editor and talented post production members. In pre-production I needed to rent a bank for the shoots. After speaking with existing banks we realized that it was nearly impossible to get any of them on board. The costs were too high and there were too many legal restrictions. And it hit us that a foreclosed bank would be ideal - it isn't functioning, has no legal restrictions, and would be affordable. I called every closed bank branch in a 40 mile radius till I finally found the perfect one in Vallejo. We did quite a few crazy things in order to get an ambulance, a cop car, a burning boat, and real oil spill footage which would have otherwise cost us an arm and a leg.

With Shoutt, when we did a beta run at Stanford University last year, a lot of our marketing efforts failed. We spent a lot of money on campus ambassadors, flyer distribution and targeted online marketing. None of it worked. We were desperate to get users signed up. We would not be able to test the product if we didn't have enough users. And it hit us - I would've done anything for free food as a student! So we walked around campus offering pizza in exchange for signing up for Shoutt. The result: our cost of acquisition went down to $1.50/user, we got a lot of users on board in a short period of time, and more importantly it gave us direct facetime with our customers.

Finding solutions and hacking your way through situations is essential irrespective of what you're building.

Recruiting

People are passionate about their art - whether it be acting, sound design, UI/UX design or server-side analytics. They want to create things that they love. Finding the right team members involves finding these passionate people. It takes a long time and a lot of effort but once you have them, you'll be damned if they don't give you their very best.

We've worked with people from around the globe with both TGB and Shoutt - California, Florida, Spain, Manchester, Brazil, Mexico, Armenia, Russia....all of them equally good, all of them equally committed.

Relationships

Relationships matter. People matter. Our family and friends have been super supportive through all our ventures, sometimes going out of their own comfort zones to help us out. When we were making TGB, our friends helped us with everything from chauffeuring the actors to and from the BART station, cooking for the entire crew for free, to being production assistants on set. Even as we bootstrap through Shoutt, our friends have put us up rent free for over 6 months now.

It doesn't matter if you're making a film or developing an iPhone app - if you're passionate about what you're doing, you'll find a lot of support.

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-- Mansi

#shoutt #indie films #startup #mansi

Choosing a technology stack for Shoutt

Choosing the server stack when building an application from scratch is best characterized by "analysis paralysis" phenomenon. Its made even worse if you are an avid reader of HN and keep up to date with the new technologies. This was very difficult for me because it was the first time I had complete freedom to choose a web framework as I saw fit.

TL;DR

Web Framework - Python, Pyramid framework

Database - Postgres

Server Hosting - Amazon Web Services

Caching - Memcached

Dev environment - Homebrew

Long version

There are plethora of options to chose from. Some of the ones which I had considered were:

PHP - Codeigniter, Zend : Oh yes, I had considered PHP for one tiny teensy weensy bit just because so many websites run PHP and its still one of the most widely supported languages on the web. But I have been burnt far too many times with PHP's unpredictable and wonky behavior along with its non uniform syntax. This famous article does a good job on why PHP is a bad choice.

Ruby - Ruby on Rails : I had dabbled a bit with RoR before for smaller projects. Although it was a very good framework to begin with, I found it to be too opinionated and too brittle in its One True Way™. Also, I was not very familiar with Ruby, and didn't want to spend time learning the subtleness of a new language along with an all new framework. I would rather spend this time improving the actual application.

Python - Web.py, Flask, Django, Pyramid/Pylons : Python has the same set of advantages as Ruby but it had an added bonus - I was already familiar with it. Its interpreter is relatively fast, its even faster to develop new features. It has a great set of libraries to plop into your project anytime you require. Package management is simple with pip install <your-new-library-name>. Among the python frameworks, Flask and Web.py were too basic (especially for the complexity w.r.t Natural Language Processing and Geo-Location features I envisioned as the project progressed). I was torn between Django and Pyramid (the successor to Pylons).

Django or Pyramid?

Django has great documentation and its really easy to start with compared to Pyramid. But Django is also a comparatively brittle framework and adding something which doesn't agree with its philosophy is painful. Django is also geared towards being a very web oriented framework. Shoutt is an iOS app, it doesn't need all the features like web form handling, web page templates etc. out of the box.

Pyramid comes off as an unopinionated, but intimidating, framework with all sorts of knobs and levers you encounter as soon as you see it. But its very very flexible in nature and you can mould it easily to use whatever your application requires.

