Comments on: How to Make $1 on The Internet

By: PDFoxy

PDFoxy — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 01:08:42 +0000

I'm agree with you

By: joshuamckenty

joshuamckenty — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:17:18 +0000

Actually Jon, when I had reached out to you (originally thinking exactly what Jesse suggests, that we had independently worked on the same idea) – you ignored me entirely. Which is what fed my suspicions.

http://blog.archive.jpsykes.com/226/usernameche...

No offense intended – my point was less “who had what idea, when”, and more “marketing wins”. And you definitely had better marketing.

(In point of fact, ajaxname/whoissocial wasn't MY idea either – it was Jessy Cowan-Sharp's. We worked on it together, along with the rest of the TinyApps crew. )

By: anotherjesse

anotherjesse — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 19:09:49 +0000

Jon,

I guess you were meaning to reply to Joshua not me… I'm the guy who doesn't ship projects

There are many ideas that are rip for picking since we are all hitting the same problems. I don't know the timeline of username check or whoissocial, but it wouldn't surprising that you came up with it and implemented it without knowledge of the tinyapps project.

By: Jon

Jon — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:47:58 +0000

“People started shooting them – by which, I mean ripping our ideas off EXACTLY – and then getting tons of press.”

As the creator of username check, I take what you're claim as highly offensive. I hadn't seen your whois site until you contacted me a week after we both launched. With all due respect, I think writing a blog post claiming you were ripped off is bullshit and you know it is.

By: anotherjesse

anotherjesse — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 06:57:59 +0000

I agree. One thing I've found is that by using the working in the same realm each time you end up with pieces/techniques you can reuse, which speeds up development and lets you think about what not how.

Many of my projects were built in a similar way to tinyapps – a crude prototype in a single session (or perhaps a couple at most). An interesting note is that while I wrote that http://overstimulate.com/articles/shipping-with... I should ship more, I usually ship after the first session to friends, who usually don't understand, but a couple do. Then I get time to revise before the world is competing

Perhaps a few revision cycles (over several months in some cases) is the key?

By: jessy

jessy — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 06:41:24 +0000

so.... you're fucked if you do and fucked if you dont? (secondary purpose of this comment: to test josh's spam filter :p)

i'm biased, but i still like the tinyhack idea. but there's (at least) one thing we never accounted for too much (or didnt implement, even when we did account for it), which is that if your goal is to build something JUST good enough that people care to give you feedback on how to improve it, then you still need to set aside time to implement that feedback. i think that's a huge part of why the amazon price watcher was successful.

as a result, in the LONG run a tinyhack evolves into something bigger, but each layer is still a tinyhack session's worth of code. hopefully, this means your products are both designed closer to your users' specs, AND more modular and re-useable.

but, eh-hem, there's no free lunch? (did i just say that?)