After skimming through each framework's documentation I was still very afraid of Pyramid, but I decided to use it because the flexibility it provides is far superior compared to Django. Its worth the steeper learning curve. It was easy to initially setup the project by following its excellent getting started guide. Pyramid's complexity/opaqueness in documentation surfaced a little bit into the development of the application where I tried to answer a simple question - "How do I split models.py into multiple files for each model?". It took me hours and hours of google searches, scouring through mailing lists, stack overflow questions and IRC chats to figure it out. This wasn't the only time this sort of happened though, I have had a few more occasions where I spent hours going down Pyramid's rabbit hole to answer a relatively simple question. Be prepared to get stuck on these kind of problems once in a while.

Database - MySql vs Postgres - Fight!

Except there really isn't that much of a fight. Postgres has PostGIS which is super useful for geo spatial features. Also, MySQL is now part of Oracle which personally makes me very uneasy about it's future development. Additionally, Postgres has improved a lot in the last couple of years and has been proven to scale if required. Thats not to say that mysql is not proven. After a little bit of searching, we found out about DBaaS for Postgres offered by enterpriseDB themselves. I use that for managing our prod db cluster and its super easy to maintain the database without worrying about the implementation specifics of replication, high availability, scaling up/scaling out etc.

A word about NoSQL databases - Mongo, Redis, CouchDB et. al. Even though its still the hotness, they are still relatively new and have not yet proved to be production ready, especially for scaling. Apart from that, the libraries which support these databases are also new. And since they are being updated and improved very quickly, and you want to start using all those awesome new features, they lead to a lot of compatibility and migration issues. Further, SQL queries are still much more expressive and easier to use than the functions that the NoSQL databases have right now. These queries are really useful when you want to run some analytics on all the data that is lying around in your system. Aaaaaand... Postgres already comes with an extension called HStore, which basically makes it a NoSQL datastore if you really want the flexibility of one.

Server Hosting - AWS

Using a cloud hosting solution is a no brainer for a startup today. AWS has consistently lowered their prices over the past couple of years and introducing more and more services which you can plug into easily as and when required. Apart from a couple of outages in previous year, they provide a fairly robust and reliable service which is relatively cheap to maintain on our scale. This, coupled with the fact that I was already familiar with its infrastructure contributed to the decision to use AWS for our servers.

Other stuff

We use memcache for caching and Ubuntu in our prod environment. For our dev environment we use Macs and homebrew to install all the packages. Pro tip - Try not to use anything other than homebrew for package management on your mac, trust me, it will become really painful otherwise.

Pyramid still gives me a good amount of pain when I start interacting and configuring something that I haven't touched before. Apart from that, this setup allows me to ship code fast. I hope this post helps you decide your tech stack.

Discuss this post on Hacker News or Reddit.

- The Grumpy Cat

#shoutt #startup #tech stack #databases #web frameworks #technology #grumpycat

Does anyone want to play tennis?

I hit a point in my life where not enough of my friends lived around me. We did the occasional social thing which was great, but there were a lot of things about my life that changed. Life was much easier when they lived closer. We could play tennis and cricket together, borrow things we each owned, bum rides off each other. We could share our problems and easily find solutions through our cumulative experiences and resources. The fact of the matter is that when I needed something, it was always easy to ask my friends.

When my friends moved away some of these things became harder to do. What bothered me the most was that I no longer had anyone to play tennis with. I saw people at the public courts, but they usually came in pairs. I tried Craigslist, but that didn't seem to work. I felt the need to connect with my neighbors, but I just couldn't find an easy way to do it. I thought to myself - "What if I stood on the top of my roof and shouted out to them? Does anyone want to play tennis?".

Now, I know that we can't all go around shouting from our rooftops, that would be kinda stupid. But what if our phones could do the shouting for us? And that is how the idea of shoutt was born...out of my necessity and need to connect with my neighbors.

It's hard to reach out to people who aren't part of our social circle. But if you think about it, we are already connected by living in the same neighborhood, working at the same place, or studying in the same school. And we are all faced with similar problems. The hard part is asking people you don't know.

That's why we built Shoutt. We wanted to make lives easier and to take the pain out of asking. Just shoutt about what you need and we'll find someone around you who is most likely to help.

- Neehar

#startup #shoutt #neehar

Hello World

My name is Shoutt. And I can't wait to meet you!

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